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to the beginning or origin, or to early times; original; primordial; primeval; first; as, primitive innocence; the primitive church. "Our primitive great sire." Milton.

Originally; at first.

The quality or state of being primitive; conformity to primitive style or practice.

First; original; indigenous; primitive; native; as, the aboriginal tribes of America. "Mantled o'er with aboriginal turf." Wordsworth.

mo*ge*net"ic*al*ly, adv. All known agamogenetic processes end in a complete return to the primitive stock. Huxley.

The love feast of the primitive Christians, being a meal partaken of in connection with the communion.

of England who accept many doctrines and practices which they maintain were those of the primitive, or true, Catholic Church, of which they consider the Church of England to be the lineal descendant.

A place on the south side of the chancel in the primitive churches, furnished with shelves, for books, vestments, etc. Weale.

One of a sect of Christian in the primitive church who used water instead of wine in the Lord's Supper.

The primitive enteron or undifferentiated digestive sac of a gastrula or other embryo. See Illust. under Invagination.

ignifying chief, arch; as, architect, archiepiscopal. In Biol. and Anat. it usually means primitive, original, ancestral; as, archipterygium, the primitive fin or wing.

A hollow blastula, supposed to be the primitive form; a c

The primitive form of fin, like that of Ceratodus.

One of a sect in the primitive church, who celebrated the Lord's Supper with bread and cheese, alleging that the first oblations of men not only of the fruit of the earth, but of their flocks. [Gen. iv. 3, 4.]

One of a primitive people supposed to have lived in prehistoric times, in Central Asia, east of the Caspian Sea, and north of the Hindoo

The structureless, protoplasmic tissue of the embryo; the primitive basis of an organ yet unformed, from which it grows.

is receiving rudimentary instruction in the doctrines of Christianity; a neophyte; in the primitive church, one officially recognized as a Christian, and admitted to instruction preliminary to admission to full membership in the church.

relating to the underworld gods of the Greeks, whose worship is widely considered as more primitive in form than that of the Olympian gods. The characteristics of chthonian worship are propitiatory and magical rites and generalized or euphemistic names of the deities, which are supposed to have been primarily ghosts.…

A native or natives of Ceylon descended from its primitive inhabitants; also (sing.),

es barefoot; and the middle sort . . . makes use of wooden clogs. Harvey. Clog almanac, a primitive kind of almanac or calendar, formerly used in England, made by cutting notches and figures on the four edges of a clog, or square piece of wood, brass, or bone; -- called also a Runic staff, from the Runic characters use…