When I was in high school—so, many years ago (how many is left as an exercise for the reader)—my English teacher, Ms. Reinhardt, gave us a set of puzzles: familiar sayings, aphorisms, and clichés in unfamiliar guise. Amazingly enough, I kept my copy all these years, and just ran across it yesterday evening while searching for something else.
I don’t know what their origin is—I don’t think she made them up—but wherever they’re from, they’re cool brain-teasers. (And if anyone does know the source, let me know so I can credit them properly.) How many of them can you figure out?

1. A lithoid form, whose onward course  
Is shaped by gravitational force  
Can scarce enjoy the consolation  
Of bryophytic aggregation.  

2. To carry haulm of cereal growth  
The tylopod is nothing loath;  
But just one haulm too many means  
That dorsal fracture supervenes.  

3. When, nimbus-free, Sol marches by  
Across the circumambient sky,  
To graminiferous meads repair—  
Your instant task awaits you there!  

4. There is no use in exhortation  
To practice equine flagellation,  
If vital forces did depart  
And still the breath, and cease the heart.  

5. That unit of the avian tribe  
Whose movements one can circumscribe  
In manu, as a pair will rate  
Subarborially situate.  

6. For none who claims to represent  
The Homo species sapient,  
Will loiter Einstein’s fourth dimension  
Or sea’s quotidian declension.  

7. Faced with material esculent  
As source of liquid nourishment  
Avoid excess; ‘twill but displease  
Of culinary expertise.  

8. Conducting to the watering place  
A quadruped of equine race  
Is simple; but he may not care  
To practice imbibition there.  

9. The coroner observed: “Perpend,  
The death of this, our feline friend,  
Reflects preoccupation shown  
With business other than his own.”  

10. Of little value his compunctions  
Who executes clavigerous functions,  
When once from circumambient pen  
Is snatched its equine denizen.  

Got em all?