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More "Vegetable matter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... island is generally allowed to be remarkably fine, and it is very deep; indeed, the luxuriance with which almost every thing grows sufficiently indicates a very rich soil: it seems to be composed principally of a deep, fat clay, and decayed vegetable matter; in short, without pretending to natural knowledge, that unhappily I do not possess, I shall only observe, that a more luxuriant soil I never met with in any part of ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... burn." "Both keep you warm." "Both are used for fuel." "Both are vegetable matter." "Both come from the ground." "Can use them both for running engines." "Both hard." "Both heavy." "Both ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... decaying leaves and other vegetable matters, and ordure of birds on the roofs; its quality is also affected by the roofing material, or else it is contaminated in the cisterns by leakage from drains or cesspools. Upland waters contain generally vegetable matter, while surface water from cultivated lands becomes polluted by animal manure. River water becomes befouled by the discharge into it of the sewers from settlements and towns located on its banks. Subsoil water is liable to infiltration of solid and liquid wastes ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... adapted to ordinary vegetation, is not necessary to the aquatic plants, and is, moreover, worse than useless; since it necessitates the frequent changing of the water for some time, in order to get rid of the soluble vegetable matter, and promotes the growth of Confervae, and other low forms of vegetation, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... the Chukches eat cloud-berries, red bilberries, and other berries, which are said to be found in great abundance in the interior of the country. The quantity of vegetable matter which is collected for food at that season of the year is very considerable, and the natives do not appear to be very particular in their choice, if the leaves are only green, juicy, and free from any bitter taste. ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... prefaced his arguments, by a long statement, as to the gradual commencement, and progress of malaria;—showed how the atmosphere, polluted by exhalations of water, impregnated with decaying and putrified vegetable matter, gave forth miasmata; which he described as being particles of poison in ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... estates were forfeited and settled by the king on Greenwich Hospital. Castle Hill rises boldly on the shore above Derwent Isle, where there is a pretty residence, and every few years there is added to the other islets on the bosom of the lake the "Floating Island," a mass of vegetable matter that becomes detached from the marsh at the upper end. At Friar's Crag, beneath Castle Hill, the lake begins to narrow, and at Portinscale the Derwent flows out, receives the waters of the Greta coming from Keswick, and, after flowing a short distance through the ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... marl to use at one application depends very much on the nature of the soil and the amount of vegetable matter it contains. Generally, fifty bushels of lime, or one hundred and fifty bushels of marl is a safe application, but if the soil is quite thin, and contains but little vegetable mould, more than this at one time would be attended with risk. The safer plan is, to make several ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones
... Igarape, is a submerged forest. Evidently this forest grew in one of those marshy lands constantly inundated, for between the stumps is accumulated the loose, felt-like peat characteristic of such grounds, and containing about as much mud as vegetable matter. Such a marshy forest, with the stumps of the trees still standing erect in the peat, has been laid bare on both sides of the Igarape Grande by the encroachments of the ocean. That this is the work of the sea is undeniable, for all the little depressions and indentations of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... thorax and head. They are all large bodied and stout limbed, and by their great strength abundantly justify their generic name, Dynastes, which is from the Greek and signifies powerful. The larvae of these beetles inhabit and feed upon decaying trees and other rotting vegetable matter, and correspond in size with the mature insects. Most of them inhabit tropical regions, where they perform a valuable service in hastening the destruction of dead ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... suitable, their old anchorage in Oyster Harbour was taken up. The luxuriant growth of vegetation had almost entirely destroyed all traces of the visit of 1818. The garden in which Mr. Cunningham had planted seeds was covered with three or four feet of additional soil, formed of sand and decayed vegetable matter, and clothed with a thicket of plants in flower. The natives appeared to be very friendly, ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... surprise us, for decaying animal matter swarms with worms, but this is not the case with vegetable matter. [Footnote: Women eat bread, vegetables, and dairy produce; female dogs and cats do the same; the she-wolves eat grass. This supplies vegetable juices to their milk. There are still those species which are unable ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... sand thrown up by the sea, and the particles of shells and rock, which have been triturated by the wave, or decomposed by the alternate action of the elements; but there is no vegetable matter, without which there can be no vegetable produce. Observe, Willy,—the skeleton of this earth is framed of rocks and mountains, which have been proudly rearing their heads into the clouds, or lying in dark majesty beneath the seas, ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... winter flowering by shifting them, if necessary, into larger pots. They succeed best in a compost of half leaf mould and half loam. They grow luxuriantly in a soil composed entirely of decayed vegetable matter; but in that they are liable to rot off at the base of ...
— In-Door Gardening for Every Week in the Year • William Keane
... such a temperature, and everywhere surrounded by food, are produced with a wonderful rapidity, but the crystallisations are formed with equal quickness, and they are no sooner produced than they are destroyed together. Notwithstanding the sulphureous exhalations from the lake, the quantity of vegetable matter generated there and its heat make it the resort of an infinite variety of insect tribes, and even in the coldest days in winter numbers of flies may be observed on the vegetables surrounding its banks or on its floating island's, ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... incalculably numerous order of plants growing on dead vegetable matter, and often produced on a ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... was filled with all manner of abominations: fragments of fat and decomposed meat, legs of rabbits and fowls, vegetable matter, broken knives and forks, and hair: and the glass of the window was caked with filth ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... inquiries from the inhabitants on that subject, the result of which confirmed me in the opinion, that the shores of the lakes are quite as healthy as any other part of the country, and that here, as elsewhere, the disease arises from stagnant pools, swamps, and masses of decayed animal and vegetable matter, which are allowed to remain and accumulate in the vicinity of settlements. When at New York, I met an old and wealthy farmer, who was himself, although eighty years of age, in the enjoyment of rude health. ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... fish was a most rebellious pike, and nearly killed every loyal subject at table; and then down the sides were various comestibles of chickens, with azure bosoms, and hams with hides like a rhinoceros; covered dishes of decomposed vegetable matter, called spinach and cabbage; potatoes arrayed in small masses, and browned, resembling those ingenious architectural structures of mud, children raise in the high ways, and call dirt-pies. Such were the chief constituents of the "feed;" and such, I am bound ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... fructification; but what is this fructification, to which you allude? It is no more than a false demonstration of the energies of the plant. For all the purposes of growth, life, durability, and the final conversion of the vegetable matter into an element, the root is the seat of power and authority; and, in particular, the tap-root above or rather below all others. This tap-root may be termed the tail of vegetation. You may pluck fruits with impunity—nay, you may even top all the branches, and the tree shall survive; ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... your own coasts for evidence. I have spoken of the boulder clay and drift as resting upon the chalk. That is not strictly true. Interposed between the chalk and the drift is a comparatively insignificant layer, containing vegetable matter. But that layer tells a wonderful history. It is full of stumps of trees standing as they grew. Fir-trees are there with their cones, and hazel-bushes with their nuts; there stand the stools of oak and yew trees, beeches and alders. Hence this stratum is appropriately called ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... answers by saying that "water, and the decomposing animal and vegetable matter existing in the soil, constitute the true nourishment of plants; and as the earthy parts of the soil are useful in retaining water, so as to supply it in the proper proportion to the roots of the vegetables, so they are likewise efficacious in producing the proper ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... manifest, too, that reptiles of other kinds would be among the first vertebrata to people the new continent. If we consider what will occur on one of those natural rafts of trees, soil, and matted vegetable matter, sometimes swept out to sea by such currents as the Mississippi, with a miscellaneous living cargo; we shall see that while the active, hot-blooded, highly-organized creatures will soon die of starvation and exposure, the inert, cold-blooded ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... of vegetable matter. In all our rich lands, there are vast quantities of vegetable matter mixed with the soil, or spread over the surface. Extreme hot weather, following especially a season of much rain, before the middle of July, will produce sickness. If ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... damp, musty cellar may be sweetened by sprinkling upon the floor pulverized copperas, chloride of lime, or even common lime. The most effective means I have ever used to disinfect decaying vegetable matter is chloride of lime in solution. One pound may be dissolved in two gallons of water. Plaster of Paris has also been found an excellent absorbent of noxious odors. If used one part with three parts of charcoal, it will be ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... inhabitants of the same region is, in fact, the same as that of the physiological division of labour in the organs of the same individual body—a subject so well elucidated by Milne Edwards. No physiologist doubts that a stomach by being adapted to digest vegetable matter alone, or flesh alone, draws most nutriment from these substances. So in the general economy of any land, the more widely and perfectly the animals and plants are diversified for different habits of life, so will a greater number of individuals be capable of there ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... vegetable matter. Their fingers must be some sort of feeding roots," Hanlon observed sagely. "They sure are the strangest ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... round about, issuing from the gravel, or drained from the nightly damps, had run into a hollow, filled with the decaying vegetation of former years. Its banks were bordered with a deep, broad layer of mud, a transition substance between the rich vegetable matter which it once had been, and the multitudinous world of insect life which it was becoming. A cloud or mist at this time was hanging over it, high in air. A harsh and shrill sound, a whizzing or a chirping, proceeded from that cloud to the ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... in throwing aside tin cans. The vegetable matter remaining in the cans soon decays and attracts flies. Have a place where these cans may be buried or burned with other refuse each day. Keep the ground surrounding the kitchen free from all kinds ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... the bulk of your soils are good enough so far as lime is concerned. Those three are potash, which is abundant and will be abundant 100 years from now, phosphoric acid, or phosphorus, with which our soils are fairly well supplied, and nitrogen, which comes from the vegetable matter. In nitrogen our prairie soils are remarkably rich when first plowed up. The phosphoric acid and the potash you can not lose unless they are taken away in the form of crops, but the nitrogen may be lost without even taking off ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... intended to be dissolved, a little fine well-washed white sand mixed with them assists the process of powdering. Tough roots, like gentian and calumba, should be cut into thin slices; and fibrous roots, like ginger, cut slanting, otherwise the powder will be full of small fibres. Vegetable matter, such as peppermint, loosestrife, senna, &c., requires to be dried before ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... location of the house with reference to its surroundings, let us now more carefully examine the character of the soil or earth foundation on which the house shall be built. All soil is made up of varying proportions of mineral and vegetable matter in the interstices of which there are usually to be found more or less air, water, and watery vapor. The mineral substances of soil include almost all of the known minerals, although many of them are found in exceedingly small quantities. The ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... clovers are usually so numerous that they literally fill the soil with vegetable matter. This matter, in process of decay, greatly increases the power of the soil to hold moisture, whether it falls from the clouds or ascends from the subsoil through capillary attraction. The moisture thus held is greatly beneficial to the plants that ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... hog-pens is allowed on account of the amount of manure they will make by working over all sorts of vegetable matter, spoiled hay, weeds, etc., etc. This is unhealthy for the family near and also for the animal. The hog is, naturally, a cleanly animal, and if given a chance he will keep himself very neat and clean. Breeding sows should have the range of a small pasture, and be regularly ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... diversification in the inhabitants of the same region is, in fact, the same as that of the physiological division of labour in the organs of the same individual body—a subject so well elucidated by Milne {116} Edwards. No physiologist doubts that a stomach adapted to digest vegetable matter alone, or flesh alone, draws most nutriment from these substances. So in the general economy of any land, the more widely and perfectly the animals and plants are diversified for different habits of life, so will a greater number of individuals be capable of there ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... The drizzling rain continued, and I hoped the ponds at the higher range, towards which we were returning, might be replenished by still heavier rain. An unpleasant smell prevailed every where this day, resembling that from a kitchen sewer or sink. Whether it arose from the earth, or from decayed vegetable matter upon it, I could not form any opinion; but it was certainly very different from the fragrance produced by a shower in other parts of New South Wales, even when it falls only on sunburnt grass. It was equally new and ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... these may be mentioned partridges, grouse, black-cock, the capercalzie and quails, and, lastly, the megapodius or bush-turkey of Australia. This last is the only bird which hatches its eggs by artificial heat, depositing them in a mound of earth and decaying vegetable matter, wherein they are hatched fully-fledged, so that they can fly away immediately on leaving the egg. All the birds yet mentioned are called gallinaceous birds, or Gallinae, and ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... less upon the waters of that Father of Rivers than it had to do in the long trek across the desert. Then all drinking water came from the Nile. It flowed down the sweet-water canal (if one may be pardoned for calling 'sweet' a volume of water so charged with vegetable matter and bacteria that it was harmful for white men even to wash in it), was filtered and siphoned under the Suez Canal at Kantara, where it was chlorinated, and passed through a big pipe line and pumped through in stages into Palestine. The engineers set about ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... walked by or ahead of the horse, over the blackened and ashy prairie, lit up by the red glare of the fire, and dotted here and there with little smokes which marked where there were coals, the remains of vegetable matter which burned more slowly than the dry grass. She said nothing; but two or three times she gave a distressed little moan as if she were in pain; but this she checked as if ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... sounded but struck only sunken logs. What gave them more concern than this was the discovery that the slender rods, sharpened to a point, could be driven through one yielding stratum after another of muck and ooze. Through myriad years the decaying vegetable matter of this rank swamp had been accumulating in these layers of muck. There was no telling how deep down the weight of the sea-chest might have caused ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... the soil. Is it fine or in lumps? Does it seem damp or dry? Can you see the separate particles of mineral matter? How large are these? Is there any evidence of vegetable matter ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... does not need it. The 'black cotton soil' is often known as regur, a corruption of a Tamil word. 'The origin of regur is a doubtful question. . . . The dark coloration was attributed by earlier writers to vegetable matter, and taken to indicate a large amount of humus in the soil; more recent investigations make this doubtful, and in all probability the colour is due to mineral constitution rather than to the very scanty organic constituents of the soil,' It may possibly be formed of 'wind-borne dust', like the loess ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... material left is spread out in the sun to dry, and is after being thus "cured" used for fuel beneath the steam-boilers, which afford both power to the engine and the means of boiling the juice. Lime-water is employed to neutralize any free acid as well as to separate the vegetable matter. The granulation and crystallization are effected in large flat pans, or now more commonly by centrifugal machines, rotating at great speed. It is then crushed and packed either in hogsheads or in boxes ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... fissures of stratified rocks, but Bischoff is of opinion that the sulphureted hydrogen must have been the result of the decomposition of sulphate of lime in the presence of organic matter. The theory of others is that sulphur owes its origin to the combination of lacustrine deposits with vegetable matter, and others again suppose that it is due to the action of the sea upon animal remains. The huge banks of rock salt often met with in the vicinity of sulphur mines, and which in some places stretch for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... Professor of Chemistry in the Royal Institution, were made on the substance employed in the process of tanning, with others to which similar properties were ascribed, in consequence of the discovery made by M. Seguier, of Paris, of the peculiar vegetable matter, now called tannin. He was, during the same period, frequently occupied in experiments ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction—Volume 13 - Index to Vol. 13 • Various
... the filters in too. This extra paper merely supplements the bedding. Large pieces of vegetable matter can take a long time to be digested. Before tossing cabbage or cauliflower cores or celery butts into the compost bucket, cut them up into finer chunks or thin slices. It is not necessary to grind the garbage. Everything will ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... poisonous vapors of the bogs, and prosecute the war in continuous battle with the mosquitoes and vermin. The water of the few sluggish streams, although transparent, was highly colored by the decaying vegetable matter and the roots of the juniper. For the first time in my life I was now out of sight of the mountains. I felt utterly lost, and found myself repeatedly rising on tip-toe and gazing for a view of them ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... these commodities. In one thousand parts of a Carrot there are ninety-five of sugar, and (according to some chemists) only three of starch. In country districts raw Carrots are sometimes given to children for expelling worms, probably because the vegetable matter passes mechanically through the body unchanged, and scours it. "Remember, William," says Sir Hugh Evans in the Merry Wives of Windsor, "Focative is Caret," "and that" replies Mrs. Quickly, "is a ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... there,—(now don't bother,) and all will be right. This you must do by diet. If you put improper food into your stomach, by Gad you play the very devil with it, and with the whole machine besides. Vegetable matter ferments, and becomes gaseous; while animal substances are changed into a putrid, abominable, and acrid stimulus. (Don't bother again!) You are going to ask, 'What has all this to do with my eye?' I will tell you. Anatomy teaches us, that the skin is a continuation of the membrane which lines ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... Nanomea is perfectly landlocked, except where there are breaks of reef—dry at low water—which is as clear as crystal, and the low-lying belt of land is a verdant girdle of coco and pandanus palms, growing with bread-fruit and fetau trees on the rich, warm soil composed of vegetable matter ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... Rhododendrons, on a spongy soil of black vegetable matter, so oozy, that it was difficult to keep the feet dry. The rain poured in torrents all the evening, and with the calm, and the wetness of the wood, prevented our enjoying a fire. Except a transient view ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... deposits of peat in the valley of the Somme, which contain not only monuments of the Roman, but also those of an older, stone period, the Finnic period; yet, says Lord Wrottesley, "distinguished geologists are of opinion that the growth of all the vegetable matter, and even the original scooping out of the hollows containing it, are events long posterior in date to the gravel with flint-implements,—nay, posterior even to the formation of the uppermost of the layers of loam with fresh-water shells overlaying ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... final preliminary to the beginning of operations, I clambered up on to the ledge. Ferns grew among decaying vegetable matter in masses difficult to push through. Polypodiums with brown, oak-leaf like, infantile fronds clung tightly to the rocks with furry fingers, and the birds'-nests were big enough to conceal a man. A broad and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... sandy plain. The encircling ridge was occupied by a belt of small trees, while on the plain grew only a short scrubby vegetation, a foot or two in height. Some vegetable soil was found, a few inches in thickness, the result of the decomposition of vegetable matter and birds' dung. On the weather side of the island was a coral reef of two miles in diameter, enclosing a shallow lagoon. In this lagoon were both sharks and turtles swimming about. The island was stocked with sea-fowl, and the trees were loaded ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... the horse soon came to understand and appreciate. The white and gray Laurentian boulders lay along the roadside. The soil seemed as if made up of decayed and pulverized rock, and doubtless contained very little vegetable matter. It is so barren that it will never repay ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... after year, form a layer of vegetable mould such as you can readily scratch up on the surface of the ground in a forest or old meadow; this is known as leaf mould, or humus. As the water soaks through this mould, it becomes loaded with decaying vegetable matter, which it carries with it down into the soil. Most of this, fortunately, is comparatively harmless to the human digestion. But some of this vegetable matter, such as we find in the water from bogs or swamps, or even heavy forests, will sometimes upset the digestion; hence, the ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... exists there, no vegetable soil is formed for, the trees and shrubs being very inflammable, conflagrations take place so frequently and extensively in the woods during summer as to leave very little vegetable matter to return to earth. On the highest mountains and in places the most remote and desolate I have always found on every dead trunk on the ground, and living tree of any magnitude also, the marks of fire; and ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... which he proved that this bird serves a most useful purpose as an insecticide. He examined the craws of twenty-eight chickadees, nineteen of them secured in the winter and nine in the spring. During the winter 70.7 per cent of the food found in these stomachs was animal, while in the spring no vegetable matter was found at all, the birds subsisting entirely on insects and their eggs and larvae. By far the larger part of the insects thus destroyed were of the noxious species that bore into the bark and wood of the trees ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... stopped the advance of the Roman centurions who were sent up the Nile in the days of Nero. Sir Samuel Baker was the one who first pointed out the great disadvantage of allowing the vegetable matter to accumulate, both to merchants and to those who were employed to suppress the slave-trade. In the year 1863 the two branches of the White Nile were blocked above their junction at Lake No. Once blocked, the accumulation ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... the advocates of the sod mulch system of orchard culture that it also supplies these conditions. Humus or decayed vegetable matter holds moisture. Grass or other mulch decaying in the soil increases its humus content and hence its water holding capacity. By forming a mulch over the soil evaporation may be checked to some extent, although probably not as effectively in a practical way, ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... remarkable experience. The terrible plant that had nearly eaten him alive was a mass of cut-up vegetable matter which attracted a swarm of insects. Most of them were ants, but such large ones the boys had never seen before, and the professor said they exceeded in size anything he had read about. Some of them were as large as big rats. They bit off large pieces of the ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... that are said to be exhausted of plant-food still contain enough potash, phosphoric acid, and lime, and other fertilizing elements, to produce good crops; but they have been greatly injured in their physical condition by long-continued cropping, injudicious tillage, and the withholding of vegetable matter. A part of the marked results secured from the plowing under of clover is due to the incorporation of vegetable matter, wholly aside from the addition of fertilizing material; and this is emphatically true ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... the bones, is soon decomposed, through direct consumption by man and other carnivora, industrial use, and employment as manure, and enters into new combinations in which its animal origin is scarcely traceable; there is, nevertheless, a large annual residuum, which, like decayed vegetable matter, becomes a part of the superficial mould; and in any event, brute life immensely changes the form and character of the superficial strata, if it does not sensibly augment the quantity of the matter composing them. The remains of man, too, add to the earthy coating that ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... islands. The megapodius or mound-maker, an ash-coloured bird about the size of a small fowl, grasps sand or soil in the hollow of a powerful claw, and throws it backwards into mounds six feet high, wherein the eggs are deposited, to be hatched by this natural incubator, through the heat of the vegetable matter contained in the rubbish heap. The young birds work their way through the mound, and run off at once into the forest, where they start on an independent career. They emerge from their birthplace covered with thick down and provided with fully-developed ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... extensive plains, designated Field's Plains, is for the most part extremely rich, as indeed might be expected, from the deposition of the quantities of vegetable matter that must take place in periods of flood. The plains are in some places even lower than the ground forming the immediate bank of the river, very soft, and difficult for loaded horses to pass over. If we had been so unfortunate as to have had a rainy season, it would have been ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... the routine procedure, sir, used, as far as I know, by all contact parties—we ran through a statistically significant sample of the terrain. There was nothing on Miracastle out of the ordinary. There was the typical, low-order vegetable matter, about what we always find. It was a ...
— General Max Shorter • Kris Ottman Neville
... Mu suggests as material for making fire: "dry vegetable matter, reeds, brushwood, straw, grease, oil, etc." Here we have the material cause. Chang Yu says: "vessels for hoarding fire, stuff ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... stones—heavy ones that wanted coaxing over,—and discovered also that the winkles hide themselves in a green, rather gelatinous weed, fuzzy like kale tops, from which they can be combed with the fingers. They love, too, a shadowed pool which is tainted a little, but not too much, by decaying vegetable matter. Uncle Jake likes the stones turned back and then replaced 'as ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... from Vellore, Hyderabad, Masulipatam, and other localities in India. They were submitted to a number of tests which induced Mr. Macie to believe that they consisted principally of silica, but that before calcination some vegetable matter must have been present. A determination of the specific gravity of the substance by Mr. Macie gave 2.188 as the result. Another determination ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... vegetation to grow along the banks of [Page 31] shallow seas, accumulated vast amounts of this vegetation, sunk it beneath the sea, roofed it over with sand, compacted the sand into rock, and changed this vegetable matter—the products of the sunshine—into coal; and when it was ready, lifted it once more, all garnered for the use of men, roofed over with mighty mountains. We mine the coal, bring out the heat, raise the steam, drive the train, so that in the ultimate analyses ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... ramify through the nourishing substratum from which there arises afterward a spore-bearing growth known as the sporocarp or young mushroom. This vegetative part of the fungus is usually hidden in the soil, or in decayed wood, or vegetable matter. In Figure 3 is a representation of the mycelium of the small pear-shaped puff-ball with a number of small white knobs marking the beginning of the puff-ball. The mycelium exposed here is very similar to the mycelium of ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... soon as Yorke had crept out of the scrub, I braced myself up, and taking out my sheath knife, began to cut away the thorny branches, and pull up by the roots some of the scrub around me, so as to make more room. The soil consisted of decomposed shell and vegetable matter, very soft and porous, underneath which were loose coral slabs, and I soon had a space cleared large enough for us both to lie down upon. Then I started to enclose it on three sides by a low wall of the flat coral stones, across which ...
— Yorke The Adventurer - 1901 • Louis Becke
... a remarkable fact,' says Dr. Dundas Thompson, 'that alcohol, when added to the digestive fluid, produces a white precipitate, so that the fluid is no longer capable of digesting animal or vegetable matter.' 'The use of alcoholic stimulants,' say Drs. Todd and Bowman, 'retards digestion by coagulating the pepsine, an essential element of the gastric juice, and thereby interfering with its action. Were it not that wine and spirits are rapidly absorbed, the introduction of these into the stomach, ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... quantities as the carbonate in the atmosphere, being produced from the putrefaction of nitrogenous animal and vegetable matter; ammonium salts are also found in small quantities in rain-water, whilst ammonium chloride (sal-ammoniac) and ammonium sulphate are found in volcanic districts; and crystals of ammonium bicarbonate have been found in Patagonian guano. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... life is required to furnish oxygen for the fish. In a well balanced aquarium the water requires renewal only two or three times a year. It is well to have an excess of plants and a number of snails, as the snails will devour all the decaying vegetable matter which would otherwise poison the water and ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... unhealthful growth; but long before maturity the days grow long and hot, drought comes, and the garden dries up. Therefore every effort should be made to supply cool manures with staying qualities, such as are furnished by decayed vegetable matter composted with the cleanings of the cow-stable. We thus learn the value of fallen leaves, muck from the swamp, etc.; and they also bring with them but few ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... persisted in wearing her nightcap. I doubt if any one but ourselves who had seen the progress of that article of dress, could by this time have told what it was meant for. It had got so limp and ragged that she couldn't see out of her eyes for it. It was so dirty, that whether it was vegetable matter out of a swamp, or weeds out of the river, or an old porter's-knot from England, I don't think any new spectator could have said. Yet, this unfortunate old woman had a notion that it was not only vastly genteel, but that it was the correct thing as to propriety. And she really ...
— The Perils of Certain English Prisoners • Charles Dickens
... like the white strips and blotches of the deposit, worthy the careful notice of the geologist. It serves to throw some light on the origin of those continuous bands of clayey or arenaceous ironstone, which in the older formations in which vegetable matter abounds, whether Oolitic or Carboniferous, are of such common occurrence. The pan is a stony stratum, scarcely less indurated in some localities than sandstone of the average hardness, that rests like a pavement on the surface of the boulder-clay, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... are very expert swimmers, and can glide through beds of reeds or rushes, or over masses of floating vegetable matter, with ease. They live on wild fowl, fish, sago and marsh plants, and on vegetables procured from the Baruga in exchange for fish and sago. They keep a few pigs on platforms built underneath or alongside their ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... scarcely be a doubt that Sarracenia and Darlingtonia may be added to this class, though the fact can hardly be considered as yet fully proved. There is a third class of plants which feed, as is now generally admitted, on the products of the decay of vegetable matter, such as the bird's-nest orchis (Neottia), &c. Lastly, there is the well-known fourth class of parasites (such as the mistletoe), which are nourished by the juices of living plants. Most, however, of the ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... marshy region. It was a marsh of which the extent, to the rounded coast which terminated the island at the southeast, was about twenty square miles. The soil was formed of clayey flint-earth, mingled with vegetable matter, such as the remains of rushes, reeds, grass, etc. Here and there beds of grass, thick as a carpet, covered it. In many places icy pools sparkled in the sun. Neither rain nor any river, increased by a sudden swelling, could supply these ponds. They ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... and inasmuch as they multiply by division, frequently appear coupled together, linked in pairs, and in chains. They are generally found in putrefying liquids, especially infusions of vegetable matter. They possess mobility to a remarkable degree. Observing a field of bacteria-termo under the microscope, they may be seen actively engaged in twining and twisting. A flagellum has been demonstrated as attached to one or both extremities. This is too minute to be generally resolved, even if it ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... are admirable breeding-places for many kinds of Diptera, and which sometimes presented one wriggling mass of larvae. We have drained many marshes, ditches, and unclean pools, rich in decomposing vegetable matter, and have thus notably checked the propagation of gnats and midges. I know an instance of a country mansion, situate in one of the best wooded parts of the home counties, which twenty years ago was almost uninhabitable, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... state of cultivation Kincardine Moss, in Perthshire. At that time, 1767, the task to be undertaken was one of stupendous magnitude; but was so successfully carried out that two thousand acres were reclaimed which for centuries had rested under seven feet of heath and vegetable matter. Similarly many other spots were brought into a state of cultivation. But this, and other pursuits then engaged in, did not occupy the time of all who had ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... Santo. A grand mountainous chain runs along the whole island, the peaks we estimate at 4,000 feet high. This alone is a fine sight—luxuriant vegetation to nearly the top of the peaks, clouds resting upon the summit of the range, from the evaporation caused by the vast amount of vegetable matter. ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... formed across their mouths, which may gradually grow to broad alluvial plains, so that the long-surviving, crescent-shaped lake, the remnant of the river bed, may be seen far from the present course of the ever-changing stream. Gradually the accumulations of vegetable matter and the silt brought in by floods efface this moat or oxbow cut-off, as it ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... vigorously and flying when frightened with remarkable vigour and speed, though but a few hours old. I come gladly to the conclusion that the megapode is a sagacious bird, not only in the avoidance of the dismal duty of incubation, but in respect of the making of those great mounds of decaying vegetable matter and earth which perform the function so effectively. In a particularly rugged part of the island is a mound almost completely walled in by immense boulders. In such a situation the birds could hardly have found it possible to accumulate by kicking ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... silk case, tenanted by a goodly grub. Six legs he has, like all insects, and tufts of white horns on each ring of his abdomen, which are his gills. A goodly pair of jaws he has too, and does good service with them: for he is the great water scavenger. Decaying vegetable matter is his food, and with those jaws he will bark a dead stick as neatly as you will with a penknife. But he does not refuse animal matter. A dead brother (his, not yours) makes a savoury meal for him; and a party of those Vorticellae would stand ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... the effect produced on the soil of a field by (1) leaving it a few years in pasture, (2) ploughing in heavy crops, (3) applying barn-yard manure. In all these cases vegetable matter is mixed ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... that name. It is caused by decaying vegetable matter, and exhibits itself in the form of gases of phosphorus, which appears to burn, but does not, like the vapor which is produced by rubbing certain ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... you mention are of any particular use for the specific purpose you describe. Keep on working in stable manure or rotten straw, or any other coarse vegetable matter, when the soil is moist enough for its decay. Plow under all the weeds you can grow, or green barley or rye, and later grow a crop of peas or vetches to plow in green. Keep at this till the pesky stuff gets mellow. If you think the soil is alkaline, use gypsum freely; if not, dose it with ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... direction it was covered thickly with logs in all stages of decay, some only lately fallen, others which could be knocked to pieces with a kick, while the feet sank at almost every step in decomposed vegetable matter. Still this was the region through which, somehow or other, ...
— In the Rocky Mountains - A Tale of Adventure • W. H. G. Kingston
... more congenial spot, but, as usually happens, in place of a romantic field or solemn aisle for his tale, it was told while they walked up and down over a floor littered with rotten cabbage-leaves, and amid all the usual squalors of decayed vegetable matter and unsaleable refuse. He began and finished his brief narrative, which merely led up to the information that he had married a wife some years earlier, and that his wife was living still. Almost ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... inorganic matter is refined by passing through organic life, so the consciousness lately within the molecules of your discarded body, will not be as the consciousness within like molecules of mineral or of vegetable matter; for it will be your consciousness —your consciousness, created by God and developed by His edict —developed after slumbering for ages within the mineral; awakening to quicker action in the vegetable world; touching the domain of conscious memory in lower ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... Manilla, who supply the merchants of India—and his analysis confirms that of Mr. Faraday. Of the three different kinds which he examined—one being of partially burnt bone, and another of chalk, the third, consisting chiefly of vegetable matter, resembled bezoar,—all of them (except the first, which possessed a slight absorbent power) were quite inert, and incapable of having any effect except on the imagination of the patient. Thunberg was shown the snake-stone used by the boers at the Cape in 1772, ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... most other things, owes its appearance on the surface to no convulsion or vagary at all, but to a most slow, orderly, and respectable process of nature, by which buried vegetable matter, which would have become peat, and finally brown coal, in a temperate climate, becomes, under the hot tropic soil, asphalt and oil, continually oozing up beneath the pressure of ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... element may play its part in Nature without negativing design in the theist's view. He believes that the earth's surface has been very gradually prepared for man and the existing animal races, that vegetable matter has through a long series of generations imparted fertility to the soil in order that it may support its present occupants, that even beds of coal have been stored up for man's benefit Yet what is more accidental, and more simply the consequence of physical ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... that profess a secret and unscientific origin. Those most "purely vegetable" seem most suitable to the wooden-heads who believe in them, but if one were sufficiently advertised as not containing a single trace of vegetable matter, avoiding thus all possible conflict of one organic life with another organic life, it would be just as popular. The favorites are those that have been secretly used by an East Indian fakir, or accidentally discovered ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... rapid decomposition of vegetable matter, and, combining with the juices of the weeds and the salts of the dung, it drains evenly through the whole mass, forming a most perfect compost. The surplus moisture, upon reaching the bottom of the heap, drains from the slightly inclined platform into the receiving cistern, ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... waste lands, where Heaths (Ericae) are produced: it is composed of decayed vegetable matter and white sand. The best sort is light when dry, of a black colour, and easily reduced to powder. Care should be taken to distinguish it from Peat, which is hard when dry, destitute in a great measure of the sand, and mostly ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... plain over which we journeyed this day, was light and sandy in character, but the large amount of vegetable matter which it contains, and the effect of the late rains, which had penetrated some 24 or 30 inches into it, made us perhaps somewhat overvalue its real merits. This plain rose gradually before us until it reached ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... food into the stomach it becomes disordered, and the whole system is affected. Vegetable matter ferments and becomes gaseous, while animal substances are changed into a putrid, abominable, and acrid stimulus. Now, some people acquire preposterous noses; others, blotches on the face and different ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... known several cases in which young ladies have been attacked with partial paralysis of the hands and arms, after having devoted some time to the practice of modelling; but at the time he had no suspicion of the cause. As all the requisite colours can be obtained from vegetable matter, and as the use of mineral colouring seems to lead to such deplorable results, the subject should be carefully investigated by those ...
— The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling • Emma Peachey
... subjects. Among conditions which act by the direct destruction of the globules in the circulating blood may be named an excess of water in that fluid; the use of water from soils rich in decomposing vegetable matter and containing alkaline salts, particularly nitrites; and the presence in the water and feed of the ptomaines of bacteria growth; hence the prevalence of "red water" in marshy districts and on clayey and other ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... summits of the range are porphyritic,** but the hills of Wingen present a variety of rocks, within a small space. In the adjacent gullies to the south of the hill, we find clay of a grey mottled appearance, and shale containing apparently a small quantity of decomposed vegetable matter; and near the fissure then on fire, occurred a coarse sandstone with an argillaceous basis. To the north-west, in a hollow containing water which drains from beneath the part ignited, is a coarse sandstone, in some places ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... club-shape and moves with the swollen end in advance. A comparatively small number of large granules are found in the swollen portion, while the smaller posterior end is quite hyaline. Contractile vacuole absent, and a nucleus was not seen. Frequent in decomposing vegetable matter. Length 37 mu. Traverses a distance of 160 mu ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins
... Old Mother Nature looked from one to another, and each in turn shook his head. "It is to mix the dead vegetable matter thoroughly with the earth so that the roots of the plants may get it easily," explained Old Mother Nature. "By making those tunnels in every direction and bringing up the earth below to the surface, Grubby ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... the acre, I have found amply sufficient for any of our lands, and a greater quantity often attended with injury to the soil and crops, whilst twenty-five bushels will answer every purpose on thin lands, deficient in vegetable matter. Ashes, bone dust, and the various marine manures that abound on the shores of the Chesapeake and its tributaries, will be found important auxiliaries in the work of 'keeping your lands rich,' whilst the necessity of clover and the proper grasses, to any system of permanent ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... certainly is always an uncommon advantage that certain kinds of soil, rich in kali and decayed vegetable matter, yield a long series of harvests without the addition of manure, provided, always, that a short interval is allowed to the process of decay to replace the exhausted plant-food. Thus in many volcanic regions. Compare on similar districts ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... They have usually been attributed to a refraction, by which a section of the bordering sky is thrown below the horizon; but I am convinced that they are the effect of reflection. It seems that a gas (emanating probably from the heated earth and its vegetable matter) floats upon the elevated flats, and is of sufficient density, when viewed obliquely, to reflect the objects beyond it; thus the opposing sky being reflected in the pond of gas, ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... Coast" (i. p. 180), it will bear repetition. Joseph Dupuis justly remarks: "I am satisfied, from my own experience, that many fall victims from the adoption of a course of training improperly termed prudential; viz. a sudden change of diet from ship's fare to a scanty sustenance of vegetable matter (rejecting even a moderate proportion of wine), and seclusion in their apartments ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... and shingle, damming the land-water back to form a lagoon. This might indeed empty itself during the floods of the rainy season; but during the dry season it must remain a stagnant pond, filling gradually with festering vegetable matter from the hills, beer-coloured, and as hideous to look at as it is to smell. Were there a tide, as in England, of from ten to twenty feet, that swamp would be drained twice a day to nearly that depth; and healthy vegetation, as ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... in France by the learned Buffon. They said that these things were absolutely begotten in the water of the decaying substances out of which the infusion was made. It did not matter whether you took animal or vegetable matter, you had only to steep it in water and expose it, and you would soon have plenty of animalcules. They made an hypothesis about this which was a very fair one. They said, this matter of the animal world, or of the higher plants, ...
— The Method By Which The Causes Of The Present And Past Conditions Of Organic Nature Are To Be Discovered.—The Origination Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... vapours thrown out from earthquakes in such abundance as to affect large regions of the atmosphere, see Botanic Garden, V. I. Canto IV. l. 65. while the diseases properly termed contagious originate from the putrid effluvia of decomposing animal or vegetable matter.] ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... village in this locality, there is a good instance of what can be got out of reclaimed land; it was formerly under water for the greater portion of the year. The soil is so rich in decayed vegetable matter as to be almost black, and now grows excellent crops of tobacco and Indian corn. The country north-east of Tokay is certainly the most picturesque side, there is more foliage, and there is ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... carefully laid down, and as carefully covered with boughs and twigs of trees which prevented it from being discovered. Traces of this new decomposed vegetable covering can be seen on every side of the trench, and it is quite evident this vegetable matter originally extended ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... generally a green, slime-covered, sluggish stream in all these forests, its channel choked with rotting leaves and decaying vegetable matter. The water should never be drunk until it has been boiled and filtered. At intervals the stream opens out and forms a clear rush-fringed pool, and the trees receding on either bank leave a lovely grassy glade, where the deer and nilghau come to drink. On the glassy bosom ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... heat vegetable matter may have been charred at the bottom of the sea, and the oleaginous, bituminous, and fuliginous substances diffused through the sea as a result of the burning may have been deposited at the bottom of the sea as coal. Further, the bituminous matter from the smoke of vegetable substances burned ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... does not exactly tally with that which we should give of the Now. His description is as follows: — "For some weeks previous to laying its eggs, the Brush turkey collects together an immense mass of vegetable matter, varying from two to four cart-loads, with which it forms a pyramidal heap; in this heap it plants its eggs about eighteen inches deep, and from nine to twelve inches apart. The eggs are always placed with the large ends upwards, being carefully covered, and ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... have none in our lakes; the water is too pure and free from vegetable matter for fish. It is doubly ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... and proper action of the skin; by great attention to the food, especially of infants fed from the bottle; free ventilation of living rooms, and especially of bedrooms; and by protection, as far as possible, being afforded from a hot sun, as well as by avoiding excessive exercise. All animal and vegetable matter should be removed from the vicinity of dwelling-houses as quickly as possible (indeed, these should be burnt instead of being put in the dust-bin), the drains should be frequently disinfected and well flushed out, especially when the mean daily temperature ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... You confound cause with effect. The country is unhealthy because it is uncultivated. The decayed vegetable matter accumulated by centuries ferments under the summer sun. The wind blows over it, and raises up a provision of subtle miasma, imperceptible to the smell, and yet destructive to life. If all these plains were ploughed or dug up three or four times, ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
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