"Alluvial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... should be drawn from the Village Indians, to which class the Mound-Builders undoubtedly belonged. Not knowing the use of wells, they established their settlements on the margins of rivers and small streams, which afforded alluvial land for cultivation, and often within a few miles of each other. In the valley of the Rio Chaco, in New Mexico, there were several pueblos within an extent of twelve miles, each consisting of a single joint-tenement house, constructed usually upon three ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... Dame; three hundred thousand men, summoned to rise against the tyrants of the earth, rose from all the varying soils of France, as if the dragon's teeth had been sown broadcast, and had yielded fruit equally on hill and plain, on rock, in gravel, and alluvial mud, under the bright sky of the South and under the clouds of the North, in fell and forest, in the vineyards and the olive-grounds and among the cropped grass and the stubble of the corn, along the fruitful banks of the broad rivers, and in the sand of the sea-shore. ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... formed by alluviation, on or beneath the shores of the sea, or in vallies of the land; it would seem, that some coal countries, which in the great commotions of the earth had been sunk beneath the water, were thus covered with alluvial limestone, as well as others with alluvial basaltes, or common gravel-beds. Very extensive plains which now consist of alluvial materials, were in the early times covered with water; which has since diminished as the solid parts of the earth have ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... marsh lands of the Flent valley, a broad alluvial plain brought down by the rivers Flent and Greet on their way to the estuary and the sea. From the slight rising ground on which he stood, he could see the great peat mosses about the river-mouths, marked here and ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... easy to explain this passage unless it be a garbled allustion to the steel-plate of the diamond-cutter. Nor can we account for the wide diffusion of this tale of perils unless to enhance the value of the gem. Diamonds occur in alluvial lands mostly open and comparatively level, as in India, the Brazil and the Cape. Archbishop Epiphanius of Salamis (ob. A.D. 403) tells this story about the jacinth or ruby (Epiphanii Opera, a Petaio, Coloniae 1682); and it was transferred to the diamond by Marco Polo (iii. 29, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Similarly, all the country south of the Caucasus must rank as Turkish territory, since the Turks form from fifty to eighty per cent, of the population; all Kazan, for the same reason, is truly Turkish, with the alluvial plains of the Volga, while the Crimea, so Tekin Alp discovers, is also a lost sheep longing for the Turkish fold. All this is Turkey (or Turania) Irredenta, and, may we ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... overlooking its waters, even in the depths of the Grand Canyon itself, or in the cliffs along the more accessible tributaries, cultivating in the bottoms their crops. Lands were also tilled along the extreme lower reaches, where the great rock-walls fall back and alluvial soils border the stream. Here and there the Amerind also crossed it, when occasion required, on the great intertribal highways which are found in all districts, but it was neither one thing ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... forest proceed; for I have observed within fifteen years the total drying up of streamlets by the removal of the forest, and these streamlets had evidently once been rivulets and even rivers of some size, as their banks, cut through alluvial soils, plainly indicated. ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... all—intermediate forms between apes and man—has been recently furnished. E. Dubois, as is well known, discovered in 1893, near Trinil in Java, in the alluvial deposits of the river Bengawan, an important form represented by a skull-cap, some molars, and a femur. His opinion—much disputed as it has been—that in this form, which he named Pithecanthropus, he has found a long-desired ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... running red with the silt and mud of their soft alluvial shores, carry far into the ocean the record of their muddy progress; but this glorious river system, through its many lakes and various names, is ever the same crystal current, flowing pure from the fountain-head of Lake Superior. Great cities stud its shores; but they are powerless ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... every one can to-day understand since they are politico-industrial. Group III, as it stands in the original text, is simply the plan for the conquest of the mineral wealth of the Yangtsze Valley which mainly centres round Hankow because the vast alluvial plains of the lower reaches of this greatest of rivers were once the floor of the Yellow Sea, the upper provinces of Hupeh, Hunan, Kiangsi being the region of prehistoric forests clothing the coasts, ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... to the still undiscovered lands. At the first glimpse the aspect of the Atlantic coast to the south of Brazil gave little promise of the wealth—that is to say, of the gold—sought by the pioneers, since its shores were low, marshy, and alluvial. ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... stands upon a small alluvial delta, of a triangular form, at the exact point of union between the rivers,—a spot so lovely, that, as I looked upon it, much as I respect manufactures, I found myself involuntarily wishing that fate had reserved it for some less dirty purpose. As the city grows, it must of necessity climb ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... walk along the river-bank in the fertile alluvial, where the poppy in white flower and tobacco were growing, and where fields of yellow rape-seed alternated with beds of rushes—the rape-seed yielding the oil, and the rushes the rushlights of Chinese lamps. Flocks ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... (Bridge of the Four Heads) and the island of the Tiber. This is said to have been formed in the kingly period by the accumulation of a harvest cast into the stream a little way above, which the current could not sweep away: it made a nucleus for alluvial deposit, and the island gradually arose. Several hundred years afterward it was built into the form of a ship, as bridges and wharves are built, with a temple in the midst, and a tall obelisk set up in guise of its mast. In mediaeval days a church replaced ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... or the Mountain of the Chain, is very interesting in many respects. After flowing for some distance through the usual strip of alluvial plain, bordered by not very lofty undulating ground, the Nile suddenly sweeps into a gap between two imposing masses of rock that overhang the stream for above a mile on either hand. The appearance of the precipices ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... went without hesitation to a spot on the banks of a little stream known as Lewes Pond Creek, a tributary of Summer Hill Creek, itself a tributary of the Macquarie River, and there at once, on February 12, 1851, found alluvial gold. In April he had so far advanced as to be able to write to the Government offering to disclose his treasures for five hundred pounds. But he subsequently decided to trust to the liberality of the Government, and offered at once to show his workings to the government ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... down upon conical roofs thatched with attaps, and diversified by the pyramids and spires and fantastic turrets of the more important buildings. The valley of the Meinam, not over six hundred miles in length, is as a long deep dent or fissure in the alluvial soil. At its southern extremity we have the climate and vegetation of the tropics, while its northern end, on the brow of the Yunan, is a region of perpetual snow. The surrounding country is remarkable for the bountiful productiveness of its unctuous loam. The scenery, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... by some two degrees and a half, again bends to the east, reaching the Gulf on the meridian of Cairo. Throughout this long distance the character of the river-bed is practically unchanged. The stream flows through an alluvial region, beginning a few miles above Cairo, which is naturally subject to overflow during floods; but the surrounding country is protected against such calamities by raised embankments, or dikes, known throughout that region ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... degree of confirmation from the best and most authentic accounts concerning that part of Africa, in which the Niger is supposed to disappear. This is represented by various concurrent testimonies to be a great tract of alluvial country, having several permanent lakes, and being annually overflowed for three months during ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... feeling of being a very old country. The big downs seem like the bases of great rocky hills which have through long ages been smoothed and worn away, softened and mellowed, the rocks, grain by grain, carried downwards into the flat alluvial meadowlands beneath. In these rich pastures, all intersected with clear streams, runnels and water-courses, full at this season of rich water-plants, the cattle graze peacefully. The downs have been ploughed and sown up to the sky-line. Then there are fine tracts of heather and pines in places. ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... this part of the Hudson are low, being rich, alluvial meadows, bordered by trees and bushes; most of the first being willows, sycamores, or nuts. The fertility of the soil had given to these trees rapid growths, and they were generally of some stature; though not one among them had that great ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... one of the most widely diffused of metals. Traces of it are found in practically all igneous and most sedimentary rocks. It occurs in sea-water, and quite frequently in beach-sands. Traces of it are also usually to be found in alluvial deposits and in the soils of most mountain-folds. In spite of its wide diffusion, however, all the gold that has been mined could be stored readily in the vaults of ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... examine the American continent, with a view to its ancient occupancy, we perceive its surface scarified with moats and walls—its alluvial level plains and vallies bearing mounds, teocalli and pyramids. Its high interior altitudes, in the tropical regions, are covered with the ruins of temples and cities—and even in the temperate latitudes of the north, ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... is one of the secrets of the flower-world. So, too, the wild hyacinths grow not in the meadows, though the fritillaries, the chequered red or pale "snake flowers," are grass-lovers, and grow only in the alluvial meadows by the streams and brooks of the valleys. Early though the fritillaries are, they are a real "grass flower," flourishing best where there is some early succulent growth around them, for they like ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... dispute; water sharing problems with upstream riparian India over the Ganges Climate: tropical; cool, dry winter (October to March); hot, humid summer (March to June); cool, rainy monsoon (June to October) Terrain: mostly flat alluvial plain; hilly in southeast Natural resources: natural gas, uranium, arable land, timber Land use: arable land 67%; permanent crops 2%; meadows and pastures 4%; forest and woodland 16%; other 11%; includes irrigated 14% Environment: vulnerable to droughts; much ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Niger is a vast alluvial morass, covered with dense forests of mangrove. "Along the whole coast ... there opens into the Atlantic its successive estuaries, which navigators have ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... pleasing interest. Outside the Cemetery, a winding path leads to the High Rocks, the road to which the inhabitants have recently improved. This elevated position above the Severn well deserves a visit, commanding as it does the Vale, through which the river winds amidst alluvial lands, bounded by the heights of Apley and Stanley, the hills of the Wrekin and Caradoc, and those of the Brown and Titterstone Clees, with the Abberley and Malvern hills in the distance. The castellated structure at the foot of the ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... impulse of a man who had been obliged to waste time, and saw an opportunity to get on, Harnden whipped up when he was again facing a smooth road. Therefore he came suddenly around the bend of the alders into cleared country and abreast a farm. It was a farm made up of the alluvial soil of the lowlands and was a rather pretentious tract of tillage, compared with the other hillside apologies of Egypt. And the buildings were in fairly good repair. It was the home of Jared Sparks Grant, the first selectman ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... given to strolling up and down the streets of Ballarat when that eviscerated city was merely in process of disembowelment, before alluvial mining gave way to quartz-crushing, when the individual had a chance, if a very vague one, of sudden and delightful fortune. The Ballarat blacks were a scaly lot, to talk of them like ill-fed hogs, as men were wont to do. They dwined and dwindled, as natives will ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... apparently of fresh-water origin, now washed by the sea and encrusted with Balini; this appears to indicate a small amount of subsidence subsequent to its deposition. At Pernambuco (latitude 8 degrees S.), in the alluvial or tertiary cliffs, surrounding the low land on which the city stands, I looked in vain for organic remains, or other evidence of changes ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... could not tell when the vein would fault and cease as entirely as if cut off. And the explanation of this is entirely theoretical. The theory is that the place of the gold was the gravel bed of an old stream, an old stream antedating the petrified forests of the South-west, and that, when vast alluvial deposits were carried over a great part of the {49} continent by inland lakes and seas, the gold settled to the bottom and was buried beneath the deposits of countless centuries. Then convulsive changes shook the earth's surface. ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... of too recent formation to be much enriched by decomposition. It varies but little in quality, there being no alluvial deposits, owing to the flat character of the eastern portion of the island. There is no sub-soil, except in a few localities, sand and gravel extending down to the rock layers. As far as I penetrated the interior, the roots ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... maintains a copious flow of water down the many rivers at all times of the year; but the rivers are liable to rise rapidly many feet above their normal level during days of exceptionally heavy rain. In their lower reaches, where they traverse the alluvial plains and swamps, the rivers wind slowly to the sea with many great bends, and all the larger ones are navigable by small steamers for many miles above their mouths: thus a large steam launch can ascend the Rejang for 160 miles, ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... of the valley of Virginia in which establishments were thus begun to be made, was at that time one continued forest; overspreading a limestone soil of great fertility; and intersected by rivers affording extensive bottoms of the most productive alluvial land. Indeed few rivers of equal size, are bordered with as wide and fertile levels of this formation of earth, as those which water that section of country: the Roanoke particularly affords large bodies of it, capable of ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... morning we rode down from the Cadmeion, and took the highway to Livadia, leading straight across the Boeotian plain. It is one of the finest alluvial bottoms in the world, a deep, dark, vegetable mold—which would produce almost without limit, were it properly cultivated. Before us, blue and dark under a weight of clouds, lay Parnassus; and far across the immense plain the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... second day after leaving our canoes we found that the whole character of the country changed. Our road was persistently upwards, and as we ascended the woods became thinner and lost their tropical luxuriance. The huge trees of the alluvial Amazonian plain gave place to the Phoenix and coco palms, growing in scattered clumps, with thick brushwood between. In the damper hollows the Mauritia palms threw out their graceful drooping fronds. ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... next mile, the trace led through heavy bottom-timber, such as we had traversed, after leaving the settlement of Swampville. The black earth, of alluvial origin, was covered deeply with decayed vegetation; and the track of horses and cattle had converted the path into mud. At intervals, it was intersected by embayments of wet morass—the projecting arms of a great swamp, that appeared to run parallel with the creek. ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... through a forest, they recognised with great satisfaction, the lofty "Yarra" trees, and the low verdant alluvial flats of the Murray. Once across the river, the boat was sunk in a deep lagoon, and the boat carriage left on the bank for the use of Stapylton. Three volunteers went back to meet him, and assist in crossing the Ovens and Goulburn. The ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... was discharged, after we got there, for lack of evidence. There was no work suitable to our instincts; so me and Liverpool began to subsist on the red rum of the country and such fruit as we could reap where we had not sown. It was an alluvial town, called Soledad, where there was no harbour or future or recourse. Between steamers the town slept and drank rum. It only woke up when there were bananas to ship. It was like a man sleeping through ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... except when pounded or heated, and then it emits a fragrant odour. It has considerable lustre; becomes highly electric by friction; and will burn with a yellow flame. It is found in nodules of various sizes in alluvial soils, or on the seashore in many places, particularly on the shores of the Baltic. Amber is much employed for ornamental purposes, and is also used in the manufacture of amber-varnish. It will not dissolve in alcohol, but yields to the concentrated action of sulphuric acid, ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead
... with scarcely one exception. Steel rusts; razors lose their edge; thread decays; clothes fall to pieces; books moulder away, and drop out of their bindings; plaster cracks; timber rots; matting is in shreds. The sun, the steam of this vast alluvial tract, and the infinite armies of white ants, make such havoc with buildings that a house requires a complete repair every three years. Ours was in this situation about three months ago; and, if we had determined to brave the rains without any precautions, we should, in all probability, have had ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... the arid plateau of Mesopotamia, stretched the [v.03 p.0100] rich alluvial plain of Chaldaea, formed by the deposits of the two great rivers by which it was enclosed. The soil was extremely fertile, and teemed with an industrious population. Eastward rose the mountains of Elam, southward were the sea-marshes ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... it is balsam! These hills are for the healing of men. I have been here three days and have taken more exercise than in three months—walking and climbing; beside the creek lined with great sycamores—alluvial soil, crumbles in your hand, and with our friend the gopher in it; and climbed up through a bit of manzanita—big fellows, twenty feet high some of them— and such a rich brown, near-burgundy red! ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... about 2000 ft. (from Derwentwater 244 ft.); the waters are usually beautifully clear, and the river is not navigable. At a former period this stream must have formed one large lake covering the whole area which includes Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite; between which a flat alluvial plain is formed of the deposits of the river Greta, which now joins the Derwent from the east immediately below Derwentwater, and the Newlands Beck, which enters Bassenthwaite. In time of high flood this plain is said to have been submerged, and the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... plain." Some fragments of quartz and ferruginous rock lay among the scrub and the tall grass, where numerous flocks were feeding. Some miles farther the wheels of the wagon plowed deep into the alluvial soil, where irregular creeks murmured in their beds, half hidden among giant reeds. By-and-by they skirted vast salt lakes, rapidly evaporating. The journey was accomplished without trouble, ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... the Nore, with homeward-bound and outward-faring ships afloat on its golden tide. Across the gleaming waters, from where they lipped their banks to the foot of low domestic Kentish hills, stretched alluvial lands, sparsely timbered, and in the clear sunshine clusters of houses, great and small, factories with tall, smoky chimneys, clumps of trees and rigid railway lines could be discerned. The landscape was not beautiful, in spite of the sun's profuse ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... tread on it, to be sure of a hundred-fold return? Who talks of succession of crops, when twelve burdens of wheat, taken from the same soil in as many years, leave the ground black and ready for another yield of almost equal abundance? An alluvial tract of about three hundred thousand acres, near the Mississippi, has been cultivated in Indian corn a hundred and fifty years,—indeed, ever since the French occupation of Illinois. What of under-draining? Some ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... "We call Zealand a group of forts defended by a garrison of farmers and shepherds. Zealand is the richest agricultural province in the Netherlands. The alluvial soil of these islands is a marvel of fertility. Few countries can boast such wheat, colza, flax, and madder as it produces. Its people raise prodigious cattle and colossal horses, which are even larger than those of ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... the Rice Lake and the Ontario, a deep and fertile valley, surrounded by lofty wood-crowned hills, the heights of which were clothed chiefly with groves of oak and pine, though the sides of the hills and the alluvial bottoms gave a variety of noble timber trees of various kinds, as the maple, beech, hemlock, and others. This beautiful and highly picturesque valley is watered by many clear streams of pure refreshing water, from whence the spot has derived its appropriate appellation of "Cold ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... which possessed the high-sounding title of "The Ever Victorious," and had achieved fame by having in the "good times" of the Flat yielded a certain Peter Finnerty two thousand ounces of gold from a hundred tons of alluvial. The then owner of the battery was an intelligent, but bibulous ex-marine engineer, who had served with Gordon in China, and when he erected the structure he formally christened it "The Ever Victorious," in memory of Gordon's army, which stamped ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... her head. She was like the wild sweet-brier roses which crowded alluvial strips of the island, fragrant and pink and bristling. "Yes, monsieur, that black feather—regard it. Me, I am sick of that black feather. You say I have concealments. I have. All winter I go lonely. The ice is massed on the lake; the snow is so deep, ...
— The Black Feather - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... types. First is the coastal plain — a consistently narrow strip of land, generally not over 3 or 4 miles wide. The soil is sandy silt with a considerable admixture of vegetable matter. In some places it is loose, and shifts readily before the winds; here and there are stretches of alluvial clay loam. The sandy areas are often covered with coconut trees, and the alluvial deposits along the rivers frequently become beds of nipa palm as far back as tide water. The plain areas are generally poorly watered except during the rainy season, having only the streams of the steep mountains passing ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... their hideous nakedness, and have been formed by the torrents, which, in the season of the rains, rush from the extensive plain, as from a wide ocean, down to the deep channel of the river in narrow streams. These streams cut their way easily through the soft alluvial soil, which must once have formed the bed of a vast lake.[14] On coming through the forest, before sunrise we discovered our error of the day before, for we found excellent deer-shooting in the long grass and brushwood, which grow luxuriantly ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... valley to Lisbon, it has usually been regarded as an important military position. Originally an Iberian settlement, founded about 300 B.C., it received the name Aurantes from the Romans; perhaps owing to the alluvial gold (aurum) found along the Tagub. Roman mosaics, coins, the remains of an aqueduct, and other antiquities have been discovered in the neighbourhood. Abrantes was captured on the 24th of November 1807 by the French under General Junot, who for this achievement was created duke of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of their streams upon their banks to produce a constant variation in their courses, which in a long period of time might amount to something very considerable. It is impossible to say, with respect to any portion of the alluvial plain, that it may not at some former period have been the bed of one or the other river. Still it would seem that, on the whole, a law of compensation prevails, with the result that the general position of the streams in the valley is not very different now from what it was 4000 ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... surrounds him. No alternation of plain and highland, meadow and forest, no slopes of hills, or hanging woods, or dells, or gorges, or cascades, or rushing streams, or babbling rills, meet his gaze on any side; look which way he will, all is sameness, one vast smooth expanse of rich alluvial soil, varying only in being cultivated or else allowed to lie waste. Turning his back with something of weariness on the dull uniformity of this featureless plain, the wayfarer proceeds southwards, and enters, at the distance of a hundred miles from ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... boldly with the longitudinal base of the steeps on the opposite shore; while their flat or gently-sloping-surfaces never fail to introduce, into the midst of desolation and barrenness, the elements of fertility, even where the habitations of men may not have been raised. These alluvial promontories, however, threaten, in some places, to bisect the waters which they have long adorned; and, in course of ages, they will cause some of the lakes to dwindle into numerous and insignificant pools; which, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... then, that left the gates of Blonay just as the fog began to stir on the wide alluvial meadows of the Rhone, were all in the saddle. A courier, accompanied by a sumpter-mule, had departed over-night to prepare the way for those who were to follow, and active young mountaineers had succeeded, from time to time, charged with different orders, issued in behalf ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... of the masses of finely-divided leaves. Leaves often 3 feet long, bipinnate, and composed of numerous bluish-green leaflets. Flowers white, borne in loose spikes in the beginning of summer, and succeeded by flat, somewhat curved brown pods. It prefers a rich, strong soil or alluvial deposit. ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... in a recent paper on the subject,[2] states the fact of the plains of Hungary being "overspread by sands, gravels, and a kind of mud called loess, or by alluvial deposits underlaid by fresh-water limestones, which may be considered as having been formed beneath an inland lake, during different periods of repletion or partial exhaustion, dating ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... is so thickly spread over this country. It is similar to that found near Naples, at Mont d'Or, Carbal, and other parts of Italy; and, indeed, all the products of the latter district are pretty nearly the same as these, allowing for the difference of a slate surface in the one case, and a sandy and alluvial soil in the other. The idea of the trass having any connexion with a deluge, is, I believe, now exploded; and geologists have agreed that it is the actual substance ejected by the volcano, subsided into a firm paste. The rain has always been observed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... the cave several hundred acres of fertile alluvial land can be seen along both banks of the river. In the bottom land lying nearest to the spring branch—which is itself entitled to be called a creek—and extending southward to Miller's residence, partly on an upper terrace, but mostly ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... merchants, a fruitful soil, and beside many waters," where the colony like a willow was transplanted [17:5]. The Kabaru Canal (the River Chebar of Ezekiel) ran southeast from Babylon to Nippur through a rich alluvial plain, intersected by numerous canals. Beside it lived a dense agricultural population. On the tells or artificial mounds made by the ruins of earlier Babylonian cities were built the peasant villages. Ezekiel speaks of preaching to the Jewish colony of Tel-Abib (Storm-hill), ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... remains of marine animals:—the Secondary rocks, containing the remains of animals and vegetables, and consequently formed after their creation;—the Tertiary formation, composed of layers of clay, sand, gravel, and marl, and containing peculiar organic remains;—and the Alluvial formation, constituted of parts of previous rocks separated by water, &c., and ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... after they came abreast the works. They were thus exposed to a longer and more dangerous cannonade than is the case where the stream flows straight past the front of a battery. The channel has now changed; but in 1862 the river, which from Memphis had pursued its winding course through an alluvial country, made when abreast of Vicksburg a sharp turn to the northeast, as though determined to reach the bluffs but four miles distant. As it neared them it swung round with a sharp turn to the southwest, parallel to its recent direction, flowing for the most part ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... limestone, form as it were the skeleton of the country. Here and there, at Carmel and Gerizim, patches of the tertiary nummulite of Egypt make their appearance, and in the plains of Megiddo and the coast, as well as in the "Ghor" or valley of the Jordan, there is rich alluvial soil. But elsewhere all is barren or nearly so, cultivation being possible only by terracing the cliffs, and bringing the soil up to them from the plains below with slow and painful labour. It has often been said ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... to the north some three hundred miles we come to Amoy, the first important seaport in the adjacent province of Fukien. The aspect of the country has undergone a change. Hills attain the altitude of mountains, and the alluvial plains, so conspicuous about Canton, become contracted ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... generally admitted that the great coal-fields of the Carboniferous age are the result of the growth in situ of the plants which compose coal, and that these grew on vast marshy or partially submerged tracts of level alluvial land. We have, however, distinct evidence of old land-surfaces, both in the Coal-measures and in other cases (as, for instance, in the well-known "dirt-bed" of the Purbeck series). When, for example, we find the erect stumps of trees standing at ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... oil revenues, the government has been trying to agree on a "shadow" fiscal management program with the World Bank and IMF. Government officials and their family members own most businesses. Undeveloped natural resources include titanium, iron ore, manganese, uranium, and alluvial gold. Growth remained strong ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... from its high mountains by its immense rivers. The valleys of the Indus (1800 miles long), the Ganges (1600 miles long), and the Brahmapootra (1500 miles long) include an area of 1,125,000 square miles, a part of which, the Indus-Ganges plain, consists of a great stretch of alluvial soil whose fertility is as rich as that of any portion of the globe. One hundred and eighty millions of people live in this plain. So finely pulverised is its soil that for a distance of almost 2000 miles not even ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... derived from the tusks of the great mammoth or fossil elephant of the geologist. The remains of this gigantic animal are abundantly distributed over the whole extent of the globe. They exist in large masses in the northern hemisphere, deeply embedded in the alluvial deposits of the tertiary period. Humboldt discovered specimens on some of the most elevated ridges of the Andes; and similar remains have been found in Africa. In the frozen regions of the far North, surrounded by ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... some time at a place called Long Creek, on the margin of a broad and rapid stream, which might well have borne the more dignified appellation of river—the land on its borders was the flat, rich "intervale," so highly prized, formed by alluvial deposits. There are, I believe, two descriptions of this intervale,—one covered with low small bushes, and, therefore, more easily cleared—the other with a gigantic growth of the butternut, the oak, and the elm. This where we lived was of the latter description. A few of the stately monarchs ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... collection of them which he had seen. He found them, to the number of forty or fifty, extending at a distance of four or five rods from one another, in a couple of wide avenues, from the edge of a wood to the margin of a river. The piece of ground on which the lodges were built seemed to be a bit of alluvial formed by the overflowing of the river. All along the stream were scattered fields of maize, whose tall, stout stalks attested the richness of the soil. The cultivation was of that sluggish and negligent description which ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... interest was far greater than he admitted. He was puzzled, too. He could not quite make out how he had missed the signs of alluvial deposit. Both scientifically and practically he was a master of his hobby, in spite of local opinion. Yet he had missed this rich haul under his very nose. That was his interest as a gold miner. But there was another side to it, which occupied his thoughts even more. And ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... off since 1993 because of the government's gross corruption and mismanagement. Businesses, for the most part, are owned by government officials and their family members. Undeveloped natural resources include titanium, iron ore, manganese, uranium, and alluvial gold. The country responded favorably to the devaluation of the CFA franc in January 1994. Boosts in production, along with high world oil prices, should further stimulate growth ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... voice shouts "Carstairs Junction," with a command of the letter r, which is the bequest of an unconquerable past, and inspires one with the hope of some day hearing a freeborn Scot say "Auchterarder." The train runs over bleak moorlands with black peat holes, through alluvial straths yielding their last pickle of corn, between iron furnaces blazing strangely in the morning light, at the foot of historical castles built on rocks that rise out of the fertile plains, and then, after a space of sudden ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... generally lie at the distance of from one to one and a half miles, and, occasionally, even at more than three miles, from the shore. The central mountains are generally bordered by a fringe of flat, and often marshy, alluvial land, from one to four miles in width. This fringe consists of coral-sand and detritus thrown up from the lagoon-channel, and of soil washed down from the hills; it is an encroachment on the channel, analogous to that low and inner part of the islets in many atolls which ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... 15th, so we crossed the Loangwa, and judged it to be from seventy to a hundred yards wide: it is deep at present, and it must always be so, for some Atumboka submitted to the Mazitu, and ferried them over and back again. The river is said to rise in the north; it has alluvial banks with large forest trees along them, bottom sandy, and great sandbanks are in it like the Zambesi. No guide would come, so we went on without one. The "lazies" of the party seized the opportunity of remaining ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... general interests would have been established, and the good of the many had been kept in view. Cotton-growing, and tobacco-planting, and rice-cultivating, had been encouraged and fostered. Those rich alluvial bottoms, so fertile and yet so uncultivated, had given out their rich harvests to some purpose—untaxed prosperity would have rewarded the hand of the hardy husbandman. India would then, besides proving herself the greatest exporting empire in the world, have clothed, fed ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... and the IMF have been cut off since 1993 because of the government's gross corruption and mismanagement. Businesses, for the most part, are owned by government officials and their family members. Undeveloped natural resources include titanium, iron ore, manganese, uranium, and alluvial gold. Oil exploration, taking place under concessions offered to US, French, and Spanish firms, has been moderately successful and has contributed to Equatorial Guinea's strong growth rates in the early 1990s. The country responded favorably to the devaluation of ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Narenta is but thinly populated, a circumstance easily accounted for by the noxious vapours which exhale from the alluvial and ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... be planted February 14. On alluvial land it is best to plant them on slight rises as a protection against the rains which sometimes occur toward the end of the month. If frost should threaten just as the beans begin to peep out, cover ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... of tall forest trees which grow inland. So hard is the wood that the boards are handed down as heirlooms from father to son, and the piles on which the houses are built last for generations. The inhabitants of Kalo possess gardens, where the rich alluvial soil produces a superabundance of coco-nuts, bananas, yams, sweet potatoes, and taro. Areca palms also flourish and produce the betel nuts, which are in great demand for chewing with quick-lime and so constitute ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... through which the minute lichen, settling on a surface of naked stone, forms in the course of ages a soil for plants of greater bulk and a higher order; and had Scotland been left to the exclusive operation of this slow agent, it would be still a rocky desert, with perhaps here and there a strip of alluvial meadow by the side of a stream, and here and there an insulated patch of rich soil among the hollows of the crags. It might possess a few gardens for the spade, but no fields for the plough. We owe our arable land to that comparatively modern geologic agent, whatever its character, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... by the natives. The Greek population are armed, and the number of Turks in the surrounding district does not exceed fifteen. Opposite to us is the pass of Thermopylae, of which pass there is now no remains, the sea having receded and a considerable plain of alluvial soil now exists where the Pass must have been. The part of Thessaly opposite the Negropont is the ancient Myseria and the first scene of the memorable Argonautic Expedition. Volo was Iolcos, from which Jason embarked his band of adventurers. ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... examining a great river-system, and finding everywhere adaptations which reveal the design of the Creator. "He would see special adaptation to the wants of man in broad, quiet, navigable rivers, through fertile alluvial plains that would support a large population, while the rocky streams and mountain torrents were confined to those sterile regions suitable only for a small population of shepherds and herdsmen.') is new to me, and admirable; but your ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... as full of talk as an egg of meat. The theme he dwelt longest on was the new glory that lay in store for the Ballarat diggings. At present these were under a cloud. The alluvial was giving out, and the costs and difficulties of boring through the rock seemed insuperable. One might hear the opinion freely expressed that Ballarat's day as premier goldfield was done. Ned set up this belief ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... of our camp was a great stretch of flat alluvial land, about ten miles long and fourteen wide, which apparently had once been the bed of a lake. With my telescope I could see at the foot of a small hill the camping-ground of Karko. There were many tents. My men seemed reassured when by their shape ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... in grain." [5] Wheat and barley were perhaps first domesticated in this part of the world. [6] Wheat still grows wild there. Though Babylonia possessed no forests, it had the date palm, which needed scarcely any cultivation. If the alluvial soil yielded little stone, clay, on the other hand, was everywhere. Molded into brick and afterwards dried in the sun, the clay became adobe, the cheapest ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... Associated Words: aquatic, aquarium, aqueduct, alluvial, alluvion, affusion, aquapuncture, alluvium, diluvium, anhydrous, enhydrous, amphibious, amphibian, aquiferous, aquiform, aquiparous, buoy, coffer, cofferdam, debacle, cataclysm, dehydrate, dehydration, irrigation, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... beheld an appalling spectacle. The river, whose stream washes on three sides the base of the proud eminence on which the castle is situated, curves away from the fortress and its corresponding village on the west, and the hill sinks downward to an extensive plain, so extremely level as to indicate its alluvial origin. Lower down, at the extremity of this plain, where the banks again close on the river, were situated the manufacturing houses of the stout Flemings, which were now burning in a bright flame. The bridge, a high, narrow combination of arches ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... in mid-stream below where we must have crossed. The stream was straight, and from where we stood we could see more than half a mile of alluvial mud with an arm of the river on either side. The mud was white, not black—so white that it dazzled the eyes ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... a remarkably rich country, famous for its ivory and coffee productions, they descended from the Mountains of the Moon to an alluvial plain, where Rumanika keeps thousands of cows. Once elephants abounded here, but, since the increase of the ivory trade, these animals had been driven off ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... mile from one of the Berkshire villages, and separated from it by the Housatonic, is one of the loveliest sites in all our old county. It is on an exhausted farm of rocky, irregular, grazing ground, with a meadow of rich alluvial soil. The river, which so nearly surrounds it as to make it a peninsula "in little," doubles around a narrow tongue of land, called the "ox-bow"—a bit of the meadow so smooth, so fantastic in its shape, so secluded, ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... name for rich low land formed by alluvial deposits: but in a general sense it denotes the lowest part of a thing, in contradistinction to the top or uppermost part. In navigation, it is used to denote as well the channel of rivers and harbours as the body ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... central plain of the interior," he continued, "is formed by a vast alluvial deposit carried down as silt by the Mississippi. East of this the range of the Alleghanies, nowhere more than eight thousand feet in height, forms a secondary or subordinate axis from which the watershed ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... way up-stream; (3) there must be security for the good government not only of the area included in the scheme, but of the whole course of the river above it. These Asiatic rivers are tricky things: they run for hundreds of miles through alluvial plains which are as flat as your hand. Here at Amarah, 200 miles from the mouth of the Tigris, we are only 28ft. above sea-level. Consequently the river's course is very easily altered. Look at Stanford's map of this region ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... all the tales is, perhaps, a less extravagant invention than we are at first inclined to think. A lake, nearly as large as the Victoria Nyanza, once covered the marshy plain where the Bahr-el-Abiad unites with the Sobat and with the Bahr-el-Ghazal. Alluvial deposits have filled up all but its deepest depression, which is known as Birket Nu; but in ages preceding our era it must still have been vast enough to suggest to Egyptian soldiers and boatmen the idea of an actual sea opening into the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... is not very well known, but a granitic mountain chain, rising in Perak to ascertained heights of eight thousand feet, runs down its whole length near the centre, with extensive outlying spurs, and alluvial plains on both sides densely covered with jungle, as are also the mountains. There are no traces of volcanic formation, though thermal springs exist in Malacca. The rivers are numerous, but with one exception small, and are seldom navigable beyond the reach of the ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... which are as large as itself, besides receiving innumerable of less pretensions—when we consider, too, the great physical phenomena which it presents in its turbid waters, its islands, its bars, and its bayous, its vast banks of alluvial deposit, its omnipotent force, and the signal futility of all human endeavors to control it, in this phase is it truly the 'Father of Waters,' and 'the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... reasonable and right to conclude certainly, that those creatures were once living beings; that the surface of the earth was once a soft sediment which received the impression of the rain-drops as they fell; and that stratified rocks were deposited out of lakes and seas, as we see alluvial strata deposited at the present day. It is impossible, therefore, that (if we are not misled by appearances) any well-ascertained fact can be contrary to the truth of God as explained by Revelation. If we are ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... from prehistoric ages to the ruined shepherd's cot of yesterday. At many spots a spectator may perceive in one survey the stone ruin of the Danmonian's habitation, and hypaethral temple or forum, the heather-clad debris left by Elizabethan streamers of alluvial tin, the inky peat-ridges from which a moorman has just cut his winter firing. But the first-named objects, with kindred fragments that have similarly endured, chiefly fire imagination. Seen grey at gloaming time, golden through sunny dawns, partaking ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... float away, drowning some or all of the family. It might be supposed that the married portion of the pioneers would select other sites than on the borders of a large river subject every year to overflow, but the richness of the alluvial soil on the banks of the Connecticut was so tempting that other considerations were overlooked, and to no part of New England was the tide of emigration turned so strongly as to the ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... "villas" in which the great landed proprietors resided. The wealth of remains which it has furnished is merely a by-product of the "coprolite" digging, and it is probable that equally systematic digging would have like results in almost any alluvial district in the island. We may therefore regard it as fairly established that these districts were as thickly peopled under the Romans as at any other period of history, and that the agricultural ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... the perilous slope, Wemple came ahead and up, gaining fifty feet of sand over the previous failure. More of the alluvial soil of the road had dropped out at the bad place; but he took the V in reverse, overhung the front wheel as before, and from the top came ahead again. Four times he did this, gaining each time, but each time knocking a bigger hole where the road ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... A.M., reached Hazarebaug, a small station, about two hundred and twenty miles from Calcutta. It is a healthy spot; the earth sandy and rocky, presenting a strong contrast to the loomy and alluvial soil of Southern Bengal. From Rogonnathpore to Hazarebaug the road runs through an almost uninterrupted jungle, swarming with wild beasts. At this place we met with a hospitable friend, who stored our palankeens with provisions, after ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... the Swan River, as well as of the Canning and most other rivers of the colony, contain many miles of rich alluvial soil, capable of growing wheat sufficient for the support of a large population. Many of these flats have produced crops of wheat for sixteen years successively, without the aid of any kind of manure. It must, however, be owned, that a very slovenly system of farming has been generally ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... fringed. We walked also to the small village of St. Raphael, a mile or two from the town, which is the modern port of Frejus, and stands in what was formerly the main sea; while the Pharos which marked the entrance of the ancient harbour is now surrounded by an alluvial meadow, and in place of the numerous vessels which must have crowded the ancient quay, a brig, and two or three feluccas, were quietly at anchor. A change like this, of the very soil, and local features, speaks more ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... that the clay takes a long time to settle. If the water be kept in rapid motion, the finer soils will all remain suspended till motion becomes slower. Apply this in geography. The bed of a stream will consist of stones if it be swift, of sand if less swift, and of clay if very slow. How are alluvial plains formed? ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... eye-brows of a sullen and frowning face. With this ledge of rocks terminate the Cumberland mountains, which cross the State of Tennessee to the margin of the river. The stream here flows nearly west, through a beautiful valley of alluvial land, formed by the Cumberland mountains and a continuation of the Blue Ridge of Virginia. Immediately opposite the termination of the Cumberland mountains commences a broken and rocky surface, which extends along ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... exposition. Webster furnishes the following definition: "(1) Delta is the name of the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet (equivalent to the English D) from the Phoenician name for the corresponding letter. The Greeks called the alluvial deposit at the mouth of the Nile, from its shape, the Delta of the Nile. (2) A tract of land shaped like the letter "delta," especially when the land is alluvial, and enclosed within two or more mouths of a river, as the Delta of the Ganges, ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... rivers themselves. The Tigris and Euphrates are rivers fed by the melting snow in the mountains of Armenia. The hotter the season and the more necessary a plentiful supply of water, the greater is the amount brought down. The rivers, however, when they reach the flat alluvial plain between the region round about Baghdad and the Persian Gulf, when left to themselves are always bringing down a deposit and choking themselves up and then breaking out in a new direction, causing swamps and turning much of ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... partly to Arabia,—if, I say, we should follow this account, we should thereby declare that in former times the Egyptians had no land to live in; for, as we have seen, their Delta at any rate is alluvial, and has appeared (so to speak) lately, as the Egyptians themselves say and as my opinion is. If then at the first there was no land for them to live in, why did they waste their labour to prove that they had come ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... "Milwaukee" signifies rich land, and the truthful significance of the appellation is amply testified by the rare flowers, green gardens, fertile fields and towering forests in and around it, all of which are the outgrowth of its soil of rich alluvial loam. ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... way to these wilderness settlements, which with every generation grew more French and less Indian. The river Mississippi was at once their friend and their enemy. It carried their produce to New Orleans, but undermined their rich alluvial shores, cut away fields and meadows, and swept them in its turbid eddies thirteen hundred miles southward, as a contribution to the mud-banks ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... Rosendo had panned the isolated alluvial deposit, and on his regular monthly returns to Simiti he and the priest had sent from thirty to ninety pesos gold to Wenceslas. To this Jose sometimes added small amounts collected from the people of Simiti, which they had gratuitously ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... rich alluvial lands at this point and around a number of verdant islands in its leisurely course. Southward, along the old front line, the land is more level, where the river makes its bend in front of Peronne. Northward, generically, it rises into a region of rolling country, ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... smaller and smaller from the base up, and each accurately balanced on the one beneath it. Then we crossed the range of hills which overlooks the fort, and passing Secocoeni's old kraal where he used to live before he retreated to his fastnesses, we arrived at a great alluvial valley nine miles broad, on the other side of which rises the Loolu. It was on this plain that the only real fight between the volunteers and Secocoeni's men took place, when the former managed to get between ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... but he had seen enough of it to recognize that prospecting is an art. Men certainly strike a vein or alluvial placer by the merest chance now and then, but the trained man works from indication to indication until, though he is sometimes mistaken, he feels reasonably sure as to what waits to be uncovered by the blasting charge or shovel. Grenfell's previous account of the ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... one thousand in number, extend, for the space of four miles, upon a beautiful piece of rich alluvial soil, in a very high state of cultivation; the fields were well fenced and luxuriant with maize, pumpkins, melons, beans and squashes. The space between the mountains and the river, on each side of the village, was thickly planted with ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... further back the ground rose abruptly to a height of thirty or forty feet; the ground around was covered with bushes, through which a few good-sized trees rose. The two men had dug through two feet of alluvial soil, and about five feet of sand. Altogether, it was a place which seemed to afford no promise whatever; and although, at the first impulse, some miners who were doing badly had marked out claims next to those staked out by Frank ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... there was a good deal of very genuine excitement to be got out of placer-mining in British Columbia, especially when there was frost in the ranges, and you had to thaw out your giant-powder. Shallow alluvial workings have a way of caving in when you least expect it of them. After all, however, I think I like the prairie ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... Norman peasant, he invariably held the upper hand in business matters. He was an authority on wine-making, the leading science of Touraine. He had managed to extend the meadow lands of his domain by taking in a part of the alluvial soil of the Loire without getting into difficulties with the State. This clever proceeding gave him the reputation of a man of talent. If Monsieur de Bourbonne's conversation pleased you and you were to ask who he was of a Tourainean, "Ho! a sly old fox!" would be the answer of those ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... an easy key into the States of the Church, which all that rich alluvial country of Ferrara had now become. I sold no crucifixes, but meditated profoundly upon them as I penetrated further into the great Lombard plain, and drew nearer to the cloudy mountains which seemed to me the guardians of my Land of Promise. I hung one ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... bed to built up anew the structure of gravel and brush that must be depended upon, if bread were to be secured from the land. The Little Colorado is a treacherous stream at best, with a broad channel that wanders at will through the alluvial country that melts like sugar or salt at the touch ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... reached the Bend, a dismal piece of alluvial swampy-looking land, drained by a wide, muddy river, called the Petticodiac, along the shore of which a considerable shipbuilding village is located. The tide here rises and falls twenty-four feet, and ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... yields from the alluvial goldfields decreased there was a great demand from the out-of-work diggers and others for land for farming, and the agricultural era began in Australia. Since then the growth of the country has been sound, and, if a little slow, sure. It has been slow because the ideal of the people has always been ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... question is a plain composed of a deep alluvial deposit, generally overlying gravel, and known as "black cotton soil." After heavy rain it is practically impassable for traffic ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... hundred thousand, of whom a considerable portion had come from the States. There, as always on the frontier, land had been a lodestone attracting both the speculator and the homeseeker. In the parishes of West Feliciana and Baton Rouge, in the alluvial bottoms of the Mississippi, and in the settlements around Mobile Bay, American settlers predominated, submitting with ill grace to the exactions of Spanish officials who were believed to be as ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... [Footnote 150: Modern alluvial accumulations are rapidly increasing on some points of this coast, owing to the enormous mass of fresh water, charged with earthy matter, that here mingles with the sea. The surface of the water at the mouth ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... travelled several miles before stopping, coming then to a suitable resting-place he lay down to gather strength for the night's journey. When night came, however, it had been raining for some hours, and in addition to the darkness of a rainy night in a swamp, Sam found the soft alluvial soil so saturated with water that he sank almost to his knees at every step. Finding it impossible to go on he stopped again on the highest and dryest piece of ground he could find, and prepared to spend the night there. Cutting down a number of thick-leaved bushes ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston
... clear-water rivers, with gravel bottoms, change their channels very gradually, and therefore one needs to learn them but once; but piloting becomes another matter when you apply it to vast streams like the Mississippi and the Missouri, whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose sandbars are never at rest, whose channels are for ever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions must be confronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a single light-house ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... New York Island is gneiss, except a portion of the north end, which is limestone. The south portion is covered with deep alluvial deposits, which in some places are more than 100 feet in depth. The natural outcroppings of the gneiss appeared on the surface about 16th Street, on the east side of the city, and run diagonally across to 31st Street on 10th Avenue. North of this, much of the surface was naked rock. ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... financiers of England were bombarded with arguments and prophecies of evil, but her geologists pointed out clearly that Australian and Californian products were almost entirely from the washing of alluvial sands and consequently must be very temporary. Her statesmen believed the geologists rather than the panic-stricken financiers, and so ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... that designation in this song, in which it occurs six times. It is also found often in the Psalms. If Moses were the singer, we might see in this often-repeated metaphor a trace of influence of the scenery of the Sinaitic peninsula, which would he doubly striking to eyes accustomed to the alluvial plains of Egypt. What are the aspects of the divine nature set forth ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... also supplemented in the same region by such attention to the growth and sale of vegetables. All the requirements as to position, soil and climate are abundantly filled by the counties with alluvial soils along the seacoast. Heavy crops of Irish potatoes and garden peas are reared on the same land which, later in the year, supplies a second crop of ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... sufficient moisture is present. On stiff clays the growth is too slow to produce crops highly satisfactory either North or South, and in dry weather it is also difficult to obtain a stand of the plants. The alluvial soils of river bottoms in the South produce good crops. The vegetable soils of the prairie do not grow the plants very well, and the adaptation in slough or swamp soils is even lower. Good crops will not be obtained on soils underlaid ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... "rush" to the Palmer River and Hodgkinson River rushes. The party of diggers I joined were good sterling fellows, and although we did not load ourselves with nuggets and gold dust, we did fairly well at times, especially in the far north of the colony where most of the alluvial gold-fields were rich, and new-comers especially had no trouble in getting on to a good show. I was the youngest of the party, and consequently the most inexperienced, but my mates good-naturedly overlooked my shortcomings as a prospector and digger, especially as I had constituted ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... whole country becomes a lake from which the villages, built on eminences, emerge like little islands. The water recedes in September; by December it has returned to its proper channel. Everywhere has been left a fertile, alluvial bed which serves the purpose of fertilization. On the softened earth the peasant sows his crop with almost no labor. The Nile, then, brings both water and soil to Egypt; if the river should fail, Egypt ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... Between Ebbsfleet and Worth it was over 4 miles wide. The Roman fortress of Ritupiae (Richborough) guarded it on the south, and the river Stour flowed into it at Stourmouth. This stream caused so much alluvial deposit that the sea receded from Richborough in early Saxon times, and part of the population removed to Sandwich. The repeated attacks by the Danes and the French did not check the growth of the town, which attained its maximum prosperity ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... of the state and the county seat of Franklin County, is located at the center of the state at the junction of the Scioto and Olentangy Rivers, on a slightly elevated alluvial plain, and is nearly equidistant from Cincinnati, southwest; Cleveland, northeast; Toledo, northwest; and Marietta, southeast, the average distance from these points being one hundred and fifteen miles. It has a population of ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... country inland. The Derwent carrying off the water from some of these hills found its outlet gradually blocked by the advancing lobe of a glacier, and the water having accumulated into a lake (named after Hackness in the map), overflowed along the edge of the ice into the broad alluvial plain now called the Vale of Pickering. Up to a considerable height, probably about 200 feet, the drainage of the Derwent and the other streams flowing into the Vale was imprisoned, and ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home |
