"Erosion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Forest, the enterprising tourist will have some feeble notion of the waste before him. The place is indeed altogether indescribable—surely one of the most striking testimonies to the force of erosion existing on the earth's surface. The explanation of the phenomenon is found here. At a remote period of geological history the action of mighty torrents let loose sculptured these fantastic and grandiose ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... may also be renewed, though slowly and with difficulty. Reforestation prevents erosion and thus conserves soil fertility. Systems of crop rotation designed to retain nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... place in the climatic condition of the country—changes which are some of them so recent as to be noted by surveyors who have found the remains of forests in districts now entirely desiccated. Possibly the ordinary processes of denudation and erosion, acting on those recent deposits which overlie the harder beds of the older series, may have much to say to these climatic changes, and the wanton destruction of forests may have assisted the efforts of nature; but it is difficult to understand the widespread desiccation ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... morning they opened up the ship, and let down the landing ramps. It was a very old world that they set foot upon. Whatever mountains or hills it had ever had, had long ago been leveled by erosion, so that now there was only a vaguely undulating plain studded with smooth and rounded boulders. The soil underfoot was packed and barren, and there was no vegetation for as far as they ...
— Shepherd of the Planets • Alan Mattox
... fact that the Pacific coast in California contains several of these fissures and earthquakes are more common there. The entire western part of the United States has been slowly rising for many centuries, and the shifting of soil due to erosion and transportation doubtless contributes to produce ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... skeered; dad's away," ran boldly on, still holding his hand, along the little valley. At its farther extremity they came to the "Run," a half-dried watercourse whose rocky sides were marked by the erosion of winter torrents. It was apparently as wild and secluded as the forest spring. "Nobody ever came here," said the girl hurriedly, "after dad sunk the ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... heart is usually normal in appearance, except an occasional cluster of hemorrhagic points on the outer surface, while the blood is dark and firmly coagulated. The lining of the stomach indicates a subacute gastritis, while occasionally an erosion is noted. An edema is observed in the submucosa of such cases. The first few inches of the small intestines likewise may show slight inflammation in certain cases, while in others it is quite severe; otherwise the digestive tract appears normal, excluding the presence of varying numbers of bots, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... sought the heights, the passes that pierced the mountain chains, and the headwaters of navigable rivers. On the ridges the forest growth was lightest and there was little obstruction from fallen timber; rain and frost caused least damage by erosion; and the winds swept the trails clear of leaves in summer and of snow in winter. Here lay the easiest paths for the heavy, blundering buffalo and the roving elk and moose and deer. Here, high up in the sun, where the outlook was unobstructed and signal ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... speaking rhetorically, sir," said Master Sean with infinite patience. "This gun or any other gun in general, if you see what I mean, sir. It's even harder to place the ownership of a gun. Most of the wear on a gun is purely mechanical. It don't matter who pulls the trigger, you see, the erosion by the gases produced in the chamber, and the wear caused by the bullet passing through the barrel will be the same. You see, sir, 'tisn't relevant to the gun who pulled its trigger or what it's fired at. The bullet's a slightly different matter. To the bullet, it is relevant which ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the caves. George finds a cave entrance. Preparing to explore the cave. The lamps. A blind lead. A fissure, not an erosion. The joke on George. The first sight of the location of the dreaded criminal colony. The magnificent wild fruits. The beautiful flowers. The first criminals. The industry of the people. Cultivating fruit and vegetables. Hutoton. Peculiarity in names. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... never been subject to convulsion and upheaval. The stratified rock lies horizontally just as it was laid down in the bottom of the Devonian Seas millions of years ago. The mountains and the valleys are the result of vast ages of gentle erosion, and gentleness and repose are stamped upon every feature of the landscape. The hand of time and the slow but enormous pressure of the great continental ice sheet have rubbed down and smoothed off all sharp angles, giving to the mountains their long sweeping lines, to the hills their broad round ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... then the level, and the relation of them to any cliffs; do they end abruptly at a cliff edge, showing that the valley was filled up; or do they fade away to the edge, showing that they are older than the valley erosion? Gravels may be the filling up of a valley which was previously eroded; note the highest level at which they can be traced; often little pockets of deposit, or traces of sandy strata, can be found clinging high up on cliffs; ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... windows like the eye pits in bone-picked skulls. There were even some small patches of vegetation rooted and growing in pockets erosion had carved in the walls. To the pilot's uninformed eyes ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... itself first in a "primary lesion" which is a local ulcer (hard chancre) at the point or points of inoculation at a period ranging from ten to thirty days after exposure. It may appear as an erosion or as a dry scaling and indurated papule, varying in size from a pin-head to a silver dollar. The base of the ulcer is indurated. It is oval in shape, perhaps somewhat irregular, with a raw surface and red colored ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... footing indeed, for the entire surface of the ground was covered with smooth, slippery boulders and rocks of iron and quartz. What had so smoothed them I do not know, for they seemed to be ill-placed for water erosion. The boys with their packs atop found this hard going, and we ourselves slipped and slid and bumped in spite ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... A very large part of the timbered area of the United States is in small woodlands on privately owned farms. Not only are the timber resources themselves of great value, but the relation of woodland to agriculture is very close, especially in its effect upon soil erosion. ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... sea, it formed three parallel promontories, which rose above the sea-level, where there had formerly been a depth of forty fathoms of water. Vast ravines were, at the same time, scooped out of the sides of the mountain by the erosion of the waters. Another eruption of this volcano in ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... practices; desertification; dumping of raw sewage, petroleum refining wastes, and other industrial effluents is leading to the pollution of rivers and coastal waters; Mediterranean Sea, in particular, becoming polluted from oil wastes, soil erosion, and fertilizer runoff; inadequate ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... dentist should be sought as to the condition of the teeth, especially as to whether there is any erosion or destruction of enamel, before using either acid ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... metal larger than the bore; the gas then acting on the base of the projectile, forces the band through the grooves, sealing the escape, entering the projectile, and, to a great extent, mitigating the erosion of surface. This is, of course, universally known. It is also pretty generally known among artillerists that the effect of the resistance offered by the band or sheathing on the powder is to cause more complete combustion ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... high temperatures or from molten materials. They come from magmas—molten mixtures of minerals, often containing gases. They come from deep below the surface of the earth. If they cool off while below the surface, they form intrusive rocks, which may later be revealed by erosion. When magmas reach the surface red hot, they form extrusive rocks, such as volcanic rocks. Thus, granite is an igneous, intrusive rock; lava is an igneous, extrusive rock. (Notice how the type of rock tells its past history—if you know what to ...
— Let's collect rocks & shells • Shell Oil Company
... the Theban wadis. But this water erosion was probably not that which would be the result of perennial streams flowing down from wooded heights, but of torrents like those of to-day, which fill the wadis once in three years or so after heavy rain, but repeated at much closer intervals. We may in fact suppose just so ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... loss of authority by rural cadres have weakened China's population control program, which is essential to maintaining long-term growth in living standards. Another long-term threat to growth is the deterioration in the environment, notably air pollution, soil erosion, and the steady fall of the water table especially in the north. China continues to lose arable land because of erosion and economic development. Beijing says it will intensify efforts to stimulate growth through spending on infrastructure - such as water supply and power grids - and ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... cold layer of moderate thickness and great general uniformity. Owing to the absence of rain and rivers, denudation such as we experience would be unknown, though the superficial scoriaceous crust might be partially broken up by expansion and contraction, and suffer a certain amount of atmospheric erosion. ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... seldom sharply defined, nor are they always all in evidence. How far they are in evidence will depend, among other things, upon the amount and rapidity of erosion, the structure and mineralogical character of the deposit, and upon ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... Scotland the two divisions of the system are sharply separated by a pronounced unconformability which is probably indicative of a prolonged interval of erosion. In the central valley between the base of the Highlands and the southern uplands lay "Lake Caledonia." Here the lower division is made up of some 20,000 ft. of shallow-water deposits, reddish-brown, yellow and grey sandstones and conglomerates, with occasional "cornstones," and thin limestones. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... of the cave erosion of the lower part of the eastern wall formed a rudely triangular recess or cavity 30 feet long by 7 feet deep at the widest part. The upper margin of this was below the surface of the ashes, so that its existence was not suspected until these had been removed from ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... science to the cultivation of the soil, came the students of Conservation. They were teaching the farmer the relation of conservation of natural resources to agriculture, the effects of forests on rainfall, moisture, erosion of soil, minimization of floods that annually bury thousands of acres of arable lands in the valleys, under rocky debris ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... sedimentary rocks, the sand, gravel, and mud—aggregating a thickness of 45,000 feet—are deposited, that they came from the north and east. "They represent the detritus of pre-existing lands, the washings of rain, rivers, coast-currents, and other agencies of erosion; and since the areas supplying the waste could scarcely have been of less extent than the new strata it formed, it is reasonably inferred that land masses of continental magnitude must have occupied the region now covered by ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... he said, "we are cousins. There is no need for harsh words between us. All I ask is that you should forbear to make your claim until I have delivered my speech in the House of Lords on the Coast Erosion Bill, upon which I feel deeply. Once the Bill is through, I shall be prepared to retire in your favour. Meanwhile let us all enjoy together the ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... surface, by far the oldest thing that mortal eye can see, since, while observing the ceaseless political or geological changes on earth, the face of this dead satellite, on account of the absence of air and water and consequent erosion, has remained unchanged for bygone ages, as it doubtless will ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... Erosion of water and wind have bared the sedimentary rocks and exposed the layers in well defined pages so I may study this great rock-paged geology book, and indeed it's ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... associated with frequent and severe headaches (often of the migraine type), a combination of initiative and irritability and a marked sexuality. X-ray examination of the sella turcica shows what is called erosion of the bone as it yields to the ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... to the Nile. All Lower Egypt is a creation of the river by the gradual accumulation of sediment at its mouths. Upper Egypt has been dug out of the desert sand and underlying rock by a process of erosion centuries long. Once the Nile filled all the space between the hills that line its sides. Now it flows through a thick layer of alluvial mud deposited by ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... slow but sure. This result is arid and plateautudinous, in a manner of speaking—not the best manner. It makes me think of democracy—and prohibition. To this complexion we shall come at last. To be sure, the genius of man will continue to cut channels in the monotonous plain; erosion will relieve the dreary prospect with form and color, but it bids fair to be, for the most part, a flat and dry world, from which many of us will part with a minimum of regret. There will remain the inextinguishable desire to learn what wonders science will disclose. Perhaps—who ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... to do with change," she said. "And with evolution. Look at this scarred mountain-side, how confused and senseless the upheavals seem which have given it its grandeur! Nor is it static yet. It is continually wearing down. Erosion is diminishing it, that river is denuding it. Eternal change ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... at high tide. I noticed a few bergs near Cape Fanshawe from Wrangell Glacier. The water ten miles from Wrangell is colored with particles derived mostly from the Stickeen River glaciers and Le Conte Glacier. All the waters of the channels north of Wrangell are green or yellowish from glacier erosion. We had a good view of the glaciers all the way to Juneau, but not of their high, cloud-veiled fountains. The stranded bergs on the moraine bar at the mouth of Sum Dum Bay looked just as they did when I first ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... description is written by Mr Archibald Blacklock, Surgeon: "The cranial bones were perfect in every respect, if we except a little erosion of their external table, and firmly held together by their sutures; even the delicate bones of the orbits, with the trifling exception of the os unguis in the left, were sound and uninjured by death and the grave. The superior maxillary bones still retained the four most posterior ...
— Phrenological Development of Robert Burns - From a Cast of His Skull Moulded at Dumfries, the 31st Day of March 1834 • George Combe
... certified; it contains almost the latest known formations; and the record is unusually full, with the exception of the later Paleozoic rocks. Its structures embrace nearly every known type of deformation. It furnishes examples of every process of erosion, of topography derived from rocks of nearly every variety of composition, and of topography derived from all types of structure except the flat plateau type. In the recurrence of its main geographic features from pre-Cambrian time ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... the material which had heretofore been firm or stiff had, under erosion, obtained a soup-like consistency, and that a huge cavity some 3 ft. wide and 26 ft. deep had been washed up toward ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... built right up on your own pet theory of erosion and changed riverbeds. And I didn't pocket among the Mexicans two years for nothin'. Where d'you s'pose this Eldorado gold came from?—rough, and no signs of washin'? Eh? There's where you need your spectacles. Books have made you short-sighted. But never mind how. 'Tisn't exactly ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... start it off, but it goes to coon inquisitiveness, prairie chicken dances, the extinction of species to which the whooping crane is approaching, browsing goats, dignified skunks, swifts in love flight, a camp in the brush, dust, erosion, silt—always with thinking added to seeing. The foremost naturalist of the Southwest, Bedichek constantly relates nature to civilization and ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... Each spring the trees received a liberal application of a 10-6-5 fertilizer. Strips six to eight feet wide on each side of the contoured rows received frequent cultivation each growing season, while strips of orchard grass sod were left between the rows to prevent erosion. The soil is Riverdale (tentative series) sandy loam that had been in orchard grass sod for ten years before the experiment was begun. It has been necessary to spray the trees each year with DDT, parathion, or both to control ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... deserts and desert deposits alike must also disappear. Vegetation will clothe the earth, and marine life swarm in the shallow seas of the broadening continental shelf. Under the mantle of vegetation, mechanical erosion will be less, that is, the breaking up of rocks into small pieces without any very great change, but the rich soil will be charged with carbon dioxide, and chemical activity will still go on. Rivers will still contain carbonates, even though they carry very little mud, and in the oceans the corals ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... allowing a gauze veil to float against them once in a thousand years, eternity will only have just begun. Our mountains have been pulverized by a process almost as slow. In our case the gauze veil is the air, and the rains, and the snows, before which even granite crumbles. See what the god of erosion, in the shape of water, has done in the river valleys and gorges—cut a mile deep in the Colorado canyon, and yet this canyon is but of yesterday in geologic time. Only give the evolutionary god time enough and all these miracles are ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... there still remained the moral customs, the conditioning, and the prohibitions. But Copper—was Copper—and somehow the conditioning lost its force in her presence. Perhaps, he thought wryly, it was a symptom of the gradual erosion of his moral character in ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... grown suddenly tired of bands, visitors, tents, buckets and spades, and had swept them all away with a gesture, leaving only the stretch of shore; much as it was before Thorhaven existed, and as it would be when Thorhaven was under the sea like the other village beyond, which coast erosion ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... erosion and floods: Forests help to regulate the flow of streams and prevent floods. Most streams are bordered by vast tracts of forest growths. The rain that falls on these forest areas is absorbed and held by the forest soil, which is permeated with decayed leaves, decayed ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... number of men being the chief motive, so long as they drew their wages in supplies. True, we scattered a few lodgments of driftwood; with the aid of a flat-bottomed scow we windlassed up and cut out a number of old snags, felled trees into the river to prevent erosion of its banks, and we built a large number of wind-dams to straighten or change the channel. It seemed to be a blanket contract,—a reward to the faithful,—and permitted of any number of extras which might ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... the shields, and, if marked erosion was found, clay was dumped into the hole. Whenever a serious blow occurred, a scowload of clay was dumped over it as soon as possible and without waiting to make soundings. For the latter purposes a considerable ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • James H. Brace, Francis Mason and S. H. Woodard
... espoused his niece, daughter of Edward IV., and in order to make the home nest perfectly free from social erosion, he caused his consort, Anne, to be poisoned. Those who believed the climate around the throne to be bracing and healthful had a chance to change their views in a land where pea-soup fog can never enter. Anne was the widow of Edward, whom Richard ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... have not undergone any complete revolution. If, at any time, the sun radiated much less than its present amount of heat, no water could have existed on the earth's surface except in the form of ice; there would have been scarcely any evaporation, and the geological changes due to erosion could not have taken place. Moreover, the commencement of the geological operations of which we speak is by no means the commencement of the earth's existence. The theories of both parties agree that, for untold aeons before the geological changes now visible ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... New Testament, therefore, there is no static creed. For, like a flowing river, the Church's thought of her Lord shaped itself to the intellectual banks of the generation through which it moved, even while, by its construction and erosion, it transfigured them. Nor did this movement cease with New Testament days. From the Johannine idea of the Logos to the Nicene Creed, where our Lord is set in the framework of Greek metaphysics, the development is just as clear as from the category of Jewish Messiah to the categories ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... thickets, and he dropped down a hillside to the southeast exposure. Here, poised above a big forested canon, and looking out upon Sonoma Valley, was a small farm-house. With its barn and outhouses it snuggled into a nook in the hillside, which protected it from west and north. It was the erosion from this hillside, he judged, that had formed the little level stretch of vegetable garden. The soil was fat and black, and there was water in plenty, for he saw several faucets running ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... way. Camps of the CCC dot the whole southern mountain region and fruits of their efforts can be seen in the growing forests on many a mountain side. In Mammoth Cave National Park alone 2,900,000 seedlings were planted to stay gulley erosion in an ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... our authorities and started out to see where the settlers first landed and where they first lived. According to the map, that historic, first landing-place would be anything but a landing-place to-day; for figure "25" (that was it) stood well out in the river. The loss by erosion had been great along that part of the shore since those first settlers arrived. But even though the landing-place could not be seen, one could look out on the waters anyway and see where ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... after the Sierra Nevada range was thrust up, high into the heavens, vast and long continued erosion "planed down this range to a surface of comparatively gentle topography." He claims that it must originally have been of great height. Traces of this eroded range (Cretaceous) "still remain in a number of flat-topped hills and ridges ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... bedrock, and, to satisfy his curiosity, had taken it down to camp for a test. He had thawed and panned it; to his amazement, he had discovered that it carried an astonishing value in gold—coarse, rough gold—exactly like that in the creek pay-streak, except with less signs of abrasion and erosion. Rumor placed the contents of that first prospect at ten dollars. Ten cents would have meant the riches of Aladdin, but— ten dollars! No wonder the wiseacres shook their heads. Ten dollars to the pan, on a hilltop! Absurd! How did metal of that specific gravity get ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... exactly where Tripoli was. About thirty years ago, when I learnt geography, one of the questions they were always asking me was, "What are the exports of Spain, and where is Tripoli?" But much may happen in twenty years; coast erosion and tidal waves and things like that. I looked at the map in order to assure myself that Tripoli had remained pretty firm. As far as I could make it out it had moved. Certainly it must have looked different thirty years ago, for ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... thickness, is spread out, moistening and enriching the soil and conserving the waters of the increased rainfall. A thousand living springs of pure, sparkling water make glad the plains and valleys. The evils of flood, erosion and drouth are checked; the climate made more congenial; the value of both hill and mountain, as a source of wealth, increased a ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... a liquid and finally to a clay-like material that could be worked with ease. A thousand years after your body has returned to dust, that piece of Indurate will still exist, unchanged, unworn. Erosion will have little effect upon it. Beside it granite, steel are nothing. If only I had the ...
— The Long Voyage • Carl Richard Jacobi
... walked along, the Captain told me that the geological formation was something wonderful in that region, but with my lifetime of experience I could see no reason for placer gold in the mountains. The decomposed mountains showed considerable erosion but the rocks seemed entirely devoid of granite or quartz, and there was no volcanic action to be seen. There was considerable iron and sandstone, but no sign whatever of gravel wash. The small particles of gold had surely been deposited by some glacial wash from ...
— The Sheep Eaters • William Alonzo Allen
... occurs when water channels and reservoirs become clotted with silt and mud, a side effect of deforestation and soil erosion. ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... distrust, for the most part, theories which have to invoke great forces in order to mould the face of a country. They tell us that the valley, with its deep sides and wide opening to the sky, may have been made by the slow operation of a tiny brooklet that trickles now down at its base, and by erosion of the atmosphere. So we shape ourselves—and that is a great thing—by the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that of Elam has now been followed by the finding of similar remains by Sir Aurel Stein in the course of the journey from which he has lately returned.(1) They were discovered in an old basin of the Helmand River in Persian Seistan, where they had been laid bare by wind-erosion. But more interesting still, and an incentive to further exploration in that region, is another of his discoveries last year, also made near the Afghan border. At two sites in the Helmand Delta, well above the level of inundation, he came across fragments of pottery ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... because these confusions have actually enabled Professor Tyndall to keep the scientific world in darkness as to the real nature of glacier motion for the last twenty years; and to induce a resultant quantity of aberration in the scientific mind concerning glacial erosion, of which another twenty years will scarcely undo ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... decivilization. There is also decivilization by erosion, and while it's going on, nobody notices it. Everybody is proud of their civilization, their wealth and culture. But trade is falling off; fewer ships come in each year. So there is boastful talk about ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... current issues: deforestation; soil erosion; water pollution from industrial and domestic effluents natural hazards: destructive earthquakes; tsunami occur along southwestern coast international agreements: party to ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... sometimes cold, the blood flows out in streams, suddenly, and causes great pain. If it arises from heat, and the orifice of the vein is dilated, there is little or no pain, but yet the blood flows faster than it does when caused by erosion, but not so fast as it does in a rupture. If caused by erosion, the woman feels a scalding of the passage, and it differs from the other two, in so much as it does not flow so quickly or so freely as they do. If it is caused by weakness of the womb, ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... The erosion of the ages had played strange tricks with the sandstone. The rocks rose like huge red toadstools or like prehistoric animals of vast size. One of them was known as the Three Bears, ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... main purposes to arouse a stronger sentiment for preserving what remains of the forests as well as for extending their areas. This is because proper forestation will lessen the danger of floods and of erosion of the soil, and it will encourage the return of the wild creatures that are of so much economic importance and add so much to the ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... whiteness, continues to the great headland of Flamborough, where the sea frets and fumes all the summer, and lacerates the cliffs during the stormy months. The masses of flinty chalk have shown themselves so capable of resisting the erosion of the sea that the seaward termination of the Wolds has for many centuries been becoming more and more a pronounced feature of the east coast of England, and if the present rate of encroachment along the low shores of Holderness ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... crazy-quilt blocks of land unsuitable for cultivation. All these agencies and all these needs tie in with the intelligent use of trees, particularly nut trees, because they serve a fourfold purpose; lumber, food, erosion control, and a balanced wild life. Here is where the nut specialist would enter the scene. By collecting data, by pooling the results of the individual growers, and especially by selection and breeding, he should be able to recommend the proper varieties ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... this country, and that the smallest spark may start a conflagration that will result in loss of life and destruction of timber and young growth valuable not only for lumber but for their influence in helping to prevent flood, erosion, and drought.—U.S. Dept. ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... the contortions are much greater than in the Jura. Fig. 19 shows a section after Heim, from the Spitzen across the Brunnialp, and the Maderanerthal. It is obvious that the valleys are due mainly to erosion, that the Maderaner valley has been cut out of the crystalline rocks s, and was once covered by the Jurassic strata j, which must have formerly passed in a great arch over what is ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... summit-level above, would to the geologist at once proclaim the secret of its formation. Not so easily explained might seem the narrow outlet to the open plain. But one skilled in the testimony of the rocks would detect certain ferruginous veins in the sandstone that, refusing to yield to the erosion of the running stream, had stood for ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... abrupt cliffs overlooking the sea. From other peaks extensive grass covered plains slope gently down nearly to the water's edge. Deep river canons cut between these mountains and across the plains, giving evidence of active erosion for a long period of time. If these mountain chains and river courses are followed back it is found that they all radiate from one stupendous mass, the center of which is Mt. Apo, the highest mountain in the Philippines and reputed to be an active ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... "while greater than that now obtaining upon Earth, was probably of the order of magnitude of three meters of mercury, originally. As to the erosion, they might have had more water to begin ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by incalculable ages of erosion. ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... of the factual justification of a professed exercise by a State legislature of its police power; and in the case of legislation affecting the remedial rights of creditors, it still affords a solid and palpable barrier against legislative erosion. Nor is this surprising in view of the fact that, as we have seen, such rights were foremost in the minds of the framers of the clause. The court's attitude toward insolvency laws, redemption laws, exemption laws, appraisement laws and the like has always been that they ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... discovery at the source of that little tributary, where the erosion of the glacier had opened a rich vein, and on following the stream through graywackes and slate to the first gravelled fissure, he had found the storage plant for his placer gold. He was on his way out to have the claim recorded and get supplies and mail when he heard the baying setter ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... sidewalk, and upon the window-pane, delight us and we do not reason why. A natural bridge pleases more than one which is the work of an engineer, yet the natural bridge can only stand when it is based upon good engineering principles. I found at the great Colorado Canon, that the more the monuments of erosion were suggestive of human structures, or engineering and architectural works, the more I was impressed by them. We are pleased when Nature imitates man, and we are pleased when man imitates Nature, and yet we recoil from the thought that life is only applied ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... from gangrene of lung and acute fibrinous pericarditis. Erosion of cervix uteri. The edema of the brain, irregular pink mottlings of white substance, and an exudative lesion of one focus in the pia mater of the right side suggested an encephalitis more marked on the right side. Microscopically ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... other hard road surfaces. Such affections may be acute, as in some cases of spavin, but are usually inflammatory conditions that do not occasion serious disturbance when these affections become chronic. If the involvement persists with sufficient active inflammation, there may follow erosion of cartilage and incurable lameness. If extensive necrosis of cartilage takes place, the attendant pain will be sufficient to cause the animal to favor the diseased part and such immobilization enhances early ankylosis—nature's substitute ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... intervals along both sides of the river are many benches and terraces of alluvium, varying in width from a few feet to several miles, and comprising all the cultivable land in the valley of the river. Since the Verde is a mountain stream with a great fall, its power of erosion is very great, and its channel changes frequently; in some places several times in a single winter season. Benches and terraces are often formed or cut away within a few days, and no portion of the river banks is free from these changes until continued erosion has lowered the bed to such a degree ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... earth such debris would very soon have become smoothed by atmospheric erosion, the interstices would have been filled up with dust and soil, while the growth of vegetation would have added a new charm to ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... plants. Difficulty when asked how did white and negro become altered from common intermediate stock: no facts. We do NOT know that species are immutable, on the contrary. What arguments against this theory, except our not perceiving every step, like the erosion of valleys{185}. ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... dire straits at that very moment. Municipal and state aid were being stretched to the limit. We appropriated half a billion dollars to supplement their efforts and in addition, as you know, we have put 300,000 young men into practical and useful work in our forests and to prevent flood and soil erosion. The wages they earn are going in greater part to the support of the nearly one million people who constitute ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... blue spar which, when it had climbed up through the air for a distance of about four feet, broke into a sort of turquoise fan and this drifted on up to the ceiling in heavy wisps. The incense pot was very old, of black lacquer and brass, greened with blotches of erosion. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... search for the explanation we need. But having availed ourselves of the aid of meteorology, we have a story that is full of marvelous interest—the great story of the evolution of the cornfield. In this story we find many alluring details of evaporation, air movements, precipitation, erosion, and the attraction of gravitation. But in all this we are but lingering in the anteroom ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... that none but he, of late years, had ridden those sloping forest covered skirts. Some one, sometime, must have done so, else the maps themselves would not have been, but what marks they must have left were either gone through the erosion of the elements or been ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... stairway step by step to successively lower geological formations, until in Arizona the platform is reached which borders the real chasm and extends southward beyond, far into the central part of that territory. It is the theory of geologists that ten thousand feet of strata have been swept by erosion from the surface of this entire platform, whose present uppermost formation is the Carboniferous; the deduction being based upon the fact that the missing Permian, Mesozoic, and Tertiary formations, which ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... pas que l'erosion des eaux pluviales, des torrens et des rivieres, soit l'unique cause de la formation des vallees: le redressement des couches des montagnes nous force a en admettre une autre, dont je parlerai ailleurs; j'ai voulu seulement prouver, ici que la correspondance ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... huge parallel chains with river and lake-basins of profound depth between them. In Mexico the same formation must have existed, but the basins have been filled up by material discharged from volcanoes and from the erosion of the mountains themselves, doubtless caused by the severe and sudden rain-storms and rapid changes of temperature characteristic of these regions. Thus the great plateau may be likened to a number of filled-up troughs, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... knew it would be easy to back-track my trail. After a while this labyrinthine series of channels and dunes opened into a wide space enclosed on three sides by denuded slopes, mostly yellow. These slopes were smooth, graceful, symmetrical, with tiny tracery of erosion, and each appeared to retain its own color, yellow or cinnamon or mauve. But they were always dominated by a higher one of a different color. And this mystic region sloped and slanted to a great amphitheater that was walled on the ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... between mainland and islands; by slight geological changes one is converted into the other. Great Britain was a peninsula at the end of the Tertiary period, before subsidence and the erosion of Dover Channel combined to sever it from the continent. It bears to-day in its flora and fauna the evidence of its former broad connection with the mainland.[804] In Pliocene times, Sicily and Sardinia ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... look for in that vicinity. 'Uzun-Tati' ('the distant Tati,') as the debris-covered area is locally designated, corresponds in its position and the character of its remains exactly to the description of Pi-mo. Owing to far-advanced erosion and the destruction dealt by treasure-seekers, the structural remains are very scanty indeed. But the debris, including bits of glass, pottery, china, small objects in brass and stone, etc., is plentiful enough, and in conjunction with the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... that gave rise to the oldest trachitic tufas of the Phlegran Fields. The destruction of the south wall may have occurred much later through some great eruptive paroxysm, but more probably, as Professor Mercalli suggests, through early marine erosion and subsequent subaerial denudation. To the submarine period must also be assigned the formation of the trachitic masses which compose Monti Trippiti, Vetta, and Garofoli (b, c, d, Fig. 14), on the east side of Epomeo; and, in part only, those of Monte Campagnano ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... river runs through a gorge in a greenstone ridge nearly one thousand feet high. The portion of the ridge east of the river is called Mount Holyoke, and the portion west of it Mount Tom. This gorge is very interesting because of showing the amount of erosion that can be performed by water in long periods of time. In all probability the bed of the Connecticut was, in remote time, much higher than it is at present, and the river itself much larger, and the rich, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... that the height of the mountains developed in the Laramide range at this time was 20,000 feet, and that, owing to the further elevation which has since taken place, from 32,000 to 35,000 feet would be their present height if erosion had not reduced them. Thus on either side of the American continent we have the same forces at work, throwing up mountain ridges where the sediments had formerly been shed ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... erosion from overgrazing and other poor farming practices; desertification; dumping of raw sewage, petroleum refining wastes, and other industrial effluents is leading to the pollution of rivers and coastal waters; Mediterranean Sea, in particular, becoming ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... it, does also find as ample illustrations in the sweeping Rhine as in any of the humbler streams whose courses I had watched and studied at home. These two principles afford perhaps the strongest and most conclusive of all proofs, that the hills and valleys of our planet are all the result of erosion. ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... formed them as parts of the delta. This mud resists the action of the river wonderfully. It is a kind of clay on which the eroding power of water has little effect. Were maps made, showing which banks and which islands are liable to erosion, it would go far to settle where the annual change of the channel would take place; and, were a few stakes driven in year by year to guide the water in its course, the river might be made of considerable commercial value in the hands of any energetic European nation. No canal ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... Erosion has worn it to an insignificant pillar, but it at one time was a portion of the main chain of bluffs bounding the valley of the Platte. Denudation through countless ages separated it from them. Fifty years ago it was a conical elevation, about a hundred feet high, from the apex of which ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... edge, peering out and down through a green screen. A couple of hundred feet in length and width, it was half of that in depth. Possibly because of some fault that had occurred when the knolls were flung together, and certainly helped by freakish erosion, the hole had been scooped out in the course of centuries by the wash of water. Nowhere did the raw earth appear. All was garmented by vegetation, from tiny maiden-hair and gold-back ferns to mighty redwood and Douglas spruces. These great trees even sprang out ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... (about five times per year along southern and eastern coasts), damaging floods, tsunamis, earthquakes; deforestation; soil erosion; industrial pollution; water ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... bluff is finding its grade, since it is spared the wash from beneath. That which breaks from erosion above straightens it out below, and in time it will find a permanent slope (something near thirty degrees, they say) that cannot be approached for beauty by any artificial process. I would not miss one of the natural shelves or fissures. The Japanese are interesting in their ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... avalanche, the attrition of glacier, the erosion of water, the cracking of frost, the weathering of rain and wind and snow—these it had eternally fought and resisted in vain, yet still it stood magnificent, frowning, battle-scarred and undefeated. Its sky-piercing peaks were as cries for mercy to the Infinite. This ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... been vastly greater than at present, and when the watercourses were consequently vastly larger and fuller. In pleistocene days the earth's climate was evidently much damper than at present. It was the rainiest of March weather. On no other theory can we account for the enormous erosion of the earth's surface, and the plowing of the great valleys. Professor Newberry finds abundant evidence that the Hudson was, in former times, a much larger river than now. Professor Zittel reaches the same conclusion ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... canyon walls are formed is a massive sandstone in which the lines of bedding are almost completely obliterated. It is rather soft in texture, and has been carved by atmospheric erosion into grotesque and sometimes beautiful forms. In places great blocks have fallen off, leaving smooth vertical surfaces, extending sometimes from the top nearly to the stream bed, 400 feet or more in height and as much in breadth. In the lower parts of the ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... a mass of ruins, and all the finer striations have been effaced from the flanks by post-glacial weathering, while the irregularity of its lavas as regards susceptibility to erosion, and the disturbance caused by inter- and post-glacial eruptions, have obscured or obliterated those heavier characters of the glacial record found so clearly inscribed upon the granite pages of the high Sierra between latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... theological prepossession." However, Prestwich has some "facts" as well as prepossessions, such as "the rapid advance of the glaciers of Greenland,"[98] which does not accord with the generalization from the Swiss glaciers;[99] and the quicker erosion of river valleys, due to a greater rainfall; facts which, however, are met by "a minute description of the successive changes by which in post-glacial time the Mersey valley and estuary were brought into their present condition, with an estimate ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... accessible," Blount said. "You know what the seasons are like, at the poles of this planet. The temperature will range from about two-fifty Fahrenheit in mid-summer to a hundred and fifty below in winter. There's the most intense sort of thermal erosion you can imagine—the ice-cap melts in the spring to a sea, which boils away completely by the middle of the summer. There will be violent circular storms of hot wind, blowing away the light sand and dust and leaving ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... Port Jackson extend underwater, preserving the same forms as they have above it; while the bays and coves now subject only to the ebb and flow of a tide present extensive ramifications, and can only be considered the submerged valleys of a surface originally scooped out by erosion at a period when the land ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... no living thing in sight. The ground itself was pebbles and small rocks and minor boulders—all apparently tumbled from the starkly magnificent mountains to one side. There were monstrous, many-colored cliffs and mesas, every one eaten at in the unmistakable fashion of wind-erosion. Through a notch in the mountain wall before them a strange, fan-shaped, frozen formation appeared. If such a thing had been credible, Bordman would have said that it was a flow of sand simulating a waterfall. And everywhere there was blinding brightness and the look and feel of blistering ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... along the hoof-pocked frozen clay. Aaron analyzed the contours of the hills for watershed and signs of erosion. He studied the patterns of the barren winter fields, fall-plowed and showing here and there the stubble of a crop he didn't recognize. When the clouds scudded for a moment off the sun, he grinned up, and looked back blinded to the road. Good tilth and friendship were promised here, ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... in this subject today because of an innate love of trees and because the development of a tree crop agriculture offers a way to stop soil erosion. To me the worst of all economic sins is the destruction of resources, and the worst of all resource destructions is the destruction of the soil, our one great and ultimate resource. "After man the desert" has been truly said too often of ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... seven islands in sight. They were higher than those we had seen before, and consisted of precipitous hills. There were also small glaciers or snow-fields, and the rock formation showed clear traces of erosion by ice or snow, this being especially the case on the largest island, where there were even small ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... action of glaciers and glacial rivers and lakes has through erosion changed the surface of the soil, tearing out some parts of the earth's surface and depositing the soil elsewhere. These river floods carried out bones of man and the implements in use, and deposited them, together with the bones of animals with ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... except under a blanket of rock which almost prevented the original magmas from cooling. The thousands or tens of thousands of feet of rock which once overlay the schists and still more the granites and gneisses must have been slowly removed by erosion, for there was no other way to get rid of them. This process must have taken tens of millions of years, and yet the whole work must have been practically completed a hundred or perhaps several hundred million ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... much narrower on the eastern coast than on the western — in fact, it may be quite absent on the eastern. It is the remains of a tilted plain sloping seaward from an altitude of about 1,000 feet to one of, say, 100 feet, and its hilly nature is due to erosion. These hills are generally covered only with grasses; the sheltered moister places often produce rank growths of tall, coarse cogon grass.[5] The soil varies from dark clay loam through the sandy loams to quite extensive deposits of coarse gravel. The level stretches in the hills on the west ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... the twisting force just referred to, the promontory underwent various changes of level. There are sea-terraces and layers of shell-breccia along its flanks, and numerous caves which, unlike the inland ones, are the product of marine erosion. The Ape's Hill, on the African side of the strait, Mr. Busk informs me has undergone similar disturbances. [Footnote: No one can rise from the perusal of Mr. Busk's paper without a feeling of admiration for the principal ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... furnishing water supply to the Negrito villages situated along their banks. Some of the larger of these streams have made deep cuts on the lower reaches of the mountain slopes, but they are generally too small to have great powers of erosion. The unwooded portions of the table-lands are covered with cogon and ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... mean tide water. The hills on its sides rise in some instances as much as 1,800 feet, and in many places the walls are very precipitous. The rock is gneiss, of a kind that is not easily disintegrated or eroded, nor is there any evidence of any convulsive movement. It is clearly a case of erosion, but not by the present river, which has no fall, for tide water extends 100 miles up the river beyond the Highlands. This therefore was probably a work mainly performed in some past period when the continent was at a higher level. Most likely it is a valley ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... of wharf which was protected from erosion by piles formed of small trees driven into the mud, to which were tied a fleet of canoes, we landed just as the sun was beginning to sink. Our approach had doubtless been observed, for as we drew near the wharf a horn was blown by someone on the shore, whereon a considerable ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... if this mute companion and co-patriot which he had come to love, were sharing his utter dismay. Almost at his very feet rushed a boisterous torrent, melting the packed earth of the road like wax in a tropic sunshine, and carrying its devastating work of erosion to the very spot where ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... ther utter degrerdation o' death; but ther men what bilt ther Bable Tower, hed they but known ther secret, mighter from thet same material have bilt a dome higher nor St. Paul's, thet would uv shone like burnished silver 'nd would hev retained all its strength 'nd splendor, notwithstandin' ther erosion uv time 'nd ther abrashin' uv ther ages, even till now, tho' since then two hundred generations uv men has ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... two species is attributable to the uplift of the Rocky Mountains in the Pleistocene. That the uplift of the Rocky Mountains and the erosion which produced the present-day relief took place in Pleistocene times is supported by the evidence found by several geologists such as Hunt and ...
— Taxonomy of the Chipmunks, Eutamias quadrivittatus and Eutamias umbrinus • John A. White
... great, sudden volcanic upheaval. These cliffs, I may remark, are basaltic, and therefore plutonic. An area, as large perhaps as Sussex, has been lifted up en bloc with all its living contents, and cut off by perpendicular precipices of a hardness which defies erosion from all the rest of the continent. What is the result? Why, the ordinary laws of Nature are suspended. The various checks which influence the struggle for existence in the world at large are all neutralized or altered. ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... place. In some cases the passage of masses of free cocci in the lymphatics, or of infective emboli in the blood vessels, leads to the formation of pyogenic abscesses in vital organs, such as the brain, lungs, liver, kidneys, or other viscera. Haemorrhage from erosion of arterial or venous trunks may take ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... explosive shell weighing from 500 to 1000 pounds, and because of their form of construction—they have shorter barrels than the naval guns—which reduces the surface of the barrel subject to erosion, they are longer lived than the long guns. The endurance of the guns is a factor because it is difficult to get repairs for such great weapons on ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller |
