"Silt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... subduing force Of wisdom on her mid-way measured course Gliding;—not torrent-like with fury spilt, Impetuous, o'er Himalah's rifted side, To ravage blind and wide, And leave a lifeless wreck of parching silt;— Gliding by thorpe and tower and grange and lea In tranquil transit ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... appearance or properties. There is, however, with us, an inclination to apply this word particularly to those purer and more compact sorts which are adapted for fuel, while to the lighter, less decomposed or more weathered kinds, and to those which are considerably intermixed with soil or silt, the term muck or swamp muck is given. These distinctions are not, indeed, always observed, and, in fact, so great is the range of variation in the quality of the substance, that it would be impossible to draw a line where muck leaves off and peat begins. Notwithstanding, ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... its commerce to Venice precisely the same questions are in course of debate which again and again, ever since Venice was a city, have put her senate at pause—namely, how to hold in check the continually advancing morass formed by the silt brought down by the Alpine rivers. Is it not strange that for at least six hundred years the Venetians have been contending with those rivers at their mouths—that is to say, where their strength has become wholly irresistible—and ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... fever-stricken peasants, scarce able to gain their half-starved living from the soil that once supported in luxury and pomp the grandeur of metropolitan cities. The ancient barrages, the canals, the systems of irrigation were all allowed to silt up and become useless; and at the end of the nineteenth century you would not find in all Mesopotamia an agricultural implement that was in any way superior to the ploughs and the flails of more than two thousand years ago. But so long ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... is the loose, loamy material usually found in the front chambers of large caverns. It is made up of roof dust, sand, and silt washed from the interior, outside dust and vegetable matter blown in by the wind, with minute amounts of clay or soil ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... Canal hardly a month after the ceremony. His widow belonged, then, to the husband's family, and from that moment her father-in-law had had nothing but bad luck. He had been robbed, his best stallion died, there had been a flood in his tea which not only spoiled the crop but filled the ground with silt—it was impossible to relate his calamities. He consulted a necromancer at last and learned that it was all caused by ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... haunt is their death-place, eight miles from Ponce, in a hollow among limestone hills, now environed by a coffee plantation. Here are found three basins—results of erosion, most likely—that are described as natural bath-tubs. The middle and largest of these pools is partly filled with silt, probably occluding the entrance to a cavern which formerly opened into it, a fathom or so below the water-surface. This cave was the hiding-place of a native woman whose father had discovered her love for one of Ponce de Leon's ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... sand hills marching in from the desert; cities have been buried and harbors filled up. Many of the harbors of the ancient civilizations are mere miasmatic marshes now. This is partly in consequence of the silt brought in by the rivers; but where the rivers do not flow in it is because the sand blows in along the shore. Harbors are especially endangered when their protection from the waves consists of a bank of sand, as ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... handle and remove such huge depositions in order to collect the richest material. The idea was bold, being an anticipation of Nature's operations; but the equitable disposal of the "tailings" in a cultivated country is impossible, as the silt runs down the rivers, creating banks and bars in their channels, obstructing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... see where some of the dirt or silt that is brought down by the creek goes," said Uncle Robert. "And all this must have been left here since the flood in the spring. Frank is right. The creek is really building land ...
— Uncle Robert's Geography (Uncle Robert's Visit, V.3) • Francis W. Parker and Nellie Lathrop Helm
... the rotating paddles were operated by a 7 h.p. engine. This apparatus washed a batch of 14 cu. yds. in from 1 to 2 hours at a cost of 7 cts. per cubic yard. The sand contained much fine coal and silt. The above data are given by Mr. W. ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... clay, or till), was effected during a time of vast, but unknown length. And if we limit our inquiries, and ask what was the interval of time between the newest bed of gravel near Cambridge, and the oldest bed of bogland or silt in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, we are utterly at a loss for a definite answer. The interval of time may have been very great. But we have no scale on ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... southwest of Riobamba, we discovered in a deep ravine numerous fossil bones, belonging chiefly to the mastodon, and extinct species of the horse, deer, and llama. They were imbedded in the middle of an unstratified cliff, four hundred feet high, of very compact silt or trachytic clay, free from stones, and resting on a hard quartzoze sandstone. In the bed of the stream which runs through the ravine (charged with nitrate of soda) are some igneous rocks. The bones were drifted to this ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... natural reservoirs. By restraining the streams in flood and replenishing them in drought they make possible the use of waters otherwise wasted. They prevent the soil from washing, and so protect the storage reservoirs from filling up with silt. Forest conservation is therefore an essential ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt
... make an exact chronological statement throwing light on the length of the various prehistoric periods, the most notable have been those by M. Morlot, on the accumulated strata of the Lake of Geneva; by Gillieron, on the silt of Lake Neufchatel; by Horner, in the delta deposits of Egypt; and by Riddle, in the delta of the Mississippi. But while these have failed to give anything like an exact result, all these investigations together point ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... is a plant of no interest to the common observer, but of much to the geologist, from the nuts of a similar plant abounding in the tertiary formations at the mouth of the Thames, and having floated about there in as great profusion as here, till buried deep in the silt and mud that now forms the island of Sheppey.* [Bowerbank "On the Fossil Fruits and Seeds of the Isle of Sheppey," and Lyell's "Elements of Geology," 3rd ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... always up along the wet gully, deep with silt and frost-splintered rock, she toiled, the heavy gasping of men behind her. Twice she was jerked to a ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... be compared to a dredger, which, gathers up all the silt of a harbour, and carries it out to sea, leaves it there and then returns to repeat the operation. If such an operation is necessary in a harbour, and if without it the best anchorages in the world would often get choked with ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... little water brings forth vegetable life in a single day. Southern streams are not perennial. On the Riviera, they are fed from nearby mountains, and are intermittent even in their season. When the water ceases, the sun quickly bakes a crust of silt and dries the stones ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... some of these mounds, exposing brick vaults, some so low as to be under water part of the time, and we wonder if the fact does not also record a slow subsidence of the delta plain under the ever increasing load of river silt. ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... convicts were employed in building a breakwater, connecting a cliffy island at the entrance with the south point of the river, for the purpose of deepening the mouth, but I much question whether it will answer, as the silt that is washed down by the stream not finding its former exit may by meeting the sea form ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... of peaks, a region of storms, a spread of dark and tangled forests. In the one, shallow rivers trickle on their sandy way to the Gulf of Mexico; from the other, the waters rush, uniting to make the mighty stream whose silt-laden floods are slowly filling the Gulf ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... found—as you will actually find along some English shores—under the sand hills, perhaps a bed of earth with shells and bones; under that a bed of peat; under that one of blue silt; under that a buried forest, with the trees upright and rooted; under that another layer of blue silt full of roots and vegetable fibre; perhaps under that again another old land surface with trees again growing in it; and under all the main bottom ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... you look at me as though I had used a strange word. Silt is the deposit of mud, sand, or earth of any kind carried up and down streams by the tide or other current. But the river engineers here are constantly removing it; the course is kept open, and the Hoogly pilots are very skilful. The river has also a bore, though not a great ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... rains, the great Mississippi of North Russia moves down to the sea, sweeping with deep wide current great volumes of reddish sediment and secretions which give it the name Dvina. And the arm of the Arctic Ocean into which it carries its loads of silt and leachings, and upon which it floats the fishermen's bottoms or the merchantmen's steamers, is called the White Sea. Rightly named is that sea, the Michigan or Wisconsin soldier will tell you, for it is white ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... back again; for the steam, as it rushed up, rasped away the sides of the hole, and hurled it up into the sea in a shower of mud and gravel and ashes; and then it spread all around, and sank again, and covered in the dead fish so fast, that before Tom had stood there five minutes he was buried in silt up to his ankles, and began to be afraid that he should have been ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... the largest channel was a swift broad stream called the Dhaus. The river is very capricious, seldom flowing for any length of time in one channel. This is owing in great measure to the amount of silt it carries with it from the hills, in its impetuous progress ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... holly, a curled leaf of broccoli, or any other vegetable production, is suspended by one end in a small cylinder of paper which is placed for support within a similarly formed tin case. The finest river silt, carefully separated from all the coarser particles, and mixed with water, so as to have the consistency of cream, is poured into the paper cylinder by small portions at a time, carefully shaking the plant a little after each addition, in order that its leaves may be covered, ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... that has just the right consistency to receive it; if the soil is too soft, its several parts will be separated and scattered as readily as though it had fallen upon hard ground where it would be torn to pieces by carnivorous animals. The dead body must then be covered up by a blanket of silt or sand like that which would be deposited as the result of a freshet. If a skeleton is too greatly broken up or scattered, it may be difficult or even impossible for its discoverer to piece together the various fragments and assemble them ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... groan, Rustum bewail'd:— "Oh, that its waves were flowing over me! Oh, that I saw its grains of yellow silt Roll tumbling in the ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... nations, before which the mightiest empires have crumbled into dust. The lagoons of Venice mirror it in the departed grandeur of her palaces, overthrown by the licentiousness of her merchant princes. The mute sands that silt up the ruins of old empires are eloquent of it. The most brilliant civilization the world has even seen through it became the most transitory. Even the vast and massive structure of the Roman Empire, undermined by moral corruption, ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... Surprised at such treatment by the storms and seas, the newly born earth masses began to crumble and "weather." The detached fragments slipped back, or were washed back, into the deeper or shallower parts of the ocean, and were there tossed back and forth, pounded and ground into sand and silt, into pebbles and boulders, while more land was slowly being thrust out for the angry sea to work upon. Layer by layer, the ground-up masses were deposited in the inner ocean bed, parts of which were now practically shut off from the vast ocean beyond. How many centuries of centuries this process ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... another river which flows through the Level, called the Old Nene. Below the point of junction of these rivers with the Wash, and still more to seaward, was South Holland Sluice, through which the waters of the South Holland Drain entered the estuary. At that point a great mass of silt had accumulated, which tended to choke up the mouths of the rivers further inland, rendering their navigation difficult and precarious, and seriously interrupting the drainage of the whole lowland district traversed by both the Old and New ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... honourable judge flatly refused, although he had a good well, besides a pond, under fence, covering several acres; his wife, however, reflecting, perhaps, that her stores were rather short of coffee or silt, entered into a rapid discussion with her worse half, and by-and-by that respectable couple of honourables agreed to sell water to us at ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... mounted day by day we crossed dozens of swift little streams cold and gray with silt. Our rate of speed was very low. One of our horses became very weak and ill, evidently poisoned, and we were forced to stop often to rest him. All the horses ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... could win from the reluctant German field was secured. The German farmer had to woo his land like a lover. And so the unyielding fields of Germany returned richer harvests thirty years ago than a like area of the prodigally vital silt of the Mississippi Valley. ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... free from the lighter silt which now finds its way to the sea; slowly filling up the river-mouth harbor, and finally destroying the commerce of the city which depends upon it. In this way, every individual, child or adult, who plants a tree, aids directly in the restoring some distant seaport to its ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... the tints of the rainbow, like Indian arrows dipped in blood, knee-deep, multi-colored, fiery, dyed in the very essence of sunglow, humming with bees and alive with butterflies, lives of a summer in the aeon of ages that the snow flakes had taken manufacturing soil out of granite, silt out of snow. ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... courses much obstructed by fallen timber, or by earth and gravel washed down from the highlands. Their channels are subject only to slow and gradual changes, and they carry down to the lakes and the sea no accumulation of sand or silt to fill up their outlets, and, by raising their beds, to force them to spread over the low grounds near their mouth. [Footnote: Forest rivers seldom if ever form large sedimentary deposits at their points of discharge into lakes or larger streams, such accumulations beginning or at least advancing ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... wider than the trench so that, when in place, the paper arches and fits tightly to the sides. The purpose of the stone or gravel is to facilitate water seepage from tile to ground while the roofing paper cover prevents silt ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... blue-green glacier-ice glances down into the valley, many knobs and depressions are laid bare which one otherwise sees only covered with white, the muddy edge of the ice comes to view with its deposit of rocks, silt, and slime, and far greater volumes of water than usual rush into the valley. This continues until it gradually becomes autumn again, the waters grow less, and one day a gray continuous gentle rain spreads over all the valley. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... 7,500,000,000 cubic yards of sediment, discharging it along the lower course, or pushing it into the Gulf. As one thinks of the small amount of sediment held in a gallon or two of river water, a comprehension of this vast amount of silt is impossible. It is enough to cover a square mile in area to a depth of 268 feet. In five hundred years it would build above the sea level a State as large and as high as Rhode Island. Thus, by means of this sediment, the river has pushed its mouths fifty miles into the sea, confining its flow ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... spot the boys betook themselves, treading the way gingerly over the tenacious but slippery surface. Will pointed to a half barrel sunk level in the ooze. It was full to the brim with fine silt. ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... digging with Dick in a ditch that is to run down through the orchard and connect finally with the land drain we put in four years ago. We laid the tile just in the gravel below the silt, about two feet deep, covering the openings with tar paper and then throwing in gravel. It was a bright, cool afternoon. In the field below a ploughman was at work: I could see the furrows of the dark earth glisten as he turned it over. ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... wear double kimonos. During the middle of the day, however, I was glad to walk with my jacket over my arm, and many little boys and girls were running about naked. The region visited had a naturally well-drained dark soil, composed of river silt, of volcanic dust and of humus from buried vegetation, and it went down to a depth beyond the need of the longest daikon (giant radish). Sweet potatoes and taro were still on the ground, and large areas, ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... laden boats go by, he found fresh enjoyment in every stop, and in blouse and knickerbockers, with bare feet, paddled about on the moist banks, making friends with the half-clothed camel-drivers, whose patient beasts knelt so obediently to be loaded with the silt deposits taken from the bed of the canal, and collecting items of interest in regard to this artery of commerce which might have made even its founder open his eyes. The girls profited by his researches, and it was, indeed, a common thing ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... think that neither his strength will defend him, nor his beauty at all, nor those beautiful arms, which shall lie everywhere in the very bottom of my gulf, covered with mud. Himself also will I involve in sand, pouring vast abundant silt around him; nor shall the Greeks know where to gather his bones, so much slime will I spread over him. And there forthwith shall be[683] his tomb, nor shall there be any want to him of entombing, when ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... you could lay hands on. So the people of the chalky Ogbury valley had perforce to grow corn for themselves, whether nature would or nature wouldn't; and, in order to grow it under such very unfavourable circumstances of soil and climate, they terraced off the entire hillside, by catching the silt as it washed slowly down, and keeping it in ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... it floated in water in a state of decomposition. The jaw would thus be deposited immediately, while the rest of the body would float and drift away altogether, ultimately reaching the sea, and perhaps becoming destroyed. The jaw becomes covered up and preserved in the river silt, and thus it comes that we have such a curious circumstance as that of the lower jaws in the Stonesfield slates. So that, you see, faulty as these layers of stone in the earth's crust are, defective as they necessarily are ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... fordable at thirty points during certain parts of the year. The first of the two main fords in the lower Jordan is just below the point where the Wady Kelt enters the Jordan from the west and deposits its mass of mud and silt. The other ford is six miles further north below the point where the Wady Nimrin comes down from the highlands of Gilead. Here to-day the main highway connecting the east and the west-Jordan country crosses the river. This spot was probably the scene of the historic crossing ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... levels which surround it. The first British capital could hardly have been more nobly placed, and one could not help grieving that the Ouse should have indolently lost York that early dignity by letting its channel fill up with silt and spoil its navigation. The Thames managed better for York's upstart rival London, and yet the Ouse is not destitute of sea or river craft. These were of both steam and sail, and I myself have witnessed the energy with which the reluctance of the indolent stream is ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... that flooding returns to the soil the needed fertility. This may be true if the flooding-water deposits much silt, but if the water be clear it is untrue, and fertilizers or leguminous crops are needed to keep up fertility. Cowpeas replace the lost soil-elements and keep down weeds, grasses, and ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... are found above the solid rocks, in the form of gravel, silt, rolled pebbles, etc., should be carefully distinguished from the solid strata upon which they repose. And the more ancient of these loose materials, found on the sides or summits of hills, etc., should be distinguished from the recent mud, sand, and gravel, brought down by land-floods, or rivers. ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... loosened gravel and earth sliding into the gully. The wash widened and opened out into a sandy flat. Link crossed this and turned up on the opposite side. Rocks impeded the progress of the car, and these had to be rolled out of the way. The shelves of silt, apparently ready to slide with the slightest weight, the little tributary washes, the boulder-strewn stretches of slope, the narrow spaces allowing no more than a foot for the outside wheels, the spear-pointed cactus that ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... note: (perennially navigable; large sections of Sava blocked by downed bridges, silt, ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... initial examination, attention should be given to the removal of dirt, silt, grease and other foreign matter from the fingers. Soap and water are good cleansing agents. So is xylene, a chemical which will readily clean grease and fatty matter from the fingers. Good results can be achieved by utilizing a child's soft-bristled ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... fine opportunities for fishing and trading; for this river, which in the North divides the two states of Vermont and New Hampshire, flows through Massachusetts and Connecticut, where it pours rich deposits of silt ...
— Three Young Pioneers - A Story of the Early Settlement of Our Country • John Theodore Mueller
... were camped, the valley had been, at some distant period, a lake which had subsided after depositing a rich layer of silt, through which the stream had cut its way subsequently. Over this rich alluvial deposit the forest had spread luxuriantly, and it was only the skill of the experienced prospector that could discover the possibilities of the enormous stretches of ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... This consists of the silt which the stream carries in suspension, and the sand and gravel and larger stones which it pushes along its bed. Especially in times of flood one may note the muddy water, its silt being kept from settling by the rolling, eddying currents; and often by placing his ear close to the bottom of a boat ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... concealed by sage, not ten minutes' walk from the Ferry inn, unknown to the map-maker and innocent of all use, lay a perfect floor for evening pacing with one's eyes upon the stars. It was the death mask of an ancient lake, done in purest alkali silt, and needing only the shadows cast by a low moon to make the illusion almost unbelievable. Slow precipitation, season after season, as the water dried, had left the lake bed smooth as a cast in plaster. Subsequent warpings had lifted the alkali crust into thin-lipped ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... the alders lie their derelict foundations, The beams wherein they trusted and the plinths whereon they built— My rulers and their treasure and their unborn populations, Dead, destroyed, aborted, and defiled with mud and silt! ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... of the ship to completely unrecognizable debris might have to be accomplished eventually, but it certainly was not immediately possible. However, perception told him that the heavy vessel was already hidden beneath silt and stagnant water. It would be safe for a while from accidental discovery. The Challonari was self-sustaining and could survive untended for years, if necessary, serving to keep the area clear of wild life that might draw ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... fine aggregate of whatever character must be clean, free from organic matter and sand, must contain no appreciable amount of mica, feldspar, alkali, shale or similar deleterious substances and not exceed two and one-half per cent of clay and silt. The sand is of such a range of sizes that all will pass the one-fourth-inch sieve and that not exceeding about five per cent ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... stately surveillance of the mother bird. Wild cats prowled boldly on the southern slopes. Cotton-tails huddled beneath the greasewood brush and nibbled at the grasses. The canon stream ran clear again now that the storm-washed silt had settled. On the peaks the high winds were cold and cutting, but on the slopes and in the valleys the earth was ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... river-side silt, rice seed is simply scattered and the harvest reaped when ripe; nothing else has ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... built upon. The marsh is about half a mile wide, and something like a mile and a half long, extending southward into Jersey City. The surface is a network of matted vegetation and roots perhaps five feet deep, and under that lies a mass of blue clay or river silt 100 feet or more in depth. The original tidal flow over these marsh lands has been obstructed by viaducts for railroads and streets, leaving only two natural outlets, a sluice way at Fifteenth street on the north, and on the south a basin constructed ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... his bulbs, working speedily, but still studying what he could see of the strange erection under the lake. He thought it was curiously free of silt, and its color, as far as he could distinguish, allowing for the dark hue of the water, was light gray—perhaps even white. ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... dark and drear. Clouds hung heavily in the sky and the moorland was wrapt in a fine mist so peculiar to that district. The roads were heavy, and one could hear the silt crush beneath ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... penetrated to the central fire, and of the sea it can be no longer said that man's "control stops with its shores." The pathway of his messenger from continent to continent he has laid deep in its chalky ooze, while over it silt silently, flake by flake, as they have been falling since aeons before his creation, the induviae of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... summer, when the river is at its highest level and overflows the banks for miles, it is no pleasure excursion to steer ungainly boats between banks of sand and silt without pilots. On the second day a strong southerly storm arose, and the dangerous waves in the whirlpools of the current capsized many vessels and damaged others. Alexander made for the bank to look for fishermen who might act as pilots, and under their guidance he continued his voyage. The ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... Surging, silt-laden water rushed upwards past the sides of the heavy cab and swirled around Troy and Alec. Both were clamped into the seat by a steel mesh belt and the waters tore and whipped at them. Despite the ...
— The Thirst Quenchers • Rick Raphael
... is the headquarters of the Governor-General of all French Indo-China. To the south Saigon is the most important town; it is situated in the Mekong delta, which is increasing in size every year by the addition of the vast quantities of silt carried down by the great river. The country abounds in wild animals, elephants, tigers, rhinoceroses, alligators, poisonous snakes, monkeys, parrots, and peacocks. In area the French possessions are about half as large again as France itself, and the population ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... of the emission jet can be applied as a factor in giving motive power, the fact that no close-fitting parts are required for the places upon which the line of force impinges will alter the conditions of the whole problem. In the centrifugal sand pump, as now largely used for raising silt from rivers and harbours, the serious corrosive action of the jet of sand and water upon the inside of the pump has been successfully overcome by facing the metal with indiarubber; but nothing of the kind could ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... named by the Jesuits 'folle avoine,' and by the English 'wild rice.' The long drooping ears filled with very large grains, black outside and white within, shook down their contents into the silt at bottom with every movement which waved their seven-feet stems. Arthur knew it as a noted haunt of wild duck, a cloud of which ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... bend beneath the high, cut banks and past the little town, disappearing behind the wooded point below, which masked the up-coming steamers till one heard the sighing labor of their stacks before he saw their smoke. It was a muddy, rushing giant, bearing a burden of sand and silt, so that one might hear it hiss and grind by stooping at its edge to listen; but the slanting sun this afternoon made it appear like a boiling flood of molten gold which issued silently out of a land of mystery and vanished ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... Fine silt, brought down in suspension by a muddy river and deposited to form the Delta when the river reaches the ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... him nor comeliness anywise, nor that armour beautiful, which deep beneath the flood shall be o'erlaid with slime, and himself I will wrap him in my sands and pour round him countless shingle without stint, nor shall the Achaians know where to gather his bones, so vast a shroud of silt will I heap over them. Where he dieth there shall be his tomb, neither shall he have need of any barrow to be raised, when the Achaians make ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... Laird forbade further dumping on the Sawdust Pile. When the necessity for more dredger-work developed, in order to keep the deep channel of the Skookum from filling, he had the pipes from the dredger run out to the Sawdust Pile and covered the unsightly spot with six feet of rich river-silt up to the ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... line, west and north of the Colorado River. The main stream of the district is the Virgin, with a drainage area of 11,000 square miles, Muddy River and Santa Clara Creek being its main tributaries. It is a torrential stream, subject to sudden floods and carrying much silt. A section of its valley in the northwestern corner of the present Arizona, near Littlefield, is to be dammed in the near future for the benefit of small farms that have been cultivated for many years and for carrying out irrigation plans of ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... directions. It was clear at a glance that when Roger the Dane laid here the first stone of his pirates' stronghold, to protect his port of Harfleur, the salt water must have dashed right up against the chalky cliff; but the centuries during which the silt of the Vosges had been carried down the river and piled up against the rocks at its mouth, had driven the castle inland for an eighth of a mile. Melcourt-le-Danois which had once looked down into the very waves now dominated in the first place ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... of the Mesopotamian rivers contains five times as much sediment as the Nile. In fact, one of the most pressing of the problems the Sumerian and early Babylonian engineers had to solve was the keeping of the canals free from silt.(1) What the floods, if left unchecked, may do in Mesopotamia, is well illustrated by the decay of the ancient canal-system, which has been the immediate cause of the country's present state of sordid desolation. That the decay was gradual was not the fault of the rivers, but was due to the ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... has highest adaptation for deposit soils, such as are made by the settling of silt held in solution by waters that overflow. In these it will grow with vigor, though they rest upon coarse sand or even upon gravel not too near the surface. Irrigating waters to some extent are necessary to grow the plants in best form, although, as previously intimated, ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... it will suffer, without being greatly affected, a far greater amount of wearing and knocking about when being transported by the agency of currents and rivers, than will a softer substance, such as clay. An equal amount of this wearing action upon clay will reduce it to a fine impalpable silt. The grains of sand, however, will still remain of an appreciable average size, and where both sand and clay are being transported to the sea in one and the same stream, the clay will be transported to long distances, whilst the sand, being heavier, ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... when water channels and reservoirs become clotted with silt and mud, a side effect of deforestation and ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... tide, except, perhaps, the extreme of the neaps. Down on that level, out from the dyke to the uncertain line of the water, you cannot walk a hundred yards without having to cross a channel more or less deep, a channel which the working of the muddy tides has scoured up into the silt and ooze of the sodden land. These channels are yards deep in slime, and they ramify like the twisted shoots of an old vine. Were you to make a map of them as they engrave this desolate waste it would look like ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... junior, I'm right down ashamed on you for a son o' mine!" he said, digging away at his oar savagely, as if trying to dredge up some of the silt from the bottom of the harbour. "You, turned fifteen year old, and been back'ard and forrud 'twixt Hardway and the Gosport shore for a matter of five years or more, and not for to know and read a common signal like that, ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... in flight, And swans be swifter than hawks of the tower, And wrens set gos-hawks by force and might, And muskets make verjuice of crabbes sour, And ships sail on dry land, silt give flower, And apes in Westminster give judgment and sentence, Then put ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... glance, but to my best belief 'Twas almost anything but brief— A wide survey, in which the earth Was seen before mankind had birth; Strange monsters basked them in the sun, Behemoth, armored glyptodon, And in the dawn's unpractised ray The transient dodo winged its way; Then, by degrees, through silt and slough, We reached Berlin—I don't know how. The good Professor's monotone Had turned me into senseless stone Instanter, but that near me sat Hypatia in her new spring hat, Blue-eyed, intent, with lips whose bloom ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... John Buchanan, a zealous antiquary, writing in 1855, informs us that in the course of the eight years preceding that date, no less than seventeen canoes had been dug out of this estuarine silt [of the valley of the Clyde], and that he had personally inspected a large number of them before they were exhumed. Five of them lay buried in silt under the streets of Glasgow, one in a vertical position with the prow uppermost, ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... and movement of the barbarous city into which the steamship cut-rates had shunted him, the alien strayed away from the sea, which he hated, as far as the district covered by Engine Company No. 99. Light as a cork, he was kept bobbing along by the human tide, the cruelest atom in all the silt of the stream that emptied into the ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... other effect than the sudden snapping of the inch line like thread. It was subsequent to this that, as the diver stayed his steps in the unsteady current, his staff was seized below. The water was murky with the river-silt above the salt brine, and he could see nothing, but after an effort the staff was rescued or released. Curious to know what it was, he probed again, and the stick was wrenched from his hand. With a thrill he recognized in such ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... diameter; at their bottoms there is a roofed chamber, into which the air is pumped, and in which the men work when excavating, this roof being supported by ample main and cross lattice girders. Shafts with air-locks and pipes for admitting water and ejecting silt are provided. The air-locks are fitted with sliding doors, worked by hydraulic rams, or by hand, the doors being interlocked in a manner similar to that in which railway points and signals are interlocked, so that one door cannot be opened until the other is closed. The hoisting of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... on one side, behind a screen. Triumphant shouts of Bande Mataram come nearer: and to them I am thrilling through and through. Suddenly a stream of barefooted youths in turbans, clad in ascetic ochre, rushes into the quadrangle, like a silt-reddened freshet into a dry river-bed at the first burst of the rains. The whole place is filled with an immense crowd, through which Sandip Babu is borne, seated in a big chair hoisted on the shoulders of ten ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... not Medeland with its wealth of woods, Fair Ganges, Hermus thick with golden silt, Can match the praise of Italy.... Here blooms perpetual spring, and summer here In months that are not summer's; twice teem the flocks: Twice does the tree yield service of her fruit. Mark too, her cities, so many and so proud, Of mighty toil the achievement, town on town Up rugged precipices ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... studying the Bowery. I have lived in it nearly thirty years, and I am just beginning to understand its heartbeats. It is like a great river fed by a hundred alien streams. Each influx brings strange seeds on its flood, strange silt and weeds, and now and then a flower of rare promise. To construe this river requires a man who can build dykes against the overflow, who is a naturalist, a geologist, a humanitarian, a diver and a strong swimmer. I ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... water came rolling through the cave. We know this to be so, because in places it broke up this layer of stalagmite and washed it away, as well as large portions of the breccia below, and after the floods had ceased, occasionally inundations still threw down layers of mud and silt. This accumulation is known as cave earth, and is the layer containing the numerous remains of the Cave-men. Here the explorers were not only struck with the large number of implements, but at once noticed that they were of a higher form and better made. Instead ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... more than half a mile of visible surface, the exploration was naturally limited; but there was a "deal more below," as Captain Jeb assured them,—reefs and shoals stretching out in every direction, and widening every year with the silt carried down from the shore. There were one or two wide hollows between the rocks, where that same silt, top-dressed with richer earth imported from more favored spots by Captain Jeb, served as kitchen garden, in which beans, cabbages and potatoes ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... until it joins the other branch. Inside the Gulf stream, along the coast of Texas, is the counter-current before referred to, making down the coast at the rate of two to three miles per hour, and bringing down the silt and mud of the Mississippi, Sabine, etc. I have seen the water off the Island of Galveston the color of ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... suits it, irrigation by underflow from ditches on higher elevations is being successfully used on small areas in the foothills. For gardens the most promising arrangement seems to be a laying of drain tiles rather near the surface, which shall be taken up each year, cleaned of silt and plant roots, and relaid along the rows before planting; but this calls for too much labor, except perhaps for amateur gardeners. The kind of soil best suited to such a system is a medium loam which ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... tank if he paid forty rupees. The merchant paid the money and then went home and called his family together and said that they would first improve the tank and then find wives for all his sons. The sons agreed and they collected coolies and drained off the water and began to dig out the silt. When they had drained off the water they found in the bed of the tank a number of big fish of unknown age: which they caught and two of them they sent to the Raja as a present. When the fish were carried into the presence of the Raja they both began to laugh: then the Raja said ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... rapidly, and the banks were slimy. Fingal's Creek was almost at its usual level and the silt was crusting along its bedraggled borders. Just above where it empties into the Neosho we noted a freshly broken embankment as though some weight had crushed over the side and carried a portion of the bank with it. Puddles of water and black mud ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... with in England, France, Germany, and other parts of Europe, are the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, horse, great Irish deer, bear, tiger, and hyaena. In the peat, No. 1 (Figure 87), and in the more modern gravel and silt (No. 2), works of art of the ages of iron and bronze, and of the later or Neolithic stone period, already described, are met with. In the more ancient or Paleolithic gravels, 3 and 4, there have been found of late years in several valleys in France and England— as, for example, in ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... 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 ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... the Modern or Superficial Formation, of which the best specimen is the great Bedford level, that spreads over the lower lands of Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, and Lincolnshire, consisting of accumulations of silt, drifted matter, and bog-earth, some of which began before the earliest periods of British history. When these accumulations are removed by artificial means, we find below sometimes shells of recent species, and the remains of an old estuary, sometimes sand-banks, gravel beds, stumps ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... flint-producing animals, we have also the great group of fresh-water and marine microscopic plants known as Diatoms, which likewise secrete a siliceous skeleton, often of great beauty. The skeletons of Diatoms are found abundantly at the present day in lake-deposits, guano, the silt of estuaries, and in the mud which covers many parts of the sea-bottom; they have been detected in strata of great age; and in spite of their microscopic dimensions, they have not uncommonly accumulated to form ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... of Flies stands apart from the city on a spit of sand which splays out into two flanges, and so embraces in two hooks a lagoon of scummy ooze, of weeds and garbage, of all the waste and silt of a slack water. In front of it only is the tidal sea, which there flows languidly with a half-foot rise; on the other is the causeway running up to the city wall. Above and all about this dead marsh you hear day ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... succession of half-circles, hills to the right, with the stream curving into a shadowy lake, or swerving out again in a bend to the low left; or high-walled sandstone bluffs to the left sending the water wandering out to the low silt shore on the right. Not river of the Thousand Islands, like the St Lawrence, but river of Countless Islands, the Saskatchewan should ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... anxious. But their leader kept steadily on. The sand was hard enough and offered sufficient resistance to the broad hoof of a horse, but if one stood still for a minute or so, it began gradually to silt up and bury it. It was a horrible place. When at noon that devil's slough resolved itself into a comparatively narrow strip, and Dorothy saw that they could easily have left it, she began to understand their reason for keeping on such dangerous ground—they did not wish to leave any tracks behind ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... few isolated points. Just how these vents have been reopened is one of the most difficult questions still left for investigation. Given a line of weakness in the rocks, though, and a susceptibility to fresh fracture is afforded. Professor McGee suggests that the overloading of the ocean bed by silt from the Mississippi river or other sources may have been the immediately exciting cause of the recent outbreaks. Other geologists have found a similar explanation acceptable in the case of eruptions elsewhere. The theory has much to ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... very carefully in a proper way this material can be separated from the pure clay. It is called silt, but really there are a number of silts, some almost like clay and some almost like sand; they shade ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... average of 0.34 ft. between the bulkhead lines. This settlement has been constantly decreasing since construction, and appears to have been due almost entirely to the disturbances of the surrounding materials during construction. The silt weighs about 100 lb. per cu. ft. * * * and contains about 38% of water. It was found that whenever this material was disturbed outside the tunnels a displacement of the ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... with no other shore in sight, yet not over three miles northeast of a "pass" between two long tide-covered sand- reefs, a ferment of delta silt—if science guesses right—had lifted higher than most of the islands behind it in the sunken west one mere islet in the shape of a broad crescent, with its outward curve to seaward and a deep, slender lagoon on the landward ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... bottom of the Nile a turbid convection was taking place, as if the river silt had been stirred up, but the fuming current was assuming a dull red tinge. The action had been rapid. Already the stain had predominated, streaks of clear water, only here and there, clarifying the opaque coloring. The boat rode half its depth in red, the paddle dripped red, the splashes of ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... stuff an', if they's time, we'll flume the silt tailin's for the fine dust. Providin' we can git a fall of water. There'll be plenty for all hands to do. An' the shares go as first fixed. I ain't expectin' you to do the diggin' an' not git a pinch or two of ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... escape was a matter of wriggling on down the drain. And wriggling was not impossible, though excessively difficult and exhausting. The drain was nowhere choked with silt, but all along was furred with ooze and there was more than an inch of ooze along its bottom. In this, hitching myself forward on my elbows by violent contortions, I slipped back almost as much as I ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... snails and the crayfish burrow deep into the mud and silt at the bottom of ponds and streams where they lie motionless during the winter. The land snails, in late autumn, crawl beneath logs, and, burrowing deep into the soft mould, they withdraw far into their shells. Then each one forms ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... light northwesterly breeze through the channels which connect the island of San Francesco with the more easterly stretches of the Venetian lagoon. The boat presently neared the shore of one of the cultivated lidi—islands formed out of the silt of many rivers by the travail of centuries, some of them still mere sand or mud banks, others covered by vineyards and fruit orchards—which, with the murazzi or sea-walls of Venice, stand sentinel between the city and the sea. ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... primal wastes set precious seed of rapture and of pain; All the strongholds that he built For the powers of greed and guilt— He must strew their bastions down the sea and choke their towers with silt; He must make the temples clean for the gods to come again, And lift the lordly cities under skies ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... ample supply of pure water could be counted on. It was known that water was met all through this valley at depths of from six to twelve feet and then that there would be found a layer of finely powdered silt to a depth of about one hundred feet, when another layer of water would be found, and that all the private wells reached this layer. When tested by the city, however, it was found that this water-bearing stratum was of too fine material to yield its water freely, and the ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... extending a hundred and seventy miles north of the shore that takes their wash to-day. Slowly, through the centuries of that age of all beginnings, the river, cutting canyons and valleys in the north and carrying southward its load of silt, built from the east across the gulf to Lone Mountain ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... into the sea. Many of these watercourses may in former times have been larger and even navigable up to a point. Their flow is now obstructed, their volume diminished. I daresay they have driven the sea further out, with silt swept down from the uplands. The same thing has struck me in England—at Lyme Regis, for instance, whose river was also once navigable to small craft and at Seaton, about a mile up whose stream stands that village—I forget its name—which was evidently the ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... the community reaction is especially well shown in the case of leaf mold and duff. The leaf litter is again only the total of the fallen leaves of all the individuals but its formation is completely dependent upon the community. The reaction of plants upon wind-borne sand and silt-laden waters ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... big things in human history have been entirely dependent upon the mud of the great rivers. Thebes and Memphis, Rameses and Amenhotep, based their civilisation absolutely upon the mud of Nile. The bricks of Babylon were moulded of Euphrates mud; the greatness of Nineveh reposed on the silt of the Tigris. Upper India is the Indus; Agra and Delhi are Ganges and Jumna mud; China is the Hoang Ho and the Yang-tse-Kiang; Burmah is the paddy field of the Irrawaddy delta. And so many great plains in either ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... time with a special lift, contrived to grip the meter firmly parallel to the current axis, so as to register only forward velocity, and with a nearly rigid gearing wire. No useful general results were obtained. Ninety specimens of silt were collected, but no connection could be traced between silt and velocity; it seemed that the silt at any point varied greatly from instant to instant, and that the quantity depended not on the mean ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... Cecil silt loam consists of 12 inches of a light gray or white silt loam. This material is underlain by a subsoil of yellow silt loam slightly heavier than the soil. The type is locally termed "white land," and is closely related to the Penn loam and the Iredell clay loam, ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... or a gradual process, this "putting off the old man?" It is both. It is a resolve taken once for all, but carried out in detail day by day. The first hour that the sap begins to withdraw, and the leaf-stalk begins to silt up, the leaf's fate is sealed: there is never a moment's reversal of the decision. Each day that follows is a steady carrying out of the plant's purpose: "this old leaf shall die, and the new leaf shall ...
— Parables of the Cross • I. Lilias Trotter
... islands; tides and rivers were opening new passages and closing old ones; and, more than all, those mightiest tools of the great Engineer, the glaciers, were furrowing valleys, dumping millions of tons of silt into the sea, forming islands, promontories and isthmuses, and by their recession letting the sea into deep and long fiords, forming great bays, inlets and passages, many of which did not exist in Vancouver's ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... could not see them," Peggotty adds, "for what with the mud and sand the water is pretty thick down there. But they could feel them well enough—an arm sticking out there, and a knee sticking out here, and sometimes half a body clear of the silt, owing to lying one over another. They could have got them all up easy enough, and would, too, if they had been paid for it. They were told that they were to have a pound apiece for all they brought ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... this river, were noted for their fertility. The annual inundations always left a rich deposit of silt. This silt produced excellent maize, potatoes, beans, pumpkins, squashes, cucumbers and melons. These, according to Heckewelder, were important items of the ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... deflected to a north-south line, roughly speaking, by the gate of the Shigdawayn, twin-hills standing nearly east and west of one another. Now become a broad, well-defined, tree-dotted bed, with stiff silt banks, here and there twenty to twenty-five feet high, it runs on a meridian for about a mile, including the palm-orchard and the camping-ground. It then turns the west end of the Jebel el-Safr, a mass of gypsum on the ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... as good as this theologian regards it. And see, we urge upon him, that you yourself do not suffer it to drop should you find that it commits you to the other side of the argument. Be at least as fair and honest as you say the infidels ought to have been. The six and a half metres of silt and slime,—representative, let us hold, of from five to six thousand years,—rest, you say, on "a foundation of sand like that of the adjacent desert." But have you ascertained on what the sand rests? I know nothing of that, replies the theologian; ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... the Jackal. "The river has shifted even in my little life." Indian rivers are nearly always moving about in their beds, and will shift, sometimes, as much as two or three miles in a season, drowning the fields on one bank, and spreading good silt on ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... Rockley girls really liked it better, or whether they only imagined they did, is a question. Certainly their lives were much more grey and dreary now that the grey clay had ceased to spatter its mud and silt its dust over the premises. They did not quite realize how they missed the shrieking, shouting lasses, whom they had known all their lives and ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... and Nature had been pouring into his sick senses her healing balm; while the medicaments of peace and sleep and quiet labour had been having their way with him, he had been reorganised, renewed, flushed of the turgid silt of dissipation. For his sins and weaknesses there had been no gall and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... are used inside the harbor, and the Bazin dredger at the entrance, where there are sand and gravel, and where the water is more disturbed. The dredger does not succeed very well in soft silt, because, owing to its slow precipitation, it runs over the sides of the hopper barges without settling. Nor does it do for dredging solid clay. It gives, however, excellent results with sand and gravel, and for this work is much superior to the bucket ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... that there was not more than five feet of water over her conning-tower, so that even a torpedo-boat, let alone a destroyer, would hit it if she came over. But nothing hit anything. The search was conducted on scientific principles while they sat on the silt and suffered. Then the commander heard the rasp of a wire trawl sweeping over his hull. It was not a nice sound, but there happened to be a couple of gramophones aboard, and he turned them both on to drown it. And in due time that boat got home with everybody's hair of just the same ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... face without mist upon the surface of the hot brew. And there is the knowledge of how to bank rivers, which is called "throwing the rives" in the South, but in the Fen Land by some other name; and how to bank them so that they do not silt, but scour themselves. There are these things and a ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... fields of waving corn, and immense flocks of wild-fowl haunted them. Into this dismal swamp the rivers brought down their freshets, the waters mingling and winding by devious channels before they reached the sea. The silt with which they were laden became deposited in the basin of the Fens, and thus the river-beds were choked up, compelling the intercepted waters to force new channels through the ooze; hence there are numerous abandoned beds of ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... loosely filled trench at its side. The loose filling of the trench should not be carried nearer than within six inches of the surface of the ground, and should be covered with fine and well-packed earth to prevent the entrance of surface-water which would soon carry in silt enough to stop its action. Whatever covering is adopted for the walk itself, it must be of such a character as to prevent any thing like a free admission of surface-water. Concrete will do this perfectly; and either ashes, or gravel dressed at the top with ashes, if well raked and rolled ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... vases of the second half of the 5th century B.C. prove the existence of trade with Greece at that period; and the town was famous in Aristotle's day for a special breed of fowls. Even at that period, however, the silt brought down by the rivers rendered access to the harbour difficult, and the historian Philistus excavated a canal to give free access to the sea. This was still open in the imperial period, and the town, which was a municipium, possessed its own gild of sailors; but its importance gradually ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... a thick growth of coarse hair all over the body. This is "the mammoth," the remains of which are found in every river valley in England, France and Germany, and of which whole carcases are frequently discovered in Northern Siberia, preserved from decay in the frozen river gravels and "silt." The ancient cave-men of France used the fresh tusks of the mammoth killed on the spot for their carvings and engravings, and from their time to this the ivory of the mammoth has been, and remains, in constant use. It is estimated that during the last two centuries ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... charitable, but we should be just; we give to the poor of the land, but we are eminently the friends of our servants; duty to mankind diverts us not from the love we bear to our dog; and with a pathetic sorrow for silt, we discard it from sight and hearing. We hate dirt. Having said so much, having shown it, by sealing the mouth of Mr. Stuart Rem and iceing the veins of Mr. Abram Posterley, in relation to a dreadful public case and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fleets into one, when occasion should require, made an attempt to re-open the canal between the Nile and the Red Sea, which had been originally constructed by Seti I. and Ramesses II., but had been allowed to fall into disrepair. The Nile mud and the desert sand had combined to silt it up. Neco commenced excavations on a large scale, following the line of the old cutting, but greatly widening it, so that triremes might meet in it and pass each other, without shipping their oars. ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... glacier-fed stream, now a muddy tributary from agricultural lands, now the clear waters from a limestone plateau, while all the time its racing current bears a burden of soil torn from its own banks. Now it rests in a lake, where it lays down its weight of silt, then goes on, perhaps across an arid stretch where its water is sucked up by the thirsty air or diverted to irrigate fields of grain. So with those rivers of men which we call migrations. The ethnic stream ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... Frisian islands of Silt and Fohr the following ABC rhymes have been recorded, consisting mostly ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... are continually in view from one angle to another as one pursues the river trail, and come constantly nearer and nearer. All the streams that are confluent with the Tanana on its left bank are glacial streams draining the high ice of these mountains. They come down laden thick with silt, at times foaming torrents, at times merely trickling watercourses that seam with numerous small runnels the wide deltas at their mouths. The tributaries of the right bank flow for the most part through heavily wooded country, and come ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... tangled girdle around D'Urban for a dozen miles inland: yonder is the white and foaming line of breakers which marks where the strong current, sweeping down the east coast, brings along with it all the sand and silt it can collect, especially from the mouth of the Umgeni River close by, and so forms the dreaded bar, which divides the outer from the inner harbor. Beyond this crisp and sparkling line of heaving, tossing snow stretches ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... thick and the silt and sand Were gathered day by day, Till not a furlong out from land A shoal had barred ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... Dr. Livingstone ("First Expedition," chapter xx.) believes the causa causans to be the sand swept over the southern part of the island: Douville more justly concludes that it is the gift of the Cuanza River, whose mud and ooze, silt and debris are swept north by the great Atlantic current. Others suppose that it results from the meeting of the Cuanza and the Bengo streams; but the latter outfall would be carried up coast. The people add the washings of the Morro, and the sand and dust of ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... scum; caput mortuum [Lat.], residuum, sprue, fecula [Lat.], clinker, draff^; scurf, scurfiness^; exuviae [Lat.], morphea; fur, furfur^; dandruff, tartar. riffraff; vermin, louse, flea, bug, chinch^. mud, mire, quagmire, alluvium, silt, sludge, slime, slush, slosh, sposh [U.S.]. spawn, offal, gurry [U.S.]; lientery^; garbage, carrion; excreta &c 299; slough, peccant humor, pus, matter, suppuration, lienteria^; faeces, feces, excrement, ordure, dung, crap [Vulg.], shit [Vulg.]; sewage, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the Earth is very great appears from what we have already reviewed. The sediments of the past are many miles in collective thickness: yet the feeble silt of the rivers built them all from base to summit. They have been uplifted from the seas and piled into mountains by movements so slow that during all the time man has been upon the Earth but little change would have been visible. The mountains have again been worn down into ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... "Ye may silt all our throats," said the boatswain, "but as long as the old brig's above water, there's ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... water to irrigate 250,000 acres of the richest of soils around the city of Phoenix in the Salt River valley. One of the most serious problems in the construction of the great dams in the West is the question of silt, which is washed down in the streams and will eventually fill up and render useless these expensive ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... immense peat bog of about twelve square miles in extent. Unlike the bogs or swamps of Cambridge and Lincolnshire, which consist principally of soft mud or silt, this bog is a vast mass of spongy vegetable pulp, the result of the growth and decay of ages. The spagni, or bog-mosses, cover the entire area; one year's growth rising over another,—the older growths not entirely decaying, but ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... volcanic convulsion, so that the diplodocus now lay a mile above the sea, with a vast pile of downs over his head which became a huge range of snow mountains. Then the rain and the sun began their work; and the whole of the immense bed of uplifted ocean-silt, now become chalk, was carried eastward by mighty rivers, forming the whole continent of North America, between these mountains and the eastern sea. At last the tropic forest was revealed again, a wide tract of petrified tree-trunks and fossil wood. And then out of an excavation, made ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... is aware of it other and stronger gusts duplicate the dastardly deed of the first wingless wizard of the plains, and the hapless voyager is left gasping. Almost immediately there are to be seen the regular "desert devils," as they are called, bringing a dozen or more whirling columns of yellow silt rapidly through the air, each pirouetting on one foot, assuming meanwhile all sorts ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... ground should be plowed deep and thoroughly pulverized. Plant the nuts 6 to 12 inches apart in rows about 3 feet apart. Put a handful of the sand from the boxes around each walnut. Our soil will appreciate the sand or silt from the drifts along the valley streams, as it has proven to be one of the best fertilizers known. If anyone doubts this let him try a quantity of ...
— Walnut Growing in Oregon • Various
... wheel before the latter could take up the slack. I deemed it advisable to use stout cord instead of wire in the future and made a protective slot for the weight. I had blocked up the seaward side of the pipe with rocks, but found that these caused a deposit of silt so I had to get into the water at low tide and shift them all out again to clean ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... Sea-captain loved, the River built, Wealth sought and Kings adventured life to hold. Hail, England! I am Asia — Power on silt, Death in my ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... and there were considerable vicissitudes in the distribution of land and water. Great areas of land repeatedly passed beneath the waters, instead of a re-elevation of the land, however, we may suppose that the shallow water was gradually filled with silt and debris from the land, and a fresh ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... irrigation was carried on by the gravity system, by which canals were built from intakes from the river and extended throughout the cultivated district. In Egypt for a long time the periodical overflow of the Nile brought in the silt for fertilizer and water for moisture. When the flood subsided, seed was planted and the crop raised and harvested. As the population spread, the use of water for irrigation became more general, and attempts were made to distribute its use not only over a wider range of territory but ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... a damp hollow behind it where ice-plants grew green and rank; and as he crept along the thunder of his exhaust started tons of sliding silt. His wheels raced and burrowed as he struck a soft spot, and then abruptly they sank. He dug them out carefully and backed away, but a mound of drifted sand barred his way. Twist and turn as he would he could not get around it and at last he climbed to its summit. The sun was setting ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... be flooded when the river overflows its banks. The mud and dirt consequently settle on the grass and make it unfit for hay, but the rainfall does good, causes the grass to grow and it is not injured by the silt. ...
— Weather and Folk Lore of Peterborough and District • Charles Dack
... part of the dam, was closed by iron doors on the down stream face and blocked with timber at the upper end. When required to be flushed out, laborers passed through the gallery and broke down the timber barrier, the silt forming a wall sufficiently thick to resist the pressure of the water for the time being, and allow of the retreat of the Forlorn Hope—if the latter had ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... banks. On the broad steps of the bathing ghats are assembled crowds of pious worshippers in clothes of every brilliant hue. The river has an aspect of kindliness and geniality and life-givingness. Its waters and rich silt have brought plenty to many a barren acre, and the dwellers on its banks know well that it issues from the ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... and ran along parallel with the coast. Charmian was at the wheel. Martin was at the engine, ready to throw on the propeller. A narrow silt of an opening showed up suddenly. Through the glasses I could see the seas breaking clear across. Henry, the Rapa man, looked with troubled eyes; so did Tehei, ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... of the stuff an', if they's time, we'll flume the silt tailin's for the fine dust. Providin' we can git a fall of water. There'll be plenty for all hands to do. An' the shares go as first fixed. I ain't expectin' you to do the diggin' an' not git a pinch ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... each other. They are compact, excluding air and failing to absorb the water that should be held in them. The excess of water finally is lost by evaporation, and the sticky mass becomes dry and hard. The incorporation of organic matter with clay or silt changes the character of such land, breaking up the mass, and giving it the porous condition so essential to productiveness. Improved physical condition is likewise given to a sandy soil, the humus ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... Low country, would have been regarded by the antiquary as belonging to very remote periods. During the previous winter I had read a little work descriptive of an ancient ship, supposed to be Danish, which had been dug out of the silt of an English river, and which, among other marks of antiquity, exhibited seams caulked with moss—a peculiarity which had set at fault, it was said, the modern ship-carpenter, in the chronology of his art, as he was unaware that there had ever been a time when moss was used for such a purpose. ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... were novel in subaqueous tunneling and are partly shown on photographs on pages 62 and 63. The bed of the Harlem River at the point of tunneling consists of mud, silt, and sand, much of which was so nearly in a fluid condition that it was removed by means of a jet. The maximum depth of excavation was about 50 feet. Instead of employing the usual method of a shield and compressed air at high pressure, a ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous
... Stone River is said to embody, historically, all of the deceits known to mountain streams. Below the Box Canyon it ploughs through a great bed of yielding silt, its own deposit between the two imposing lines of bluffs that resist its wanderings from side to side of the wide valley. This fertile soil makes up the rich lands that are the envy of less fortunate regions in the Great Basin; but the ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... deserted, is now a city of the dead, a Pompeii above ground, whose avenues of tombs lead to streets of human dwellings more desolate still. It is no longer by Ostia, nor even by the Tiber, that one can reach the sea: the way was choked by sand and silt seventeen centuries ago, and Trajan caused the canal to be made which bears his name; and this is still the outlet from Rome to the Mediterranean, while the river expires among the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various |
