"Sterile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are sterile in genius, we must cheer us with books of rich and believing men who had atmosphere and amplitude about them. Every good fable, every mythology, every biography out of a religious age, every passage of love, and even philosophy and science, when they proceed from an intellectual ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... var and spruce trees, with an undergrowth of raspberry, wild rhododendron, and alder. We passed a chain of lakes extending for sixteen miles, their length varying from one to three miles, and their shores covered with forests of gloomy pine. People are very apt to say that Nova Scotia is sterile and barren, because they have not penetrated into the interior. It is certainly rather difficult of access, but I was by no means sorry that my route lay through it. The coast of Nova Scotia is barren, and bears a very distinct resemblance to the east of Scotland. The climate, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... off by name, he had darted like a javelin at the legs of the refugee, startling him so much out of the perpendicular that the superstructure of plastic art came to the ground with a crash, top-dressing the sterile soil of the Campus Martius with a coat of manufactured plaster of Paris. Marius, blubbering over the shattered chimney-stacks of Carthage, could not have displayed a more touching classical spectacle than did that modern Roman lamenting to and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... from the main land by a channel. The southern portion of it is a thickly-populated village, but the principal part of the island is laid out as a park, of which the people of Stockholm are justly proud. It was originally a sterile tract of land: the first improvements converted it into a deer park for the royal use; but Gustaf III. and Charles (XIV.) John, as Bernadotte was styled, turned it into a public park. It is laid out in walks ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... Soudan, and Dar Zaleh; the prospect beneath and around them varying with every hour of their progress, from the most fertile and highly cultivated district, dotted here and there with straggling villages, to the most sterile and sandy wastes. They saw but little game during this portion of their journey, and only descended to the ground at night, when the vessel was secured by her four grip- anchors during the hours which her ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... had lived for fifteen years on land of his own, in Lower Bengal, studying cholera. He held that cholera was a germ that propagated itself as it flew through a muggy atmosphere; and stuck in the branches of trees like a wool-flake. The germ could be rendered sterile, he said, by 'Mellish's Own Invincible Fumigatory'—a heavy violet-black powder—' the result of fifteen ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... of some of the scathing criticism of scholars which appears in the first of the "Thoughts out of Season"—the polemical pamphlet (written in 1873) against David Strauss and his school. He reproaches his former colleagues with being sterile and shows them that their sterility is the result of their not believing in anything. "He who had to create, had always his presaging dreams and astral premonitions—and believed in believing!" (See Note on Chapter LXXVII.) In the last two ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... edge of a plain to which I had mounted by many a weary path—up many a dark ravine. I was twelve or fourteen thousand feet above sea level, and although I had just parted from the land of the palm-tree and the orange, I was now in a region cold and sterile. Mountains were before and around me—some bleak and dark, others shining under a robe of snow, and still others of that greyish hue as if snow had freshly fallen upon them, but not enough to cover their stony surface. The plain ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... prolific garden,—even to-day it is called the huerta,—their silk manufactures were known and valued throughout the world; their industry and frugality were, in fact, their worst crimes; they were able to draw wealth from the sterile lands which "Christians" found wholly unproductive. "Since it is impossible to kill them all," said Ribera, the representative of Christ, he again and again urged on ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... to the vow of celibacy, had become more and more stagnant, while the civil communities increased in power to adapt themselves to the age. All that was virile and creative combined in the towns; all that was inadequate, sterile, useless, coagulated in the monasteries, which thus became cesspools, and ultimately took on the character of festering sores by which the civil bodies which had at first been purged into them were endangered. Luther tells us how there was a Bishop ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... the River. Return of the boats. An Alligator. Stokes' Bay. Narrow escape of an Officer. Change of Landscape. Pheasant-Cuckoos. A new Vine. Compass Hill. Port Usborne. Explore the eastern shore of King's Sound. Cone Bay. Native Fires. Whirlpool Channel. Group of Islands. Sterile aspect of the Coast. Visited by a Native. Bathurst Island. Native Hut and Raft. Return to Port Usborne. Native Spears. Cascade Bay. Result of Explorations in King's Sound. Interview with Natives. Coral Reefs. Discover Beagle Bank. Arrival at Port George the Fourth. Examination of Collier ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... a stony stratum, scarcely less indurated in some localities than sandstone of the average hardness, that rests like a pavement on the surface of the boulder-clay, and that generally bears atop a thin layer of sterile soil, darkened by a russet covering of stunted heath. The binding cement of the pan is, as I have said, ferruginous, and seems to have been derived from the vegetable covering above. Of all plants, the heaths are found to contain most iron. ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... took its course across the Channel. Great things were expected as the result of this expedition, but it only enacted the old story of "The mountain in labour." The point against which this force was directed was the sterile rock of Bellisle, which, at the expense of two thousand lives, was captured. Thus disappointed, the people complained of the obstinacy of Pitt, and asked, sarcastically, what could be done with it? Nevertheless, if it was no use to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... within her limits: here, the roads stained with oxides, indicative of mineral wealth; there, the valleys plumed with grain and maize; the bays white with sails; the forest alive with game; lofty ridges, serene nooks, winding rivers, pine barrens, alluvial levels, sterile tracts, primeval woods—every phase and form of natural resource and beauty to invite productive labor, win domestic prosperity, and gratify the senses and the soul. Rivers, whose names were already historical—the James, the York, the Rappahannock, the Potomac, and the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... legislator vote against all restriction; or else as farmer, he would practise in his fields the same principle which he proclaims in the public councils. We would then see him sowing his grain in his most sterile fields, because he would thus succeed in laboring much, to obtain little. We would see him forbidding the use of the plough, because he could, by scratching up the soil with his nails, fully gratify his double wish of ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... must carry our warm cloak of human sympathy and understanding for vast tracts of land will prove to be a sterile desert—swept by icy storms of popular prejudice and personal greed and unless we come well prepared we shall forsake our faith in humanity and that, dear boys, would be the worst thing that could happen to any ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... principle well known to have regulated their choice of site, namely, the high land in preference to the low, as less subject to the unwholesome miasmas generated by breaking into the rich valleys and alluvial bottoms of primeval regions. By degrees, however, they quitted the safety of this sterile elevation, to brave the dangers of richer though lower fields. So that, at the present day, some of those mountain townships present an aspect of singular abandonment. Though they have never known aught but peace and health, they, in one lesser aspect at ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... such a desire for vengeance—a thirst for blood—a calm, reflecting rage! When I did not know that one of the victims of the monster was my own child, I said to myself, the death of this man will be sterile, while his life will be fertile, if, to redeem it, he accept the conditions which I impose. To condemn him to be charitable, to expiate his crimes, appeared to me just; and then, life without gold, life without sensuality, would be for him a long and double torture. But it is my ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... extensive salt and fresh-water lagoons, separated by low land, whose banks were covered with a pretty luxuriant carpet, formed of mosses, grasses, and Carices. But first on the neighbouring high land, where the weathered gneiss strata yielded a more fertile soil than the sterile sand thrown up out of the sea, did the vegetation assume a more variegated stamp. No trace of trees[251] was indeed found there, but low willow bushes, entensive carpets of Empetrum nigrum and Andromeda tetragona were seen, along with large tufts of a species ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... about two inches from the child, and the other two or three inches nearer the mother. Cut the cord about one-half inch beyond the first ligature, which will be between the two ligatures. The cord should be tied with sterile tape made for the purpose, or heavy twisted ligature silk, or a narrow, ordinary, strong tape, previously boiled. It should be tied firmly and inspected a number of times within one hour of its birth. It is ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... moment be supposed that nothing more is meant than the little town or city; by Cintra must be understood the entire region, town, palace, quintas, forests, crags, Moorish ruin, which suddenly burst on the view on rounding the side of a bleak, savage, and sterile-looking mountain. Nothing is more sullen and uninviting than the south- western aspect of the stony wall which, on the side of Lisbon, seems to shield Cintra from the eye of the world, but the other side is a mingled scene of fairy ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... see the sterile rust on the corn, and to feel the blazing heat of dog-days, when not a breath stirs as the languid shepherd leads his flock to the banks of the stream. The sunny pastures of Calabria lie spread before us, we ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... was so named in honour of the marquis of that title, the wise Whig premier who held that while the British Parliament had an undoubted right to tax the American colonies, the notorious Stamp Act was unjust and impolitic, "sterile of ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... they commonly set a larger proportion of capsules. The degree of infertility of the self-fertilised flowers differs extremely in the different species, and even, as we shall see in the section on self-sterile plants, in the individuals of the same species, as well as under slightly changed conditions of life. Their fertility ranges from zero to fertility equalling that of the crossed flowers; and of this fact no explanation can be offered. There are fifteen ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... the sterile present to feed upon a pregnant future. Tomorrows dinner never yet fed ...
— Wise or Otherwise • Lydia Leavitt
... home," Jason said. "The old Pyrran hospitality." Brucco only grunted and stamped out. Jason followed him down a bare corridor into a sterile lab. ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... of vivid green verdure and brilliant wild flowers. Then the period of drought ensues; the sun rapidly burns up all vegetation, and everywhere the eye is wearied by long stretches of brown and yellow desert. Occasional sandstorms darken the heavens, sweeping over sterile wastes and piling up the shapeless mounds which mark the sites of ancient cities. Meanwhile the rivers are increasing in volume, being fed by the melting snows at their mountain sources far to the north. The swift Tigris, which is 1146 miles long, ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... it," insisted Hartrott. "The last hour of the French Republic as an important nation has sounded. I have studied it at close range, and it deserves no better fate. License and lack of confidence above—sterile enthusiasm below." ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... deplorable that the existence of religious belief in a commune should be dependent on the esteem in which a single man is held? When the preservative force of Christianity permeating all classes of society shall have put life into the new order of things, there will be an end of sterile disputes about doctrine. The cult of a religion is its form; societies only exist by forms. You have your standard, ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... is in the sterile soil Deserted by the rustic swain Because it yields not for his toil The recompense he would obtain. By wall and ledge, and rock, and mound, Where'er neglect and ruin reign In greatest beauty there 'tis found, To cheer and ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... this narrowness give way to a more expanded sympathy. The brotherhood of mankind, indeed, was taught by Socrates, Cicero, and others of the ancient moral philosophers, yet these seeds of philosophy fell in very sterile soil and took root with discouraging slowness. Philosophers elsewhere taught the dogma of universal love,—Confucius among the Chinese, Gautama among the Hindoos,—but their teachings have borne little fruit in the great, stagnant peoples of ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... contained in this one small flask, and the last drop of that I have, as you see, now made use of. But although I have no more of the water, I have a secret of almost equal value. I know where the water came from, and whence it may be obtained. It springs from the bowels of the earth, in a sterile and uninhabited country more than a hundred days' journey from Bagdad. To get there will be both difficult and costly, as one must pass through the territory of a race of Infidels whom one must bribe freely in order to ensure one's safety. The question is, Dare you attempt it, and will you ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... apparatus is concerned, differs but little from that of a chemical laboratory, and the cleanliness of the apparatus is equally important. The glassware comprised in the following list, in addition to being clean, must be stored in a sterile or germ-free condition. ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... rocky hill-sides bare, and solitary but for the sheep that nibbled at the scanty grass, and the shepherds that leaned upon their crooks and motionlessly stared at us as we rushed by. As we drew near Rome, the scenery grew lonelier yet; the land rose into desolate, sterile, stony heights, without a patch of verdure on their nakedness, and at last abruptly dropped into the gloomy ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... the slow rains weep down upon us, and the very clouds look cold above. Then, like Hamlet the Dane, we take no pleasure in the life that weighs so wearily upon us, and deem "this goodly frame, the earth, a sterile promonotory; this most excellent canopy, the air, this brave, overhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, a foul ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... nearly five hundred verses, describe a palace, commencing at the facade, and at length finishing with the garden; but his description, we may say, was much better described by Boileau, whose good taste felt the absurdity of this "abondance sterile," in overloading a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... us, is afflicted by mediocrity and by sterility. But has not democracy in my country, as in yours, shown before now that it well knows how to choose rulers neither mediocre nor sterile; men more than the equals in unselfishness, in rectitude, in clear sight, in force, of any absolutist statesman, that ever in times past bore the scepter? If I live a few months, or it may be even a few weeks ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... continuous series of females and then a continuous series of males, the latter with less provisions and smaller cells. This distribution of the sexes agrees with what we have long known of the Hive-bee, who begins her laying with a long sequence of workers, or sterile females, and ends it with a long sequence of males. The analogy continues down to the capacity of the cells and the quantities of provisions. The real females, the Queen-bees, have wax cells incomparably more spacious than the cells ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... more) I think we—must go. (going to MADELINE, holding out his hand and speaking from his sterile life to her fullness of ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... substituting for their individualism his own tastes, plans, and sentiments, one might almost say his own individualism, and losing money thereby, he had gone far to demonstrate his pet theory that the higher the individualism the more sterile the life of the community. If, however, the matter was thus put to him he grew both garrulous and angry, for he considered himself not an individualist, but what he called a "Tory Communist." In connection with his agricultural interests he was naturally a Fair Trader; ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... material criterion for life. Britain is altogether small, the mere taproot of her extended empire; Scotland, again, which alone the Scottish boy adopts in his imagination, is but a little part of that, and avowedly cold, sterile, and unpopulous. It is not so for nothing. I once seemed to have perceived in an American boy a greater readiness of sympathy for lands that are great, and rich, and growing, like his own. It proved to be quite otherwise: a mere dumb piece of boyish romance, that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... again he thundered, "The conditions must be made intolerable to the conscience of a Christian city," and the spirit of the times rolled back the sterile answer, "It can't be done in Cincinnati." But he shook himself like a lion ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... that side is not pleasing to the eye; you descend from the noble mountains of Germany into the Italian plains, through a long and sterile district, insomuch that travellers who have formed a magnificent idea of our country, begin to laugh, and imagine they have been purposely deluded with previous accounts of ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal—these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance were fragmentary and sterile. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... a cross (crucial) cut, like this (x). The cut must reach through the mass to sound tissue beneath and beyond it. Then scrape out all the dead tissue. Dress with iodoform or sterile gauze. An antiseptic like listerine, glyco-thymoline, etc., can be used to wet the gauze, put on as a dressing afterwards and then more dry gauze above, strapped with adhesive plaster. Water and instruments must be boiled, hands must be absolutely clean. Everything around it must be clean. Sometimes ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... is the offspring of a lioness, by a leopard that coerces her, and, for this reason, cheetas are sterile like mules and all other hybrids. No animal of the same size is as weighty as the cheeta. It is the most somnolent animal on earth. The best are those that are 'hollow-bellied,' roach backed, and have deep black spots on a dark tawny ground, the spots on the back being close to each other; ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... of land, when it appears fertile, omens good; but if sterile and rocky, failure and ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... she,."through wildernesses gone, Through sterile sands, strange paths, and uncouth ways, Yet spoil or booty have we gotten none, Nor victory deserving fame or praise, Godfrey meanwhile to ruin stick and stone Of this fair town, with battery sore assays; And if awhile we rest, we shall behold ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... If this nation did not show an unmistakable tendency to put men at the center of politics instead of machinery and things; if there were not evidence to prove that we are turning from the sterile taboo to the creation of finer environments; if the impetus for shaping our destiny were not present in our politics and our life, then essays like these would be so much baying at the moon, fantastic ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... he had certainly been here with her not less than an hour and a half. It must be after eleven, then. One o'clock! And before that must come Makoff and Spider Jack! The night that half an hour ago had seemed so sterile, was crowding a program of events upon him ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... up to similar views, Hamlet 'lost all his mirth.' This is the cause of his heavy disposition; of his having 'foregone all custom of exercise'—so 'that this goodly frame, the earth,' seems to him 'a sterile promontory,' a mere place of preparation for gaining the next world through penance and prayer. Verily, 'this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,' appears to him no better 'than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.' Quite in accordance with such ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... I mean to say is this:—permanent inequality of conditions leads men to confine themselves to the arrogant and sterile research of abstract truths; whilst the social condition and the institutions of democracy prepare them to seek the immediate and useful practical results of the sciences. This tendency is natural and inevitable: it is curious to be acquainted ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... roast lamb, omelette, figs, oranges, and wine. Truly, if national character depended wholly on physical geography, we should be inclined to look in the valley of the Eurotas for the rich and luxurious Athens, and seek its stern and simple rival among the bleak hills and sterile plains of Attica. We had a short ride that afternoon up the valley of the Eurotas, with a keen north wind in our faces, and were not sorry to reach ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... mention their pretty flowers, reflect a purple tinge, and help to declare the ripeness of the year. Perhaps I have the more sympathy with them because they are despised by the farmer, and occupy sterile and neglected soil. They are high-colored, like ripe grapes, and express a maturity which the spring did not suggest. Only the August sun could have thus burnished these culms and leaves. The farmer has long since done his upland haying, and he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... have only to look around you to know that this picture has been drawn with the pencil of truth. What has made desolate and sterile one of the loveliest regions of the whole earth? What mean the signs of wasteful neglect, of long improvidence around you: the half-finished mansion already falling into decay, the broken-down enclosures, the weed- grown garden the slave hut open to the elements, the hillsides ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... technically capable individual as himself. He will be a father of several children, I think, because his scientific mental basis will incline him to see the whole of life as a struggle to survive; he will recognize that a childless, sterile life, however pleasant, is essentially failure and perversion, and he will conceive his honour involved in the possession ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... close upon them. Brown snakes got into my net while beating among dead leaves for insects, and made me rather cautious about inserting my hand until I knew what kind of game I had captured. The fields and meadows which had been parched and sterile, now became suddenly covered with fine long grass; the river-bed where I had so many times walked over burning rocks, was now a deep and rapid stream; and numbers of herbaceous plants and shrubs were everywhere springing up and bursting into flower. I found plenty of new ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... by many Honourable Lords, Worshipful Knights, Esquires, Gentlemen, and others both in England and Scotland. So now your Lordship's inclination hath incited, or invited my poor muse to shelter herself under the shadow of your honorable patronage, not that there is any worth at all in my sterile invention, but in all humility I acknowledge that it is only your Lordship's acceptance, that is able to make this nothing, something, ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... drifted about from place to place, saving every possible dollar of his uncertain earnings in the conscious hope that he could go back to New England and ask Nancy Wentworth to marry him. The West was prosperous and progressive, but how he yearned, in idle moments, for the grimmer and more sterile soil that ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... therefore, impossible for me to breathe into my fable that glowing life which animates the pure productions of poetical inspiration; but, in order to render the cold and sterile actions of the politician capable of affecting the human heart, I was obliged to seek a clue to those actions in the human heart itself. I was obliged to blend together the man and the politician, and to draw from the refined intrigues of state situations interesting ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... south, like a broad ocean, without wave or ripple. The few trees scattered here and there stand alone, casting long shadows over the plain at nightfall, and adding solemnity to the mysterious stillness of that isolated place. It is not a place for human habitation, for the soil is sandy and sterile; neither is it a place for human hearts, so desolate in winter, and so unsheltered and dry during the long warm summer. Yet midway between the village and the pond was once a house, standing with its back turned ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... Father so mad," explained Sylvia, sucking dreamily, her eyes on the little maelstrom created in the foaming liquid by the straw, forgetting everything else. The luxurious leisure in which she consumed her potation made it last a long time, and it was not until her suction made only a sterile rattling in the straw that she looked up at ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... characteristic of the Miocene period. To this tranquil condition of the surface succeeded the era of volcanic eruptions, when the lakes were drained, and when the fertility of the mountainous district was probably enhanced by the igneous matter ejected from below, and poured down upon the more sterile granite. During these eruptions, which appear to have taken place towards the close of the Miocene epoch, and which continued during the Pliocene, various assemblages of quadrupeds successively inhabited the district, among which are ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... sea-coast suffered from want of water, as little or no rain fell there, and the few streams, in their short and hurried course from the mountains, exerted only a very limited influence on the wide extent of territory. The soil, it is true, was, for the most part, sandy and sterile; but many places were capable of being reclaimed, and, indeed, needed only to be properly irrigated to be susceptible of extraordinary production. To these spots water was conveyed by means of canals and subterraneous aqueducts, executed on a noble scale. They consisted of ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... obscurely woven in and out among each other forming usually a cushion-shaped aethalioid mass. The outer layer sterile, often calcareous, forming a fragile crust, more or less defined. The middle layer sporiferous with calcigerous capillitium. The lowest ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... hours' work, which constitutes a day's work with us, is done, the young people have all sorts of games and sports, and they carry them as late into life as the temperament of each demands. But what I was saying to Mr. Twelvemough—perhaps I did not make myself clear—was that we should regard the sterile putting forth of strength in exercise, if others were each day worn out with hard manual labor, as insane or immoral. But I can account for it differently with you, because I understand that in your conditions a person of leisure ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... reconciled himself to his position as the local exemplification of the traditional Englishman whose trains of ideas run on the freight schedule—and was one of the most popular fellows in Lattimore. He gloried in his slavery to Antonia, and seemed to glean hope from the most sterile circumstances. ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... hotel, bright with the latest fastidiousness in modern decoration and art-furniture, and gay with pictured canvases and color, seemed to mock the sullen landscape, and the sterile crags amid which the building was set. An attempt to make a pleasance in this barren waste had resulted only in empty vases, bleak statuary, and iron settees, as cold and slippery to the touch as the sides ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... very active. But it was like a bubble floating in the darkness. At any moment it might burst and leave him in chaos. He would not die. He knew that. He would go on living, but the meaning would have collapsed out of him, his divine reason would be gone. In a strangely indifferent, sterile way, he was frightened. But he could not react even to the fear. It was as if his centres of feeling were drying up. He remained calm, calculative and healthy, and quite freely deliberate, even whilst he felt, with faint, small but final sterile horror, that his mystic reason was breaking, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... smiled at her. It is folly to grow angry with one's own hallucinations. That would be a double madness. As she stood before me, my treacherous senses leaped to their sterile ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... the infection as best he could, knowing there was almost no chance. He used all the penicillin he dared. Then he began sewing up the incision. It was all he could do, except for dressing the wound with a sterile bandage. He reached for ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... these juli, are not all of them seed-bearers, some are sterile, and whatever you raise of them, will never come to bear; and therefore by some they are called the male sort, as Mr. Ray (that learned botanist) has observed. The ozier is of that emolument, that in some ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... ruled well and strongly and by the laws of the empire. He was compelled by the barbaric confederates, who had placed him where he was, to grant them a third of the lands, certainly, of the great Italian landowners; but he created nothing new; like all the barbarians he was sterile, his only service was a service of destruction. With him even this service ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... Sewee and Santee Indians; and to have submitted to their rigorous fate with that resignation and cheerfulness which is characteristic of their nation.—Many must have been the hardships endured by them in settling upon a soil covered with woods, abounding in serpents and beasts of prey, naturally sterile, and infested by a climate the most insalubrious. For a picture of their sufferings read the language of one of them, Judith Manigault, bred a lady in ease and affluence:—"Since leaving France we have experienced every kind of affliction, disease, pestilence, famine, poverty, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... subject of "Hearth-fires" (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up. His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and feel how little it contained; but Winsett's, after all, contained still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiosities made their ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... train was going very slowly, and she could now see why. They were mounting a steep incline. The rich, damp earth of the plains beyond Robertville, with its rank grass, its moist ploughland and groves of eucalyptus, was already left behind. The train was crawling in a cup of the hills, grey, sterile and abandoned, without roads or houses, without a single tree. Small, grey-green bushes flourished here and there on tiny humps of earth, but they seemed rather to emphasise than to diminish the aspect of poverty presented by the soil, over which the dawn, rising ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... the "Philosophical Dictionary," I must confess I have no wish to turn over another page of Voltaire. It is simply incredible to me that human beings possessed of the same senses as ours could find satisfaction for their imagination in the sterile moralising, stilted sentiment, superficial wit, and tiresome persiflage of that queer generation. I suppose they didn't really. I suppose they used to go off on the sly, and read Rabelais and Villon. I suppose it was only the preposterous "social world" of those days who enjoyed nothing ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... beings, separated from the great tide of life like one of the shallow pools which the ebbing sea has left upon its sands, numbers scarcely a hundred and a half. The men are fishers, for there is no other occupation to be followed on the sterile rock. Every day also the level sweep of sands is wandered over by the women and children, who seek for cockles in the little pools; the babble of whose voices echoes far through the quiet air, and whose shadows fall long and unbroken on the brown ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... real feeling for the tragic life of Negro sharecroppers in the Brazos bottoms. He represents the critical awareness of life that has come to modern fiction of the Southwest, in contrast to the sterile action, without creation of character, in most older fiction ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... the thin poetic soil. The singers of fragile loves and trivial pleasures are often charming, and as often they are merely frivolous or merely depraved. Grecourt; Piron; Bernard, the curled and powdered Anacreon; Bernis, Voltaire's "Babet la Bouquetiere," King Frederick's poet of "sterile abundance"; Dorat, who could flutter at times with an airy grace; Bertin, born in the tropics, and with the heat of the senses in his verse; Parny, an estray in Paris from the palms and fountains of the Isle Bourbon, the "dear Tibullus" of ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... revolutionists they would probably have carried off the victory, but the whole number of their troops on the island available for military service at any one time rarely reached eight thousand men. A campaign in the Monte Cristi district which might have ended the war was rendered sterile by the lack of troops. Finally the Spaniards, unable to garrison the towns they won, were reduced to the possession of Santo Domingo City and a few other places near the seacoast, all practically in a state of siege. ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... which is so passionately and frequently expressed in Kabr's poems, balances and controls those abstract tendencies which are inherent in the metaphysical side of his vision of Reality: and prevents it from degenerating into that sterile worship of intellectual formul which became the curse of the Vedntist school. For the mere intellectualist, as for the mere pietist, he has little approbation. [Footnote: Cf. especially Nos. ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... This will endear him to English and American lovers of art, though it is only one of his many endowments. His wit keeps him from extremes, though some of his plates are not for puritans; his vivid sympathies prevent him from falling into the sterile eccentricities of so many of his contemporaries; if he is cynical he is by the same taken soft-hearted. His superb handling of his material, with a synthetic vision superadded, sets apart Louis Legrand in a profession which to-day is filled with farceurs and fakers and with too few ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... working in the idea: she wanted throbs, visible aims, the Christian incarnate; she would have preferred the tale of slaughter—periodically invading all English classes as a flush from the undrained lower, Vikings all—to frigid sterile Satire. And truly it is not a fruit-bearing rod. Colney had to stand on the defence of it against the damsel's charges. He thought the use of the rod, while expressing profound regret at a difference of opinion ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... nature it is the exception to find two recognised species which can be crossed or hybridised. In the case of the horse and the ass, although mules are the hybrid offspring of the two, the mules themselves are sterile, and there are many similar cases, so that some naturalists have maintained that mutual infertility should be recognised as the test ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... drawing. Spirit is greater than intellect, and may survive it in the course of a long life. But in the active years, for this kind of woman, the mental life becomes one with the spiritual. A lusty serviceableness will issue from their union. If mental interests seem sterile, the cure, as far as the college is concerned with it, is to deepen, not to lessen the love of learning. The renewal of sincerity, humility and enthusiasm in the age-old search for truth is more necessary than the introduction ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... Durkin absently. Life, at that moment, was confronting him so grimly, so flat and sterile and uncompromising in its secret exactions, that he had no heart to ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... the furthest south-western frontier outpost. In 1879 the Argentine Government determined to rid the country of the aborigines, or, at all events, to break their hostile and predatory spirit once for all; with the result that the entire area of the grassy pampas, with a great portion of the sterile pampas and Patagonia, has been made available to the emigrant. There is no longer anything to deter the starvelings of the Old World from possessing themselves of this new land of promise, flowing, like Australia, with milk and tallow, if not with honey; any emasculated ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... sterile literature of art criticism has been seriously enriched by a brilliant if wilful manifesto. The refreshing absence of obscurity common to art criticism will be particularly welcome. For genuine students the book possesses significant form, and will ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... good enough to use for edging, so after removing this have it broken into bits and put in a heap by itself. When the earth beneath is loosened, examine it carefully. If it is good old mellow loam without the pale yellow colour that denotes the sterile, undigested soil unworked by roots or earthworms, have it taken out to eighteen inches in depth and shovelled to one side. When the bad soil is reached, which will be soon, have it removed so that the pit will be three ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... Woodsia Hayscented Fern. Dennstaedtia Hart's Tongue. Scolopendrium Walking Fern. Camptosorus Asplenium Type Athyrium Type Sporangia of the Five Families Indusium Common Polypody. Polypodium vulgare Sori of Polypody Polypody in mass (Greenwood) Gray Polypody. Polypodium incanum Brake. Bracken. Sterile Frond Bracken. Fertile Frond Bracken, var. pseudocaudata Spray of Maidenhair Sori of Maidenhair Maidenhair. Adiantum pedatum Alpine Maidenhair Venus-Hair Fern. Adiantum capillus-veneris Purple Cliff Brake. Pellaea atropurpurea Dense Cliff Brake. ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... on her pretty head; her heart bursting with fond schemes to keep that precious mother alive. It's a splendid nature, that girl's; one that is in danger of being wrecked by its own impetuosity, but one so full and rich that it is capable of bubbling over and enriching all the dull and sterile ones about it. Now, if all the money I can rake and scrape together need not go to those languid, boneless children of my languid, boneless sister-in-law, I could put that brave little girl on her feet. I think she will be able to do battle with the world so long ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... at Whitehall, and took the middle line to Albany, traversing a wild sterile country, over bad roads and worse bridges, until we reached Sandy-hill, where the noble Hudson ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... anterior, exterior and superior to man, merely shifting the locus of that authority from the Church to the Book. Thus he paved the way for Zwingli and the Protestant scholasticism which became more rigid and sterile than the Catholic which it succeeded. We usually regard the Reformation as a part of the Renaissance and hence included in the humanistic movement. Politically and religiously, it undoubtedly should be so regarded, for it was a chief factor ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... once more to the West, from Asia to Europe, from Arabia to Scandinavia. We have now to deal with the raids and settlements of the Norsemen or Northmen. Like the Arabs the Northmen quitted a sterile peninsula and went forth to find better homes in distant lands. Their invasions, beginning toward the close of the eighth century, lasted ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... wolves and other beasts of prey, and to men who after many efforts will be compelled to abandon their life, and the human race will die out. In this way the fertile and fruitful earth will remain deserted, arid and sterile from the water being shut up in its interior, and from the activity of nature it will continue a little time to increase until the cold and subtle air being gone, it will be forced to end with the ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... vineyards, cottages, and everything combustible, consumed and nearly overwhelmed the town, and at last poured into the sea, where as it cooled, it formed a rugged termination or promontory of considerable height. The surface of this mass presented a rocky and sterile aspect, strongly opposed to the exuberance of vegetation in the more fortunate neighborhood. Passing through Torre del Annunziata, a populous village, the street of which was literally lined with maccaroni hanging to dry, I soon reached Pompeii. Between these last mentioned ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... wretched Svend hid was probably the last representative of great forests that grew where now is sterile moor. In the bogs trunks of oak and fir are found lying as they fell centuries ago. The local names preserve the tradition, with here and there patches of scrub oak that hug the ground close, to escape the blast from the North Sea. There is one such thicket near the hamlet of ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... Hadria, "the poor, sterile lives exhaust the strong and full ones. I will not be one of those vampire souls, at least not while I ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... in the meantime, he must live. Again, therefore, he had to resort to literary jobs for his daily support. These obtained for him petty occasional sums, the largest of which was ten pounds, from the elder Newbery, for a historical compilation; but this scanty rill of quasi patronage, so sterile in its products, was likely soon to cease; Newbery being too ill to attend to business, and having to transfer the whole management ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... and her intimates, of persons (the phrase of Steele's recurred to her as meeting it appropriately) "who had seen the world enough to undervalue it with good breeding," must seem to her at last a little sterile when she was conscious—never more than now—of how clearly and swiftly the healthy young blood coursed through her veins, dissipating any morbid imaginations that she might feel inclined to cherish. She looked out at life, in her conviction that so little ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... Dominions in South Africa. The tide of confederation, and corporate union is manifestly rising, the wave of extended British influence is flowing northwards, the various nationalities and states of this vast country are educating themselves by experience to see the folly and sterile weakness of isolation, and are learning to realise the inherent strength, and vitality of mutual co-operation, based on a self respecting, yet unselfish responsibility to ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young
... that star's malignant gleam That ruled my hapless birth; and dim the morn That darted on my infant eyes the beam; And harsh the wail, that told a man was born; And hard the sterile earth, which first was worn Beneath my infant feet; but harder far, And harsher still, the tyrant maid, whose scorn, In league with savage Love, inflamed the war Of all my passions.—Love himself more tame, With pity soothes my ills; while that cold heart, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... Chicago University to contain an area of two million four hundred and fifty-five thousand square miles, equal to that of all Europe excepting Russia, Norway and Sweden. Unlike the inland basin of Asia, in which the vast, mountain-girt Desert of Gobi stretches out its seas of sand, stony, sterile and desolate, the inland basin of America is its garden-spot and granary. Swept by the vapor-bearing winds and rain-distilling clouds from the Gulf of Mexico, and blessed with an excellent climate, it contains all the physical ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... South Connemara, some of the ashes from the midsummer bonfire are thrown on the fields to fertilize them.[521] One writer informs us that in Munster and Connaught a bone must always be burned in the fire; for otherwise the people believe that the fire will bring no luck. He adds that in many places sterile beasts and human beings are passed through the fire, and that as a boy he himself jumped through the fire "for luck."[522] An eye-witness has described as follows a remarkable ceremony observed in Ireland on Midsummer Eve: "When the fire burned for some ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... the great mass of existence! What a glorious monument of human invention; which has in a manner triumphed over wind and wave; has brought the ends of the world into communion; has established an interchange of blessings, pouring into the sterile regions of the north all the luxuries of the south; has diffused the light of knowledge and the charities of cultivated life; and has thus bound together those scattered portions of the human race, between which nature seemed to ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... gales.[159] A yellow-floating pomp, thy bounty shines In Autumn unconfined. Thrown from thy lap, Profuse o'er nature, falls the lucid shower Of beamy fruits; and, in a radiant stream, Into the stores of sterile Winter pours. In winter awful thou! with clouds and storms Around thee thrown—tempest o'er tempest rolled. Majestic darkness! on the whirlwind's wing Riding sublime, thou bidst the world adore,[160] And humblest nature with ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... now about ten miles from the shore, and the general appearance of the island suggested a recent snowfall. As the sun shone upon a bare white surface, the sterile slopes and mountain sides were utterly devoid of vegetation, and presented a sad aspect of desolation, which reminded me of the barren range on the shores ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... together of many unfamiliar elements and it is well known that the reproduction of abnormal growths, whether animal or vegetable, is irregular and not to be depended upon, even when they are not absolutely sterile. ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... criticism on the measure of Caius unjust.] But even here to condemn without more knowledge of his measures would be unjust. Fixed payments it must be remembered were not always preferable to tithes of the produce. In a sterile year the payers of vectigalia would be best off. Again, if a rich province like Asia did not pay tribute in proportion to other provinces, a re-adjustment of its taxes would not seem to the Romans unfair; and perhaps auction at Rome would after all ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... saw a rock resembling a galley under sail off a headland, which, in consequence, he called Punta de la Galera. No safe anchorage appearing, he coasted westward in search of a harbour and water. Instead of a sterile land, he saw the country covered with groves of palm-trees, cultivated in many places, and enlivened by hamlets and scattered habitations, while streams ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... thee not, oh sterile flower! thou wast never enwoven in its chaplets of delirious perfume. In that vigorous and healthy society they would have spurned thee under foot disdainfully. Purity, mysticism, melancholy—three words unknown to thee, three new maladies ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... power and the intelligent correction of bad physical habits remedy his defect. Pure mental impression, however vivid, which is not followed up by improvement of the environment, or correction of bad physical habits, will be almost absolutely sterile. Faith without works is as dead in medicine as in religion. Mental influence is little more than an introduction committee to real treatment. Even the means used for producing mental impressions are physical,—impressions ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... will not angle in that gulf; but I have fished up an island in Maracaybo, or Venezuela Gulf. It is called Curacoa, and is arid and sterile. There is very little water, and only one well in the island, and the water is sold at a high price. Its capital is Williamstadt, one of the neatest cities in the ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... have gold and treasure, And thy heart be wrapt in pleasure, Whilst we, thy elder born, Of our heritage are shorn? Must the youngest still be nursed, And the elder branches cursed? And condemned, by stern command, To a wild and sterile land?" ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... question, inevitable, perhaps, and yet very paralysing to any steady progress, as to whether it was really worth while to continue labour in such a sterile field, came up once more for discussion. In an elaborate report, designed rather to elicit the views of the home authorities than to express his own, dated August 18, 1877, Mr. Gilmour depicts rapidly and clearly his relations, ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... they care about is their damned sterile destiny! They don't care about people. Well we do! We care about something to live for. The hell with the destiny of the Galaxies! They don't know, and we'll be gone before they ...
— Dead World • Jack Douglas
... quality and sold readily at prices which enabled the Government to be more liberal, they were also occupied by the whites in such a manner as to preclude the possibility of the Indian hunting over or having access to them whereas the lands now ceded are notoriously barren and sterile, and will in all probability never be settled except in a few localities by mining companies, whose establishments among the Indians, instead of being prejudicial, would prove of great benefit as they would afford a market ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... in our hearts—I see you valued his poor father, ma'am—but he comes too late for me. At your age, ma'am, friendships come naturally; they spring like loves in the soft heart of youth: at seventy, the gate is not so open; the soil is more sterile. I shall never care for another Christopher; never see another grow to ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... talis esse potest. [Sidenote: Abilech desertum.] Primo tendant de Ierusalem in supra dictam Gazam Palestinorum, inde ad Castellum Dayre, atque ex tunc exitur de terra Syriae, et intratur a superiori parte in desertum longum arenosum, et sterile, prope ad septem dietas, quod lingua eorum vocatur Abilech; tamen per illud inueniantur plura hospitia, vbi haberi possunt ad victum nccessaria. Et qui in eundo rectum iter tenet, veniet in Ciuitatem dictam, Balbes, quae est ad finem ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation. v. 8 - Asia, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... no blessing, but with fresh blossoms and living fruits from the fullness of her power. In the endless succession of new forms creating Time plaits the wreath of Eternity, and blessed is he whom Fortune selects to be healthy and bear fruit. We are not sterile flowers among other living beings; the gods do not wish to exclude us from the great concatenation of living things, and are giving us plain tokens ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... dark time had shed as rain Or sown on sterile earth as seed That bears no fruit save tare and weed An age and half an age again, She ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... so good and great a servant: perhaps no one man of the many whom for the like cause she neglected, disgraced, persecuted, knew that the cause existed in the fact of their having taken to themselves partners of life and happiness—a solace which she sacrificed to the sterile honors of an undivided crown—of their enjoying the bliss and perfect contentment of a happy wedded life, while she, who would fain have enjoyed the like, could she have done so without the loan of some portion of her ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... critics, binders and bookworms. Only by the doubtful faith that men are made by their adversity can we reconcile our charge against the Sower who cast the seed of genius to fall on such barren ground, amid the stones of a sterile time and the briars ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... held sufficient for the discovery—they might pitch the more suitably, in case of their first husband's decease, upon a second match. The fertile women to be wedded to those who desire to multiply their issue; and the sterile ones to such other mates, as, misregarding the storing of their own lineage, choose them only for their virtues, learning, genteel behaviour, domestic consolation, management of the house, and matrimonial conveniences ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... here (Abou Hammed) at 4.25 this morning, 23d May, I had the luxury of a bath. The very sight of the Nile was delightful, after the parched desolation of the last seven days. The small village is utterly destitute of everything, and the sterile desert extends to the very margin of the Nile. The journey having occupied ninety-two hours of actual marching across the desert, gives 230 miles as the distance from Korosko, at the loaded-camel rate of two and a half miles per hour. The average duration ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... Turn we now to Ireland in 1835. My record of just fifty years ago is much what it might be now, starvation, beggary, and human wretchedness of all sorts in the midst of a rich land, through indolence relapsed into a jungle of thorns and briars, quaking bogs, and sterile mountains; whisky, and the idle uncertain potato, combining with ignorance and priestcraft, to demoralise the excitable unreasoning race of modern Celts. Let us turn from the sad scenes of which my said diary is ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... nature had assigned a sterile yet immense place on the globe, the ninth part of the habitable world, and a population of forty millions of men, all compelled by the savage genius of Peter the Great to unite themselves into one nation, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... it, but must search for it next time I go to Varallo. Torrotti presently says that the country being sterile, the people are hard pressed for food during two-thirds of the year; hence they have betaken themselves to commerce and to sundry arts, with which they overrun the world, returning home but once or twice a year, with their hands well filled with that which they have garnered, to sustain and comfort ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... ocean, on some sterile length of sand or rock, and amongst sea-faring people? Still, you are girls to be envied; for the sea has grand thoughts to tell you, and the rocks are full of meaning. The bracing air, the salt breeze, the impetuous ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... they were exposed to the attacks of the Jebusites in their rear: as soon therefore as David found he had nothing more to fear from the Philistines, he turned his attention to Jerusalem.* This city stood on a dry and sterile limestone spur, separated on three sides from the surrounding hills by two valleys of unequal length. That of the Kedron, on the east, begins as a simple depression, but gradually becomes deeper and narrower as it extends towards the south. About a mile ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... precedes population; I, on the contrary, maintain that population precedes, and is indeed the cause of, production. They teach that man breeds up to the capital, or in proportion to the abundance of the food, he possesses: I assert, that he is comparatively sterile when he is wealthy, and that he breeds in proportion to his poverty; not meaning, however, by that poverty, a state of privation approaching to actual starvation, any more than, I suppose, they would contend, that extreme and culpable excess is ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... down from the mountains to leave the front. I never had the feeling more strongly than when we passed out of Belgium this afternoon. I had it most strongly as we drove by a cluster of villas standing apart in a sterile region of sea-grass and sand. In one of those villas for nearly a year, two hearts at the highest pitch of human constancy have held up a light to the world. It is impossible to pass that house without a sense of awe. Because ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... from this; indeed, in our theatres we have reached the topsy-turvydom of having the dramatist write for the players instead of having the players act for the dramatist. Sterile art is the general outcome. A great form of architecture perished with the architect who, forgetful of noble design, indulged in desperate tours de force and offered to the stonemason the opportunity of executing miracles in ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... impunity to its edges. Fear stalks the classroom. The teacher is no longer a stimulant to adventurous thinking; she becomes instead a pipe line for safe and sound information. A deadening dogma takes the place of free inquiry. Instruction tends to become sterile; pursuit of knowledge is discouraged; discussion often leaves off where it ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... a short, sharp council of ways and means held in the soft evening light which bathed the sterile rocky plain and the distant mountainous land with a weird beauty, that made those who gazed around feel a sensation of wonder, that nature could spread such a mask over a scene whose aspect to the adventurers was full of the ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... he meant the sterile plains, which yield little except hay, looks rich with verdure in the mellow afternoon light, when midsummer is come, and the whole populace, men, women, and children, on Sundays and feast-days pour out of the city gates ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... batches of eggs collected, one alone hatched. The rest were probably sterile, a suspicion corroborated by the lack of pairing in the breeding-cage. Laid at the end of July, the eggs of the Twelve-spotted Mylabris began to hatch on the 5th of September. The primary larva of this Meloid is still unknown, so far as ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... about the distribution of powers. Here he repeated what he had done everywhere when in command. He established educational institutions; ordered that the rivers be examined in order to study the feasibility of changing their courses so as to furnish water to arid and sterile areas; distributed land among the Indians; suppressed the duties on mining machinery; ordered the planting of trees, and showed in a thousand ways his untiring energy, all the while keeping in active diplomatic correspondence and in constant communication with his friends and civil officers, ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... head of the Brinkley-Jones Hospital and Training School for Nurses at Milford, Kansas, has now furnished to the scientific world what are termed "ample proof cases" that by implantation of the fresh interstitial glands of the goat sterile people may bear children of either sex desired. Already the town is filling up with childless people waiting to be operated upon. Incidentally, cases of insanity are cured within thirty-six hours after a simple operation. Other ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... which the party soon stood, was not of an inviting aspect. It was sterile, naked, and very rocky, as Biarne had described it, and not a blade of grass was to be seen. There was a range of high snow-capped mountains in the interior, and all the way from the coast up to these mountains the land was covered with snow. In truth, a more forbidding ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... chapter of my Memoirs during his life. I should have suppressed it, did I feel the least drop of bitterness mingled with the recollection of the acts of petty ingratitude of this charming writer. But my object in writing this work is less to satisfy sterile revenge than to exhibit to you a corner of literary life in Paris in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... left at Calcutta. On the following morning I was travelling over a flat and apparently rising country, along an excellent road, with groves of bamboos and stunted trees on either hand, few villages or palms, a sterile soil, with stunted grass and but little cultivation; altogether a country as unlike what I had expected to find in India as well might be. All around was a dead flat or table-land, out of which a few conical ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... the lip of the flower, and gather pollen from it. 3. Diagram of one of the two stamens. f. The stalk or filament of the stamen. a1. The pollen-producing half-anther, eo. The elongated connective joining it to the sterile half-anther. 4. Section through a flower showing ov. the ovary; nec. the nectary or honey-glands; st. the style; li. the lip of the flower on which the bee alights. 5. Similar section showing the effect of the pushing back of a2 by the bee, and the downward swinging ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester |
