"Sterility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... medical advice and treatment make all the difference between a childless home and one that has the happiness of a well-rounded family. In every marriage children should be an essential feature—the most essential feature in the long run. In many countries sterility is sufficient grounds for divorce. In an ideal civilization probably no marriage would be permitted between a person who appears to be sterile and one who appears normal. The sterile would marry the sterile, and the fertile the fertile. Even in our civilization what right has anyone to doom ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... vast ranges strewn over with huge blocks of sandstone, rose in desolate grandeur around; chasms, ravines, and thirsty stony valleys yawned on every side; all was broken, rugged, and arid, as if the curse of sterility had fallen on the land; in short, the contrast was complete between this desert place and the country we had so lately traversed up the river. I was able, accordingly, to procure nothing in the shape of a fresh meal, save a few black ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... into the streets to disgusting overwork, without daring to utter the cry for help that brings, not rescue, but exposure and infamy, yet revenging herself terribly in the end by scattering blindness and sterility, pain and disfigurement, insanity and death among us with the certainty that we are much too pious and genteel to allow such things to be mentioned with a view to saving either her or ourselves from them. And all the time we shall keep enthusiastically investing her trade ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... The general sterility of Attica was the great safety of her people in their early history. "It drove them abroad; it filled them with a spirit of activity, which loved to grapple with danger and difficulty; it told them that, if they would maintain themselves in the dignity ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... a very significant fact that Chicago contained in 1903 but a handful of writers, while St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit and Kansas City had fewer yet. "What is the reason for this literary sterility?" I asked of my companions. "Why should not these powerful cities produce authors? Boston, when she had less than three hundred thousands citizens had Lowell, Longfellow, Emerson ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... beyond the influence of the tanks is neither rich nor interesting. The cultivation seemed scanty and the population thin, owing to the irremediable sterility of soil, from the poverty of the primitive rock from whose detritus it is chiefly formed. Raghunath Rao told me that the wish of the people in the castle to adopt a child as the successor to his nephew arose from the desire to escape the scrutiny into the past accounts of disbursements ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... requires, or there is no prolific faculty in it; or there is a deficiency of a due proportion of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness; or there is a resolution of the generative parts. The Stoics attribute sterility to the obliquity of the yard, by which means it is not able to ejaculate in a due manner, or to the unproportionable magnitude of the parts, the matrix being so contracted as not to have a capacity to receive. Erasistratus assigns it to the womb's being more callous or more carneous, thinner ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... was said to have been wrongfully hanged at Montgomery; and, when the rope was round his neck, he declared in proof of his innocence that grass would never grow on his grave. Curious to relate, be the cause what it may, there is yet to be seen a strip of sterility—in the form of a ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... useful to the extent that they aided the former,—to that new one in which was, and is, taught, that manufactures and commerce were the great and profitable pursuits of man, and that agriculture, because of the "constantly increasing sterility of the soil," was the least profitable of all. Hence it is that we see England to have been steadily passing on in the same direction, and devoting all her energies to the prevention of the establishment, ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... with surprise, Who scarcely would believe their ears and eyes. The friar passed for saint:—Feronde his fruit; None durst presume to doubt nor to dispute; A double miracle at once appeared The dead's return: the lady's state revered. With treble force Te Deum round was sung; Sterility in marriage oft was rung, And near the convent many offered prayers, In hopes their fervent vows would ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... seldom read a first book more pregnant with promise, or fuller of the faults which, more surely than precocious perfection, betoken talent. . . . His errors seem to be entirely errors of youth and in the right direction." "Exuberance is more easily corrected than sterility." "His dialogue reads too often like a catalogue 'raisonne' of his library." The critic finds traces of a scholarly and poetic taste, but withal a straining after novelty and "an affectation of quaintness so marked as to be often unpleasant." ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... yours, viz., that crossing must be one means of eliminating variation, and then I wished to make out how far in animals and vegetables this was possible. Papilionaceous flowers are almost dead floorers to me, and I cannot experimentise, as castration alone often produces sterility. I am surprised at what you say about Compositae and Gramineae. From what I have seen of latter they seemed to me (and I have watched wheat, owing to what L. de Longchamps has said on their fertilisation ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Numerous herds, fertile fields, abundant harvests—whatsoever should be the reward of piety—was in the hands of these idolaters. And now, when a people of saints and believers occupy these fields, all is become sterility and solitude. The earth, under these holy hands, produces only thorns and briers. Man soweth in anguish, and reapeth tears and cares. War, famine, pestilence, assail him by turns. And yet, are not these the children of the prophets? The Mussulman, Christian, Jew, are they ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... the Chinese against the opulence of the Californian soil. The "garden patch" prospered; the neighbors spoke well of it and of him. But Jackson knew that this fierce harvest of early spring was to be followed by the sterility of the dry season, and that irrigation could alone make his work profitable in the end. He brought a pump to force the water from the little stream at the foot of the slope to the top, and allowed it to flow back through parallel trenches. Again Buckeye applauded! Only the gloomy barkeeper ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... much to say. This was the trouble with them all. There was not a spark of genuine poetic fire in the Seven. They sang without an ear for music; they strewed their pages with faded artificial flowers which they mistook for Nature, and endeavored to overcome sterility of imagination and want of passion by veneering with magniloquent epithets. They padded their ill-favored Muse, belaced and beruffled her, and covered her with garments stiffened with tawdry embroidery ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... industry and endurance of William Burness to the utmost; and what with the sterility of the soil, which was the poorest in the parish, and the loss of cattle by accidents and disease, it was with great difficulty that he managed to support his family. They lived so sparingly that butcher's meat was for years ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... with each other, added to the roughness below, made the passage infinitely toilsome. Scattered over this space were single cedars with their ragged spines and wreaths of moss, and copses of dwarf oaks, which were only new emblems of sterility. ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... young and pleasure-loving, and at last her nature could no longer stand this general rejection, the absence of the simple pleasures of life. It was not their quarrels, even when they came to blows, that determined her action. It was a revolt from the radical sterility of Terry's philosophy. Katie furnished her with the necessary money, and she went away to California. There this tired creature, this civilised product of the slums, this thoughtful prostitute, this striving human being full of the desire for ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... the teeth of danger. I still felt faint. Though less than twenty-four hours since I had eaten, I hungered acutely. Was there nothing I could eat? I looked inquiringly around. It was a scene of sterility and starvation. Not a symptom of life—scarcely a sign of vegetation! Rocks, bare and forbidding, formed two parallel facades grinning at each other across the gorge—their rugged features but little relieved ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... hear; dear goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend To make this creature fruitful! Into her womb convey sterility! Dry up in her the organs of increase; And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honour her! If she must teem, Create her child of spleen; that it may live, And be a thwart disnatured torment to her! Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth; ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... corn-fields, wheat-fields, and market-gardens, a process which in New Mexico had already gone far. Even the tract inclosed by the parallels 31 and 45 degrees and the meridians 100 and 120 degrees, which long seemed destined for perpetual sterility, spite of the many enterprises conceived, and the others, like the scheme of the Colorado River Irrigation Company, initiated for redeeming it, grew valuable when it was believed that the National Government would undertake ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... life, the revolution in the woman's world, the woman in the modern American family, the career of the child, the passing of patriarchism and familiarism, the precarious hour, the trend as to marriage, race sterility and race suicide, divorce, the attitude of the church, the family, and the social revolution. The author finds that during the past half century the American family possesses unity, due to the fact that the period itself ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... remembered that his theory is, that slight variations occurring in an individual advantageous to it (not to its associates), in the struggle for life, is perpetuated by inheritance, it is no wonder that the case of sterile ants gave him so much trouble. Accidental sterility is not favorable to the individual, and its being made permanent by inheritance, is out of the question, for the sterile have no descendants. Yet these sterile females are not degenerations, they are in general larger and ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... up the argument. Divorce cases are rare because they are almost exclusively based upon incompatibility of temper or persistent sterility. ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... corner of Orleans and Dauphine streets, in the city of New Orleans, there is a tree which nobody looks at without curiosity and without wondering how it came there. For a long time it was the only one of its kind known in the state, and from its isolated position it has always been cursed with sterility. It reminds one of the warm climes of Africa or Asia, and wears the aspect of a stranger of distinction driven from his native country. Indeed with its sharp and thin foliage, sighing mournfully under the blast of one of our November ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... to exertion, and renders it unnecessary. Vegetable diet is more suited to them than animal, which favours a denser population. Talent is elicited by the efforts required to overcome difficulties and hardships; and their natural birth-place is a country of frost and snow—of tempests—of sterility enough to give a spur to exertion, but not enough to extinguish hope. Where these difficulties exist, and give occasion to war and emulation, the powers of the human ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... object of great consequence to the Lacedaemonians, who fortified, at great expence, and with much labour and skill, its two harbours, Cythera and Scandea. The convenience of these harbours to the Lacedaemonians compensated for the sterility of the island, which was so great that when the Athenians conquered it, they could raise from it only four Attic talents annually. The chief employment and source of wealth to the inhabitants consisted in collecting a species ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... hills,—being directly the reverse of what has happened in every country of the world, in every county in England, and on every farm in each and all of those counties.[138] Had he not been misled by the idea of "the constantly increasing sterility of the soil," Mr. McCulloch could not have failed to see that the only advantage resulting from the use of the steam-engine, or the loom, or any other machine in use for the conversion of the products of the earth, was, that it diminished the quantity of labour required ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... unceasingly from place to place, person to person, thing to thing. I travel unceasingly from motive to motive, mind to mind; my native air is also desert air—hence the sterility of my work." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... from democracy, its achievements have been limited and partially sterilized. It can also be stated that the separation of the democratic idea from the national principle and organization has issued not merely in sterility, but in moral and political mischief. All this must remain mere assertion for the present; but I shall hope gradually to justify these assertions by an examination of the subsequent course of ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... while it fills us with that supreme sense of countless unseen possibilities, and of the hidden, undefined movements of shadow and light over the spirit, without which the soul of man falls into hard and desolate sterility. In youth, perhaps, it is the latter aspect of Mr. Carlyle's teaching which first touches people, because youth is the time of indefinite aspiration; and it is easier, besides, to surrender ourselves ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... serious than a common cold, yet it is able to inflict much prolonged misery on its victims, while on the race its influence in the long run is even more deadly than that of syphilis, for gonorrhoea is the chief cause of sterility in women, that is to say, in from 30 to 50 per cent. of such cases, while of cases of sterility in men (which form a quarter to a third of the whole) gonorrhoea is the cause in from 70 to 90 per cent. The inflammation of the eyes of the new-born leading to blindness ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... startled him and that he would have clutched his newly-acquired gold and garnered it to himself, fearful lest another stroke of ill-fortune should fall upon him. But instead of making him a coward it gave him courage. It did not warp his mind or steel his heart against humanity. No sterility settled upon him. His wrongs seemed to have fertilized his generosity, and ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... a quack. I speak French, gentlemen; I speak nine languages, and can tell you the Hebrew for an old umbrella. The Gypsy's Elixir cures colds, gout, all nervous affections, with such cutaneous disorders as are diseases of the skin, debility, sterility, hostility, and all the illities that flesh is heir to except what it can't, such as small-pox and cholera. It has cured cholera, but it don't claim to do it. Others claim to cure, but can't. I am not a charlatan, but an Ann-Eliza. That is the difference between me and ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... years ago the whole region watered by the Platte was regarded as a veritable desert, never to be brought under the domain of agriculture, but forever doomed to a hopeless sterility. Its inhabitants were a wild, merciless horde of savages, whose only aim was murder, and an unceasing warfare against any encroachment upon their domain ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... The sterility of the hills here is much relieved by the bunches of beautiful large yellow flowers of the Cochlospermum Gossypium, interspersed with the large balls of white cotton, just bursting from the seed-vessels. ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... diversified supply, Mr. Back and Mr. Hood took views and sketches of the surrounding scenery, which is extremely picturesque in many parts, and wants only the addition of trees to make it beautiful. The hills present the bold character of rugged sterility, whilst the valleys, at this season, ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... of popular etymology, in deriving the name, 'the valley of blessing,' from that morning's worship. Perhaps the name was older than that, and was given from a feeling of the contrast between the waste wilderness, which in its gaunt sterility seemed an accursed land, and the glen which with its trees and stream was indeed a 'valley of blessing.' If so, the name would be doubly appropriate after that day's experience. Be that as it may, here we have in vivid form the truth that all our struggles ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... occupy a still wider territory, extending on the south into Cinaloa, on the east in to the Province of Taraumara. The Upper Pima are found far to the north living by the Sobahipuris to its outlet, and on both banks of the Gila to the Tomosatzi, in vales of luxuriant beauty, and in wastes of sand and sterility between those rivers and the sea,—having still other tribes beyond them using the same language in different dialects. The Lower Pima are in the west of the Province, having many towns extending to the frontier of the indomitable ...
— Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language - Shea's Library Of American Linguistics. Volume III. • Buckingham Smith
... the fire is believed to promote the growth of the crops and the welfare of man and beast, either positively by stimulating them, or negatively by averting the dangers and calamities which threaten them from such causes as thunder and lightning, conflagration, blight, mildew, vermin, sterility, disease, and not least ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... among themselves, and assumed that they could operate without the intervention of the occult original. But Nature would not be mocked; and whenever this race of idolaters have worked without her agency, she has afflicted them with the most stubborn sterility. ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... had not only to subdue the wild beasts and teach the earth to bring forth wholesome food in place of useless plants, but also to battle with wintry climates, and overcome the adverse influences of cold, sterility of soil, and other hostile conditions ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... went on to maintain that if vigour was due to memory, want of vigour was due to want of memory. Thus I was led to connect memory with the phenomena of hybridism and of old age; to show that the sterility of certain animals under domestication is only a phase of, and of a piece with, the very common sterility of hybrids—phenomena which at first sight have no connection either with each other or with memory, but the connection between which will never be lost sight of by those who have once laid hold ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... patterns life fits each of us as we grow up. Not one in ten thousand glances into human faces is arrested because it has lit upon a personality that cannot be immediately located, measured, accounted for. The reason for this sterility of variety which soon makes the world rather monotonous to the seeing eye is that few of us are born with any considerable amount of personality, and what little we have is speedily suppressed by a system of training which is throughout based ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... remarkable fact to germinate in the great naturalist's mind. It bore full fruit at a later date. An important theory then current, that large animals require a luxuriant vegetation, was overthrown at the same time, for there was every reason to believe that the sterility of the surrounding country was no new thing. The South American ostrich and many other animals here afforded ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... to put the men on fixed rations, that they might not experience too great privations before the spring, when they might reach a country where there was more game. But the Spaniards, discontented at the sterility of the place, and at the length and rigour of the winter, began to murmur. This land seemed to stretch southwards as far as the Antarctic pole, they said; there did not seem to be any strait; already ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... and a half. This head was so named by captain Cook, from the great number of Indians assembled there in 1770. Mr. Westall's sketch of it (Atlas, Plate XVIII, View 4.), taken as we steered close along the shore for Sandy Cape, will show that the same sterility prevailed here as in the southern part of the peninsula; and it ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... Excise. To add to his income he, in 1788, leased a farm on the river Nith, about twelve miles from Dumfries. The place contained one hundred acres, and was stated to be "more the choice of a poet than of a farmer." Its fine situation and beautiful views compensated, perhaps, in Burns's mind, for its sterility. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Indeed most of the houses we saw on the road indicated poverty, or rather that the people could just live. Towards the frontiers they grew worse and worse in their appearance, as if not willing to put sterility itself out of countenance. No gardens smiled round the habitations, not a potato or cabbage to eat with the fish drying on a stick near the door. A little grain here and there appeared, the long stalks of which you might almost reckon. The day ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... to the inheritance we leave our children, no one could experience more fully than Napoleon, for no one had yet possessed so formidable a power on the earth; that the course of nature having made her sterility a hopeless evil, it was her duty to be the first to sacrifice the sentiments of her heart to the good of the state, and the personal happiness of Napoleon sad but powerful reasoning, which policy invoked in aid of the divorce, and of which this excellent princess ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... was it with the dullness and sterility that prevailed in the intellectual world. The master-class did not want ideas—it only wanted to be let alone; and so it put in the seats of authority men who were blind to the blazing beacon-fires of the future. It would be no exaggeration to say that the intellectual and cultural ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... family quarrels; or a couple may terminate their state of wedlock by mutual consent on payment of a moderate fine to the chief. Such separation by mutual consent is occasioned not infrequently by the sterility of the marriage, especially if the couple fails to obtain a child for adoption; the parties hope to procure offspring by taking new partners; for the desire for children and pride and joy in the possession of them are strongly felt by all. The husband of a sterile wife may leave ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... remarks I have asked myself the cause of the sterility of the learned bodies, and I do not hesitate to say to-day, that it is because scientists refuse to declare themselves fools, and it is to this lack of sincerity that they doubtless owe the ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... discovered this, she wept and lamented. After that the bestowal of immortality was impossible. Demeter left the house. Keleus then built a temple. The grief of Demeter for Persephone was limitless. She spread sterility over the earth. The gods had to appease her, to prevent a great catastrophe. Then Zeus induced Hades (Pluto) to release Persephone into the upper world, but before letting her go, he gave her a pomegranate to ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... the original sketches of the above cuts. They represent three of the spots that stud the Southern Pacific Ocean. The first beams with lovely luxuriance in its wood-crowned heights; while the second and third rise from the bosom of the sea in frowning sterility amidst the gay ripple that ever and anon laves their sides, and plashes in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various
... content of this art to its external manifestation, we shall find similar reasons for its failure to delight or satisfy. The ambition of the Caracci was to combine in one the salient qualities of earlier masters. This ambition doomed their style to the sterility of hybrids. Moreover, in selecting, they omitted just those features which had given grace and character to their models. The substitution of generic types for portraiture, the avoidance of individuality, the contempt for what is simple and natural in details, deprived ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... sterility of hybrids, that can no longer be insisted upon as absolutely true, nor be practically used as a test between species and varieties, unless we allow that hares and rabbits are of one species. That such sterility, whether total or partial, subserves a purpose in keeping species apart, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... persons, a company of developed men, and it is difficult, very difficult to find them. In this country sterility reigns throughout the whole region of gray matter in the brain—it is sterility in the great gray ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... ancient Persians. All the old authorities, especially Herodotus, testify to the comparative purity of their lives, to their love of truth, to their heroism in war, to the simplicity of their habits, to their industry and thrift in battling sterility of soil and the elements of Nature, to their love of agricultural pursuits, to kindness towards women and slaves, and above all other things to a strong personality of character which implied a powerful will. The early Persians chose the bravest ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... don't know whether you've ever noticed how lonesome one feels on these Carnival days amidst the throngs of people. This solitude in the crowd is far more intense than solitude in a forest. It brought to my mind the thousand absurdities one commits; the sterility of my own life. 'I'm going to waste my life in some grubbing profession,' I said to myself. 'I'll wind up by becoming a teacher, a sort of English instructress. No; never that. I must seek an opportunity and the means to emancipate ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... Nile: it was four hundred and fifty miles in circumference and three hundred and fifty feet deep, with subterranean channels, flood-gates, locks, and dams, by which the wilderness was redeemed from sterility. Look at the magnificent mason-work of this ancient people! Mr. Kenrick, speaking of the casing of the Great Pyramid, says, "The joints are scarcely perceptible, and not wider than the thickness of silver-paper, and the cement so tenacious that fragments of the casing-stones still remain ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... exploring the Harle, or gap between Wangeroog and Spiekeroog; the sea breaking heavily on the banks outside ... Fine as the day was, the scene from the offing was desolate to the last degree. The naked spots of the two islands are hideous in their sterility: melancholy bits of wreck-wood their only relief, save for one or two grotesque beacons, and, most bizarre of all, a great church-tower, standing actually in the water, on the north side of Wangeroog, a striking witness to ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... back!' I used to see him looking at me askance with a peculiarly keen expression in his eyes, and as his words had been repeated to me I knew of what he was thinking. He was the first man of his condition who to my knowledge called rocks beautiful. The peasant class abhor rocks on account of their sterility, and because the rustic idea of a beautiful landscape is the fertile and level plain. In searching for the picturesque and the grandeur of nature, it is perfectly safe to go to those places which the peasant declares to be frightful by ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... the pistil to occupy a central position. Naturally, a fifth stamen would be only in its way, an encumbrance to be banished in time. In the figwort, for example, we have seen the fifth stamen reduced, from long sterility, to a mere scale on the roof of the corolla tube; in other lipped flowers, the useless organ has disappeared; but in the beard-tongue, it goes through a series of curious curves from the upper to the under side of the flower to get ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... theft of the Sampo, Louhi sent nine diseases upon Wainamoinen's people,—colic, pleurisy, fever, ulcer, plague, consumption, gout, sterility, and cancer, the offspring of the fell Lowyatar; but by the use of vapor baths and balsams Wainamoinen healed his people. Then Louhi sent Otso the Bear, the honey-eater, but he was slain by the hero, who ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... indubitable as the magical tricks which Mr. Burbank has played with flowers and fruits. But the smiling Dame Nature sets her inexorable limits to "Burbanking"; she allows it to go about so far, and no farther. Freakish free verse, like freakish plants and animals, gets punished by sterility. Some of the "imagist" verse patterns are uniquely and intricately beautiful. Wrought in a medium which is neither wholly verse nor wholly prose, but which borrows some of the beauty peculiar to each art, they are their own excuse for being. And nevertheless they may not prove fertile. ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... special character of the poetry of the Empire lies in its combination of the tradition derived from the eighteenth century, with a certain reaching-forth to an ideal, by-and-by to be realised, which it could not attain. Its comparative sterility is not to be explained solely or chiefly by the vigilance of the imperial censure of publications. The preceding century had lost the large feeling for composition, for beauty and severity of form; attention was fixed upon details. If invention ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... of the Physiocrates, only transfers already existing wealth from one hand to another. What the merchants gain by it is at the cost of the nation. Hence, it is desirable that this loss should be as small as possible. Hence sterility!(316) But, the more important branches of business, especially wholesale trade, are connected with a transportation of goods (Verri), either from one place or from one period of time, into another. Here the genuine merchant ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... make a Scotch dukedom or a German principality,—belonging to the San Spirito, does little more, I was told, than pay its working. The land labours under an eternal entail, which binds it over to perpetual sterility. It is God's, i.e. it is the Church's; and no one,—no, not even the Pope,—dare alienate a single acre of it. No Pope would set his face to such a piece of reformation, well knowing that every brotherhood and sisterhood in Rome would rise in arms against him. And even though he should ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... relations, normal or abnormal; and in society at large to do nothing about the ancient evil of prostitution, to provide neither isolation nor treatment for the worst of contagious diseases, and to regard the blindness, feeble-mindedness, sterility, paralysis, and insanity which result from those diseases as afflictions which could not be prevented. The progress of medicine within twenty years, both preventive and curative, has greatly changed ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... no vegetation upon them, and are just as uninviting in appearance as the light-brown hills which fringe the coast of Arabia, as seen by voyagers on the Red Sea. Further up the hill, in the central folds of the range, this great sterility changes for a warm rich clothing of bush-jungle and a little grass. Gum-trees, myrrh, and some varieties of the frankincense are found in great profusion, as well as a variety of the aloe plant, from which the Somali manufacture good strong cordage. The upper part ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... state, who claim that the functions of the state are to meddle with the business of every man, matters little. It is the same socialistic philosophy at bottom, and it has produced to-day a France of thirty-eight millions of people pledged to sterility, one million of whom are state officials superintending the affairs of the others at a cost, in salaries alone, of upward of five ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... although the desert is real desert, it does not give, to me, at any rate, the immense impression of naked sterility, of almost brassy, sun-baked fierceness, which often strikes one in the Sahara to the south of Algeria, where at midday one sometimes has a feeling of being lost upon a waste of metal, gleaming, angry, tigerish in color. ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... goods to sell. People accuse such a man of self-advertisement. But at least the cheap-jack does advertise his wares, whereas the don or dear-jack advertises nothing except himself. His very silence, nay his very sterility, are supposed to be marks of the richness of his erudition. He is too learned to teach, and sometimes too wise even to talk. St. Thomas Aquinas said: "In auctore auctoritas." But there is more than one man at Oxford or Cambridge who is considered an authority because ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... which look at sensible objects only for immediate pleasure, afford matter of the most instructive speculation to the philosopher, who studies the wisdom of nature through the medium of things. As, on the one hand, the summit of the mountain may be supposed the point of absolute sterility, so, on the other, the sandy desert, moved by nothing but the parching winds of continents distant from the sources of abundant rains, finishes the scale of natural fertility, which thus diminishes in the two opposite extremes of hot and dry, of cold and wet; thus ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... seeming to hate equally too wide a deviation from ordinary practice and none at all. This fact reappears in heredity as the beneficial effects of occasional crossing on the one hand, and on the other, in the generally observed sterility of hybrids. If heredity be an affair of memory, how can an embryo, say of a mule, be expected to build up a mule on the strength of but two mule-memories? Hybridism causes a fault in the chain of memory, and it is to this cause ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... it too had served its turn. For as every man's life (and perhaps, but you must answer for this, every woman's life), awaits the hour of blossoming that makes it immortal, so this tree passed in a single night from sterility to immortality; and it mattered as little if its body were burned the next day, as it would have mattered had Gerard and Thea gone down through the waters that night instead of many years later, after a life-time of great joy ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... by that extraordinary law of compensation which seems to be the most general law of the universe, the effects differed as much in quantity and time as in character—a remarkable efflorescence of literature in Germany being at once produced, to relapse shortly into a long sterility, a tardier but more constant growth following in England and Italy, while the effect in Spain was the most partial and obscure of all. The great names of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide hardly meet with any others in these ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... for unless there be considerable attention paid to other parts of the land, besides those appropriated to the raising of tobacco, the manure will no longer be found on the plantation, and general exhaustion and sterility ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... 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 verses he reveals the nature of his altruism. How far it differs from that of Christianity ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... their hearts, in the strength of no unnatural vanity, the reward which their labours are certain hereafter to obtain. To those who can anticipate the vast dominions of immortality among men, what boots the sterility of the cabined and petty present? But the mere man of languages and learning—the machine of a memory heavily but unprofitably employed—the Columbus wasting at the galley oar the energies which should have discovered a world—for him there is no ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... best worth living; then evil days for the commonwealth are at hand. There are regions in our land, and classes of our population, where the birth rate has sunk below the death rate. Surely it should need no demonstration to show that wilful sterility is, from the standpoint of the nation, from the standpoint of the human race, the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death; a sin for which there is no atonement; a sin which is the more dreadful exactly in proportion as the men and women guilty ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... dry ground, who had no form nor comeliness; and when they should see him, there was no beauty that they should desire him.' Meagre were his looks; sharp misery had worn him to the bone. His crown of thorns indicated the sterility of the territories over which he reigned. The reed in his hand, gathered from the banks of the Nile, indicated that it was only the mighty river, by keeping within its banks, and thus withholding its wonted munificence, that placed an unreal sceptre in his gripe. He was nailed ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... animals live. It had not now rained for an entire year. When the island was discovered, the immediate neighbourhood of Porto Praya was clothed with trees, [1] the reckless destruction of which has caused here, as at St. Helena, and at some of the Canary islands, almost entire sterility. The broad, flat-bottomed valleys, many of which serve during a few days only in the season as water-courses, are clothed with thickets of leafless bushes. Few living creatures inhabit these valleys. The ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... next year. There are no fresh personal incidents, peculiar to one particular daemon. If the drama rose from the Spring Song only, beautiful it might be, but with a beauty that was monotonous, a beauty doomed to sterility. ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... efficiency eliminated itself. War had finally progressed to the point where even a minor nation, such as Cuba or Portugal, could completely destroy the whole planet. Eliminated wasn't quite the word. In spite of their sterility, the military machines still claimed their million masses of men, still drained a third of the ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... unconscious effort made by a limited class to achieve per saltum what was slowly and laboriously wrought out by whole nations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Too precocious, too complete within too narrow limits, it was doomed to sterility. Not the least singular fact about it is that though the Carmina Vagorum continued to be appreciated, they were neither imitated nor developed to any definite extent after the period which I have indicated. ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... They are reliable when they state observed facts, such as the following: It is now established in medical science that (1) gonorrheal infection results in tens of thousands of cases in complications, such as heart disease, gonorrheal rheumatism, sterility of both men and women, blindness of infants, inflammatory diseases of female reproductive organs, and other well-marked sequelae of the disease; and (2) that syphilis is responsible for a large majority of cases of locomotor ataxia, ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... these descendants have married and inter-married with Indian, Negro and White with no serious detriment except the introduction of tuberculosis into one branch of the family by an infusion of white blood. It is interesting to note that crime, drunkenness, pauperism or sterility has not resulted from these two hundred years of miscegenation. Thrift and intelligence, longevity and fertility have been evident. In every war except the Mexican, the community has been represented; one member of the group became a bishop in the A.M.E. Church; one, chaplain in the United ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... Athena, no! thy plunderer was a Scot. Ask'st thou the difference? From fair Phyles' towers Survey Boeotia;—Caledonia's ours. 130 And well I know within that bastard land [10] Hath Wisdom's goddess never held command; A barren soil, where Nature's germs, confined To stern sterility, can stint the mind; Whose thistle well betrays the niggard earth, Emblem of all to whom the Land gives birth; Each genial influence nurtured to resist; A land of meanness, sophistry, and mist. [xv] Each breeze from foggy mount and marshy plain Dilutes with drivel every drizzly ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... table which, although foreign to this subject, has a certain bearing on the matter. Matthews Duncan, believing that the absence of sexual desire and of sexual pleasure in coitus are powerful influences working for sterility, noted their presence or absence in a number of cases, and found that, among 191 sterile women between the ages of 15 and 45, 152, or 79 per cent., acknowledged the presence of sexual desire; and among 196 sterile women (mostly the same cases), 134, or 68 per cent., acknowledged the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... better relation to him for the purpose. He encouraged, beguiled, excited him, manifested an unfathomable credulity, and his only interruptions were when the Colonel did not respond to it. He had his intermissions, his hours of sterility, and then Lyon felt that the picture also languished. The higher his companion soared, the more gyrations he executed, in the blue, the better he painted; he couldn't make his flights long enough. He lashed ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... world-worn, the over-subtle, the corrupted, while it ignores all normal healthy life, virtuous habits, pure affections, steady labor, honesty, and duty. It is an affectation, and because it is an affectation the school is struck with sterility. The reader desires in the poem something better than a juggler in rhyme, or a conjurer in verse; he looks 'to find in him a painter of life, a being who thinks, loves, and has a conscience, who ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... big pile of manuscript before me certain things become clearer to me, and particularly the immense inconsequences of my experiences. It is, I see now that I have it all before me, a story of activity and urgency and sterility. I have called it Tono-Bungay, but I had far better have called it Waste. I have told of childless Marion, of my childless aunt, of Beatrice wasted and wasteful and futile. What hope is there for a people whose women ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... is known to Bavarian and Austrian peasants, who think that if you give the first fruit of a tree to a woman with child to eat, the tree will bring forth abundantly next year. On the other hand, the Baganda believe that a barren wife infects her husband's garden with her own sterility and prevents the trees from bearing fruit; hence a childless woman is generally divorced. The Greeks and Romans sacrificed pregnant victims to the goddesses of the corn and of the earth, doubtless in order that the earth might teem and ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... drive through the outskirts of Benares before you get to the hotel. And all the aspects are melancholy. It is a vision of dusty sterility, decaying temples, crumbling tombs, broken mud walls, shabby huts. The whole region seems to ache with age and penury. It must take ten thousand years of want to produce such an aspect. We were still outside of the great native city ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... excellence of poetry and of prose fiction in the time itself, a great deal could be said on both sides. But if one took the larger historic view, it would certainly have to be admitted that, while the excellence of French poetry was a magnificent Renaissance after a long period of something like sterility, the excellence of the novel was something more—an achievement of things never yet achieved; an acquisition and settlement of territory which had never previously ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... elevation, as also most of the inland ones. They seemed to be composed of naked rocks, whose summits were capt with snow. Nor did the valleys appear to greater advantage. To whatever quarter we directed our glasses, nothing but sterility was to be seen. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... in love with Poppaea, and resolved to put away Octavia. At Poppaea's instigation she was accused of a base intrigue. The plot failed; the false charge could not be pressed home; she was divorced on the ground of sterility, and imprisoned in a town of Campania. A rumour arose that she was to be reinstated; the mob of Rome declared itself in her favour and gave wild expression to its joy. Poppaea's statues were cast down, Octavia's replaced. Poppaea was furious. She ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... dream of wealth as the year declined. He had reared no crop for the supply of his household during the sterility of winter. The season was long and severe, and for the first time the family was really straitened in its comforts. By degrees a revulsion of thought took place in Wolfert's mind, common to those whose golden dreams have been disturbed by pinching ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... scoria of burnt bricks than any thing else, is all that ultimately remains of the immense body which time or accident had prostrated. Thus it would appear, that it is not less to the character of its woods than to the ravages of fire that New South Wales owes its general sterility. ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... novel, has been felt to be peculiarly dependent upon the fashion of life in Britain. Blankenburg, another eighteenth-century student of German literary conditions, in his treatise on the novel[7], has similar theories concerning the sterility of German life as compared with English, especially in the production of humorous characters[8]. He asserts theoretically that humor (Laune) should never be employed in a novel of German life, because "Germany's political institutions and laws, and our nice ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... conceit must not go so far as to suppose that it was that appreciation which commended him to his own countrymen. At the time when Sydney Smith wrote the article from which we have quoted there was apparently an almost literary sterility in this country, and the professional critics of the critical journals were, as Professor Lounsbury says in his admirable Life of Cooper, undoubtedly greatly affected by English opinion. But there was an American reading public independent of the few literary periodicals, as was ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... whaling-station on the Three Kings Islands, and there they became infected and carried the disease to the mainland. Venereal disease is not common now among the Maoris, but it made great ravages in the early days of colonization, to which may be attributed much of the sterility and repeated miscarriages in the transitional ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... descendants of the self-fertilised plant named Hero.—Summary on the growth, vigour, and fertility of the successive crossed and self-fertilised generations.—Small amount of pollen in the anthers of the self-fertilised plants of the later generations, and the sterility of their first-produced flowers.—Uniform colour of the flowers produced by the self-fertilised plants.—The advantage from a cross between two distinct plants depends on their differing ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... discussed with all the importance of a national treaty. When the call had been accepted, the stipend was generally fixed at one hundred pounds, and a rude parsonage opened its doors of welcome. To this was almost invariably attached a farm, whose native sterility called for such expenditure of toil that it might ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... always follow intercourse of the male and female. Impotency in the male and sterility in the female ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... however, before we go any further, that, notwithstanding the sterility of this part of the coast; it is not without importance, on account of the rich produce of the sea which bathes it. The agriculture of the waters as a celebrated naturalist has said, offers too many advantages, for the places that are ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... commercial schemes, he had not been mistaken in foreseeing material for journalism, even for a book. Yes, he should certainly write a book on the Bahamas, if only to expose the monstrous system of misgovernment which accounted for the sterility into which these islands had fallen. The climate, in winter at all events, was superb. Sutherland and he lay about in delicious sunshine, under a marvellous sky, smoking excellent cigars, and talking over old Oxford days. He ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... she might be destined. Her solitary position, also, separated from all her kindred except her little sister, a mere effigy of royalty in the hands of statesmen, and surrounded by the formalities and ceremonials of state, which spread sterility around the occupant ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... cause of all good to mortal men, that reconciles all creatures, and glues them together in perpetual amity and firm league; and can no more abide bitterness, hate, malice, than fair and foul weather, light and darkness, sterility and plenty may be together; as the sun in the firmament (I say), so is love in the world; and for this cause 'tis love without an addition, love [Greek: kat' exochaen], love of God, and love of men. [4603]"The love of God begets the love of man; and by this love of our neighbour, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... human race give birth to children from puberty to sterility. She may give birth a dozen times, but nature finally calls a halt, and the whole system of life sustaining nerves of the womb which are in the fascia, with blood in great abundance to supply foetal life, ceases to go farther with the processes of building beings. Vitality for that purpose ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... learn and repeat and to which it has no other relation, are quite right in condemning that conception, only that is not, in fact, what the Christian Religion is. The content of the Christian dogmas is so full and so complex that there is never any danger of intellectual sterility in those who are called to deal with them; and their application to life is so rich and so manifold that there is not the least danger that those who set out to apply them to the problems of daily existence will become mere ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... scarred trail, rutted through its clay surface by the hauling of lumber. It was metaled and smooth. There were many changes in the character of things hereabouts—all changes which attested that the curse of decay and hopeless sterility had been lifted. Off through a rift in the hills loomed the white concrete abutment of an aqueduct—and through the valley wound a railroad. A man might have walked many miles and come upon few deserted habitations, preyed ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... sun are much more fitted to be types and characters of the Infinite. And thirdly (which is the main reason), the exuberant and riotous prodigality of life naturally forces the mind more powerfully upon the antagonist thought of death, and the wintry sterility of the grave. For it may be observed generally, that wherever two thoughts stand related to each other by a law of antagonism, and exist, as it were, by mutual repulsion, they are apt to suggest each other. On these ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... these, not merely from their isolation, but from the sterility of the soil and the inhospitable air of the region, the struggle for existence is often a severe one. Perseverance and self-denial, however, triumphed over all difficulties. Year after year the trees bowed themselves before the axe, and the soil surrendered ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... and Presbyterian missions and the traders; each worked against the others, offering the natives the best of opportunities to fish in troubled waters. The result of all this was a rapid decrease of the population and frequent artificial sterility. The primitive population has disappeared completely in some places, and is only to be found in any numbers far inland among the western mountains. The situation is a little better in the north, where we find a number of flourishing villages along ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... Sterility may be in the male or in the female. If due to the stallion, then all the mares put to him remain barren; if the fault is in the mare, she alone fails to conceive, while other mares served by the same stallion get ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... progress without a sincere and single eye to the truth. The fatal sterility of the middle ages, and of our first and second University periods, had to do with the mistake of gagging men's mouths, and dictating all their conclusions. Things came to be so arranged that contradictory ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... precipitation. Hippolita, his wife, an amiable lady, did sometimes venture to represent the danger of marrying their only son so early, considering his great youth, and greater infirmities; but she never received any other answer than reflections on her own sterility, who had given him but one heir. His tenants and subjects were less cautious in their discourses. They attributed this hasty wedding to the Prince's dread of seeing accomplished an ancient prophecy, which was said to have pronounced that the castle ...
— The Castle of Otranto • Horace Walpole
... the commandership. Colmenares, whom I have mentioned above, was commanded to search along those coasts where it was thought Nicuesa wandered abandoned. It was known that the latter had left Veragua, because of the sterility of the soil. The colonists instructed Colmenares to bring Nicuesa back as soon as he could find him and to assure him they would be grateful to him if, on his arrival, he succeeded in calming the dissensions which rent the colony. Colmenares accepted this mission, for he was a personal ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... cultivation of the soil; and the soil had to be created. There were sand-banks, interspersed with layers of peat, broad downs swept by the winds, great tracts of barren land apparently condemned to an external sterility. The first elements of manufacture, iron and coal, were wanting; there was no wood, because the forests had already been destroyed by tempests when agriculture began; there was no stone, there ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... front of the body over the womb. It is also assisted by the wearing of the tight cane belt already mentioned. I could not hear of any system of using drugs or herbs to procure abortion; but herbs are used to produce general sterility, which they are believed to be ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... population, to a state of veritable political helotry. And just as their evolution has been on very different lines, so must be their future fate. In Bohemia all is activity and political progress, in Hungary the sterility of a corrupt and reactionary system, staking the future upon the hollow credit of a long-vanished past. The Czechs are beyond all question the most progressive, the most highly civilised, the most democratic of all Slavonic nations. The stubborn spirit of John Hus is ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... was danger, but the course was clear towards obtaining from the greater assembly what he would have extracted from the less if he had held office in 1787. That is the secret of Necker's unforeseen weakness in the midst of so much power, and of his sterility when the crisis broke and it was discovered that the force which had been calculated equal to the carrying of a modest and obvious reform was as the rush of Niagara, and that France was in ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... accustomed as he was by his constant intercourse with Liszt and Chopin during his stay of several years in Paris to the rich passage work of the new school, appeared to him old-fashioned. Mendelssohn, who in his letters repeatedly alludes to his sterility in the matter of new pianoforte passages, allowed himself to be persuaded by Hiller to rewrite the pianoforte part, and was pleased with the result. It is clear from the above that if Mendelssohn failed to give Chopin his due, Chopin did more ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the sex factors are concerned there is a difference between the ovules and pollen grains borne by the same plant. Unfortunately further investigation of this case is rendered impossible owing to the complete sterility of the F1 ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... the supposed multiple origin of the cabbage throws no light on the characteristic differences between the cultivated forms. If our cabbages are the descendants of three or four distinct species, every trace of any sterility which may originally have existed between them is now lost, for none of the varieties can be kept distinct without scrupulous care to ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... bloom, goes on to produce fine looking average-sized nuts practically all of which are without seed or kernels. Such therefore is the importance of knowing the correct pollinators for each variety of nut tree. In the self-sterility of filberts the failure of self-pollination results in an absence of nuts or in very few rather than a full crop of seedless fruits such as the common chestnut and the Weschcke black walnuts produces. This is the only black walnut that has come to the ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... triumphing more and more over the many worlds, the big oneness swallowing up the many small diversities in its insatiable gnawing appetite, leaving a dreary sameness throughout the world, that means at last complete sterility. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... why a continuous expanse of verdure is not seen. The truth is, Southern California, with a few exceptions, is cultivated only where man has brought to it vivifying water. When that appears, life springs up from sterility, as water gushed forth from the rock in the Arabian desert when the great leader of the Israelites smote it in obedience to Divine command. Hence, there is always present here the fascination of the unattained, which yet is readily attainable, patiently waiting for the master-hand ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... of man. Savage governments, savage nations, and savage indolence, have left those countries almost in a state of nature; yet it is within the tropics that the true productiveness of the earth is alone to be looked for. Our long winters, our mountains, and the comparative sterility of Europe, prohibit that richness of produce which only waits the hand of man in the South, and it is only when the industry of the European shall be suffered to throw its strength into the Asiatic soil, that man will ever be able to discover ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... sheltered cove under the shadow of uplands on which a quaint village perched and dispersed itself on a country road in summer cottages; above these in turn rose loftier heights of barren sand or rock, with here and there a rank of sickly pines dying along their sterility. It had been harsh and cold all day when the boat moved, for it was running full in the face of the northeast; the river had widened almost to a sea, growing more and more desolate, with a few lonely islands breaking its expanse, and the shores ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... knife, and when the moon was six days old gathered by the priest, who was clothed with white for the occasion, and the plant received on a white napkin, and two white bulls sacrificed. Thus consecrated, Misselto was held to be an antidote to poison, and prevented sterility. Query, Has not the custom of hanging up Misselto at merry-makings, and the ceremony so well known among our belles, some ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... for ten years. Balzac, the first writer in French prose who gave majesty and harmony to a period, did not grudge to expend a week on a page, never satisfied with his first thoughts. Our "costive" Gray entertained the same notion: and it is hard to say if it arose from the sterility of their genius, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... phenomenon is so striking here that it is called New Englandism. Why are there so few large families outside the Irish and Canadian elements? Why are there seen so few children in the fashionable districts of our large cities? Why this blast of sterility with which the land is cursed? Look behind the phenomenon, and you will find the cause; and the finding will make you shudder. And if only those shudder who are free from stain, the shuddering will be scarcely audible. Onan ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... merry, bad song, which the rocks echoed back, and all the goitred women at the roadside stopped with their pack burdens to listen. He told a thousand anecdotes. He knew all the story of the pass; how the Swiss, filing through it, had scattered the Milanese; how Suwarrow and Massena had made its sterility fertile with blood. ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... a German municipal theatre as my model, and he said that the municipal theatres all over Europe gave fine performances of old classics but did not create (he disliked modern drama for its sterility of speech, and perhaps ignored it) and that we would create nothing if we did not give all our thoughts to Ireland. Yet in Ireland he loved only what was wild in its people, and in 'the grey and wintry sides of many glens.' All the rest, all that one reasoned over, fought for, ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... accordingly reigned paramount among those inamoratas who were turned of thirty, without being under the necessity of proceeding by tedious addresses, and was thought to have co-operated with the waters in removing the sterility of certain ladies, who had long undergone the reproach and disgust of their husbands; while Peregrine set up his throne among those who laboured under the disease of celibacy, from the pert miss of fifteen, who, with a fluttering heart, tosses her head, bridles up, and giggles involuntarily ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... expectantly, rolling her eyes, then in full loathing of menkind went back to the kitchen and vowed herself to sterility. ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... imposing martial appearance. Though it is but a detachment of not over fifty men—a single troop—riding by twos, the files stretch afar in shining array, its sheen all the more brilliant from contrast with the sombre sterility of the desert. ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... embarrassed by the existence of bounties which economically they cannot approve but which politically they dare not remove. But surely we shall have learned our lesson badly if the old strife of Tory and Liberal is to be revived in all its former virulence and sterility. Besides there is the Labour Party to be considered, as Mr. GEORGE ROBERTS reminded the House in the best speech he has made since he went on the Treasury Bench. He pointed out that if high wages and good conditions were to be secured for agricultural workers the prosperity of the agricultural ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... that the constant insecurity of life and property in all but the central parts of the republic is such as to keep down the natural increase of a population never prolific, being made up of a combination of uncongenial races—whites and Indians, whose intermixture leads to sterility. ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... than is founded upon the paucity of his published work. It has fairly been said that the springs of originality in the brain of a great inventive genius are bound to bubble up more continuously and in fuller volume than could be confined within the narrow bounds of the poetry of Gray. But the sterility of the age, the east wind of discouragement steadily blowing across the poet's path, had much to do with this apparent want of fecundity, and it would be an error to insist too strongly on a general ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... women of this time wholly inconceivable. That nothing ethically valuable can be accomplished except after instant prayer, or after copious outpourings of Divine grace, that the curse of absolute sterility is upon all our attempts to conform to the dictates of the moral law, unless God be with us in prayer, is ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan |
