"Viscid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so slight that it was hard for the boy to realize that it was a depression at all, had, toward its center, a smaller flat, 115 acres in extent. There were no flames, no sulphurous steam, no smoke, no bubbling whirls of viscid matter, nothing exciting whatever. The stretch before him resembled nothing so much as mud-flat with the tide out. The dried-up bed of a large park pond, with a small island or two of green shrubbery, and some very scrawny palms around ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Solfatara volcano have been undoubtedly of a vitreous nature, and these appear at present argillaceous. Some fragments of this lava are but half or at one side changed into clay, which either is viscid or ductile, or hard and stoney. Clays by fire are deprived of their coherent quality, which cannot be restored to them by pulverization, nor by humectation. But the sulphureous Solfatara steams restore ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... was seen that sun and stars, far from being the cool, earthlike, habitable bodies that Herschel thought them (surrounded by glowing clouds, and protected from undue heat by other clouds), are in truth seething caldrons of fiery liquid, or gas made viscid by condensation, with lurid envelopes of belching flames. It was soon made clear, also, particularly by the studies of Rutherfurd and of Secchi, that stars differ among themselves in exact constitution or condition. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the same length as the sack required. The outer bark is then removed and the inner bark loosened by pounding, so that it can be separated by turning it inside out. Sometimes a small piece of the wood is left to form the bottom of the sack. The fruit exudes a milky, viscid juice, which hardens into the consistency of beeswax, but becomes ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... the action, corrosion, and stimulation of pernicious teas. In proportion to the state of the fluids, in particular constitutions, they may either prove too relaxing or astringent, too condensing or attenuating, and too acrid or viscid; for India teas, that to some constitutions are very diluting, may produce in others contrary effects: therefore such should be chosen as possess a combination of quality that may render them, as nearly as possible, to a general specific. But this cannot be well expected where one single ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... topography of the moon; and beyond it tier after tier, as far as the eye could reach, the blue mountains of Nevada. A narrow gorge, standing fairly on end, led down from the Pass. Without hesitation, like a sluggishly moving, viscid brown fluid, the sheep flowed over the edge. The dogs, their flanking duties relieved by the walls of dark basalt on either hand, fell to the rear with their masters. The mountain-bred horses dropped calmly down the ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... the third degree Runs till he drops down dead. Thou laughest here! 'Sooth, it elates me, thus reposed and safe, To void the stuffing of my travel-scrip 40 And share with thee whatever Jewry yields. A viscid choler is observable In tertians, I was nearly bold to say; And falling-sickness hath a happier cure Than our school wots of: there's a spider here Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs, Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-gray back; Take five and ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... invent a sure method of putting him to death. Water, fire and sword all having failed, they finally fixed upon smothering him in a vast cream-cake. The whole country round made contributions of flour for the tough pastry, sugar for the viscid filling, and bricks for a huge oven; and it was made and baked on a plain outside the city walls. Meanwhile the prisoner was allowed to go and bid his mother farewell, and the fifth brother secretly became his substitute. When the cake was done, a multitude of people, with ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... an uneven surface, secretes a thin, scanty, viscid fluid, which dries to a firm, adherent crust. It is usually defined against the healthy skin by a slightly elevated, hard, roll-like, waxy-looking border. In rare instances there is a disposition, at points, to spontaneous involution and scar formation; as a rule, however, the ulcerative ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... half melted, half frozen; milky, muddy &c. n.; lacteal, lactean[obs3], lacteous[obs3], lactescent[obs3], lactiferous[obs3]; emulsive, curdled, thick, succulent, uliginous[obs3]. gelatinous, albuminous, mucilaginous, glutinous; glutenous, gelatin, mastic, amylaceous[obs3], ropy, clammy, clotted; viscid, viscous; sticky, tacky, gooey; slab, slabby[obs3]; lentous|, pituitous[obs3]; mucid[obs3], muculent[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... mischief. Every purple flush of its hideous body told me so. The vague, goggling eyes which were turned always upon me were cold and merciless in their viscid hatred. I dipped the nose of my monoplane downwards to escape it. As I did so, as quick as a flash there shot out a long tentacle from this mass of floating blubber, and it fell as light and sinuous as a whip-lash across ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of making raised or leavened bread consists, in brief, of mixing the flour and water in proper proportions for a stiff dough, together with some salt for seasoning, and yeast (or other agent) for leavening. The moistened gluten of the flour forms a viscid, elastic, tenacious mass, which is thoroughly kneaded to distribute the yeast. The dough is then set in a warm place and the yeast begins to grow, or "work," causing alcoholic fermentation, with the production of carbon dioxid gas, which expands ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... the Professor, again smiling blandly, "there you have touched what once was, and, to some philosophers it seems, still is, the great difficulty. By some great men it has been held that glacier ice is always in a partially soft, viscid, or semi-fluid condition, somewhat like pitch, so that, although apparently a solid, brittle, and rigid body, it flows sluggishly in reality. Other philosophers have denied this theory, insisting that the ice of glaciers is not like pitch, but like glass, and that it cannot be squeezed without ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... tissue, some of which measure a line and half across; they form the whole inner face of each woody zone. When boiling water is poured over shavings of this wood a clear jelly, resembling tragacanth, is formed and becomes a thick viscid mass; iodine stains it brown, but not a trace of starch is indicated in it. No doubt the nutritious quality of the tree is owing to the mucilage, which is apparently of the same nature as that of the nearly allied Tragacanth tree of Sierra Leone ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... would put off his tour of inspection till the next day. Travelling in the buggy as he did, he must keep to the road which led to Derrick's, in very roundabout fashion, by way of Guadalajara. This rain would reduce the thick dust of the road to two feet of viscid mud. It would take him quite three hours to reach the ranch house on Los Muertos. He thought of Delaney and the buckskin and ground his teeth. And all this trouble, if you please, because of a fool ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... heavens, overshadowed the city like a gigantic funeral pall. Entire streets had been swept away, not a house left on either side, nor any trace that houses had ever been there, save the calcined stone-work lying in the gutter in a pasty mess of soot and ashes, the whole lost in the viscid, ink-black mud of the thoroughfare. Where streets intersected the corner houses were razed down to their foundations, as if they had been carried away bodily by the fiery blast that blew there. Others had suffered less; one in particular, owing to some ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... coal, and, when pulverized and scattered over growing potato-plants or other vegetables, it prevents their destruction by insects or blight, and acts also as a fertiliser of the soil. Essential and viscid oils are obtained by various well-known processes from bituminous substances, but from none in such abundance and possessing such valuable properties as the oils extracted from the bitumen of the lake of Trinidad, as well as from the ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... colossal and seemingly all-embracing diameter. The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming, turbid slime—cumbered spray, foul, festering, furiously troubled, slipping, as it seemed, particle by particle, viscid gout by gout, into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round, with a swaying and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 28, 1893 • Various
... as a green freshly broken off leaf or as the green spider would fall, but with a slower motion, precisely like a leaf withered up till it has become almost light as a feather. It is not difficult to imagine how this comes about: either a thicker line, or a greater stiffness or tenacity of the viscid fluid composing the web and attached to the point the spider drops from, causes one to fall slower than the other. But how many tentative variations in the stiffness of the web material must there have been before the precise degree was attained ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... a viscid fluid, which circulates under the bark: this is called cambium. When it is too abundant it is effused, part of its water evaporates, and it becomes gum. If the vital circle is not interrupted, the fluid traverses the branches, and the peduncle ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... unaptly applied to fermentation, the property of attenuation being to divide, then dilute, and rarify thick, gross, viscid, and dense substances, in which some degree of fluidity is pre-supposed; it is, therefore, that kind of dilution or fluidity which is promoted by agitation, and very aptly applied to mark the progress ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... 12 a white hard frost suddenly fell on the whole field of operations, and turned the viscid mud everywhere to the hardness of stone. The men could march, the artillery move; and Wellington, whose strategy was ripe, was at once ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... the offspring of protoplasm progressed, and the offspring of nothing else does so, is that the viscid nature of protoplasm allows vibrations to last a very long time, and so very old vibrations get carried into any fragment that is broken off; whereas in the case of air and water, vibrations get soon effaced and only very recent vibrations get carried ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... occur in the centre of the masses, due to the baking of the exterior, even if the generator is fitted with a reaction grid. Manifestly, when carbide in lumps of reasonable size is dropped into excess of water which is not merely a thick viscid cream of lime, the temperature cannot possibly exceed the boiling-point—i.e., 100 deg. C.—provided always the natural convection currents of the water are properly made ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... not picture to herself what it would be like; how the judges would behave toward Pavel. Her thoughts muddled her brain, covered her eyes with a gray mist, and plunged her into something sticky, viscid, chilling and paining her body. The feeling grew, entered her blood, took possession of her heart, and weighed it down heavily, poisoning in it all that was ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... of the methods of manufacture are very simple. In the simplest form, the sugar cane is crushed in a mortar. The juice thus extracted is boiled in common open pans. After boiling a certain length of time, it becomes a dark colored, soft, viscid mass. The uncrystallized sirup is expressed by putting the whole into cloth bags and subjecting them to pressure. This is molasses in a crude state. It is further purified by reboiling it with ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... males had proprietorship in the world under father—all men were worshipful and giants and genii. That was the established perception and those its earliest images. The perception remained, deepening, changing only in hue, as a viscid liquid solidifies and darkens in a vessel over the fire. It remained, persisted. Time but steadied the focus as the wise oculist, seeking for his patient the perfect image, drops lenses in the frame through which ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... understood, as if the Saviour of mankind had sweated real blood. But the text does not say so much. The sweat was only [Greek: hosei thromboi haimatos], as it were, or like drops of blood; that is, the drops of sweat were so large, thick and viscid, that they trickled to the ground like drops of blood. Thus were the words understood by Justin Martyr, Theophylactus and Euthymius. And yet Galen has observed, that it sometimes happens, that the pores are so ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead
... 1. BOLETUS BOVINUS. Pileus flat, smooth, viscid; the thin, transparent skin easily peeling. Flesh white, unchangeable in color (stem same color as pileus). Tubes whitish yellow, yellow or gray, shallow. Very ...
— Mushrooms of America, Edible and Poisonous • Anonymous
... was probably the material procured from wine lees (dregs), deposited after fermentation has commenced, and which after considerable application of heat yields not only most of the tannin contained in the stones and fruit stalks, but a viscid compound characteristic of gelatine and of a red-purple color which in course of ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... There was a pool of this kind a quarter of a mile away, where there were "diggings" worked by Patsey's father, and thither they proceeded along the ridge in single file. When it was reached they solemnly began to wade in its viscid paint-like shallows. Possibly its unctuousness was pleasant to the touch; possibly there was a fascination in the fact that their parents had forbidden them to go near it, but probably the principal object of this performance was to produce a thick coating ...
— The Queen of the Pirate Isle • Bret Harte
... of being dissolved in water, and forming with it a viscid transparent fluid; but not in vinous spirits or oil; it burns in the fire to a black coal, without melting or catching fire; and does not dissolve in water at boiling heat. The name of gum has been inaccurately ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... considerable cavity within. I stuffed this with the bread and sausage, crumbled fine, ruminating, the while, upon the probability that the sausage and cakes I had devoured presented the like appearance by the time they reached my stomach. When the variegated and viscid compound was tucked away, I wound a soft string about the disk to keep it in shape, and enveloped it, first in raw cotton, then in a bit of red flannel. In my uncertainty as to which end would bourgeon into a head, and from which would be evolved the tail, I left ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... were! The audience made a tumult that was half applause and half exclamation at a prodigy, and the three women who made their way on the platform seemed to be moving through the noise as through a viscid element. The woman doctor, who was to be the chairman, lowered her curly grey head against it buttingly; Mrs. Ormiston, the mother of the famous rebels Brynhild, Melissa, and Guendolen, and herself a heroine, lifted ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... characterized by a viscid watery secretion from the mucous glands, which are always found in the ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... as beeswax, and of a white purified form, which had been treated by sulphuric acid. Specimens from Utah had already been shown before the Academy. There was no mystery as to its genesis in either region, as it had been shown to be the result of inspissation of a thick and viscid variety of petroleum. The term "petroleum" includes a great variety of substances, from a limpid liquid, too light to burn, to one that is thick and tarry. These differ widely also in chemical composition: ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... remedy should be capable of restoring the tone of the muscular fibres, when they are relaxed, and also have the power of relaxing them when they are too rigid; that it should coagulate the fluids when in a state of resolution, and again attenuate them when they are too viscid; that it should moderate the nerves when in a state of preturnatural sensibility, and likewise restore them to their proper degree of irritability when they are in a ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... pensiveness somewhat less lackadaisical. In fact, though Miss Jemima was constitutionally mild, she was not de natura pensive; she had too much of the Hazeldean blood in her veins for that sullen and viscid humor called melancholy, and therefore this assumption of pensiveness really spoiled her character of features, which only wanted to be lighted up by a cheerful smile to be extremely prepossessing. The same remark might apply to the figure, which—thanks to the same pensiveness—lost ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... thy sweet tongue by that viscid 'hate'; thou hadst better indulge in less of devil's warfare and leave room for digestion of gentle peace. Thou hast bloomed into a beauteous maid, but thy temper hath blown also. My lord hast seen many beauties that he could have for ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... and gradually, almost imperceptibly expanding, with its viscid transparency shot through with opalescent lights, the Thing lay there in the deepening twilight and palpably shivered. As darkness descended, a sort of hellish radiance began to ooze from it. I say hellish, because there is no other word to describe ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... hypogæa, (Linn). This shell fruit has two names in Housa, goújĕeă, and gaýda. Many of the shells are double; they are smallish, very soft, and easily broken. The taste of the fruit is not disagreeable, a good deal like the almond, but more viscid, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... up to his room after dinner in order to be alone with his soul, and at every step his soul seemed to sigh; at every step his soul mounted with his feet, sighing in the ascent, through a region of viscid gloom. ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... ascending, 'till (having sufficiently saturated them) it transpires the rest of the liquid at the summity and tops of the branches into the atmosphere, and leaving some of the less refined matter in a viscid hony-dew, or other exsudations, (often perceived on the leaves and blossoms,) anon descending and joining again with what they meet, repeat this course in perpetual circulation: Add to this, that from hence those regions and places crowded with numerous and thick ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... in gentle and playful embrace. Suddenly tightening its folds, a crackling sound was heard; the writhing coils were then slowly unwound—and, with a shudder, he beheld the monster licking over the motionless figure, till it was covered with a viscid slime. Then the serpent began to devour his prey; and, when gorged and helpless, behold, it was immediately fallen upon by two other snakes. To his disturbed fancy, there was a dim resemblance between their heads and those of Quirk and Snap—they all three became intertwisted together—and ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... October number of the same journal appeared his famous article "On some Organisms living at great depth in the North Atlantic Ocean," originally delivered before the British Association at Norwich in this year (1868). The sticky or viscid character of the fresh mud from the bottom of the Atlantic had already been noticed by Captain Dayman when making soundings for the Atlantic cable. This stickiness was apparently due to the presence of innumerable lumps of a transparent, gelatinous substance, consisting of minute ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... a foot high. It was in flower although covered with ice.* Also a variety of Leucopogon villosus, with rather less hair than usual, and another species of the same genus, probably new. Near the highest parts of the plateau I found a new species of eucalyptus with short broad viscid leaves, ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... of vast labor and erudition, emanating from a mind very full of books, and grinding and pressing down the great accumulation of grapes that it had gathered from so many vineyards, and squeezing out rich viscid juices,—potent wine,—with which the reader might get drunk. Some of it, moreover, seemed, for the further mystification of the officer, to be written in cipher; a needless precaution, it might seem, when the writer's natural chirography was so ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... fasten upon him in the darkness. His imagination—always sufficiently vivid, and spurred to an unnatural effect by the exciting scenes of the previous night—painted each patch of shadow, clinging bat-like to the humid wall, as some globular sea-spider ready to drop upon him with its viscid and clay-cold body, and drain out his chilled blood, enfolding him in rough and hairy arms. Each splash in the water beneath him, each sigh of the multitudinous and melancholy sea, seemed to prelude the laborious advent of some mis-shapen and ungainly abortion of the ooze. ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... scattered groups on Carmel and elsewhere, "giving a park-like appearance to the landscape."[217] The third kind is Quercus infectoria, a gall-oak, also deciduous, and very conspicuous from the large number of bright, chestnut-coloured, viscid galls which it bears, and which are ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... door as soon as you've gone in." For Dollops, who was of an inventive turn of mind, had an especial "man-trap" of his own, which consisted of heavy brown paper, cut into squares, and thickly smeared over with a viscid varnish-like substance that would adhere to the feet of anybody incautiously stepping upon it, and so interfere with flight that it was an absolute necessity to stop and tear the papers away before running with any sort of ease and swiftness was possible. This was the ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... were to appear skipping about over the surface with pitchforks, turning their victims as the cook turns her frying crullers in the sputtering fat, it would not much astonish you. This liquid is rather thick and viscid, but it is boiling furiously. Great masses of it are thrown up forty or fifty feet, and fall with a crash like that of the surf upon the shore. Livid jets are thrown up many feet high against the sides and drip back, cooling quickly as the lava ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... small bird, Melithreptes Pacifica, inhabits the mountainous regions of Hawaii, and has under each wing a single feather, one inch long, of a bright canary yellow. The birds are caught by means of a viscid substance smeared on poles. Formerly they were strictly tabu. It is of these feathers that the mamo or war-cloak of Kamehameha I., now used on state occasions by the Hawaiian kings, is composed. This priceless ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... gelatines, such as gelatine dynamite and gelignite, both of which substances consist of a mixture of gun-cotton dissolved in nitro-glycerine, with the addition of varying proportions of wood-pulp and saltpetre, the latter substances acting as absorbing materials for the viscid gelatine. Nitro-glycerine is also largely used in the manufacture of smokeless powders, such as cordite, ballistite, ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... unsteadily, and for a moment his legs felt like wisps of cotton. He balanced his machine against the grassy edge of the path and sat down panting. His hands were gnarled with swollen veins and shaking palpably, his breath came viscid. ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... widely dissimilar in their mutual reaction—the stigmas of each form being almost powerless on their own pollen, but causing, through some mysterious influence, apparently by simple contact (for I could detect no viscid secretion), the pollen-grains of the opposite form to protrude their tubes. It may be said that the two pollens and the two stigmas mutually recognise each other by some means. Taking fertility as the criterion of distinctness, it is no exaggeration to say that the pollen ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... followed. His gun was raised as he neared it. Then out of the mass shot a serpentine arm. It whipped about him, soft, sticky, viscid—utterly loathsome. He screamed once when it clung to his face, then tore savagely and in silence at the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... succulent cactus and thistles, aloes and figs. The arborescent tabayba (Euphorbia canariensis), locally called 'cardon,' is compared by some with the 'chandelier' of the Cape, bristling with wax tapers: the Guanches used it extensively for narcotising fish. This 'milk plant,' with its acrid, viscid, and virulent juice, and a small remedial shrub growing by its side, probably gave rise to the island fable of the twin fountains; one killed the traveller by a kind of risus Sardonicus, unless he used the other by way of cure. A scatter of crosses, which are ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... instrument, in its simplest form, consists merely of a basin filled with some viscid liquid, which, on the occurrence of a shock of an earthquake of sufficient force to disturb the equilibrium of the building in which it is placed, is tilted on one side, and the liquid made to rise in the same direction, thus showing by its height ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... to bed. In less than three hours, an inflammation came on, which extended high up the arm; and, soon afterwards, each hand, from the wrist downward, was enclosed in a kind of bladder, containing nearly a pint of viscid serous fluid. There were, however, three fingers of one hand, and two of the other, in which this vesication did not form. These fingers continued cold and insensible, nor could the circulation in them be restored; and, eventually, the ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... base of the rachises, main or secondary, glandular streaks are seen as in the rachises of Sporobolus coromandelianus. These glands secrete a viscid juice ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... unanimous, undulate, urbanity, usurious, uxorious, vacillate, vacuous, vandalism, variegate velocity, venal, venereal, venial, venous, veracious, verdant, verisimilitude, vernacular, versatile, vestal, vibratory, vicarious, vicissitude, virulence, viscid, viscous, vitiate, vitreous, vituperate, vivacious, volatile, volition, voluminous, voluptuary, voluptuous, voracious, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the North Sea, past an island he calls Thule; his further progress, he asserted, was hindered by a barrier of a peculiar nature,—neither earth, air, nor sky, but a compound of all three, forming a thick viscid substance which it was impossible to penetrate. Now, whether this same Thule was one of the Shetland Islands, and the impassable substance merely a fog,—or Iceland, and the barricade beyond, a wall of ice, it is impossible to say. ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... latter are coarse, often dirty, and nearly always have something bristling about them which is entirely absent in the sculptures of the wind. The under side of the roof in the cavity looked very much as a very stiff or viscid treacle would look when spread over a meshy surface, as, for instance, over a closely woven netting of wire. The stems and the branches of the brush took the place of the wire, and in their meshes the snow had been pressed through by its own weight, but held together by its curious ductility or ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... spread to all the muscles of deglutition and respiration, so that the patient not only has the greatest difficulty in swallowing, but has a constant sense of impending suffocation. To add to his distress, a copious secretion of viscid saliva fills his mouth. Any voluntary effort, as well as all forms of external stimuli, only serve to aggravate the spasms which are always induced by the attempt to swallow fluid, or even by the sound of ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... the Tana River was from the top of a bluff. It flowed below us a hundred feet, bending at a sharp elbow against the cliff on which we stood. Out of the jungle it crept sluggishly and into the jungle it crept again, brown, slow, viscid, suggestive of the fevers and the lurking beasts by which, indeed, it was haunted. From our elevation we could follow its course by the jungle that grew along its banks. At first this was intermittent, leaving thin or even open spaces at intervals, but lower down it extended away unbroken and ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... without the application of heat. This I have found in practice to be incorrect: for when I have excited albumenized paper, to which a sufficient heat has not been applied, I have invariably observed that a portion of the albumen becomes detached into the silver solution, making it viscid, and favouring its decomposition. Consequently, the sheets last excited seldom retain their colour so long as those which are first prepared. But even laying aside the question of the coagulation of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... attracted the attention of the Company's Government, and that a considerable nursery of the kaluwi has been established in the Botanic Garden at Calcutta, under the zealous and active management of Dr. Roxburgh, who expresses his opinion that so soon as a method shall be discovered of removing a viscid matter found to adhere to the fibres the kaluwi hemp, or pulas, will supersede every other material. The bagu-tree (Gnetum gnemon, L.) abounds on the southern coast of the island, where its bark is beaten, like hemp, and the twine manufactured from it is employed in the construction of ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... naturally begins to freeze on the surface, the lava at first becoming viscid, much in the manner of cream on the surface of milk. Urged along by the more fluid lava underneath, this viscid coating takes a ropy or corrugated form. As the freezing goes deeper, a firm stone roof may be formed across the gorge, which, when ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... moment was drenched in black petroleum. The fine particles of it filled the air, sprayed the cactus and the greasewood. Rivulets of the viscid stuff began to gather in depressions and to flow in gathering volume, as tributaries joined the stream, into the sump holes prepared for it. The pungent odor of crude oil, as well as the touch and the taste ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... goats are very few to bag, and those few even more supernaturally fleet and sure of foot and keen of nose than their less-hunted ancestors. Still, somewhere in that upper world of lilac-white that melts into the clouds in vast but distance-softened chasms of viscid ice and rifts of gray gneiss, there is an object for him. In some nook or on some crag of the square leagues of desert that swell around him a troop of the desiderated ruminants is grazing, if grazing it can be called where grass is none. He is very sure of that. Even from the door of his chalet ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... part of the pistil is variously modified, having either little papillae which hold the pollen spores, or are viscid. In either case the spores germinate when placed upon this receptive part (stigma) of the pistil, and send their tubes down through the tissues of the pistil until they reach the ovules, which are fertilized much as in ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... sat in his buckboard, ready to go into town for a first glimpse of Carroll in more than two months, he gazed with an immense satisfaction over the broad river moving brown and glacier-like as though the logs that covered it were viscid and composed all its substance. The enterprise ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... as he laid hold of it, Lanyard dropped the garment in sheer surprise to find it damp and heavy in his grasp, sodden with viscid moisture. And when, in a swift flash of intuition, he examined his fingers, he discovered them discoloured with a ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... four miles from me, which ultimately proved to be a creek, and the most southern point of the N'yanza, which, as I have said before, the Arabs described to us as the Ukerewe Sea.[57] We soon afterwards descended into a grassy and jungly depression, and arrived at a deep, dirty, viscid nullah (a watercourse that only runs in wet weather), draining the eastern country into the southern end of the creek. To cross this (which I shall name Jordan) was a matter of no small difficulty, especially for the donkeys, whose fording seemed ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... LIFE is manifested is in a viscid gelatinous substance without colour or form, called Protoplasm. Wherever there is life there is protoplasm. Protoplasm, as before remarked, lies just under the bark in trees, and is the material from which the growth of the wood and bark cells and fibres proceeds. Protoplasm, is also present ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... higher in the scale of life than the monera is the vegetable or animal cell, which arose out of the monera by the important process of segregation in their homogeneous viscid bodies, the differentiation of an inner kernel from the surrounding plasma. By this means the great progress from a simple cytod (without kernel) into a real cell (with kernel) was accomplished. Some of ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... to the nose had no reason; for they will do it themselves, especially to me; my very mustachios, which are full, perform that office; for if I stroke them but with my gloves or handkerchief, the smell will not out a whole day; they manifest where I have been, and the close, luscious, devouring, viscid melting kisses of youthful ardour in my wanton age left a sweetness upon my lips for several hours after. And yet I have ever found myself little subject to epidemic diseases, that are caught, either by conversing with the sick or bred by ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... widely different from the normal form." "The abnormal leaf is much less divided, and not acuminated. The petals are considerably larger, and quite entire. There is also in the fresh state a conspicuous, large, oblong gland, full of a viscid secretion, on the back of each of the calycine segments." Dr. King, who subsequently had charge of these Gardens, informs me that a tree of Paritium tricuspis (probably the very same plant) growing there, had a branch buried in the ground, apparently by accident; and this branch changed its ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... step of the digestive process is the breaking up of the food in the mouth by means of the jaws and teeth. On this being done, the saliva, a viscid liquor, is poured into the mouth from the salivary glands, and as it mixes with the food, it performs a very important part in the operation of digestion, rendering the starch of the food soluble, and gradually changing it into a sort of sugar, after which the other principles ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... is a pity that Peripatus (276/1. Moseley "On the Structure and Development of Peripatus capensis" ("Phil. Trans. R. Soc." Volume 164, page 757, 1874). "When suddenly handled or irritated, they (i.e. Peripatus) shoot out fine threads of a remarkably viscid and tenacious milky fluid... projected from the tips of the oral papillae" (page 759).) is so stupid as to spit out the viscid matter at the wrong end of its body; it would have been beautiful thus to have explained the origin ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... aqueous vapour that had floated at first as steam around its heated mass condensed with time into a wide ocean over the now hardened shell. Gradually this ocean shifted its bulk into two or three main bodies that sank into hollows of the viscid crust, the precursors of Atlantic, Pacific, and the Indian Seas. Wrinklings of the crust, produced by the cooling and consequent contraction, gave rise at first to baby mountain ranges, and afterwards to the earliest rough draughts of the still ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... natural when it was stated by a Carolinian correspondent (Mr. B.F. Grady) that in the long-leaved, yellow-flowered species the lid just above the mouth of the tubular pitcher habitually secretes drops of a sweet and viscid liquid, which attracts flies and apparently intoxicates them, since those that sip it soon become unsteady in gait and mostly fall irretrievably into the well beneath. But upon cultivating plants of this species, obtained for the purpose, the existence ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... caesia are quite similar to those of our American forms, with the following interesting exception: The doorway of the cavity constituting the bird's domicile is plastered up with clay, made viscid by the nuthatch's glutinous saliva, leaving in the center a circular hole just large enough to afford entrance and exit for the little owner. Says the author quoted above: "When the sitting bird is interfered with, she defends her treasures with great courage, hissing like a wryneck, ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... commerce are the balsam of Peru, balsam of Tolu, liquid storax and liquidambar. Balsam of Peru is the produce of a lofty leguminous tree, Myroxylon Pereirae, growing within a limited area in San Salvador, Central America and introduced into Ceylon. It is a thick, viscid oleo-resin of a deep brown or black colour and a fragrant balsamic odour. It is used in perfumery. Though contained in the pharmacopeias it has no special medicinal virtues. Balsam of Tolu is produced from Myroxylon toluiferum. It is of a brown colour, thicker ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... of the Wheat seedling may be shown in fine flour. [1]"The flour is to be moistened in the hand and kneaded until it becomes a homogeneous mass. Upon this mass pour some pure water and wash out all the white powder until nothing is left except a viscid lump of gluten. This is the part of the crushed wheat-grains which very closely resembles in its composition the flesh of animals. The white powder washed away is nearly pure wheat-starch. Of course the other ingredients, such as the mineral matter and the like, might be referred to, but ...
— Outlines of Lessons in Botany, Part I; From Seed to Leaf • Jane H. Newell
... the exercises of Venus Thucydides: which was the better wrestler To die of old age is a death rare, extraordinary, and singular To make little things appear great was his profession To smell, though well, is to stink Valour will cause a trembling in the limbs as well as fear Viscid melting kisses of youthful ardour in my wanton age We can never be despised according to our full desert When we have got it, we want something else Women who paint, pounce, and ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Essays of Montaigne • David Widger
... of fine porous tissue, covered, during life, with viscid, semi-liquid protoplasm, and are held in shape and strengthened by a more or less rigid skeleton, consisting chiefly of lime or silica. The tissue consists of a very fine network of threads, formed probably by gradual solidification of the threads of protoplasm. ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... and the boat poled cautiously into the bank. She slid over viscid slime that scarcely impeded her and came to rest against the twisted roots of a malodorous tree from which drooped heavy, damp masses of moss, felt, but unseen. Barry gave orders to stretch a sail ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... body when it first appeared had now, owing to there being but a minor degree of phosphorus in the brackish water, given place to a dulled, sickly, greenish reflection, accentuated however by thin, vivid streaks, caused by the exudation from the gills of a streaming, viscid matter, common to some species of sharks, and giving it a truly terrifying and horrible appearance. Presently a couple of natives, taking careful aim, fired at the creature's head; in an instant it darted off with extraordinary velocity, rushing through the water like a submerged ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... might be supposed—types in which the living units essentially composing the mass, are dispersed through an inert substance, that can scarcely be called living in the full sense of the word. It is thus with some of the Protococci and with the Nostoceae, which exist as cells imbedded in a viscid matter. It is so, too, with the Thalassicollae—bodies made up of differentiated parts, dispersed through an undifferentiated jelly. And throughout considerable portions of their bodies, some of the Acalephae exhibit more or ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... means of increasing the intensity of gravity tenfold in his laboratory. All the conditions of life would be modified to the extent of being unrecognizable. A living being borne in this space would remain small and squat. All objects would be stocky and be spread out in width or else be shattered. Viscid or semi-solid bodies, such as pitch, would rapidly spread out and take on a surface as plane and smooth as water under the conditions of gravity upon the earth. On still further increasing the gravity, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... landmarks were distinct, but it was half-past four before Dick reached the meeting-house and the crossing of the country road. To avoid the rising grade he had taken a longer and more circuitous road, in whose viscid mud Jovita sank fetlock deep at every bound. It was a poor preparation for a steady ascent of five miles more; but Jovita, gathering her legs under her, took it with her usual blind, unreasoning ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... are pretty, and the tinge of red in the stem adds to its beauty. There are other species of Russula that also have red tints in the stem. Cap rosy red, with pink and orange hues, 1 to 2 inches broad, convex, becoming nearly plane or slightly depressed; at first viscid, soon dry, slightly marked with lines on the thin margin, taste mild. Gills moderately close, nearly entire, rounded behind and slightly adnexed, swollen in the middle, whitish, becoming yellow. Stem 1 to 2 inches long, 3 to 4 lines thick, ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... assured him that he had left nothing unaccountable or suspicious. The brush was broken where the nighthound had been tearing at the coat; a bear might have done that. There were splashes of the viscid stuff the thing had used for blood, but they wouldn't be there long. Terrestrial rodents liked nighthound blood, and the woods were full of mice. He climbed in under the wheel, backed, turned, ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... purplish red. The skin over them is thinned out, and broken down in places to form one or two crateriform ulcers from which a clear sticky fluid exudes. The size varies from that of a pea to a small orange. The pus is characteristic, varying in consistency though usually viscid, and containing ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... although in all its diverse forms it retains the same qualities. It is an oleagenous substance, naturally evolved from the earth, and may be found in all degrees of thickness, from a very light substance found in some parts of Persia, to a thick viscid substance more indigenous to Britain. Before taking a lease of the petroleum spring, Mr. Young suggested the advisability of Tennant's people taking it up, but they said it was too small a matter for them. Mr. Young, however, in 1848, ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... the "heavy oil" comes over; towards the end a thick brown or yellow viscid product is got. The receiver is again changed, and the ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... AA. When the crust of highly fluid lava remains unbroken after its first freezing, it presents a smooth, hummocky, and ropy surface known by the Hawaiian term PAHOEHOE. On the other hand, the crust of a viscid flow may be broken and splintered as it is dragged along by the slowly moving mass beneath. The stream then appears as a field of stones clanking and grinding on, with here and there from some chink a dull red glow or a wisp of steam. It sets to a surface called AA, of broken, sharp-edged blocks, ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... sometimes termed the 'birdcatching plant' by settlers and bushmen . . . It will always be a plant of special interest, as small birds are often found captured by its viscid fruits, to which their feathers become attached as effectively as ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... sound, and the spring itself adds to the winter music. The rocks where it bubbles out are thickly covered with hoar frost. One of the big blocks of limestone in its causeway is covered with ice, clear and viscid as molten glass. The river is bridged over with ice twenty inches thick, save only the little gulf stream into which the spring pours its waters. From the surface of this stream thin smoky wreaths of vapor rise and are changed into crystals by the frosty air. But the waters ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... mouth. Dryness of the mouth not from a deficiency of saliva. 2. By Sensitive ideas. 3. By volition. 4. By distasteful substances. It is secreted in a dilute and saline state. It then becomes more viscid. 5. By ideas of distasteful substances. 6. By nausea. 7. By aversion. 8. By catenation with stimulating substances in the ear. II. 1. Secretion of tears less in sleep. From stimulation of their excretory duct. 2. Lacrymal sack is a gland. 3. Its uses. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... confounded and silent, with, about them, a greyer, a more subdued, look which made all more resemble their fellows. In fact, to all had the atmosphere become oppressive, as though everyone's breast had had clamped into it a large, soft clod of humid, viscid earth. Until at last someone said in a low, shamefaced, but ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... stood at the brink of the bottomless caldron of viscid muck and gazed out across the deadly plain. Bill stood still beside her, watching her face with eager, ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... it was the next interruption came—it was another telegram—I don't know. Time had been obliterated. But then it began to flow again; though not with a viscid and heavy measure. And when I took up my light and ready pen, there, standing at eager attention, was all my staff, waiting the call. What had happened to bring them all back? If the writers of literary manuals will explain that secret to ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... vapour had now risen a height of ten or fifteen feet, and formed a roof both over the land and over the red water, under which it was possible to see for a great distance. The surface of the red oil or viscid liquid was perfectly smooth, and, indeed, it did not seem as if any wind could rouse a wave on it, much less that a swell should be left after the gale had gone down. Disappointed in his search for water to drink, Felix mechanically turned ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... changes. A moist, warm medium being most favorable to the growth of the yeast, the water should just be lukewarm; then a good flour, containing about 8 per cent of gluten is necessary. This gluten is the proteid in flour; when well mixed with water it forms a viscid elastic substance, hence it is necessary to well knead dough to make it more springy, so that when the gas is generated in it, it will expand and take the form of a sponge, and thus prevent the gas from escaping. The bread must be put into a very hot oven at first, 340 deg. F., so that ...
— The Story of Crisco • Marion Harris Neil
... Spanish Main, where now, through the colonnades of its warehouse supports, the vistas are empty. Once you had to squeeze sideways through the stacked merchandise. There were huge hogsheads of sugar and hillocks of coconuts. Molasses and honey escaped to spread a viscid carpet which held your feet. The casual prodigality of it expanded the mind. Certainly this earth must be a big and cheerful place if it could spread its treasures thus wide and deep in a public place under the sky. It corrected the impression got from the retail shops for ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson |
