"Fecundity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... both races and all conditions, the demand of the delta lands, to which the sugar crop was confined, was almost wholly for negro slaves. The only notable increase in the rural white population of the district came through the fecundity of the small-farming Acadians who had little to ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... flat-bodied, black, with immense side-fins ever outspread like the pinions of a bat,—the terror of luggermen, the uprooter of anchors? From all these, perhaps, and from other monsters likewise—goblin shapes evolved by Nature as destroyers, as equilibrists, as counterchecks to that prodigious fecundity, which, unhindered, would thicken the deep into one measureless and waveless ferment of being... But when there are many bathers these perils are forgotten,—numbers give courage,—one can abandon one's self, without fear of the invisible, to the ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... while there are not much above a dozen who know how to interest with the ordinary events of life, and by the portrayal of characters truly human. If the former is a talent, it must be owned that it is much commoner than the latter . . . . If we are to rate novelists according to their fecundity, or the riches of their invention, we must put Alexander Dumas above Cervantes. Cervantes wrote a novel with the simplest plot, without belying much or little the natural and logical course of events. This novel which was called 'Don Quixote,' is perhaps ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... "The fecundity of the people of reason is extreme. It is very rare to find a married couple with less than five or six children, while there are hundreds who have from twelve to fifteen. Very few of them die in their youth, and in reaching the age of puberty ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... delicate meshes of some marvelous twining and climbing plant. A day might be passed here as in a forest, in the presence of grandeurs as solemn as those of nature, before caprices as fascinating, amid the same intermingling of sublime monotony and inexhaustible fecundity, before contrasts and metamorphoses of light as rich and as unexpected. A mystic reverie, combined with a fresh sentiment of northern nature, such is the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... destroying so many birds, and, by interfering with their natural surroundings, driven them away. Birds are great destroyers of insects, and their presence in the orchard should be encouraged in every possible way. Add to these facts the marvelous fecundity of the insect tribe, and the increase is less remarkable. Loss from these orchard pests has now run up into the millions. It has been estimated that the loss in the United States from wormy apples alone is over $11,000,000 annually. Thus has the necessity for fighting ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... Messrs. Darwin and Wallace have each thrown invaluable light upon these last two points, but Buffon, as early as 1756, had made them the keystone of his system. "The movement of nature," he then wrote, "turns on two immovable pivots: one, the illimitable fecundity which she has given to all species: the other, the innumerable difficulties which reduce the results of that fecundity." Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck followed in the same sense. They thus admit the survival of the fittest as fully as Mr. Darwin himself, though ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... modern evening services, it marks a phase of expression, at once ethereal and predilectious. Produced at a more mature period, and under certainly different circumstances, it confirms, honours indeed, the fecundity of the age of its inception, namely, ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... Lexington is called the Blue Grass Region, and boasts itself as of peculiar fecundity in the matter of pasturage. Why the grass is called blue, or in what way or at what period it becomes blue, I did not learn; but the country is very lovely and very fertile. Between Lexington and Frankfort a large ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... on our book-shelves. Look through any catalogue you will, and you will find that a large proportion of the works in it have been contributed by Anon. The only author who can in the least compete with him in fecundity is Ibid." ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... heap that was turned over to Company L. Alas, I was young and prodigal in those days! I told a thousand "stories" to the good people of Quincy, and every story was "good"; but since I have come to write for the magazines I have often regretted the wealth of story, the fecundity of fiction, I lavished ...
— The Road • Jack London
... by without any fresh capture or even sight of fish, until I began to believe that the stories I had heard of the wonderful fecundity of the Coast of Japan waters were fables without foundation, in fact. Had I known what sort of fishing our next bout would be, I should not have been so eager to sight whales again. If this be not a platitude of the worst kind, I don't know the meaning of the word; but, after all, platitudes ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... these inhospitable shores border those of the archipelago of Asia, on which nature has lavished blessings and treasures, he can scarcely conceive how so vast a sterility could be produced in the neighbourhood of such great fecundity. We continued to range the coast, which seemed to make part of the archipelago, everywhere bordered with reefs and quicksands, against which the sea struck with violence, and varied itself as it were in sheafs of foam. Never was such a spectacle before presented to our observation. 'These breakers,'" ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... powerful for constraint; that they will laugh at argument, and defeat violence; that the continent of North America contains three millions, not of men merely, but of whigs, of whigs fierce for liberty, and disdainful of dominion; that they multiply with the fecundity of their own rattlesnakes, so that every quarter of a century doubles ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... modern decorations employed by the Hopi, especially as a symbol of fecundity, is the butterfly or moth. It is a constant device on the beautiful white or cotton blankets woven by the men as wedding gifts, where it is embroidered on the margin in the forms of triangles or even in more realistic patterns. This symbol is a simple ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... in his own way; for if you invade his freedom by your so-called practical considerations, it may be at the expense of those qualities on which his success as a discoverer depends. Let the self-styled practical man look to those from the fecundity of whose thought be, and thousands like him, have sprung into existence. Were they inspired in their first enquiries by the calculations of utility? Not one of them. They were often forced to live low and lie hard, and to seek compensation for their penury in the delight which their favourite ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... of the early wars for democracy. The seeds of universal freedom once sown, finally ripened not alone to the unshackling of a race, but to the fecundity and birth of a spirit that moved all nations and peoples to seek an enlarged liberty. The finger of disintegration and change is never still; is always on the move; always the old order is passing; always the new, although unseen ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... cheerful welcome and assurance—these blades of the corn, so much mightier than any blades of steel. He saw the broad beckoning banners of the pale tassels bursting out atop of the stalk, token of fecundity and of the future. He caught the wide-driven pollen as it whitened upon the earth, borne by the parent West Wind, mother of increase. He saw the thickening of the green leaf at the base, its swelling, its growth and expansion, ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... with the skin, and at the present day the skins are exported in large numbers to Europe, where they are made into muffs, tippets and trimmings. That chinchillas have not under such circumstances become rare, if not extinct, is owing to their extraordinary fecundity, the female usually producing five or six young twice a year. They are docile in disposition, and thus well fitted for domestication. The Peruvian chinchilla (C. brevicaudata) is larger, with relatively shorter ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... all her fecundity from the other! Do you not see her hovering about him like an amorous woman running after a man in a field?" And he exalted ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... truly a power as generalization) is what gives such vigor and greatness to single lines and sentiments of Wordsworth, and to poems developing a single thought or sentiment. It was this that made him so fond of the sonnet. That sequestered nook forced upon him the limits which his fecundity (if I may not say his garrulity) was never self-denying enough to impose on itself. It suits his solitary and meditative temper, and it was there that Lamb (an admirable judge of what was permanent in literature) liked him best. Its narrow bounds, but fourteen paces ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... very remote—an average of only three or four volumes per year. This rate, in days when French scribes carry on five romances at a time, in the daily feuilletons of five newspapers, and when certain English authors, emulous of Gallic fecundity, annually conceive and elaborate their dozen or two of octavos—says little for his industry, or much for his judicious forbearance. Latterly, however, we regret to observe in him a disposition to increase the length of his books, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... place, feeling very grateful to those gentlemen of the Chapter who gave him his house rent free, on account of his wife being the daughter of a former old servant of the church. The smell of the paste and of the damp floor infected his house with the rank atmosphere of poverty. A hopeless fecundity aggravated this poverty; his sad, placid wife with her big yellow eyes appeared every year with a new baby tugging at her flabby breast, and several children crept along the cloister walls, dull and inert with hunger, with enormous heads and thin necks, always sickly, ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... as infinite. There are many species of vegetables of which a single plant will produce in one year the germs of a thousand; if only two come to maturity, in fourteen years the two will have multiplied to sixteen thousand and more. It is but a moderate case of fecundity in animals to be capable of quadrupling their numbers in a single year; if they only do as much in half a century, ten thousand will have swelled within two centuries to upward to two millions and a half. The capacity of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... ovum, germ, cell; spawn. Associated Words: ooelogy, ooelogist, ovology, oviferous, yolk, glair, albumen, embryo, oviparous, oviposit, oviposition, vitellus, fecundate, impregnate, impregnation, fecundity, clutch, vitelline, oviduct, Ovipara, ovulation, ovulist, tread, treadle, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... nothing new among us," said he; "we have traveled over each other's minds." Johnson was piqued at the suggestion. "Sir," said he, "you have not traveled over my mind, I promise you." Sir Joshua, less confident in the exhaustless fecundity of his mind, felt and acknowledged the force of Goldsmith's suggestion. Several new members, therefore, had been added; the first, to his great joy, was David Garrick. Goldsmith, who was now on cordial terms with him, had zealously promoted his election, and Johnson had given it his warm ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... feature, what was the supreme quality, the one characteristic which marked the nature of the man. Was it his incomparable genius for finance? Was it his splendid oratorical powers? Was it his marvellous fecundity of mind? In my estimation it was not any one of these qualities. Great as they were, there was one still more marked, and if I have to give my own impression, I would say that the one trait which was dominant in his nature, which marked the man more distinctly than any other, was ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... of unbelievers, we do not find that the population of this new colony was in anywise hindered thereby; on the contrary, they multiplied to a degree which would be incredible to any man unacquainted with the marvelous fecundity of this ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... literary artist, but a few remarks may be made on some of the features of his art which are most conspicuous in the poems selected for this volume. It is scarcely necessary to dwell upon the poet's extraordinary fecundity of words and images. Occasionally, especially in his later works, this degenerates into diffuseness, and he exhibits a tendency to repetition and a fondness for long enumeration of names and details. On the other hand, he constantly ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... which I estimate the total population, including old men, women and children. I ought here to observe, that I have chosen this medium of six and one-half between the five persons estimated in Spain and eight in the Indies, as constituting each family, or entire tribute; for although the prodigious fecundity of the women in the latter hemisphere, and the facility of maintaining their numerous offspring, both the effects of the benignity of the climate and their sober way of living, sufficiently warrant the conclusion, that a greater number of persons enter into the composition of ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... the years of befuddling emptiness that had marked his attitudes toward the surfaces of thought about him. The emotionless disillusion of his nature had finally produced an adventure for him—the adventure of mental fecundity. ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... this harvest," says Mr. Barrow, "ripe for gathering at all seasons of the year,—without the labour of tillage—without expense of seed or manure—without the payment of rent or taxes—is inexhaustible, the extraordinary fecundity of the most valuable kinds of fish would alone afford abundant proof. To enumerate the thousands, and even millions of eggs which are impregnated in the herring, the cod, the ling, and, indeed, in almost the whole of the esculent ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... chose a place where four roads met as the scene of this assembly, or if that was not convenient, the neighbourhood of a lake. Upon this spot nothing would ever afterwards grow, as the hot feet of the demons and witches burnt the principle of fecundity from the earth, and rendered it barren for ever. When orders had been once issued for the meeting of the sabbath, all the wizards and witches who failed to attend it were lashed by demons with a rod made of serpents or scorpions, as a punishment for their inattention or ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... We need not wonder, therefore, that in her sanctuary on the Aventine she was represented by an image copied from the many-breasted idol of the Ephesian Artemis, with all its crowded emblems of exuberant fecundity. Hence too we can understand why an ancient Roman law, attributed to King Tullus Hostilius, prescribed that, when incest had been committed, an expiatory sacrifice should be offered by the pontiffs in the grove of Diana. For we know that the crime of incest is commonly supposed to cause a ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Englishman as I appreciate the vital qualities of the bee, I do not guarantee the Englishman against being, like the bee (or the Canaanite) smoked out and unloaded of his honey by beings inferior to himself in simple acquisitiveness, combativeness, and fecundity, but superior to him in ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw |
