"Humidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... against burning. Though the seminal humour seems of a contrary nature to fire, yet the body completed proves a combustible lump, wherein fire finds flame even from bones, and some fuel almost from all parts; though the metropolis of humidity seems least disposed unto it, which might render the skulls of these urns less burned than other bones. But all flies or sinks before fire almost in all bodies: when the com- mon ligament is dissolved, the attenuable ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... occupied by the armies was low and swampy, a character which it possessed in ancient times; the marshes on the southern side being supposed to be the same in which Marius concealed himself from his enemies during his proscription. [20] Its natural humidity was greatly increased, at this time, by the excessive rains, which began earlier and with much more violence than usual. The French position was neither so low nor so wet as that of the Spaniards. It had the advantage, moreover, of being supported ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... The gate was closed. Beyond it was a burial ground —a dreadful spot in which the night was very slowly stirring, but where I could dimly see heaps of dishonoured graves and stones, hemmed in by filthy houses with a few dull lights in their windows and on whose walls a thick humidity broke out like a disease. On the step at the gate, drenched in the fearful wet of such a place, which oozed and splashed down everywhere, I saw, with a cry of pity and horror, a woman lying—Jenny, the mother of the ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... discovery. Meantime, the water left in the shallow lake, cut off from the flow of the river, gradually evaporated—a thing that would take but a few years in that country, where the heat is intense and the humidity very low. That left somewhere about 2,000 miles of desert land, covered with a deposit of salt from the sea water which had evaporated, and most of it below the level of the sea. That is the Colorado desert as it has ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... rain seldom pours down here, but falls in a steady drizzle from a hopelessly leaden sky, under which a grey and sodden landscape presents a picture of dreary desolation. But this damp cheerlessness has its advantages, for incessant humidity sheds perpetual verdure over the coast-districts, where the thermometer rarely falls as low as zero Fahr. Winter only sets in here about the 1st of December, and snow has vanished by the end of May, while in the interior lakes and rivers are still ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... more popular sanatorium for this disease, is a complete delusion. Instead of the climate being essentially dry, it is saturated with humidity during a great part of the year; and the peculiar sirocco of the place is of a hot, dry, irritating nature. An intelligent medical author, who had resorted to Madeira for change of air, remarks, that 'very frequent and remarkable ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... self-preservation demand, that they who yield us food and comfort, should have ample food and comfort themselves—that they who aid to clothe us should have at least sufficient covering to protect them from the rigour and humidity of the climate in which they labour—that they should have houses fitted for the inhabitants of a civilized country, not wigwams worse than those of the savage—that they should be taught and led and ...
— Facts for the Kind-Hearted of England! - As to the Wretchedness of the Irish Peasantry, and the Means for their Regeneration • Jasper W. Rogers
... a ready-made way, a crevice through which it can slip; but this crevice I have never been able to discover. What about a dissolving fluid which would soften the mortar under the point of the ovipositor? No, for I see not a trace of humidity around the point where the thread is at work. I fall back upon a fissure, a lack of continuity somewhere, although my examination fails to discover any on the Mason-bee's nest. I was better served in another case. Leucopsis dorsigera, FAB., settles her eggs on ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... as ten o'clock crowds began to gather in Beresford-place, and in an hour about ten thousand men were present. The morning had succeeded to the hopeless humidity of the night, and the drizzling rain fell with almost dispiteous persistence. The early trains from Kingstown and Dalkey, and all the citerior townlands, brought large numbers into Dublin; and Westland-row, Brunswick, ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... the old vapour-pot system with the steam shooting out into the room. Look here!" He led Janet to the apparatus in which the pure air is forced through wet cloths, removing the dust, explaining how the ventilation and humidity were regulated automatically, how the temperature of the room ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Europe, I ascribe to two causes: the first is, the number of woods, which, though scattered up and down, cover the face of this country: the second, the great number of rivers. The former prevent the sun from warming the earth; and the latter diffuse a great degree of humidity: not to mention the continuity of this country with those to the northward; from which it follows, that the winds blowing from that quarter are much colder than if they traversed the sea in their course. For it is well known that the air is never so hot, ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... each day the harvested nuts must be placed in cold storage at temperatures between 32 deg.F. and 45 deg.F. It has been found that a nearly air-tight container is required in order to maintain a relative humidity of 100% and prevent too much drying of the nuts. A 50-pound tin lard can with one 20d nail hole in the side near the lid has proven to be a good container for large quantities and these same cans also make good shipping containers merely by wiring on the lids. One-gallon friction ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... home, and set her face steadily forward towards Guildford. The chill freshness of the November air was pleasant after the long period of oppressive warmth and closeness which had gone before, and now that the leaves had really fallen from the trees, there was less of the heavy humidity in the air that seemed to hold the germs of distemper and transmit them alike to ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... been split lengthwise, and the internal substance of which was very phosphorescent, could imbibe olive oil many times and yet continue for a long time to give a feeble light. By preserving these Rhizomorphae in an adequate state of humidity, I have been able for many evenings to renew the examination of their phosphorescence; the commencement of dessication, long before they really perish, deprives them of the faculty of giving light. Those which had been dried for more than a month, when plunged into water, commenced ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... rainy, hot, humid summers (southwest monsoon, June to September); less cloudy, scant rainfall, mild temperatures, lower humidity during winter (northeast monsoon, ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... It had rained all night. The roaring of the overflowing gutters filled the deserted streets, in which the houses, like sponges, absorbed the humidity, which penetrating to the interior, made the walls sweat from cellar to garret. Jeanne had left the convent the day before, free for all time, ready to seize all the joys of life, of which she had dreamed so long. She was afraid her father would not set out for the new home ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... hot blood. Moreover, every thing around us seemed curiously to have swelled and grown larger and softer and less cold of outline; the whole scene, though as motionless as ever, appeared to have taken on a sort of bright-red humidity, and deposited that humidity in purple, scintillating, quivering dew on the turf's various spikes and tufts. Gradually, also, the shadows were deepening and lengthening, while on the further side of the cemetery wall a cow lowed at intervals, in a gross and ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... never, so to speak, "met". The subject, from some occult sense of decorum, was tabu. If an anti were setting forth her views when a suffragist entered the room she instantly ceased and began to talk about humidity or the Balkans. A suffragist would no more have marshalled her arguments for the overthrow of an equal than she would have corrected a point of etiquette. But each went out with zeal into New England villages for the conversion ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... confinement, to take wing, they detach wherever it is most convenient to them, their envelope, or web, a portion of which remains suspended to the trunk of the tree, where it waves to and fro like a streamer, and which becomes more or less white, according as the air and humidity of the season and situation admit. This natural silk paper has been gathered measuring a yard and a half, of an elliptical shape, which is peculiar to all ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... narrow rules wherein it is manifested to the eyes of the profane. When they teach that creation's object and end was man, your theologians and your philosophers reason like the multiped of Versailles or the Tuileries, who believe the humidity of the cellars is made for their special use and that the remainder of the castle is uninhabitable. The system of the world, as Canon Copernicus taught in the last century, following the doctrines of Aristarchus of Samos and Pythagorean philosophers, is doubtless known to you, as there have ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... time, [b] warme well your garments at the fire, and warm the linings of the same, for it helpeth concoction, and remoueth all humidity and moysture. But my father did not allow of this custome, warning men of strength, and those that are borne for the Common-wealth, not to accustom themselves to such kind of softnesse, which doe weaken our bodies. Also [c] when ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... feet was widely prevalent amongst the troops in France during the European War. Although allied to frost-bite, cold appears to play a less important part in its causation than humidity and constriction of the limbs producing ischaemia of the feet. Changes were found in the endothelium of the blood vessels, the axis cylinders of nerves, and the muscles. The condition does not ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... the sun. In April the horizon begins to resume the misty veil. The mornings are cool and overcast, but the middle of the day is clear. In a few weeks after, the brightness of noon also disappears. The great humidity gives rise to many diseases, particularly fevers, and the alternations from heat to damp cause dysentery. On an average, the victims to this disease are very numerous. It is endemic, and becomes, at apparently regular but distant periods, epidemic. The intermittent fevers ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... at different stations to cure these local complaints. The electrician soon learns to diagnose and prescribe for this, his most valuable charge. At Aden, where they suffer much from humidity, the mouse-mill is or has been surrounded with burning carbon. At Malta a gas flame was used for the same purpose. At Suez, where they suffer from drought, a cloud of steam was kept rising round the instrument, saturating the air and paper. ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... state that it is on the barometer that I now place my somewhat limited reliance on a hunting morning, and not on the hygrometer, on the weight of the column of air on a given point of the surface of the earth, rather than on the state of the evaporations, the relative humidity, and the dew point. And I have noticed that the best scenting days have been those when the thermometer has given readings from 38 up to 46 Fahrenheit in the shade. A high and steady glass, an almost imperceptible east or north-east wind, with ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... night falls beneath the sky and the stars. [58] The soil, though improper for the olive, the vine, and other productions of warmer climates, is fertile, and suitable for corn. Growth is quick, but maturation slow; both from the same cause, the great humidity of the ground and the atmosphere. [59] The earth yields gold and silver [60] and other metals, the rewards of victory. The ocean produces pearls, [61] but of a cloudy and livid hue; which some impute to unskilfulness in ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... smooth, a deplorable business, for it made the paper very moisture absorbent, a condition fatal in such a humid climate as in these islands. Moreover, as the alum used is impure and contains a large proportion of iron salts, the humidity and weather oxidize it which finally darkens the paper, so that Philippine books present a coloration which runs the gamut of tones from the color of bone to that of ...
— Doctrina Christiana • Anonymous
... Mrs. Pierce's generally meant a resort to a handkerchief, and Mr. Pierce did not care for any increase of atmospheric humidity just then. He therefore concluded that since his wit was taken seriously, he would try a bit ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... reduced her to mere passivity. The only wish the humidity of the place left in her was to stand motionless. The helpless flatness of the landscape gave her, as it gives all such temperaments, a sense of bare equality with, and no superiority to, a single entity ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... air; and the soil, in which they are constructed, should be essentially conservative, the air being never changed, is constantly of the same temperature, very dry, and not subject to the variations of humidity, which affect the external air: this, with other necessary precautions being observed, they will preserve the corn twenty or thirty years perfectly sound. In countries, (like that of the Cape of Good Hope,) subject to drought, inundations, or locusts, these ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... clear, temperature -25 deg.. It was wonderfully mild considering the temperature—this sounds paradoxical, but the sensation of cold does not conform to the thermometer—it is obviously dependent on the wind and less obviously on the humidity of the air and the ice crystals floating in it. I cannot very clearly account for this effect, but as a matter of fact I have certainly felt colder in still air at -10 deg. than I did to-day when the thermometer was down to -25 deg., ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... lay six hundred miles of barren hills, swampy kevirs, brier-covered wastes, and salty deserts, with here and there some kanot-fed oases. To the south lay the lifeless desert of Luth, the "Persian Sahara," the humidity of which is the lowest yet recorded on the face of the globe, and compared with which "the Gobi of China and the Kizil-Kum of central Asia are fertile regions." It is our extended and rather unique experience on the former of these two that prompts us to refrain from further description ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... Wales, cursed with a weeping climate, owing to the same cause in both, the neighbourhood of high mountains, and a westerly situation, exposed to the vapours of the Atlantic ocean. This air, however, notwithstanding its humidity, is so healthy, that the natives are scarce ever visited by any other disease than the smallpox, and certain cutaneous evils, which are the effects of dirty living, the great and general reproach of the commonalty of this kingdom. Here are a great many living monuments of longaevity; ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... day for the operation, as the glass should be perfectly dry, and unaffected by the humidity of the atmosphere. Of course, if you have a choice, it is more convenient to work on your glass before it is fixed in the frame. If you are working on a piece of unattached glass, lay it on a flat table (a marble slab is preferable), over which you must previously lay ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... permeating every other interest, is the orange. As to dampness, a physician threatened with consumption, and naturally desirous of finding the driest air, began while at Coronado Beach a simple but sure test for comparative degrees of "humidity" by just hanging a woolen stocking out of his window at night. At that place it was wet all through, quite moist at Los Angeles, very much less so at Pasadena, dry as a bone or red herring or an old-fashioned sermon ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... important of external laws are those relating to climate, since any species can flourish only within narrower or wider, but always fixed limits, of temperature, humidity etc., ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... white and hung with chintz, seemed to keep some traces of the elegant gallantry of the eighteenth century. A heap of still-glowing ashes—which testified to the pains taken to dispel humidity—filled the fireplace, whose marble mantlepiece supported a bust of Marie Antoinette in bisuit. Attached to the frame of the tarnished and discoloured mirror, two brass hooks, that had once doubtless served the ladies of old-fashioned days to hang their chatelaines on, ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... heat, we give it water in abundance and perfect sanitation and light everywhere, we give it ventilation less successfully than we might, and finally we give it the human quality that is so modern. There are no dungeons in the good modern house, no disgraceful lairs for servants, no horrors of humidity. ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... us both with a soporific humidity; and equally immersed in one unconscious thought, we remained there side by ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... they will sometimes stretch themselves and turn in their webs so as to take it from the point of a pin or camel's-hair pencil. Besides water to drink, they require an atmosphere saturated with moisture, like that of their native island, the relative humidity being about seventy on the Hygrodeik scale. If stroked upon the back, they often raise their bodies as a cat does, and sometimes put back a leg to push away your finger. They may be allowed to run over one's person with perfect safety, but, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... leaving the Nascaupee River. The morning was fearfully hot, and we floundered through marshes with heavy packs, bathed in perspiration, and fairly breathing flies and mosquitoes. Not a breath of air stirred, and the humidity and heat were awful. Stanton and Duncan remained to pitch the tent and bring up some of our stuff that had been left at the second lake, while Richards, Easton, Pete and I trudged three miles over the hills for the caribou meat ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... culpable degree. Pardon me if I add that this suspicion is to some extent confirmed by my finding you destitute of protection against imbriferous inclemency under atmospheric conditions whose contingent humidity should be obvious to a being endowed with the most ordinary allotment ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... end of water, month after month! The heat is the same all the year round—not very excessive, seldom 104 deg., but still oppressive and enervating because of the humidity of the air. Yet the voyage was not monotonous. Leaning against the masts and gunwale, or leisurely moving the oars, the soldiers could observe the dolphins leaping in the river, the sudden darts of the alligators as they hunted the fish through the water, or the ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... well last night. It was close in my room, and this morning the humidity's oppressive. You know what that does to us of ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... evaporation, thereby also controlling the sap pressure. With the exception of shading, pruning and defoliating, this is about the only method we have of preventing evaporation. Defoliation, of course, interferes with the tree's power of growth. Controlling the humidity is probably not practical on ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... breath in the hall, as the curtain fell behind him. It was an immense relief to escape from the oppressive humidity and heat of the flower-room, and from that ridiculous bore ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... light ones some two weeks ago. I got jerry that there would be some class to the humidity, so I made the ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey
... true, that many of the surrounding objects in nature are constantly tending to man's destruction. The excess of heat and cold, humidity and dryness, noxious exhalations from the earth, the floating atoms in the atmosphere, the poisonous vapors from decomposed animal and vegetable matter, with many other invisible agents, are exerting their deadly influence; ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... and assist the other, to perform and fulfil all the Works of the Lord; and so an influence was permitted the Earth to bring forth by the Lights of Heaven, as also an internal Heat, to warm and digest that which was too cold for the Earth, by reason of its humidity, as unto every Creature a peculiar fashion according to its kind; so that a subtile sulphurous Vapour, is stired up by the Starry Heaven, not the common, but another more clarified and pure Vapour, distinct from others, which ...
— Of Natural and Supernatural Things • Basilius Valentinus
... hitherto proceeded, it will also appear that cattle are more subject to these diseases than any other species of domesticated animals, and that the pestilence is always most fearful among them. It is also evident that the maladies which proceed from cold or humidity are more frequent in the temperate and southern parts of Europe than those which depend upon drought, or almost ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... September took their departure from Timor for Van Dieman's Land, having on board a large proportion of sick. On drawing near the coast, the humidity of the climate and short allowance of water caused ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... neatly fenced gardens; the banks everywhere were either covered with timber or waving with wild grass five feet in height; and the luxuriant growth in many places of flowers and weeds testified to the richness of the soil and the warm humidity of the climate. Primroses, cowslips, marsh violets, buttercups, wild-roses, cinquefoil, iris, and azure larkspur grow everywhere throughout the valley in the greatest abundance; and a peculiar species of umbelliferae, with hollow-jointed stems, attains in many places a height of ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... of Winnipeg in summer. The fresh northwest breeze that sweeps the Manitoba plains had dropped. Dark thunder-clouds rolled about the sky, but the sun was hot and an enervating humidity brooded over the town. The perspiring crowd in Main Street moved slackly, the saloon bars were full, and the groups of holiday-makers flocking to the ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... N. moisture; moistness &c. adj.; humidity, humectation[obs3]; madefaction|, dew; serein[obs3]; marsh &c. 345; hygrometry, hygrometer. V. moisten, wet; humect[obs3], humectate[obs3]; sponge, damp, bedew; imbue, imbrue, infiltrate, saturate; soak, drench &c. (water) 337. be moist &c. adj.; not have a dry thread; perspire &c. (exude) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... it—another mystery, profounder and graver, floats amid these thick mists, perhaps the mystery of the creation itself! For was it not in stagnant and muddy water, amid the heavy humidity of moist land under the heat of the sun, that the first germ of life pulsated and expanded to ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... possible to forecast a quite different depth and distribution of the ores from that which might be inferred from present surface conditions. Present surface conditions, of low relief, considerable humidity, and with the water table usually not more than 100 feet from the surface, do not promise ore deposits at great depth. The erosion which formed the old pre-Cambrian surface, however, started on a country of great relief and semi-arid ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith |
