"Sterile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mind, and she was obliged to answer so many questions that the strain was relieved. They walked amidst a wild and dismal scene. The hills were sterile and black. The salt ponds, sunken far below the level of the sea, from lack of rain, glittered white, but they were set with aloes and manchineel, and there were low and muddy flats to be avoided. It was a new aspect of nature to the child who had lived his four years amid ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... most perfect justice and a well-understood severity. But whatever were the difficulties I foresaw, without any apprehension of the troubles and dangers of every description that I should have to surmount, I proceeded straightforward towards the object I had traced out for myself. The road was sterile and encumbered with rocks; but I entered upon it with courage, and I succeeded in obtaining over the Indians such an influence, that they ultimately obeyed my voice as they would that of a parent. The character of the Tagaloc is extremely ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... oldest son of a poor New Hampshire farmer, who found great difficulty is wresting from his few sterile acres a living for his family. Nearly a year before, he had lost his only cow by a prevalent disease, and being without money, was compelled to buy another of Squire Green, a rich but mean neighbor, on a six months' note, on very unfavorable terms. As it required great economy to make both ends meet, ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... to encourage, rather than discourage, the expression of new beliefs and the dissemination of knowledge tending to support them. But the very opposite is, in fact, the case. From childhood upward, everything is done to make the minds of men and women conventional and sterile. And if, by misadventure, some spark of imagination remains, its unfortunate possessor is considered unsound and dangerous, worthy only of contempt in time of peace and of prison or a traitor's death in time of war. Yet such men ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... there was a change for the worse, and the road from bad became abominable, rising by an easy ascent between great sterile fields in which the only signs of vegetation were the everlasting pine woods with their dark verdure, forming a dismal contrast with the gray-white soil. It was the most forlorn spot they had seen yet. The ill-paved road, washed by the recent rains, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... as he sat with them around the fire. Their sterile fields in Poor Valley had only served to eke out their subsistence. This year the corn-crop had failed, and the wheat was hardly better. The winter had found them without special provision, but without special anxiety, ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the rows are from each other, but sometimes in squares. Pride in appearance and convenience in vineyard operations make perfect alignment imperative. Many varieties of grapes, especially of American species, are partially self-sterile, so that some varieties must have others interplanted with them for cross-pollination. This is usually done by setting alternate rows of the variety to be pollinated and the cross-pollinator. All self-fertile varieties ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... dropped on the treeless plains, the barbed-wire fences running at right angles, and the towns mere assemblages of flimsy wooden sheds with painted-pine battlement, produced on me the effect of an almost helpless and sterile poverty. ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... bacteria can be kept entirely free from germs while in contact with the open air at a temperature of from 42 to 43 degrees Centigrade. Now appear the three remarkable results. After about one month of waiting the culture dies—that is to say, if put into a fresh bouillon it becomes absolutely sterile. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... past the charred timbers and ashes of my claim, across the scorched and stunted fields blighted by drought, avoiding the great cracks which had opened in the dry earth and lay gaping like thirsty mouths for rain. The crops were burnt, and the land which had seemed so fertile looked bleak and sterile. ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... as the glass apparatus is concerned, differs but little from that of a chemical laboratory, and the cleanliness of the apparatus is equally important. The glassware comprised in the following list, in addition to being clean, must be stored in a sterile or germ-free condition. ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... studied. There breathes under the wind of those dismal forests that are called secrets of the body, one of those mysteries that the angels of destruction whisper in the ear of night as it descends upon the earth. That man is better or worse than God has made him. His bowels are like those of sterile women, where nature has not completed her work, or there is distilled in the shadow ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... certain technical skill in composition and construction, and disheartened by repeated failures, exclaims with petulance: "What shall I write about?" She dolefully imagines that the list of feasible subjects is exhausted; her wearied brain refuses any longer to carry on its sterile activities, and despair settles down upon her. This is because her eyes have not been opened to the limitless possibilities for the making of good "copy" which exist on every side. Most probably she has been looking ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... of his labours—labours from which the youngest and least impressionable planeur might well have shrunk. He had traced through cold and heat, across the deeps of the oceans, with instruments of his own invention, over the inhospitable heart of the polar ice and the sterile visage of the deserts, league by league, patiently, unweariedly, remorselessly, from their ever-shifting cradle under the magnetic pole to their exalted death-bed in the utmost ether of the upper atmosphere each one of the Isoconical Tellurions Lavalle's Curves, as we call them today. He ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... with fresh blossoms and living fruits from the fullness of her power. In the endless succession of new forms creating Time plaits the wreath of Eternity, and blessed is he whom Fortune selects to be healthy and bear fruit. We are not sterile flowers among other living beings; the gods do not wish to exclude us from the great concatenation of living things, and are giving us plain tokens ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... enjoy the rights of freemen in their native clime!—And, oh sir, when we look to ourselves—when we see the fertilization of those barren wastes which always mark the land of slaves—when we see a dense population of freemen—when lovely cottages and improved farms arise upon the now deserted and sterile soil—and where now deep silence reigns, we hear the chimes of religion from the village spire;—will you not—will not every friend of his country, thank this Society for its patriotic labors! Yes! Kings ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... and out among each other forming usually a cushion-shaped aethalioid mass. The outer layer sterile, often calcareous, forming a fragile crust, more or less defined. The middle layer sporiferous with calcigerous capillitium. The lowest layer ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... maniac calumny. Why did not this base Plebeian, anterior to his giving publicity to the tartaric nausea that rankled at his gloomy heart, forward the corroding philippic, and bid defiance to my contradiction? No, no; he knew full well that with his scanty stock of English ammunition scattered over the sterile floor of his literary magazine, he could not have the effrontery, impudence, or presumption to enter the list of philosophical and scientific disputation with one who has traversed the thorny paths of literature, explored its mazy windings, and who is thoroughly ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... reputation for saying the wrong thing, and, tenacious like all her breed, she would hold to it when she had said it, and add to it another wrong thing, and so on. With the decease of her husband the family tenacity, the family matter-of-factness, had gone sterile within her. A great talker, when allowed, she would converse without the faintest animation for hours together, relating, with epic monotony, the innumerable occasions on which Fortune had misused her; nor did she ever perceive that her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was going very slowly, and she could now see why. They were mounting a steep incline. The rich, damp earth of the plains beyond Robertville, with its rank grass, its moist ploughland and groves of eucalyptus, was already left behind. The train was crawling in a cup of the hills, grey, sterile and abandoned, without roads or houses, without a single tree. Small, grey-green bushes flourished here and there on tiny humps of earth, but they seemed rather to emphasise than to diminish the aspect of poverty presented by ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... little use for slaves at home, but for slave ships she had abundant use. With a sterile soil, and with the sea at her doors swarming with edible fish and beckoning to her sails, her hardy industry found its best field on the ocean. The fisheries were the foundation of her commerce. The thrifty Yankee sold the best of his catch in Europe (here again we follow Weeden); the medium quality ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... up with all those sterile and wanton party movements which discredit our days, uttering over and over again hollow phrases in condemnation of all that is noble and sacred, appealing to the most execrable passions ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... happening everywhere," said Hadria, "the poor, sterile lives exhaust the strong and full ones. I will not be one of those vampire souls, at least not while I have my senses ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... on board the Queen had their own hobbies. The monotony of voyaging through hyper-space had long ago impressed upon men the need for occupying both hands and mind during the sterile days while they were forced into close companionship with few duties to keep them alert. Jellico's cabin was papered with tri-dee pictures of the rare animals and alien creatures he had studied in their native haunts or of which he kept careful and painstaking records. Tau ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... to the mansion of Francis, and had completed the terrace of Henry. Soon, however, the magnificent King conceived an inexplicable disgust for his birthplace. He quitted Saint Germains for Versailles, and expended sums almost fabulous in the vain attempt to create a paradise on a spot singularly sterile and unwholesome, all sand or mud, without wood, without water, and without game. Saint Germains had now been selected to be the abode of the royal family of England. Sumptuous furniture had been hastily sent in. The nursery of the Prince of Wales had been carefully furnished ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... beautiful outcroppings are sometimes indications of noxious weeds hidden below the surface. Weeds are not unfrequently born from the very richness and exuberance of the soil, whilst many a dark and seemingly sterile stem conceals the embryo of fruit and flowers which a genial sunshine will call into life ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... years the men who dwelt in the rude log cabins of that frost-bitten and sterile region had been serving as volunteers in the army, fighting for a cause which was none of theirs and which they did not at all understand or try to understand. They fought upon instinct alone. It had always been the custom of the mountain dwellers to shoulder their ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... drop the clerical simile, let us peep within the sheathing spathe, or, better still, strip it off altogether. Doctor Torrey states that the dark-striped spathes are the fertile plants, those with green and whitish lines, sterile. Within are smooth, glossy columns, and near the base of each we shall find the true flowers, minute affairs, some staminate; others, on distinct plants, pistillate, the berry bearers; or rarely both male and female ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... quia absurdum, and this is opposed to the critical attitude which denies the possibility of individual survival in the sense previously defined. Thus Unamuno leads us to his inner deadlock: his reason can rise no higher than scepticism, and, unable to become vital, dies sterile; his faith, exacting anti-rational affirmations and unable therefore to be apprehended by the logical mind, remains incommunicable. From the bottom of this abyss Unamuno builds up his theory of life. But is it a theory? Unamuno does not claim for it such an intellectual ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... protected against that outer air of reality which braces ordinary men, but benumbs and disintegrates the whole vital apparatus of such an organisation as Rousseau's. If he had been devoid of this feeling about women, his character might very possibly have remained sterile. That feeling was the complementary contribution, without which ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... he got also conditionally a note from me to my next neighbor, a wealthy retired physician, possessed of a large domain, a man eminently practical and businesslike in his management of it. He employed many laborers on the sterile waste he called his "farm," and it occurred to me that if there really was any work in my friend, the Tramp, which my own indolence and preoccupation had failed to bring out, he was ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... upon him all sorts of foolish schemes for "compromising" or "settling the difficulties,"—phrases which were euphemisms of the peace Democracy to disguise a concession of success to the South. The President endured these sterile suggestions with his wonted patience. But toward the close of June, Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, was seized with the notion that, if he should go to Washington on a personal mission ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... coming down from the mountains to leave the front. I never had the feeling more strongly than when we passed out of Belgium this afternoon. I had it most strongly as we drove by a cluster of villas standing apart in a sterile region of sea-grass and sand. In one of those villas for nearly a year, two hearts at the highest pitch of human constancy have held up a light to the world. It is impossible to pass that house without a sense of awe. Because ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... admitted, however, that the growth of the once vast supposed relatively sterile region west of the Missouri River is not due in its entirety to the building of railroads, but that the idea of absolute sterility was a mistaken one; without a fertile soil and other possibilities for the advancement of civilization there, railroads would never have been constructed. The ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... otherwise trivial or monotonous. If silly at times, she never was stupid—distinction of meaning and moment.—A blameless creature, incapable of thinking, still more of speaking, evil of the worst or weakest, her inherent goodness washed about you like sun-warmed water, if sterile yet translucently pure. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... loss to France.[135] The expulsion of the Acadians, a harmless and inoffensive people, from Nova Scotia, is another instance of the revenge that natural laws inflict upon tyranny and injustice. Next to the persecuted Pilgrims crossing a dreary ocean in mid-winter to the sterile coasts of a land of savages for freedom's sake, history hardly furnishes a more touching picture than that of forty thousand homeless, friendless, starving Negroes going to a land already consecrated with the blood of the martyrs to the cause of free Soil and unrestricted liberty. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... character, and assuming the regimen indirect as soon as it is addressed to man, it signifies excitement, agitation, rancor, revolt full of reproach, premeditated vengeance, menace never ceasing to threaten if retaliation should ever become possible, feeding itself meanwhile with a bitter, if sterile hatred. ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... human beings shown more distinctly, than when France wasted her strength and treasure in a sterile contest on the continent of Europe, and permitted, with scarce an effort, her North American colonies to be torn ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... and without a murmur;" it also signifies "excitement, agitation, rancor, revolt full of reproach, premeditated vengeance, menace never ceasing to threaten if retaliation should ever become possible, feeding itself meanwhile with a bitter if sterile hatred." ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... the more easily acquired. Gonorrhea has even more dangerous consequences in women than in men. The gonococcus bacilli infect all the inner female genital organs. They cause frequent inflammations and lead to growths in the belly. Women thus attacked usually are apt to be sterile; they suffer agonies, and often become chronic invalids. The child born of a gonorrheal mother, while passing through the infected genital organs, comes to life with infected eyelids. This is Blennorrhea, which may result ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... fellow-creatures lessen our own private and particular woe? No, no, each suffers on his own account, each struggles with his own grief, each sheds his own tears. And besides," he went on, "what has my life been up to the present moment? A cold, barren, sterile arena, in which I have always fought for others, never for myself. Sometimes for a king, sometimes for a woman. The king has betrayed, the woman disdained me. Miserable, unlucky wretch that I am! Women! Can I ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... fifteenth century, otherwise somewhat sterile, introduced one distinguished poet, Charles of Orleans, graceful and pleasing; and one who at moments rose to the height of being almost a great poet: this was Francis Villon, the celebrated author of The Ballade ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... attempt. The ruins have been recently explored by Germans. The embankments which regulated the flow of the Euphrates and Tigris have given way, and at the present time the whole region round Babylon is marshy and malarious. In the words of Jeremiah, li. 43, "Her cities are a desolation, a sterile land, and a wilderness, a place wherein no ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... evils that are human and necessary, and therefore always present. I detest such waste of energy, and I agree with all my heart in the statement recently made by the Editor of "The New Age" that in moments such as these, when any waste is inexcusable, sterile complaint is the worst of waste. But my complaint here is not sterile. It is fruitful. This Capitalist Press has come at last to warp all judgment. The tiny oligarchy which controls it is irresponsible and feels itself ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... seeks out the first; They call on their gods, who were deaf to their cries, For the punishing flame caused their cold granite eyes In tears of hot lava to burst! Thus away in the whirlwind did everything pass, The man and the city, the soil and its grass! God burnt this sad, sterile champaign; Naught living was left of this people destroyed, And the unknown wind which blew over the void, Each mountain changed ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... vernal rain Warmed the chill heart of earth again, Tilled the dull plot of sterile ground, Within the dank and narrow round That compassed his obscure domain; With earnest zeal, thro' heat and cold, He wrought and turned the sluggish mold, And all in furrows straight and fair He sowed the yellow seed with care, Trusting the ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... Blancas. The Arkansas river plays quite a part in the whole of this region—I see it, or its high-cut rocky northern shore, for miles, and cross and recross it frequently, as it winds and squirms like a snake. The plains vary here even more than usual—sometimes a long sterile stretch of scores of miles—then green, fertile and grassy, an equal length. Some very large herds of sheep. (One wants new words in writing about these plains, and all the inland American West—the terms, far, large, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... stream, ascended into a higher portion of undulating country, that gradually became less and less interesting, until, in the end, we all pronounced it the tamest and least inviting region we had yet seen in Europe. I do not say that the country was particularly sterile, but it was common-place, and offered fewer objects of interest than any other we had yet visited. Until now, our destination was not settled, though I had almost decided to go to Nuremberg, and thence, by Ratisbonne and the Danube, to ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... he started on his travels again toward Cape Cod. Five miles beyond a large village, in a flat, sterile, gloomy region, he alighted with his baggage, and said, "This is the place for me." The train went on, and the depot-master went into his little den without noticing Osgood. Several tall school-girls, who had come to watch for the train, strolled down a cross-road, and he was alone. He ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal—these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance were fragmentary and sterile. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... is impossible to look up a passage.[76] The French translation by Jean de Pauly[B] professes to present the entire text of the Venetian Talmud of 1520, but it does nothing of the kind.[77] The translator, in the Preface, in fact admits that he has left out "sterile discussions" and has throughout attempted to tone down "the brutality of certain expressions which offend our ears." This of course affords him infinite latitude, so that all passages likely to prove displeasing to the "Hebraisants," to whom his work is particularly ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... restless, feverish couch of pain, thought flies untrammelled through the circuit of the globe, far—far to the frigid regions of the north, where almost eternal winter reigns, and we view the hardy inhabitant of that sterile clime, wrapped in his furs, drawn by the swift-footed reindeer, across ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... eyes of the universe a struggle between perfidy and weakness, egotism and ambition;—the rising generation would commence the task of purifying this earth, so sullied by vice. It would bring, not the peace of despotism or the sterile agitations of intrigue, but fire and sword to lay low the thrones and exterminate the oppressors. O more fortunate posterity, thou art not stranger to us! It is for thee that we brave the storms and the intrigues ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... came, it was to shine upon the same broken and unsightly quarter of the world. Mile upon mile, and not a tree, a bird, or a river. Only down the long, sterile canyons, the train shot hooting, and awoke the resting echo. That train was the one piece of life in all the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit to be observed in this paralysis of man and nature. And when I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sun was several hours high. My bed faced a window, and by raising myself on one elbow I could look out on what I expected would be the main street. To my astonishment I beheld a lonely country road winding up a sterile hill and disappearing over the ridge. In a cornfield at the right of the road was a small private graveyard, inclosed by a crumbling stone wall with a red gate. The only thing suggestive of life was this little corner lot occupied by death. I got ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... but on the sandy road and hummock-field some light was shining, like hopefulness against hope; the farm was ploughed no more; the ungrateful centuries were left behind and abandoned, like old wilderness battle-fields, so sterile that their great events remain ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... challenge to the wilderness that had lain sterile long, and he could forecast the grimness, but not the end of the coming struggle with rock and flood and snow. Other men had gone down vanquished in such a fight, he knew, and the forest they slept in had closed once more upon and hidden the little scars they made. Jimmy had also challenged ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... duchy of Prussia. Even after this accession of territory, the chiefs of the house of Hohenzollern hardly ranked with the Electors of Saxony and Bavaria. The soil of Brandenburg was for the most part sterile. Even round Berlin, the capital of the province, and round Potsdam, the favourite residence of the Margraves, the country was a desert. In some places, the deep sand could with difficulty be forced by assiduous tillage to yield thin crops of rye and oats. In other places, the ancient ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... interesting feature is the barren and desolate country to the east of Lake Dambeling, doubtless a continuation of the same sterile country seen by Mr. Roe, the surveyor-General, east of York many years previously; and probably from Mr. Eyre's observation, extending quite down to the southern coast. We had no means of ascertaining the width of this ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... bay. Yet more remote, and in another part of the prospect, might be caught, dim and shadowy, and backed by the darkest foliage, the ruined pillars of the ancient Posidonia. There, in the midst of his blackened and sterile realms, rose the dismal Mount of Fire; while on the other hand, winding through variegated plains, to which distance lent all its magic, glittered many and many a stream by which Etruscan and Sybarite, Roman and Saracen and Norman had, at intervals ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Italy on that side is not pleasing to the eye; you descend from the noble mountains of Germany into the Italian plains, through a long and sterile district, insomuch that travellers who have formed a magnificent idea of our country, begin to laugh, and imagine they have been purposely deluded with previous ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... whereby a true species may be known from a mere variety? Is there no criterion of species? Great authorities affirm that there is—that the unions of members of the same species are always fertile, while those of distinct species are either sterile, or their offspring, called hybrids, are so. It is affirmed not only that this is an experimental fact, but that it is a provision for the preservation of the purity of species. Such a criterion as this would ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... country and put them at work on specific questions as advisors to me, under Cabinet officers. One group on Taxes and Finance, one on Labor and Capital, one on Internal Improvements, one on Education and Health. And have a program agreeable to Congress, which is sterile because it is ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... the United States. About thirty thousand pipes are made annually, of which two thirds are exported. Little or no wine is produced on the southern slope of the island. The hills around Santa Cruz are little more than rugged peaks of naked rock. The scenery is wild and bold, but sterile; and scattered around are stupendous hills of lava, the products of former volcanic eruptions, but which have, for ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... the close of an unusually severe winter. The miller's craft was nigh useless, the current of the rivulet was almost still. Everything seemed so hard and frost-bound, that nature looked as though her fetters were rivetted for ever. But the dark and sterile aspect she displayed was bedizened with such beauteous frost-work, that light and glory rested upon all, and winter ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... highway called destiny—with a secret power within that impels him forward, but allows no pause nor retrograde. Along this highway are flowers, and briars, and thistles, and weeds, and shady woods, and barren rocks, and sterile bluffs, and glassy plots; but proportioned differently to each, as the Maker of all designs his path to be pleasant or otherwise. Beside this highway are perhaps a dozen minor paths, all running a similar ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... judges, there will always remain some room for error or prejudice. Why interdict to yourselves the means of reparation? Why condemn yourself to powerlessness to help opprest innocence? What good can come of the sterile regrets, these illusory reparations you grant to a vain shade, to insensible ashes? They are the sad testimonials of the barbarous temerity of your penal laws. To rob the man of the possibility of expiating ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... record is founded on fact. In the year 1808, a young female visited the grey, sterile mountain tract of Cefu Ogo, in Denbighshire, each day successively for two months. Her lover, who was a seaman on board one of the Welsh traders, had often met her there, and a tranquil, uninterrupted walk it afforded them, for exchanging ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... French Protestantism'—and the squire's shrug was superb—'Teutonic Protestantism is in the order of things, so to speak, but Latin Protestantism! There is no more sterile ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... no shop; he had no private fortune; but he was one of the true causers of the French Revolution, the rascally collectors of taxes, the underlings of the atrocious fermiers generaux, who wrung the last farthing from the already oppressed peasant, and made the whole realm of France as sterile, hopeless, and wretched, as a nation must inevitably become, if it is allowed to be the prey of an O'Connell in every parish. His nominal salary was under a hundred a-year; but we shall see the style he lives ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... civilized nations. In Germany that stock which was destined to bring back our country from degradation to historical importance did not grow up on the fertile banks of the Rhine or the Danube, but on the sterile sands of the March. ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... argument. They contend, that production precedes population; I, on the contrary, maintain that population precedes, and is indeed the cause of, production. They teach that man breeds up to the capital, or in proportion to the abundance of the food, he possesses: I assert, that he is comparatively sterile when he is wealthy, and that he breeds in proportion to his poverty; not meaning, however, by that poverty, a state of privation approaching to actual starvation, any more than, I suppose, they would contend, that extreme ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that sets it a-work; and learning a mere hoard of gold kept by a devil, till sack commences it and sets it in act and use. Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father, he hath, like lean, sterile and bare land, manured, husbanded and tilled with excellent endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should ...
— King Henry IV, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Chiswick edition]
... by the ocean, on some sterile length of sand or rock, and amongst sea-faring people? Still, you are girls to be envied; for the sea has grand thoughts to tell you, and the rocks are full of meaning. The bracing air, the salt breeze, the impetuous beat of the sea, must arouse energy within you which even the heat of ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... A barren and sterile country was soon spread before them, the sun was oppressively hot, and not a sign of water was to be observed in any direction. At last they arrived at a muddy pool, in which elephants had evidently been enjoying themselves, and the oxen and horses were but ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... respecting this subject, on their part, it would ill become them as subjects to make, or her, as an independent princess, to endure. England was the husband which she had betrothed to her; Englishmen were her children; while employed in rearing and governing such a family, she could not deem herself sterile or her life useless. She desired, for her own part, no higher character, nor fairer remembrance of her to be transmitted to posterity, than to have this inscription, when she should pay the debt of nature, engraven on her tomb: "Here lies Queen Elizabeth, who lived ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... commemorate the event and preserve the sacred relic which soon began working wonders for the good of the island, such as warding off Saracenic invasions, procuring plentiful vintages, and causing sterile cattle ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Germans know Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare better than we do, but they know nothing, and care nothing, for the sizzling, crackling stream of purposeless incident, and sterile comment, that pours in upon the readers of American newspapers, and which has had its part in making us the largest consumers of nerve-quieting drugs in the world. All too many of the pens that supply our press are without education, without experience, without responsibility ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... which he meant the sterile plains, which yield little except hay, looks rich with verdure in the mellow afternoon light, when midsummer is come, and the whole populace, men, women, and children, on Sundays and feast-days pour out of the city ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... fields and gardens of humanity, then it looks indeed like an enemy, or a long line of enemies; like a line of tawny wild beasts thus halted with their heads lifted. It is the feeling that such vain and sterile sand can yet make itself into something like a mountain range; and the traveller remembers all the tragedies of the desert, when he lifts up his eyes to those accursed hills, from whence no ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... sunlight and gleams of blue, that they had worked their way up through the cloud-layers. In process of time, indeed, they got clear of the mists altogether, and emerged on to the higher valleys of the Alps—vast, sterile, the white snow-plains glittering in the sun, except where the rocks showed through in points of intense black. There were no longer any pines. They were in a world of snow and barren rocks and brilliant sunlight, with a cold luminous blue sky overhead; themselves the only living creatures ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... trace out the complication of causes, an indiscriminate though large destruction of either sex would not tend to modify the sex-producing power of the species. With strictly social animals, such as bees or ants, which produce a vast number of sterile and fertile females in comparison with the males, and to whom this preponderance is of paramount importance, we can see that those communities would flourish best which contained females having a strong inherited tendency to produce more and more ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... them on the ground of common interests and sympathies, went quite as far as their evident superiority in arms and resources toward establishing the deep-founded and highly valued peace, without which the handful of white men could never have made good their footing upon that stern and sterile coast. ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... marching from Cassala we arrived at the valley of the Atbara. There was an extraordinary change in the appearance of the river between Gozerajup and this spot. There was no longer the vast sandy desert with the river flowing through its sterile course on a level with the surface of the country; but after traversing an apparently perfect flat of forty-five miles of rich alluvial soil, we had suddenly arrived upon the edge of a deep valley, between five and six miles wide, at the bottom of which, about two hundred ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... service, was on those occasions when we went down from London with the news of victory. A period of about ten years stretched from Trafalgar to Waterloo: the second and third years of which period (1806 and 1807) were comparatively sterile; but the rest, from 1805 to 1815 inclusively, furnished a long succession of victories; the least of which, in a contest of that portentous nature, had an inappreciable value of position—partly for its absolute interference with the plans of our enemy, but still more from its keeping alive in ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... may in dark nights produce injurious consequences. Having now passed the northern promontory, we steered southward for the roads of Santa Cruz. The shore here, consisting of high, steep masses of lava, presents a picturesque but desolate and sterile landscape, amidst which the eye seeks in vain for some spot capable of producing the rich wine of Teneriffe. Upon a point of rock about a thousand feet above the level of the sea, we saw a telegraph in ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... heart bursting with fond schemes to keep that precious mother alive. It's a splendid nature, that girl's; one that is in danger of being wrecked by its own impetuosity, but one so full and rich that it is capable of bubbling over and enriching all the dull and sterile ones about it. Now, if all the money I can rake and scrape together need not go to those languid, boneless children of my languid, boneless sister-in-law, I could put that brave little girl on her feet. I think she will be able to do battle with the world so long as she has her mother for a motive-power. ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... an idiot, that he might be a poet, and scribbled verses in plenty. But the distinguishing feature in this case was, that he waited for no failure, for no public ridicule or neglect, not even for any private nipping of the merciful, but so seldom effective, sort, to check those sterile growths. The critic was sufficiently early developed in him to prevent the corruption of the poet from presenting itself, in its usual disastrous fashion, to the senses of the world. Thus he lives (for his political and legal renown, though not inconsiderable, is comparatively ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... the infection as best he could, knowing there was almost no chance. He used all the penicillin he dared. Then he began sewing up the incision. It was all he could do, except for dressing the wound with a sterile bandage. He ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... The Indian Christian Church, hardly yet acclimatised so far as it is the creation of modern efforts, would she survive? The English sweet-pea, sown in India, produced its flowers, but not at first any vigorous self-propagating seed. The Br[a]hma Sam[a]j, graft of West on East, and still sterile as an intellectual coterie, how would it fare, cut off from its Western nurture? The [A]rya Sam[a]j—what, in that event, would be her resistance to the centripetal force that we have noted in her blind patriotism? The reactionary Theosophists—after ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... the stock manipulator, the paralyzing of whole industries, the overstimulation of others, for speculative purposes; the assignments and bank failures, the crises and panics, the deserted towns and the starving populations! Consider the energies wasted in the seeking of markets, the sterile trades, such as drummer, solicitor, bill-poster, advertising agent. Consider the wastes incidental to the crowding into cities, made necessary by competition and by monopoly railroad rates; consider the ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... for Damascus at dawn," he said cynically. "I don't care to be mocked there for bringing news of promises. We have had too many of those barren mares. I shall say that I have found everything here is sterile—the talk abortive—the men mere windy bellies without ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... bog-bean bloom and walked round the big boulders with which this sterile region is thickly strewn. The natives know nothing of Home or any other Rule, and you might as well speak to them of the Darwinian theory, or the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, or the Homeric studies of the Grand Old Man, or the origin of ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... drops out of the affair, and Mildred poorer, also wiser, returns to her home in England. She has embraced the Roman Catholic religion, but you do not feel she is sincerely pious. It is one more gesture in her sterile career. At the end we find her trying to evade the inevitable matrimony, for she is alone, her brother dead, and she an heiress. Suspicious of her suitor's motives—it is the same faithful Alfred—she wearily debates the situation: "Her nerves were shattered, and life grows terribly ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... misfortune was, that neither solitary Peckham nor its sterile neighbourhood, presented any expedients, either for the execution of the afore-mentioned design, or for the relief of poor Mrs. Wetenhall: she was visibly pining away, when, through fear of dying either with solitude or of want, she had recourse to ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... Berlin the country was now fertile and flat, and now sterile and flat; near the capital the level sandy waste spread almost to its gates. The train ran quickly through the narrow fringe of suburbs, and then they were in one of those vast Continental stations which put ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Dictionary," I must confess I have no wish to turn over another page of Voltaire. It is simply incredible to me that human beings possessed of the same senses as ours could find satisfaction for their imagination in the sterile moralising, stilted sentiment, superficial wit, and tiresome persiflage of that queer generation. I suppose they didn't really. I suppose they used to go off on the sly, and read Rabelais and Villon. I suppose it was only the preposterous "social world" of those ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Scott, of the Calcutta Botanic Gardens, informs me that seeds of the sweet-pea (Lathyrus odoratus) imported from England produce plants, with thick, rigid stems and small leaves, which rarely blossom and never yield seed; plants raised from French seed blossom sparingly, but all the flowers are sterile; on the other hand, plants raised from sweet-peas grown near Darjeeling in Upper India, but originally derived from England, can be successfully cultivated on the plains of India; for they flower and seed profusely, and ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... of their core. But this general disenchantment with the world—nay, with herself, since it appeared that she was not made for easy pre-eminence—only intensified her sense of forlornness; it was a visibly sterile distance enclosing the dreary path at her feet, in which she had no courage to tread. She was in that first crisis of passionate youthful rebellion against what is not fitly called pain, but rather the absence of joy—that first rage of disappointment in life's morning, which we whom the years ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... deserts.(223) The sentence: "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread," has been a blessing to mankind. Athens was not only the literary and political, but also the economic capital of Greece; and yet Attica was one of the most sterile countries in the world.(224) Unfortunate Messina, on the other hand, was the most fertile province of Greece. In modern times, no countries of equal extent have produced as many great captains, statesmen, savants and artists ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... the company. If these two touched hands, then in that moment would be spanned the distance between the star in the ascendant and the wavering marsh-light, between the sea-colossus and his one-time rival, now so long overwhelmed and chained to sterile earth. ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... With borders of birch-trees Winds sadly and drearily Into the distance; On either hand running Low hills and young cornfields, Green pastures, and often— More often than any— Lands sterile and barren. And near to the rivers 10 And ponds are the hamlets And villages standing— The old and the new ones. The forests and meadows And rivers of Russia Are lovely in springtime, But O you spring cornfields, Your growth thin and scanty ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... after what we had seen, did not give us much pleasure; its appearance on the whole being sterile, though after leaving Luz as far as Esterre, the brightness of the fields and trees, and the splashing of the water overflowing the miniature mill conduits, ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... fragile loves and trivial pleasures are often charming, and as often they are merely frivolous or merely depraved. Grecourt; Piron; Bernard, the curled and powdered Anacreon; Bernis, Voltaire's "Babet la Bouquetiere," King Frederick's poet of "sterile abundance"; Dorat, who could flutter at times with an airy grace; Bertin, born in the tropics, and with the heat of the senses in his verse; Parny, an estray in Paris from the palms and fountains of the Isle Bourbon, the "dear Tibullus" of Voltaire—what a swarm ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... . . a species of Triodia ('porcupine grass' or, incorrectly, 'spinifex' of explorers and residents) dominates sand ground and the sterile slopes and tops ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... church spire, is a great place for plaster and limestone, and would be a good location for a person interested in these substances. Indeed, if a man can live on rocks, like a goat, he may settle anywhere between Windsor and Halifax. It is one of the most sterile regions in the Province. With the exception of a wild pond or two, we saw nothing but rocks and stunted firs, for forty-five miles, a monotony unrelieved by one picturesque feature. Then we longed for the "Garden of Nova Scotia," and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... he sat, hopelessly, over the dim and sterile pages of "Mortimer Slant," Mrs. Rossiter came, heavily, in to talk with him. Mrs. Rossiter always entered the room with an expression of stupid benignity that hid a good deal of rather sharp perception. The fact that she ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... later work his mannerisms in prose and in verse are discomfortably glaring; the outcome of his unsurpassable literary faculty is often no more than a parade or triumph of the vocables; there were times when his brain appears to have become a mere machine for the production of antitheses and sterile conceits. What is perhaps more damning than all, his work is saturate in his own remarkable personality, and is objective only here and there. His dramas are but five-act lyrics, his epics the romance of an egoist, his history is confession, his criticism the opinions of Victor ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... "conversion" (p. 21). You are oppressed by "the futility of the individual life"; you fall into "a state of helpless self-disgust" (p. 21); you are, in short, in the condition described by Hamlet when he says: "It goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... terms. In the religious sphere a like development has been shown. Early religious ideals have no relation to the material betterment of mankind. The early Christian thought it meritorious to live a sterile life at the top of a pillar, eaten by vermin, as the Hindoo saint to-day thinks it meritorious to live an equally sterile life upon a bed of spikes. But as the early Christian ideal progressed, sacrifices having no end connected with the betterment of mankind lost their appeal. The ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... precipitous escarpment several hundred feet sheer, in long stretches, tending with an unbroken facade, in other places showing ragged, where cleft by canons, through which rush torrents, the heads of numerous Texan streams. Its surface is, for the most part, a dead horizontal level, sterile as the Sahara itself, in places smooth and hard as a macadamised road. Towards its southern end there is a group of medanos (sandhills), covering a tract of several hundred square miles, the sand ever drifting about, as with ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... most interesting, because these castes could only be developed if the variations which produced them were profitable to the community; "for no amount of exercise, or habit, or volition, in the utterly sterile members of a community could possibly have affected the structure or instincts of the fertile members, which alone leave descendants." This fact Darwin considers to be demonstrative against Lamarck's doctrine. At the same time, he admits that instincts are not always perfect, and are liable ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... ambitious project, this was never completed. The few fragments of it which have been printed date mostly from this time. The style is still classic, but it is the pseudo-classicism of his model, Tasso. The poet had taken the first step leading to Romanticism. Hence this work was not so sterile as his earlier performances. Lista, on seeing the fragments, did much to encourage the young author. Some of the octaves included in the published version are said on good authority to have come from the schoolmaster's ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... during the ride to Schenectady. Its beauties might be melancholy, but could she be melancholy, and Antonio so near? The pines might be silvery and lofty, but the proud stature of majestic man, eclipsed in her eyes all their beauties. Not so Charles. He early began to lavish his abuse on the sterile grounds they passed, and gave any thing but encomiums on the smoothness of the road they were travelling. In the latter particular, even the quiet spirit of Miss Emmerson joined him, and Julia herself was occasionally made sensible that she was not reposing "on a ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... somehow that he had been wild and extravagant, that he had been sent to rusticate among rocks and hills so sterile there would be little chance for his wild acts to take root; but then, to some old ladies and young ones too, this ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... a sea before them. There was snow on the sea and snow on the land: there were mountains on both, and huge drifts, and here and there vast polinas—a space of soft, watery ice, which resembled the lakes of Siberia. All was bitter, cold, sterile, bleak, and chilling to the eye, which vainly sought a relief. The prospect of a journey over this desolate plain, intersected in every direction by ridges of mountain icebergs, full of crevices, with soft salt ice here ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... Chaudiere cast a delicate veil of spray over the sharp outlines of the bridge traced against a yellow sky; to the right, the water stretched away in a dull gray expanse, bordered by grim pines and flat sterile country. Around them the three mighty cliffs on which the Capital is built, above them the cold gray of an autumnal sky, and opposite them the long undulations of purplish brown hills that break ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... "can see in the commerce of other peoples an incentive to attack." Why not? For what purposes, primarily, do navies exist? Surely not merely to fight one another,—to gain what Jomini calls "the sterile glory" of fighting battles in order to win them. If navies, as all agree, exist for the protection of commerce, it inevitably follows that in war they must aim at depriving their enemy of that great resource; nor is it easy to conceive what broad military use they ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... custom that they felt bound to follow. There was no longer any meaning in the symbol of fertility. Multiply and be fruitful, the Bible might urge, following an ancient economic ideal of happiness. But the end of marriage no longer being this gross purpose, the sterile woman has at last come into ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... the administration of the colonies. Many of their peculiarities, including most of their defects, are to be referred to the peculiar circumstances under which the discovery of the New World was effected. Unlike the settlements on the comparatively sterile shores of North America, which were permitted to devise laws accommodated to their necessities, and to gather strength in the habitual exercise of political functions, the Spanish colonies were from the very ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... the Etats Generaux assembled at Versailles; but their time was spent in bickerings and in sterile discussions while oppressed and panting France vainly awaited the salutary reforms they were expected to effect. From May, the date of their meeting, to the immortal night of the Fourth of August, when the ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... a large, prominent structure, stands out on the slope of a sterile mountain side, the road sweeping up to its level in a long, elliptic curve. We find much people here congregated, and omnibuses and footfarers are still arriving and departing. Among the throng are three veritable Capuchin ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... weeds and trees, and several plants noted somewhat in detail yet unlike any form known to me. Of the recognizable plants a number were used somewhat cleverly for their analogical significance. Of these may be mentioned the snowball and hydrangea whose flowers as every botanist knows are sterile, the size of the individual blossom being gained at the expense of loss of stamens and pistils. These plants were plainly used to indicate barrenness and the predominance of traits other than sexual. The keen critic will here interpose an objection. How ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... I no longer expected any solution to the problem set before me for my grief, a grief, too, that was both sterile and mortal, a day came on which I had a conversation with my mother so startling and appalling that to this hour my heart stands still when I think of it. I have spoken of dates; among them is the ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... had their quickening effect upon Johnny's intellect. A brilliantly wicked thought struck him. As he was passing a perfectly bare spot on the road he managed, without being noticed, to cast his glittering flake of gold on the sterile ground at the other side of the road, where the minister's path would lie. Then, at a point where the road turned, he concealed himself in the brush. The Reverend Mr. Staples hurried forward as he lost sight of the boy in the sweep of the road, but halted suddenly. Johnny's ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... and he had lived for fifteen years on land of his own, in Lower Bengal, studying cholera. He held that cholera was a germ that propagated itself as it flew through a muggy atmosphere; and stuck in the branches of trees like a wool-flake. The germ could be rendered sterile, he said, by 'Mellish's Own Invincible Fumigatory'—a heavy violet-black powder—' the result of fifteen years' ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... unnecessary; for to found an art we must bring time to our aid; art must ripen tranquilly. Yet tranquillity is what is most lacking in Parisian art. The artists, instead of working steadily at their own tasks and uniting in a common aim, are given up to sterile disputes. The young French school hardly exists any longer, as it has now split up into two or three parties. To a fight against foreign art has succeeded a fight among themselves: it is the deep-rooted evil of the country, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... of the new and nobler influences the sterile spaces were transformed into wooded parks, the merry electric car replaced the melancholy 'bus, smooth concrete the tempestuous plank sidewalk, the macadamised road the primitive corduroy, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... flesh of the fruit amply attested. Like a true Provencal, he passed from the gloom of despair to a joy that was half insane. He ran back to the top of the hill, and busied himself for the rest of the day in cutting down one of the sterile trees which had been his shelter ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Strait is great or small, a perilous journey or a mere day's travel, according to the mind and the transportation facilities of the voyager. Before four o'clock in the afternoon the coast was low and sandy to the westward, and it continued sterile and bare for long hours while the plane hung high against the sky with a following wind driving it on vastly more swiftly than its own engines ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... of nature. It is no valid objection to this conclusion that animals suddenly supplied with an excess of food, or when grown very fat; and that most plants on sudden removal from very poor to very rich soil, are rendered more or less sterile. We might, therefore, expect that civilised men, who in one sense are highly domesticated, would be more prolific than wild men. It is also probable that the increased fertility of civilised nations would become, as with our domestic animals, an inherited character: it is at least known ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... from the Nueces to the valley of the Rio Grande is poor, sterile, sandy, and barren, with not a single tree of any size or value on our whole route. The only tree which we saw was the musquit-tree, and very few of these. The musquit is a small tree, resembling an old and decayed peach-tree. The whole country may be truly called a perfect waste, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... wilfully misled them, but were mollified by promise of large rewards. One of the commanders, Menon, won the approval of Cyrus by being the first to lead his own contingent across the Euphrates on his own initiative. The advance was now conducted by forced marches through a painfully sterile country. In the course of this, the troops of Clearchus and Menon very nearly came to blows; the intervention of Proxenus only made matters worse; and order was restored by the arrival of Cyrus, who pointed out that ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... the feasibility of paying every dollar then with more ease than we now pay for useless luxuries? Why, it looks as though Providence had bestowed upon us a strong box in the precious metals locked up in the sterile mountains of the far West, and which we are now forging the key to unlock, to meet the very contingency that ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... by the Colorado, the Humboldt, or the streams that are lost in the Great Salt Lake, or some smaller absorbent of the scanty waters of the Great Basin, had never proved attractive to our borderers, and for excellent reasons. It is, as a whole, so arid, so sterile (though its valleys do not lack fertility wherever their latent capacities can be developed by irrigation), and its game is so scanty and worthless, that old Bridger (pioneer of settlers at the military post ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to be done and what ought not to be done, the liberty permitted to the husband, the liberty permitted to the wife, if the wife shall continue her work or profession or remain at home dependent on the husband's earnings, whether the marriage shall be fruitful or sterile—these are but a few of the questions left undecided. And thus to leave unguided each wife and each husband, with their own idea of what is good to do and what is evil, makes for narrowness and waste of effort; while further, our inability ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... continuous series of females and then a continuous series of males, the latter with less provisions and smaller cells. This distribution of the sexes agrees with what we have long known of the Hive-bee, who begins her laying with a long sequence of workers, or sterile females, and ends it with a long sequence of males. The analogy continues down to the capacity of the cells and the quantities of provisions. The real females, the Queen-bees, have wax cells incomparably more spacious ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... of the tube. This being a vital condition, the moth fails to withdraw the pollen; and inasmuch as the pollen is usually deposited close to the head of the moth, this flower would receive no pollen upon its stigma. This particular blossom would thus be both barren and sterile. None of its pollen would be carried to other stigmas, nor would it set a seed to perpetuate by inheritance its ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... attempt at versification in the description of a thunderstorm in six lines, the recital of which afforded his mother considerable pleasure and promise; and, on another occasion, he is stated to have remarked, during a journey over a sterile district of Scotland, in a day of drizzling rain, "It is only nature weeping for the barrenness of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind; Again I seize the theme, then but begun, And bear it with me, as the rushing wind Bears the cloud onwards: in that tale I find The furrows of long thought, and dried-up tears, Which, ebbing, leave a sterile track behind, O'er which all heavily the journeying years Plod the last sands of life—where ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... Abel of savage legend. One of the brothers, named Ioskeha, slew the other, and became the father of mankind (as known to the Red Indians) and the guardian of the Iroquois. The earth was at first arid and sterile, but Ioskeha destroyed the gigantic frog which had swallowed all the waters, and guided the torrents into smooth streams ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... had become sterile. Verdi seemed to have ceased writing. There were whisperings of an "Iago" written in collaboration with Boito, but it was awaiting ultimate criticism and final polish while the wonderful old master was ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... they entered a fertile tract of country which had been literally turned into a garden by the skill and industry of the Carthaginian cultivators, at that time celebrated throughout the world for their knowledge of the science of agriculture. The rougher and more sterile ground was covered with groves of olive trees, while rich vineyards and orchards of fig and other fruit trees occupied the better soil. Wherever it was possible little canals leading water from reservoirs and dammed up streams ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty |
