Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Stratum   /strˈætəm/   Listen
Stratum

noun
(pl. E. stratums, L. strata. the latter is more common)
1.
One of several parallel layers of material arranged one on top of another (such as a layer of tissue or cells in an organism or a layer of sedimentary rock).
2.
People having the same social, economic, or educational status.  Synonyms: class, social class, socio-economic class.  "An emerging professional class"
3.
An abstract place usually conceived as having depth.  Synonyms: layer, level.  "A simile has at least two layers of meaning" , "The mind functions on many strata simultaneously"



Related searches:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Stratum" Quotes from Famous Books



... ice congeals continually there, and the snow which forms falls to the ground as snow, and accumulates in vast and permanent stores. The summit of Mount Blanc is covered with a bed of snow of enormous thickness, which is almost as much a permanent geological stratum of the mountain as the granite which ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... mollifying of a wound with ointment. The man was of a far finer nature than any of those who thus judged him, of whom some would doubtless have got out of their difficulties sooner than he—only he was more honorable in debt than they were out of it. A woman of strong sense, with an undeveloped stratum of poetry in the heart of it, his wife was able to appreciate the finer elements of his nature; and she let him see very plainly that she did. This was strength and a lifting up of the head to the ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... should always be pointed, and the point should be kept in a state of cleanliness, and the conductors should terminate in a moist stratum of earth, or in London it might safely be conveyed into the common sewer. It has been objected to the use of pointed conductors, that we invite the lightning to the point; and that is true to a certain extent, and in gunpowder mills the conductor should be placed at some ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various

... unwholesome to eat. Pease intended for long transportation should be packed in open baskets (not in boxes or tight barrels), and laid in layers not more than two inches thick; and, between such layers, a thick stratum of clean straw or other dry material ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr

... its navigation, are laid down in my manuscript plan with great care and minuteness. It is subject to one great inconvenience; viz. that vessels drawing more than twelve feet water cannot enter the river, even in perfectly calm weather, on account of a stratum of slaty limestone which runs, at a depth at high water of fifteen feet, from a point on the mainland to some rocks in the middle of the entrance into the harbour, and which are just even with the water's edge. This, together with the lee current that sets on the southern shore, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... and when the combustible fluid was spouting from the wells at the rate of many hundred barrels per day. Before the present deep wells were bored, oil was not produced in sufficient quantities to cause such a conflagration, and there was never seen upon the creek a stratum of the fluid of such ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... up-to-the-minute—if not a little ahead of it—she found her aunt, like many of those barnacles clinging to the outer reefs of learning in college towns, was really a fossil. If one desires to meet the ultraconservative in thought and social life let me commend him to this stratum of humanity within stone's throw of a college. These barnacles like Aunt Euphemia are wedded to a manner of thought, gained from their own school experiences, that went out of fashion inside ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper

... exposed to the weather, and where the disposition of the strata was of course more plainly developed. The base is a coarse, granular, siliceous sandstone, in which large pebbles of quartz and jasper are embedded: this stratum continues for sixteen to twenty feet above the water: for the next ten feet there is a horizontal stratum of black schistose rock, which was of so soft a consistence, that the weather had excavated several tiers of galleries; upon the ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King

... we know? Why tetlka, but tetlamen? Why memona, but memamen? There is no recollection in the minds of the Greeks of the motive power that was once at work, and left its traces in these grammatical convulsions; but in Sanskrit we still see, as it were, alower stratum of grammatical growth, and we can there watch the regular working of laws which required these changes, and which have left their impress not only on Greek, but on Sanskrit, and even on German. The same necessity which made Homer say oida and idmen, and the Vedic poet vda ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... Green was running through the papers, and as fast as he ran through them he permitted himself certain comments that passed for humor with his followers. There could be no doubt that in his own social stratum Mr. Green must have been accounted something ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini

... their frequent meetings, accidental or designed, had often chained her to him by descriptions of the countries he had visited and the wonders he had seen. He, too, had found out that there was a deep vein of romance running beneath the stratum of reserve that, at first, had formed the outward feature of her character, but which was wearing away as she became accustomed to her new friends, and had been treated as a ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale

... level, which belongs to an earlier date; this seems to have been in use till the construction of the Roman road, which at first ran round the rock on the outside, until Vespasian cut the tunnel. In repairing the modern road just outside the south entrance to the tunnel, a stratum of carbonized corn, beans, &c., and a quantity of burnt wood, stones, tiles, pottery, &c., was found under and above the modern road, for a distance of some 500 yds. This debris must have belonged to the castle ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... found? From this the highest apex of things, downwards through all strata and breadths, how many fully awakened Realities have we fallen in with:—alas, on the contrary, what troops and populations of Phantasms, not God-Veracities but Devil-Falsities, down to the very lowest stratum,—which now, by such superincumbent weight of Unveracities, lies enchanted in St. Ives' Workhouses, broad enough, helpless enough! You will walk in no public thoroughfare or remotest byway of English ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... fluently, opinions and directions concerning the erection of the monument. While doing this, his eyes dropped, at moments, to the grave, and were fixed with such force on it as if he wished to pierce through that carpet of flowers; through the stratum of brick; through the coffin, and look at that which was under the lid. At last, with a polite elevation of his hat, he took farewell of them, and passed on by a path, amid columns and statues intwined with a lace of bright leaves, into the centre of that broad city of the dead. ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)

... and reluctant as I felt to leave I soon joined Nielsen, and we proceeded onward. At last we reached the white winding plain, that had resembled a frozen river, and which from afar had looked so ghastly and stark. We found it to be a perfectly smooth stratum of salt glistening as if powdered. It was not solid, not stable. At pressure of a boot it shook like jelly. Under the white crust lay a yellow substance that was wet. Here appeared an obstacle we had not calculated upon. Nielsen ventured ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey

... found the chief part of the gentlemen of Boston and its vicinity, the leading lawyers, the rich merchants, the successful manufacturers, not only opposed to him, but entertaining towards him sentiments of personal dislike and even vindictiveness. This stratum of the community, having a natural distaste for disquieting agitation and influenced by class feeling,—the gentlemen of the North sympathizing with the "aristocracy" of the South,—could not make common cause with anti-slavery people. Fortunately, ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse

... whale-boat was sent off to the southward, with Mr. Bass, the surgeon of the Reliance, to discover where an article so valuable was to be met with. He proceeded about seven leagues to the southward of Point Solander, where he found, in the face of a steep cliff, washed by the sea a stratum of coal, in breadth about six feet, and extending eight or nine miles to the southward. Upon the summit of the high land, and lying on the surface, he observed many patches of coal, from some of which it must have been that Mr. Clarke was so ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins

... sand. Farther on, they sank to sand dunes piled into rounded banks and softly moulded ledges, like snow-drifts. Landing the next day at a bold bluff marked Cliff End on the charts, he found the lower stratum to consist of a solid mass of tertiary fossils, chiefly immense oysters, mingled, however, with sea-urchins. Superb specimens were secured,—large boulders crowded with colossal shells and perfectly preserved echini. From the top of ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... little island, and the museums are full of just such objects. When it comes to underground historical relics, the poverty of New England as compared with the wealth of Old England is very striking. Stratum after stratum carries the explorer through the relics of successive invaders. After passing through the characteristic traces of different peoples, he comes upon a Roman pavement, and below this the ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... Canaanites lived on quietly in the cities of the plain, and not till the period of the monarchy, when Israel had grown strong, were they subdued and made tributary. This chapter, as well as the main stem of the Book of Judges, corresponds to the Jehovistic stratum of the tradition, to which also passages in Joshua, of an identical or similar import, may be added without hesitation. The Angel of Jehovah is enough to tell us this. The difference which exists between it and the Jehovistic main version in the Book of Joshua is to ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... the left bank of the river Arpatchai, which here forms the boundary between Russia and Turkey. It is distant thirty-five miles from Kars and eighty-four miles from Tiflis. The plain on which it is situated is perfectly level and very peculiar. It has a stratum of alluvial soil for the depth of one foot six inches on the surface, and then a substratum of fine uniform lava, ten to fifteen feet thick, supposed to have issued from Mount Alagos (13,450 feet), an extinct volcano thirty miles from Alexandropol. The depth of the ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... system of essences, which actual existence illustrates. In the matter of physics, truly, we are reduced to skimming the surface, since we have to start from our casual experiences, which form the most superficial stratum of nature, and the most unstable. Yet these casual experiences, while they leave us so much in the dark as to their natural basis and environment, necessarily reveal each its ideal object, its specific essence; ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... surface, like a shelf, upon the slope of the Atbara valley, about thirty or forty feet below the rich table lands; the surface of this was perfectly firm, as by the constant rains it had been entirely denuded of the loam that had formed the upper stratum. This formed a charming place for the encampment of a large party, as the ground was perfectly clean, a mixture of quartz pebbles upon a hard white sandstone. Numerous mimosas afforded a shade, beneath which the Arabs sat in groups, and at ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker

... of matter would prove materialism,"—when I dream that I am conversing with a conservative friend who says that he does not like new religions and I reply that Moses and Jesus were new once, it is plain that a different stratum of mind is operative than when I dream that I am in an old fort and chased by three rats, or that a snake is on my bed and my father kills it with a pitchfork, or strangest of all, that I throw an egg at the plug of a sap bucket which it ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... Derby, whom he believed to be the originator of the scheme, he (December 30th) expressed his sense of the generosity of the Premier's letter: "It reveals to me, after all the hard things I have said of him, a now and unexpected stratum of genial dignity and manliness of character." To his brother John he wrote: "I do, however, truly admire the magnanimity of Dizzy in regard to me. He is the only man I almost never spoke of without contempt ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... the transition of plant to animal life in the forms of tortoise and other shell motifs;—kelp and its analogy to the prehistoric lobster, skate, crab and sea urchin. The water-bubble motif is carried through all vertical members which symbolize the Crustacean Period, which is the second stratum of ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... the exceeding buoyancy or inflation of scrip which he had secured about his person while endeavoring to escape. Many skeletons, supposed to be those of females, encompassed in that peculiar steel coop or cage which seems to have been worn by the women of that period, were also found in the upper stratum. Alexis von Puffer, in his admirable work on San Francisco, accounts for the position of these unfortunate creatures by asserting that the steel cage was originally the frame of a parachute-like garment which distended ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte

... and the giant swung Sancho around until he faced the deepest recess of the cave. There, swathed in mummy clothes, preserved by the chemical miracle of the stratum of red earth that formed the core of the rock, the body of Red Jabez stood erect against the wall, bathed in the red glow, diamonds glittering where the dead eyes had been. And on the rock ledge at his feet stood a tall flagon of gold, in which Dolores ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle

... every stratum of social life. Besides portraying the grinding effect of economic conditions, he also treats of the struggle of the individual for his mental and spiritual liberation from the slavery of convention and tradition. Thus Heinrich, the bell-forger, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... Bank deemed Churm's deposits the fundamental stratum of its wealth. They lay there in the vaults, like underlying granite. When hot times came, they boiled up in a mountain to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... Williams received an invitation to a party, not an unusual thing, but this was a very select affair; the very highest stratum of society. She was holding a counsel with herself, and doing some very close thinking on the all-important subject of her wardrobe, and she came to the usual feminine conclusion that "positively" ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston

... excuse for doing so; if Solomon had been of a less phlegmatic disposition, he might have married her a year ago, young as she was. "Read this," said he, producing a letter from his pocket, "and tell me what you think of it. It's old Stratum's ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn

... chalk was superseded by a thick bed of saponaceous earth, whilst the summit of the cliff was composed of a bright red sand. Semi-opal and hydrate of silex were found in the chalk, and some beautiful specimens of brown menelite were collected from the upper stratum ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt

... the lowest stratum of human life as witnessed in Australia, we find that, as Meyer asserts (11), the bride appears "generally to go very unwillingly" to the man she has been assigned to. Lumholtz relates that the man seizes ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... while Lady Lundie steadily pursued her inquiries down stairs. She got on from Jonathan (last of the males, indoors) to the coachman (first of the males, out-of-doors), and dug down, man by man, through that new stratum, until she struck the stable-boy at the bottom. Not an atom of information having been extracted in the house or out of the house, from man or boy, her ladyship fell back on the women next. She pulled the bell, and ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins

... droops his shoulders with weariness at the end of a day. And especially he should have realized that Paraguay is not, strictly speaking, a Latin-American nation. It is Latin-Indian, in which the population graduates very definitely from a sub-stratum of nearly or quite pure Indian race to an aristocracy of nearly or quite pure Spanish descent, and that the color of a man's skin fixes his place in society. Both Bell and Paula were too light of skin for the peasant's clothes they wore. They aroused curiosity at once. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various

... an irritation and an absurdity to him that, under Madame Cervin's eye, he had been compelled to treat her with the ceremonies due to une jeune fille honnete. For he had at once detected the girl's reckless temper. From what social stratum did she come—she and the brother? In her, at least, there was some wild blood! When he sounded Madame Cervin, however, she, with her incurable habit of vain mendacity, had only put her lodger in a light which Montjoie felt ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... breakfast almost in silence, astonishing Sandy somewhat by not complaining of the excess of soda in the biscuits. Ford was inclined toward fastidiousness when he was sober—a trait which caused men to suspect him of descending from an upper stratum of society; though just when, or just where, or how great that descent had been, they had no means of finding out. Ford, so far as his speech upon the subject was concerned, had no existence previous ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower

... vagabonds, street rovers, and beggars, the whole multitude, which, bound down by anxiety for its daily bread, had never lifted its eyes to look at the great social order of which it is the lowest stratum, and the whole weight ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... success. The infiltration of water had made excavation impossible and had no doubt destroyed everything belonging to the most ancient settlement. It is not going too far to predict that exactly the same thing will be found by any explorer who tries to discover a Neolithic stratum beneath a city-mound of Babylonia. There is little hope that prehistoric Chaldaea will ever be known to us. But in Egypt the conditions are different. The Delta is like Babylonia, it is true; but in the Upper Nile valley the river flows down with but a thin border of alluvial land on either side, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall

... judges fixed their eyes on me, and so did the audience, confound them! To be the focus of so many eyes was trying to my modesty; for, although unacquainted with bettermost society, still, below any little manner that I had acquired, there was, and always will be, an under stratum of bashfulness, or sheepishness, or mauvaise honte, call it which you will; and the torture, the breaking on the wheel, with which a man of that temperament perceives the eyes of a whole courthouse, for instance, attracted ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... vessel to another, and pour out for your enemy a glass of invisible poison. So down to the floor this heavy carbonic acid comes, and lies along it, just as it lies often in the bottom of old wells, or old brewers' vats, as a stratum of poison, killing occasionally the men who descend into it. Hence, as foolish a practice as I know is that of sleeping on the floor; for towards the small hours, when the room gets cold, the sleeper on the floor is ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... opened or shut, to act as a counterpoise; thus producing a rupture of equilibrium around the central fulcrum, and thereby changing the upward movement of the balloons into an oblique forward movement. In other words, the ship being raised into the air—to the stratum immediately above the region of storms—and maintained there by the ascensional force of the balloons, and being forced onward by the screws, the four anterior wings are to be opened, the four posterior ones remaining closed. The forepart ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various

... to which it rose. A thin piece of clean cork, well-wetted in distilled water, was then carefully and lightly placed on the solution at the c side, and distilled water poured gently on to it until a stratum the eighth of an inch in thickness appeared over the sulphate of magnesia; all was then left for a few minutes, that any solution adhering to the cork might sink away from it, or be removed by the water on which ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday

... mound, an epitome, indeed, of the 'Bishop's' gastronomical past, that emphasised his descent from Olympus to Hades; for on the top was a plebeian deposit of tomato and sardine cans, whereas below, if you stirred the heap, might be found a nobler stratum of terrines, once savoury with foie gras and Strasbourg pate, of jars still fragrant of fruits embedded in liqueur, of bottles that had contained the soups that a divine loves— oxtail, turtle, mulligatawny, and the like. Upon rectory, glebe, and garden was legibly inscribed ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell

... have generally avoided crumpling or distortion, and thus give the mountain views the appearance of having had all the upper surfaces rolled flat when they were in a plastic condition. Denudation and the action of ice in the glacial epochs have worn through the hard upper stratum, and formed the long and narrow dales; and in Littondale, Wharfedale, Wensleydale, and many other parts, one may plainly see the perpendicular wall of rock sharply defining the upper edges of the valleys. The softer rocks below generally take ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home

... travellers were made acquainted with the method by which the water was obtained for the daily supply of the kraal. None was allowed to be exposed either to the sun or to view, the well being carefully covered up with a thick stratum of turf. The kraal had been built near a spring, which had of course decided the selection of its site; and over the spring a new surface had been given to the ground, so that the presence of water ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid

... mental life are in perpetual interaction one with the other. Just as everything conscious has its preliminary step in the Unconscious, so every conscious thought passes down into the lower stratum and there becomes an element in our being, partaking of the Unconscious energy, and playing its part in supervising and determining our mental and bodily states. If it is a healthful thought we are so much the better; if it is a diseased one we are so much the worse. It is this ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks

... its changes and evolutions for that which I have seen with my own eyes in this brief interval of time—things that no other mortal eye had seen before, glimpses of a world past, a world dead, a world so long dead that even in the lowest Cambrian stratum no trace of it remains. Fused with the melting inner crust, it has passed forever beyond the ken of man other than in that lost pocket of the earth whither fate has borne me and where my doom is sealed. I am here ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... her bands, "when I am dead, is he never to know that I was his mother?" The anguish of that question thrilled the heart of the listener. He was affected below all the surface that worldly thoughts and habits had laid, stratum by stratum, over the humanities within. He threw his arms round Catherine, and strained her to ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... be gained by the creature; so sets forth alone to climb the heavens, and instead of climbing, falls into the abyss. Then follows the long dismal night of feverish efforts and delirious visions, or, it may be, helpless despair; till at length a deeper stratum of the soul is heaved to the surface; and amid the first dawn of morning, the youth says within him, "I have sinned against my Maker—I will arise and go to my Father." More or less, I say, will Christian tragedy correspond to this—a fall and a rising ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald

... seen that all the plants and shells, marine and freshwater, of the forest bed, and associated fluvio-marine strata of Norfolk, are specifically identical with those of the living European flora and fauna; so that if upon such a stratum a deposit of the present period, whether freshwater or marine, should be thrown down, it might lie conformably over it, and contain the same invertebrate fauna and flora. The strata so superimposed would, in ordinary geological ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell

... that the soil of Guaham, under the first stratum of earth, consists of coral blocks not yet quite dissolved; from which it may be conjectured, that a former group of low coral islands, as well as the basin which they enclosed, were forced upwards by the power of subterranean fire; and in this manner the island of Guaham has been formed. ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue

... like villages in that part of the country generally, consisted of two long parallel rows of wooden houses. The road—if a stratum of deep mud can be called by that name—formed the intervening space. All the houses turned their gables to the passerby, and some of them had pretensions to architectural decoration in the form of rude perforated woodwork. Between the houses, and in a line with them, were great wooden ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... late for her to reform. Her song was sung. And as for buying frills and fallals, there were two daughters to provide for and a son who was growing into the stratum of foppery. With a sigh of dismissal she flung on her old wrapper, whose comfortableness she suddenly despised, and made her escape, murmuring, ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes

... ancestors. The desire is safely hidden away in his subliminal consciousness until favoring circumstances tempt it forth. It is not alone in "sleep, dreams, hypnosis, trance, and ecstacy that we see a temporary subsidence of the upper consciousness and the upheaval of a subliminal stratum"; there are many other states and many other causes for this ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir

... upon sand, but upon a rock. And the worst of all existing Schemes for social betterment by organisation of the skilled workers and the like is that they are founded, not upon "rock," nor even upon "sand," but upon the bottomless bog of the stratum of the Workless. It is here where we must begin. The regimentation of industrial workers who have got regular work is not so very difficult. That can be done, and is being done, by themselves. The problem that we have to face is the regimentation, the organisation, of those who have not got ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... ii. p. 418, where he says, "After they have pounded their ore, their first work is to calcine it, which is done in kilns, much after the fashion of ordinary lime-kilns, These they fill up to the top with coal and ore, stratum super stratum, until it be full; and so setting fire to the bottom, they let it burn till the coal be wasted, and then renew the kilns with fresh ore and coal, in the same manner as before. This is done without fusion of the metal, and serves to consume the more ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... know, only just begun: it being, of course, conceivable that the creation of a perfect society of men, as the first requisite to a regime of culture, must nick to itself a longer loop of time than the making of, say, a stratum of coal. A loquacious person—he is one of your cherished "novel"-writers, by the way, if that be indeed a Novel in which there is nowhere any pretence at novelty—once assured me that he could never reflect without swelling on the greatness of the age in which he lived, an age the mighty civilisation ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel

... is beheld at morning, in the neighborhood of rivers, a dense mist will be observed lying beneath the spectator in a solid stratum, refracting the light now breaking from the east. Here and there, in this lake of vapor, the tops of hills peer up like green islands in a golden sea. But, ere you have time to let fancy run riot, the "cloud ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... had any callers since her marriage. Socially she had been entirely unrecognized. The social stratum represented by the Mesquite Club, and that lower stratum identified with church "socials" and similar affairs, did not know of Sylvia's existence—had decided definitely never to know of her existence after she had walked down the aisle of the church to the strains of the ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge

... was not moulded entirely from one stratum of pipe-clay. Only a few wear paint, enamelling, and gold as delicate costly Sevres; and, while the majority are only coarse pottery, it is scarcely kind—certainly not generous—in dainty, transparent china, belonging to king's palaces, to pity or denounce the ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... the face of the moon had cleared, but tatters and scuds of smoke-colored cloud fled northward, as if scourged by a stormy current too high to stir the sultry stagnation of the lower atmospheric stratum. From its vaporous lair somewhere in the cypress and palm jungles of the Mexican Gulf borders, the tempest had risen, and before its breath the shreds of cloud flew like avant couriers of disaster. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... beauty, and as full of fascination as a fig of seeds. To-day beautiful women in San Francisco's aristocracy were rare. In Kearney Street, on a Saturday afternoon, one could hardly walk for the pretty painted shop-girls; and in that second stratum which was led by the wife of a Bonanza king who had been pronounced quite impossible by Mrs. Yorba and other dames of the ancient aristocracy, there were many stunningly handsome girls. They could be met at the fashionable summer resorts; ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... a coal formation, probably coeval with the above, or at least belonging to some of the lower divisions of the Oolitic period, has been mined extensively for a century or more. It affords the thickest stratum of pure vegetable matter hitherto detected in any secondary rock in England. One seam of coal of good quality has been worked three and a half feet thick, and there are several feet more of pyritous coal resting ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... through the influence of an excited imagination, or a CONSCIOUSLY received suggestion of an hypnotic sort. Lastly, I believe that this change was the result of my receiving telephathically, and upon a mental stratum quite below the level of immediate consciousness, a healthier and more energetic attitude, receiving it from another person whose thought was directed upon me with the intention of impressing the idea of this attitude upon me. In my case the disease was distinctly what would be classed as nervous, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... Illinois, and occasionally we now hear similar statements of Kansas, or California, or the valley of the Willamette. In the nature of things these statements were erroneous. The idea of soil, in reason and in the use of the word, contains the idea of exhaustion. Soil is not merely the upper stratum of the earth; it is a substance which possesses the power, under certain circumstances, of giving up essential properties of its own for the support of vegetable and ultimately of animal life. What it gives up it loses, and to the extent of its loss it is exhausted. It is no more untrue ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell

... noticed on Etna, the thickness of each stratum of earth between the several strata of lava. 'He tells me,' wrote Brydone, 'he is exceedingly embarrassed by these discoveries in writing the history of the mountain. That Moses hangs like a dead weight upon him, and blunts all ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... out the origin of words by the aid of a second-hand dictionary. It's the next funniest thing to grubbing after stumps in a ten-acre lot. Dentists make capital philologists—: they are so much accustomed to digging for roots. It's rather dull work to shovel around in the Anglo-Saxon stratum, but, as soon as you strike the Sanscrit, then you're off, and if you don't find big nuggets, it's because—well, it's because there are none there. Sometimes you dig down to about the time when NOAH went on his little sailing excursion, and strike what seems to be a first-class ...
— Punchinello, Volume 2, No. 37, December 10, 1870 • Various

... was correct, the essential nation will be all of educated men, that is to say, the essential nation will speak some dominant language or cease to exist, whatever its primordial tongue may have been. It will pass out of being and become a mere local area of the lower social stratum,—a Problem ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... the currents grew. Stern volplaned again; and as the machine slid down toward earth, came into a calmer and more peaceful stratum. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... vertical rays of the sun, rises, creating a partial vacuum which the cold air from the poles rushes equator-ward to fill, the warm air moving toward the poles to restore the balance. Thus at a few degrees north of the equator the upper stratum of air will always be found to be travelling northward. And it continues so to do until it reaches the vicinity of the thirtieth parallel of latitude, when, having lost most of its heat by constant exposure to open space, it becomes cold enough to descend, taking the place ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... falls from the atmosphere is determined; for the condition on which the falling back, in rain, of the water which has been taken up by evaporation mainly depends, is the cooling of the atmospheric stratum which contains it; and this effect is produced in very various ways, and many different causes operate to modify it. Sometimes the stratum is cooled by being wafted over ranges of mountains, sometimes by encountering and ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott

... circular walls of pastry an inch thick, and so rich as easily to be pulled down, and roomy enough within for the Court of King Pepin, lay first a thick stratum of mince-meat of two savory hams of Westphalia, and if you cannot get them, of two hams ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... unusual activity was seen to prevail about the precincts of tranter Dewy's house. The flagstone floor was swept of dust, and a sprinkling of the finest yellow sand from the innermost stratum of the adjoining sand-pit lightly scattered thereupon. Then were produced large knives and forks, which had been shrouded in darkness and grease since the last occasion of the kind, and bearing upon their sides, "Shear-steel, warranted," in such emphatic letters of assurance, that the warranter's ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy

... the intermediate elongated or angular cells; and below, (c), two flattened, compressed, structureless, and horny scales from the outer portion of the hair. Now these latter flattened scales are of great importance. Their character and mode of connection with the stratum, or cortical substance, below, not only make all the difference between wool and hair, but also determine the extent and degree of that peculiar property of interlocking of the hairs known as felting. Let us now again look at a human hair. The light ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith

... soever had been the freedom with which he had lost and changed many a foolish liking, he found, let his hopelessness or his offence be what it might, he had not the power to shake himself free from the first worthy passion ever roused in him. It had struck root below the sandy upper stratum of his mind into a clay soil beneath, where at least it was able to hold, and whence it could draw a little slow ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald

... plug it and stop it with tons of reinforced waterproof concrete—whenever on the surface of the world they dam it and turn it into new channels, it evades them. And in a new place its icy water bursts through—as though every stratum in the Alps dipped toward their underground tunnel to carry the water from the Glacier of Thusis ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers

... thoroughly good foot-paths must be dug out to a considerable depth, filled with loose stones, and dressed at the top with some good finishing material; but this is not necessary even for the best work. The great point is to secure a thorough draining of the sub-stratum, so that there shall be no rising of ooze-water from below, and so that the ground shall be free from such saturation as to cause heaving during frost. This condition may be secured by a suitable draining of the ground immediately under the walk, and by the use of ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring

... not be sustained in subsequent generations. We have seen that the great Galen, at Rome, five centuries after the time of Herophilus, was prohibited from dissecting the human subject. The fact speaks volumes for the attitude of the Roman mind towards science. Vast audiences made up of every stratum of society thronged the amphitheatre, and watched exultingly while man slew his fellow-man in single or in multiple combat. Shouts of frenzied joy burst from a hundred thousand throats when the death-stroke was ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... special element of both hope and difficulty in the solution of our Indian Social problem,—The Beggars. Here we have the lowest stratum of the submerged tenth, excluding from them the religious mendicants with whom we are not now concerned. I ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker

... eyes—a tender and idyllic blue. There, however, the obvious resemblance ended. The elder's azure gaze was set in a face scarred and riven by hardship, debauch and disease; he had been—before he had inevitably returned to the mountains where he was born—a brakeman in the lowest stratum of the corruption of small cities on big railroads; and his thin stooped body, his gaunt head and uncertain hands, all bore the stamp of ruinous years. But in the midst of this his eyes, like David's, retained their singularly tranquil color ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... considered to be good form among solid wealthy provincials. Why travel first-class (they argue) when second is just as good and no one can tell the difference once you get out of the train? Why ape the tricks of another stratum of society? They like to read about the dinner-parties and supper-parties at the Grand Babylon; but they are not emulous and they do not imitate. At their most adventurous they would lunch or dine in the neutral region of the grill-room at the Grand Babylon. As for Wilkins's, in Devonshire ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett

... grease-cups does not tend to delicacy of hands; that when you wash with a cake of petrified pink soap and half a pitcher of cold hard water, you never quite get the stain off—you merely get through the dust stratum to the Laurentian grease formation, and mutter, "a nice clean grease doesn't hurt food," and go ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis

... nickname),—his Birkebeins I guess always to have been a kind of Norse Jacquerie: desperate rising of thralls and indigent people, driven mad by their unendurable sufferings and famishings,—theirs the deepest stratum of misery, and the densest and heaviest, in this the general misery of Norway, which had lasted towards the third generation and looked as if it would last forever:—whereupon they had risen proclaiming, in this furious dumb manner, unintelligible except to Heaven, that the same ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle

... reef, the surface soil was red, and of a sandy nature. The next stratum was of a loose, yellow, gravelly lime, and the third blue, of a hard, slaty nature. This last was the real diamantiferous soil. Large stones had been found in the "yellow," but the working of this generally did not pay. Kimberley mine, however, had paid very ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various

... before leaving college; and it may easily be imagined that many of these refer to common events in an English education. Nay further, on looking through the list of all the associations it was easy to see how they are pervaded by purely English ideas, and especially such as are prevalent in that stratum of English society in which I was born and bred, and have subsequently lived. In illustration of this, I may mention an anecdote of a matter which greatly impressed me at the time. I was staying in a country house with a ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... attack on such a position would have been too costly. The Allies turned the line of the Ourcq from the north. They crossed the river in force in the upper part of its course, where it has not yet attacked the stratum of hard limestone, and where the valley is wider, and the sides are less steep. Nevertheless ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... corresponding with a friend, where doubt and distrust have no place, and every thing is said as it is thought. The original idea is laid down in its simple purity, and all the supervenient conceptions are spread over it, "stratum super stratum," as they happen to be formed. These are the letters by which souls are united, and by which minds, naturally in unison, move each other, as they are moved themselves. I know, dearest lady, that in the perusal of this, such is the consanguinity of our intellects, you ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... seeing that, fortify the place as I might, it could be easily commanded by batteries raised on the higher side. And so fixing upon a grassy knoll among the woods, in the immediate neighbourhood of a scaur of boulder clay, capped by a thick stratum of sand, as a much better scene of operations, I took possession of the knoll somewhat irregularly; and carrying to it large quantities of sand from the scaur, converted it into the site of a magnificent stronghold. First I erected an ancient castle, consisting of four towers built on a rectangular ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... had been driven through the soft stratum under the old well, and began to reach firmer ground, the pounding and shaking of the earth became worse and worse. My wife was obliged to leave home with ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton

... classes; the landlords being a virtual nobility, the poorer colonists a middle class, and the slaves comprising the lower social stratum. The Church of England was the prevailing sect, and English habits of hospitality and ease of manner replaced the Puritan austerity of the North. Yet Virginia had a severe code of punishments; and at one time, if a man stayed away from church ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle

... this man associated with the remains of one other skeleton, probably a woman, and with the bones of extinct animals, were found in a geological stratum which indicates his age at about 500,000 years. Professor McGregor, after a careful anatomical study, has reproduced the head and bust of Pithecanthropus, which helps us to visualize this primitive species as of rather ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... deep to absorb more light and to render the bottom more or less invisible. That the water of the sea, or any other deep and transparent water, seen from above, appears more dark the greater the depth of the liquid stratum, and that the land in comparison with it appears bright under the solar illumination, is known and confirmed by certain physical reasons. The traveler in the Alps often has occasion to convince himself of it, seeing from the summits the deep ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... doubt whether that which we had adopted as the least circuitous, be not also preferable, as possessing the striking panoramic point to which we had climbed. After two or three more miles over an expanse of parched turf, we reached what geologists would call the bluff escarpment of the stratum. The descent before us was so precipitous, as to leave us at first at a loss to make out how the road could be conducted down it: and the prospect which burst upon us in front, had apparently no limit but the power of human vision. Beyond the foreground, which was formed by a series ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes

... The skeletons of the full-grown, deep-sea Globigerinae are so remarkably solid and heavy in proportion to their surface as to seem little fitted for floating; and, as a matter of fact, they are not to be found along with the Diatoms and Radiolaria, in the uppermost stratum of the ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... of the antiquary, on the north-west point of Cefyn-bryn. We may here remark that this district, especially the coast, offers a rich harvest to the geologist. The general substratum of the peninsula is limestone and marble, bounded to the north by an immense iron and coalfield. The limestone stratum is continually "cropping out" in the interior, and of course it can be worked at a trifling expense. This may account for the general healthiness of the district. Though rain in consequence of the western exposure, falls frequently, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various

... the fields sang in gleeful strains the deeds of the forest-dwellers; no wonder that Robin Hood became the hero of the people, and that the homely song of the land was full of stories of his deeds. We can scarcely call these historical tales: they are legendary; yet it may well be that a stratum of fact underlies the aftergrowth of romance; certainly they were history to the people, and as such, with a mental reservation, they shall be history to us. We propose, therefore, here to convert into prose "a lytell geste of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... veil, and she turned toward the east to face it. In the golden splendour of declining day the white sails of yachts crowded landward on the last leg before beating westward into Blue Harbour; a small white cruiser, steaming south, left a mile long stratum of rose-tinted smoke hanging parallel to the horizon's plane; the westering sun struck ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... where the Burkian school proclaims how exceptional progress has been in history, we take that as proof of the ease with which essential habit may be acquired. Habit, in fact, without philosophy destroys the finer side of civilized life. It may leave a stratum to whom its riches have been discovered; but it leaves the mass of men soulless automata without spontaneous response to the chords struck by ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... chief characters of the story are a young man and a young woman. The young man sprung from the lowest stratum of Southern society, and the young woman from the highest. The story of the intermingling of their lives must be left for ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company

... was taken at night under protection of a policeman to some cabarets, where I found crowds of that class which is the stratum below the working class; lads who sweep crossings and hold horses, mendicants, and, I was told, thieves, girls whom a servant-maid would not speak to, very merry, dancing quadrilles and waltzes, and regaling themselves on sausages,—the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... hills our sailors thought they saw a heavy sea in the blue water border which bounded the circle of vision. If this was not an illusion, caused by the unequal heating and oscillatory motion of the lower stratum of the atmosphere, the open water may have been of great extent. Perhaps the statement of the natives was correct, that it extended as far as Behring's Straits. But we could not now place complete ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... "Every stratum was aquiver with apprehension," he declared; "and there was never any telling when the next grand upheaval would rock the whole structure ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter

... tea-parties following Lady Theobald's, the two men appeared together. The small end of the wedge being inserted into the social stratum, the rest was not so difficult. Mrs. Burnham was at once surprised and overjoyed by her discoveries of the many excellences of the man they had so hastily determined to ignore. Mrs. Abercrombie found Mr. Burmistone's manner all that ...
— A Fair Barbarian • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... almost to black. There is some gleaming white quartzite mixed with both these shales. Next above lies more than four thousand feet of Siyeh limestone, very solid, very massive, iron-gray with an insistent flavor of yellow, and weathering buff. This heavy stratum is the most impressive part of the Glacier landscape. Horizontally through its middle runs a dark broad ribbon of diorite, a rock as hard as granite, which once, while molten, burst from below and forced its way between horizontal beds ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard

... part of which was deposited within the first 300 feet. Lower down, from one to two feet of deposit was laid over the meadows; rocks, weighing from five to twenty tons, were transported to a considerable distance; and at seven miles from the outbreak, near Huddersfield, a stratum of sand was laid over the fields. The mention of these facts may be of service to those who have had opportunities for ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various

... superficial variety, pus forms between the rete Malpighii and the stratum corneum of the skin, the latter being raised as a blister in which fluctuation can be detected (Fig. 9, a). This is commonly met with in the palm of the hand of labouring men who have recently resumed work after a spell of idleness. ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... respectable old age, even for the life of a nation. This is plainly corroborated by the other means of reckoning the antiquity of the monuments,—such as the wear of the stones by meteorological influences, or the thickness of the stratum of the rich loam, the result of the decay of vegetable life, accumulated on the roofs and terraces of the buildings, not to speak of their position respecting the pole-star and the ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.

... are not found on the surface of the ground, but ordinarily buried deeply where the earth has not been disturbed. They are recovered from a stratum of gravel or clay which has been deposited gradually and has fixed them in place safe from the air, a sure proof that they have been there for a ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos

... these observations of our author, is this. First, there is no distinction to be made of what is termed primary and secondary mountains, with regard to the position of their strata; every different species of stratum, from the stratified granite and quartzy schistus of the Alps to the oolites of the Jura and Saleve, being found in every respect the same; whether this shall be supposed as arising from their ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton

... the story of capital is to be found in this fact, too often forgotten, that there was an economic-political division cutting deep through every stratum of the Northern people. Their economic life as well as their political life was controlled on the one hand by a devotion to the cause of the war, and on the other hand by a hatred of that cause or by cynical indifference. And ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson

... which strikes me is a doubt whether a mass of strata, when heated, and therefore in some slight degree at least softened, would bow outwards like a bar of metal. Consider of how many subordinate layers each great mass would be composed, and the mineralogical changes in any length of any one stratum: I should have thought that the strata would in every case have crumpled up, and we know how commonly in metamorphic strata, which have undergone heat, the subordinate layers are wavy and sinuous, which has always been attributed to ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... the supposition that the stars of our firmament, instead of being scattered indifferently in all directions through space, form a stratum of which the thickness is small in comparison with its length and breadth; and in which the earth occupies a place somewhere about the middle of its thickness and near the point where it subdivides into two principal laminae inclined at a small ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... Massachusetts important changes had come upon the chain of colonies along the Atlantic seaboard in America. In the older colonies the people had been born on the soil at two or three generations' remove from the original colonists, or belonged to a later stratum of migration superimposed upon the first. The exhausting toil and privations of the pioneer had been succeeded by a good measure of thrift and comfort. There were yet bloody campaigns to be fought out against the ferocity and craft ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... names of the earliest period are in many cases untranslateable—that is to say, as with the first stratum of Greek names, they bear no obvious meaning in the language as we know it. Others are names of animals or natural objects. Unlike the later historical cognomens, they each consist, as a rule, of a single element, not of two elements ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen

... men by his simulation of virtue. It would have been impossible for him to have organised that atrocious attack upon the Commonwealth, unless that fierce outgrowth of depraved passions had rested on some under-stratum of agreeable qualities ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins

... be ruled without representation by a distant government exercising its authority through innumerable prefects. Such Teutonic rank and file as there was became absorbed into this population; and except in sundry chartered towns there was nothing like a social stratum interposed between the nobles and ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske

... the lower. "But," says Galien, "a ship keeps its place in the water because it is full of air, and air is much lighter than water. Suppose, then, that there was the same difference of weight between the upper and the lower layer of air as there is between the lower stratum and water; and suppose, also, a boat which rested upon the lower layer of air, with its bulk in the lighter upper layer—like a ship which has its keel in the water but its bulk in the air—the same thing would happen with the air-ship as with the ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion

... myself, "when men seek gain they bore for it. They go down—never up." Even so with the Dimocrisy. We dug downward, downward, downward, through all the strata uv society. We went through the groceries; the next stratum was the most ignorant uv the furiners; then we struck the poor whites uv the South; then, below them, the heft uv the people uv Noo Gersy; then Southern Illinoy and Indiana; then Pike county, Missouri; and so on. We never went ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby

... chance or not until he has tested the matter by boring. The quality of the artesian water is determined by its distant source and the bad water you have found is therefore no indication of the quality of what may be below it. No one should enter an artesian undertaking, except to tap a stratum of known depth, without a long purse. Probably one in a thousand of the bores made into the crust of the earth yields as many gallons of artesian water as gallons of various liquids used in boring it - and yet some of them are good wells to pump from because they pierce other strata carrying water, ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson

... public welfare. In democratic communities, there is always a tendency on the part of what may be called superfine persons to hold aloof from public, and especially municipal, life. If this sentiment of fastidiousness or indifference were to spread widely, and a fashion which begins in one social stratum quickly permeates to those immediately below it, there would be great danger, as there seems to be in America, of the public administration becoming seriously and permanently deteriorated. To prevent this evil, it is desirable to create, in every community, a strong sentiment against ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler

... Thoreau means when he says in "Walden," in telling of his visit to "Baker Farm": "Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a rainbow's arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinging the grass and leaves around, and dazzling me as if I looked through colored crystal." Is it possible, then, to reach the end of the rainbow? Why did he not dig for the pot of gold that is buried ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs

... the place where I had torn off the plank. I eagerly scrambled in that direction, but could see no way over it. I must get inside, as I first intended. I thought then, if I could force off the top, I might make my way through it to an upper stratum of the cargo. I did as I proposed. In vain I tried with my back and hands to force up the top. I had forgotten to bring the handspike. It occurred to me that with that as a lever I should succeed. I ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston

... brilliant day, with a glorious blue sky overhead and a bracing breeze out of the east. Just beyond Long Island a low stratum of miasmic gray was the only shred of the usual fog to be seen on the whole horizon. In the little roadstead the vessels, black-hulled or white, rode eagerly and gracefully at their moorings, the bright ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams

... tile—a nest sometimes quite eight inches thick—we find live inhabitants only in a thin outer layer. All the remainder, the catacombs of past generations, is but a horrible heap of dead, shrivelled, ruined, decomposed things. Into this sub-stratum of the ancient city the unreleased Bees, the untransformed larvae fall as dust; here the honey-stores of old go sour, here the uneaten provisions are ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre

... lowest channels that offered. As elsewhere, it is obstructed by the unrecognized mistakes of its past. Our part of London, like Kensington or Islington, is but the formless accretion of countless swarms of life which had no common endeavour; and so here we are, Time's latest deposit, the vascular stratum of this area of the earth's rind, a sensitive surface flourishing during its day on the piled strata of the dead. Yet this is the reef to which I am connected by tissue and bone. Cut the kind of life you find in Poplar and I must bleed. I cannot detach myself, and write of it. Like any other atom, ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson

... slight gathering on his brow, and look inquiringly at him. He says, 'I have decided upon opening the large upper valve,' and carefully explains why. 'The tension,' he says, 'in the balloon is not greater than it would bear with safety in a warm stratum of air; but now that we are three miles up with a chilled balloon, it is better to allow some to escape at top, as well as a good deal from the neck.' At once I see the force of the argument, and inwardly ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne

... of which the water was very brackish. From hence, however, we ran immediately to an eminence near us, where the nature of the country appeared evidently changed. The plain was covered with a thin stratum of vegetable soil, which being very poor, was manured in the plantations with broken shells and corals. The eminence, on the contrary, was a rocky ground, consisting of large pieces of quartz and glimmer (mica). Here grew a quantity of dry grasses, about two or three ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr

... In the trough of the valley lies a regular opaque layer of white clouds, hiding the fields and cottages from our view. We have already passed the zone of perpetual moisture, whose incessant clouds and showers are caused by the stratum of hot air—charged with water evaporated from the gulf—striking upon the mountains, and there depositing part of the aqueous ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor

... were taken off in silence—some by her own listless hands, some by Cytherea's. Then followed the outer stratum of clothing. The dress being removed, Cytherea took it in her hand and went with it into the bedroom adjoining, intending to hang it in the wardrobe. But on second thoughts, in order that she might not keep Miss Aldclyffe waiting a moment longer than necessary, she flung it down on ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy

... pit through the floor beneath us, and that I could succeed in making a section right through in the direction of New Zealand, I should find in each of the different beds through which I passed the remains of animals which I should find in that stratum and not in the others. First, I should come upon beds of gravel or drift containing the bones of large animals, such as the elephant, rhinoceros, and cave tiger. Rather curious things to fall across in Piccadilly! If I should dig lower still, I should come upon a bed ...
— The Past Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley

... weather the fork should not be used during the growing or bearing season. The turning down of a stratum of dry, hot soil next to the roots must cause a sudden check and injury from which only a soaking rain can bring full relief. But in moist weather, and periods preceding and following the blossoming and fruiting season, I have often used the ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe

... it ever must, the saddest and most hopeless spectacle in the kaleidoscope of life. There were scores of thousands in this social sewer and new recruits coming daily. The avarice and extravagance of the Court pressed upon the great stratum of middle life, which in time bore down upon the lower sphere with crushing weight, while many of its numbers, weary of the eternal struggle, relaxed their hold on respectability and fell into the pit of crime and moral death. The inhabitants ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various

... he has had fields of view which contained no less than 588 stars, and these were continued for many minutes, so that in one quarter of an hour's time there passed no less than 116,000 stars. He also intimates the probability of the sun being placed in this great stratum, though perhaps not in the very ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various

... from Pekin and "the Islands" to Cape Town and Buenos Ayres, and given him not merely an acquaintance with the world but—what is far more of an acquisition—the gift of getting acquainted in almost any stratum of the world in the briefest possible space ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck

... and sent his level beams along the stream, the thin stratum of mist, or malaria, rose also and dispersed, but the light was not able to enliven the dull water nor give any hint of its apparently fathomless depth. Venerable mud-turtles crawled up and roosted upon the old logs in the stream, their backs glistening ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... a slight haze makes the opposite shore-line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, "the glassy surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another. You would think that you could walk dry under it to the opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim over might perch on it. Indeed, they sometimes dive below this line, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... perfect fossil of the sea turtle has recently been discovered in an extensive stratum of limestone, four fathoms water, called the Stone Ridge, about four miles off Harwich harbour. It is incrusted in a mass of ferruginous limestone, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various

... last quarter of the ebb, floating objects drift southward toward the sea, while the heavier material upon the bottom is borne northward toward the city piers. While, upon the surface, the ebb exceeds the flood both in velocity and duration, the motions of the lowest water-stratum are subject to the reverse conditions: it therefore follows that the heavier deposits from the city drainage cannot be swept away through this the main avenue to the sea. This contrast of motion between the upper and lower drifts was observed in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... had made his parting visit to Lilian Ashford, who knit his "fighting socks," as he had called them since the eventful day when he had found her letter and her picture in them. Of course, he could not help thinking of her; and, as he had a thin stratum of sentiment in his composition, it is more than probable that the beautiful young lady monopolized more than her fair share of his thoughts; but I am sure it was not at all to the detriment of the affection he owed his mother and the other dear ones, who were shrined ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic

... be a short sound of "u," it is only a weak case of In. by s. But if the pupil shuts his eyes, such inclusions will not be observed. It is true that such application is not so high or grand as when they govern ideas, but it is equally genuine. It is only a lower stratum, but still it is a part of terra firma, and on no account is ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)

... wild-animal fear that Americans ever have seen was furnished by the African motion pictures of Paul J. Rainey. They were taken from a blind constructed within close range of a dry river bed in northern British East Africa, where a supply of water was held, by a stratum of waterproof clay or rock, about four feet below the surface of the dry river bed. By industrious pawing the zebras had dug a hole down to the water, and to this one life-saving well wild animals of many species flocked from miles around. ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... of fact, underneath the manifold disagreements as to good and bad, there is a deep stratum of absolute certainty. It is only in the more complex and delicate matters that doubt arises; all men share in those elementary perceptions of good and bad that make up the bulk of human valuation. To men everywhere it is an evil to ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... the abutments a thick stratum of shale had been exposed that air-slaked as fast as it was uncovered. Jim gave orders that drifts be driven through the stratum until a safe distance from possible exposure was reached. These were to be filled with concrete immediately. It was careful and important ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow

... entered it under his brother's wing, hardly seemed to the new boy as disreputable a haunt as his recent Modern friend had led him to expect. Nor did the sixty or seventy fellows who clustered in the common room strike him as exactly the lowest stratum of Fellsgarth society. Yorke, the captain, for instance, with his serene, well-cut face, his broad shoulders and impressive voice hardly answered to the description of a lout. Nor did Ranger, of the long legs, with speed written in every ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed

... forming a continuous stratum 1 Pores each a distinct tube, standing closely side by side Fistulina 1. Stem central, and stratum of spores easily separable from the cap Boletus 1. Stratum of tubes not separating easily, cap covered with coarse scales Strobilomyces ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard

... the earth was of a cylindrical form, suspended in the middle of the universe, and surrounded by water, air, and fire, like the coats of an onion; but that the interior stratum of fire was broken up and collected into masses, from which originated the sun, moon, and stars; which he thought were carried round by the three spheres in which they were respectively fixed. He ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero

... head of the firm of Willoughby & Walton, and it was the general opinion that Mrs. Willoughby was the head of the firm of Ella & William Willoughby. The Willoughbys were good mixers, and were spoken well of even by the set who occupied the social stratum just one degree below that in which they themselves moved. In fact, when Mrs. Willoughby had been severely injured in an automobile accident during the previous summer Glenclair had shown real solicitude for her and had forgotten a good deal of its ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... road, Or, it may be, a picture; to these men, The landscape is an armory of powers, Which, one by one, they know to draw and use. They harness beast, bird, insect, to their work; They prove the virtues of each bed of rock, And, like the chemist 'mid his loaded jars, Draw from each stratum its adapted use To drug their crops or weapon their arts withal. They turn the frost upon their chemic heap, They set the wind to winnow pulse and grain, They thank the spring-flood for its fertile slime, And, on cheap summit-levels of the snow, Slide with the sledge to inaccessible ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... he wasn't altogether a fool in other ways. Deep down in him there was a kind of stratum of sense. I had known him, once or twice, show an almost human intelligence. But to reach that stratum, mind you, ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse

... quite sure, but I am afraid your cottages are on that stratum where you could not bring ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge



Words linked to "Stratum" :   age class, upper class, caste, substrate, corneum, organism, cuticle, agriculture, commonalty, middle class, ninja, world, level, proletariat, craft, cambium, dermis, peasantry, woman, trade, superstrate, socio-economic class, horizon, bed, firing line, commons, labour, working class, rete Malpighii, stratum corneum, estate, corium, fair sex, market, society, yeomanry, horny layer, derma, labor, people, malpighian layer, upper crust, bourgeoisie, womanhood, wall, seam, place, the three estates, commonality, demimonde, paries, immigrant class, class structure, sodality, center, epidermis, underworld, being, estate of the realm, brotherhood, lower class, domain, fraternity, stratify, underclass, old school, booboisie



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com