FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • More 'Detritus' Quotes from Famous Books

... and deposition of sediment constitute the legitimate business of a river. If the bed of the Mississippi were of adamant, and its drainage slopes were armored with chilled steel, its current would do just what it has been doing in past ages—wear them away, and fill the Gulf of Mexico with the detritus. ...

— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various

... particular that prepares the opinions and beliefs of crowds, or at least the soil on which they will germinate. This is why certain ideas are realisable at one epoch and not at another. It is time that accumulates that immense detritus of beliefs and thoughts on which the ideas of a given period spring up. They do not grow at hazard and by chance; the roots of each of them strike down into a long past. When they blossom it is time that has prepared their blooming; and to arrive at a notion of ...

— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon

... end of the mattress so that his feet were on a level with his pillowed head; the chest of little drawers which his daughters called "father's hobby," nailed high on the wall and filled with all sorts of odds and ends, the detritus and possible repair-material of years of housekeeping—all this Sissy took in with the unseeing eyes one has ...

— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson

... slope, well-watered by bubbling springs and mountain rills, we found a comfortable khambi with well-made huts, which the natives call Simbo. It lies just two hours or five miles north-west of the Ungerengeri crossing. The ground is rocky, composed principally of quartzose detritus swept down by the constant streams. In the neighbourhood of these grow bamboo, the thickest of which was about two and a half inches in diameter; the "myombo," a very shapely tree, with a clean trunk like ...

— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... half its width by an enormous detritus of boulders, taking the form of a huge jagged tongue, with curling on edges; commonly said to be high when the Hsin T'an is low. At its worst during early summer and autumn. Wrecks frequent, after Mi Tsang Gorge is passed, eight ...

— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... the sage has spent a lifetime in putting content into the word. For him, the word epitomizes his life history. Through its magic leading he retraces his journeys through physiography and geology, watching the sea wear away two thousand feet of the Appalachian Mountains and spread the detritus over vast areas, making the great fertile corn and wheat belt of our country. He knows that this section produces, annually, such a quantity of corn as would require for transportation a procession of teams that would encircle the ...

— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson

... and we thought we should have been obliged to have passed the night without any. At last we discovered some by looking close to the mountain, for at the distance even of a few hundred yards the streamlets were buried and entirely lost in the friable calcareous stone and loose detritus. I do not think Nature ever made a more solitary, desolate pile of rock; — it well deserves its name of Hurtado, or separated. The mountain is steep, extremely rugged, and broken, and so entirely destitute of trees, and even bushes, that we actually could not ...

— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... the second class consisting of rocks formed of the broken fragments or altered substance of the primary ones, therefore called "Secondary;" and, thirdly, rocks or earthy deposits formed by the ruins and detritus of both primary and secondary rocks, called, therefore, "Tertiary." This classification was always, in some degree, uncertain; and has been lately superseded by more complicated systems, founded on the character of the fossils contained in the various deposits, and ...

— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin

... he did so promptly, for, in less than a minute, and without the slightest premonition, the immense bank above them slid with a terrific rumbling noise into the river. The enormous mass of sand and vegetable detritus thus detached could not have been much, if at all, less than half a mile in extent. It came surging and hurling down— trees and roots and rocks and mud intermingling in a chaos of grand confusion, the great cable-like creepers twining like snakes in agony, and snapping as if they were mere ...

— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne

... regard to the rivers, that the winter floods break down the drifts in the banks and agitate the auriferous detritus, thus acting as natural sluices, and cause the metal to accumulate in favourable spots; whilst on the New Zealand coast the heavy seas breaking on the shingly beach, carry off the lighter particles, leaving behind the gold, which is so much heavier. These beaches are composed, as also are the "terraces" ...

— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson

... the "base level of erosion," as the Major called it, would vegetation succeed in holding its place; that is when the declivity of the surrounding region became reduced till the rain torrents should lack the velocity necessary to transport any great load of detritus, and the disintegrated material would accumulate, give a footing to plants, and thus further protect itself and ...

— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... sustaining a soil comparatively thin. The character of the island is that of a mountain mass, which, as the ancient watermark on the northern coast shows, has at some remote period been tilted over, and has shot out an immense amount of detritus on its southern side, forming thus the plains which extend along a good part of that coast, varying in breadth from ten to twenty miles, besides the alluvial peninsula of Vere. In the interior, also, there is an upland basin of considerable extent, looking ...

— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... its rise in a war of invasion. When the northern host swept southward, and overwhelmed Jerusalem, the onrushing wave was fretted with fire; later, when the wave of war retreated, it carried back the detritus of a ruined civilization. The story of the siege of Jerusalem, the assault upon its gates, the fall of the walls, all the horrors of famine and of pestilence, are given in the earlier chapters of this wonderful book. The homeward march of the Persian army ...

— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various

... is as elegantly rounded as an acorn-cup. From this contour results a naked semi-cone of polished granite, whose face would cover one of our smaller Eastern counties, though its exquisite proportions make it seem a thing to hold in the hollow of the hand. A small pine-covered glacis of detritus lies at its foot, but every yard above that is bare of all life save the palaeozoic memories which have wrinkled the granite Colossus from the earliest seethings of the fire-time. I never could call a Yo-Semite crag inorganic, as I used to speak of everything not ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... rills which rise amid the icy summits of the great chain, or the lower peaks of the minor one, combine into ever growing streams of pleasant waters which finally unite in the sluggish but impressive Po. Melting snows and torrential rains fill these watercourses with the rich detritus of the hills which renews from year to year the soil it originally created. A genial climate and a grateful soil return to the industrious inhabitants an ample reward for their labors. In the fiercest heats of summer the passing traveler, if he pauses, will hear the soft sounds of slow-running ...

— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... the concrete surface are filled once or twice a year, tar or asphalt being employed. The dust and detritus is cleaned out of the cracks and the hot filler poured in, with enough excess overflowing ...

— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg

... into a narrow plain of shingle and sand. I am convinced that these shingle terraces were accumulated during the gradual elevation of the Cordilleras by the torrents delivering at successive levels their detritus on the beach-heads of long, narrow arms of the sea, first high up the valleys, then lower down and lower down as ...

— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various

... throughout the remainder of our journey. I saw but one flower of it, but its falcate seed-vessels, often more than a foot long, were very numerous. Pandanus spiralis was frequent. The box (Eucalyptus), on the flats along the creek, the soil of which is probably formed of the detritus of basaltic rock, had a lanceolate glossy leaf, uniting the character of the box with glossy orbicular leaves growing generally on the whinstone soil of the northern parts of the colony, and of the box with long lanceolate leaves which prefers stiff flats on the tributary ...

— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt

... world's history when a more exuberant vegetation prevailed, if not a more abounding animal life. The same persistent, ever-acting law of vital development and growth has been present, in all conditions and circumstances of matter, ever since the detritus of the silicious rocks felt the first influence of the rains, the dews, and the sunlight. Then the earth commenced "to bring forth the grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit-trees yielding fruit, after his kind;" and in their growth was laid the foundation of animal life. Whether ...

— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... compression, upon a stiff clay substratum; but in Oude I have seen it only in nodules, usually formed on nuclei of flint or other hard substances. The kingdom of Oude must have once been the bed, or part of the bed, of a large lake, formed by the diluvial detritus of the hills of the Himmalaya chain, and, as limestone abounds in that chain, the bed contains abundance of lime, which is taken up by the water that percolates through it from the rivers and from the rains and floods above. The lime thus taken up and held in solution with carbonic ...

— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman

... and if any mould, however minute, by any means accumulates between the slates, there, too, they spring up, and even on the slates themselves. Tiles are often coloured yellow by such growths. On some old roofs, which have decayed, and upon which detritus has accumulated, wallflowers may be found; and the house-leek takes capricious root where it fancies. The stonecrop is the finest of roof-plants, sometimes forming a broad patch of brilliant yellow. Birds carry up seeds and grains, and these germinate in moist thatch. Groundsel, ...

— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies

... well-watered by bubbling springs and mountain rills, we found a comfortable khambi with well-made huts, which the natives call Simbo. It lies just two hours or five miles north-west of the Ungerengeri crossing. The ground is rocky, composed principally of quartzose detritus swept down by the constant streams. In the neighbourhood of these grow bamboo, the thickest of which was about two and a half inches in diameter; the "myombo," a very shapely tree, with a clean trunk like an ash, the "imbite," with large, fleshy leaves ...

— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... stone-towers. But we are warned to be careful for the sake of the little ghosts: if any of their work be overturned, they will cry. So we move very cautiously and slowly across the cave to a space bare of stone-heaps, where the rocky floor is covered with a thin layer of sand, detritus of a crumbling ledge above it. And in that sand I see light prints of little feet, children's feet, tiny naked feet, only three or four inches long—the footprints ...

— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn