|
|
|
More "Sterility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... chimney; and then they yoked their miscellaneous cattle again, and breasted the hill. With many a jump, and bump, and jolt, and scream from inside, they reached the summit, and looked down on a vast slope, flowering but arid, a region of gaudy sterility. ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... OF DECADENCE.—The sixteenth century reaped the fruits that had been sown in the fifteenth, but it scattered no seeds for a harvest in the seventeenth, which was therefore doomed to general sterility. In the reigns of Charles V. and Philip II. the chains of civil and religious despotism were forged which subdued the intellect and arrested the genius of the people. The Spanish viceroys ruled with an iron hand over ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... will understand this better when I explain about the development and birth of the child.) If this tear is repaired immediately no inconvenience usually results but if it is neglected it may produce a series of complications, some of which are falling of the womb, inflammation and even sterility. ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... self-evolved. It is a premature, an unconscious effort made by a limited class to achieve per saltum what was slowly and laboriously wrought out by whole nations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Too precocious, too complete within too narrow limits, it was doomed to sterility. Not the least singular fact about it is that though the Carmina Vagorum continued to be appreciated, they were neither imitated nor developed to any definite extent after the period which I have indicated. They fell still-born upon the unreceptive soil of European culture at that epoch. ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... avenue without having exchanged a single word. I felt deeply, as you may believe, how much this silence, on my part at least, was awkward, stiff, and ridiculous; but, as it often happens in circumstances which demand most imperatively the resources of eloquence, I was stricken with an invincible sterility of mind. I tried in vain to find some plausible subject of conversation, and the more annoyed I felt at finding none, the less capable I ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... should haste To assimilate her offerings, and we From high life-elements, as doth the tree, Should grow to higher; so what we call Taste Is a slow living as of roots encased In the grim chinks of some sterility Both cramping and withholding. Art is Truth, But Truth dammed up and frozen, gagged and bound As is a streamlet icy and uncouth Which pebbles hath and channel but no sound: Give it again its summer heart of youth And it will be a life upon ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... exit of a discontented and resentful expectant mother, a woman, very much alone in the world—perhaps a bachelor maid or a barren wife, who, as she sits in the office, bitterly weeps and wails over her state of loneliness or sterility; and so we are led to realize that discontentment is the lot of many women; and we are sometimes led to regret that ours is not the power to take from her that hath and give to her ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... my lord. Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend To make this creature fruitful! Into her womb convey sterility! Dry up in her the organs of increase; And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honour her! If she must teem, Create her child of spleen, that it may live And be a thwart disnatur'd torment to her! ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... doubt, by the unfavourable impression he had imbibed by spending a long protracted winter on the dreary northern shore, amid almost ever-during arctic ice, and surrounded by the most unpromising sterility; and though some of his companions represented the land as pleasing and fertile, the desire of visiting Iceland seems, for some time, to have lain dormant among the adventurous Norwegian navigators; probably because neither fame nor riches could be acquired, either ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... When it is remembered that his theory is, that slight variations occurring in an individual advantageous to it (not to its associates), in the struggle for life, is perpetuated by inheritance, it is no wonder that the case of sterile ants gave him so much trouble. Accidental sterility is not favorable to the individual, and its being made permanent by inheritance, is out of the question, for the sterile have no descendants. Yet these sterile females are not degenerations, they are in general larger and more ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... the shedding of the fruit just as the pits are hardening. When they are hard the fruit does not fall. So this June-drop question ties in with the complications of pollination and nutrition. We know from experiments on the sterility of the pear tree, if highly fed and cultivated, such as those I worked on in the city of Rochester, that those highly fed trees will have some self-fertilized pears. In all of the pears we got no pears resulted when pollinized with the pollen of ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... Who, as he listened to the musical hum of the great humble-bees, or marked their ponderous flight from flower to flower, and watched the unpacking of their trunks for their work of suction, would have supposed that the multiplication or diminution of their race, or the fruitfulness and sterility of the red clover, depend as directly on the vigilance of our cats as do those of our well-guarded game-preserves on the watching of our keepers? Yet this Mr. Darwin has discovered to ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... more common as the result of degeneration or extensive and destructive disease of the secreting organs (testicles, ovaries) which elaborate the male and female sexual products, respectively. Such diseases are, therefore, a common cause of sterility in both sexes. The old bull, fat and lazy, becomes sluggish and unreliable in serving, and finally gets to be useless for breeding purposes. This is not attributable to his weight and clumsiness alone, but largely to the fatty ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... civilized world to the other, cheated, beaten, bullied, and hunted into the streets to disgusting overwork, without daring to utter the cry for help that brings, not rescue, but exposure and infamy, yet revenging herself terribly in the end by scattering blindness and sterility, pain and disfigurement, insanity and death among us with the certainty that we are much too pious and genteel to allow such things to be mentioned with a view to saving either her or ourselves from them. And all the time we ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... effects converge, paralyzing in the nation the best half of the soul, and, worse still, to leading the will astray and perverting the public mind, transforming generous impulses into evil outbursts, and organizing lasting inertia, ennui, discontent, discord, feebleness, and sterility.[4102] ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... have been wrongfully hanged at Montgomery; and, when the rope was round his neck, he declared in proof of his innocence that grass would never grow on his grave. Curious to relate, be the cause what it may, there is yet to be seen a strip of sterility—in the form of a cross—amidst ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... South, miscegenation, the Negro family since emancipation, the new basis of American life, the revolution in the woman's world, the woman in the modern American family, the career of the child, the passing of patriarchism and familiarism, the precarious hour, the trend as to marriage, race sterility and race suicide, divorce, the attitude of the church, the family, and the social revolution. The author finds that during the past half century the American family possesses unity, due to the fact that the period itself is marked by intrinsic oneness ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... the small mountain proprietors who form the populations of the towns of 10,000 inhabitants towards the Mediterranean. You have seen with what indomitable resolution they combat the sterility of their meagre domains, without any hope of ever becoming rich. These poor people, who spend their lives in getting their living, would fancy themselves transported to Paradise, if anybody were to give ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... to pass on his intelligence to little Scogans, and Denis to little Denises. The bull turned his head to see what was happening, regarded the drumming stick for several seconds, then turned back again satisfied, it seemed, that nothing was happening. Sterility was odious, unnatural, a sin against life. Life, life, and still more life. The ribs of the placid ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... running down the bark of the tree and entering the ground, where every drop binds a certain amount of earth to an insoluble substance, in which state it remains for ever. With every application the quantity of these insoluble compounds is augmented and sterility added. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... to the dust and proclaim our utter worthlessness, is to men and women of this time wholly inconceivable. That nothing ethically valuable can be accomplished except after instant prayer, or after copious outpourings of Divine grace, that the curse of absolute sterility is upon all our attempts to conform to the dictates of the moral law, unless God be with us in prayer, is henceforth an ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... his leadership were. But, whatever the uncertainties of the moment, they soon passed. Laurier at once showed capacities which the Liberals had never before known in a leader. The long story of Liberal sterility and ineffectiveness from the middle of the last century to almost its close is the story of the political incapacity of its successive leaders, a demonstration of the unfitness of men with the emotional equipment of the ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... man wishes to leave behind some monument of his labors, to bless or instruct mankind. Any man without some form of this noble ambition lives in vain, even if his monument be no more than a cultivated farm rescued from wildness and sterility. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... briefest sketch of the condition of Chinese medicine leaves the impression of the appalling stagnation and sterility that may afflict a really intelligent people for thousands of years. It is doubtful if they are today in a very much more advanced condition than were the Egyptians at the time when the Ebers Papyrus was written. From one point of view it is an interesting experiment, as illustrating the state in ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... where it is not perceived, but like the distinctions of geography—existing to-day, forgotten to-morrow—and abolished by a stroke of the pen, or a trick of diplomacy. Russia, again, a mighty empire, as respects the simple grandeur of magnitude, builds her power upon sterility. She has it in her power to seduce an invading foe into vast circles of starvation, of which the radii measure a thousand leagues. Frost and snow are confederates of her strength. She is strong by her very weakness. But Rome laid a belt about the Mediterranean of a thousand miles in breadth; and ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... a horse in poor condition and in warm weather cannot go much over a day without water, and when the sterility of the country is considered, it will be readily seen what a disadvantage one labours under without camels, which can go ten days without water. Well can I sympathize with Mr. Giles when he states in his journal: "All I coveted ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... of the Great Bight, still longed to venture again, and accompanied his friend Sturt as far as ever his duties permitted him. Leichhardt died in harness somewhere in Australia, and Kennedy lost his life in his desire to emulate his former chief, Mitchell. Even the very sterility of the great solitude seems to have been, in its way, a lure to drag men back to encounter ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... Injun Mountain to the right, with its bare, beetling sandstone crags. There was the long line of cherty hills to the left, covered by a dark growth of stunted pines. Between lay that melancholy stretch of sterility known as Poor Valley,—the poorest of the several valleys in Tennessee thus piteously denominated, because of the sorry contrast which they present to the rich coves and fertile vales so usual among the mountains of ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... rank luxuriance Of vegetation flourish and decay, Vanish and pass away insensibly, Perish from off the earth which nourished it, And time supplant its rich exuberance With arid wastes of bleak sterility; Wilt thou look down in silent unconcern When countless eons of denuding time Have rendered earth as barren as thyself, Bereft of verdure's last habiliment; When men, with all their passions and desires, Their strange combines of evil and of good, Their ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... too, according to a German belief, is said to attract rain, and in olden times was thought to produce sterility. Some critics have suggested that it is the plant referred to in "Macbeth" by ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... with the ass is easy enough, and is constantly done as far as I am aware, if you take two mules, a male and a female, and endeavor to breed from them, you get no offspring whatever; no generation will take place. This is what is called the sterility of the hybrids between two distinct species." (Huxley, "On the Origin of Species." p. ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... industry and endurance of William Burness to the utmost; and what with the sterility of the soil, which was the poorest in the parish, and the loss of cattle by accidents and disease, it was with great difficulty that he managed to support his family. They lived so sparingly that butcher's meat was for years a stranger in the house, and they ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... climbing a little up that gorge, into the shade? I cannot digest properly with the sun staring at me. And tell me, as we go along, your impressions of the ruin. . . I perceive drawbacks to incest; grave practical drawbacks—sterility, inbreeding. Yes, there is obviously something to be said for exogamy. AUDI ALTERAM PARTEM as Eames might say, though God knows why he thinks it sounds better in Latin. Seen ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... treatment of male rats with certain types of hard radiations, which not only renders them reproductively sterile but leaves the rodents so treated in full possession of all other sexual functions and impulses. Furthermore, this condition of sterility is venereally contagious, so that one male rat so treated will sterilize all female rats with which it comes in contact, and these, in turn, will sterilize all male rats coming in contact with them. Our mathematicians estimate that ...
— Operation R.S.V.P. • Henry Beam Piper
... scarcely touched by the hand of man. Savage governments, savage nations, and savage indolence, have left those countries almost in a state of nature; yet it is within the tropics that the true productiveness of the earth is alone to be looked for. Our long winters, our mountains, and the comparative sterility of Europe, prohibit that richness of produce which only waits the hand of man in the South, and it is only when the industry of the European shall be suffered to throw its strength into the Asiatic soil, that man will ever be able to discover ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... and abounding in grape-vines. These tracts possess springs in abundance. The "islands" so often alluded to by travellers are most picturesque and beautiful features in the landscape. They must not be compared to oases, for they are surrounded by anything but sterility; but they are the evidence of springs, and generally of a slight rise in the ground, and the timber upon them is of almost tropical luxuriance. Herds of deer are feeding in their shade, the murmur of wild bees fills the air, and the sweet vine-smell invites ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... and the very general sterility of hybrids from being a CRUX of the theory of descent becomes a stronghold of defence. It appears as part of the same story as the benefit derived from judicious, and the mischief from injudicious, crossing; and this, in its turn, is seen as ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... SEDESQUE QUIETAE which, in some degree the Elizabethan poets offer, disappear; until filling the central years of the seventeenth century we reach an age as barren for inspiration of new song as the Wars of the Roses; although the great survivors from earlier years mask this sterility;—masking also the revolution in poetical manner and matter which we can see secretly preparing in the later 'Cavalier' poets, but which was not clearly recognised before the time of ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... mountains to the north-east. The margin of the actual coast nearest to the ship was indented with bays; and even rocks appeared in places; but the general character of the scene was that of a fierce and burning sterility. On this picture of desolation all stood gazing in awe and admiration for some minutes, as the day gradually brightened, until a cry arose from ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... under heaven. Far from being an admirer of mountains, he was of the opinion of Dr Johnson that "an eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility" and that "this uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveller" (Works, ed. ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... to the theory of the Physiocrates, only transfers already existing wealth from one hand to another. What the merchants gain by it is at the cost of the nation. Hence, it is desirable that this loss should be as small as possible. Hence sterility!(316) But, the more important branches of business, especially wholesale trade, are connected with a transportation of goods (Verri), either from one place or from one period of time, into another. Here the genuine merchant speculates ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... and 1775 he says that he made 3,000 pounds by his agricultural writings. The pen brought him more profit than the plough. He took a hundred acres in Hertfordshire, and said of them, "I know not what epithet to give this soil; sterility falls short of the idea; a hungry vitriolic gravel—I occupied for nine years the jaws of a wolf. A nabob's fortune would sink in the attempt to raise good arable crops in such a country. My experience and knowledge had increased ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... control the excessive vegetation, and he matched the small economies of the Chinese against the opulence of the Californian soil. The "garden patch" prospered; the neighbors spoke well of it and of him. But Jackson knew that this fierce harvest of early spring was to be followed by the sterility of the dry season, and that irrigation could alone make his work profitable in the end. He brought a pump to force the water from the little stream at the foot of the slope to the top, and allowed it to flow back through parallel trenches. Again Buckeye applauded! ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... girls too, as they will. Then from the porch may many a bride Unto the holy temple ride: And thence return, short prayers said, A wife most richly married. Last, may the bride and bridegroom be Untouch'd by cold sterility; But in their springing blood so play, As that in lusters few they may, By laughing too, and lying down, People a city or ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... feverish sense of weariness and pain that I found myself entering this vast reservoir of human vices. I became at once sensible of the sterility of that polluted soil so incapable of nurturing affection, and I clasped your image the closer to my heart. It is you, who, when I was most weary of existence, gifted me with a new life. You breathed into me a part of your own spirit; my soul feels that influence, and becomes more ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he who allowed vice and degrading passions to find a place in his own soul, and neglected to exterminate noxious animals and weeds, and to help redeem the earth from the barrenness and sterility created by the enemy of Ormazd. [Footnote: The belief of the Zoroastrians in the sacredness of the elements,—earth, water, fire, and air,—created a difficulty in regard to the disposal of dead bodies. They could neither be burned, buried, thrown into the water, nor left to decay ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... any destination. The desolation of the country had become so absolute that she could not conceive of anything but still greater desolation lying beyond. She had no feeling that she was merely traversing a tract of sterility. Her sensation was that she had passed the boundary of the world God had created, and come into some other place, upon which He had never looked and of which ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... the most general law of the universe, the effects differed as much in quantity and time as in character—a remarkable efflorescence of literature in Germany being at once produced, to relapse shortly into a long sterility, a tardier but more constant growth following in England and Italy, while the effect in Spain was the most partial and obscure of all. The great names of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide hardly meet with any others in these literatures representing ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... spot of verdure is to be seen on this place, but the glorious hills rising on every side, vested in foliage of living green, make ample amends for the sterility of the tiny level upon which we camp. The surrounding scenery is infinitely more charming than that of Rich Bar. The river, in hue of a vivid emerald, as if it reflected the hue of the fir-trees above, bordered with a band of dark red, caused by the streams flowing into ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... surveyed the generation to which he himself belongs, and after having scanned these wide domains of emasculation, these prairies of spiritual sterility, these vast plains of servility and irresolution, he has addressed to himself the questions: How does a whole generation become such? How was it possible to nip in the bud all that was fertile and ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... influences were strong; in the speech of the upper circles there was an over-fondness for German, French, and English words. Between them the two friends, by force of their great genius, cleared away the debris which made for sterility and erected in their stead a new structure out of living Russian words. The spoken word, born of the people, gave soul and wing to literature; only by coming to earth, the native earth, was it enabled to soar. Coming up from Little Russia, the Ukraine, with Cossack ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... nature, we must seek the continent of Europe, whose human inhabitants had not only to subdue the wild beasts and teach the earth to bring forth wholesome food in place of useless plants, but also to battle with wintry climates, and overcome the adverse influences of cold, sterility of soil, and other hostile conditions of ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... ancient Persians. All the old authorities, especially Herodotus, testify to the comparative purity of their lives, to their love of truth, to their heroism in war, to the simplicity of their habits, to their industry and thrift in battling sterility of soil and the elements of Nature, to their love of agricultural pursuits, to kindness towards women and slaves, and above all other things to a strong personality of character which implied a powerful will. The early Persians chose the bravest and most capable ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... we are to admire in Mr. Tazewell. It is the great and clear comprehension; the freshness and rapidity with which every thing luxuriates on the generous soil of his mind, which is further removed from even occasional sterility than in any one I have known. This soil has no succession of seasons; the sun which warms it is never for a moment obscured by cloud or eclipse; there reigns a bright, a genial, a perpetual summer. His perceptions are as intuitive and as ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... anathema. She was young and pleasure-loving, and at last her nature could no longer stand this general rejection, the absence of the simple pleasures of life. It was not their quarrels, even when they came to blows, that determined her action. It was a revolt from the radical sterility of Terry's philosophy. Katie furnished her with the necessary money, and she went away to California. There this tired creature, this civilised product of the slums, this thoughtful prostitute, this striving human being ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... inhabitants from both heat and cold. There are also two or three mud and stone burges, or round towers, to protect the few dates and spots of green. Nevertheless, in this pretence of existence, surrounded by the frightful sterility of The Desert, glowed the warmth of true hospitality. The Arab merchant, Zaleeâ, who lives here, and had been one of our caravan, made me come to dine with him in his house, and introduced me to his family. He gave me for dinner boiled mutton and sopped bread. ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... satisfaction which should exhilarate the following years. The heat of youth may spread happiness into wild luxuriance, but the radical vigour requisite to make it perennial is exhausted, and all that can be hoped afterwards is languor and sterility. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... country beyond the influence of the tanks is neither rich nor interesting. The cultivation seemed scanty and the population thin, owing to the irremediable sterility of soil, from the poverty of the primitive rock from whose detritus it is chiefly formed. Raghunath Rao told me that the wish of the people in the castle to adopt a child as the successor to his nephew ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... in itself, the body, instead of renewing itself in health and purity, is poisoned. Again, when in the reproduction of species the sexual emotion becomes an end in itself rather than a means for the renewal of life, degeneration and sterility result. Man is guilty of a like sin against the intelligence when he employs his creative activity of thought for its own sake, without basing it upon truth; by so doing he creates an unreal world, full of error, and destroys the possibility of ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... unlovely side of Mexican life and travel is laid bare to the traveller. Nevertheless, these conditions alternate with those of the handsome and extensive cities of the plateau and with the great mining regions, all of which—in point of interest and value—compensate for sterility elsewhere. As for the branch line from San Luis Potosi to Tampico, it passes through the same remarkable tropical zone as the Vera Cruz line. The mountain scenery upon this route is impressive, with dense woods and fertile valleys giving place to the great canyon of Tamasopo. ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... ways. Assert sex as the predominant fulfillment, and you get the collapse of living purpose in man. You get anarchy. Assert purposiveness as the one supreme and pure activity of life, and you drift into barren sterility, like our business life of to-day, and our political life. You become sterile, you make anarchy inevitable. And so there you are. You have got to base your great purposive activity upon the intense sexual fulfillment of all your individuals. That ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... mountains, and one from the sea coast. These mountains have a considerable elevation, as also most of the inland ones. They seemed to be composed of naked rocks, whose summits were capt with snow. Nor did the valleys appear to greater advantage. To whatever quarter we directed our glasses, nothing but sterility was ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... a tiny fragment of it,—one term of its ascending "series," one day in its cycle of years. In other words, the spiritual fertility of the average Utopian child, taken in conjunction with the spiritual sterility of the average non-Utopian child (and man), points to the conclusion which the thinkers of the Far East reached thousands of years ago,—that for the full development of human nature a plurality of lives is needed, which will do for the individual soul what generations of scientific breeding ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... with the tide. I don't know whether you've ever noticed how lonesome one feels on these Carnival days amidst the throngs of people. This solitude in the crowd is far more intense than solitude in a forest. It brought to my mind the thousand absurdities one commits; the sterility of my own life. 'I'm going to waste my life in some grubbing profession,' I said to myself. 'I'll wind up by becoming a teacher, a sort of English instructress. No; never that. I must seek an opportunity and the means to emancipate myself from this petty existence, or else plunge ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... in order that he might settle the dispute about the commandership. Colmenares, whom I have mentioned above, was commanded to search along those coasts where it was thought Nicuesa wandered abandoned. It was known that the latter had left Veragua, because of the sterility of the soil. The colonists instructed Colmenares to bring Nicuesa back as soon as he could find him and to assure him they would be grateful to him if, on his arrival, he succeeded in calming the dissensions which rent the colony. Colmenares accepted this mission, for he was ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... small. Indeed most of the houses we saw on the road indicated poverty, or rather that the people could just live. Towards the frontiers they grew worse and worse in their appearance, as if not willing to put sterility itself out of countenance. No gardens smiled round the habitations, not a potato or cabbage to eat with the fish drying on a stick near the door. A little grain here and there appeared, the long stalks of which you might almost reckon. The ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... the points of the pennoned lances, give them an imposing martial appearance. Though it is but a detachment of not over fifty men—a single troop—riding by twos, the files stretch afar in shining array, its sheen all the more brilliant from contrast with the sombre sterility of ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... [Greek]; "in opere tuo," as the Vulgate has it—"in thy works." Man's work is too often the curse of the very planet which he misuses. None should know that better than the botanist, who sees whole regions desolate, and given up to sterility and literal thorns and thistles, on account of man's sin and folly, ignorance and greedy waste. Well said that veteran botanist, the venerable ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... and in society at large to do nothing about the ancient evil of prostitution, to provide neither isolation nor treatment for the worst of contagious diseases, and to regard the blindness, feeble-mindedness, sterility, paralysis, and insanity which result from those diseases as afflictions which could not be prevented. The progress of medicine within twenty years, both preventive and curative, has greatly changed the ethical as well as the physical situation. The policy of silence ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... Considerable effort has been expended in the prosecution of this project, but up to the present time we have recorded no successful pollinations. We have not as yet a very wide range of varieties, but as far as we have gone we have encountered complete sterility in the selfing within the individuals and in the attempt to use pollen of the same variety brought from a distance. The unfortunate feature about all the hybridizing work with apples is the mongrel character of the plants on which we work. We know ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... confessed that she could cause sterility in cattle, and bewitch pigs and poultry by merely repeating the magic words Turius und Shurius Inturius! She was hanged and burned. Another woman in the same city, named Kornelis van Purmerund, was arrested in consequence of some disclosures the former had made. A witness came forward ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... Lug, it is curious that he is never connected with the August festival in Wales which corresponds to Lugnasad in Ireland. There may be some support to the theory which makes him a sun-god in a Triad where he is one of the three ruddroawc who cause a year's sterility wherever they set their feet, though in this Arthur excels them, for he causes seven years' sterility![388] Does this point to the scorching of vegetation by the summer sun? The mythologists have not made use of this incident. On the whole ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... his people between Chiusi, Caprese, and the Pieve, render himself master of this branch of the Apennines, and descend at pleasure into the Casentino, the Val d'Arno, the Val di Chiane, or the Val di Tavere, as well as be prepared for every movement of the enemy. But Niccolo, considering the sterility of these places, told him, "his horses could not eat stones," and went to the Borgo San Sepolcro, where he was amicably received, but found that the people of Citta di Castello, who were friendly to the Florentines, could not be induced to yield to his overtures. Wishing to have ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... gentlemen; I speak nine languages, and can tell you the Hebrew for an old umbrella. The Gypsy's Elixir cures colds, gout, all nervous affections, with such cutaneous disorders as are diseases of the skin, debility, sterility, hostility, and all the illities that flesh is heir to except what it can't, such as small-pox and cholera. It has cured cholera, but it don't claim to do it. Others claim to cure, but can't. I am not a charlatan, but an Ann-Eliza. That is the difference between me and a lady, as ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... they say?' They will say that human things are fated to decay, and even the perfect State will not escape from this law of destiny, when 'the wheel comes full circle' in a period short or long. Plants or animals have times of fertility and sterility, which the intelligence of rulers because alloyed by sense will not enable them to ascertain, and children will be born out of season. For whereas divine creations are in a perfect cycle or number, the human creation is in a number which declines from perfection, ...
— The Republic • Plato
... the theft of the Sampo, Louhi sent nine diseases upon Wainamoinen's people,—colic, pleurisy, fever, ulcer, plague, consumption, gout, sterility, and cancer, the offspring of the fell Lowyatar; but by the use of vapor baths and balsams Wainamoinen healed his people. Then Louhi sent Otso the Bear, the honey-eater, but he was slain by the hero, who made a banquet ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... ruddy, but, I regret to say, glistening with rain, free from wrinkles, remember, quieta non movere. Take now your frequent altar denunciations of local superstitions,—the eggs found in the garden, and the consequent sterility of the milk, the evil eye and the cattle dying, etc., etc.,—it will take more than altar denunciations, believe me,—it will take years of vigorous education to relegate these ideas into the limbo of exploded fantasies. And the people won't be comfortable without them. You take away ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... peculiarly keen expression in his eyes, and as his words had been repeated to me I knew of what he was thinking. He was the first man of his condition who to my knowledge called rocks beautiful. The peasant class abhor rocks on account of their sterility, and because the rustic idea of a beautiful landscape is the fertile and level plain. In searching for the picturesque and the grandeur of nature, it is perfectly safe to go to those places which the peasant declares to be ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... as the tree inevitably perishes which the sea-hawk chooses for its nest; while freedom, on the contrary, flourishes like the tannen, 'on the loftiest and least sheltered rocks,' and clothes with its refreshing verdure what, without it, would frown in naked and incurable sterility. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... stanzas, in the timid elegiac strains of Millevoye. The special character of the poetry of the Empire lies in its combination of the tradition derived from the eighteenth century, with a certain reaching-forth to an ideal, by-and-by to be realised, which it could not attain. Its comparative sterility is not to be explained solely or chiefly by the vigilance of the imperial censure of publications. The preceding century had lost the large feeling for composition, for beauty and severity of form; attention was fixed upon details. If invention ceased to create, it must necessarily trick out what ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... this is true love indeed, the cause of all good to mortal men, that reconciles all creatures, and glues them together in perpetual amity and firm league; and can no more abide bitterness, hate, malice, than fair and foul weather, light and darkness, sterility and plenty may be together; as the sun in the firmament (I say), so is love in the world; and for this cause 'tis love without an addition, love [Greek: kat' exochaen], love of God, and love of men. [4603]"The love of God ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... sweet chestnuts, barley cakes, and pork (as contrasted with the fish which formed the chief seasoning for the bread of an Athenian)—his superior courage and endurance—his reverence for Lacedaemonian headship as an old and customary influence—his sterility of intellect and imagination as well as his slackness in enterprise—his unchangeable rudeness of relations with the gods, which led him to scourge and prick Pan if he came back empty-handed from the chase; while the inhabitant of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... not die upon the broken sword; one has to live on. Would that I could dissuade you from this inky pestilence! This poetizing spirit, which gives all life so much significance to the imagination, strikes it with sterility in every thing which should beget or prosper a personal career. It opens the heart—true, but keeps it open; it closes in on nothing—shuts in nothing for itself. It is an open heart, and the sunshine enters there, and the bird alights there; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... creative fire, is aroused against the narrow asceticism of orthodox Christianity, embodied in the wan and feeble Titurel. Satan decides to imitate the Lord of Christianity, by begetting upon a virgin, Candida, a son who is to save the world from the sterility of asceticism. Candida is briefly introduced, acknowledging the power of the mighty spirit and bewailing her fate in one of the finest passages in the play. Merlin is born, combining the supernatural ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... battles that were fought between the French and English armies in the Spanish territories, and which are told with great truth and develope the extraordinary powers of this celebrated writer. The divorce of Josephine, and marriage of Maria Louisa, commence the succeeding volume. The sterility of Bonaparte's wife was now an irremediable evil; and political motives were to supersede the ties of endearment, affection, talents, and virtue. Fouche the minister of police, made Josephine the means of suggesting to Napoleon, the measure of her ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... the deposit of its own dead leaves and weeds and grasses without either the winds and waters to clear these away or the soil to reabsorb and reconvert them into the materials of reproduction. Thus year by year the land tends farther toward sterility by the very accumulation of what was once its life. But send a forest fire across those smothering strata of vegetable decay; give once more a chance for every root below to meet the sun above; for every seed above to reach ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... the Towara complain of the sterility of their wives;[They wish for children because their tribe is strengthened by it. But Providence seems to have wisely proportioned the fertility of their women to the barrenness of the country.] and though the Bedouin women in general are less fruitful ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... gynaecologists are consulted more often by women who desire children but do not have them, than by those who wish to avoid having them—the truth being that the tendency among people in comfortable surroundings is towards relative sterility rather ...
— Conception Control and Its Effects on the Individual and the Nation • Florence E. Barrett
... took views and sketches of the surrounding scenery, which is extremely picturesque in many parts, and wants only the addition of trees to make it beautiful. The hills present the bold character of rugged sterility, whilst the valleys, at this season, ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... blind and ancient, Ugly daughter of Tuoni. Faithfully the virgin-mother Guards her children in affection, As an artist loves and nurses What his skillful hands have fashioned. Thus Lowyatar named her offspring, Colic, Pleurisy, and Fever, Ulcer, Plague, and dread Consumption, Gout, Sterility, and Cancer. And the worst of these nine children Blind Lowyatar quickly banished, Drove away as an enchanter, To bewitch the lowland people, To engender strife and envy. Louhi, hostess of Pohyola, Banished ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... progress without a sincere and single eye to the truth. The fatal sterility of the middle ages, and of our first and second University periods, had to do with the mistake of gagging men's mouths, and dictating all their conclusions. Things came to be so arranged that contradictory views ran side by side, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... returning the conversation, and replying it! a manner to make it drop. Acting thus, it is easy to see that I was mixed up in nothing, and what I shall have to relate now will have less of the singularity and instructiveness of good and faithful memoirs, than of the dryness and sterility of the gazettes. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... application; and prisoners of the first grade may subscribe for newspapers that contain no objectionable matter. But only a small proportion of the inmates is addicted to reading, and the opportunities for doing so are limited. And as months and years go by, the desolation and sterility of the place weigh heavier upon the spirit, the mind reduces its radius and grows inert, and stimulants stronger than current fiction are needed to rouse it. Prison, prison, prison; steel walls and gratings; the predestinate ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... said was brought from one of these mountains. The whole of the country through which we have passed for four days contains no cultivable land on this side of the river, except on its margin; but in compensation for this sterility, the islands in this part of the river, which are numerous, very large, and very beautiful, are without a superior for luxuriance of vegetation. Every day when we have come to the river to halt and refresh ourselves, we found one or more ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English
... which human nature is subject, there is none that more diametrically opposes the very end of our creation, and the design of nature in the formation of different sexes, and the power thereby given us for the work of generation, than that of sterility or barrenness which, where it prevails, renders the most accomplished midwife but a useless person, and destroys the design of our book; I think, therefore, that barrenness is an effect that deserves our first ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... of those glorious afternoons that sometimes come in the African spring, although it was so intensely still. Everywhere appeared the proofs of evidences of life. The winter was over, and now, from the sadness and sterility of its withered age, sprang youth and lovely summer clad in sunshine, bediamonded with dew, and fragrant with the breath of flowers. Jess lay back and looked up into the infinite depths above. How blue they were, and how measureless! ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... are almost sterile when crossed; while both animals and plants, which have always been regarded by naturalists as of distinct species, turn out, when the test is applied, to be perfectly fertile. Again, the sterility or fertility of crosses seems to bear no relation to the structural resemblances or differences of the members ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... as logically inclines to everything which can augment the difficulty and diminish the product; as, privileges, monopolies, restrictions, prohibition, suppression of machinery, sterility, &c. ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... woke from his dream of wealth as the year declined. He had reared no crop for the supply of his household during the sterility of winter. The season was long and severe, and for the first time the family was really straitened in its comforts. By degrees a revulsion of thought took place in Wolfert's mind, common to those whose golden dreams have been disturbed by pinching realities. The idea gradually stole upon him ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... pastoral life, under a mild heaven, had studied science, and cultivated the arts; they were men who had descended from a cold northern climate, where nature did little to supply their wants, where hunger and cold could not be avoided but by industry and exertion; where, in one word, the sterility of nature was counteracted by the energy ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... some lecturers, with an extra spice of mirthfulness in their composition, have given public record of their impressions in this respect. There are, however, certain facts to be considered which at least relieve him from the charge of literary sterility. A lecture often becomes famous, and is demanded by each succeeding audience, whatever the lecturer's preferences may be. There are lectures called for every year by audiences and committees which the lecturer would be glad never to see again, and which he never would see again, if he were to consult ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... Hebrideans, settle them here on good lands, as a reward for their virtue and ancient poverty; and replace them with a colony of her wicked sons. The severity of the climate, the inclemency of the seasons, the sterility of the soil, the tempestuousness of the sea, would afflict and punish enough. Could there be found a spot better adapted to retaliate the injury it had received by their crimes? Some of those islands might be considered ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... mind in which every thought and feeling came readily to the lips. "Loose the knots of the heart," he says. We absorb elements enough, but have not leaves and lungs for healthy perspiration and growth. An air of sterility, of incompetence to their proper aims, belongs to many who have both experience and wisdom. But a large utterance, a river, that makes its own shores, quick perception and corresponding expression, a constitution to which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... still and doing nothing on a controversial issue until both sides have exhausted their ammunition was never better illustrated than in this matter. He allowed the controversy to continue to the point of intellectual sterility. He buttressed his delays with more evasions, until finally the women intensified their demand for action. They picketed his official gates. But the President still recoiled from action. So mightily did he recoil from it that he was willing to ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... was along a ridge, which extended upwards of fifty miles, through a succession of deep ravines, where no objects met the eye except barren sandstone rocks, and stunted trees. With the banksia and xanthorrhoea always in sight, the idea of hopeless sterility is ever present to the mind, for these productions, in sandy soils at least, grow only where nothing else can vegetate. The horizon is flat, affording no relief to the eye from the dreary and inhospitable scene, ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... at the expense of the whole; for unless there be considerable attention paid to other parts of the land, besides those appropriated to the raising of tobacco, the manure will no longer be found on the plantation, and general exhaustion and sterility must follow. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... gorge, into the shade? I cannot digest properly with the sun staring at me. And tell me, as we go along, your impressions of the ruin. . . I perceive drawbacks to incest; grave practical drawbacks—sterility, inbreeding. Yes, there is obviously something to be said for exogamy. AUDI ALTERAM PARTEM as Eames might say, though God knows why he thinks it sounds better in Latin. Seen ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... up to the vivacity of its d'ebut, you will have no reason to complain of the sterility of my letters. I do not say this from the spirit of the House of Commons on the first day,(341) which was the most fatiguing and dull debate I ever heard, dull as I have heard many; and yet for the first quarter of an hour it looked as if we were met to choose a King of Poland,(342) ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... newly-acquired gold and garnered it to himself, fearful lest another stroke of ill-fortune should fall upon him. But instead of making him a coward it gave him courage. It did not warp his mind or steel his heart against humanity. No sterility settled upon him. His wrongs seemed to have fertilized his generosity, and here we ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... island; and, more than all, as displaying a wise and beautiful provision of Nature, by which the rich tribute of the great deep is most generously lavished on the land most in need of a compensation for its own sterility. ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... and the traders; each worked against the others, offering the natives the best of opportunities to fish in troubled waters. The result of all this was a rapid decrease of the population and frequent artificial sterility. The primitive population has disappeared completely in some places, and is only to be found in any numbers far inland among the western mountains. The situation is a little better in the north, where we find a number of flourishing villages along ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... "that this kingdom of France is governed by thirty intendants? You have neither parliament, nor estates, nor governors. It is upon thirty masters of request, despatched into the provinces, that their evil or their good, their fertility or their sterility, entirely depend." ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... was not imposed on everybody as a duty. In seven years of growing appreciation Congreve came to think the little graces and humours the better part. That I believe to have been the first cause of his early sterility; but others helped to determine the effect. A certain indolence is of course implied in what has been said. There was the gout, and there were his unfortunate obesity and his failing sight. There was ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... Conservative party have so often been hired bravos or wandering minstrels with whom it can share no common conviction. I never cease wondering why it cannot produce a man of its own faith. There must be something inherent in its creed that produces sterility. ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... over the big pile of manuscript before me certain things become clearer to me, and particularly the immense inconsequences of my experiences. It is, I see now that I have it all before me, a story of activity and urgency and sterility. I have called it Tono-Bungay, but I had far better have called it Waste. I have told of childless Marion, of my childless aunt, of Beatrice wasted and wasteful and futile. What hope is there for a people whose women become fruitless? I think of all the energy ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... race give birth to children from puberty to sterility. She may give birth a dozen times, but nature finally calls a halt, and the whole system of life sustaining nerves of the womb which are in the fascia, with blood in great abundance to supply foetal ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... Maudslay's pictures of stele N, Plate 82 (Biologia Centrali-Americana; Archaeology) inter alia. But they were much more widely used by women, not merely by maidens, but also by brides and married women, to heighten their fertility and cure sterility, and by pregnant women to ensure safe delivery in childbirth. It was their wider employment by women that gives these shells ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... to place, person to person, thing to thing. I travel unceasingly from motive to motive, mind to mind; my native air is also desert air—hence the sterility ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... first discovery, it was probably supposed to belong to a southern continent; but, in fact, it is an island, and that of no great extent. If our commander had not been unwilling to deprive M. Kerguelen of the honour of its bearing his name, he would have been disposed, from its sterility, to call it the ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... Paleolithic Age. Of that remote time, the morning time of human life, we learn only from the labors of geologists and archaeologists. We are virtually dealing with a past geological age. The long term of years thus defined drew to its close amidst scenes of almost Arctic sterility. In all probability, glaciers reflected the sun's rays from all the considerable hills and mountains of Central and Northern Europe, though forming, perhaps, but a remnant of the great glaciers of the Ice ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... disease progresses, the blood becomes impoverished, the feet and ankles are swollen, the mind is apprehensive and melancholy, and very frequently the function of generation is injured, resulting in complete sterility. Exercise produces pain in the small of the back and the lower portion of the spine, and, owing to a relation of the vaginal walls, the womb falls far below its natural position, or turns in various directions, according to the manner in which the weight above rests upon it. Ulcers are apt to appear ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... of the Physiocrates, only transfers already existing wealth from one hand to another. What the merchants gain by it is at the cost of the nation. Hence, it is desirable that this loss should be as small as possible. Hence sterility!(316) But, the more important branches of business, especially wholesale trade, are connected with a transportation of goods (Verri), either from one place or from one period of time, into another. Here the genuine ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... excellence of those efforts of genius. The secret of Lady Mallow's silence rests between her husband and herself; and it is just possible that some too candid avowal of Lord Mallow's may be the reason of her poetic sterility. It is one thing to call the lady of one's choice a tenth muse before marriage, and another thing to foster a self-delusion in one's wife which can hardly fail to become a discordant element in domestic life. "If your genius had developed, and you had ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... than good, but through the greater part of the interior the rainfall is far less than the land requires. The ground becomes parched, the streets dry up, and the grasses wither, and the whole face of nature presents a scene of sterility. Sometimes there is no rain for long periods. There have been times when not a drop of rain fell for two years, and but for the heavy dews at night, a vast extent of land would have been absolutely turned to a desert. ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... HYBRIDISM is not a WEAK, but a STRONG chapter. You have done wonders there. But still you have not accounted, as you may be held to account, for divergence up to a certain extent producing increased fertility of the crosses, but carried one short almost imperceptible step more, giving rise to sterility, or reversing the tendency. Very likely you are on the right track; but you have something to ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... After passing several methods in review, he accepts an operation known as tubo-ligature as being the best from all points of view. This operation will render the female permanently sterile without having any deleterious effect upon her health. Absolutely no result follows, he assures us, but sterility. If the wives of all defectives were operated upon in this way, Dr Chapple assures us that the problem concerning the defective would speedily be solved and society would be the happier and wealthier in every way. The proposal might give something of a shock to the moral conscience but such ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... song, which the rocks echoed back, and all the goitred women at the roadside stopped with their pack burdens to listen. He told a thousand anecdotes. He knew all the story of the pass; how the Swiss, filing through it, had scattered the Milanese; how Suwarrow and Massena had made its sterility ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... quantity; no clear distinction has been, or can be, drawn between species and well-marked varieties. It cannot be maintained that species when intercrossed are invariably sterile and varieties invariably fertile; or that sterility is a special endowment and sign of creation. The belief that species were immutable productions was almost unavoidable as long as the history of the world was thought to be of short duration; and now that we have acquired some idea of the lapse of time, we are too apt to assume, without ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... that extraordinary law of compensation which seems to be the most general law of the universe, the effects differed as much in quantity and time as in character—a remarkable efflorescence of literature in Germany being at once produced, to relapse shortly into a long sterility, a tardier but more constant growth following in England and Italy, while the effect in Spain was the most partial and obscure of all. The great names of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide hardly meet with ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... the westward of a line drawn due south from Fort Kearney to the Republican we shall find a comparatively abrupt and unexplained change taking place in the scenery. Our green river-bottoms will give way to tracts of the color and seemingly of the sterility proper to an ash-heap. Our bluffs will recede, grow higher, and exchange their flat mesa-like surfaces for a curved contour, imitating the mountainous formation on a reduced scale. For long distances the vast gray level around us will be dotted with conical sand-dunes, forever piling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... of the oak forest was relieved and broken by a hundred plantations of every variety of tree that the climate would bear, and every hue, from the sombre evergreen to the early suspicions of the yellow leaf of autumn. Even the tops of the mountains were free from sterility, for they were capped with green as bright, with trees as lofty, and with pasture as rich, as that of ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... him of the perilous difficulty besieging all attempts to clothe in words the visionary scenes derived from the world of dreams, where a single false note, a single word in a wrong key, ruins the whole music; and, secondly, I desire him to consider the utter sterility of universal literature in this one department of impassioned prose; which certainly argues some singular difficulty suggesting a singular duty of indulgence in criticizing any attempt that even imperfectly succeeds. The sole Confessions, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... words respecting the argument which we drew from the peerage. Mr Sadler asserted that the peers were a class condemned by nature to sterility. We denied this, and showed from the last edition of Debrett, that the peers of the United Kingdom have considerably more than the average number of children to a marriage. Mr Sadler's answer has amused ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... journey towards the west, where we found a fair well or fountain whence flowed an abundant stream of water, and where we and our beasts were satisfied with drink. According to a tradition among the inhabitants, this region was formerly burnt up with drought and sterility, till the evangelist St Mark procured this fountain from God by miracle. We came into the sea of sand before our arrival at the mountain of the Jews, formerly mentioned, and in it we journeyed three days and nights. This is a vast plain ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... and I was awaiting an opportunity to surprise you with it. It is the pearl of my collection! What do you think of the idea—that lily which symbolizes triumphant purity, and those thistles, the plants which spring up among ruins, and which symbolize the sterility of the world, at last deserted, again won over to the only perfect felicity? All your work lies ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... replied: "I shall cry aloud like a savage bear, like the wild ass, like a woman in travail! The punishment of heaven has already visited itself upon thy incest! May God inflict thee with the sterility of mules!" ...
— Herodias • Gustave Flaubert
... the new be too foreign, we cannot fuse the old and the new—nature seeming to hate equally too wide a deviation from ordinary practice and none at all. This fact reappears in heredity as the beneficial effects of occasional crossing on the one hand, and on the other, in the generally observed sterility of hybrids. If heredity be an affair of memory, how can an embryo, say of a mule, be expected to build up a mule on the strength of but two mule-memories? Hybridism causes a fault in the chain ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... on the islands or the borders of the river, where a soil more genial or more easily tilled had tempted the settler to fix himself. At length we approached Gardiner, a flourishing village, beautifully situated among the hills on the right bank of the Kennebeck. All traces of sterility had already disappeared from the country; the shores of the river were no longer rock-bound, but disposed in green terraces, with woody eminences behind them. Leaving Gardiner behind us, we went on ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... Switzerland, but no one would recommend a stranger to visit that quarter of Ireland at the end of November, and the absence of cultivation, seen under the depressing conditions of Nature, would strike a visitor with all the effect of absolute sterility. Gordon was so impressed, and it seemed to him that the Irish peasants of a whole province were existing in a state of wretchedness exceeding anything he had seen in either China or the Soudan. If he had seen the same places ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... in the yields from Rotundifolia vines. At times there are record-breaking yields and, again, small yields are reported, the small yields resulting from black-rot, coulure, wet weather, self-sterility, lack of cultivation, fertilization, lack of pruning, age of vines, and various other causes. In spite of this, Rotundifolia vines are said to be among the safest and most prolific of fruit-bearing plants. While in one of the largest Rotundifolia vineyards there has been only a partial crop during ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... elegant rendering of the legal axiom, "The form is of more consequence than the matter." In the eyes of the poet the advantage rests with the lower classes, for they seldom fail to give a certain character of rude poetry to their thoughts. Perhaps also this same observation may explain the sterility of the salons, their emptiness, their shallowness, and the repugnance felt by men of ability for bartering their ideas ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... a quack. I speak French, gentlemen; I speak nine languages, and can tell you the Hebrew for an old umbrella. The Gypsy's Elixir cures colds, gout, all nervous affections, with such cutaneous disorders as are diseases of the skin, debility, sterility, hostility, and all the illities that flesh is heir to except what it can't, such as small-pox and cholera. It has cured cholera, but it don't claim to do it. Others claim to cure, but can't. I am not a charlatan, ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... conjuncture does not scatter their wits; they still contrive to reconcile the two principles that they appear to regard in the light of divine commands. The first is that of unique maternity, never infringed except in the case of sterility in the reigning queen, and even then only very exceptionally; the second is more curious still, and, although never transgressed, susceptible of what may almost be termed a Judaic evasion. It is the law that invests the person of a queen, whoever she be, with a sort of inviolability. ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... distinct and self-evolved. It is a premature, an unconscious effort made by a limited class to achieve per saltum what was slowly and laboriously wrought out by whole nations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Too precocious, too complete within too narrow limits, it was doomed to sterility. Not the least singular fact about it is that though the Carmina Vagorum continued to be appreciated, they were neither imitated nor developed to any definite extent after the period which I have indicated. They fell still-born ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... passage from his article: "I was under the impression that hermaphroditism was the usual character of these hybrids; and it has suggested itself to my mind as a possibility, which I have not, at present, sufficient data either to prove or to disprove, that the sterility of hybrids in general (still a somewhat obscure subject) may perhaps be partly due to hybridism having a tendency ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... Equal Rights movement in 1834, which was a diluted revival of the Workingmen's Party, and which, also, was turned into sterility by the treachery of its leaders, we arrive at the panic of 1837, the time when Astor, profiting from misfortune on every side, ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... only by degrading it; whilst the boldly prudent, the thriftily selfish and ambitious, the imaginative and poetic, the lovers of money and solid comfort, the worshippers of success, art, and of love, will all oppose to the Force of Life the device of sterility. ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... intuitive communion with God in strictly Catholic terms; and by so doing renew, enrich and explicate the content of those terms for those who follow them. Those who could not harmonize their own vision of reality with the current formulae—Fox, Wesley or Blake, driven into opposition by the sterility of the contemporary Church—were forced to find elsewhere some tradition through which to maintain contact with the past. Fox found it in the Bible; Wesley in patristic Christianity. Even Blake's prophetic ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... revolution in the woman's world, the woman in the modern American family, the career of the child, the passing of patriarchism and familiarism, the precarious hour, the trend as to marriage, race sterility and race suicide, divorce, the attitude of the church, the family, and the social revolution. The author finds that during the past half century the American family possesses unity, due to the fact that the period itself is marked by intrinsic oneness as the expression ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... and even that seems to be checked in its growth. What is not heath is nakedness, a little diversified by now and then a stream rushing down the steep. An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility. The appearance is that of matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by nature from her care and disinherited of her favours, left in its original elemental state, or quickened only with one sullen power of ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... prosperity and luxury. Numerous herds, fertile fields, abundant harvests—whatsoever should be the reward of piety—was in the hands of these idolaters. And now, when a people of saints and believers occupy these fields, all is become sterility and solitude. The earth, under these holy hands, produces only thorns and briers. Man soweth in anguish, and reapeth tears and cares. War, famine, pestilence, assail him by turns. And yet, are not these the children of the prophets? ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... wholly unimportant), with goods to sell. People accuse such a man of self-advertisement. But at least the cheap-jack does advertise his wares, whereas the don or dear-jack advertises nothing except himself. His very silence, nay his very sterility, are supposed to be marks of the richness of his erudition. He is too learned to teach, and sometimes too wise even to talk. St. Thomas Aquinas said: "In auctore auctoritas." But there is more than one man at Oxford or Cambridge who ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... and Dauphine streets, in the city of New Orleans, there is a tree which nobody looks at without curiosity and without wondering how it came there. For a long time it was the only one of its kind known in the state, and from its isolated position it has always been cursed with sterility. It reminds one of the warm climes of Africa or Asia, and wears the aspect of a stranger of distinction driven from his native country. Indeed with its sharp and thin foliage, sighing mournfully under the blast of one of our November northern winds, it looks ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... compared with the rest of Greece, its soil, though propitious to the growth of the olive, is not fertile or abundant. In spite of painful and elaborate culture, the traces of which are yet visible, it never produced a sufficiency of corn to supply its population; and this, the comparative sterility of the land, may be ranked among the causes which conduced to the greatness of the people. The principal mountains of Attica are, the Cape of Sunium, Hymettus, renowned for its honey, and Pentelicus for its marble; the principal streams which water the valleys are the capricious ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by anticipating some of the satisfaction which should exhilarate the following years. The heat of youth may spread happiness into wild luxuriance, but the radical vigour requisite to make it perennial is exhausted, and all that can be hoped afterwards is languor and sterility. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... a long drive through the outskirts of Benares before you get to the hotel. And all the aspects are melancholy. It is a vision of dusty sterility, decaying temples, crumbling tombs, broken mud walls, shabby huts. The whole region seems to ache with age and penury. It must take ten thousand years of want to produce such an aspect. We were still outside of the great native city when we reached the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... its exploration. Washington Irving, in his history of Captain Bonneville, says of the party, "A desert surrounded them and stretched to the southwest as far as the eye could reach, rivalling the deserts of Asia and Africa in sterility. There was neither tree, nor herbage, nor spring, nor pool, nor running stream, nothing but parched wastes of sand, where horse and rider were ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... from the foretopmast-head one forenoon, as we were slowly gliding over the blue surface of the deep. As we got up with it, we saw that it was a long, low, almost barren island, a few trees only in the higher parts retrieving it from actual sterility. It was a wild, desolate, melancholy-looking spot, such as would make a man shudder at the very thought of being wrecked on it. At one end, inside a reef over which the surf was breaking violently, ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... thing apart, owing to a general instinctive repugnance to admit that a phenomenon, whose extrinsications are so extensive and penetrate every fibre of social life, derives, in fact, from the same causes as socially insignificant forms like rickets, sterility, etc. But this repugnance is really only a sensory illusion, like many ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... Usually, involved titles serve to hide in a book-stall shop—made goods, and romance writers or dramatic authors who pride themselves on living to write, and who seek inspiration elsewhere than in regularity of habits and the work-table, have their efforts marked from the first by sterility. Obscure or famous, rich or poor, an artist must be an artisan and practise these fruitful virtues—patient application, conscientious technicality, absorption in work. When he seated himself at his table Dorsenne ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Panhellenic Gangs, organized juvenile Genius, early development of Germany, will-training in Girl graduates aversion to marriage of fecundity of sterility of Girls and boys, differences between coeducation for, dangers of education of education of, humanistic education of, manners in education of, more difficult than of boys education of, nature in education of, regularity in education ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... no name for it but Post-Impressionism. Such men as Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh recognized the sterility of Impressionism and of a narrow aestheticism, while they shared the hatred of the aesthetes and the Impressionists for the current art of the salons. No more than the aesthetes or the Impressionists ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... with Liszt and Chopin during his stay of several years in Paris to the rich passage work of the new school, appeared to him old-fashioned. Mendelssohn, who in his letters repeatedly alludes to his sterility in the matter of new pianoforte passages, allowed himself to be persuaded by Hiller to rewrite the pianoforte part, and was pleased with the result. It is clear from the above that if Mendelssohn failed to give Chopin his due, Chopin did more than ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... hanged at Montgomery; and, when the rope was round his neck, he declared in proof of his innocence that grass would never grow on his grave. Curious to relate, be the cause what it may, there is yet to be seen a strip of sterility—in the form of a cross—amidst a ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... offended morality, has always intimidated people who have not measured its essential weakness; but it will prevail with those degenerates only in whom the instinct of fertility has faded into a mere itching for pleasure. The modern devices for combining pleasure with sterility, now universally known and accessible, enable these persons to weed themselves out of the race, a process already vigorously at work; and the consequent survival of the intelligently fertile means the survival of the partizans of the Superman; for what is proposed is nothing but the replacement ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... there sprung up amidst the rugged spar-stones that, intermixed with rude crags of granite, were thickly scattered over this wide waste, which, throughout its vast extent, afforded as perfect a picture of sterility as can be well conceived. With this brief outline of the scenery, we must next attempt to describe the parties who were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... of the rock. Near the bridge a subterranean stream, almost as large as the river, bursts forth from the solid heart of the mountain. On either side gigantic masses of rock, with here and there a pine to adorn their sterility, tower to the height of 6,000 feet, in some places almost perpendicular from summit to base. They are worn and broken into all fantastic forms. There are pyramids, towers, bastions, minarets, and long, sharp spires, splintered ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... pining under the influence of long-continued drought and heat; the ground is parched and rent; scarcely a blade of verdure is to be seen except in the beds of rivers, where the last pools of water seem about to evaporate, and leave the land under the dominion of perpetual sterility. Man and beast pant for fresh air and cool water; but no cool breeze comes. A blast, as if from the mouth of a furnace, greets the burning cheek; no blessed drops descend; the sky is clear as a mirror, without a single cloud to mitigate the intensity of the sun's withering rays. At ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... Apennines, and descend at pleasure into the Casentino, the Val d'Arno, the Val di Chiane, or the Val di Tavere, as well as be prepared for every movement of the enemy. But Niccolo, considering the sterility of these places, told him, "his horses could not eat stones," and went to the Borgo San Sepolcro, where he was amicably received, but found that the people of Citta di Castello, who were friendly to the Florentines, could not be induced to yield to ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... extended, surrounded by two high hedges of hazel, elder and white thorn, and a deep ditch, the little inclosure—uncultivated, though gay in its sterility; because the mosses there grew thick, wild heliotrope and ravenelles there mingled perfumes, while from beneath an ancient chestnut issued a crystal spring, a prisoner in its marble cistern, and on the thyme all around alighted thousands of bees from the neighboring plants, whilst chaffinches ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... influence in this respect is most striking in those southern countries where a long dry season is followed by heavy tropical showers, which in a few days change the whole face of nature, from one of parched sterility to one of a ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... scarcely would believe their ears and eyes. The friar passed for saint:—Feronde his fruit; None durst presume to doubt nor to dispute; A double miracle at once appeared The dead's return: the lady's state revered. With treble force Te Deum round was sung; Sterility in marriage oft was rung, And near the convent many offered prayers, In hopes their fervent vows would gain ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... the sterility of first crosses and of hybrids—Sterility various in degree, not universal, affected by close interbreeding, removed by domestication—Laws governing the sterility of hybrids—Sterility not a special endowment, but incidental on other differences, not accumulated by natural selection—Causes ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... minds which look at sensible objects only for immediate pleasure, afford matter of the most instructive speculation to the philosopher, who studies the wisdom of nature through the medium of things. As, on the one hand, the summit of the mountain may be supposed the point of absolute sterility, so, on the other, the sandy desert, moved by nothing but the parching winds of continents distant from the sources of abundant rains, finishes the scale of natural fertility, which thus diminishes in the two opposite extremes of hot and dry, ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... contrasted with the fish which formed the chief seasoning for the bread of an Athenian)—his superior courage and endurance—his reverence for Lacedaemonian headship as an old and customary influence—his sterility of intellect and imagination as well as his slackness in enterprise—his unchangeable rudeness of relations with the gods, which led him to scourge and prick Pan if he came back empty-handed from the chase; while the inhabitant of Phokaea or Miletus exemplifies the Grecian ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... tradition of the Catholic Church, they have erred from the knowledge of the truth, and as the proverb saith: "The husbandmen have gone astray in their own husbandry, and have gathered in their hands sterility," because certain priests in deed, but not priests in reality, had dared to slander the God-approved ornaments of the sacred monuments. Of whom God cries aloud through the prophet: "Many pastors have corrupted my vineyard, they have polluted my portion" [Jer. 12:10; cf. LXX]. And, forsooth, ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... better relation to him for the purpose. He encouraged, beguiled, excited him, manifested an unfathomable credulity, and his only interruptions were when the Colonel did not respond to it. He had his intermissions, his hours of sterility, and then Lyon felt that the picture also languished. The higher his companion soared, the more gyrations he executed, in the blue, the better he painted; he couldn't make his flights long enough. He lashed him on when ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... as well as for other fruit must be manured with great care and attention. They have no black cattle to afford such compost as our farmers use in England. The dung of mules and asses, which are their only beasts of burthen, is of very little value for this purpose; and the natural sterility of their ground requires something highly impregnated with nitre and volatile salts. They have recourse therefore to pigeons' dung and ordure, which fully answer their expectations. Every peasant opens, at one corner ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... probably no less effective than most of the modern drugs recommended for the same purpose. Concerning a function over which so many fond superstitions still linger in the public mind we may, perhaps, charitably forgive Gilbert for the introduction of an empirical remedy for sterility, which, he assures us, he has often tried and with invariable success, and which enjoys the double advantage of applicability ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... marble-hearted fiend, More hideous, when thou show'st in a child, Than the sea monster! Hear, nature, hear! Dear goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose, if Thou did'st intend to make this creature fruitful! Into her womb convey sterility! Dry up in her the organs of increase; And from her degraded body never spring A babe to honor her! If she must teem, Create her a child of spleen; that it may live And be a thwart disnatured torment to her! Let it stamp wrinkles on her brow of youth; With falling tears fret channels ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... Unproductiveness.— N. unproductiveness &c. adj.; infertility, sterility, infecundity[obs3]; masturbation; impotence &c. 158; unprofitableness &c. (inutility) 645. waste, desert, Sahara, wild, wilderness, howling wilderness. V. be - unproductive &c. adj.; hang fire, flash in the pan, come to nothing. [make unproductive] sterilize, addle; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... sixth century, taken prisoner, and kept as such during the remainder of her life at Dunbar. She was buried at Meigle; and, if tradition can be trusted, every female walking over her grave is doomed to perpetual sterility. Speaking of the grave reminds us of a son of Clotaire, who was desirous of executing vengeance against his enemy Bason. He was prevented from doing so by the latter fleeing to St. Martin's Church for sanctuary. The prince, fearing that an invasion ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... freshness and balm in the twilight atmosphere; a more lively, yet still unquiet, note from the birds, settling down into their Coverts; the vague sense under all that hush, which still outwardly wears the bleak sterility of winter, of the busy change, hourly, modestly, at work, renewing the youth of the world, re-clothing with vigorous bloom the skeletons of things,—all these messages from the heart of Nature to the heart of Man may well affect ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have a way of asserting themselves with annoying persistency. Furthermore, breeding between animals closely allied in parentage is prone to lead to degeneracy, physical weakness, and mental stupidity, while impotence and sterility are frequent concomitants, and none but experienced breeders should attempt so hazardous an experiment. Observation has proved that the union of father with daughter and mother with son is preferable to an alliance ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... roughness below, made the passage infinitely toilsome. Scattered over this space were single cedars with their ragged spines and wreaths of moss, and copses of dwarf oaks, which were only new emblems of sterility. ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... system was true, and has been accepted. To him the bustle of the outer world was only a hindrance to that process of self-absorption which was his way of interpreting life. Accessible only to interests of emotion and sense, he was saved from intellectual sterility, and made eloquent, by the vehemence of his emotion and the fire of his senses. He was a master example of sensibility, as Voltaire was a master example of ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... consulted more often by women who desire children but do not have them, than by those who wish to avoid having them—the truth being that the tendency among people in comfortable surroundings is towards relative sterility rather than towards ...
— Conception Control and Its Effects on the Individual and the Nation • Florence E. Barrett
... Parnassus: and here Daniel broke down. He did indeed acquire a style of his own; but the effort exhausted him. He was no longer prolific; his ardor had gone: and his innate self-distrustfulness made him quick to recognize his sterility. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... considerable evidence for the first of these charges, it has frequently been repeated. Professor Montegazza of the University of Pavia collected data in regard to 512 cases of consanguineous marriage of which between 8 and 9 per cent were sterile, and with this basis he asserts that sterility is the only fact which can safely be deduced from his cases, since it cannot be hereditary.[43] But if in the nature of things absolute sterility is not inheritable, comparative infertility may be. And even ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... was discussed with all the importance of a national treaty. When the call had been accepted, the stipend was generally fixed at one hundred pounds, and a rude parsonage opened its doors of welcome. To this was almost invariably attached a farm, whose native sterility called for such expenditure of toil that it might truly ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... the third or fourth year of the plantation, the trees, according to the best system of husbandry, are pruned down to the height of three feet from the ground on the richest soil, and still lower in proportion to its sterility. All the branches which are not as nearly as possible at right angles with the trunk, are likewise removed by the pruning-knife, so that in the following spring the whole stem is covered with fresh ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... varieties, are almost sterile when crossed; while both animals and plants, which have always been regarded by naturalists as of distinct species, turn out, when the test is applied, to be perfectly fertile. Again, the sterility or fertility of crosses seems to bear no relation to the structural resemblances or differences of the ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... But the sterility of these speculations gradually became apparent as the winter months slipped away and Rose did not come back. It was felt, though such a feeling would have looked absurd if put into words, that by failing to come ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... also was it with the dullness and sterility that prevailed in the intellectual world. The master-class did not want ideas—it only wanted to be let alone; and so it put in the seats of authority men who were blind to the blazing beacon-fires of the future. It would be ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... consequence to the Lacedaemonians, who fortified, at great expence, and with much labour and skill, its two harbours, Cythera and Scandea. The convenience of these harbours to the Lacedaemonians compensated for the sterility of the island, which was so great that when the Athenians conquered it, they could raise from it only four Attic talents annually. The chief employment and source of wealth to the inhabitants consisted in collecting a species of shell-fish, ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... inculcated somehow they certainly are, and it is difficult to understand how mothers manage to reconcile this teaching with their evident wish that their girls should marry. The ideal held up to girls nowadays is apparently the sexless sort of Diana one—not merely chastity, but sterility. ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... married and inter-married with Indian, Negro and White with no serious detriment except the introduction of tuberculosis into one branch of the family by an infusion of white blood. It is interesting to note that crime, drunkenness, pauperism or sterility has not resulted from these two hundred years of miscegenation. Thrift and intelligence, longevity and fertility have been evident. In every war except the Mexican, the community has been represented; one member of the group became a bishop in the A.M.E. Church; ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... root out of a dry ground, who had no form nor comeliness; and when they should see him, there was no beauty that they should desire him.' Meagre were his looks; sharp misery had worn him to the bone. His crown of thorns indicated the sterility of the territories over which he reigned. The reed in his hand, gathered from the banks of the Nile, indicated that it was only the mighty river, by keeping within its banks, and thus withholding its wonted munificence, that placed an unreal sceptre in his gripe. He was nailed ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... west by south, quitting the bed of the river, which I named the Gascoyne in compliment to my friend, Captain Gascoyne, and found that we were in a very fertile district, being one of those splendid exceptions to the general sterility of Australia which are only occasionally met with: it apparently was one immense delta of alluvial soil covered with gently sloping grassy rises, for they could scarcely be called hills; and in the valleys between these lay many freshwater lagoons which rested ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... little examination. Butler claimed, justly, that his "Life and Habit" was an advance on Hering in its dealing with questions of hybridity, and of longevity puberty and sterility. Since Semon's extended treatment of the phenomena of crosses might almost be regarded as the rewriting of the corresponding section of "Life and Habit" in the "Mneme" terminology, we may infer that this view of the question was one of Butler's "brilliant ideas." That Butler shrank ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... entered the fertile plain of Dali. This is about six miles long, by one in width, highly cultivated, with the river flowing through the midst. As far as we could see in a direct line groves of olives, vineyards, and ploughed land, diversified by villages, exhibited the power of water in converting sterility ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... restrained, and the means of artificial irrigation, to sustain nature during the long droughts of summer, obtained. By the incessant labour of centuries this prodigy has been completed, and the very stony sterility of nature converted into the means of heightening, by artificial means, the heat of summer.... No room is lost in these little but precious freeholds; the vine extends its tendrils along the terrace walls ... in the corners formed by their meeting, a little sheltered nook ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
