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More "Vegetation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tributary to the stream valley, thus furnishing excellent surface drainage for the entire farm. In some places the sides of these valleys are quite sloping and subject to moderate erosion when not protected by vegetation. Above and between these slopes the upland is nearly level. As they came upon one of these level areas, grown up with small forest trees, ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... their forms the craggy and stony character of the Dinaric Alps, rising perpendicularly from the water on the side of the prevailing wind, and without vegetation. On the other side are softer hills and plains with southern vegetation, the aromatic scents from which are carried by the breeze. There are about twenty large islands, some of which are over 30 miles long; but the number may be raised to a hundred ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... hundred yards, to the very point which must have been the base of the spire of smoke—he had marked it so well that he could not be mistaken—and from his leafy covert saw a large open space entirely destitute of vegetation. He expected to see there also the remains of a camp fire, but none was visible, not a single charred stick, ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... boys go, too, troops of them, of a Sunday, to bathe and prowl around, and indulge the semi-barbarous instincts that still lurk within them. Life, in all its forms, is most abundant near water. The rank vegetation nurtures the insects, and the insects draw the birds. The first week in March, on some southern slope where the sunshine lies warm and long, I usually find the hepatica in bloom, though with scarcely an inch of stalk. In the spring runs, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... bush, would rush upon the unwary passer-by, and know no pleasure greater than the act of crushing his victim to a shapeless mass beneath his feet. How little does his tame sleepy son resemble him! Instead of browsing on the rank vegetation of wild pasturage, he devours plum-buns; instead of bathing his giant form in the deep rivers and lakes of his native land, he steps into a stone-lined basin to bathe before the eyes of a pleased multitude, the whole of whom form their ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... the sharp, in her nature. True, it was not discernible yet in her, nor was she aware of it herself. What knows the seed in the ground of the effect which the refreshing dew and the warm sunbeams are to have in producing from it vegetation ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... station at Orham is a low whitewashed building with many windows. The vegetation about it is limited exclusively to "beach grass" and an occasional wild-plum bush. The nearest building which may be reached without a boat is the life-saving station, two miles below. The outer beach changes its shape every winter. The gales tear great holes in its sides, and then, as if in ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... and picturesqueness to the landscape. They are remarkable for their parallelism, regularity, rectilineal direction and evenness of outline, and constitute what is by far the most conspicuous feature in the topography of Loudoun. Neither snow-capped nor barren, they are clothed with vegetation from base to summit and afford fine range and pasturage ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... and barren. Bleak hills destitute of vegetation, narrow ravines, and savage gorges appeared on every side. Often it seemed impossible that they could make any further progress; but after several hours spent in climbing and scrambling they at length reached the point for which they had been directing their course, on the north-western shore. ...
— The Two Shipmates • William H. G. Kingston
... the day Nic sat watching their progress, a good deal of it through the gloomy shades of a great swamp, through which the river ran at times almost in twilight, the faint current being marked by the difference in colour and the freedom from the vegetation which marked the waters of the great lagoon spreading away to right and left among the trees, which grew and fell and rotted as far ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... shawl many times folded. They seldom, however, venture out of their houses during mid-day, and all journeys, even those of caravans, are performed in the night. Rains are also rare in the summer season, and long droughts banish vegetation, and attract numberless columns of locusts, which destroy the ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... honored with the name of Isabella, after his patron, the Spanish queen, surpassed in charm all he had yet seen. Like them all, it was covered with rich vegetation, its climate delightful, its air soft and balmy, its scenery so lovely that it seemed to him "as if one would never desire to depart. I know not where first to go, nor are my eyes ever weary of gazing on ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... following him. Little threads of grass were filling up the deep clear-cut lettering on the cross; and the gray and yellow lichens were creeping over the granite. Since the snow had melted and the sun had shone hotly into the high-lying valley there had been a rapid growth of vegetation here, as everywhere else, and the weeds and grass had flourished luxuriantly; but amongst them Alice's slip of ivy had thrown out new buds and tendrils. The priest paused before the grave, with Felicita standing beside him silent and spell-bound. She did not weep or cry, or fling ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... you descend towards the base of the mountains the plants are more vigorous and their boughs and foliage are denser; and their vegetation varied according to the various species of the plants of which such woods are composed, and their boughs are of diverse arrangement and diverse amplitude of foliage, various in shape and size; and some have straight boughs like the cypress, and some have widely scattered and spreading ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... Leaf Mould. Practically the whole surface of the earth is covered with some form of vegetation—grass, trees, or other green plants. These dying down and decaying year after year, form a layer of vegetable mould such as you can readily scratch up on the surface of the ground in a forest or old meadow; this is ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... unpopular among farmers is the selfish and reckless manner in which many followers of a hunt ride over arable land; the greatest sinners in this respect being those who reside in towns, and who, knowing nothing about agriculture, err more from ignorance than indifference. Unless vegetation stares them in the face, they evidently think there is no harm in riding over ploughed land, no matter how distinctly the smoothly-harrowed surface and carefully prepared drains indicate the presence of seed underneath. In such a case, our best plan would be to skirt along, as ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... Pierce, B.A. 1904, has produced three volumes of poems, of which The World that God Destroyed exhibits an epic sweep of the imagination. He imagines a world far off in space, where every form of life has perished save rank vegetation. One day in their wanderings over the universe, Lucifer and Michael meet on this dead ball. A truce is declared and each expresses some of the ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... azure firmament—the least of many changes that refreshed and invigorated that famous house—'The Tiger' also shone forth in savage splendour and his black and orange stripes blazed again from a mass of tropical vegetation. ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... the girl at the knothole, the sky had fallen at the beginning of this clamour. She would not have been astonished to see the stars swinging from their abodes, and the vegetation, the barn, all blow away. It was the end of everything, the grand universal murder. When two of the three miraculous soldiers who formed the original feed-box corps emerged in detail from the hole under the beam and slid away into the darkness, she did no ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... resources: guano (deposits worked until about 1890) Land use: arable land: 0% permanent crops: 0% meadows and pastures: 0% forest and woodland: 0% other: 100% Irrigated land: 0 km2 Environment: some low-growing vegetation Note: strategic location in the North Pacific Ocean; Johnston Island and Sand Island are natural islands; North Island (Akau) and East Island (Hikina) are manmade islands formed from coral dredging; closed to the public; former nuclear weapons test site; site ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... amongst the wild flowers, in the shade of the woods," Duncan answered; "that is, if one may take so great a liberty with the woods of madame! This sort of country rather fascinates me," he added thoughtfully. "I have lived so long in a land where the vegetation is a jungle and the flowers are exotics. There is a species of exaggeration about it all. ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... both amusement and instruction. What is this rock that I am standing on? Has it remained here for ages to be dashed by the furious ocean?— or has it lately sprung from the depths, from the silent labour of the indefatigable zoophytes? Look at its sides; behold the variety of marine vegetation with which it is loaded. Are they of the class of the ulvae, confervae, or fuci? to be welcomed as old acquaintance, or, hitherto unnoticed, to be added to the catalogue of Nature's endless stores? And what are those corals, that, like mimic tenants of the ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the most sheltered portions of the Corniche,—a genuinely tropical temperature, where dates, cactus, the aloe, with its tall, candelabra-like branches, grow in the fields. When he saw those slender trunks, that fantastic vegetation shooting up in the white, hot air, when he felt the blinding dust crunching under the wheels like snow, de Gery, his eyes partly closed, half-dreaming in that leaden noonday heat, fancied that he was making once more the tiresome journey from Tunis ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... passed, in panoramic review, a sunny land, filled with brilliant-hued vegetation, and dotted with villages and cities which were bright with light-colored buildings. People appeared moving through the scenes, as in a cinematograph exhibition, but with infinitely more semblance of reality. In fact, the pictures, blending one into another, seemed ...
— The Moon Metal • Garrett P. Serviss
... thin, mean-looking, and half-starved. Two weeks of the delicious spring grass and the fat on their ribs and loins rolls and shakes as they move, growing almost visibly under the succulent influence of the delicate vegetation. ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... and ironed down with trolley-rails; but the Guercino has been spared, though it is no longer so accessible to the public. Still, there is a garden left, and our hotel, with others, looks across the sun and dust of its street into the useful vegetation of the famous old Capuchin convent, with the church, to which I came so eagerly so long ago to revere Guido's "St. Michael and the Dragon" and the decorative bones of the good brothers braided on ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... passed only by carrying the canoe and luggage to the smoother waters above. It was apparent that the river frequently overflowed its banks, for immense quantities of driftwood lined both shores, while the vegetation had been swept away to that extent that a space of a dozen feet from the margin of the stream was comparatively free from it. Thus both ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... remains as it was in '52. There the trail is to be seen miles and miles ahead, worn bare and deep, with but one narrow track where there used to be a dozen, and with the beaten path that vegetation has not yet recovered from the scourge of passing hoofs and tires of wagons ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... whose soft irregular masses on the undulating ground had somewhat the effect of the waves of the sea. These alternated with stretches of yellow gorse and brown heather, sheets of cotton-grass, and pools of white crowfoot, and all the vegetation of a mountain side, only that the mountain was ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... factory chimneys rose up from the barren soil. The only vegetation on that putrid land, where the spring breezes wafted an odor of petroleum and slate, blended with another odor that was even less agreeable. At last, however, they crossed the Seine a second time, and the bridge was a delight. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... but a handful of date-trees, thrown upon the wide waste of The Sahara, with one or two pools of sluggish running water, sheltering beneath its palms thirty or forty inhabitants. There are four or five spots of vegetation, gems of emerald on the rugged brow of The Desert. The houses, if such they are, consist of half a dozen or more of mud hovels huddled together, here and there a little stone stuck in the walls, and some dark passages running beneath them. One or two had a couple ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... Thursday, not at their house at Neuilly, but at the studio on the Quai d'Orsay, where the whole family spend the day together. This studio would seem to be the strangest place. It is in a corner of the old Cour des Comptes. He has got permission to do his work there, in the midst of wild vegetation and mouldering heaps of stone. As I went away I turned to watch them walking along the quay, father, mother, and children, all enveloped in the calm light of the setting sun, which made a halo round them like a Holy Family. Strung ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... marched, bright and happy, conscious that their cause was a good one, and that their enjoyment would not be marred by any excesses. The day was charming; there had been just enough rain during the preceding night to lay the dust and freshen up the vegetation, while the ardent rays of the sun were tempered from time to time by transient screens of semi-transparent clouds. As the procession neared Cricketty Hall, a cooling breeze from the west sprang up, just enough to ruffle out the banners, as they were carried proudly aloft, without ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... the nature of the vegetation, which is not vigorous enough to maintain a noxious stagnation in the lower strata of ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... All this vegetation, to be sure, was stunted. The madrona was here no bigger than the manzanita; the bay was but a stripling shrub; the very pines, with four or five exceptions in all our upper canyon, were not so tall as myself, or but a little ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tiny blue-white suns there seemed to be, stretching off between the columns, carried on thick cables and radiating the artificial daylight of the interior. Hot, damp odors wafted across the roof, the odors of decayed vegetation. ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... where it was broken by a sheer precipice forming one side of a deep gully. This was the work of man, having once been a railroad cut, but it had been in disuse for many years and was now covered with vegetation. You could walk up the hill till you came to the brink of this almost vertical chasm, but you could no more scramble down it than you could scramble down a well. On the opposite side of the cut the hill continued upward and the bridging of the chasm ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... before there were any people on the earth and perhaps before there were any animals or birds or reptiles here, the world was covered with an immense, luxuriant growth of vegetation. How do we know it? The geologists tell us so. They have dug deep into the earth and they have examined what they found, and they have long ago determined that this condition is true. It would seem that ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... splendor of Cathay and the wealth of Hindustan were only known to Europeans through the narratives of Marco Polo or Sir John Mandeville—early on the morning of Friday, October 12th, a man stood bareheaded on the deck of a caravel and watched the rising sun lighting up the luxuriant tropical vegetation of a level and beautiful island toward which the vessel was gently speeding her way. Three-and-thirty days had elapsed since the last known point of the Old World, the Island of Ferrol, had faded away over the high poop of his vessel; eventful ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... granite;[C] farther on it was sienite; then the sienite showed a strong predominance of feldspar; then it became an impure Labradorite; then passed into gneiss; the gneiss became soft, stratified, and frequently intersected by trap;—and with every softer quality of rock there was an improvement in vegetation. This was particularly observable at L'Anse du Loup, where there is a red sandstone formation extending some miles along the sea and a mile or two inland. Here we seemed suddenly transported to a Southern climate, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... toward the end of June he talked to her about love and the married state. It had been raining all day long, and though no rain fell at the moment, one felt that more was coming. The air was saturated with moisture; heavy odors of sodden vegetation crept through the open window; and one saw a mist like steam beginning to rise from the fields beyond the roadway. Mr. Furnival, the new pastor, had just passed by; and it was his ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... them, I wrote down the minute of the hour of his birth, and how he was called. By visitations, I kept informed of the various countries, their conditions, and their relations with each other; for as the state of the earth points favorably or unfavorably to its vegetation, so do the conditions of nations indicate the approach of changes, and give encouragement to those predestined to bring the changes about. Again I say, my Lord, as the stars are the servants of God, they have their servants, whom you shall never know except ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... to Ahab that a judgment was about to fall upon the land, because the people had forsaken the worship of God, and bowed down to idols instead. This punishment was to be in the shape of a drought, at all times a terrible infliction, but especially so in Eastern countries where all vegetation quickly dries up when there ...
— The Man Who Did Not Die - The Story of Elijah • J. H. Willard
... Thiers. The light and the complexion of things had to my eyes not a little of that mollified depth last loved by them rather further on. It was simply perhaps that the weather was hot and the mountains drowsing in that iridescent haze that I have seen nearer home than at Chambery. But the vegetation, assuredly, had an all but Transalpine twist and curl, and the classic wayside tangle of corn and vines left nothing to be desired in the line of careless grace. Chambery as a town, however, constitutes no foretaste of the monumental ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... said they might be engaged with war among some hostile tribes, or had gone to other hunting grounds. The winter was unusually mild, and it was long before it set in. Yet the spring following was tardy, and later than usual. It was the latter end of May before vegetation had ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... than six thousand. Within half a century the part played by these two towns standing opposite each other has been reversed. The advantage of situation, however, remains with the historic town, whence the view on every side is perfectly enchanting, where the air is deliciously pure, the vegetation splendid, and the residents, in harmony with nature, are friendly souls, good fellows, and devoid of Puritanism, though two-thirds of the population are Calvinists. Under such conditions, though there are the usual disadvantages of life in a small town, ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... when ascending to the top of a somewhat lofty mound, could see no signs of pursuers in the vast stretch of desert behind him. In front the ground was already becoming dotted here and there with vegetation, and he doubted not that after a few hours' ride he should be fairly in the confines of cultivated country. He gave his camel a meal of dates, and having eaten some himself, again set the creature in motion. ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... at right angles to each other, and thus allowing every air from the water to blow freely through them. On the other side of the town could be seen the Savannah, a park-like enclosure bordered by pretty villas, with a panorama of superb hills clothed with vegetation, forming the background of the picture; between which, extending right across the island, was discerned the entrance to the fertile valley of Diego Martin; while across the gulf on the mainland rose the majestic mountains of Cumana. Leave was ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... walk with my jacket over my arm, and many little boys and girls were running about naked. The region visited had a naturally well-drained dark soil, composed of river silt, of volcanic dust and of humus from buried vegetation, and it went down to a depth beyond the need of the longest daikon (giant radish). Sweet potatoes and taro were still on the ground, and large areas, worked to a perfect tilth, had been sown or were in course of ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... no Arabs journeying now. No tents huddled among the low bushes. The last sign of vegetation was obliterated. The earth rose and fell in a series of humps and depressions, interspersed with piles of rock. Every shade of yellow and of brown mingled and flowed away towards the foot of the mountains. Here and there dry water-courses showed their teeth. Their crumbling banks ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... and the laurel. The tulip and the chestnut gave no sense of struggle against a stingy nature. The soft, full outlines of the landscape carried no hidden horror of glaciers in its bosom. The brooding heat of the profligate vegetation; the cool charm of the running water; the terrific splendor of the June thunder-gust in the deep and solitary woods, were all sensual, animal, elemental. No European spring had shown him the same intermixture of delicate grace and passionate depravity that marked the Maryland ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... range of the hunter, and very few buts and bounds warned him of his being about to trespass upon the private property of some neighbor. Herds of buffaloes and deer still fed upon the rich cane-brake and rank vegetation of the boundless woods, and resorted to the numerous Licks ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... the mind of man. For the sand of the Sahara we find substituted an impalpable powder of alkali, white as the driven snow, stretching for ninety miles at a time in one uninterrupted dazzling sheet, which supports not even that last obstinate vidette of vegetation, the wild-sage brush. Its springs are far between, and, without a single exception, mere receptacles of a salt, potash, and sulphur hell-broth, which no man would drink, save in extremis. A few days of this beverage ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... while others are scarcely worth a visit. Most of them have historical memories reaching from the dawn of history to times which are within the memory of many now living, and some of them are remarkable for their geological formation or luxuriant Southern vegetation. The planning of a tour among them requires the most careful comparison of the time-tables of the various shipping companies, and the scheme, once decided on, must be strictly adhered to under pain of the risk of being ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... lay the desert, but a desert suddenly and miraculously changed, a desert he had never seen before. Mile after mile it swept away before him, hot, dry, suffocating, lifeless. The sparse vegetation was grey with the alkali dust. The heat hung choking in the air like a curtain. Lizards sprawled in the sun, repulsive. A rattlesnake dragged its loathsome length from under a mesquite. The dried carcass of a steer, ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... structures of which I have spoken. The hovels have disappeared, and the debris lies many feet thick over the old ground-level. But the channels are still in working order, and wherever they exist will be found rich crops, tall and stately trees, and a tangle of luxuriant vegetation. On the rocks above are the ruins of buildings and temples and walls, and in many places small shrines stand out, built on the jutting edges of great boulders or on the pinnacles of lofty crags, in places that would seem inaccessible to ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... from the local airport flew over Oracle and announced on his return that he could see no signs of the town, that its immediate vicinity was buried under an incredibly tall and tangled mass of vegetation. "From the air it looks like giant stalks of spaghetti, twisted, fantastic," was his description. He went on to say that he noticed quite a few drifting globes and large birds with black, glistening wings, but these offered ...
— The Seed of the Toc-Toc Birds • Francis Flagg
... from the saddle, reading the trail that Grit's paws had left in the alkali and sand. Cactus reared its spiny stems or sprawled over the ground more like strange water-growths that had survived the emptying of an inland sea than vegetation of the land. Once the dog's tracks led aside to a scummy puddle, saucered by alkali, dotted with the spoor of desert animals that drank the bitter water in extremity. Then it ran straight to a wide reef of ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... flora of the tropics in its rankest and most prodigal growth. Spaces here and there had been wrested from the jungle and planted with bananas and cane and orange groves. The rest was a riot of wild vegetation, the home of monkeys, tapirs, jaguars, alligators and prodigious reptiles and insects. Where no road was cut a serpent could scarcely make its way through the tangle of vines and creepers. Across the treacherous mangrove swamps few things without ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... Gospel as a seed contains the tree. It fell among Adam's descendants as a mustard-seed falls between the furrows, and lay long unnoticed there. With the Lord, in the development of his kingdom, a thousand years are as one day in the growth of vegetation. A man who in his childhood observed the seed cast into the ground, may live long and die old before the plants have reached maturity; but the seed of the kingdom has not lost its life, the God of the covenant has not forgotten his own. At the appointed time he will visit his ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... industrious zeal in covering up memorials of man's art and industry, is often curiously assisted by the zoophytes and vegetation of the ocean, as well as guarded in its labor by abnormal monsters of piscine creation. An example of this occurred in an amusing venture after Lafitte's gold. While the Gulf coast of Western Louisiana is fortified, in its immature terre tremblante, by the coral reefs and islets, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... could anyhow take a bit of the Arctic world and float it down into the tropics, the ice would all melt, and the white dreariness would disappear, and a new splendour of colour and of light would clothe the ground, and an unwonted vegetation would spring up where barrenness had been. And if you and I will only float our lives southward beneath the direct vertical rays of that great 'Sun of Righteousness,' then all the dreary winter and ice of our sorrows will melt, and joy will spring. Brother! the Christian ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... none Coastline: 68.5 km Maritime claims: Exclusive fishing zone: 12 nm Territorial sea: 12 nm Disputes: none Climate: tropical marine; little seasonal temperature variation Terrain: flat with a few hills; scant vegetation Natural resources: negligible; white sandy beaches Land use: arable land 0%; permanent crops 0%; meadows and pastures 0%; forest and woodland 0%; other 100% Environment: lies outside the Caribbean hurricane belt Note: ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... brought them in to ruin the range, knowing that they would cut the feeding ground to pieces, kill the roots of vegetation with their sharp hoofs, and finally fill the country with little gullies to carry off the water that ought to sink ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... country, well grassed, but having no permanent water. At Kokriega there is a well which may be relied on for a small supply, but would be of no use in watering cattle in large numbers. The ranges are composed of ferruginous sandstone and quartz conglomerate, and as to vegetation are of a very uninviting aspect. The plain to the south is covered with quartz and sandstone pebbles. About five miles to the north-east of the Kokriega is a spot where the schist rock crops out from under the sandstone, and the rises here have ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... other boy sat up, with their faces turned toward the rosy morning light, as if they were sun-worshipers. Ned also felt the inspiration. The world was purer and clearer here than in the city. In the early morning the grayish, lonely tint which is the prevailing note of Mexico, did not show. The vegetation was green, or it was tinted with the glow of the sun. Near the lower shores he saw the ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to the edge and looked down. The bottom of the ravine was many yards below, and there were cruel rocks, partly hidden by dense vegetation, now brown from the touch ...
— With Trapper Jim in the North Woods • Lawrence J. Leslie
... of dimensions to another, a permanent way from Earth to a strange, carboniferous-period planet on which a monstrous dull-red sun shone hotly. Tommy should come out into a tree-fern forest whose lush vegetation would hide the sky, and which furnished a lurking place not only for strange reptilian monsters akin to those of the long-dead past of Earth, but for the bands of ragged, half-mad human beings who were outlaws from the civilization ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... strangers is usually the fate of those who are thus lured from their homes by a deceitful hope. There, where Nature wears a perpetual verdure—where the fervid sun brings forth a luxuriance of vegetation unknown in more northern regions, the wearied spirit sinks to repose, soothed, or saddened, by the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... place he regularly wrote up the pages of his Journal, in which, paying great attention to literary style and composition, he recorded only matters that would be of general interest, such as remarks on scenery and vegetation, on the peculiarities and habits of animals, and on the characters, avocations and political institutions of the various races of men with whom he was brought in contact. It was the freshness of these observations that gave his "Narrative" so much charm. Only in those cases in ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... great forests that sent far out to sea the odors of countless flowers. The weary toilers who had sailed so far, with nothing to look upon but the sky and the great stretches of the sea, were charmed with the richness of the vegetation, the balmy air, and the ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... produces oil, and at the same time more grain than the Koura. Every olive tree here is worth from fifteen to twenty piastres. The soil in which the trees grow is regularly ploughed, but nothing is sown between the trees, as it is found that any other vegetation diminishes the quantity of olives. The ground round the stem is covered to the height of two or three feet with earth, to prevent the sun from hurting the roots, and to give it the full benefit of the rains. We met with ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... of Thessaly, says the poet, is in the utmost degree fertile in poisonous herbs, and her rocks confess the power of the sepulchral song of the magician. There a vegetation springs up of virtue to compel the Gods; and Colchis itself imports from Thessaly treasures of this sort which she cannot boast as her own. The chaunt of the Thessalian witch penetrates the furthest seat of the Gods, and contains words so powerful, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... nations vanished, and when civilization itself lay fallen and inert, these magnificent Roman roads were unused and left to the destructive agencies of time and the elements of Nature. Rains and floods washed away and inundated their embankments; forests and rank vegetation overgrew and concealed them; winds covered them with dust and heaps of sand; and little by little in the process of ages their hard surfaces and massive foundations were somewhat broken and caused to partially ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... all to pieces one of these days. Those flames, eh? Why I thought any one knew enough about natural phenomena to answer that question. But it seems I'm wrong. Those flames are nothing more nor less than marsh gas, Sir Nigel, evolved from the decomposition of vegetation, and therefore only found in swampy regions such as this. Whew! and to think that here is a community that has been bowing down to these things as symbols ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... what we know, that solar energy is the source of all energy on this earth, and that, just as in the deepest spiritual analysis 'there is no power but of God,' so in the material region we may say that the only force is the force of the sun, which not only stimulates vegetation and brings light and warmth—as the pre-scientific prophetess knew—but in a hundred other ways, unknown to her and known to modern science, is the author of all change, the parent of all life, and the reservoir ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... good reason to weep. For he had but to look at the enormous height of the polished rocks to be convinced of the impossibility of climbing them. The vegetation, too, was so scanty that it could only provide him with food for a very short time. He saw but two courses open to him: either to die from starvation, or to be devoured by the monstrous serpents that crawled about ...
— Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen • Alexander Chodsko
... picturesque, even fantastic, in outline. The heights are inaccessible to any foot but those of the goat and goatherd. We were astonished at seeing a troop of goats wending their way upward, for to our eyes there seemed not even the remotest trace of vegetation upon the rocks; and indeed the poor things looked as if with them existence were truly "a struggle," out of which little could be gained by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... landing in Porto Rico at Naguabo, where the Caribs afterward destroyed a Spanish settlement, he gave its present name to the island when he put in Aguada for water. Charmed with the beauty of the bay, the opulence of vegetation, the hope of wealth in the river sands, he christened it "the rich port," and extending this, applied to the whole island the name of San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico—St. John the Baptist of the Rich Port. The natives knew their island as ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... as perfectly symmetrical as Giotto's circle, and as pure, withal, as the mathematics her father taught. It was just when spring was coming to extract the roots of frozen-up vegetation that I fell in love with the Corollary. That she herself was not indifferent I soon had reason to regard ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... curious plants. But there is something new as far as I know, and particularly ingenious here in the disposition and management of them. Those that naturally delight in the rocks, and the dry hungry soil, are here planted upon ridges of artificial rock-work; where they shew all the luxuriance of vegetation that they could amongst the Alps, the Pyrenees or the Andes. While a very different tribe, the Aquatics, display themselves in a large cistern, where they are constantly supplied with their best and most natural nourishment the rain water, conveyed to them from the eves of the richest ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... glory, here and there touched with the gold of early autumn, and the slopes and meadows bright with lively green, a pleasant change for eyes fresh from the bare, rugged mountain-side and the rank unwholesome vegetation of Panama. Shaggy little Scottish oxen were feeding on the dewy grass, their black coats looking sleek in the sun beyond the long shadows of the thorns; but as Mary said, laughing, 'Only Farmer Fitzjocelyn's ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... orders of Captain P.P. King, to whom the execution of this important service had been intrusted, and to accompany him to those particular coasts, destined for his investigation, in order to form and prepare such collections of their vegetation, for the use of His Majesty's gardens at Kew, as circumstances, and the particular season of the year proper for visiting those shores, might afford me. My very limited knowledge of the plants of that continent, especially of genera, that form a striking feature in ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... first stages of our journey upon this new river, which evidently had its rise in the mountains of the S.E., we made rapid progress to the W.N.W. through an unbroken and uninteresting country of equal sameness of feature and of vegetation. On the 23rd, as the boats were proceeding down it, several hundreds of natives made their appearance upon the right bank, having assembled with premeditated purposes of violence. I was the more surprised at this show of hostility, because we had passed on general ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... Poverty is necessarily selfish, contracted, grovelling, anxious. Now and then a poor man's heart, when certain beams and dews visit it, may smell like the budding vegetation in yonder garden on this spring day, may feel ripe to evolve in foliage, perhaps blossom; but he must not encourage the pleasant impulse; he must invoke Prudence to check it, with that frosty breath of hers, which is as nipping ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... destitution would ensue. Such was the case in the summer of 1845. It is said by eyewitnesses that in a single night the entire potato crop was smitten with disease, and the healthy plants were transformed into a mass of putrefying vegetation. Thus at one fell stroke the food of nearly a whole nation ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... part of the district once miscalled the Great American Desert. It was an idea commonly accepted, but, as the sequel proved, erroneous, that lack of moisture was the cause of lack of vegetation. An irrigating ditch was constructed on the ranch, trees were planted, and it was hoped that with such an abundance of moisture they would spring up like weeds. Vain hope! There was "water, water everywhere," but ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... and to have the power of generation like insects, and have thence been announced amongst the animal kingdom in Sect. XIII. and to these must be added the buds and bulbs which constitute the viviparous offspring of vegetation. The former I suppose to be beholden to a single living filament for their seminal or amatorial procreation; and the latter to the same cause for their lateral or branching generation, which they possess in common with ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... character of the Roman wall (judging from the fragments that remain) it seems scarcely conceivable that his operations extended lower than the battlements of the wall, unless indeed they comprised the freeing of the ditch and berme from vegetation, obstructions, ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... the horizon, the shrubs, the flowers, are all that remain of the little canton, three or four leagues in extent, where Jesus founded his Divine work. The trees have totally disappeared. In this country, in which the vegetation was formerly so brilliant that Josephus saw in it a kind of miracle—Nature, according to him, being pleased to bring hither side by side the plants of cold countries, the productions of the torrid zone, and the trees of temperate climates, laden all the year with flowers and ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... no doubt about the road now, for we were enclosed in a narrow valley, with only the great thoroughfare built above the river, and that not too securely. We made good speed, and soon sighted Venanson, a queer village perched above all vegetation on the ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... land and especially on the mud-flats round it there are large numbers of sandpipers, Kentish and ringed plovers, stints and stilts, terns and gulls, ducks and teal, egrets and cranes: but as there is not a blade of vegetation within a mile of them there are no facilities for observation, ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... river that yesterday at the Cote Dorion? Why had he been saved by this yokel at the fire, and brought here to lie in oblivion in this mountain hut, wrapped in silence and lost to the world? Why had his brain and senses lain fallow all these months, a vacuous vegetation, an empty consciousness? Was it fate? Did it not seem probable that the Great Machine had, in its automatic movement, tossed him up again on the shores of Time because he had not fallen on the trap-door ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... exciting or interesting than their monotonous routine of work. We continually came across a little band of, say, twenty or thirty men and a couple of officers stationed near some culvert or bridge. Their tents were pitched on a bit of stony ground, with not a trace of vegetation near it, and here they stayed for months together, half dead from the boredom of their existence. Nevertheless such work was quite essential to the success of the campaign, for the attitude of the Dutch colonists up-country has been throughout the war an uncertain factor, and if these long lines ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... changes of vegetation—this little spongeous tract of water plants, and on either side of it all the growths are tough or brittle—heather, bracken, hurts, ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... himself once more to repose his limbs, wearied with the fatigues of the ascent and overcome by the heat that was there intolerable. At the distance of about two hundred yards on his right was a solitary tree, standing like a sign to mark the tomb of nature's vegetation. Upon this tree his eyes were fixed listlessly, and he was marveling within himself how that single scion of the forest could have been spared, when the burning lava, whenever the eruption might have taken place, had hurled down and reduced ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... shrubs growing in the Signine channel, which will before long become big trees scarcely to be hewn down with an axe and which interfere with the purity of the water in the Aqueduct of Ravenna. Vegetation is the peaceable overturner of buildings, the battering-ram which brings them to the ground, though the trumpets never sound for siege. Now we shall have Baths again that we may look upon with pleasure; water which will cleanse not stain[1]; water after using which we shall not require to wash ourselves ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... overture, carry a single note to the extreme fortissimo, making it pass rapidly through all the intermediate stages, I saw it attain to that fixed, unalterable gold of fine days, on which the sharply cut shadows of the wrought iron of the balustrade were outlined in black like a capricious vegetation, with a fineness in the delineation of their smallest details which seemed to indicate a deliberate application, an artist's satisfaction, and with so much relief, so velvety a bloom in the restfulness of their ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... knowledge; it is to assert that that idea has scientific truth. Mythology cannot flourish in that dialectical air; it belongs to a deeper and more ingenuous level of thought, when men pored on the world with intense indiscriminate interest, accepting and recording the mind's vegetation no less than that observable in things, and mixing the two developments ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... joke; for instance, and one often perpetrated on board ship, to stand talking to a man in a dark night watch, and all the while be cutting the buttons from his coat. But once off, those buttons never grow on again. There is no spontaneous vegetation ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... style of the writing, particularly in the Hebrew, is strongly contrasted; and the details of the story are not entirely harmonious. In the first narrative the order of creation is, first the earth and its vegetation, then the lower animals, then man, male and female, made in God's image. In the second narrative the order is, first the earth and its vegetation, then man, then the lower orders of animals, then woman. In the first story plant life springs ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... a tract more purely of tumbled sand, than all this between Kunersdorf and Dam Vorstadt; and you judge, without aid of record or tradition, that it is greatly altered for the worse since Friedrich's time,—some rabbit-colony, or other the like insignificancy, eating out the roots, till all vegetation died, and the wind got hold and set it dancing;—and that, in 1759, when Russian human beings took it for a Camp, it must have been at least coherent, more or less; covered, held together by some film of scrubby vegetation; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of this monotonous life; and, since I am compelled to speak my mind, a little ashamed, as a gentleman, of living on my wife and her brother, and doing nothing for myself. So I shall go to the Vaal river, and see a little life; here there's nothing but vegetation—and not much of that. Not a word more, Phoebe, if you please. I am a good, easy, affectionate husband, but I am a man, and not a child to be tied to a woman's apron-strings, however much I ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... entitled to the first-rate embellishment of art, inasmuch as the basement of Clarence Terrace commands a "living picture" of extraordinary luxuriance; and from the drawing-room windows the lake may be seen studded with little islands, and environed with lawny slopes and unusual park-like vegetation: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 322, July 12, 1828 • Various
... that rock through the thick carpet of bark and dust. This betokened that he was near the edge of the forest or some rocky opening. He fancied that the light grew clearer beyond, and the presence of a few fronds of ferns confirmed him in the belief that he was approaching a different belt of vegetation. Presently he saw the vertical beams of the sun again piercing the opening in the distance. With this prospect of speedy deliverance from the forest at last secure, he did not hurry forward, but on the contrary coolly retraced his footsteps to the spring again. The fact was ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... showing the supposed correspondence between the scriptural and the geological order of creation, Canon Driver said: "The two series are evidently at variance. The geological record contains no evidence of clearly defined periods corresponding to the 'days' of Genesis. In Genesis, vegetation is complete two days before animal life appears. Geology shows that they appear simultaneously—even if animal life does not appear first. In Genesis, birds appear together with aquatic creatures, and precede all land animals; according to the evidence of geology, birds are ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... servants' offices. A wide receding stretch of broken country, rising in the distance to the dignity of blue precipitous hills; a gorge of which opened far away, to delight and draw the eye into its misty depth; a middle distance of lordly forest, with patches of clearing; bits of tropical vegetation at hand, and over them and over it all a tropical sky. In one direction the view was very open. Eleanor could discern a bit of a pathway winding through it, and once or twice a dark figure moving along its course. This was Vuliva! this was her foreign home! the region where darkness and ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... they walked through it, and went over on the solid ice. The ground between the sea and the pond was from half a cable's length to a quarter of a mile broad, and the whole island appeared covered with gravel and small stones, without the smallest verdure or vegetation of any kind. They met with only one piece of drift wood, about three fathom long, with a root on it, and as thick as the Carcass's mizen mast; which had been thrown up over the high part of the land, and lay on the declivity towards the pond. They saw three bears; and a number of wild ducks, geese, ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... and there my wife was charmed with the richness of the vegetation and the lofty trees. Fritz left us, thinking this a favourable spot for game. We soon heard the report of his gun, and an enormous bird fell a few paces from us. I ran to assist him, as he had much difficulty in securing his prize, which was only wounded in ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... savage and horrible. The wild rocks raised their lofty summits till they were lost in the clouds, and the valleys lay covered with everlasting snow. Not a tree was to be seen, nor a shrub even big enough to make a toothpick. The only vegetation we met with was a coarse strong-bladed grass growing in tufts, wild burnet, and a plant like moss, which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... looped this across his chest and pulled like a horse on the tow-path, while Sam Bolton sat in the stern with the steering-paddle. The banks were sometimes precipitous, sometimes stony, sometimes grown to the water's edge with thick vegetation. Dick had often to wade, often to climb and scramble, sometimes even to leap from one foothold to another. Only rarely did he enjoy level footing and the opportunity for a straight pull. Suddenly in a shallow pool, ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... orchards, sprinkled with little villages and the country palaces of the nobles—a rich, cultured landscape, which gradually merges into the forests of oak and chestnut that girdle the waist of the great volcano. But all the wealth of southern vegetation cannot hide the footsteps of that Ruin, which from time to time visits the soil. Half-way up, the mountain-side is dotted with cones of ashes and cinders, some covered with the scanty shrubbery ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... sides of the cliffs, he discovered a flower-growth which was rich in variety of colouring. Amid several kinds of tufted grasses were seen growing a small purple flower and the white star of the chickweed; The sight of all this richness of vegetation growing in a little spot close beside the snow, and amid such cold Arctic scenery, would have delighted a much less enthusiastic spirit than that of our young surgeon. He went quite into raptures with it, and stuffed his botanical box with mosses and ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... its burning rays on the fields, and under this shower of flame life burst forth in glowing vegetation from the earth. As far as the eye could see, the soil was green; and the sky was blue to the verge of the horizon. The Norman farms scattered through the plain seemed at a distance like little woods inclosed each in a ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... the hilltops and keep watch through the long coal building ages, we should see generation after generation of forest trees and underwoods living, withering, dying, falling to earth. Slowly a layer of dead and decaying vegetation thus collects, over which the forest flourishes still—tree for tree, and shrub for shrub, springing up in the place of ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... home was a desert, walled in by barren, snow-clad mountains. There was not a tree in sight. There was no vegetation but the endless sage-brush and greasewood. All nature was gray with it. We were plowing through great deeps of powdery alkali dust that rose in thick clouds and floated across the plain like smoke from ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... comfortable, and present a charming appearance. The vine is little cultivated in this part of the country, where it would hardly succeed, as the land is too low and damp; but there are, nevertheless, a few small vineyards on the slopes, and the vegetation in the whole country is incredibly rich and luxuriant. The late wars have left traces which only a ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... a few moments we embraced them all. The sun was hot upon us, but, after a ride of two or three miles, we came to the Henrietta, my dear Edward and Susan's residence, and were soon under the roof of a spacious, elegant and most commodious mansion. And here we are with midsummer temperature and vegetation, but a ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... hovered a degree or two above the tree-tops on the western bank of the stream, the moon, now nearly full, sailed gloriously into view above the clumps of vegetation that shrouded the eastern bank; and the gradual transition from the ruddy, golden light of the dying sun to the flooding silver of the brilliant moon, with the ever-changing effects that accompanied the transition, presented a spectacle of enchanting ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... with their variety of fruits, the tropical fruit-trees, Oranges, Bananas, etc., the shade- and cluster-trees, so important to the comfort and shelter of man, are added to the vegetable world during these epochs. The fossil vegetation of the Tertiaries is, indeed, most interesting from this point of view, showing the gradual maturing and completion of those conditions most intimately associated with human life. The earth had already its seasons, its spring and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... justified; the tiger-shooting expedition proved a much rougher business than the sportsmen had anticipated. Once they quitted the roads and foot-path, vegetation became rank and overpowering and in places impassable. Swampy ground, dense thorn thickets and elephant grass made progress enormously difficult—the jungle guards well its many secrets and is full ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... for an unobserved start could not have been selected, however. All this part of the country is a sandy waste, with a sparse growth of scrub oaks and but little vegetation. There are no farms, and the nearest houses are at Whiting. No one could see our work, except, possibly, the passengers from occasional trains, which rushed by without stopping, and were infrequent at this time ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... Domenech, Vol. II, p. 197; Timberlake, p. 77.] and the ring; [Footnote: Kane's Wanderings, p. 310.] the different ways of preparing the ground, whether tamping with clay, [Footnote: Catlin, Vol., I, p. 132.] or flooring with timber, [Footnote: Lewis and Clarke, Vol. I, p. 148.] or simply removing the vegetation, [Footnote: Domenech, Vol. II, p. 197.]—all these minor differences are of little consequence. The striking fact remains that this great number of tribes, so widely separated, all played a game in which the principal requirements were, that a small circular disk ...
— Indian Games • Andrew McFarland Davis
... of Maccabeus there was something congenial in the adventurous kind of existence which he led, and yet he was not one who would have adopted a guerrilla life from choice. As even in a hard and rocky waste there are spots where rich vegetation betrays some source of hidden nourishment below, and they who dig deep enough under the surface find a spring of bright pure living waters,—so deep within the Asmonean's heart lay a hidden source of tenderness which prevented his nature from becoming hardened by the stern necessities ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... light and the complexion of things had to my eyes not a little of that mollified depth last loved by them rather further on. It was simply perhaps that the weather was hot and the mountains drowsing in that iridescent haze that I have seen nearer home than at Chambery. But the vegetation, assuredly, had an all but Transalpine twist and curl, and the classic wayside tangle of corn and vines left nothing to be desired in the line of careless grace. Chambery as a town, however, constitutes no foretaste of the monumental cities. There is shabbiness and shabbiness, the ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... my impressions of my journey through the continually descending valley. I was particularly astonished at the southern vegetation which suddenly spreads out before one on climbing down from a steep and narrow rocky pass by which the Tosa is confined. I arrived at Domodossola in the afternoon in a blaze of sunshine, and I was reminded here of a ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... described in his beautiful work, The Rhododendron of Sikkim-Himalaya. It is called R. nivale, or snow-rhododendron. 'The hard, woody branches of this curious little species, as thick as a goose-quill, struggle along the ground for a foot or two, presenting brown tufts of vegetation where not half-a-dozen other plants can exist. The branches are densely interwoven, very harsh and woody, wholly depressed; whence the shrub, spreading horizontally, and barely raised two inches above the soil, becomes eminently typical of the arid, stern climate it inhabits. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... Saddles and bits. The Courier. Leather clothes. The Serape. The Rag-fair of Mexico, Thieves. Gourd water-bottles. Ploughing. Travelling by Diligence. Indian carriers. Mules. Breakfast. Bragadoccio. Robbers. Escort. Cuernavaca. Tropical Vegetation. Sugar-cane. Temisco. Sugar-hacienda. Indian labourers. The evensong. The Raya. Strength of the Indians. Xochicalco. Ruins of the Pyramid. Sculptures. Common ornaments. The people of Mexico and Central America. Their ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... months. He finds that plants and seeds so treated sprout and germinate rapidly when exposed to the warm air of spring and summer. It appears also that chrysales similarly treated become moths in about one-tenth of the time required under ordinary circumstances; from which facts, and the celerity of vegetation in Canada and the arctic regions, Professor Simpson infers that, if we in this country were to keep our grain in ice-houses during the winter, we should get quicker and better crops, and avoid the ill consequences which sometimes attend sowing in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... of St Thomas consists of a red and yellow marl, or clay, of great fertility, which is kept soft and mellow by the heavy dews which fall nightly, contributing greatly to vegetation, and preventing it from being dried up by the great heats; and so great is the luxuriant fertility of the soil, that trees immediately spring up on any spots left uncultivated, and will grow as high in a few days ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... was indeed broken up by streaks of yellow sand-break in the lower lands, and by many tall trees of the pine family, out-topping the others—some singly, some in clumps; but the general colouring was uniform and sad. The hills ran up clear above the vegetation in spires of naked rock. All were strangely shaped, and the Spy-glass, which was by three or four hundred feet the tallest on the island, was likewise the strangest in configuration, running up sheer from ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... outset, heavy, miry ground and a matted, marish vegetation, greatly delayed our progress; but by little and little the hill began to steepen and become stony under foot, and the wood to change its character and to grow in a more open order. It was, indeed, a most pleasant portion of the island that we were now approaching. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... leaves and woodland vegetation forms rich and fertile soils in the forests, in which conditions are favorable for the development of new tree growth. When living tree seeds are exposed to proper amounts of moisture, warmth and air in a fertile ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... small swampy pool, which was formed of water that had been left by the inundations of the river in some old deserted channel, and which was now covered and almost concealed by some sort of mossy and floating vegetation. Curtius running headlong, and paying little heed to his steps fell into this hole, and sank in the water. Romulus supposed of course that he would be drowned there, and so turned away and went to find some other enemy. Curtius, however, succeeded in crawling ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... bravely, still it was not felt the less acutely. There were no Europeans nearer than a distance of five miles; and owing to the peculiar nature of the scenery, its extraordinary stillness, and the unusual aspect of its gigantic vegetation, it was, despite its beauty, invested to a remarkable degree with an air of desolateness and solitude. At five in the morning, my husband set out upon his journey, and at eight a negro came to inquire whether massa was ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... Rome best, in this respect, is Piranesi. His edifices, always immensely too big, his vegetation, extravagantly too luxurious, are none too much to render Rome. And those pools of blackness and immense lakes ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... brings houses and trees and ships into relief, with all their rich variety of color, the scene is memorable and full of beauty. On the green slope behind the castle, while the outline of the tropical vegetation is only stealing into view, there is hid, and yet visible, a long, low building of yellow columns, blue facade, brown gables and red tiles: if you shut out the rest of the landscape with your hands, you would say it was a picture by Fortuny. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... low-lying region of vast forests and thickets, of slow deep rivers and creeks, and of lagoons and bayous. If Northern troops want to be ambushed they couldn't come to a finer place for it. Forrest and five thousand of his wild riders might hide within rifle shot of us in this endless mass of vegetation. And so, my lads, it behooves us to be cautious with a very great caution. You will recall how we got cut up by Forrest in the ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... romance and minstrelsy, was an intellectual spring among all the nations of the West. In literature the time of invention must precede the refinements of art. Legend must go before history, and poetry before criticism. Vegetation must precede spring, and spring must precede ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... cannon, brought here to war against the natives, and now binding the messengers of the nations and of commerce to this shore. Where there are no embankments, the water comes up to the roots of the trees, and a carpet of grass, moss, and tropical vegetation grows from the salt tide ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... was to get round the lagoon, which was so overgrown with reeds and suchlike rank vegetation as grows in swamps that we couldn't tell where it began or ended; but as the sea must lay towards the west, I came to the conclusion that if we skirted the bank in the opposite direction we would soon come to the neck of the water and be able to wade across it. This we did, but it was arduous ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... almost incredible that the dreary regions of which our pictures afford a glimpse enjoyed, ages ago, a climate even warmer than our own. The chilling waves that dash against the base of the dreary North Cape once washed shores clothed in luxuriant vegetation. Stately forests stood where now only stunted shrubs struggle a few inches above ground. The mammoth, and other animals that require a warm climate, roamed in multitudes through those regions. Their bones, found in great abundance ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... difficult for an European to form an idea of the hardships that are to be encountered in a journey over such a dry plain at the hottest season of the year. All vegetation seems utterly destroyed; not a blade of grass, not a green leaf, is anywhere to be seen; and the soil, a stiff loam, reflects back the heat of the sun with redoubled force; a man may congratulate himself that, being on horseback, he is raised some feet above it. Nor is any rest from ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... near Kandy, has forwarded to me many valuable observations, not only in connection with the botany, but the zoology of the mountain region. The latter I have here embodied in their appropriate places, and those relating to plants and vegetation will appear in a future edition ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... anxiety. His nephew was a very worthy boy, and his rights should be respected. Nevertheless, the baron often longed to supersede them. Of this there was every prospect now. The lady of the house had intrusted her case to a highly celebrated simple-woman, who lived among rocks and scanty vegetation at Heddon's Mouth, gathering wisdom from the earth and from the sea tranquillity. De Wichehalse was naturally vexed a little when all this accumulated wisdom culminated in nothing grander than a somewhat undersized, and unhappily female child—one, ...
— Frida, or, The Lover's Leap, A Legend Of The West Country - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... and then, with all that, it takes away with it the fumes that you have seen produced from the candle, disperses them throughout the whole of the atmosphere, and carries them away to places where they are wanted to perform a great and glorious purpose of good to man, for the sustenance of vegetation; and thus does a most wonderful work, although you say, on examining it, "Why, it is a perfectly indifferent thing." This nitrogen in its ordinary state is an inactive element; no action short of the most intense electric force, and then in the most infinitely small degree, can cause ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday
... sand to one of loose materials; and although in the one case the cliffs are less precipitous, yet in the other they attain a higher altitude. He sees before him a long reach of coast, resembling a vast sand-bank, more than three hundred and fifty feet in height, without a trace of vegetation. Ascending to the top, rounded hillocks of blown sand are observed, with occasional clumps of trees standing out like ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the stage is nine leagues, and runs through a valley which constantly increases in fertility. All that merely struggles into vegetation on the higher mountains has here more strength and vitality. The sun shines with warmth, and there is once ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... standstill. It was delightful—that little peep of you that I got—and it only made me regret the more that it is impossible to see much of you nowadays. I cannot help feeling that there is a danger of vegetation if one limits oneself too completely to a provincial life, and, charming though Cornwall is, its very fascination causes one to forget the importance of the outer world. I fancied that I discerned signs that you yourself felt this confinement and wished ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... but to germinate and multiply, by natural means, a particular species of nature's productions; and what else does the husbandman, who consults times and seasons, and, by what might be deemed a natural magic, from the mere scattering of his hand, covers a whole plain with golden vegetation? The mysteries of our art, it is true, are deeply and darkly hidden; but it requires so much the more innocence and purity of thought, to penetrate unto them. No, father! the true alchymist must be ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... the island; on the contrary, they merely observed, that sharks were too vicious to ride; and asked me to accompany them to their town, an invitation which I gladly accepted. As I walked along I observed that the island was composed of white porous pumice stone, without the least symptoms of vegetation; not even a piece of moss could I discover—nothing but the bare pumice stone, with thousands of beautiful green lizards, about ten inches long, playing about in every part. The road was steep, and in several parts the ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... mountain-masses rise, picturesque, even fantastic, in outline. The heights are inaccessible to any foot but those of the goat and goatherd. We were astonished at seeing a troop of goats wending their way upward, for to our eyes there seemed not even the remotest trace of vegetation upon the rocks; and indeed the poor things looked as if with them existence were truly "a struggle," out of which little could be gained by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... so. Space travel is too cheap and sol-type solar systems too numerous to justify the settlement of hostile worlds. There's no point in trying to live where one has to put on special equipment every time he goes outdoors. There's no reason to settle on a world where one can't grow the kind of vegetation one's ancestors adapted themselves to some tens of thousands of generations ago. It simply ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... special indulgence which the German public have bestowed upon a small work bearing the title of 'Ansichten der Natur', which I published soon after my return from Mexico. This work treats, under general points of view, of separate branches of physical geography (such as the forms of vegetation, grassy plains, and deserts). The effect produced by this small volume has doubtlessly been more powerfully manifested in the influence it has exercised on the sensitive minds of the young, whose imaginative faculties are so strongly manifested, than ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... one. It is Italy without the enervating heat and aridity which are such serious drawbacks to the enjoyment of its other charms by Northern folk. It is Switzerland without the rigidity of its climate and the comparative poverty of the northern vegetation. You have the oleander and cactus around your feet, while the snow-peaks high above your head are rose-colored morning and evening by a southern sun. You wander amid groves of Spanish chestnut, and may hear the while the Swiss-sounding cattle-bells ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... the atmosphere and promote vegetation; then why not Love-spats promote love, as they certainly ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... Ears, Bee Hill, Fox Creek, White Rabbit—can any one mistake the animals haunting these places in earlier days? Trapper's Grove tells a story we feel, but need not rehearse. So, descriptive words in vegetation, or person, or characteristic, what volumes are contained in them! Crystal River, Little Muddy, Elm Creek, Mission Creek (a stream on which was an Indian mission), Calumet, Table Rock, Crab Orchard, Elm Creek, Lost River (the river lost in the sand), Soldier Creek, Battle Creek, Corn Creek, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... mind readers of one another's most secret thoughts. Long ago they settled all their differences in the struggles of their first ardent loving years. Henceforth one commands while the other obeys. Everything is finished between them but their lives. These go on like weary vegetation from which their children gather ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... the bungalow there was a sort of sandy stretch, where little grew in the way of vegetation, and there, Rose explained, was probably where Ponto had seen the toads. They headed toward it, the scientist eagerly looking on the ground, for a first sight of the specimens he had come ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... old road by which they were to travel ran at a short distance from the left bank of the Hugli, passing through an undulating country, interspersed with patches of low wood and scattered trees. The scenery was full of charm for Desmond: the rich vegetation; antelopes darting among the trees; flamingoes and pelicans standing motionless at the edge of the slow-gliding river; white-clad figures coming down the broad steps of the riverside ghats to bathe; occasionally the dusky ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... separation of the solids, fluids, and gases around the earth's surface, the thought involuntarily arises, how narrowly the human race escaped being surrounded with an untransparent atmosphere, which, though not greatly prejudicial to some classes of vegetation, would yet have completely vailed the whole of the starry canopy. All knowledge of the structure of the universe could then have been withheld from the inquiring spirit of man."[268] The sun, then, may have shone with all his brilliancy, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... water power, at certain points, to the factories built on its banks. The air is dim and lightless with the smoke from all these habitations and places of business. The soil in the valley (or "bottom," to use the local term) is rich; but, as the road begins to ascend, the vegetation becomes poorer; it does not flourish, it merely exists; and, instead of trees, there are only bushes and shrubs about the dwellings. Stone dykes are everywhere used in place of hedges; and what crops there are, on the patches ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... pseudo-Queen Anne, genuine George I. cottages, and frankly Edwardian kitchens, there rose a riot of delectable vegetation. White jasmine and yellow jasmine strove together like first cousins who hate each other, jackmanni and tropaeolum were rival beauties, and rambler roses climbed indifferently about, made friends where they could, and when they found themselves unable, firmly ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... could see where the old Lazar-house had been overlaid with the taste of more recent inhabitants, but, as Caleb said, no one had lived here now for a dozen years or more. The walls were smeared with green vegetation; the iron gate creaked heavily with rust. On the roof the stonecrop flourished, and the swallows had built their nests about ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... rose up, then his muscles relaxed and he seemed to brood. Michael, the cook, signalled that the meal was ready, but Van Brunt motioned back to delay. The silence hung heavy, and he fell to analyzing the forest scents, the odors of mould and rotting vegetation, the resiny smells of pine cones and needles, the aromatic savors of many camp-smokes. Twice Fairfax looked up, ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... garden of Eden could hardly have rivalled. It was a morning of the tropics, calm, serene and lovely. But two miles before them there emerged from the sea an island of mountains and valleys, luxuriant with every variety of tropical vegetation. The voyagers, weary of gazing for many weeks on the wide waste of waters, were so enchanted with the fairy scene which then met the eye, that they seemed really to believe that they had reached ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... answer is that the real drama of daily life of the settlers—the life they knew 24 hours a day—is locked in the unwritten history beneath humus and tangled vegetation of the island. Here a brass thimble from the ruins of a cottage still retains a pellet of paper to keep it on a tiny finger that wore it 300 years ago. A bent halberd in an abandoned well, a discarded sword, and a piece of armor tell again the passing of terror of ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... routine of work. We continually came across a little band of, say, twenty or thirty men and a couple of officers stationed near some culvert or bridge. Their tents were pitched on a bit of stony ground, with not a trace of vegetation near it, and here they stayed for months together, half dead from the boredom of their existence. Nevertheless such work was quite essential to the success of the campaign, for the attitude of the Dutch colonists up-country ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... the long narrow steamboats afforded a most agreeable passage down the stream of the rapid Rhone to Avignon. The autumn rains, which sometimes caused a weary march through the byroads of Normandy, had cooled the air, freshened vegetation, and made travelling in the south of France pleasant. While journeying on, every hour and every league bringing me nearer to the intended meeting, it was natural to feel some anxiety lest in such great distances to be traversed, with little or no intermediate communication, something might go wrong, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... storm, which lasted for thirty days; and when the winds abated, the hundred or more men, women, children, and slaves, found themselves among the islands of what now is named Hili-liland. There they settled—there, where nature furnishes, without labor, light and heat the year round, and vegetation is literally perpetual. They met with none of the initial difficulties of primitive peoples. They were educated, and they possessed the treasures of knowledge born of a thousand years of Roman supremacy; from the beginning they had that other ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... the salutation of the dove, Borne on the zephyr through some lonesome grove, When spring returns, and winter's chill is past, And vegetation smiles ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... were, in those days of scarcity, obliged to spend much of their time in the chase. Once, while at a noted game lick, [Footnote: These game licks were common, and were of enormous extent. Multitudes of game, through countless generations, had tramped the ground bare of vegetation, and had made deep pits and channels with their hoofs and tongues. See McAfee MSS. Sometimes the licks covered acres of ground, while the game trails leading towards them through the wood were as broad as streets, even 100 feet wide. I have myself seen small ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... prevailed all over the globe, and began their office of absorbing carbon, and storing it up for future use. Land-animals as yet were not, for the excess of carbonic acid in the atmosphere rendered it incapable of supporting animal life. But the richness of this island vegetation gradually purified the air; while the decaying plants themselves, being accumulated into vast beds and strata, and subjected, through the changes of the earth's surface, to the pressure of mighty waters, gradually formed immense ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... portion of our first day's march (16th August) the track lay along the edge of a pebbly desert, which left but a skirting of one to three miles of loam and rank vegetation between its measureless sterility and the tawny Nile waters. The small rounded pebbles and the fine sand of the Nubian wilderness were surely fashioned in some great lake or sea of a prehistoric past. Far as we were from the dervishes, a childish terror of them was ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... covered with foliage. Many are rugged and bare. Some of these are too precipitous to sustain vegetation, others are masses of quartz and granite. On the hillsides most exposed to the wind, only grass and small shrubs are able ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... of the other cannot occur without loss, the mean energy absorbed daily by the vegetable for the purpose of growth must greatly exceed that used in animal growth; so that the chemical potential energy of vegetation upon the earth is much greater than the energy of all kinds represented in the animal configurations.[1] It appears, too, that in the power possessed by the vegetable of remaining comparatively inactive, of surviving hard times by the expenditure and ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... Scottish church is deeply tainted with the principles of the Secession. These germs of evil and of revolution, speaking of them in a personal sense, cannot be purged off entirely until one generation shall have passed away. But, speaking of them as principles capable of vegetation, these germs may or may not expand into whole forests of evil, according to the accidents of coming events, whether fitted to tranquillize our billowy aspects of society; or, on the other hand, largely to fertilize the many occasions of agitation, which ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... and treading very softly. He advanced in this manner three or four hundred yards, to the very point which must have been the base of the spire of smoke—he had marked it so well that he could not be mistaken—and from his leafy covert saw a large open space entirely destitute of vegetation. He expected to see there also the remains of a camp fire, but none was visible, not a single charred ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... nearly right as that of the two varieties of the water-persicaria. Going one step further, we meet with the very interesting case of alpine plants. The vegetation of the higher regions of mountains is commonly called alpine, and the plants show a large number of common features, differentiating them from the flora of lower stations. The mountain plants have small ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... growth just mentioned, it will be very necessary to properly train the young shoots in such a manner as to ensure a neat and compact growth. All decaying vegetation, such as leaves, stems, &c., must be promptly removed, and that before they cause other leaves, &c., to become equally diseased. Nothing looks so excessively deplorable as to see what was at one time a neat bed of ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... gathered as specimens of all the wild fruit-trees of the forest: the brown beam-berries, the laburnums, and wild cherry, with their red, transparent fruit, the bluish mulberry, the orange-clustered mountain-ash. All this forest vegetation, mingling its black or purple tints with the dark, moist leaves, brought out the whiteness of the young girl's complexion, her limpid eyes, and her brown curls ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the writing, particularly in the Hebrew, is strongly contrasted; and the details of the story are not entirely harmonious. In the first narrative the order of creation is, first the earth and its vegetation, then the lower animals, then man, male and female, made in God's image. In the second narrative the order is, first the earth and its vegetation, then man, then the lower orders of animals, then woman. In the ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... the trunks still encumbered the ground which they so recently shaded. Around these dry blocks, wheat, suckers of trees, and plants of every kind, grow and intertwine in all the luxuriance of wild, untutored nature. Amidst this vigorous and various vegetation stands the house of the pioneer, or, as they call it, the log house. Like the ground about it, this rustic dwelling bore marks of recent and hasty labor; its length seemed not to exceed thirty feet, its height ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... compared to those in India. On the river there are pied Kingfishers. On the flooded land and especially on the mud-flats round it there are large numbers of sandpipers, Kentish and ringed plovers, stints and stilts, terns and gulls, ducks and teal, egrets and cranes: but as there is not a blade of vegetation within a mile of them there are no facilities for observation, still less ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... the roots of great trees whose branches stretch far out over its surface. Occasionally, the mountains recede and form a vast amphitheatre, clad in primeval forest, and there are islands on which vegetation runs riot in its unbridled luxury, and weaves festoons of gay creepers to conceal the gaunt skeletons of the endless piles of dead drift-wood. All is in the most glorious green—a very extravagance of fresh and brilliant color—relieved with the bright purples and tender leafing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... of us. Those few simple plants which still, in the primitive way, fertilize themselves, are not enough and are too weak to carry on the vegetation of the earth, and without the insects and birds and the wind we never should have been born at all; for they are necessary to make the plants reproduce their kinds and grow, and the plants are necessary food for us as well as for the ...
— Every Girl's Book • George F. Butler
... with a cultivating hand, preserved to his country the wealth which it derived from benignant skies and a prolific soil—if, ignorant of all that had happened in the short interval, and observing the wide and general devastation of fields unclothed and brown; of vegetation burned up and extinguished; of villages depopulated and in ruins; of temples unroofed and perishing; of reservoirs broken down and dry, this stranger should ask, "what has thus laid waste this beautiful and opulent land; what monstrous madness has ravaged ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... people. His first impression probably is, what a bleak and barren coast! but, should he allow his thoughts to wander back to the remote past, he can imagine how in ages gone by this may have been an Eden with its luxuriant vegetation and a much milder climate. The huge mammoth roamed freely through the forest, along with many other animals that have long since passed into the forgotten history of long ago. Then through the changes of nature the warming ocean currents were ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... to the nature of the vegetation on the margin of a stream or lake, or to artificial works ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the future course of our travellers was down hill, but in some respects it was more toilsome than their uphill journey had been. The scenery changed considerably in respect of the character of its vegetation, and was even more rugged than heretofore, while the trees were larger and the underwood more dense. Many a narrow escape had Will and his friends during the weeks that followed, and many a wild adventure, all of which, however, terminated happily—except one, ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... permanent crops: 0% meadows and pastures: 0% forest and woodland: 0% other: 100% (largely covered by permanent ice and snow with some sparse vegetation consisting of ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... proper and literal sense of the Latin and the languages derived from Latin, it signifies that which animates. Thus people have spoken of the soul of men, of animals, sometimes of plants, to signify their principal of vegetation and life. In pronouncing this word, people have never had other than a confused idea, as when it is said in Genesis—"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... side of the trail great patches of rice-grass had been flattened from the force of the wind and rain, and the air was filled with the sweet smell of vegetation drying in the sun. As she approached the other side, the blue sky curved down to meet the ocean on a far straight line. The yellow-green of the sea was set off by astonishing areas of clearest cobalt blue, and the flying spray from combers breaking for miles out on the North Shoals, caught the ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... the whole splendid continent of Africa opens before us and our children. Our nation shall roll the tide of civilization and Christianity along its shores, and plant there mighty republics, that, growing with the rapidity of tropical vegetation, shall ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... a forest you begin by dividing its vegetation into two classes; on the one hand the full-grown trees, the large or medium-sized oaks, beeches and aspens, and, on the other, the saplings and the undergrowth. In like manner, in estimating society, you ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... "the America and untravelled parts of truth," lay for them the true prospect of science, like the new world itself to a geographical discoverer such as Raleigh. And welcome as one of the minute hints of that country far ahead of them, the strange bird, or floating fragment of unfamiliar vegetation, which met those early navigators, there was a certain fantastic experiment, in which, as was alleged, Paracelsus had been lucky. For Browne and others it became the crucial type of the kind of agency in nature ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... lights, but never warms, is a mystery; where there is a day that lasts fifty-two English days, and a night that lasts thirty-eight; where there is no spring and no autumn, but a faint semblance of summer for three months, and then winter; where a few dwarf willows and stunted grass form all the vegetation; and where, at a certain distance below the surface, there is frost as old as the "current epoch" of the geologist. But by way of compensation, reindeer and elks, brown and black bears, foxes and squirrels, abound; ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... found any sign that men had stopped even temporarily upon this shore, though, of course, he knew that so quickly does the rank vegetation of the tropics erase all but the most permanent of human monuments that he might be in error in ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... example, that the endless variety of colour which we see in plants is developed only by the rays of the sun, is to know a truism sublime by its very comprehensiveness. The cause of the whiteness of celery is nothing more than the want of light in its vegetation, and in order that this effect may be produced, the plant is almost wholly covered with earth; the tops of the leaves alone being suffered to appear above ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... Frederic E. Plant Succession. An analysis of the development of vegetation. Carnegie Institution ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... bushes along the borders of the plains. The situation was desperate. He looked, and his eyes rested upon a pile of large boulders several yards away. These were heaped upon a great flat portion of rock, whose surface was devoid of the least vestige of vegetation. To get the injured man there was his only hope. But when he offered the suggestion, ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... soil! Next to moral conversion, and the reclaiming to their noble uses the perverted powers of human nature, there is nothing does one's heart so much good as the sight of waste and barren land reclaimed to the uses and wants of man; to see vegetation clothe the idle space, and the cursed and profitless soil teeming with the means of life and bringing forth abundant produce to requite the toil that fertilized it; to see the wilderness crowned with bounteous increase, and the blessing ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... many wounds. The recollection of it all was very clear now, very poignant: the bright winding river, there broadening at its ford; the wild and lonely aspect of the country round about. On the farther bank the long lofty ridge of rock, trodden and licked bare of vegetation for ages by the countless passing buffalo; blackened by rain and sun; only the more desolate for a few dwarfish cedars and other timber scant and dreary to the eye. Encircling this hill in somewhat the shape of a horseshoe, a deep ravine heavily wooded and rank with grass and underbrush. The Kentuckians, ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... final act of vegetation is the production of seed, after the performance of which function many plants, having accomplished their destined purpose, perish. The grasses (which include the cereals) are annuals, or plants which have but a year's existence, consequently ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... felt in Sweden and Denmark. The tribunals were closed a considerable time. The worst thing was, that it completely thawed for seven or eight days, and then froze again as rudely as before. This caused the complete destruction of all kinds of vegetation—even fruit-trees; and others of the most hardy kind, were destroyed. The violence of the cold was such, that the strongest elixirs and the most spirituous liquors broke their bottles in cupboards of rooms with fires in them, and surrounded by ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... hacked and furrowed in their outline, offered an uninviting prospect. There was here no Eldorado such as, farther south, met the covetous gaze of a Cortez or a Pizarro, no land of promise luxuriant with the vegetation of the tropics such as had greeted the eyes of Columbus at his first vision of the Indies. A storm-bound coast, a relentless climate and a reluctant soil-these were the treasures of the New World as first known to the ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... Scarce a day passed without heavy squalls of wind, which hurried down with redoubled velocity from the mountains, and strong showers of rain, which retarded all our occupations. The air was commonly cold and raw, vegetation made slow advances, and the birds were only found in vallies sheltered from the chilling southern blast. This kind of weather, in all likelihood, prevails throughout the winter, and likewise far into the midst of summer, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... caloric rays of the sun and the electric blue light in stimulating the glands of the body, the nervous system generally, and the secretive organs of man and animals." He also states that he finds that vegetation is vastly improved by the transmitted blue light. These alleged re-discoveries—for the General only claims to have devised the method of utilizing them—were extensively promulgated through the press early in 1871. Subsequently, in 1876, General Pleasonton published a book on the ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... off, a range of low brown hills, covered with a stunted vegetation, runs parallel with the shore—along their undulating sides, angular spires of granite project through the parched and scanty soil; while on their highest brow one solitary giant stands, resembling ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... islands we also found a number of grey turtle-doves, but no other animals. Nor is there any vegetation beyond brushwood, and little or no grass. This and what has hereinbefore been related is all that we have experienced and ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... interpreted these bonfires as mainly sun charms, and he sees in the Balder myth, and in the peasant customs all over Europe, which he asserts illustrate this myth, an ancient ritual which originally marked the beginning of the new year, when the tree spirit, or spirit of vegetation, was burned, the special reasons why the deity of vegetation should die by fire being that as "light and heat are necessary to vegetable growth, on the principle of sympathetic magic, by subjecting the personal representative ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... of progress, civilization and national intercourse, while disavowing all care about all other nations in the world. No citizen of the United States has, or ever will have, the wish to see this country degraded to the rotting vegetation of a Paraguay, or the mummy existence of a Japan and China. The feeling of self-dignity, and the expansiveness of that enterprizing spirit which is congenial to freemen, would revolt against the very idea of such a degrading ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... himself, will doubt for a moment that the Goshen of America is to be found in the sandy valleys and upon the pine-clad hills of St. Croix? (Laughter.) Who will have the hardihood to rise in his seat on this floor and assert that, excepting the pine bushes, the entire region would not produce vegetation enough in ten years to fatten a grasshopper? (Great laughter.) Where is the patriot who is willing that his country shall incur the peril of remaining another day without the amplest railroad connection with such an inexhaustible mine of agricultural wealth? (Laughter.) Who will answer ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... skirmishers extending for several hundred yards to both sides of the road, and deployed at intervals of from 10 to 50 yards. A column may thus protect itself when passing through country covered with high corn or similar vegetation. In such case, the vegetation forms a natural protection from rifle fire beyond ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... noon at an altitude of well above seven thousand feet. In a grassy open space they left their horses; King carried their lunch bundle and they went on on foot. Along the frothing creek, along the mountain-side through a wild country of dwarfed vegetation. She began to understand a thing he had told her; that the Sierra is the land of dwarf and giant. Pine and cedar and, in one spot he knew, mighty sequoia piercing at the sky; and here pine, dwarfed, pygmied until it was but a mat of twisted, broken twigs carpeting the heights. ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... circumference and a couple of feet high was the usual growth to which they attained, though at the back of the run they were much larger. Spaniards grow in clusters, or patches, among the tussocks on the plains, and constitute a most unpleasant feature of the vegetation of the country. Their leaves are as firm as bayonets, and taper at the point to the fineness of a needle, but are not nearly so easily broken as a needle would be. No horse will face them, preferring a jump at ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... of books whose use was free to all who visited the settlement. It stood high on a hill in a grove of silver-birches and looked upon the Western Mountains; and it always seemed to me an ideal dwelling for such a bachelor-scholar. Here in May and June he became almost one with the resurgent vegetation. Here, in October, he was a witness of the jewelled pageant of the dying foliage, and saw the hillsides reeking, as it were, and aflame with ruby and gold and emerald and topaz. One September day in 1900, at the ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... shows, for instance, that the little layer of soil on the surface of the earth from which plants and animals derive their nutriment was, before the advent of man, replenished quite as fast as it was washed away, but that after man had put his plow into it and had taken off the protective mat of vegetation, he unconsciously despoiled the accumulation of ages. "In a plowed field, an hour's torrential rain may wash off to the sea more than would pass off in a thousand years in the slow process of erosion which the natural ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
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