DRY ROT • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Dry rot

"Dry rot" Quotes from Famous Books

... thought with a little anxiety of his wife, and wondered whether his elder son had not after all inherited that kind of dry rot of the soul, in which the sap and vigour disappear little by little, leaving the shape indeed intact but not the powers. When he had married her, thirty-five years before, she had seemed to him an incarnate mystery of whose key he was taking possession—her silence had seemed pregnant with knowledge, ...

— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson

... we have gone farther in demand for and effort toward individual freedom than we have in any translation of the old social pressure upon the individual conscience and life to assume social obligations and bear them worthily and usefully. There is a dry rot at the core of any class or any nation which turns its inmost psychology toward what it can get from life without regard to what it should give back to life. Too many children and youth in conditions in which, happily, the old despotism of age is outgrown, have unhappily missed the old sense ...

— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... that the human race may become consciously and increasingly master of itself and of its destiny, and recognizing the Darwinian principle of the selection of the fittest as the only means of preventing the moral and physical degeneracy which, like an internal dry rot, has hitherto been the besetting danger of all civilizations, I desire that the thinkers who mould the opinions of mankind shall not be led astray from the true path of enduring progress and happiness by reliance on fallacious beliefs which will not bear examination. Such, at least, ...

— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball

... difficulties connected with the floors on or near the ground, by reason of the dry rot incident to such places. Dry rot consists in the development of fungus growth from spores existing in the wood, and waiting only the proper conditions for their germination. The best condition for this germination ...

— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various