"Columnar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... question of the original character of the pedimental group, the Heraion at Olympia, probably the oldest Greek columnar structure known, furnishes important light. Pausanias says nothing whatever of any pedimental figures. Of course his silence does not prove that there were none; but with all the finds of acroteria, terracottas and the like, no trace of any such sculptures was ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... feeding in the aftermath. The scales of the bark are gone or smoothed down and level, so that insects have no hiding-place. There are no crevices for them, the horsehairs that were caught anywhere have been carried away by birds for their nests. The trunk is smooth and columnar, hard as iron. A hundred times the mowing-grass has grown up around it, the birds have built their nests, the butterflies fluttered by, and the acorns dropped from the oaks. It is a long, long time, counted by artificial hours ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... sympathy plus, and an imagination that could live every life, feel every pang of pain, know every throb of joy, die every death. In stature he was short, stout, square of shoulder and deep of chest. He had a columnar neck and carried his head with the poise of a man ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... possible that sentiment has only been cumbered Avith the riches which archaeology has dug up for it by lowering the surface of the Cow Field fifteen or twenty feet; by scraping clean the buried pavements; by identifying the storied points; by multiplying the fragments of basal or columnar marbles and revealing the plans of temples and palaces and courts and tracing the Sacred Way on which the magnificence of the past went to dusty death. After all, the imagination is very childlike, and it prefers the elements of its pleas-ures simple and few; if the ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... screened from the sun by the branches of the lofty elms which united over the path, and caused it to resemble, in the solemn obscurity of the light which they admitted, as well as from the range of columnar stems, and intricate union of their arched branches, one of the narrow side aisles ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the hill a splendid hotel is erected for visitors to the Causeway; after passing this we descended to the base of the cliffs, which are here upward of four hundred feet high, and soon began to find in the columnar formation of the rocks indications of our approach. The guide pointed out some columns which appeared to have been melted and run together, from which Sir Humphrey Davy attributed the formation of the Causeway to the action of fire. Near this is the Giant's ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... blue with a large yellow five-pointed star in the center and a columnar arrangement of six small yellow five-pointed stars along ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... proceeding upwards, we find that the lowermost cells of the rete mucosum, those that are set immediately on the corium, are columnar in shape. In animals that have a coloured skin these cells contain pigment granules. Directly superposed to these we find cells which in shape are polyhedral. Above them, and forming the most superficial layer of the rete mucosum, is a series of ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... of heat, far across the bare, dreamy hills of fallow and the blasted fields of wheat, stood up some huge white columnar clouds, a vivid contrast ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... the columnar, self-reliant capital letter to signify that there is no disguise in its egoisms. If it were a chapter of autobiography, this is what the reader would look for as a matter of course. Let him consider it as being such a chapter, and its ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... and McLean camped below the cliffs of Horn Bluff (1000 FEET IN height). Columnar Dolerite is seen surmounting a sedimentary series partly buried in ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... creature's action and unable to restrain her impatience started stealthily to climb up the tree. Inch by inch she clambered up the columnar trunk. Warruk whimpered and Myla cooed low and stroked his back to quiet him; then she peered up and down and to both sides before again settling herself for sleep while Suma's claws dug deeply into the bark as she ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... Pass in daylight is still a memorable place. The pot-holes can then be safely approached, and one can peer into the blackness below until the eyes become adapted to the gloom. Then one sees the wet walls of limestone and the curiously-formed isolated pieces of rock that almost suggest columnar basalt. In crevices far down delicate ferns are growing in the darkness. They shiver as the cool water drips upon them from above, and the drops they throw off fall down lower still into a stream of underground water that ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... the infancy of vaulting, their builders found it convenient to vault with one bay of vaulting over two bays of arcade, as in the choir of Boxgrove in the next century. The result is that the piers are alternately columnar and clustered. Setting aside a few of the very grandest buildings of the style—as one would hardly compare this nave with Peterborough, Ely, or Saint Stephen's—this Romanesque nave of Le Mans is one of the finest works of its kind to be found anywhere. And its juxtaposition with ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... of the bridge, but the figures themselves are put in without any attention to subject, though an unconscious humorist has discovered in them the domestic circle of the painter. The man in Venetian dress is there to assist the left-hand columnar group, placed at the edge of the picture after the manner of Leonardo. The woman and child lighten the mass of foliage on the right and make a beautiful pattern. The white town of Castelfranco sings against the threatening sky, the winds ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... the action resembling the discharge of a great gun from the face of a fortification. It often happens that two chasms converging separate a rock from the cliff. Then a lowering of the coast may bring the mass to the state of a columnar island, such as abound in the Hebrides and along ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... invariably supported by stone arches of considerable magnitude, which sprang from the ground-floor level. These arches were uniform throughout the town, and the base of the arch was the actual ground, without any pillar or columnar support; so that in the absence of a powerful beam of timber, the top of the one-span arch formed a support for the joists of the floor above. In large houses numerous arches gave an imposing appearance to the architecture of the ground ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... tree-foliage and grass—transparent greens, grays, &c., all in sunset pomp and dazzle. The clear beams are now thrown in many new places, on the quilted, seam'd, bronze-drab, lower tree-trunks, shadow'd except at this hour—now flooding their young and old columnar ruggedness with strong light, unfolding to my sense new amazing features of silent, shaggy charm, the solid bark, the expression of harmless impassiveness, with many a bulge and gnarl unreck'd before. In the revealings of such light, such exceptional hour, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... and flowers which swept over them as they glided on over the surface of the swiftly running clear black water, the sun entirely screened and all around them a delicious twilight, with densely planted, tall, columnar trees apparently rising out of the flood on either hand, while a rush and splash here and there told that they were disturbing some of the dwellers in ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... thy fair palace has had fairer offspring, Thou art ruling the world still by the beautiful form; Out of thy mansion majestic was born in a song the Greek Temple, Sentineled round with a choir—Titans columnar of stone, Bearing forever their burden to hymns of a Parian measure, Wearing out heaviest Fate to a Pindaric high strain. Look! those boys of thy garden with tapers are moving to statues, Seeming to walk into stone while they are bringing the ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... mistaken. In the Euphorbias we find a number of kinds, especially amongst those which inhabit the dry, sandy plains of South Africa, which bear a striking resemblance to many of the Cactuses, particularly the columnar ones and the Rhipsalis. (The Euphorbias all have milk-like sap, which, on pricking their stems or leaves, at once exudes and thus reveals their true character. The sap of the Cactuses is watery). Amongst Stapelias, too, we meet with plants which mimic the stem characters of some of the smaller ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... centre of the city, with the noisy streets of the busiest metropolis in Europe eddying around its walls, was a sacred island in the tumultuous main. Through the perpetual twilight, tall columnar trunks in thick profusion grew from a floor chequered with prismatic lights and sepulchral shadows. Each shaft of the petrified forest rose to a preternatural height, their many branches intermingling in the space above, to form an impenetrable ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... opened round Cape Raoul at E. 5 deg. N., and the distance run from one to the other was nine miles. These two high, columnar capes are the extreme points of the land which captain Furneaux took to be Maria's Island. Between them, the shore falls back about four miles, and forms a small bay at the head, where there appeared to be shelter against all winds except those from the southward; and perhaps ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... the station-house. One of the agents with a picket of a few of our blacks, armed for the purpose, was keeping guard over the ivory; but deep within the forest, red gleams that wavered, that seemed to sink and rise from the ground amongst confused columnar shapes of intense blackness, showed the exact position of the camp where Mr. Kurtz's adorers were keeping their uneasy vigil. The monotonous beating of a big drum filled the air with muffled shocks and a lingering vibration. A steady droning sound of many men chanting each to himself some weird ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... an irregular elliptic base, and rises abruptly to a height of 1114 ft. The only side from which the rock can be ascended is the east; the other sides being for the most part perpendicular, and generally presenting lofty columnar forms, though not so regular as those of Staffa. This island is composed of micro-granite with riebeckite, of great interest on account of the rare occurrence of this type in Britain. It is comparatively ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of the Snow Were wont to take their pastime when their tasks Upon the mountain's side and in the clouds Were ended. Here they taught the silent frost To mock, in stem and spray, and leaf and flower, The growths of summer. Here the palm upreared Its white columnar trunk and spotless sheaf Of plume-like leaves; here cedars, huge as those Of Lebanon, stretched far their level boughs, Yet pale and shadowless; the sturdy oak Stood, with its huge gnarled roots of seeming strength, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... our meal, and had lighted our manilas, the steersman turned the little launch sharply about, and headed directly for the shore. In a moment we had shot under and through the deep fringe of mangrove trees, and had emerged into the jungle. On all sides the trees rose, columnar and straight, and the ground was firm, although densely covered with ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... and tigerlike changefulness of feeling. The swift, vindictive anger leaps, like a white flame, into this white spirit, and, stripped in a moment of all convention, she stands before us clear, detached, columnar, among the tender frailties of the piece. Cassandra, the original of Isabella in Whetstone's tale, with the purpose of the Roman Lucretia in her mind, yields gracefully enough to the conditions of her brother's safety; ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... the structure of the palm trunks out of unconnected wood bundles, the assertion has been made that the palm stem does not grow thicker in the course of time, and that this is the explanation of the columnar almost evenly thick trunk. But careful measurements that were made for years have led Regel to the conclusion that a thickening of the trunk actually takes place, which probably amounts to an increase of about a third over the original circumference ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... and enemies and wore his purple cones like the tasseled honor badges of a soldier, with pendulous moving, plumy arms: yet to the eye of the Forester, the life history was there, in the fluted grooved columnar bark, in the knot scars where branches had been discarded to send the main trunk towering above its fellows for light and air, in the wood rings, where a branch had broken and fallen away in the struggle. Why, this noble fellow had been a straggling sapling ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... of Kotlugja, in 1860, was accompanied by dreadful floods. It began with a number of earthquakes, which shook the surrounding country. Then a dark columnar cloud of vapor was seen to rise by day from the mountain, and by night balls of fire (volcanic bombs) and red-hot cinders to the height of 24,000 feet (nearly five miles), which were seen at a distance of 180 miles. Deluges of water rushed from the heights, ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... not pause once. They flew in a straight line over the island to the west, always maintaining their columnar formation. At first the men thought that they were making for the trees. They ran after them. The speed of their running had no effect this time on their visitors, who continued to sail eastward. The men called on them to stay. They called repeatedly, singly ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... of the plow and leaning on the crossbar, his back to the horses, stood a young Quaker. His broad-brimmed hat, set carelessly on the back of his head, disclosed a wide, high forehead; his flannel shirt, open at the throat, exposed a strong, columnar neck, and a deep, broad chest; his sunburned and muscular arms were folded across his breast; figure and posture revealed the perfect concord of body and soul with the beauty of the world; his great blue eyes were fixed upon the notch in the hills where the sun had just disappeared; he ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... for some miles, the road is macadamised, broad level and straight, with grand columnar trees on either side, and leaves on its surface. Every mile or so you meet or pass groups of Kachins, Chinese or Shans, or people you can't quite place. They walk in Indian file as they are accustomed to in narrow hill and jungle paths. The Chinese men are without ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... to face with her in the hall of the ruined palazzo, a room magnificent and naked, with here and there a long strip of damask, black with damp and age, hanging down on a bare panel of the wall. It was furnished with exactly one gilt armchair, with a broken back, and an octagon columnar stand bearing a heavy marble vase ornamented with sculptured masks and garlands of flowers, and cracked from top to bottom. Charles Gould was dusty with the white dust of the road lying on his boots, on his shoulders, on his cap with two peaks. Water dripped from under it ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... foreign cedars and our native ones white and red, their skyward lines modified as the square or pointed architecture of the house may call for contrasts in pointed or broad-topped arborescence. If, at times, I dream behind all this a grove, with now and then one of its broad, steepling or columnar trees pushed forward upon the lawn, it is only there that I see anything so stalwart as a pine or so ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... creditable progress, and the subscribers will be gratified in learning, that one of the pupils sent in a design for the Nelson Testamonial, which would in all probability have been accepted, had not the decision been made in the usual preconcerted underhand manner. Following the columnar idea of Mr. Railton, our talented pupil had put forth a peculiarly appropriate idea: the shaft would have been formed by a sea-telescope of gigantic proportions, pulled out to its utmost extent. On the summit of this Nelson would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... country, which it commands to a vast distance on both sides. The limestone of which it is composed is white, soft, and fossiliferous; it detaches itself in enormous flakes from the mountain-sides, which are sometimes broken into a succession of gigantic steps, while occasionally they present the columnar appearance of basalt. The flanks of the Sinjar are seamed with innumerable ravines, and from these small brooks issue, which are soon dispersed by irrigation, or absorbed in the thirsty plains. The sides of the mountain are capable of being cultivated by means ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... recorded, that there was a well marked Bechera detected about two years ago by Dr. Macbean of Edinburgh, an accomplished naturalist and careful observer, in a thin argillaceous stratum, interposed, in the Queen's Park, between a bed of columnar basalt and a bed of trap-tuff, in the side of the eminence occupied atop by the ruins of St. Anthony's Chapel. The stratified bed in which it occurs seems, from its texture and color, to be composed mainly of trappean materials, but ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... in their habits than most other palms are the urucuri palms—Attalea excelsa—groves of which beautify the higher lands, and grow in vast numbers under the crowns of the more lofty ordinary forest-trees; their smooth columnar stems being generally fifty feet in height, while their broad, finely pinnated leaves, interlocking above, form arches and woven canopies of elegant and diversified shapes. The fruit, in size and shape like the date, has a ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... The proof-sheets of my book began to drop in upon me, demanding revision; and to a quarry in the neighbourhood of the town, rich in the organisms of the Mountain Limestone, and overflown by a bed of basalt so regularly columnar, that one of the legends of the district attributed its formation to the "ancient Pechts," I was able to devote, not without profit, the evenings of several Saturdays. I formed, at this time, my first acquaintance with the Palaeozoic shells, as they occur ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... solid stone, decorated its front, and above the roof the chimneys were panelled or columnar, some coped gables with finials and like features still retaining traces of their Gothic extraction. Soft brown mosses, like faded velveteen, formed cushions upon the stone tiling, and tufts of the houseleek ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... quickly, advance in close column, present well, take aim well,—all in profound silence.'" The whole business of infantry in the field is summed up in the royal sentence, though some may think that line would be a better word than column; and the Prussian system did favor the linear rather than the columnar arrangement of troops, as it "presented a wide front, less exposed to the fire of the artillery, and more efficient from the force of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... day-dreams of a youthful prospector, had deviated from his path in attempting to make a short cut through the forest. He had lost the sun, his only guide, in the thickly interlaced boughs above him, which suffused though the long columnar vault only a vague, melancholy twilight. He had evidently penetrated some unknown seclusion, absolutely primeval and untrodden. The thick layers of decaying bark and the desiccated dust of ages deadened his footfall and invested the gloom with ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... Investigations respecting coreless vortices will be found in a paper by the author, "Vibrations of a Columnar Vortex," Proc. R.S.E., March 1, 1880; and a paper by Hicks, recently read before the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... forest, the odorous mists that infest those regions were drawn upward, giving out as the air grew warm a sickening and malarious influence. Vast and gloomy cypress, bay, swamp palm, ironwood, and other tropical woods reared their columnar trunks, from out a dark and noisome undergrowth, to an immense height. In those leafy depths no sun ever shone, and the absence of bird ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... replying, Adrian drew his hands gently over the face above him, caressingly over the glorious mass of golden hair and round the columnar throat Bronzino would have left reluctantly alone. Said Irene, from the other end of the room:—"Are you ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... constructed with blocks quarried from their sides, and vie in grotesqueness of outline and massiveness of character with the alternate airiness and solidity exhibited by nature in the nicely-poised logging stones and columnar piles, and in the walls of prodigious cuboidal blocks of granite which often crest and top her massive domes and ridges in natural ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... vertical bands of red (hoist side), blue, and red; centered on the hoist-side red band in yellow is a five-pointed star above the national emblem (soyombo—a columnar arrangement of abstract and geometric representations for fire, sun, moon, earth, ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... poetic possibilities in it into the region of romance. He remembered having seen somewhere a statue of Clio whose features bore a remote resemblance to those of the young girl before him—the same massive, boldly sculptured chin, the same splendid, columnar throat, the same grave immobility of vision. It seemed sacrilege to approach such a divine creature with a trivial remark about the weather or the sights of Rome, and yet some commonplace was evidently required ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... has furnished also specimens of ancient sandstone; with columnar rocks, probably of clink-stone. Round Hill, near Point Grindall, a promontory on the north of Morgan's Island, is composed, at the base, of granite; and Mount Caledon, on the west side of Caledon Bay, seems likewise to consist of that rock, as does also Melville Island. ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... little, but he had paddled steadily, keeping in touch with the south bank. By-and-by daylight came like a glow in a ground glass globe. The shores made on each side of the river a dark smudge, in which one could detect hints of columnar forms and shadows of twisted branches high up. The mist was still thick on the water, but a good watch was being kept, for as Iamb' Itam approached the camp the figures of two men emerged out of the white vapour, and voices ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... may be described in general terms as plants having a woody axis, overlaid with thick masses of cellular tissue forming the fleshy stems. These are extremely various in character and form, being globose, cylindrical, columnar or flattened into leafy expansions or thick joint-like divisions, the surface being either ribbed like a melon, or developed into nipple-like protuberances, or variously angular, but in the greater number ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... thick, but finely curved, and always ready to laugh, attested, like the ruddiness in his full cheeks, to the purity and richness of his blood. His forehead, high, broad, and unwrinkled, save for a line between the eyes, and his neck, thick, round, and columnar, contrasted in their whiteness with the colour in the rest of the face. His hands were large and dimpled —"beautiful hands," his sister calls them. He was proud of them, and had a slight prejudice against any one with ugly extremities. His nose, about which he gave special directions to David when ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... longing for civilization when he lay awake late one night, wrapped in a single blanket, beside the sinking fire. Dark columnar trunks rose about him, touched with the uncertain red radiance now and then cast upon them when little puffs of bitter wind stirred the blaze, and he could see the filmy wreaths of smoke eddy among the branches. He was cold and overtired; ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... ordered to attend to the result. We found the coast well covered with vegetation of moderate height, even in its outline, and easy of approach. The islands are rocky and barren, presenting high cliffs of a columnar structure. I have named the westernmost group of those we passed Berens' Isles in honour of the Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, and the easternmost Sir Graham Moore's Islands. At the spot where we landed some mussel-shells and a single piece of seaweed lay on the beach; this ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... puffs of white steam. Two white spires and a tower are in bold relief against the precipitous basaltic cliff, at whose foot the village seems to nestle. Yet the mountain is not wholly precipitous; for the columnar masses been fretted away by a thousand frosts, making a sloping debris below, and leaving above the iron-yellow scars of fresh cleavage, the older blotches of gray, and the still older stain of lichens. Nor is the summit bald, but tufted with dwarf ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... of shady mangos were seen everywhere amongst the dwellings, amidst fragrant blossoming orange, lemon, and many other tropical fruit trees, some in flower, others in fruit, at varying stages of ripeness. Here and there, shooting above the more dome-like and sombre trees, were the smooth columnar stems of palms, bearing aloft their magnificent crowns of finely-cut fronds. Amongst the latter the slim assai-palm was especially noticeable, growing in groups of four or five; its smooth, gently-curving stem, twenty to thirty feet high, terminating in a head of feathery foliage, inexpressibly ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... he had been reclining, upright, massy, and imperturbable. He was enveloped in a voluminous mantle, which, at this moment, with a leisurely motion, he suffered to fall at his feet, and displayed a figure in which the grace of an Antinous met with the columnar strength of a Grecian Hercules,— presenting, in its tout ensemble, the majestic proportions of a Jupiter. He stood—a breathing statue of gladiatorial beauty, towering above all who were near him, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... wide trough of the canyon beneath the white, steady stars, through scrub oak and chaparral, the air sweet scented with wild spice, through slopes set with sleeping folded poppies and Mariposa lilies, past cactus groves, columnar, stately, mystic; the mesa slopes receding, its great bulk dim mass, the twin notches that marked the Pass of the Goats hardly discernible against the sky. They crossed a white road, unfenced but evidently a main source of travel ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... his intended prey. The coiled tail of the colossus lashed out irresistibly, but the assailant cleared it in his spring, fell upon the victim's shoulders, and buried his fangs in the base of that columnar neck. ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the circumstance of the Giant's Causeway which it contains; a coast composed of stratified chalk indurated and consolidated to a species of marble or lime-stone, and of great masses of basaltes or columnar whin-stone. Now, though our present object is not the formation of land, yet, knowing the mineral constitution of this land, the coast of which we are considering as having been worn by the action of the sea, the view here to be given, of the white marble and basaltic cliffs, ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... coughing, slides back one of these upon the right, and waves me into the dimness of an inner sanctuary, haunted by faint odours of incense. A colossal bronze lamp, with snarling gilded dragons coiled about its columnar stem, is the first object I discern; and, in passing it, my shoulder sets ringing a festoon of little bells suspended from the lotus-shaped summit of it. Then I reach the altar, gropingly, unable yet to distinguish forms clearly. But the priest, sliding back screen after screen, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... beautiful curve of the unflexed biceps and that fulness of the back arm so often lacking in a one-sided development; the surface of the abdomen showed the peculiar corrugation of the very strong man; the round, columnar neck ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... possess a capacity to part along parallel surfaces, called cleavage. The development of the schistose or gneissic structure is accompanied by the recrystallization of the rock materials, producing new minerals of a platy or columnar type adapted to this parallel arrangement. Even the composition of the rock may be substantially changed, though this is perhaps not the most common case. Whereas by weathering the rock is loosened up and disintegrated, ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... I right in concluding, from the description which; you were so kind as to send to me, that the lignite bed, with its superincumbent basalts, lies above those particular columnar basalts which form the far-famed Giant's Causeway? I see from your sketch that basalts of great thickness, and in some views beautifully columnar, do underlie the lignite bed; but I am not quite sure ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... the Parthenon, Lord Elgin also procured some valuable inscriptions, written in the manner called Kionedon or columnar. The subjects of these monuments are public decrees of the people, accounts of the riches contained in the treasury, and delivered by the administrators to their successors in office, enumerations of the statues, the silver, gold, and precious stones, deposited in the ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... COLUMNAR STRUCTURE. Just as wet starch contracts on drying to prismatic forms, so lava often contracts on cooling to a mass of close-set, prismatic, and commonly six-sided columns, which stand at right angles to ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... precipitous sides,—it is indisputable that they have been formed by the growth of coral; and this makes the case much more remarkable. In Peros Banhos and in the Great Chagos Bank, some of these almost columnar masses are 200 feet high, and their summits lie only from two to eight fathoms beneath the surface; therefore, a small proportional amount more of growth would cause them to attain the surface, like those numerous knolls, which rise from an equally great depth within the Maldiva atolls. ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... columns of a grayish-white conglomerate rock, one of which was about twenty feet high, and two feet in diameter. They are surmounted by slabs of a dark ferruginous conglomerate, forming black caps, and adding very much to their columnar effect at a distance. This rock is very destructible by the action of the weather, and the hill, of which they formerly constituted a ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... square jaws, wide nostrils, full lips, large eyes set wide apart, forehead rather low and sloping, and a columnar neck that rose right out of his spine. A man with such a neck can "stand punishment"—and give it. Such a neck is only seen once in a thousand times. Men with such necks have been mothered by women who bore burdens balanced on their heads, boycotted the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... the horizon with its hideous profile as the moon rose in the east. The red glow of the furnaces bathed the tall buildings, the gigantic scaffolds, the cord-like elevated pipelines and the columnar smokestacks in the crimson of anger. Even the moon seemed to fade as the long-fingered smokestacks reached toward it belching their pollution. The air, which should have been clean, was filled with the reek of ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... who cannot afford to lose any the smallest buttress, but who not only loves Truth even for itself, and when it reveals itself aloof from all interest, but who loves it with an indescribable awe, which too often withdraws the genial sap of his activity from the columnar trunk, the sheltering leaves, the bright and fragrant flower, and the foodful or medicinal fruitage, to the deep root, ramifying in obscurity and labyrinthine ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
