"Gneiss" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... name, according to Mr. Sam, means 'when you hear, it shakes,' signifying that the thunder reverberates from the heights owing to its steep side and gives it a tremulous motion. This abrupt, cliff-like side is the western, where the schistose gneiss is exposed for a thickness of 60 feet and more: the stone is talcose, puddinged in places with quartz pebbles, and everywhere showing laminations of black sand. The long oval mound of red clay, overgrown with trees, ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... and feldspar crystals and development of muscovite and chlorite in the cracks. This was accompanied by a growth of muscovite and quartz in the unbroken feldspar. The aspect of the rock at this stage is that of a gneiss with rather indefinite banding. Further action reduced the rock to a collection of angular and rounded fragments of granite, quartz, and feldspar in a matrix of quartz and mica, the mica lapping around the fragments and rudely parallel to their surfaces. The last stage was complete pulverization ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... ingredients in this magnificent pharmacy; its resources are boundless, but require the nicest discretion. I remember to have cured a disconsolate widower, who obstinately refused every other medicament, by a strict course of geology. I dipped him deep into gneiss and mica schist. Amidst the first strata I suffered the watery action to expend itself upon cooling, crystallized masses; and by the time I had got him into the tertiary period, amongst the transition chalks of Maestricht and the conchiferous marls of Gosau, he was ready ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... columns, which, however, are not vertical. About m. from the town is the Coupe de Jaujac, an extinct volcano, which has burst through the coal formation of this valley, bounded by mountains of granite and gneiss. It is ascended easily in 20 minutes. At the foot of the crater, just where the path leading to the top commences, is a gaseous chalybeate spring; ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... of this formation are not very fertile, nor yet are they sterile; they are of medium quality, and susceptible, under skilful culture, of the highest improvement. The primitive rocks are chiefly represented by granite and gneiss. ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... simple words in common use, like a-b ab, and e-b eb, and i-b, ib, proceeding by gradual, if not by easy stages to honorificatudinibility and disproportionableness, with a department at the back devoted to twisters like phthisic, and mullein-stalk, and diphtheria, and gneiss. We used to have a fine old sport on Friday afternoons, called "choose-up-and-spell-down." I don't know if you ever played it. It was a survival, pure and simple, from the Old Red School-house. There was where it really lived. ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... no. mowed, cut down. neigh, to cry as a horse. mule, an animal. nit, egg of an insect. mewl (mul), to squall. knit, to unite. mist, fine rain. gneiss, a kind of mineral. missed, did miss. more, a greater quantity. nice, delicate; fine. mow'er, one who mows. owe, to be bound. muse, to meditate. oh! alas! mews (muz), an inclosure. ode, a poem. owed, indebted. none, not one. one (wun), a single thing. nun, ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... consist chiefly of red sandstone. There was also a good deal of green-stone and gneiss, and some of the spires of these that shot up to a considerable height were particularly striking and ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... some other fortifications which really scarcely belong to our subject, though certain archaeologists claim for them a prehistoric origin. We refer to the vitrified forts, which are strange structures in which stones, such as granite and gneiss, quartzite and basalt, have been subjected to a heat so ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... southern shores of Winnipeg. On its east and north, however, the country is of a different character. There the geological formation is what is termed primitive. The rocks consist of granite, sienite, gneiss, &c.; and, as is always the case where such rocks are found, the country is hilly and rugged. On the western shores a secondary formation exists. This is stratified limestone—the same as that which forms the bed of many ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... Squib, he set out to explain that he meant "gneiss," not "nice!" The ignorance of these English about a joke is really wonderful. It is easy to see that they have never been brought up on them. But perhaps there was some excuse for the professor that day, for he was the president pro tem. of our projected ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... the Carpathians consist of various older strata—secondary, primary, and metamorphic—and the rocks of which they are composed are limestone, marble, schist (mica-schist and slate), and gneiss. On the summits are found conglomerates formed of ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... slates called mica-schist or hornblende-schist; every vestige of the organic bodies having been obliterated." Again, it is fast becoming an acknowledged truth that igneous rock, of whatever kind, is the product of sedimentary strata which have been completely melted. Granite and gneiss, which are of like chemical composition, have been shown, in various cases, to pass one into the other; as at Valorsine, near Mont Blanc, where the two, in contact, are observed to "both undergo a modification of mineral character. The granite ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... obtain very small bits. Fortunately in climbing to the summit of the island the sailors found some big pieces of rock broken off by the frost, and these they embarked in their boats. Looking closely at them, I noticed an exact resemblance between these rocks and the little bits of gneiss which we had found in the stomach of a penguin we had killed the day before. The little islet on which we landed is part of a group of eight or ten of similar character and form; they are between five hundred and six hundred yards from the nearest coast. We also noticed on the beach several ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... earlier lighthouse that was swept away by the terrible storm of 1703, and here Smeaton built his great lighthouse in 1759, one hundred feet high, which has recently been superseded by the new lighthouse. The Eddystone Rocks consist of twenty-two gneiss reefs extending about six hundred and fifty feet, in front of the entrance to Plymouth Sound. Smeaton's lighthouse, modelled after the trunk of a sturdy oak in Windsor Park, became the model for all subsequent lighthouses. ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... commercially, includes true granite and such allied rocks as syenite and gneiss. In fact even quartzite is sometimes called granite in commerce, as in the case of the Baraboo quartzites of Wisconsin, but this is going too far. For statistical purposes, the United States Geological Survey has also included small quantities of diorite ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... once frequent in the valleys of Switzerland; for hardly any valley is without one or more transverse barriers of resisting material, over which the river flowing through the valley once fell as a cataract. Near Pontresina, in the Engadin, there is such a case; a hard gneiss being there worn away to form a gorge, through which the river from the Morteratsch glacier rushes. The barrier of the Kirchet above Meyringen is also a case in point. Behind it was a lake, derived from ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... are a newcomer in America," says the stranger. "It may then interest you to know that the crest of the Alleghany Mountains, composed of granite, gneiss, and slates, is the watershed between the Atlantic and the Mississippi. You must not suppose that these mountains are everywhere as low as here; far down south-west, in North Carolina, there are summits more ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... the base of the wall is a group of immense gneiss boulders, five in number, weighing probably many hundred tons each, and under these are two holes in which two imaginary old women reside—the guardian spirits of the quarry—who were always consulted before any pipe-stone ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... fluid, hard or soft, I do not know, I do not know. Her method of forming coal, geysers and hot sulphur-springs, and the jewels, and the atols and coral reefs; the metamorphic rocks of sedimentary origin, like gneiss, the plutonic and volcanic rocks, rocks of fusion, and the unstratified masses which constitute the basis of the crust; and harvests, the burning flame of flowers, and the passage from the vegetable to ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... but cleared before noon, and at 11.30 A.M. we were on the river. That afternoon and the day following we passed the most picturesque part of the river. There were Maid Marion Falls, where the river drops fifty feet into a narrow gorge cut out of the gneiss and schists of the Laurentian rock over which it flows; Gertrude Falls, a direct drop of sixty feet, which for dignity and beauty is unsurpassed by any feature of the Nascaupee; and Isabella Falls, a ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... up to the present time are gold, quicksilver, plumbago and iron. The two latter are of the finest quality and in immense abundance. The rocks of Ceylon are primitive, consisting of granite, gneiss and quartz. Of these the two latter predominate. Dolomite also exists in large quantities up to an elevation of five thousand feet, but not ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... represents very inadequately the antiquity of the existing coast-line. Some of its caves, hollowed in hard rock in the line of faults and shifts by the attrition of the surf, are more than a hundred feet in depth; and it must have required many centuries to excavate tough trap or rigid gneiss to a depth so considerable, by a process so slow. And yet, however long the sea may have stood against the present coast-line, it must have stood for a considerably longer period against the ancient one. The latter presents ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... the geology about Monte Video as I hear there are slates there, so I presume in that district I shall find the junctions of the Pampas, and the enormous granite formation of Brazils. At Bahia the pegmatite and gneiss in beds had the same direction, as observed by Humboldt, prevailing over Columbia, distant 1300 miles—is it not wonderful? Monte Video will be for a long time my direction. I hope you will write again to me, there is nobody from whom I like receiving advice so much as from you...Excuse ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... work is exclusively the province of the women. There are no circular hand-mills, as among Oriental nations; but the corn is ground upon a simple flat stone, of either gneiss or granite, about two feet in length by fourteen inches in width. The face of this is roughened by beating with a sharp-pointed piece of harder stone, such as quartz, or hornblende, and the grain is reduced to flour by great labour and repeated grinding or rubbing with a stone ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... been a dreary spectacle at that time, low, bare hills of gneiss, granite, etc.; low valleys half-filled with broken rock and over everything a sprinkling of erratic boulders; no living thing in sight, nothing green, nothing growing, nothing but evidence of mighty power used only to destroy. A ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... in part to the nature of the rock. At Sleupe Harbor, latitude 51 deg., this was 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... dot the coast from the Gaboon to Loango. We hugged the right side to avoid the rapid swirl; there was no backwater at the points, and hard work was required to prevent our being swept against the boulders of gneiss, schiste, and pudding-stone edging the shores and stretching into the stream. Here the fish is excellent as at Porto cla Lenha, and we found the people catching it in large spoon-shaped basins: I enquired about the Peixe mulher (woman- fish), ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... pavements or steps, where it is subject to great wear; also in plinths and quoins of buildings where it is desired to preserve a good face and sharp arris. The order of strength and hardness of stone is—(1) Basalt, (2) granite, (3) limestone, (4) sandstone. Granite, seinite, and gneiss take the first, place for strength, hardness and durability, but they will not stand a high temperature. "Stones which are of a fine, uniform grain, compact texture and deep color are the strongest; and when the ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... 5. Fine-grained gneiss, composed of white quartz, white feldspar, and black mica, with a vein containing hornblend and ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... publications of learned societies on geology, entomology, paleontology, botany, and one volume of Philosophical and Religious Walks about Mont Blanc. The geology of the Alps is a most perplexing problem. The summit of the Jungfrau, for example, consists of gneiss granite, but two masses of Jura limestone have been thrust into it, and their ends ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... on which we landed is about a thousand feet high, and composed of gneiss. Every here and there along the shore, between the projecting points of rocks, is a small cove or bay, having a beach composed of small pieces of limestone, which make the water almost as white as milk. Landing in one of these coves, we carried the boat above high-water mark; ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... extent, it is impossible to say what measure is owing to restraint, and what to license where the right is balanced between them. I was not a little provoked one day, a summer or two since, in Scotland, because the Duke of Athol hindered me from examining the gneiss and slate junctions in Glen Tilt, at the hour convenient to me; but I saw them at last, and in quietness; and to the very restriction that annoyed me, owed, probably, the fact of their being in existence, instead of being blasted away ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin |
