"Sterile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whom I could never induce to come and live at Sairmeuse, died, bequeathing all her property to Marie-Anne. This property consisted of a poor little cottage near the Reche, with a little garden and a few acres of sterile land. In compliance with my daughter's entreaties, I repaired the cottage, and sent there a few articles of furniture—a table, some chairs, and a couple of beds. My daughter designed it as a home for old Father Guvat and his wife. And I, surrounded ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... Chatham's eloquence to marble lips. Nor does the chisel occupy alone The powers of sculpture, but the style as much; Each province of her art her equal care. With nice incision of her guided steel She ploughs a brazen field, and clothes a soil So sterile with what charms soe'er she will, The richest scenery and the loveliest forms. Where finds philosophy her eagle eye, With which she gazes at yon burning disk Undazzled, and detects and counts his spots? In London. Where her implements exact, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... above the world, and fastens it on God, but has fastened there imperfectly; the root of Pride was left, and therefore it sent up an offshoot by its side, and shows itself in spiritual things. So, if it misses consolations from God, and its mind stays dry and sterile, it at once becomes disturbed and depressed, and, under colour of virtue—because it thinks itself deprived of God—it begins to complain, and lays down the law to God. But were it truly humble and had true hate and knowledge of itself, ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... other years, to repeat to himself the same words, save that for is, he then murmured was! And Nora, with her grand, full heart, all her luxuriant wealth of fancy and of thought, child of light and of song, did she then never discover that there was something comparatively narrow and sterile in the nature to which she had linked her fate? Not there could ever be sympathy in feelings, brilliant and shifting as the tints of the rainbow. When Audley pressed her heart to his own, could he comprehend one finer throb ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... small, a perilous journey or a mere day's travel, according to the mind and the transportation facilities of the voyager. Before four o'clock in the afternoon the coast was low and sandy to the westward, and it continued sterile and bare for long hours while the plane hung high against the sky with a following wind driving it on vastly more swiftly than its own engines ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... should be sitting amongst the first row of the spectators, close to the statue of Dionysus[72] and loaded with perfumes. Crates,[73] again, have you done hounding him with your rage and your hisses? True, 'twas but meagre fare that his sterile Muse could offer you; a few ingenious fancies formed the sole ingredients, but nevertheless he knew how to stand firm and to recover from his falls. 'Tis such examples that frighten our poet; in addition, he would tell himself, that before being a pilot, he must first ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... indication of their existence. In the hot months of the year this region must be vile in the extreme, and I consider myself most fortunate in having the cool season before me to traverse it in. It is stony, sterile, and hideous, and totally unsuited for the occupation or habitation of ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... companion!) Even in the breach of Heaven's assaulted wall. Like to a wind-sown sapling grow I from The clift, Sweet, of your skyward-jetting soul, - Shook by all gusts that sweep it, overcome By all its clouds incumbent: O be true To your soul, dearest, as my life to you! For if that soil grow sterile, then the whole Of me must shrivel, from the topmost shoot Of climbing poesy, and my life, killed through, Dry down and perish to ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... in tracing the development of the sonata from the suite leads us through a sterile tract of seemingly bare desert. The compositions referred to are full of fragments, sometimes fine in themselves, but lying wherever they happened to fall, their sculptors having no perception of their value one with another. ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... squatter. Agricultural settlements will follow; towns and villages will be established, gold-fields probably discovered, and waves of population will overflow and will fertilize vast tracts of country which we have hitherto concluded to be a sterile desert. These events will owe their initiation to the adventurous pioneers who first crossed the continent from sea to sea. Theirs was the arduous effort; theirs the courage, endurance, and sustaining hope; theirs the conflict with danger and the great triumph over difficulties; theirs the agony ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... proceeded steadily in the direction of the land of the Derikas. Two or three villages were seen on the river-banks, but the landscape was bare and sterile, and Miss Tinne felt no inclination to disembark until she reached Mount Hunaya. When her followers understood that she had resolved to encamp there during the rainy season, they protested vehemently, and talked of the dangers to ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... sterile mind, and was destitute of principle. Constructive politics were beyond his powers, and he was hopelessly ignorant of social movements. The real Europe of his time was to him a closed book; and while Napoleon was well served in every other function ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... sterile steep, The ancient prophet bowed the knee, And seven times sent his servant forth To look ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... statements, and one of these may have been a hoax (and there have been several scientific hoaxes) which, however, took in an American Agricultural Journal. It related to the formation in Holland of a new breed of oxen by the crossing of distinct species of Bos (some of which I happen to know are sterile together), and the author had the impudence to state that he had corresponded with me, and that I had been deeply impressed with the importance of his result. The article was sent to me by the editor of an English Agricultural Journal, asking ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... as a maker one may still live as a critic, and I will confess I am all for laxness and variety in this as in every field of art. Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me the instinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund. It is the tired man with a headache who values a work of art for what it does not contain. I suppose it is the lot of every critic nowadays to suffer from indigestion and a fatigued appreciation, and to develop ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... when John Hammond strolled slowly up the leafy avenue at Fellside. He had been across the valley and up the hill to Easedale Tarn, and then by rough untrodden ways, across a chaos of rock and heather, into a second valley, long, narrow, and sterile, known as Far Easedale, a desolate gorge, a rugged cleft in the heart of the mountains. The walk had been long and laborious; but only in such clambering and toiling, such expenditure of muscular force and latent ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... nitrates and showed an increase in nitrogenous material. They had clearly made use of the nitrogen of the air. When these plants were examined they had small swellings or nodules on their roots, while those grown in sterile sand without soil-extract had no nodules. Now these peculiar nodules are a normal characteristic of the roots of leguminous plants grown in ordinary soil. The experiments above mentioned made clear for the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... species may be known from a mere variety? Is there no criterion of species? Great authorities affirm that there is—that the unions of members of the same species are always fertile, while those of distinct species are either sterile, or their offspring, called hybrids, are so. It is affirmed not only that this is an experimental fact, but that it is a provision for the preservation of the purity of species. Such a criterion as this would be invaluable; but, unfortunately, not only ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... rule of life be at the same time more simple and more attractive to the beggared Mohammedan cast on the sterile shores of Northern Africa ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... the others who had sickened and died felt as she did. She speculated with grim amusement whether Walter Kramer would be as impersonal as he was with the others, when he performed the post-mortem on her body. She shivered at the thought of that bare sterile room and the shining table. Death was not a pretty thing. But she could meet it with resignation if not with courage. She had already seen too much for it to have any meaning. She did not falter as she placed a finger ...
— Pandemic • Jesse Franklin Bone
... a hot day at Washington. Even at that hour the broad avenues, which diverged from the Capitol like the rays of another sun, were fierce and glittering. The sterile distances between glowed more cruelly than ever, and pedestrians, keeping in the scant shade, hesitated on the curbstones before plunging into the Sahara-like waste of crossings. The city seemed deserted. Even that vast army of contractors, speculators, place-hunters, and lobbyists, which hung on ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... the only objects of interest. The large amount of freight discharged indicated it to be a prominent distributing point for the interior. Leaving Diego and running down the eastern coast with land in view, mountainous and apparently sterile, we reach Tamatave and ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... and tales, novels philosophic and religious, historical and satiric, novels of love, novels of adventure. Yet, strange to say, while the instinct was prolific in the Hellenic domain of the Roman Empire, it was for the most part sterile in Italy, though Roman life was saturated with the influence of Greek culture. Its only two notable examples are Petronius Arbiter and Apuleius, both of whom belong to the first two ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... states as a reason why so many witches were to be found at Labourt, that the country was mountainous and sterile! He discovered many of them from their partiality to smoking tobacco. It may be inferred from this that he was of the opinion of King James, that tobacco was the "devil's weed." When the commission first sat, the number ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... and calculate what it probably will be twenty-five years hence, who can doubt the feasibility of paying every dollar then with more ease than we now pay for useless luxuries? Why, it looks as though Providence had bestowed upon us a strong box in the precious metals locked up in the sterile mountains of the far West, and which we are now forging the key to unlock, to meet the very contingency that is ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... beauty by the richest scenes he had visited in his wanderings. Even the Happy Valley of Rasselas would have sunk into nothing upon the comparison. He came—he revisited the loved scene; it was but a sterile glen, surrounded with rude crags, and traversed by a northern torrent. This was not the worst. The fires had been quenched upon thirty hearths—of the cottage of his fathers he could but distinguish a few rude stones—the ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... angle in that gulf; but I have fished up an island in Maracaybo, or Venezuela Gulf. It is called Curacoa, and is arid and sterile. There is very little water, and only one well in the island, and the water is sold at a high price. Its capital is Williamstadt, one of the neatest cities in the ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... delicate than the common red ceader, it's fruit and smell are the same with the red ceader. the tops of these hills which produce the pine and cedar is of a different soil from that just described; it is a light coloured poor sterile sandy soil, the base usually a yellow or white clay; it produces scarcely any grass, some scattering tuffts of sedge constitutes the greater part of it's grass. About 5 P.M. my attention was struck by one of the Party runing at a distance towards ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... timbers and ashes of my claim, across the scorched and stunted fields blighted by drought, avoiding the great cracks which had opened in the dry earth and lay gaping like thirsty mouths for rain. The crops were burnt, and the land which had seemed so fertile looked bleak and sterile. ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... stover, them to keep; Thy banks with pioned and twilled brims, Which spongy April at thy best betrims, 65 To make cold nymphs chaste crowns; and thy broom-groves, Whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves, Being lass-lorn; thy pole-clipt vineyard; And thy sea-marge, sterile and rocky-hard, Where thou thyself dost air;—the queen o' the sky, 70 Whose watery arch and messenger am I, Bids thee leave these; and with her sovereign grace, Here on this grass-plot, in this very place, To come and sport:—her ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... atmosphere of vapour." [432] Mr. Breen is more emphatic. He writes: "In the want of water and air, the question as to whether this body is inhabited is no longer equivocal. Its surface resolves itself into a sterile and inhospitable waste, where the lichen which flourishes amidst the frosts and snows of Lapland would quickly wither and die, and where no animal with a drop of blood in its veins could exist." [433] The anonymous author of the Essay on the Plurality of Worlds announces ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... deserts.(223) The sentence: "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread," has been a blessing to mankind. Athens was not only the literary and political, but also the economic capital of Greece; and yet Attica was one of the most sterile countries in the world.(224) Unfortunate Messina, on the other hand, was the most fertile province of Greece. In modern times, no countries of equal extent have produced as many great captains, statesmen, savants and artists as Holland, whose securest ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... the sloping hillsides, around the leafing hazel "gay-circles of anemones dance on their stalks." In the more open places the little wind flower, with its pretty leaves and solitary white blossoms, blooms in cheerful companionship with its fellows, and the more sterile parts of the hillside are snowed with the white plumes of the plantain-leaved everlasting. Downy yellow violets and the common blue violets grow everywhere and down on the sand near the river the birdfoot violet, with its quaintly cut leaves and handsome ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... and not until the empire extended to the outer borders of the civilized world did this narrowness give way to a more expanded sympathy. The brotherhood of mankind, indeed, was taught by Socrates, Cicero, and others of the ancient moral philosophers, yet these seeds of philosophy fell in very sterile soil and took root with discouraging slowness. Philosophers elsewhere taught the dogma of universal love,—Confucius among the Chinese, Gautama among the Hindoos,—but their teachings have borne little fruit ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... flowers consist of a perianth without corolla, the sepals arranged by threes in two or three whorls. The end of the receptacle expanded like a bead, bears a large number of stamens in 6 vertical series, with anthers sessile and 4-lobed. Female flowers analogous as regards the perianth, with 6-9 sterile stamens. Carpels formed of 5 ovaries, free, unilocular, containing one ovule each. Fruit, a drupe of a purple color, the size of a filbert, ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... and persistent for several years (except in Larix), scattered along the twigs, spirally arranged or tufted, linear, needle-shaped, or scale-like; sterile and fertile flowers separate upon the same plant; stamens (subtended by scales) spirally arranged upon a central axis, each bearing two pollen-sacs surmounted by a broad-toothed connective; fertile flowers composed ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... Seas. It has three gates—three only. England holds the key to every one of these gates. Count them—Gibraltar, Malta, Aden. But she commands the entrance to the Red Sea, not by one, but by several strongholds. Midway in the narrow strait is the black, bare rock of Perim, sterile, precipitous, a perfect counterpart of Gibraltar; and on either side, between it and the mainland, are the ship-channels which connect the Red Sea with the great Indian Ocean. This ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... to see the sterile rust on the corn, and to feel the blazing heat of dog-days, when not a breath stirs as the languid shepherd leads his flock to the banks of the stream. The sunny pastures of Calabria lie spread before us, we see the yellow Tiber ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... up at its five massive marble edifices, strolling in its shady walks or by its verdant play-grounds, or listening to the cheerful cries of the boys at play, the most sympathetic and imaginative of men must pause before censuring the sterile and unlovely life of its founder. And if he should inquire closely into the character and career of the man who willed this great institution into being, he would perhaps be willing to admit that there was room in the world for one Girard, though ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... is full of peril! The path that runs through the fairest meads, On the sunniest side of the valley, leads Into a region bleak and sterile! Alike in the high-born and the lowly, The will is feeble, and passion strong. We cannot sever right from wrong; Some falsehood mingles with all truth; Nor is it strange the heart of youth Should waver and comprehend but slowly The things that ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... deliberately inserted the word "alone." The context shows that this is a falsification. The Apostle contrasts justifying faith, not with those preparatory acts of salvation which spring from it, but with the sterile "works of the law" (i.e. the Old Testament), which, as such, possessed no more power to justify than the good works of the heathen. Keeping this contrast in mind, it would not be incorrect to say, and St. Paul might well have said, that ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... seem conclusive; for the only reference to the subject in the preface is as follows: 'What could my sterile and uncultivated genius produce but the history of a child, meagre, adust, and whimsical, full of various wild imaginations never thought of before; like one you may suppose born in a prison, where every inconvenience keeps its ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... put aside revealed religion and refer everything to Nature, but they do not hesitate to oppose the designs of Nature when it suits their purpose. The doctrine of the Church has always been one wife, one husband. Polygamy and polyandry are relatively sterile. It is the acknowledged wife and the acknowledged husband that are fruitful; it is the husband and wife who furnish the world with men and heaven with souls, whereas the lover and the mistress fulfil no purpose, they ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... of to-day seem to prefer action to thought. Disdaining the sterile dissertations of the philosophers, they take no interest in vain speculation concerning matters whose essential nature ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... are sterile in genius, we must cheer us with books of rich and believing men who had atmosphere and amplitude about them. Every good fable, every mythology, every biography out of a religious age, every passage of love, and even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... information which poured in upon them; their constitutional lack of moral courage, and the circumstance that they were striving to reconcile contradictories. Without chart or compass they drifted into strange and sterile courses, beginning with the Prinkipo incident and ending with the written examination to which they naively subjected Kolchak in order to legalize international relations, which could not truly be described as either ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... become sterile. Verdi seemed to have ceased writing. There were whisperings of an "Iago" written in collaboration with Boito, but it was awaiting ultimate criticism and final polish while the wonderful old master was engaged in revamping some of his early works. Boito was writing ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... this wild tract, a few miles to the north-east of Lorette, there dwelt, some six or seven years ago, a poor farmer named Cantin, who added to the meagre fare afforded by his sterile acres such stray birds and hares as he could get within range of his old musket, without risking himself very far away from the isolated clearing. One night in the early part of May, when the snow had disappeared from the open grounds, but lingered yet in the ravines and rocky ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... which was almost entirely free from foreign inroads, seems precisely the period when the want of political ideas and constructive capacity was most marked. Nor were the incursions always destructive and sterile. The invaders, though they had generally more valour than culture of their own, often brought with them foreign art and ideas, Hellenic, Persian or Mohammedan. Naturally the northern districts felt their violence most as well as the new influences ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... have been a subtle lawyer who could have pronounced upon the rightful owner. The demesne around the castle contained some well-grown and handsome timber, and as the soil was undulating and fertile, presented many features of beauty; beyond it, all was sterile, bleak, and barren. Long tracts of brown heath-clad mountain or not less unprofitable valleys of tall and waving fern were all that the eye could discern, except where the broad Shannon, expanding into a tranquil and glassy lake, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... very apt to inspire the savant with a peculiar distrust of all spontaneous emotion. Ceasing to open his heart to that light from the Absolute, which ought to quicken it into bloom, it learns to dwell only in the sterile world of abstract formulas. If he could find algebraic signs for its expression, he would willingly believe in the immortality of the soul: the characters which he can never learn to comprehend, are precisely those in which dwell the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... any contribution to the national stock of ideas and ideals is concerned. There are, for example, those great elements, the Spanish Catholics, the French Catholic population of Louisiana, the Irish Catholics, the French-Canadians who are now ousting the sterile New Englander from New England, the Germans, the Italians the Hungarians. Comparatively they say nothing. From all the ten million of coloured people come just two or three platform voices, Booker Washington, Dubois, Mrs. Church Terrell, mere protests at specific wrongs. The clever, restless Eastern ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... I find some with three or four; the best-colonised offer me as many as five. And, to crown my delight, the joy of the seeker to whom success comes at the last moment, when he is on the verge of despair, here again, duly furnished with an egg, is a sterile cocoon, that is to say, one containing only a shrivelled and decaying larva. All my suspicions are confirmed, down to the most inconsequent: the egg housed with a ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... frigid desolation. Away on the southern horizon lay the black line which marked the tremendous forest limits of the Beaver River. For the rest it was a world of snow that hid up the rugged undulations of a sterile territory. ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... way to the other side of the house and across the green. The grass terminated a little distance from the inn in a clay bank bordering a wide tract of bare and sterile land, which extended almost to the summit of the rise. Clearly defined in the clay and the black soft earth were two sets of footprints, one going towards the rise, and the other returning. The outgoing footsteps were deeply ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... features of the first. Mr. Effingham declared, with a grateful heart, that in no park, or garden, had he ever before met with a promenade that seemed so delightful as this spot of naked and moistened sand, on the sterile coast of the Great Desert. Its charm was its security, for its distance from every point that could be approached by the Arabs, rendered it, in their eyes, ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... magnificent King conceived an inexplicable disgust for his birthplace. He quitted Saint Germains for Versailles, and expended sums almost fabulous in the vain attempt to create a paradise on a spot singularly sterile and unwholesome, all sand or mud, without wood, without water, and without game. Saint Germains had now been selected to be the abode of the royal family of England. Sumptuous furniture had been hastily sent in. The nursery ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... at this season on dry and sandy fields and hill-sides. The culms of both, not to mention their pretty flowers, reflect a purple tinge, and help to declare the ripeness of the year. Perhaps I have the more sympathy with them because they are despised by the farmer, and occupy sterile and neglected soil. They are high-colored, like ripe grapes, and express a maturity which the spring did not suggest. Only the August sun could have thus burnished these culms and leaves. The farmer has long since done his upland haying, and he will not condescend to bring ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... conventions and petty, unoriginal judgments that go to the making of the rule of our society. The woman had to make her choice between love in an undignified poverty for which all her training had unfitted her, and a sterile ease and magnificence that gave her those opportunities which her temperament and education demanded. She chose for dignity and opportunity, was tempted to grasp at love, and thus finally came into a blind alley from which death was the ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... by which he meant the sterile plains, which yield little except hay, looks rich with verdure in the mellow afternoon light, when midsummer is come, and the whole populace, men, women, and children, on Sundays and feast-days pour out of the city gates eagerly ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... knows what other "ite"? I hear these ancient gentry preached about and the heroes who smote them hip and thigh extolled. Personally, I am a great deal more interested in the modern tussle for a promised land than in those old time frays for a fertile patch in a sterile wilderness; and I see the same call for the hero's fighting edge; and I like the MacDonalds, who jump out from behind the Safety Line to fight for right, though it bring but the bloody bullet holes in the soft of the temple; and ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... up there in that sterile place and go hungry?" said the Wolf. "Down here where I am the broken-bottle vine cometh up as a flower, the celluloid collar blossoms as the rose, and the tin-can tree brings ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... "conversion" (p. 21). You are oppressed by "the futility of the individual life"; you fall into "a state of helpless self-disgust" (p. 21); you are, in short, in the condition described by Hamlet when he says: "It goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... country near the river Orinoco; the only part of the continent of America that Columbus had seen. Tombut, in the same latitude, is the most sterile part of Africa. America embraces a greater compass of latitude by many degrees than the other continent; and yet its inhabitants present a much less variety in their physical and moral character. When shall we be able ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... a deathless wreath may crown, Though he may win a sterile, hard renown, His name shall ne'er a sudden glow impart, Nor make the tear of admiration start; Ne'er in his plaudits shall warm blessings join! None cry, "The triumph of that man is mine!" But, when his greatness crumbles ...
— Vignettes in Verse • Matilda Betham
... distant reminiscences, like the most immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as what she imagined, her voluptuous desires that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the domestic tete-a-tete—she gathered it all up, took everything, and made it all serve as fuel for ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... several tenants; and all other necessaries of life not raised by them must be purchased extravagantly dear. It is, indeed, surprizing how this immense city, said to contain three millions of inhabitants, is contrived to be supplied at any rate, considering the very sterile and unproductive state of the country for many miles around it. It might not, however, be a matter of less astonishment to a Chinese, nor less difficult for him to conceive, in what manner our own ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... chalky soil, bursting open here and there, and displaying its tawny bowels. And never either have I since witnessed a sky of such intense purity, a July day so lovely and so warm; at eight o'clock the sultry heat was already scorching our faces. O the splendid morning, and what a sterile plain ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... of durability which his influence is likely to possess with the next and following generations is another and rather sterile question, which we are not now concerned to discuss. The unrestrained eccentricities which Mr. Carlyle's strong individuality has precipitated in his written style may, in spite of the poetic fineness of his imagination, which no historian ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... THE WOMB or Fibromata, Frequency.—Some observers state that twenty to forty per cent of all women over thirty-five years have one or more of these tumors. They are not malignant. They are more common in women who are sterile, unable to become pregnant. They appear early in life and attack all classes. They appear oftener in the body of the womb than in the neck. When in the body of the womb the back wall is the common site. A covering of loose fibrous tissue ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... towards the street corner where Silas Wegg sat at his stall. A few small lots of fruits and sweets, and a choice collection of halfpenny ballads, comprised Mr. Wegg's stock, and assuredly it was the hardest little stall of all the sterile little stalls in London. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... interior of the hotel, bright with the latest fastidiousness in modern decoration and art-furniture, and gay with pictured canvases and color, seemed to mock the sullen landscape, and the sterile crags amid which the building was set. An attempt to make a pleasance in this barren waste had resulted only in empty vases, bleak statuary, and iron settees, as cold and slippery to the touch as ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Divine dumb things of the inward spirit and heart, Moved silently; nor hand or lip again Touch hand or lip of either, but for mine Shall thine meet only shadows of swift night, Dreams and dead thoughts of dead things; and the bed Thou strewedst, a sterile place for all time, strewn For my sleep only, with its void sad sheets 920 Shall vex thee, and the unfruitful coverlid For empty days reproach me dead, that leave No profit of my body, but am gone As one not worth being born to bear no seed, A ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... sod. In other instances it may remain quite firmly adherent to the margin of the pileus so that it breaks apart as the pileus in age expands somewhat. In such cases one often searches for some time to discover it clinging as a sterile margin of the cap. It is interesting to observe a section of the plants at this stage. These sections can be made by splitting the pileus and stem lengthwise through the middle line with a sharp knife, as shown in Fig. 35. Here, in the plant at the right hand, ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... and without a murmur;" it also signifies "excitement, agitation, rancor, revolt full of reproach, premeditated vengeance, menace never ceasing to threaten if retaliation should ever become possible, feeding itself meanwhile with a bitter if sterile hatred." ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... all sail and put to sea, swearing he would leave the laggards to shift for themselves. It was in vain that those on board made remonstrances and entreaties, and represented the horrors of abandoning men upon a sterile and uninhabited island; the ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... indeed crept out somehow that he had been wild and extravagant, that he had been sent to rusticate among rocks and hills so sterile there would be little chance for his wild acts to take root; but then, to some old ladies and young ones too, this rumor lent but ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... man of the many whom for the like cause she neglected, disgraced, persecuted, knew that the cause existed in the fact of their having taken to themselves partners of life and happiness—a solace which she sacrificed to the sterile honors of an undivided crown—of their enjoying the bliss and perfect contentment of a happy wedded life, while she, who would fain have enjoyed the like, could she have done so without the loan of some portion of her independent and undivided authority, was compelled, by her ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... touched hands, then in that moment would be spanned the distance between the star in the ascendant and the wavering marsh-light, between the sea-colossus and his one-time rival, now so long overwhelmed and chained to sterile earth. ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... tell me that the fields are sterile, the barn small, the stable crazy, the woods scanty. These would be powerful objections to a mere tiller of the earth, but they ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... streams and brooks in addition to the various rivers, which, rising within or beyond the great mountain barriers, traverse the plains on their way to the Tigris. The hills themselves—known now as the Jebel Maklub, the Ain-es-sufra, the Karachok, etc.—are for the most part bare and sterile. In form they are hogbacked, and viewed from a distance have a smooth and even outline but on a nearer approach they are found to be rocky and rugged. Their limestone sides are furrowed by innumerable ravines, and have a dry and parched appearance, being even ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... sustaining the viscera of the diaphragm, and although it contains no nourishment whatever, it is useful to them, because they have long periods when food is scarcely procurable, as they bestow very little cultivation upon their land, which is naturally very sterile. Yet, one would scarcely have expected hungry cannibals to resort to ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... egotism, I don't know, but from her is taken away, and everything has been taken away. Sometimes I am dreadfully sorry for her. Formerly I very much wanted Nicholas to marry her, but I always had a sort of presentiment that it would not come off. She is a sterile flower, you know—like some strawberry blossoms. Sometimes I am sorry for her, and sometimes I think she doesn't feel it ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... fresh from sea, and who has just walked, for the first time, in a grove of cocoa-nut trees, can be a judge of anything but his own happiness. The island would generally be considered as very uninteresting, but to any one accustomed only to an English landscape, the novel aspect of an utterly sterile land possesses a grandeur which more vegetation might spoil. A single green leaf can scarcely be discovered over wide tracts of the lava plains; yet flocks of goats, together with a few cows, contrive to exist. It rains very seldom, but during a short portion ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... at a temperature of from 42 to 43 degrees Centigrade. Now appear the three remarkable results. After about one month of waiting the culture dies—that is to say, if put into a fresh bouillon it becomes absolutely sterile. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... children per family.[98] It must be remembered that this average, which is even higher than that found in Russia, the most prolific of European countries, is not quite the same as the number of children per marriage; but it indicates very great fertility, while it may be noted also that sterile marriages are comparatively rare among French Canadians, although among English Canadians the proportion of childless families is found to be almost exactly the same (nearly 20 per cent) as among the infertile Americans of Massachusetts. ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... suggestions that faithfulness of representation in picture or book gives to the natural man; but because of the fact that nature is almost infinitely rich, and the unassisted imagination of man but a poor and sterile thing, tending constantly towards some ossified convention. "Treasure Island" is a much better story than "The Wreckers," yet I, for one, shall never cease to regret that Mr Stevenson did not possess, when he wrote "Treasure Island," that knowledge of ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... of the Acadians, a harmless and inoffensive people, from Nova Scotia, is another instance of the revenge that natural laws inflict upon tyranny and injustice. Next to the persecuted Pilgrims crossing a dreary ocean in mid-winter to the sterile coasts of a land of savages for freedom's sake, history hardly furnishes a more touching picture than that of forty thousand homeless, friendless, starving Negroes going to a land already consecrated with ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... oiled wrestlers: my gates, my friendly threshold, were crowded, my home was decked with floral coronals, when I was wont to leave my couch at sunrise. Now shall I live a ministrant of gods and slave to Cybebe? I a Maenad, I a part of me, I a sterile trunk! Must I range o'er the snow-clad spots of verdurous Ida, and wear out my life 'neath lofty Phrygian peaks, where stay the sylvan-seeking stag and woodland-wandering boar? Now, now, I grieve the deed I've done; now, now, do ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... transplanting was slow, difficult, and intensely painful to the Irish, for Connaught was bleak, sterile, and desolate, and the weather was inclement. The natural protectors of many families had been killed or banished, and the women and children clung with frantic fondness to their old homes. But for the ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... myself to go through many elaborate reports of meetings where female education was discussed by those supposed to be competent; but as a rule, not without rare, striking exceptions, these proceedings are smitten with the same sterile and complacent artificiality that was so long the curse of woman's life. I deem it almost reprehensible that, save a few general statistics, the women's colleges have not only made no study themselves of the larger problems that impend, but have often maintained ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... station. I tell you that I don't know myself now—that I have not known myself since I knew you. Qualities of understanding, ability to appreciate, to express myself without employing the commonplaces, subtleties of intercourse—all, maybe, were latent in me, but sterile, until you came into my life. ... And when you go, then, lacking impulse and incentive, the new facility, the new sensitive alertness, the unconscious self-confidence, all will smoulder and die out in me. ... I know it; I realise that it ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... monopolizing all branches of small trade, while the natives are lazy and listless, true children of the equatorial regions. Is it because Nature is here so bountiful, so lovely, so prolific, that her children are sluggish, dirty, and heedless? It would seem to require a less propitious climate, a sterile soil, and rude surroundings to awaken human energy and to place man at his best. The common people are seen almost naked, and those who wear clothes at all, affect the brightest colors. The jungle is dense, tigers abound, and men, women, and children are almost daily ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... went some thirty-five leagues, passing a large number of falls both by land and water, the country being far from attractive, and covered with pines, birches, and some oaks, being also very rocky, and in many places somewhat hilly. Moreover it was very barren and sterile, being but thinly inhabited by certain Algonquin savages, called Otaguottouemin, [100] who dwell in the country, and live by hunting and the fish they catch in the rivers, ponds, and lakes, with which the region is well provided. It seems indeed that God has been pleased ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain
... round-breeched calves occasionally, and not very unfrequently, dropped by cows of the common mixed kind, and which, if killed early, make very blue veal, and if allowed to grow up, become exceedingly profitless and unsatisfactory beasts; the heifers being often sterile, the cows poor milkers, the oxen dull, mulish beasts, yielding flesh of very dark color, ill flavor and destitute of fat. They are known by various names in different localities, in Maine as the "Whitten" and "Peter Waldo" breed, in Massachusetts ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... it is, that it is a crime to teach a child anything at all, school-wise. It is just evil to collect children together and teach them through the head. It causes absolute starvation in the dynamic centers, and sterile substitute of brain knowledge is all the gain. The children of the middle classes are so vitally impoverished, that the miracle is they continue to exist at all. The children of the lower classes do better, because they escape into the streets. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... leeches, and having observed them in the ponds at Nyingan, I sent William Baldock and Yuranigh there in search of some, and they brought back enough. Fourteen were applied to my eyes the same afternoon. The ground here was quite naked; it was, in fact, the blue clay of the Darling, with the same sterile looking plants; and no time was to be lost in seeking some ponds where there might be also good grass for the cattle. Therm. at sunrise, 97 deg.; at noon, 100 deg.; at 9 P.M. 90 deg.; with wet bulb, ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... fashion in Italy, and every part of the peninsula abounded in them. They bore names fanciful or grotesque, such as The Ardent, The Illuminated, The Unconquered, The Intrepid, or The Dissonant, The Sterile, The Insipid, The Obtuse, The Astray, The Stunned, and they were all devoted to one purpose, namely, the production and the perpetuation of twaddle. It is prodigious to think of the incessant wash of slip-slop which they poured out in verse; of the grave disputations they ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... life's short years had been stern and sterile — I stood like one whom the blasts blow back — As with shipmen whirled through the straits of Peril, So fierce foes menaced ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... organisms the feelings are dwarfed, as the thought may be in certain sterile imaginations. Thus, just as some minds have the faculty of comprehending the connections existing between different things without formal deduction; and as they have the faculty of seizing upon each formula separately, without combining them, or without ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... take no advice. Strike out alone through the highways and lanes of story, character and experience. The best novelist is the one who fears not to tell you the truth, which is more wonderful than fiction. It is always the best hearts that bend to mistakes. Absolute virtue is as sterile as granite rock; absolute vice is as poisonous as a stagnant pond. No healthy interest or speculation can linger about either. Enter into the struggle and know human nature; don't stay outside and try ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... afraid to give to beggars, lest their charity should be ill applied. No money, no food, no clothes, and no fuel, if distributed with ordinary discretion, can be misapplied at present in Paris. The French complain that all they ever get from England is good advice and sterile sympathy. Now is the moment for us to prove to them that, if we were not prepared to go to war in order to protect them from the consequences of their own folly, we pity them in their distress; and that our pity means something more than words and phrases which ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... beings, separated from the great tide of life like one of the shallow pools which the ebbing sea has left upon its sands, numbers scarcely a hundred and a half. The men are fishers, for there is no other occupation to be followed on the sterile rock. Every day also the level sweep of sands is wandered over by the women and children, who seek for cockles in the little pools; the babble of whose voices echoes far through the quiet air, and ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... consolation during the South African War in the foolish remark—The Germans would have done no better. What the German Army, which had not been actively employed for twenty-eight years, might have accomplished under the same conditions is a matter for sterile speculation which has little bearing on the case. But the German Army certainly had not been accustomed to look upon War as a branch of ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... and Wheatstone came at an apter time than Hjorth's, and was more conspicuously made. Above all, in the affluent and enterprising hands of the brothers Siemens, it was not suffered to lie sterile, and the Siemens dynamo-electric machine was its offspring. This dynamo, as is well known, differs from those of Gramme and Paccinotti chiefly in the longitudinal winding of the armature, and it is unnecessary to describe it here. It has been ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... largest of the rivers which Nearchus had met with in the Gulf of Persia. The province of Persis is described by Nearchus as naturally divided into three parts. "That division which lies along the side of the Gulf is sandy, parched, and sterile, bearing little else but palm-trees." To the north and north-east, across the range of mountains, the country improves considerably in soil and climate; the herbage is abundant and nutritious; the meadows well watered; and the vine and every kind of ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... abundant and very green. That tree is always more flourishing and luxuriant, so that in comparison with it the other trees seem like withered things. Also another smaller river which ran past Aglao and Baubuen dried up, and the earth was left very sterile. It is true that these things were said, but without any foundation. The large river still remains and flows in the same course, and that of Aglao has the same course, and there is no notice or tradition that it had ever dried up; and it is not possible that so ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... now that he wearied of her. Love's young dream had been sweet indeed; but, ah! how bitter was the awakening. Her castles in the air had all melted into clouds, and here in the very flower of her youth she felt that her life was ruined, and she was as one wandering in a sterile waste, with a black and starless sky overhead. She clasped her hands with a sensation of pain, and a rose at her breast fell down withered and dead. She took it up with listless fingers, and with the quiver of her hand the leaves fell off and were scattered ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... our village one winter day a stranger who had neither the air of a Schnorrer (beggar) nor of an itinerant preacher; nor, from the brief time he spent at the Beth-Hamidrash, where I sat pursuing droningly my sterile studies, did he appear to be a scholar. He was a lean, emaciated, sickly young man, but his eyes had the fire of a lion's, and his glance was as a god's. When he spoke his voice pierced you, and when he was silent his presence filled the room. From Eliphaz the Pedlar (who ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... gutters grosser with mud, a darker curiosity deepened on the brows of Basil, and the figure of Rupert seen from behind seemed to fill the street with a gigantic swagger of success. At length, at the end of the fourth or fifth lean grey street in that sterile district, we came suddenly to a halt, the mysterious lieutenant looking once more about him with a sort of sulky desperation. Above a row of shutters and a door, all indescribably dingy in appearance and in size scarce sufficient even for a penny ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... land, when it appears fertile, omens good; but if sterile and rocky, failure and ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... great human infirmity as Tennyson. The way in which his simplicity of nature would manifest itself was, in some instances, most remarkable. Though, of course, he had his share of that egoism of the artist without which imaginative genius may become sterile, it seemed impossible for him to realize what a transcendent position he took among contemporary writers all over the world. “Poets,” he once said to me, “have not had the advantage of being born to the purple.” Up ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... harbour of Sydney Cove as traders carrying provisions for sale to the half-starved settlers, then as whalers, and before another thirty years had passed, the starry banner might be met with anywhere in the Pacific, from the sterile shores of the Aleutian Islands to the coasts ...
— The Adventure Of Elizabeth Morey, of New York - 1901 • Louis Becke
... this subject, on their part, it would ill become them as subjects to make, or her, as an independent princess, to endure. England was the husband which she had betrothed to her; Englishmen were her children; while employed in rearing and governing such a family, she could not deem herself sterile or her life useless. She desired, for her own part, no higher character, nor fairer remembrance of her to be transmitted to posterity, than to have this inscription, when she should pay the debt of nature, engraven on her tomb: "Here lies Queen ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... certain technical skill in composition and construction, and disheartened by repeated failures, exclaims with petulance: "What shall I write about?" She dolefully imagines that the list of feasible subjects is exhausted; her wearied brain refuses any longer to carry on its sterile activities, and despair settles down upon her. This is because her eyes have not been opened to the limitless possibilities for the making of good "copy" which exist on every side. Most probably she has been looking in quite the ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... her from me; like a thief you stole her, At dead of night; that cursed hour you chose To rifle me of all my heart held dear. May all your joys in her prove false, like mine! A sterile fortune, and a barren bed, Attend you both: continual discord make Your days and nights bitter and grievous still: May the hard hand of a vexatious need Oppress and grind you; till at last you find The curse of ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Thomas Otway
... passage: 'Ever dearest and best adored,—said Edward, clasping the dear head to his breast, and drawing the silken hair through his caressing fingers, from which he suffered it to fall like golden rain,—ever dearest and best adored, let us fly from the unsympathetic world and the sterile coldness of the stony-hearted, to the rich warm Paradise of Trust and Love.' Miss Twinkleton's fraudulent version tamely ran thus: 'Ever engaged to me with the consent of our parents on both sides, and the approbation of the silver-haired rector of the district,—said Edward, ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... owing to the vow of celibacy, had become more and more stagnant, while the civil communities increased in power to adapt themselves to the age. All that was virile and creative combined in the towns; all that was inadequate, sterile, useless, coagulated in the monasteries, which thus became cesspools, and ultimately took on the character of festering sores by which the civil bodies which had at first been purged into them were endangered. Luther tells us how there was a Bishop of Wuerzburg who used ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... striking as is the form of the giraffe, it only furnishes a proof of the wonderful manner in which an all-wise Creator has adapted means to ends. A vegetable feeder, but an inhabitant of sterile and sandy deserts, its long slender neck and sloping body, enable it to reach with ease its favorite food: leaf by leaf is daintily plucked from the lofty branch by the pliant tongue, and a mouthful of tender and juicy food is speedily accumulated. The oblique and narrow apertures ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... carry our warm cloak of human sympathy and understanding for vast tracts of land will prove to be a sterile desert—swept by icy storms of popular prejudice and personal greed and unless we come well prepared we shall forsake our faith in humanity and that, dear boys, would be the worst thing that could happen to any ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... spots upon the banks of streams in the flat regions. These flat regions themselves were traversed in many places by rocky ridges of a singularly forbidding aspect. The whole appearance of the country was dry, stony, sterile. As a modern writer observes, "the livery of the land is constantly brown or gray; water is scanty; plains and mountains are equally destitute of wood. When the traveller, after toiling over the rocky ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... I perceived how intolerably false many of our cherished ideals are; that apart from lives of pure selfishness and annexation, many a professed philanthropist or active statesman is merely following a sterile sort of ambition; that it is rare on the whole for so-called public men to live for the sake of the public; while the simple, kindly, uncalculating, friendly attitude to life is a real source of grace and beauty, and leaves ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Thuringia that the possession of fern seed causes the bearer to be pursued by serpents till thrown away; and, according to a curious Eussian proverb, "from all old trees proceeds either an owl or a devil," in reference, no doubt, to their often bare and sterile appearance. ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... fiction which lie scattered over nearly the whole extent of that region of daring adventure and romantic incident. The common idea seems to be, that the first wanderers to Kentucky were a simple, ignorant, low-bred, good-for-nothing set of fellows, who left the frontiers and sterile places of the old States, where a considerable amount of labor was necessary to secure a livelihood, and sought the new and fertile country southeast of the Ohio River and northwest of the Cumberland Mountains, where corn would produce bread for them with simply the labor of planting, ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... V. be - unproductive &c. adj.; hang fire, flash in the pan, come to nothing. [make unproductive] sterilize, addle; disable, inactivate. Adj. unproductive, acarpous[obs3], inoperative, barren, addled, infertile, unfertile, unprolific[obs3], arid, sterile, unfruitful, infecund[obs3]; sine prole; fallow; teemless[obs3], issueless[obs3], fruitless; unprofitable &c. (useless) 645; null and void, of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... period of drought ensues; the sun rapidly burns up all vegetation, and everywhere the eye is wearied by long stretches of brown and yellow desert. Occasional sandstorms darken the heavens, sweeping over sterile wastes and piling up the shapeless mounds which mark the sites of ancient cities. Meanwhile the rivers are increasing in volume, being fed by the melting snows at their mountain sources far to the ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... laudable, but the views were beautiful and changing incessantly, while the spring advancing was spreading her green mantle over rock and tree, and making that beautiful which was lately a blighted and sterile thicket. The convent of Trinita itself holds a most superb situation on the projection of an ample rock. It is a large edifice, but not a handsome one—the monks reserving their magnificence for their churches—but was surrounded by a circuit of fortifications, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... god of southern peoples, but is spoken of with all hatred and loathing: 'Black creeping thing of the low lands, monster flecked with the colours of death, thou that hast on thy skin the stain of the sterile soil, get thee forth from the path of a hero.' After slaying the serpent, Lemminkainen reaches Pohjola, kills one of his hosts, and fixes his head on one of a thousand stakes for human skulls that stood about the house, as they might round the hut of a Dyak in Borneo. He ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... a rock resembling a galley under sail off a headland, which, in consequence, he called Punta de la Galera. No safe anchorage appearing, he coasted westward in search of a harbour and water. Instead of a sterile land, he saw the country covered with groves of palm-trees, cultivated in many places, and enlivened by hamlets and scattered habitations, while streams came ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... either side, with sufficient grass for the horses. Leaving Murphy bound, Hampton clambered up the front of the rock to where he was able to look out. All was silent, and his heart sank as he surveyed the brown sterile hills stretching to the horizon, having merely narrow gulches of rock and sand between, the sheer nakedness of the picture unrelieved by green shrub or any living thing. Then, almost despairing, he slid back, stretched himself out amid the soft grass, and sank into the slumber of exhaustion, his ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... confined to the restless, feverish couch of pain, thought flies untrammelled through the circuit of the globe, far—far to the frigid regions of the north, where almost eternal winter reigns, and we view the hardy inhabitant of that sterile clime, wrapped in his furs, drawn by the swift-footed reindeer, ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... starting, I collected a great number of most beautiful flowers, which grow in profusion in this otherwise desolate glen. I was literally surrounded by fair flowers of every changing hue. Why Nature should scatter such floral gems upon such a stony sterile region it is difficult to understand, but such a variety of lovely flowers of every kind and colour I had never met with previously. Nature at times, indeed, delights in contrasts, for here exists a land "where bright flowers are all scentless, and songless bright birds." The flowers alone ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... be used when introducing water into the intestines. The use of this preparation renders the water completely sterile unless it be notoriously impure. Such water should never be used. But the Antiseptic Tonic possesses another important property which is most valuable in cases of Constipation, for it acts as an admirable tonic on the muscular coat of the colon, strengthening it and restoring ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... word, all that Jesus connotes by "the Kingdom of God" is "taken from them" (Matt. 21:43), and nothing left but "outer darkness" (Matt. 22:13). The vision of God is not for the impure (Matt. 5:8). Meanwhile sin is not a sterile thing, it is a leaven (Matt. 16:6). If our modern medical language may be applied—and Jesus used the analogy of medicine in this very case (Mark 2:17)—sin is septic. In the first place, all sin is anti-social—an ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... potest. [Sidenote: Abilech desertum.] Primo tendant de Ierusalem in supra dictam Gazam Palestinorum, inde ad Castellum Dayre, atque ex tunc exitur de terra Syriae, et intratur a superiori parte in desertum longum arenosum, et sterile, prope ad septem dietas, quod lingua eorum vocatur Abilech; tamen per illud inueniantur plura hospitia, vbi haberi possunt ad victum nccessaria. Et qui in eundo rectum iter tenet, veniet in Ciuitatem dictam, Balbes, quae est ad finem Regni Halapiae: Sicque ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation. v. 8 - Asia, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... hard to believe that that was a sea before them. There was snow on the sea and snow on the land: there were mountains on both, and huge drifts, and here and there vast polinas—a space of soft, watery ice, which resembled the lakes of Siberia. All was bitter, cold, sterile, bleak, and chilling to the eye, which vainly sought a relief. The prospect of a journey over this desolate plain, intersected in every direction by ridges of mountain icebergs, full of crevices, with soft ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various |
