"Vegetation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... its burning rays on the fields, and under this shower of flame life burst forth in glowing vegetation from the earth. As far as the eye could see, the soil was green; and the sky was blue to the verge of the horizon. The Norman farms scattered through the plain seemed at a distance like little woods inclosed each in a ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... the hilltops and keep watch through the long coal building ages, we should see generation after generation of forest trees and underwoods living, withering, dying, falling to earth. Slowly a layer of dead and decaying vegetation thus collects, over which the forest flourishes still—tree for tree, and shrub for shrub, springing up in the place of ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... home was a desert, walled in by barren, snow-clad mountains. There was not a tree in sight. There was no vegetation but the endless sage-brush and greasewood. All nature was gray with it. We were plowing through great deeps of powdery alkali dust that rose in thick clouds and floated across the plain like smoke from ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... comfortable, and present a charming appearance. The vine is little cultivated in this part of the country, where it would hardly succeed, as the land is too low and damp; but there are, nevertheless, a few small vineyards on the slopes, and the vegetation in the whole country is incredibly rich and luxuriant. The late wars have left traces which only a ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... a few moments we embraced them all. The sun was hot upon us, but, after a ride of two or three miles, we came to the Henrietta, my dear Edward and Susan's residence, and were soon under the roof of a spacious, elegant and most commodious mansion. And here we are with midsummer temperature and vegetation, but a ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... hovered a degree or two above the tree-tops on the western bank of the stream, the moon, now nearly full, sailed gloriously into view above the clumps of vegetation that shrouded the eastern bank; and the gradual transition from the ruddy, golden light of the dying sun to the flooding silver of the brilliant moon, with the ever-changing effects that accompanied the transition, presented a spectacle of enchanting ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... with their variety of fruits, the tropical fruit-trees, Oranges, Bananas, etc., the shade- and cluster-trees, so important to the comfort and shelter of man, are added to the vegetable world during these epochs. The fossil vegetation of the Tertiaries is, indeed, most interesting from this point of view, showing the gradual maturing and completion of those conditions most intimately associated with human life. The earth had already its seasons, its spring and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... justified; the tiger-shooting expedition proved a much rougher business than the sportsmen had anticipated. Once they quitted the roads and foot-path, vegetation became rank and overpowering and in places impassable. Swampy ground, dense thorn thickets and elephant grass made progress enormously difficult—the jungle guards well its many secrets and is full ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... for an unobserved start could not have been selected, however. All this part of the country is a sandy waste, with a sparse growth of scrub oaks and but little vegetation. There are no farms, and the nearest houses are at Whiting. No one could see our work, except, possibly, the passengers from occasional trains, which rushed by without stopping, and were infrequent at this time ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... Domenech, Vol. II, p. 197; Timberlake, p. 77.] and the ring; [Footnote: Kane's Wanderings, p. 310.] the different ways of preparing the ground, whether tamping with clay, [Footnote: Catlin, Vol., I, p. 132.] or flooring with timber, [Footnote: Lewis and Clarke, Vol. I, p. 148.] or simply removing the vegetation, [Footnote: Domenech, Vol. II, p. 197.]—all these minor differences are of little consequence. The striking fact remains that this great number of tribes, so widely separated, all played a game in which the principal requirements were, that a small circular disk ...
— Indian Games • Andrew McFarland Davis
... of Maccabeus there was something congenial in the adventurous kind of existence which he led, and yet he was not one who would have adopted a guerrilla life from choice. As even in a hard and rocky waste there are spots where rich vegetation betrays some source of hidden nourishment below, and they who dig deep enough under the surface find a spring of bright pure living waters,—so deep within the Asmonean's heart lay a hidden source of tenderness which prevented his nature from becoming hardened by the stern necessities ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... light and the complexion of things had to my eyes not a little of that mollified depth last loved by them rather further on. It was simply perhaps that the weather was hot and the mountains drowsing in that iridescent haze that I have seen nearer home than at Chambery. But the vegetation, assuredly, had an all but Transalpine twist and curl, and the classic wayside tangle of corn and vines left nothing to be desired in the line of careless grace. Chambery as a town, however, constitutes no foretaste of the monumental cities. There is shabbiness and shabbiness, the ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... my impressions of my journey through the continually descending valley. I was particularly astonished at the southern vegetation which suddenly spreads out before one on climbing down from a steep and narrow rocky pass by which the Tosa is confined. I arrived at Domodossola in the afternoon in a blaze of sunshine, and I was reminded here of a ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... described in his beautiful work, The Rhododendron of Sikkim-Himalaya. It is called R. nivale, or snow-rhododendron. 'The hard, woody branches of this curious little species, as thick as a goose-quill, struggle along the ground for a foot or two, presenting brown tufts of vegetation where not half-a-dozen other plants can exist. The branches are densely interwoven, very harsh and woody, wholly depressed; whence the shrub, spreading horizontally, and barely raised two inches above the soil, becomes eminently typical of the arid, stern climate it inhabits. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... Saddles and bits. The Courier. Leather clothes. The Serape. The Rag-fair of Mexico, Thieves. Gourd water-bottles. Ploughing. Travelling by Diligence. Indian carriers. Mules. Breakfast. Bragadoccio. Robbers. Escort. Cuernavaca. Tropical Vegetation. Sugar-cane. Temisco. Sugar-hacienda. Indian labourers. The evensong. The Raya. Strength of the Indians. Xochicalco. Ruins of the Pyramid. Sculptures. Common ornaments. The people of Mexico and Central America. Their ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... months. He finds that plants and seeds so treated sprout and germinate rapidly when exposed to the warm air of spring and summer. It appears also that chrysales similarly treated become moths in about one-tenth of the time required under ordinary circumstances; from which facts, and the celerity of vegetation in Canada and the arctic regions, Professor Simpson infers that, if we in this country were to keep our grain in ice-houses during the winter, we should get quicker and better crops, and avoid the ill consequences which sometimes attend sowing in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... of St Thomas consists of a red and yellow marl, or clay, of great fertility, which is kept soft and mellow by the heavy dews which fall nightly, contributing greatly to vegetation, and preventing it from being dried up by the great heats; and so great is the luxuriant fertility of the soil, that trees immediately spring up on any spots left uncultivated, and will grow as high in a few days ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... was indeed broken up by streaks of yellow sand-break in the lower lands, and by many tall trees of the pine family, out-topping the others—some singly, some in clumps; but the general colouring was uniform and sad. The hills ran up clear above the vegetation in spires of naked rock. All were strangely shaped, and the Spy-glass, which was by three or four hundred feet the tallest on the island, was likewise the strangest in configuration, running up sheer from ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... outset, heavy, miry ground and a matted, marish vegetation, greatly delayed our progress; but by little and little the hill began to steepen and become stony under foot, and the wood to change its character and to grow in a more open order. It was, indeed, a most pleasant portion of the island that we were now approaching. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... leaves and woodland vegetation forms rich and fertile soils in the forests, in which conditions are favorable for the development of new tree growth. When living tree seeds are exposed to proper amounts of moisture, warmth and air in a fertile ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... small swampy pool, which was formed of water that had been left by the inundations of the river in some old deserted channel, and which was now covered and almost concealed by some sort of mossy and floating vegetation. Curtius running headlong, and paying little heed to his steps fell into this hole, and sank in the water. Romulus supposed of course that he would be drowned there, and so turned away and went to find some other enemy. Curtius, however, succeeded in crawling ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... bravely, still it was not felt the less acutely. There were no Europeans nearer than a distance of five miles; and owing to the peculiar nature of the scenery, its extraordinary stillness, and the unusual aspect of its gigantic vegetation, it was, despite its beauty, invested to a remarkable degree with an air of desolateness and solitude. At five in the morning, my husband set out upon his journey, and at eight a negro came to inquire whether massa was ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... Rome best, in this respect, is Piranesi. His edifices, always immensely too big, his vegetation, extravagantly too luxurious, are none too much to render Rome. And those pools of blackness and immense lakes ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... brings houses and trees and ships into relief, with all their rich variety of color, the scene is memorable and full of beauty. On the green slope behind the castle, while the outline of the tropical vegetation is only stealing into view, there is hid, and yet visible, a long, low building of yellow columns, blue facade, brown gables and red tiles: if you shut out the rest of the landscape with your hands, you would say it was a picture by Fortuny. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... low-lying region of vast forests and thickets, of slow deep rivers and creeks, and of lagoons and bayous. If Northern troops want to be ambushed they couldn't come to a finer place for it. Forrest and five thousand of his wild riders might hide within rifle shot of us in this endless mass of vegetation. And so, my lads, it behooves us to be cautious with a very great caution. You will recall how we got cut up by Forrest in the ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... romance and minstrelsy, was an intellectual spring among all the nations of the West. In literature the time of invention must precede the refinements of art. Legend must go before history, and poetry before criticism. Vegetation must precede spring, and spring must precede ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... cannon, brought here to war against the natives, and now binding the messengers of the nations and of commerce to this shore. Where there are no embankments, the water comes up to the roots of the trees, and a carpet of grass, moss, and tropical vegetation grows from the salt tide ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... was to get round the lagoon, which was so overgrown with reeds and suchlike rank vegetation as grows in swamps that we couldn't tell where it began or ended; but as the sea must lay towards the west, I came to the conclusion that if we skirted the bank in the opposite direction we would soon come to the neck of the water and be able to wade across it. This we did, but it was arduous ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... almost incredible that the dreary regions of which our pictures afford a glimpse enjoyed, ages ago, a climate even warmer than our own. The chilling waves that dash against the base of the dreary North Cape once washed shores clothed in luxuriant vegetation. Stately forests stood where now only stunted shrubs struggle a few inches above ground. The mammoth, and other animals that require a warm climate, roamed in multitudes through those regions. Their bones, found in great abundance ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... difficult for an European to form an idea of the hardships that are to be encountered in a journey over such a dry plain at the hottest season of the year. All vegetation seems utterly destroyed; not a blade of grass, not a green leaf, is anywhere to be seen; and the soil, a stiff loam, reflects back the heat of the sun with redoubled force; a man may congratulate himself that, being on horseback, he is raised some feet above it. Nor is any rest from ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... near Kandy, has forwarded to me many valuable observations, not only in connection with the botany, but the zoology of the mountain region. The latter I have here embodied in their appropriate places, and those relating to plants and vegetation will appear in a future edition ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... anxiety. His nephew was a very worthy boy, and his rights should be respected. Nevertheless, the baron often longed to supersede them. Of this there was every prospect now. The lady of the house had intrusted her case to a highly celebrated simple-woman, who lived among rocks and scanty vegetation at Heddon's Mouth, gathering wisdom from the earth and from the sea tranquillity. De Wichehalse was naturally vexed a little when all this accumulated wisdom culminated in nothing grander than a somewhat undersized, and unhappily female child—one, ...
— Frida, or, The Lover's Leap, A Legend Of The West Country - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... and then, with all that, it takes away with it the fumes that you have seen produced from the candle, disperses them throughout the whole of the atmosphere, and carries them away to places where they are wanted to perform a great and glorious purpose of good to man, for the sustenance of vegetation; and thus does a most wonderful work, although you say, on examining it, "Why, it is a perfectly indifferent thing." This nitrogen in its ordinary state is an inactive element; no action short of the most intense electric force, and then in the most infinitely small degree, can cause ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday
... sand to one of loose materials; and although in the one case the cliffs are less precipitous, yet in the other they attain a higher altitude. He sees before him a long reach of coast, resembling a vast sand-bank, more than three hundred and fifty feet in height, without a trace of vegetation. Ascending to the top, rounded hillocks of blown sand are observed, with occasional clumps of trees standing out like ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the stage is nine leagues, and runs through a valley which constantly increases in fertility. All that merely struggles into vegetation on the higher mountains has here more strength and vitality. The sun shines with warmth, and there is once ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... standstill. It was delightful—that little peep of you that I got—and it only made me regret the more that it is impossible to see much of you nowadays. I cannot help feeling that there is a danger of vegetation if one limits oneself too completely to a provincial life, and, charming though Cornwall is, its very fascination causes one to forget the importance of the outer world. I fancied that I discerned signs that you yourself felt this confinement and wished ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... but to germinate and multiply, by natural means, a particular species of nature's productions; and what else does the husbandman, who consults times and seasons, and, by what might be deemed a natural magic, from the mere scattering of his hand, covers a whole plain with golden vegetation? The mysteries of our art, it is true, are deeply and darkly hidden; but it requires so much the more innocence and purity of thought, to penetrate unto them. No, father! the true alchymist must be ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... the island; on the contrary, they merely observed, that sharks were too vicious to ride; and asked me to accompany them to their town, an invitation which I gladly accepted. As I walked along I observed that the island was composed of white porous pumice stone, without the least symptoms of vegetation; not even a piece of moss could I discover—nothing but the bare pumice stone, with thousands of beautiful green lizards, about ten inches long, playing about in every part. The road was steep, and in several parts the ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... mountain-masses rise, picturesque, even fantastic, in outline. The heights are inaccessible to any foot but those of the goat and goatherd. We were astonished at seeing a troop of goats wending their way upward, for to our eyes there seemed not even the remotest trace of vegetation upon the rocks; and indeed the poor things looked as if with them existence were truly "a struggle," out of which little could be gained by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... so. Space travel is too cheap and sol-type solar systems too numerous to justify the settlement of hostile worlds. There's no point in trying to live where one has to put on special equipment every time he goes outdoors. There's no reason to settle on a world where one can't grow the kind of vegetation one's ancestors adapted themselves to some tens of thousands of generations ago. It simply ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... special indulgence which the German public have bestowed upon a small work bearing the title of 'Ansichten der Natur', which I published soon after my return from Mexico. This work treats, under general points of view, of separate branches of physical geography (such as the forms of vegetation, grassy plains, and deserts). The effect produced by this small volume has doubtlessly been more powerfully manifested in the influence it has exercised on the sensitive minds of the young, whose imaginative faculties are so strongly manifested, than ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... one. It is Italy without the enervating heat and aridity which are such serious drawbacks to the enjoyment of its other charms by Northern folk. It is Switzerland without the rigidity of its climate and the comparative poverty of the northern vegetation. You have the oleander and cactus around your feet, while the snow-peaks high above your head are rose-colored morning and evening by a southern sun. You wander amid groves of Spanish chestnut, and may hear the while the Swiss-sounding cattle-bells ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... the atmosphere and promote vegetation; then why not Love-spats promote love, as they certainly ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... Ears, Bee Hill, Fox Creek, White Rabbit—can any one mistake the animals haunting these places in earlier days? Trapper's Grove tells a story we feel, but need not rehearse. So, descriptive words in vegetation, or person, or characteristic, what volumes are contained in them! Crystal River, Little Muddy, Elm Creek, Mission Creek (a stream on which was an Indian mission), Calumet, Table Rock, Crab Orchard, Elm Creek, Lost River (the river lost in the sand), Soldier Creek, Battle Creek, Corn Creek, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... mind readers of one another's most secret thoughts. Long ago they settled all their differences in the struggles of their first ardent loving years. Henceforth one commands while the other obeys. Everything is finished between them but their lives. These go on like weary vegetation from which their children gather ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... the bungalow there was a sort of sandy stretch, where little grew in the way of vegetation, and there, Rose explained, was probably where Ponto had seen the toads. They headed toward it, the scientist eagerly looking on the ground, for a first sight of the specimens he had come ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... old road by which they were to travel ran at a short distance from the left bank of the Hugli, passing through an undulating country, interspersed with patches of low wood and scattered trees. The scenery was full of charm for Desmond: the rich vegetation; antelopes darting among the trees; flamingoes and pelicans standing motionless at the edge of the slow-gliding river; white-clad figures coming down the broad steps of the riverside ghats to bathe; occasionally the dusky ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... separation of the solids, fluids, and gases around the earth's surface, the thought involuntarily arises, how narrowly the human race escaped being surrounded with an untransparent atmosphere, which, though not greatly prejudicial to some classes of vegetation, would yet have completely vailed the whole of the starry canopy. All knowledge of the structure of the universe could then have been withheld from the inquiring spirit of man."[268] The sun, then, may have shone with all his brilliancy, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... water power, at certain points, to the factories built on its banks. The air is dim and lightless with the smoke from all these habitations and places of business. The soil in the valley (or "bottom," to use the local term) is rich; but, as the road begins to ascend, the vegetation becomes poorer; it does not flourish, it merely exists; and, instead of trees, there are only bushes and shrubs about the dwellings. Stone dykes are everywhere used in place of hedges; and what crops there are, on the patches ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... pseudo-Queen Anne, genuine George I. cottages, and frankly Edwardian kitchens, there rose a riot of delectable vegetation. White jasmine and yellow jasmine strove together like first cousins who hate each other, jackmanni and tropaeolum were rival beauties, and rambler roses climbed indifferently about, made friends where they could, and when they found themselves unable, firmly ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... could see where the old Lazar-house had been overlaid with the taste of more recent inhabitants, but, as Caleb said, no one had lived here now for a dozen years or more. The walls were smeared with green vegetation; the iron gate creaked heavily with rust. On the roof the stonecrop flourished, and the swallows had built their nests about ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... rose up, then his muscles relaxed and he seemed to brood. Michael, the cook, signalled that the meal was ready, but Van Brunt motioned back to delay. The silence hung heavy, and he fell to analyzing the forest scents, the odors of mould and rotting vegetation, the resiny smells of pine cones and needles, the aromatic savors of many camp-smokes. Twice Fairfax looked up, ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... garden of Eden could hardly have rivalled. It was a morning of the tropics, calm, serene and lovely. But two miles before them there emerged from the sea an island of mountains and valleys, luxuriant with every variety of tropical vegetation. The voyagers, weary of gazing for many weeks on the wide waste of waters, were so enchanted with the fairy scene which then met the eye, that they seemed really to believe that they had reached ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... answer is that the real drama of daily life of the settlers—the life they knew 24 hours a day—is locked in the unwritten history beneath humus and tangled vegetation of the island. Here a brass thimble from the ruins of a cottage still retains a pellet of paper to keep it on a tiny finger that wore it 300 years ago. A bent halberd in an abandoned well, a discarded sword, and a piece of armor tell again the passing of terror of ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... routine of work. We continually came across a little band of, say, twenty or thirty men and a couple of officers stationed near some culvert or bridge. Their tents were pitched on a bit of stony ground, with not a trace of vegetation near it, and here they stayed for months together, half dead from the boredom of their existence. Nevertheless such work was quite essential to the success of the campaign, for the attitude of the Dutch colonists up-country ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... the long narrow steamboats afforded a most agreeable passage down the stream of the rapid Rhone to Avignon. The autumn rains, which sometimes caused a weary march through the byroads of Normandy, had cooled the air, freshened vegetation, and made travelling in the south of France pleasant. While journeying on, every hour and every league bringing me nearer to the intended meeting, it was natural to feel some anxiety lest in such great distances to be traversed, with little or no intermediate communication, something might go wrong, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... storm, which lasted for thirty days; and when the winds abated, the hundred or more men, women, children, and slaves, found themselves among the islands of what now is named Hili-liland. There they settled—there, where nature furnishes, without labor, light and heat the year round, and vegetation is literally perpetual. They met with none of the initial difficulties of primitive peoples. They were educated, and they possessed the treasures of knowledge born of a thousand years of Roman supremacy; from the beginning they had that other ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... the salutation of the dove, Borne on the zephyr through some lonesome grove, When spring returns, and winter's chill is past, And vegetation smiles ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... were, in those days of scarcity, obliged to spend much of their time in the chase. Once, while at a noted game lick, [Footnote: These game licks were common, and were of enormous extent. Multitudes of game, through countless generations, had tramped the ground bare of vegetation, and had made deep pits and channels with their hoofs and tongues. See McAfee MSS. Sometimes the licks covered acres of ground, while the game trails leading towards them through the wood were as broad as streets, even 100 feet wide. I have myself seen small ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... prevailed all over the globe, and began their office of absorbing carbon, and storing it up for future use. Land-animals as yet were not, for the excess of carbonic acid in the atmosphere rendered it incapable of supporting animal life. But the richness of this island vegetation gradually purified the air; while the decaying plants themselves, being accumulated into vast beds and strata, and subjected, through the changes of the earth's surface, to the pressure of mighty waters, gradually formed immense ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... portion of our first day's march (16th August) the track lay along the edge of a pebbly desert, which left but a skirting of one to three miles of loam and rank vegetation between its measureless sterility and the tawny Nile waters. The small rounded pebbles and the fine sand of the Nubian wilderness were surely fashioned in some great lake or sea of a prehistoric past. Far as we were from the dervishes, a childish terror of them was ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... covered with foliage. Many are rugged and bare. Some of these are too precipitous to sustain vegetation, others are masses of quartz and granite. On the hillsides most exposed to the wind, only grass and small shrubs are able ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... of the other cannot occur without loss, the mean energy absorbed daily by the vegetable for the purpose of growth must greatly exceed that used in animal growth; so that the chemical potential energy of vegetation upon the earth is much greater than the energy of all kinds represented in the animal configurations.[1] It appears, too, that in the power possessed by the vegetable of remaining comparatively inactive, of surviving hard times by the expenditure and ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... Scottish church is deeply tainted with the principles of the Secession. These germs of evil and of revolution, speaking of them in a personal sense, cannot be purged off entirely until one generation shall have passed away. But, speaking of them as principles capable of vegetation, these germs may or may not expand into whole forests of evil, according to the accidents of coming events, whether fitted to tranquillize our billowy aspects of society; or, on the other hand, largely to fertilize the many occasions of agitation, which ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... and treading very softly. He advanced in this manner three or four hundred yards, to the very point which must have been the base of the spire of smoke—he had marked it so well that he could not be mistaken—and from his leafy covert saw a large open space entirely destitute of vegetation. He expected to see there also the remains of a camp fire, but none was visible, not a single charred ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... nearly right as that of the two varieties of the water-persicaria. Going one step further, we meet with the very interesting case of alpine plants. The vegetation of the higher regions of mountains is commonly called alpine, and the plants show a large number of common features, differentiating them from the flora of lower stations. The mountain plants have small ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... growth just mentioned, it will be very necessary to properly train the young shoots in such a manner as to ensure a neat and compact growth. All decaying vegetation, such as leaves, stems, &c., must be promptly removed, and that before they cause other leaves, &c., to become equally diseased. Nothing looks so excessively deplorable as to see what was at one time a neat bed of ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... gathered as specimens of all the wild fruit-trees of the forest: the brown beam-berries, the laburnums, and wild cherry, with their red, transparent fruit, the bluish mulberry, the orange-clustered mountain-ash. All this forest vegetation, mingling its black or purple tints with the dark, moist leaves, brought out the whiteness of the young girl's complexion, her limpid eyes, and her brown curls ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the writing, particularly in the Hebrew, is strongly contrasted; and the details of the story are not entirely harmonious. In the first narrative the order of creation is, first the earth and its vegetation, then the lower animals, then man, male and female, made in God's image. In the second narrative the order is, first the earth and its vegetation, then man, then the lower orders of animals, then woman. In the ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... the trunks still encumbered the ground which they so recently shaded. Around these dry blocks, wheat, suckers of trees, and plants of every kind, grow and intertwine in all the luxuriance of wild, untutored nature. Amidst this vigorous and various vegetation stands the house of the pioneer, or, as they call it, the log house. Like the ground about it, this rustic dwelling bore marks of recent and hasty labor; its length seemed not to exceed thirty feet, its height ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... compared to those in India. On the river there are pied Kingfishers. On the flooded land and especially on the mud-flats round it there are large numbers of sandpipers, Kentish and ringed plovers, stints and stilts, terns and gulls, ducks and teal, egrets and cranes: but as there is not a blade of vegetation within a mile of them there are no facilities for observation, still less ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... the roots of great trees whose branches stretch far out over its surface. Occasionally, the mountains recede and form a vast amphitheatre, clad in primeval forest, and there are islands on which vegetation runs riot in its unbridled luxury, and weaves festoons of gay creepers to conceal the gaunt skeletons of the endless piles of dead drift-wood. All is in the most glorious green—a very extravagance of fresh and brilliant color—relieved with the bright purples and tender leafing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... of us. Those few simple plants which still, in the primitive way, fertilize themselves, are not enough and are too weak to carry on the vegetation of the earth, and without the insects and birds and the wind we never should have been born at all; for they are necessary to make the plants reproduce their kinds and grow, and the plants are necessary food for us as well as for the ...
— Every Girl's Book • George F. Butler
... with a cultivating hand, preserved to his country the wealth which it derived from benignant skies and a prolific soil—if, ignorant of all that had happened in the short interval, and observing the wide and general devastation of fields unclothed and brown; of vegetation burned up and extinguished; of villages depopulated and in ruins; of temples unroofed and perishing; of reservoirs broken down and dry, this stranger should ask, "what has thus laid waste this beautiful and opulent land; what monstrous madness has ravaged ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... people. His first impression probably is, what a bleak and barren coast! but, should he allow his thoughts to wander back to the remote past, he can imagine how in ages gone by this may have been an Eden with its luxuriant vegetation and a much milder climate. The huge mammoth roamed freely through the forest, along with many other animals that have long since passed into the forgotten history of long ago. Then through the changes of nature the warming ocean currents were ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... to the nature of the vegetation on the margin of a stream or lake, or to artificial works ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the future course of our travellers was down hill, but in some respects it was more toilsome than their uphill journey had been. The scenery changed considerably in respect of the character of its vegetation, and was even more rugged than heretofore, while the trees were larger and the underwood more dense. Many a narrow escape had Will and his friends during the weeks that followed, and many a wild adventure, all of which, however, terminated happily—except one, ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... permanent crops: 0% meadows and pastures: 0% forest and woodland: 0% other: 100% (largely covered by permanent ice and snow with some sparse vegetation consisting of ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... proper and literal sense of the Latin and the languages derived from Latin, it signifies that which animates. Thus people have spoken of the soul of men, of animals, sometimes of plants, to signify their principal of vegetation and life. In pronouncing this word, people have never had other than a confused idea, as when it is said in Genesis—"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... side of the trail great patches of rice-grass had been flattened from the force of the wind and rain, and the air was filled with the sweet smell of vegetation drying in the sun. As she approached the other side, the blue sky curved down to meet the ocean on a far straight line. The yellow-green of the sea was set off by astonishing areas of clearest cobalt blue, and the flying spray from combers breaking for miles out on the North Shoals, caught the ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... the whole splendid continent of Africa opens before us and our children. Our nation shall roll the tide of civilization and Christianity along its shores, and plant there mighty republics, that, growing with the rapidity of tropical vegetation, shall ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... a forest you begin by dividing its vegetation into two classes; on the one hand the full-grown trees, the large or medium-sized oaks, beeches and aspens, and, on the other, the saplings and the undergrowth. In like manner, in estimating society, you ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... "the America and untravelled parts of truth," lay for them the true prospect of science, like the new world itself to a geographical discoverer such as Raleigh. And welcome as one of the minute hints of that country far ahead of them, the strange bird, or floating fragment of unfamiliar vegetation, which met those early navigators, there was a certain fantastic experiment, in which, as was alleged, Paracelsus had been lucky. For Browne and others it became the crucial type of the kind of agency in nature ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... lights, but never warms, is a mystery; where there is a day that lasts fifty-two English days, and a night that lasts thirty-eight; where there is no spring and no autumn, but a faint semblance of summer for three months, and then winter; where a few dwarf willows and stunted grass form all the vegetation; and where, at a certain distance below the surface, there is frost as old as the "current epoch" of the geologist. But by way of compensation, reindeer and elks, brown and black bears, foxes and squirrels, abound; ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... found any sign that men had stopped even temporarily upon this shore, though, of course, he knew that so quickly does the rank vegetation of the tropics erase all but the most permanent of human monuments that he might be in error in ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... example, that the endless variety of colour which we see in plants is developed only by the rays of the sun, is to know a truism sublime by its very comprehensiveness. The cause of the whiteness of celery is nothing more than the want of light in its vegetation, and in order that this effect may be produced, the plant is almost wholly covered with earth; the tops of the leaves alone being suffered to appear above ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... Frederic E. Plant Succession. An analysis of the development of vegetation. Carnegie Institution ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... bushes along the borders of the plains. The situation was desperate. He looked, and his eyes rested upon a pile of large boulders several yards away. These were heaped upon a great flat portion of rock, whose surface was devoid of the least vestige of vegetation. To get the injured man there was his only hope. But when he offered the suggestion, ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... good joke; for instance, and one often perpetrated on board ship, to stand talking to a man in a dark night watch, and all the while be cutting the buttons from his coat. But once off, those buttons never grow on again. There is no spontaneous vegetation ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... soil! Next to moral conversion, and the reclaiming to their noble uses the perverted powers of human nature, there is nothing does one's heart so much good as the sight of waste and barren land reclaimed to the uses and wants of man; to see vegetation clothe the idle space, and the cursed and profitless soil teeming with the means of life and bringing forth abundant produce to requite the toil that fertilized it; to see the wilderness crowned with bounteous increase, and the blessing ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... many wounds. The recollection of it all was very clear now, very poignant: the bright winding river, there broadening at its ford; the wild and lonely aspect of the country round about. On the farther bank the long lofty ridge of rock, trodden and licked bare of vegetation for ages by the countless passing buffalo; blackened by rain and sun; only the more desolate for a few dwarfish cedars and other timber scant and dreary to the eye. Encircling this hill in somewhat the shape of a horseshoe, a deep ravine heavily wooded and rank with grass and underbrush. The Kentuckians, ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... final act of vegetation is the production of seed, after the performance of which function many plants, having accomplished their destined purpose, perish. The grasses (which include the cereals) are annuals, or plants which have but a year's existence, consequently ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... felt in Sweden and Denmark. The tribunals were closed a considerable time. The worst thing was, that it completely thawed for seven or eight days, and then froze again as rudely as before. This caused the complete destruction of all kinds of vegetation—even fruit-trees; and others of the most hardy kind, were destroyed. The violence of the cold was such, that the strongest elixirs and the most spirituous liquors broke their bottles in cupboards of rooms with fires in them, and surrounded by ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... hacked and furrowed in their outline, offered an uninviting prospect. There was here no Eldorado such as, farther south, met the covetous gaze of a Cortez or a Pizarro, no land of promise luxuriant with the vegetation of the tropics such as had greeted the eyes of Columbus at his first vision of the Indies. A storm-bound coast, a relentless climate and a reluctant soil-these were the treasures of the New World as first known to the ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... Scarce a day passed without heavy squalls of wind, which hurried down with redoubled velocity from the mountains, and strong showers of rain, which retarded all our occupations. The air was commonly cold and raw, vegetation made slow advances, and the birds were only found in vallies sheltered from the chilling southern blast. This kind of weather, in all likelihood, prevails throughout the winter, and likewise far into the midst of summer, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... caloric rays of the sun and the electric blue light in stimulating the glands of the body, the nervous system generally, and the secretive organs of man and animals." He also states that he finds that vegetation is vastly improved by the transmitted blue light. These alleged re-discoveries—for the General only claims to have devised the method of utilizing them—were extensively promulgated through the press early in 1871. Subsequently, in 1876, General Pleasonton published a book on the ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... off, a range of low brown hills, covered with a stunted vegetation, runs parallel with the shore—along their undulating sides, angular spires of granite project through the parched and scanty soil; while on their highest brow one solitary giant stands, resembling ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... islands we also found a number of grey turtle-doves, but no other animals. Nor is there any vegetation beyond brushwood, and little or no grass. This and what has hereinbefore been related is all that we have experienced and ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... interpreted these bonfires as mainly sun charms, and he sees in the Balder myth, and in the peasant customs all over Europe, which he asserts illustrate this myth, an ancient ritual which originally marked the beginning of the new year, when the tree spirit, or spirit of vegetation, was burned, the special reasons why the deity of vegetation should die by fire being that as "light and heat are necessary to vegetable growth, on the principle of sympathetic magic, by subjecting the personal representative ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... of progress, civilization and national intercourse, while disavowing all care about all other nations in the world. No citizen of the United States has, or ever will have, the wish to see this country degraded to the rotting vegetation of a Paraguay, or the mummy existence of a Japan and China. The feeling of self-dignity, and the expansiveness of that enterprizing spirit which is congenial to freemen, would revolt against the very idea of such a degrading ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... himself, will doubt for a moment that the Goshen of America is to be found in the sandy valleys and upon the pine-clad hills of St. Croix? (Laughter.) Who will have the hardihood to rise in his seat on this floor and assert that, excepting the pine bushes, the entire region would not produce vegetation enough in ten years to fatten a grasshopper? (Great laughter.) Where is the patriot who is willing that his country shall incur the peril of remaining another day without the amplest railroad connection with such an inexhaustible mine of agricultural wealth? (Laughter.) Who will answer ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... skirmishers extending for several hundred yards to both sides of the road, and deployed at intervals of from 10 to 50 yards. A column may thus protect itself when passing through country covered with high corn or similar vegetation. In such case, the vegetation forms a natural protection from rifle fire beyond ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... noon at an altitude of well above seven thousand feet. In a grassy open space they left their horses; King carried their lunch bundle and they went on on foot. Along the frothing creek, along the mountain-side through a wild country of dwarfed vegetation. She began to understand a thing he had told her; that the Sierra is the land of dwarf and giant. Pine and cedar and, in one spot he knew, mighty sequoia piercing at the sky; and here pine, dwarfed, pygmied until it was but a mat of twisted, broken twigs carpeting the heights. ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... circumference and a couple of feet high was the usual growth to which they attained, though at the back of the run they were much larger. Spaniards grow in clusters, or patches, among the tussocks on the plains, and constitute a most unpleasant feature of the vegetation of the country. Their leaves are as firm as bayonets, and taper at the point to the fineness of a needle, but are not nearly so easily broken as a needle would be. No horse will face them, preferring a jump at ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... of books whose use was free to all who visited the settlement. It stood high on a hill in a grove of silver-birches and looked upon the Western Mountains; and it always seemed to me an ideal dwelling for such a bachelor-scholar. Here in May and June he became almost one with the resurgent vegetation. Here, in October, he was a witness of the jewelled pageant of the dying foliage, and saw the hillsides reeking, as it were, and aflame with ruby and gold and emerald and topaz. One September day in 1900, at the ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... shows, for instance, that the little layer of soil on the surface of the earth from which plants and animals derive their nutriment was, before the advent of man, replenished quite as fast as it was washed away, but that after man had put his plow into it and had taken off the protective mat of vegetation, he unconsciously despoiled the accumulation of ages. "In a plowed field, an hour's torrential rain may wash off to the sea more than would pass off in a thousand years in the slow process of erosion which the natural ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk |
