"Silt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brought from Gaul and Britain, quartered in the capitol on Mount Silpius at the city's southern limit. The riches of the East, and of Egypt, flowed through, leaving their deposit as a river drops its silt; were ever- increasing. One quarter, walled off, hummed with foreign traders from as far away as India, who lodged at the travelers' inns or haunted the temples, the wine-shops and the lupanars. In that quarter, too, there were barracks, ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... the interior," he continued, "is formed by a vast alluvial deposit carried down as silt by the Mississippi. East of this the range of the Alleghanies, nowhere more than eight thousand feet in height, forms a secondary or subordinate axis from which the watershed ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... massacred. The lake set free Flowed forth in many rivers: to the west Aeas, (18) a gentle stream; nor stronger flows The sire of Isis ravished from his arms; And Achelous, rival for the hand Of Oeneus' daughter, rolls his earthy flood (19) To silt the shore beside the neighbouring isles. Evenus (20) purpled by the Centaur's blood Wanders through Calydon: in the Malian Gulf Thy rapids fall, Spercheius: pure the wave With which Amphrysos (21) irrigates the meads Where once Apollo served: Anaurus (22) flows ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... soil by erosion occurs where run-off waters are not obstructed by forest growth. Silt, sand, and every other kind of soil are swept from their natural positions and spritted away by the foaming waters as they surge down the steep slopes. The stream or river which is flooded by these rushing waters roars down its narrow channel, tearing loose and undermining the ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... experiment is made very carefully in a proper way this material can be separated from the pure clay. It is called silt, but really there are a number of silts, some almost like clay and some almost like sand; they shade one into ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... the Sawdust Pile. When the necessity for more dredger-work developed, in order to keep the deep channel of the Skookum from filling, he had the pipes from the dredger run out to the Sawdust Pile and covered the unsightly spot with six feet of rich river-silt up to the level of ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... honourable judge flatly refused, although he had a good well, besides a pond, under fence, covering several acres; his wife, however, reflecting, perhaps, that her stores were rather short of coffee or silt, entered into a rapid discussion with her worse half, and by-and-by that respectable couple of honourables agreed to sell water to us ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... surface, by accretion becomes so heavily laden with earthy matter that it sinks to the bottom. This precipitation of drift has taken place to such an extent, that the bed of the Missouri is in many places completely covered to a great depth by immense fields of logs. Of all the silt thrown into the Mississippi, the Missouri furnishes ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... outscourings^; off scum; caput mortuum [Lat.], residuum, sprue, fecula [Lat.], clinker, draff^; scurf, scurfiness^; exuviae [Lat.], morphea; fur, furfur^; dandruff, tartar. riffraff; vermin, louse, flea, bug, chinch^. mud, mire, quagmire, alluvium, silt, sludge, slime, slush, slosh, sposh [U.S.]. spawn, offal, gurry [U.S.]; lientery^; garbage, carrion; excreta &c 299; slough, peccant humor, pus, matter, suppuration, lienteria^; faeces, feces, excrement, ordure, dung, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... a half dozen trails of large parties, and he felt sure that, according to arrangement, they were converging on the Ohio, at the point where the Licking emptied the waters and silt of the Kentucky woods into the larger stream. Timmendiquas, no doubt, would be there, and Henry's heart throbbed a little faster at the thought that he would meet ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... won first place were grown by Mr. Duke Hughes, of Coal Run, Noble County, O. He states the tree is about 50 years old and stands in well-limed permanent pasture near the crest of a ridge, in Muskingum silt loam. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... drawing away the main volume of that double-mouthed river. The distance from Baghdad to Basra is about 300 miles, and the area traversed by the Shatt-el-Arab is slowly extending at the rate of a mile every thirty years or so, as a result of the steady accumulation of silt and mud carried down by the Tigris and Euphrates. When Sumeria was beginning to flourish, these two rivers had separate outlets, and Eridu, the seat of the cult of the sea god Ea, which now lies 125 miles inland, was a seaport at the head ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... man. Here the Wady 'Afr takes the name of "El-Bad." Sweeping from west to east, it is deflected to a north-south line, roughly speaking, by the gate of the Shigdawayn, twin-hills standing nearly east and west of one another. Now become a broad, well-defined, tree-dotted bed, with stiff silt banks, here and there twenty to twenty-five feet high, it runs on a meridian for about a mile, including the palm-orchard and the camping-ground. It then turns the west end of the Jebel el-Safr, a mass of gypsum on the left bank, and it ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... state of decomposition. The jaw would thus be deposited immediately, while the rest of the body would float and drift away altogether, ultimately reaching the sea, and perhaps becoming destroyed. The jaw becomes covered up and preserved in the river silt, and thus it comes that we have such a curious circumstance as that of the lower jaws in the Stonesfield slates. So that, you see, faulty as these layers of stone in the earth's crust are, defective as they necessarily are as a record, the account of contemporaneous vital phenomena ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... earth Was seen before mankind had birth; Strange monsters basked them in the sun, Behemoth, armored glyptodon, And in the dawn's unpractised ray The transient dodo winged its way; Then, by degrees, through silt and slough, We reached Berlin—I don't know how. The good Professor's monotone Had turned me into senseless stone Instanter, but that near me sat Hypatia in her new spring hat, Blue-eyed, intent, with lips whose bloom Lighted the heavy-curtained ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... humus. The nitrogen of the soil is one of the constituents of this humus or other organic matter. It is not contained in the mineral particles of the soil. On the other hand the other six elements of plant food are contained largely in the mineral part of the soil, as the clay, silt, and sand. thus the iron, calcium, magnesium, and potassium, all of which are called abundant elements, are contained in the mineral matter, and usually in considerable amounts, while they are found in the organic matter in very small proportion. The phosphorus and sulfur are found ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... Buchanan, a zealous antiquary, writing in 1855, informs us that in the course of the eight years preceding that date, no less than seventeen canoes had been dug out of this estuarine silt [of the valley of the Clyde], and that he had personally inspected a large number of them before they were exhumed. Five of them lay buried in silt under the streets of Glasgow, one in a vertical position with the prow uppermost, ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... a matter of wriggling on down the drain. And wriggling was not impossible, though excessively difficult and exhausting. The drain was nowhere choked with silt, but all along was furred with ooze and there was more than an inch of ooze along its bottom. In this, hitching myself forward on my elbows by violent contortions, I slipped back almost as much as I ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... significance of the community reaction is especially well shown in the case of leaf mold and duff. The leaf litter is again only the total of the fallen leaves of all the individuals but its formation is completely dependent upon the community. The reaction of plants upon wind-borne sand and silt-laden waters illustrates the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... and drear. Clouds hung heavily in the sky and the moorland was wrapt in a fine mist so peculiar to that district. The roads were heavy, and one could hear the silt crush beneath her ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... hundred and seventy miles north of the shore that takes their wash to-day. Slowly, through the centuries of that age of all beginnings, the river, cutting canyons and valleys in the north and carrying southward its load of silt, built from the east across the gulf to Lone Mountain a ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... than five feet of water over her conning-tower, so that even a torpedo-boat, let alone a destroyer, would hit it if she came over. But nothing hit anything. The search was conducted on scientific principles while they sat on the silt and suffered. Then the commander heard the rasp of a wire trawl sweeping over his hull. It was not a nice sound, but there happened to be a couple of gramophones aboard, and he turned them both on to drown it. And in due time that boat got home with everybody's ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... found a 60-foot boat just above Upper Slough Landing, anchored off the sandbar. This was a notorious whiskey boat, and just below it was a flight of steps up the steep bank. No plantation darky ever used those steps. He would rather scramble in the loose silt and risk his neck than ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... Tejend, Kohik, and where the Kalmuks feed their sheep, The northern Sir; and this great Oxus stream, The yellow Oxus, by whose brink I die." Then, with a heavy groan, Rustum bewail'd:— "Oh, that its waves were flowing over me! Oh, that I saw its grains of yellow silt Roll tumbling in the current o'er my head!" But, with a grave mild voice, Sohrab replied:— "Desire not that, my father! thou must live. For some are born to do great deeds, and live, As some are born to be obscured, and die. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... looked not a little anxious. But their leader kept steadily on. The sand was hard enough and offered sufficient resistance to the broad hoof of a horse, but if one stood still for a minute or so, it began gradually to silt up and bury it. It was a horrible place. When at noon that devil's slough resolved itself into a comparatively narrow strip, and Dorothy saw that they could easily have left it, she began to understand their reason for keeping on such dangerous ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... along the wet gully, deep with silt and frost-splintered rock, she toiled, the heavy gasping of men behind her. Twice she was jerked to a ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... river had cut into some of these mounds, exposing brick vaults, some so low as to be under water part of the time, and we wonder if the fact does not also record a slow subsidence of the delta plain under the ever increasing load of river silt. ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... Roger the Dane laid here the first stone of his pirates' stronghold, to protect his port of Harfleur, the salt water must have dashed right up against the chalky cliff; but the centuries during which the silt of the Vosges had been carried down the river and piled up against the rocks at its mouth, had driven the castle inland for an eighth of a mile. Melcourt-le-Danois which had once looked down into the very waves now dominated in the ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... some of you look at me as though I had used a strange word. Silt is the deposit of mud, sand, or earth of any kind carried up and down streams by the tide or other current. But the river engineers here are constantly removing it; the course is kept open, and the Hoogly pilots ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... uncertain whether he had crossed the Divide at all, Mackenzie ordered the canoe down this river. Snowy peaks were on every side. Glaciers lay along the mountain tarns, icy green from the silt of the glacier grinding over rock; and the river was hemmed in by shadowy canons with roaring cascades that compelled frequent portage. Mackenzie wanted to walk ahead, in order to lighten the canoe and look out for danger; but fear had got in the marrow ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... Late Lat. barra, origin unknown), in physical geography, a ridge of sand or silt crossing an estuary under water or raised by wave action above sea-level, forming an impediment to navigation. When a river enters a tidal sea its rate of flow is checked and the material it carries in suspension is deposited in a shifting bar crossing the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... every river in the Punjab is no small matter,' said her husband. 'For me, a stream that leaves good silt on my land suffices, and I thank Bhumia, the God of the Home-stead.' He shrugged one knotted, ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... numerous fossil bones, belonging chiefly to the mastodon, and extinct species of the horse, deer, and llama. They were imbedded in the middle of an unstratified cliff, four hundred feet high, of very compact silt or trachytic clay, free from stones, and resting on a hard quartzoze sandstone. In the bed of the stream which runs through the ravine (charged with nitrate of soda) are some igneous rocks. The bones were ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... River, with fine opportunities for fishing and trading; for this river, which in the North divides the two states of Vermont and New Hampshire, flows through Massachusetts and Connecticut, where it pours rich deposits of silt ...
— Three Young Pioneers - A Story of the Early Settlement of Our Country • John Theodore Mueller
... loved, the River built, Wealth sought and Kings adventured life to hold. Hail, England! I am Asia — Power on silt, Death in my hands, ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... The marsh is about half a mile wide, and something like a mile and a half long, extending southward into Jersey City. The surface is a network of matted vegetation and roots perhaps five feet deep, and under that lies a mass of blue clay or river silt 100 feet or more in depth. The original tidal flow over these marsh lands has been obstructed by viaducts for railroads and streets, leaving only two natural outlets, a sluice way at Fifteenth street on the north, and on ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... are found above the solid rocks, in the form of gravel, silt, rolled pebbles, etc., should be carefully distinguished from the solid strata upon which they repose. And the more ancient of these loose materials, found on the sides or summits of hills, etc., should be distinguished from the recent mud, sand, and gravel, brought down by land-floods, ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... succession of half-circles, hills to the right, with the stream curving into a shadowy lake, or swerving out again in a bend to the low left; or high-walled sandstone bluffs to the left sending the water wandering out to the low silt shore on the right. Not river of the Thousand Islands, like the St Lawrence, but river of Countless Islands, ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... room will some day again be shrouded under a forest growth. The mechanical city will be neglected, tumbled into ruins, buried beneath the silt of the passing centuries. The sun will slowly rise—a giant dull red ball, burning out, cooling. And the Earth will cool. Humans, perhaps, will have passed decadence and reverted to savagery. Perhaps the polar ice-caps will again come down, and ice ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... a sort of strange little gully, where the silt had washed down more heavily during the period of erosion than at any other place. Looking up, the boys could see that it afforded a steep but accessible avenue by means of which an agile person could ascend the otherwise impregnable ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... natural reservoirs. By restraining the streams in flood and replenishing them in drought they make possible the use of waters otherwise wasted. They prevent the soil from washing, and so protect the storage reservoirs from filling up with silt. Forest conservation is therefore an essential ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt
... there last winter, and the ashes had never been removed, and now the light lay, yellow and vivid, on a red clinker of coal and a charred piece of stick. A piece of glossy white paper had been flung in the untidy grate, and in the hollow curve of it a thin silt of black dust had gathered—the light showed it plainly. All these things the boy marked and was subtly aware of their unpleasantness. He was forced to read to escape the sense of them. But it was words, words, ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... almost milk-like character, as it twisted in and out of the tortuous canon on its turbulent journey to the sea. But Fairchild failed to notice either that or the fact that ancient, age-whitened water wheels had begun to appear here and there, where gulch miners, seekers after gold in the silt of the creek's bed, had abandoned them years before; that now and then upon the hills showed the gaunt scars of mine openings,—reminders of dreams of a day long past; or even the more important fact that in the distance, softened by the mellowing rays of a dying sun, ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... roots were thick and the silt and sand Were gathered day by day, Till not a furlong out from land A shoal had barred ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... crowned with the ruins of ancient strongholds, and broken by the low hills that border the plain of Issus. The plain is watered by the Cydnus (Tarsus Chai), the Sarus (Sihun) and the Pyramus (Jihun), each of which brings down much silt. The Sarus now enters the sea almost due south of Tarsus, but there are clear indications that at one period it joined the Pyramus, and that the united rivers ran to the sea west of Kara-tash. Such appears to have ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... falls were sheer, they had to disembark and walk along little portages through the green raspberry bushes. The prints of great hooves in the black silt betrayed where wild animals had paused to drink. They stopped for lunch on a warm rock beside a singing waterfall, and at last they turned an elbow in the stream and with suddenly widened vision beheld the lake's sapphire expanse and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... water channels and reservoirs become clotted with silt and mud, a side effect of ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... being greatly affected, a far greater amount of wearing and knocking about when being transported by the agency of currents and rivers, than will a softer substance, such as clay. An equal amount of this wearing action upon clay will reduce it to a fine impalpable silt. The grains of sand, however, will still remain of an appreciable average size, and where both sand and clay are being transported to the sea in one and the same stream, the clay will be transported to long distances, whilst ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... is generally thought, is trapped beneath the ice floes or embedded in the deep silt of the polar sea-floor, her margin of safety has passed the deadline, it was pointed out to-day by her designers. Through special rectifiers aboard, her store of air can be kept capable of sustaining life for a theoretical period of thirty-one days. And exactly thirty-one days have now elapsed ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... the higher regions, and then a much greater amount of blue-green glacier-ice glances down into the valley, many knobs and depressions are laid bare which one otherwise sees only covered with white, the muddy edge of the ice comes to view with its deposit of rocks, silt, and slime, and far greater volumes of water than usual rush into the valley. This continues until it gradually becomes autumn again, the waters grow less, and one day a gray continuous gentle rain spreads over all the valley. Then, after the mists have dispersed about the summits, the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... it broke up this layer of stalagmite and washed it away, as well as large portions of the breccia below, and after the floods had ceased, occasionally inundations still threw down layers of mud and silt. This accumulation is known as cave earth, and is the layer containing the numerous remains of the Cave-men. Here the explorers were not only struck with the large number of implements, but at once noticed ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... soft mud, covered over on the top with most deceiving soft green moss which looked solid, but which quaked to every step and gave to the slightest weight. Many muskegs west of Edmonton have been formed by beavers damming the natural drainage of a small river for so many centuries that the silt and humus washed down from the mountains have formed a surface of ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... soil in which the McKinster tree is growing, taken at a depth of 6 inches, was tested in July 1950. The results specify that the soil is mostly silt with an average amount of organic matter and that evidence indicates it to contain ashes. The acidity is specified as "neutral", potash "high", and phosphate "low". No mention is made of available nitrogen; however, the dark green color of the leaves and vigorousness ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... processes above described Is a rock powder containing a great variety of sizes of soil grains intermingled with clay. The larger soil grains are called sand; the smaller, silt, and those that are so small that they do not settle from quiet water after 24 hours are ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... among the alders lie their derelict foundations, The beams wherein they trusted and the plinths whereon they built— My rulers and their treasure and their unborn populations, Dead, destroyed, aborted, and defiled with mud and silt! ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... S. Farron, Ashton-under-Lyne. The general appearance of this arrangement is as in Fig. 1 or Fig. 3, the center view, Fig. 2, showing what is the cardinal feature of the trap, viz., that it contains a collector for silt, sand, or sediment which is not, as in most other traps, carried out through the valve with the efflux of water. The escape valve also is made very large, so that while the trap may be made short, or, in other words, the expansion ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various
... to make an exact chronological statement throwing light on the length of the various prehistoric periods, the most notable have been those by M. Morlot, on the accumulated strata of the Lake of Geneva; by Gillieron, on the silt of Lake Neufchatel; by Horner, in the delta deposits of Egypt; and by Riddle, in the delta of the Mississippi. But while these have failed to give anything like an exact result, all these investigations together point to the central truth, so amply established, of the vast antiquity of man, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the air and pawing the ground. Boyton raised his revolver and fired. The great head swayed from side to side and the noble animal dropped to his knees. Thinking the shot was fatal, Paul seized the hunting knife and sprang forward to silt its throat, having first flung a lot of brush on the smoldering fire. As the flames shot up, the elk rose to his feet and commenced to retreat slowly across the bar. Fully expecting to see him fall at every step, Paul followed as fast as the cumbersome rubber pants would permit. Instead ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... lopsided little caravan. The pack animals were loaded into one truck and didn't like it. We had another stripped-down truck which carried supplies. The ancient stone roads, rutted and gullied here and there with the flood-waters and silt of decades, had not been planned for any travel other than the feet of men or beasts. We passed tiny villages and isolated country estates, and a few of the solitary towers where the matrix mechanics worked alone with the secret sciences of Darkover, ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... the Level, called the Old Nene. Below the point of junction of these rivers with the Wash, and still more to seaward, was South Holland Sluice, through which the waters of the South Holland Drain entered the estuary. At that point a great mass of silt had accumulated, which tended to choke up the mouths of the rivers further inland, rendering their navigation difficult and precarious, and seriously interrupting the drainage of the whole lowland district traversed by both the Old and New Nene. Indeed the sands were accumulating ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... He must treble bless with shade, In primal wastes set precious seed of rapture and of pain; All the strongholds that he built For the powers of greed and guilt— He must strew their bastions down the sea and choke their towers with silt; He must make the temples clean for the gods to come again, And lift the lordly cities under skies without ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... the Highlands, and of which the remains, if found in England or the Low country, would have been regarded by the antiquary as belonging to very remote periods. During the previous winter I had read a little work descriptive of an ancient ship, supposed to be Danish, which had been dug out of the silt of an English river, and which, among other marks of antiquity, exhibited seams caulked with moss—a peculiarity which had set at fault, it was said, the modern ship-carpenter, in the chronology of his art, as he was unaware that there had ever been a time when moss was used for such a ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... girls really liked it better, or whether they only imagined they did, is a question. Certainly their lives were much more grey and dreary now that the grey clay had ceased to spatter its mud and silt its dust over the premises. They did not quite realize how they missed the shrieking, shouting lasses, whom they had known all their ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... the boys betook themselves, treading the way gingerly over the tenacious but slippery surface. Will pointed to a half barrel sunk level in the ooze. It was full to the brim with fine silt. ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... double kimonos. During the middle of the day, however, I was glad to walk with my jacket over my arm, and many little boys and girls were running about naked. The region visited had a naturally well-drained dark soil, composed of river silt, of volcanic dust and of humus from buried vegetation, and it went down to a depth beyond the need of the longest daikon (giant radish). Sweet potatoes and taro were still on the ground, and large areas, ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... they did not give their sanction to the idea that the statue was a petrifaction, but Professor Hall was induced to say: "To all appearance, the statue lay upon the gravel when the deposition of the fine silt or soil began, upon the surface of which the forests have grown for succeeding generations. Altogether it is the most remarkable object brought to light in this country, and, although not dating back to the stone age, is, nevertheless, deserving ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... are sitting there, on one side, behind a screen. Triumphant shouts of Bande Mataram come nearer: and to them I am thrilling through and through. Suddenly a stream of barefooted youths in turbans, clad in ascetic ochre, rushes into the quadrangle, like a silt-reddened freshet into a dry river-bed at the first burst of the rains. The whole place is filled with an immense crowd, through which Sandip Babu is borne, seated in a big chair hoisted on the shoulders of ten ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... covering of yellow silt away and adjusted the instrument's controls as best he could, centering it on where Judd's craft had last been. Then he peered through—and saw that which ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... of the Earth is very great appears from what we have already reviewed. The sediments of the past are many miles in collective thickness: yet the feeble silt of the rivers built them all from base to summit. They have been uplifted from the seas and piled into mountains by movements so slow that during all the time man has been upon the Earth but little change would have been visible. ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... will be free from the lighter silt which now finds its way to the sea; slowly filling up the river-mouth harbor, and finally destroying the commerce of the city which depends upon it. In this way, every individual, child or adult, who plants a tree, aids directly in the restoring ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... are continually in view from one angle to another as one pursues the river trail, and come constantly nearer and nearer. All the streams that are confluent with the Tanana on its left bank are glacial streams draining the high ice of these mountains. They come down laden thick with silt, at times foaming torrents, at times merely trickling watercourses that seam with numerous small runnels the wide deltas at their mouths. The tributaries of the right bank flow for the most part through heavily ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... corn for themselves, whether nature would or nature wouldn't; and, in order to grow it under such very unfavourable circumstances of soil and climate, they terraced off the entire hillside, by catching the silt as it washed slowly down, and keeping it in place ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... you found—as you will actually find along some English shores—under the sand hills, perhaps a bed of earth with shells and bones; under that a bed of peat; under that one of blue silt; under that a buried forest, with the trees upright and rooted; under that another layer of blue silt full of roots and vegetable fibre; perhaps under that again another old land surface with trees again growing in it; and ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... crude oil consists of carbon and hydrogen, though it also contains varying quantities of moisture, sulphur, nitrogen, arsenic, phosphorus and silt. The moisture contained may vary from less than 1 to over 30 per cent, depending upon the care taken to separate the water from the oil in pumping from the well. As in any fuel, this moisture affects the available heat of the oil, and in contracting for ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... stronger gusts duplicate the dastardly deed of the first wingless wizard of the plains, and the hapless voyager is left gasping. Almost immediately there are to be seen the regular "desert devils," as they are called, bringing a dozen or more whirling columns of yellow silt rapidly through the air, each pirouetting on one foot, assuming meanwhile all sorts of ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... would greatly aid the tidal currents cutting down the passes between the mountains just before, and to the level of, the stationary periods. The currents in the fiords in T. del Fuego in a narrow crooked part are often most violent; in other parts they seem to silt up. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Fine silt, brought down in suspension by a muddy river and deposited to form the Delta when the river reaches the sea, ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... hammer pile-driving machine with me. I submitted them to Mr. Baker, and he saw its importance in a moment. "That," he 'said, "is the very thing that I want to enable me to complete my contract satisfactorily." Thousands of enormous piles had to be driven down into the deep silt of the Shore; and to have driven them down by the old system of pile-driving would have occupied a long time, and would also have ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... portion of Egypt has been deposited from the waters of that river. A natural register thus re-enforces the written records, and both together compose a body of evidence not to be gainsaid. Thus the depth of muddy silt accumulated round the pedestals of monuments is an irreproachable index of their age. In the eminent position he occupied, Eusebius might succeed in perverting the received book-chronology; but he had no power to make the endless trade-wind that sweeps over the tropical Pacific ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... especially in the dry interior of Australia, to a slight depression of the ground varying in size from a few yards to a mile in length, where the deposit of fine silt prevents the water from sinking into the ground as rapidly ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... heights they saw the waters Of the Bay of San Francisco Lying crystal-clear and purple. Then no Sacramento River Poured its flood of silt into it, For a range of hills continued, All unbroken, from Diablo To the distant smoking mountain Which ...
— The Legends of San Francisco • George W. Caldwell
... canal between the Nile and the Red Sea, which had been originally constructed by Seti I. and Ramesses II., but had been allowed to fall into disrepair. The Nile mud and the desert sand had combined to silt it up. Neco commenced excavations on a large scale, following the line of the old cutting, but greatly widening it, so that triremes might meet in it and pass each other, without shipping their oars. After a time, however, he felt compelled to desist, without effecting his purpose, owing to ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... and ran along parallel with the coast. Charmian was at the wheel. Martin was at the engine, ready to throw on the propeller. A narrow silt of an opening showed up suddenly. Through the glasses I could see the seas breaking clear across. Henry, the Rapa man, looked with troubled eyes; so did Tehei, the ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... D. There had been a forest fire: so brief a thing we had not noticed it is we passed. The trees were denuded over a widespread area; the naked blackened trunks stood stripped of smaller branches and foliage. I think that the fire had occurred the previous autumn; in the silt of ashes and charred branches with which the ground was strewn, already a new pale-green ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... pollutants, silt, not only comes from the land but is the land, most often good topsoil, washing away toward the sea. Even under pristine conditions streams are likely to run somewhat muddy after storms; it is a natural phenomenon, a ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... of its commerce to Venice precisely the same questions are in course of debate which again and again, ever since Venice was a city, have put her senate at pause—namely, how to hold in check the continually advancing morass formed by the silt brought down by the Alpine rivers. Is it not strange that for at least six hundred years the Venetians have been contending with those rivers at their mouths—that is to say, where their strength has become wholly irresistible—and never once thought ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... water was ejected, carrying with it large quantities of sand and silt, and so abundantly that every stream-bed, even though generally dry in summer, was flooded. By the passage of the water, some part of the fissures was often enlarged into a round hole of considerable size, ending in a craterlet at the surface. Certain belts within the fissured ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... has not the solidity of soft chalk. Marse Harris Dickson, who knows more about Vicksburg—and also about negroes, common law, floods, funny stories, geology, and rivers—than any other man in Mississippi, tells me that this marl was deposited by the river, in the form of silt, centuries ago, and that it was later thrown up into hills by volcanic action. He did not live in Vicksburg when this took place, but deduces his facts from the discovery of the remains of shellfish in the ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... into the sea in a shower of mud and gravel and ashes; and then it spread all around, and sank again, and covered in the dead fish so fast, that before Tom had stood there five minutes he was buried in silt up to his ankles, and began to be afraid that he ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... of summer, when the river is at its highest level and overflows the banks for miles, it is no pleasure excursion to steer ungainly boats between banks of sand and silt without pilots. On the second day a strong southerly storm arose, and the dangerous waves in the whirlpools of the current capsized many vessels and damaged others. Alexander made for the bank to look ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... OF STREAMS. This consists of the silt which the stream carries in suspension, and the sand and gravel and larger stones which it pushes along its bed. Especially in times of flood one may note the muddy water, its silt being kept from settling by the rolling, eddying currents; ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... peaceful water again, a mile or perhaps, so quiet that a thin covering of clear water over the top of the silt-laden pool beneath, reflecting the tinted walls and the turquoise sky beneath its limpid surface. Gems of sunlight sparkled on its bosom and scintillated in the ripples left behind by the oars. When seated with our backs to the strongest light, and when glancing ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... with a delighted eye upon the inexhaustible spray of spreading bubbles; I see in imagination the prehistoric times when seaweed, the first-born of plants, produced the first atmosphere for living things to breathe at the time when the silt of the continents was beginning to emerge. What I see before my eyes, between the glass panes of my trough, tells me the story of the planet surrounding ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... is an army of peaks, a region of storms, a spread of dark and tangled forests. In the one, shallow rivers trickle on their sandy way to the Gulf of Mexico; from the other, the waters rush, uniting to make the mighty stream whose silt-laden floods are slowly ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... could win from the reluctant German field was secured. The German farmer had to woo his land like a lover. And so the unyielding fields of Germany returned richer harvests thirty years ago than a like area of the prodigally vital silt of ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... amidst sacred groves and graceful palms, lighten the banks. On the broad steps of the bathing ghats are assembled crowds of pious worshippers in clothes of every brilliant hue. The river has an aspect of kindliness and geniality and life-givingness. Its waters and rich silt have brought plenty to many a barren acre, and the dwellers on its banks know well that it issues ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... five types of soil to grow my trees in, stiff clay, rich gravel, quicksand and humus, light sand and silt or bottom land, well drained. I have no sour, undrained ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... contradictory but the flood refers to the valley of the Nene and the lowlands which are apt to be flooded when the river overflows its banks. The mud and dirt consequently settle on the grass and make it unfit for hay, but the rainfall does good, causes the grass to grow and it is not injured by the silt. ...
— Weather and Folk Lore of Peterborough and District • Charles Dack
... active sensor classes, three of which are active acoustics, lidar and magnetic anomaly detectors. Broadband underwater active acoustics could address pressing needs such as shallow-water anti-submarine warfare and mine detection (both buried and silt covered). The practical application of lidar is a relatively recent development enabled by advances in laser, power management, and data processing technologies. Lidar can be used for fire control, weapon guidance, ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... and snails and the crayfish burrow deep into the mud and silt at the bottom of ponds and streams where they lie motionless during the winter. The land snails, in late autumn, crawl beneath logs, and, burrowing deep into the soft mould, they withdraw far into ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... glittering snow peak suggests a white-crested roller, higher than the rest. The drenching rains which fall each year have washed the soil from the sides of the hills until they have become strangely grooved by numberless water-courses, and the black primeval rock is everywhere exposed. The silt and sediment have filled the valleys which lie between, and made their surface sandy, level and broad. Again the rain has cut wide, deep and constantly-changing channels through this soft deposit; ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... Sub-River Tunnels.—The character of the material through which the tunnels were to be constructed differed greatly in the two rivers. The bed of the North River, at the level of the tunnels, consists of silt composed principally of clay, sand, and water, while that of the East River is formed of a great variety of materials, such as quicksand, sand, boulders, gravel, clay, and bed-rock. When the method of construction ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Charles W. Raymond
... currents, running red with the silt and mud of their soft alluvial shores, carry far into the ocean the record of their muddy progress; but this glorious river system, through its many lakes and various names, is ever the same crystal current, flowing pure from the fountain-head ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... character must be clean, free from organic matter and sand, must contain no appreciable amount of mica, feldspar, alkali, shale or similar deleterious substances and not exceed two and one-half per cent of clay and silt. The sand is of such a range of sizes that all will pass the one-fourth-inch sieve and that not exceeding about five per cent will ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... Medeland with its wealth of woods, Fair Ganges, Hermus thick with golden silt, Can match the praise of Italy.... Here blooms perpetual spring, and summer here In months that are not summer's; twice teem the flocks: Twice does the tree yield service of her fruit. Mark too, her cities, so many and so proud, Of mighty toil the achievement, town on town Up rugged precipices ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott |
