"Sterile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... or her, as an independent princess, to endure. England was the husband which she had betrothed to her; Englishmen were her children; while employed in rearing and governing such a family, she could not deem herself sterile or her life useless. She desired, for her own part, no higher character, nor fairer remembrance of her to be transmitted to posterity, than to have this inscription, when she should pay the debt of nature, engraven on her tomb: "Here lies Queen Elizabeth, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... southern Dakota. The houses, bare as boxes, dropped on the treeless plains, the barbed-wire fences running at right angles, and the towns mere assemblages of flimsy wooden sheds with painted-pine battlement, produced on me the effect of an almost helpless and sterile poverty. ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... theoretical side of his labours—labours from which the youngest and least impressionable planeur might well have shrunk. He had traced through cold and heat, across the deeps of the oceans, with instruments of his own invention, over the inhospitable heart of the polar ice and the sterile visage of the deserts, league by league, patiently, unweariedly, remorselessly, from their ever-shifting cradle under the magnetic pole to their exalted death-bed in the utmost ether of the upper atmosphere—each ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... obligations, loyalty to our friends, patience in finishing our work, obedience to a rule of life, have a surer foundation in habits solidly formed and blindly followed than in these momentary transports, ardent but sterile. They would have preferred to Bloch, as companions for myself, boys who would have given me no more than it is proper, by all the laws of middle-class morality, for boys to give one another, who would not unexpectedly ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... The youth, the early light that he has lost Are as a little strength submerged and drowned In this fierce rage that bids him seek me out And take me in the darkness of my home, And change, and fill me, as the virgin night Is changed to day, and as the moonlight sky Is emptied of her sterile ray, and filled With overflooding light that spills to earth A golden augury of later fruits And a ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... fresh grass for pasture, will die and food will then be lacking to the lions and wolves and other beasts of prey, and to men who after many efforts will be compelled to abandon their life, and the human race will die out. In this way the fertile and fruitful earth will remain deserted, arid and sterile from the water being shut up in its interior, and from the activity of nature it will continue a little time to increase until the cold and subtle air being gone, it will be forced to end with the element of fire; and then its surface will be left burnt up to cinder and this will be the end ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... they care about is their damned sterile destiny! They don't care about people. Well we do! We care about something to live for. The hell with the destiny of the Galaxies! They don't know, and we'll be gone before ...
— Dead World • Jack Douglas
... when put to their proper use by human intelligence: but human intelligence can do much without them; and they without human intelligence can do nothing. They exist in the highest degree in regions of which the inhabitants are few, and squalid, and barbarous, and naked, and starving; while on sterile rocks, amidst unwholesome marshes, and under inclement skies, may be found immense populations, well fed, well lodged, well clad, well governed. Nature meant Egypt and Sicily to be the gardens of the world. They once were so. Is it anything in the earth or in the air that ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sacrificial temple. offerkniv (-en, -ar), sacrificial knife. offerlund (-en, -ar), sacrificial grove. offerfrest (-en, -er), sacrificial priest. offersten (-en, -ar), sacrificial stone. offerng|a (-an, -or), sacrificial incense. offr|a (-ade, -at), to sacrifice. ofruktbar, sterile, unfruitful. ofta, often. ofrd (-en), misfortune, disaster. ofrsonlig, unrelenting, unforgiving. ofrsont, unpropitiated. ohmnad, unavenged. ohrd, unheard, unheeded. oknd, unknown. om, about, if, concerning, for, during, in, ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... place which cuts off one from one's world. And when at first the poor, uncouth, sullen creatures who were a part of my new charge, frightened and dismayed her, there was always the garden to fly to for consolation. If she couldn't plant seeds of order and cleanliness and morality and thrift in the sterile soil of poor folks' minds, she could always plant seeds of color and beauty and fragrance in her garden and be surer of the result. That garden was my delight, too. I am sure no other equal space ever harbored so many birds and bees and butterflies; ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... severe test before admitting them to the high-vaulted and rather draughty halls of his intellect. There are fine passages in his essay, but it is intellectualized, bloodless, heedless of the trifling oddities of human intercourse that make friendship so satisfying. He seems to insist upon a sterile ceremony of mutual self-improvement, a kind of religious ritual, a profound interchange of doctrines between soul and soul. His friends (one gathers) are to be antisepticated, all the poisons and pestilence of their faulty humours are to be drained away before ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... Herodotus: but the countries which gave birth to Queen and River were alike unknown. The sunny fountains, the golden sands, the palmy plains of Africa were to be traced in the verses of the poet; but he dealt neither in latitude nor longitude. The maps presented a terra incognita, or sterile mountains, where modern travellers have found rivers, lakes, and alluvial basins,—or exhibited barren wastes, where recent discoveries find rich meadows annually flowed, studded with walled towns and cities, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... in Hocking County. On shaded sandstone, intermingled with an ash-gray, crustose thallus, which appeared like a sterile Pertusaria. The type specimen is deposited in the writer's herbarium, and a cotype may be seen in ...
— Ohio Biological Survey, Bull. 10, Vol. 11, No. 6 - The Ascomycetes of Ohio IV and V • Bruce Fink and Leafy J. Corrington
... fashion in Italy, and every part of the peninsula abounded in them. They bore names fanciful or grotesque, such as The Ardent, The Illuminated, The Unconquered, The Intrepid, or The Dissonant, The Sterile, The Insipid, The Obtuse, The Astray, The Stunned, and they were all devoted to one purpose, namely, the production and the perpetuation of twaddle. It is prodigious to think of the incessant wash of slip-slop which they poured out in verse; of the grave disputations they held upon the ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... operative is too close to the soil to be either socialistic in his views or collectivistic in his attitude. The labor agitator has found sterile soil for his propaganda. Yet signs of a dawning class consciousness are appearing. As always, the first manifestation is opposition to the dominant political party or faction. This has not yet, however, been translated into any considerable ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... despite the Governor's prohibition, was addicted to roving over the cliffs by herself, finding kinship in the sterile crags and futile restlessness of the ocean. She had learned that although change of scene lightened the burden, only death ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... all alike in general structure, but become more rigidly specialized for the performance of restricted tasks. As before, there is the fundamental differentiation into the sexual "queens" and males, and the sterile workers concerned with the immediate material life of the community. In some species the workers serve as herdsmen, caring for the ant-cattle or aphids, from which they receive minute drops of a sweet juice for food. The aphids ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... could get up a whistle or call him off by name, he had darted like a javelin at the legs of the refugee, startling him so much out of the perpendicular that the superstructure of plastic art came to the ground with a crash, top-dressing the sterile soil of the Campus Martius with a coat of manufactured plaster of Paris. Marius, blubbering over the shattered chimney-stacks of Carthage, could not have displayed a more touching classical spectacle than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... behind which lies a level, desolate moor, treeless, shrubless, and barren of all vegetation, save coarse grass and weeds, and a profusion of stunted dog-roses, which, in their season, must throw a rare and singular charm over their sterile home. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... In geographical position, it would seem that the advantage was decidedly with the South. And the same may be said of the patronage bestowed by the home governments. But notwithstanding the high mountain ranges, the deep forests, and the sterile coasts of New England, her people cut their way through every obstacle, and soon stood face to face with their aristocratic neighbors. A collision of ideas was now inevitable. The South, quick to discover the unheralded force of Yankee ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... shall prologuize, how we shall perorate, 265 Utter fit things upon art and history, Feel truth at blood-heat and falsehood at zero rate, Make of the want of the age no mystery; Contrast the fructuous and sterile eras, Show—monarchy ever its uncouth cub licks 270 Out of the bear's shape into Chimaera's, While Pure Art's birth ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... while they feast now here, now there. In spite of Sprengel's most patient and scientific research, that shed great light on the theory of natural selection a half century before Darwin advanced it, he never knew that flowers are nearly always sterile to pollen of another species when carried to them on the bodies of insect visitors, or that cross-pollenized blossoms defeat the self-pollinated ones in the struggle for survival. These facts Darwin ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... of human invention, that has thus triumphed over wind and wave; has brought the ends of the earth in communion; has established an interchange of blessings, pouring into the sterile regions of the north all the luxuries of the south; diffused the light of knowledge and the charities of cultivated life; and has thus bound together those scattered portions of the human race, between which Nature seemed to have thrown ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... across to whar they're at. Leanin' over Sarah Ann's off-shoulder, bein' the one furthest from that onmitigated Jenks, I says, "Sweetheart, how can you waste time talkin' to this yere hooman Sahara, whose intellects is that sterile they wouldn't raise cow-pease?" ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... not this base Plebeian, anterior to his giving publicity to the tartaric nausea that rankled at his gloomy heart, forward the corroding philippic, and bid defiance to my contradiction? No, no; he knew full well that with his scanty stock of English ammunition scattered over the sterile floor of his literary magazine, he could not have the effrontery, impudence, or presumption to enter the list of philosophical and scientific disputation with one who has traversed the thorny paths of literature, explored its ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... species may be known from a mere variety? Is there no criterion of species? Great authorities affirm that there is—that the unions of members of the same species are always fertile, while those of distinct species are either sterile, or their offspring, called hybrids, are so. It is affirmed not only that this is an experimental fact, but that it is a provision for the preservation of the purity of species. Such a criterion as this would ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... occasionally, and not very unfrequently, dropped by cows of the common mixed kind, and which, if killed early, make very blue veal, and if allowed to grow up, become exceedingly profitless and unsatisfactory beasts; the heifers being often sterile, the cows poor milkers, the oxen dull, mulish beasts, yielding flesh of very dark color, ill flavor and destitute of fat. They are known by various names in different localities, in Maine as the "Whitten" and "Peter Waldo" breed, in Massachusetts as "Yorkshire" ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... for plaster and limestone, and would be a good location for a person interested in these substances. Indeed, if a man can live on rocks, like a goat, he may settle anywhere between Windsor and Halifax. It is one of the most sterile regions in the Province. With the exception of a wild pond or two, we saw nothing but rocks and stunted firs, for forty-five miles, a monotony unrelieved by one picturesque feature. Then we longed for the "Garden of Nova Scotia," ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... object of envy. In pursuing my investigation, I do not find that I am led to more advantageous ideas of the liberty of the savage; on the contrary, I sees in him only the slave of his wants, and of the freaks of a sterile and parsimonious nature. Food he has not at hand; rest is not at his command; he must run, weary himself, endure hunger and thirst, heat and cold, and all the inclemency of the elements and seasons; and as the ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... precious to give Christian burial to the dead men, even if we had had the proper tools to open the earth. With a sigh, we left the birds their prey, and once more continued our journey through the wildest part of the sterile ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... barren flanks of Dry Gulch, a town was born. Mothered by the stubborn desert that appears sterile and is not, it was a sprawling, ungainly, ill-begotten thing. In the night it came; in the dawn it grew; during the first day it assumed lustiness and an insolence that was its birthright. And, like any welcome child, there was a name awaiting it. Men laughed as the unceremonious ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... Garnett and her intimates, of persons (the phrase of Steele's recurred to her as meeting it appropriately) "who had seen the world enough to undervalue it with good breeding," must seem to her at last a little sterile when she was conscious—never more than now—of how clearly and swiftly the healthy young blood coursed through her veins, dissipating any morbid imaginations that she might feel inclined to cherish. She looked out at life, in her conviction that so ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... The sterile mountainous districts in this rigorous climate of Tierra del Fuego furnish no animal fit for food, and without proper clothing or nourishment the people are reduced to a state of complete barbarism. Hunting yields them hardly any game, fishing is almost equally unproductive of results; ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... on, friend.—It seems a dreary rout: but how cheerily the eye glances over a sterile tract, when the habitation of a benefactor, whom we are approaching to requite, lies ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... become quite resigned to my existence, and doles me out small confidences. She has not a rich nature, to begin with, and it has never been fertilized much, so it's rather sterile; but no noxious weeds, anyhow, as there may be in Sir Lionel's more generous and cultivated soil. I think I shall get on with her pretty well after all, especially motoring, when I can take her with plenty of ozone. She ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... northern sub-arctic latitudes. This desolate belt is not less than 5,000 miles in extent. In breadth it varies from 200 to 500 miles. In winter the tundra is, of course, one vast frozen sheet. In the brief summer it is swampy, steaming, and swarming with mosquitoes. Treeless and sterile, the tundra is the home of strange uncouth tribes, but it is a valuable training ground for hardy hunters. To the minds of most people the tundra is Siberia. This mischievous fallacy is difficult to dispel. In a few years the Siberian railway will have completely dissipated ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... to enter?—or rather is there not some deep innate principle,—some strong motive of aggrandizement or preservation,—some real Enceladus,—the cause of this furious volcano of destructive agitation? If, indeed, the struggle be for the possession of a sterile waste in the heart of the continent,—useless either as a slave-breeding or a slave-working country,—clearly, whatever the politician might say to the contrary, the patriot and the merchant would soon apply to the struggle the principle, that sometimes the game ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... Texas Smith had ridden off to stalk a deer; but the animal being in good racing condition in consequence of the thin fare of this sterile region, the hunting bout had miscarried; and our desperado was returning unladen toward the train when he heard the distant ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... has much the same structure as that of the mildews, but the spore sacs are much more numerous, and there are special sterile filaments developed between them. If the young spore fruit is treated with chlor-iodide of zinc, it is rendered quite transparent, and the young spore sacs colored a beautiful blue, so that they ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... most densely peopled country in the world, and we are coming to a pretty sterile region that won't support much life in the best ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Works, no longer vain And worthless deemed by me, Whate'er this sterile genius has produced, Expect at last, the rage of envy spent, An unmolested happy home, Gift of kind Hermes and my watchful friend, Where never flippant tongue profane Shall entrance find, And whence the coarse unlettered multitude Shall ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... besonders den christlichen Weltalters, die hochste, und umfassendste Theodicee.—VATKE, Die Menschliche Freiheit, 1841, 516. La theologie, que l'on regarde volontiers comme la plus etroite et la plus sterile den sciences, en est, au contraire, la plus etendue et la plus feconde. Elle confine a toutes les etudes et touche a toutes les questions. Elle renferme tous les elements d'une instruction liberale.—SCHERER, Melanges, 522. The belief that the course of ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... devoted by superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal—these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance were fragmentary and sterile. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... was a perfectly honest statement of the fact. Her attitude on this and other things might be called a prejudice; but it could not possibly be called a fad, still less an affectation. She really had an obstinate objection to all those natural forces that seemed to be sterile or aimless; she disliked loud winds that seemed to be going nowhere; she did not care much for the sea, a spectacle of which I was very fond; and by the same instinct she was up against the moon, which she said looked like an imbecile. On the other hand, she had a sort of hungry appetite for ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... was pleading with effect, and laying up happiness in great store to cheer him through unnumbered sterile years inevitably before him after time had resolved this Lael into a faint and fading memory, like the other Lael gone to dust under the stone ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... far. The navigation of the coast is exceedingly dangerous, from the continual presence of ice, and the extraordinary force of the currents. While the coast proved so inaccessible, the interior of the country wears a still more dreary and sterile aspect; not a tree, nor shrub, nor plant of any land, is to be seen, save the lichens that cover the rocks, and a few willows. The native Esquimaux, whom our people had seen, evinced the same amicable disposition by which their whole race is distinguished. ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... has died as a maker one may still live as a critic, and I will confess I am all for laxness and variety in this as in every field of art. Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me the instinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund. It is the tired man with a headache who values a work of art for what it does not contain. I suppose it is the lot of every critic nowadays to suffer from indigestion and a fatigued appreciation, and to develop a self-protective tendency ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... the Cardinal. "But she is so virtuous!" Everybody burst out laughing; and the more willingly, as the Cardinal, very pure in his manners, was still more so in his language. His saying was verified by the event: the marriage proved sterile. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... ocean, on some sterile length of sand or rock, and amongst sea-faring people? Still, you are girls to be envied; for the sea has grand thoughts to tell you, and the rocks are full of meaning. The bracing air, the salt breeze, the impetuous beat of the sea, ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... woods and crossed his path, to find alders, and blossoming dog-wood, the mountain brake, and his childhood's friend the mullen stalk. Even to this day when he came upon an orchid, or a wild rose, with its small pink petals (smaller in this red sterile soil than in his native country), or when a humming bird in its shining plumage came to sip honey from the flowers, or when in the still woods he heard the liquid notes of a hermit thrush, the romance and the reverence of youth ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... were which had to be solved, such as the necessity of the principle of divergence of character, the extinction of intermediate varieties, on a continuous area, with graduated conditions; the double problem of sterile first crosses and ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... doubt if the man has a chance to do all of this experimenting. For the salt in his blood turns to solid hard grains, and the dissolved food in the blood turns to dustlike particles. His blood flows through him, a muddy stream of sterile water. The cells of his body get no food, and even before they miss the food, most of the cells shrivel to drops of muddy water. ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... would be equally disastrous in its results. With the principal lyric metres, too, the sapphic and alcaic, he had done what Virgil had done with the dactylic hexameter, carried them to the highest point of which the foreign Latin tongue was capable. They were naturalised, but remained sterile. When at last Latin lyric poetry took a new development, it was by starting afresh from a wholly different point, and by a reversion to types which, for the culture of the early imperial age, were ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... times are sterile in genius, we must cheer us with books of rich and believing men who had atmosphere and amplitude about them. Every good fable, every mythology, every biography out of a religious age, every passage of love, and even philosophy and science, when ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... rid, for example, of the whole agnostic controversy, by refusing to entertain the hypothesis of trans-empirical reality at all. It gets rid of any need for an absolute of the bradleyan type (avowedly sterile for intellectual purposes) by insisting that the conjunctive relations found within experience are faultlessly real. It gets rid of the need of an absolute of the roycean type (similarly sterile) ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... took the middle line to Albany, traversing a wild sterile country, over bad roads and worse bridges, until we reached Sandy-hill, where the noble Hudson bursts ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... are placed side by side and are perpendicular to the surface of the gills. Upon each of these basidia are in some species two, usually four, slender projections upon which the spores are produced. In Figure 2 a number of sterile cells will be seen which resemble the basidia except that the latter bear four sterigmata upon which the spores rest. Among these basidia and sterile cells will frequently be seen an overgrown bladder-like sterile basidium which projects beyond the rest of the hymenium, and whose use is not ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... borne with resignation and without a murmur;" it also signifies "excitement, agitation, rancor, revolt full of reproach, premeditated vengeance, menace never ceasing to threaten if retaliation should ever become possible, feeding itself meanwhile with a bitter if sterile hatred." ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... forests. It is one thing to talk about plans or policies, but a plan or policy without a religious motive is like a watch without a spring or a body without the breath of life. The trouble, to-day, is that we are trying to hatch chickens from sterile eggs. We may have the finest incubator in the world and operate it according to the most improved regulations—moreover, the eggs may appear perfect specimens—but unless they have the germ of life in them all our efforts are ...
— Fundamentals of Prosperity - What They Are and Whence They Come • Roger W. Babson
... with portable Steam-engines and all sorts of mining machinery, and there was but one subject of conversation. Some new well had begun to flow with hundreds of barrels of petroleum per diem. Some new man had made a fortune. Farmers, who had barely been able to get a living from their sterile acres, had become millionaires. The whole region was alive with fortune-hunters, from every quarter of the country. Millions of dollars were in the pockets of men who were ready to purchase. Seedy, crazy, visionary fellows were working as middle-men, to talk up schemes, and win their ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... none is better than camphor in saturated solution in sterile oil as may be obtained in ampules. Alcohol is absolutely contraindicated in the latter condition. In the former kind of heart attack, vasodilation from a large close of whisky or brandy may be of value. The dose should be large to cause immediate increased peripheral circulation, ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... more) I think we—must go. (going to MADELINE, holding out his hand and speaking from his sterile life to her fullness of life) Good-bye, Madeline. ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... population; I, on the contrary, maintain that population precedes, and is indeed the cause of, production. They teach that man breeds up to the capital, or in proportion to the abundance of the food, he possesses: I assert, that he is comparatively sterile when he is wealthy, and that he breeds in proportion to his poverty; not meaning, however, by that poverty, a state of privation approaching to actual starvation, any more than, I suppose, they would contend, that extreme and culpable excess is the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the majority of Cactuses is no doubt intended to serve as a protection from the wild animals inhabiting with them the sterile plains of America, and to whom the cool watery flesh of the Cactus would otherwise fall a prey. Indeed, these spines are not sufficient to prevent some animals from obtaining the watery insides ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... husband in his doorway, and her defiance had moved him from her path. Then she had been inspired by the fact that the man she loved was near her, that she had been wrongfully accused and was ready to fight. Afterwards, however, when she was alone, the sterile presence of Joel Mazarine, his merciless eyes, his hopeless religious tyranny, had worn upon her as his past ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... embroideries, the dried fruits and the strange birds and beasts of Asia Minor and Arabia, and in exchange for their oriental merchandise obtained an abundance of corn, wine, oil, meat and other commodities of life that their beautiful but somewhat sterile dominions were unable to supply to an ever increasing population. But it was not only the material products of the East that the sailors of Amalfi conveyed to Europe in their home-bound argosies; for they brought back with them the rudiments of arts and sciences that distracted Italy had well-nigh ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... a stretch of dry, hot sand, innocent of vegetation, to wrest it from the clutch of the desert as from the maw of a devastating giant, to bring water mile upon mile from the mountain canons, to make the sterile breast of the mother earth fertile, to drive back the horned toad and the coyote, to make green things spring up and flourish, to carve out homes, to cause trees and flowers and vines to give shade and ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... evergreen and persistent for several years (except in Larix), scattered along the twigs, spirally arranged or tufted, linear, needle-shaped, or scale-like; sterile and fertile flowers separate upon the same plant; stamens (subtended by scales) spirally arranged upon a central axis, each bearing two pollen-sacs surmounted by a broad-toothed connective; fertile flowers composed of spirally arranged bracts or cover-scales, each bract subtending ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... sending glances of inquiry in every direction, in the hope of discovering where the much-desired element was kept. They saw not the slightest indications of stream or pool, well or water-hole, of any kind. The place all around had the same sterile appearance as that of the country over which they had journeyed for the last two days, and certainly things looked confirmatory of the Bechuanas' statement. After all, they might be telling the truth! It was not very cheering to think so; and our ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... occupations otherwise trivial or monotonous. If silly at times, she never was stupid—distinction of meaning and moment.—A blameless creature, incapable of thinking, still more of speaking, evil of the worst or weakest, her inherent goodness washed about you like sun-warmed water, if sterile yet translucently pure. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... of bog-bean bloom and walked round the big boulders with which this sterile region is thickly strewn. The natives know nothing of Home or any other Rule, and you might as well speak to them of the Darwinian theory, or the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, or the Homeric studies of the Grand Old Man, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... borne examination. It is artificial and sterile. Look at Christianity. It is the highest of all religions, but it is not monotheism. Look at Buddhism. In its pure form it is not even theism. The second classification is ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... published biography, but the analysis of the lecturer, done in a few pointed sentences, not only carried conviction to the mind, but just, so to speak, laid the truth bare. And yet it was all to me incredibly sterile and arid. Not the slightest interest was taken in the emotional or psychological side; it was all purely and exactly scientific. We waited until the end of the address, which was greeted with decorous applause, and the hall was emptied in ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... each other, but sometimes in squares. Pride in appearance and convenience in vineyard operations make perfect alignment imperative. Many varieties of grapes, especially of American species, are partially self-sterile, so that some varieties must have others interplanted with them for cross-pollination. This is usually done by setting alternate rows of the variety to be pollinated and the cross-pollinator. All self-fertile varieties ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... We passed a chain of lakes extending for sixteen miles, their length varying from one to three miles, and their shores covered with forests of gloomy pine. People are very apt to say that Nova Scotia is sterile and barren, because they have not penetrated into the interior. It is certainly rather difficult of access, but I was by no means sorry that my route lay through it. The coast of Nova Scotia is barren, and bears a very distinct ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... or a single good government. It failed in India, the land of its birth. Nothing like the progress and the development of Christian civilization appears in Buddhism. Something in the heart of the system makes it sterile, notwithstanding its excellent intentions. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... You stole her from me; like a thief you stole her, At dead of night; that cursed hour you chose To rifle me of all my heart held dear. May all your joys in her prove false, like mine! A sterile fortune, and a barren bed, Attend you both: continual discord make Your days and nights bitter and grievous still: May the hard hand of a vexatious need Oppress and grind you; till at last you find The curse of disobedience ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Thomas Otway
... form, or cheer of ceremony. There was a deep richness and a prolonged energy in the tone, which proved that the feelings and lungs of the men were roused to the uttermost in its delivery. It told of long gathering anxieties swept entirely away, and of deep joy at seeing friendly faces in a sterile land, where lurking foes might be more likely ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... been left behind them, and they entered a fertile tract of country which had been literally turned into a garden by the skill and industry of the Carthaginian cultivators, at that time celebrated throughout the world for their knowledge of the science of agriculture. The rougher and more sterile ground was covered with groves of olive trees, while rich vineyards and orchards of fig and other fruit trees occupied the better soil. Wherever it was possible little canals leading water from reservoirs and dammed up streams crossed the plains, and every foot of the irrigated ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... descent of a new variety from the original form. Among species in a state of nature it is the exception to find two recognised species which can be crossed or hybridised. In the case of the horse and the ass, although mules are the hybrid offspring of the two, the mules themselves are sterile, and there are many similar cases, so that some naturalists have maintained that mutual infertility should be recognised as the test ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... overcome the Revolution and save the monarchy, remained inert and sterile. The Opposition insultingly charged it with impotence; it called it the hectoring ministry, the dullest of ministries, and, for answer, it prepared the expedition of Algiers and prorogued the Chambers, protesting ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... near the Cape of Good Hope, where Captain Cook's first care was to provide a place for the sick on shore. Here the greater number recovered, though some were still ill when again taken on board. The country appeared to the voyagers to be of a most sterile and forlorn character, and from the accounts they received of the great distances from each other at which the settlers were situated, they conjectured that such must be the general nature of the country ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... is not as copious or rich as the Greek or Latin, this must not be laid to their charge, assuming that our language is not capable in itself of being barren and sterile; but it should rather be attributed to the ignorance of our ancestors, who, having (as some one says, speaking of the ancient Romans) held good doing in greater estimation than good talking and preferred ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... creed, and thus puts far out of sight the salutary truth of the brotherhood of man. Because of these and other scarcely less prominent defects in its teachings, Islam has proved a blight and curse to almost every race embracing its sterile doctrines. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... see the sterile rust on the corn, and to feel the blazing heat of dog-days, when not a breath stirs as the languid shepherd leads his flock to the banks of the stream. The sunny pastures of Calabria lie spread before us, we see the yellow Tiber at ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... minutes. The interior of foods rarely reaches a temperature above 200 deg. F., because of the water they contain which is not completely removed below 212 deg. One of the chief objects in cooking food is to render it sterile. Not only do bacteria become innocuous through cooking, but various parasites, as trichina and tapeworm, are destroyed, although some organisms can live at a comparatively high temperature. Cooked ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... descendant of Julia, the last sterile monster of the Julian race, Nero, was buried at the foot of the same hill. Alive, he was condemned by the Senate to be beaten to death in the Comitium; dead by his own hand, he received imperial honours, and his ashes rested for a thousand ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... and powerfully enforced as to carry all before it. The democracy of sentimentalism took the place that ought to have been filled in the literature of revolutionary preparation by the democracy of utility. Rousseau's fiction of the Sovereignty of the People was an arbitrary and intrinsically sterile rendering of the real truth in ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... ran to seed in the thin poetic soil. The singers of fragile loves and trivial pleasures are often charming, and as often they are merely frivolous or merely depraved. Grecourt; Piron; Bernard, the curled and powdered Anacreon; Bernis, Voltaire's "Babet la Bouquetiere," King Frederick's poet of "sterile abundance"; Dorat, who could flutter at times with an airy grace; Bertin, born in the tropics, and with the heat of the senses in his verse; Parny, an estray in Paris from the palms and fountains of the Isle Bourbon, the "dear Tibullus" ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... of "Hearth-fires" (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up. His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and feel how little it contained; but Winsett's, after all, contained still less, and though their common fund of intellectual ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... institution should be regulated in every country in accord with its situation and the character of its inhabitants. Nations with rich territories, for example, should be led to devote themselves to agriculture; manufacturing industry should be left to sterile lands. That which renders the constitution of the state genuinely solid and endurable is the judicious adaptation of laws to natural conditions. A conflict between the two tends to destruction; but when the laws are in sympathy with the natural conditions, when they keep in touch with ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... was not love itself, but only the edge of its cloak; response was an indivisible part of realization. No, sterility was the measure—of its absence. And she was, Linda felt, in spite of Vigne and Lowrie, the latter a specially vigorous contradiction, the most sterile woman alive. There were always Dodge's assurances, but clay, stone, metal, were cold for a belief to embrace. And she was, she knew, lovelier now than she had ever been before, than she would ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Fernando Wood, who had urged upon him all sorts of foolish schemes for "compromising" or "settling the difficulties,"—phrases which were euphemisms of the peace Democracy to disguise a concession of success to the South. The President endured these sterile suggestions with his wonted patience. But toward the close of June, Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, was seized with the notion that, if he should go to Washington on a personal mission to Mr. Lincoln, purporting ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... comparatively early in life, left the way open for the development of his younger contemporaries, among whom several had genius little inferior to his own. Steen Steensen Blicher (1782-1848) was a Jutlander, and preserved all through life the characteristics of his sterile and sombre fatherland. After a struggling youth of great poverty, he published, in 1807-1809, a translation of Ossian; in 1814 a volume of lyrical poems; and in 1817 he attracted considerable attention by his descriptive poem of The Tour in Jutland. His real genius, however, did not lie ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... Hammond strolled slowly up the leafy avenue at Fellside. He had been across the valley and up the hill to Easedale Tarn, and then by rough untrodden ways, across a chaos of rock and heather, into a second valley, long, narrow, and sterile, known as Far Easedale, a desolate gorge, a rugged cleft in the heart of the mountains. The walk had been long and laborious; but only in such clambering and toiling, such expenditure of muscular force and latent heat, could the man's restless soul endure ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... warmth was when they came upon a deep fissure in the rocks where was a pool of water, with the most gorgeous flowers around the margin. Everywhere else the soil was sandy, covered in places with pebbles and burning gravel. In front of them were the mountains, bare and sterile, on which the least experienced of the party knew no drop of water could ...
— The Search for the Silver City - A Tale of Adventure in Yucatan • James Otis
... these juli, are not all of them seed-bearers, some are sterile, and whatever you raise of them, will never come to bear; and therefore by some they are called the male sort, as Mr. Ray (that learned botanist) has observed. The ozier is of that emolument, that in some places I have ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... an agreeable time. At intervals, I heard him exclaim to himself, and half aloud, 'Poor Falkland!' His look was even more expressive than were his words. 'But his wife,' added he, 'she is to be pitied!' One could see his soul filled with the most benevolent intentions, which were sterile.[41] If ever pure action was done, it was that which he then meditated; and the man who conceived it, and who accomplished it, was then progressing through thorns and thistles, toward that free but narrow path which ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... glumes. The first two glumes are unequal, narrow, keeled, membranous, 1-nerved, persistent, acute, mucronate and the second glume awned shortly. Floral glumes narrow or broad, acute, obtuse or minutely 2-toothed and awned, paleate; sterile glumes are small, without palea. There are two lodicules and anthers are rather small. Grain is ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... for slaves at home, but for slave ships she had abundant use. With a sterile soil, and with the sea at her doors swarming with edible fish and beckoning to her sails, her hardy industry found its best field on the ocean. The fisheries were the foundation of her commerce. The thrifty Yankee sold the best of his catch ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... for high principles, 'e and I might 'a bin as 'appy as 'appy and 'ad a large family. And there was nothin' to stop 'im a-marryin' me, if that was all he wanted to feel comfortable about it. But jus' see. He's had a life that seems to me downright sterile, and I—well, I ain't been really happy till we made it up three years ago" (leans over, and ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... attempt. The ruins have been recently explored by Germans. The embankments which regulated the flow of the Euphrates and Tigris have given way, and at the present time the whole region round Babylon is marshy and malarious. In the words of Jeremiah, li. 43, "Her cities are a desolation, a sterile land, and a wilderness, a place wherein no ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... sometimes very slight, following a birth, or the same process set up by uterine pessaries used for displacements, may induce adhesive inflammation in the tubes, and simple and permanent sterility is the incurable result. It is a well known fact that prostitutes are usually sterile, and this arises from the prevalence of venereal disease, which produces gonorrhoeal inflammation of the Fallopian tubes, resulting ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... into a globular shape. Either they stick to the oyster's shell, or they become embedded in the creature's folds. On the valves a pearl sticks fast; on the flesh it lies loose. But its nucleus is always some small, hard object, say a sterile egg or a grain of sand, around which the mother-of-pearl is deposited in thin, concentric layers over ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... had their quickening effect upon Johnny's intellect. A brilliantly wicked thought struck him. As he was passing a perfectly bare spot on the road he managed, without being noticed, to cast his glittering flake of gold on the sterile ground at the other side of the road, where the minister's path would lie. Then, at a point where the road turned, he concealed himself in the brush. The Reverend Mr. Staples hurried forward as he lost sight of the boy in the sweep of the road, but halted suddenly. Johnny's ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... common humanity. Of this, more anon. I wish now to say that I undertake this work with a purpose as serious as I am capable of; and that among the inducements that move me, personal grudge and grievance are not included. Individual enmities are foolish and sterile for the individuals, and a bore for everybody else. Individuals are never so much to be hated as are the conditions which prompt them to act hatefully. Improve the environment which produced the murderer, ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... to appear insignificant and debased, by all the conventions and petty, unoriginal judgments that go to the making of the rule of our society. The woman had to make her choice between love in an undignified poverty for which all her training had unfitted her, and a sterile ease and magnificence that gave her those opportunities which her temperament and education demanded. She chose for dignity and opportunity, was tempted to grasp at love, and thus finally came into a blind alley from which death was ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... hues which 'nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on,' but piles of precious stones, rubies, pearls, emeralds, Golconda's mines, and all the blazonry of art. Such persons are in fact besotted with words, and their brains are turned with the glittering but empty and sterile phantoms of things. Personifications, capital letters, seas of sunbeams, visions of glory, shining inscriptions, the figures of a transparency, Britannia with her shield, or Hope leaning on an anchor, make up their stock-in-trade. They may be considered as hieroglyphical ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... man of letters, his essays were arid and tedious. I never heard him lecture, but should imagine that he was an ideal University Extension lecturer. I do not mean this to be in the least complimentary to him as a critic. His book, "Illustrations Tennyson," was an entirely sterile exercise proving on every page that the author had no real perceptions about literature. It simply made creative artists laugh. They knew. His more recent book on modern tendencies displayed in an acute degree the characteristic ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... that out of the hard soil of the Puritan thought and character, out of the sterile rocks of the New England conscience, have sprung the flowers of poetry which you bid me celebrate to-night? From those songless beginnings have burst, in later generations, melodies that charm and uplift our land—now a deep organ peal filling ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... some important elements of prosperity. The inhabitants of Scotland, though poor, were strong and able to work. The land, though cold and sterile, was capable ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... of vital importance. Whether or not it is to be a lasting form, time alone will show. Finally I have tried to display, in this long imperialist conflict, the strife of two rival conceptions of empire: the old, sterile, and ugly conception which thinks of empire as mere domination, ruthlessly pursued for the sole advantage of the master, and which seems to me to be most fully exemplified by Germany; and the nobler conception ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... The Skenite Arabians are the nomadic Arabs who live in tents. Strabo (p. 747) speaks of them thus: "The parts of Mesopotamia which are towards the south and at some distance from the mountains, and are waterless and sterile, are occupied by the Skenite Arabs, who are robbers and shepherds, and readily remove to other parts when the pastures fail and booty is ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... Conqueror (Macmillan, 1948) John W. Wilson conveys real feeling for the tragic life of Negro sharecroppers in the Brazos bottoms. He represents the critical awareness of life that has come to modern fiction of the Southwest, in contrast to the sterile action, without creation of character, in most older fiction of ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... the serene temples of the wise, the inmost shrine, which we carefully keep locked, is full of spiders' webs. All men, all, are fundamentally useless; nature tolerates, she does not need, she does not use them: sterile flowers! All - down to the fellow swinking in a byre, whom fools point out for the exception - all are useless; all weave ropes of sand; or like a child that has breathed on a window, write and obliterate, write and obliterate, idle words! Talk of it no more. That way, I ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a country of brown barren earth and broken outlines. There are rocks and clefts and patches of sterile soil. Strange vegetable forms grow in the clefts and hang over the rocks. Others are spheroidal in shape, resting upon the surface of the parched earth. Others rise vertically to a great height, like carved and fluted columns. Some throw out branches, crooked, shaggy branches, with hirsute ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... terms. In the religious sphere a like development has been shown. Early religious ideals have no relation to the material betterment of mankind. The early Christian thought it meritorious to live a sterile life at the top of a pillar, eaten by vermin, as the Hindoo saint to-day thinks it meritorious to live an equally sterile life upon a bed of spikes. But as the early Christian ideal progressed, sacrifices having no end connected with the betterment of mankind lost their appeal. ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... Damascus at dawn," he said cynically. "I don't care to be mocked there for bringing news of promises. We have had too many of those barren mares. I shall say that I have found everything here is sterile—the talk abortive—the men mere windy bellies ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... even in the sky—which grew in the dust, and lived on dust, and out of the dust drew elements of beauty such as roses and lilies couldn't boast of. "That means," the crazy woman said, "that there's nothing so dry, or parched, or sterile, that God can't take it and fashion from it the most priceless treasures of loveliness, if we only had ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... oldest son of a poor New Hampshire farmer, who found great difficulty is wresting from his few sterile acres a living for his family. Nearly a year before, he had lost his only cow by a prevalent disease, and being without money, was compelled to buy another of Squire Green, a rich but mean neighbor, on a six months' note, on very unfavorable terms. ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... there in search of some, and they brought back enough. Fourteen were applied to my eyes the same afternoon. The ground here was quite naked; it was, in fact, the blue clay of the Darling, with the same sterile looking plants; and no time was to be lost in seeking some ponds where there might be also good grass for the cattle. Therm. at sunrise, 97 deg.; at noon, 100 deg.; at 9 P.M. 90 deg.; with ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... stenografio. Step sxtupo. Step pasxi. Step by step pasxo post pasxo, pasxo pasxe. Step (relationship) duon. Stepfather duonpatro. Steppe stepo. Stereotype stereotipo. Stereotype plate klisxajxo. Stereometry stereometrio. Sterile senfrukta. Sterility senfrukteco. Sterling vera. Stern (of ship) posta parto. Stern severega. Stertorous stertora. Stew boleti. Steward (of ship) sxipintendanto. Steward intendanto. Stick bastono. Stick glui. Stick bills ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... head; her heart bursting with fond schemes to keep that precious mother alive. It's a splendid nature, that girl's; one that is in danger of being wrecked by its own impetuosity, but one so full and rich that it is capable of bubbling over and enriching all the dull and sterile ones about it. Now, if all the money I can rake and scrape together need not go to those languid, boneless children of my languid, boneless sister-in-law, I could put that brave little girl on her feet. I think she will be able to do battle ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... fate be far gentler than the last? And if you have known and wept over that early tomb, if you have seen the infant flower fade away from the green soil of your affections; if you have missed the bounding step, and the laughing eye, and the winning mirth which made this sterile world a perpetual holiday,—Mother of the Lost, if you have known, and you still pine for these, answer me yet again! Is it not a comfort, even while you mourn, to think of all that that breast, now so silent, has escaped? The cream, the sparkle, the ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ago there lived in a lonely hut on Mount Mitchell in North Carolina this identical Grimmel and his brothers. Their father, John Boyer, was a hunter. When he died the two elder sons, Richard and Hugh, remained with their mother, farmed a sterile tract on the Black Mountains and trapped bears and wolves through the great southern ranges of the Appalachian chain. Twice in the year they came down to the hamlet at Gray Eagle to exchange their peltry for such goods ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... filled with the spur of a glacier, whose surface was covered with pink snow! One can imagine with what feelings the two youths gazed on this beautiful sight. It seemed as if that valley, instead of forming a portion of the sterile region beyond the Arctic Circle, were one of the sunniest regions of the south, for a warm glow rested on the bosom of the snow, as if the sun were shedding upon it his rosiest hues. A little farther to the north the ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... are excessively weird and rugged. They always remind us of sterile deserts, and we cannot fail to notice the absence of grassy plains or green forests such as we are familiar with on our globe. In some respects the moon is not very differently circumstanced from the earth. Like it, the moon has the pleasing alternations of day and night, though the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... them grain for sale; so that, had I not had the Wanguana a little under control, we should not have completed our distance that day, and so reached Manyonge, which reminded me, by its ugliness, of the sterile Somali land. Proceeding through the semi-desert rolling table-land—in one place occupied by men who build their villages in large open squares of flat-topped mud huts, which, when I have occasion to refer to them in future, I shall call by their ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... adieu—and, in doing so, naturally turn my thoughts to that country where the rights of the people consist not of sterile and metaphysic declarations, but of real defence and protection. May they for ever remain uninterrupted by the devastating chimeras of their neighbours; and if they seek reform, may it be moderate and permanent, acceded to reason, and ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... suffice for home consumption, no exportation of cereals can be expected to take place. This circumstance, together with its rugged appearance, naturally procures for the province the character of being sterile and unproductive, and such it doubtless is when compared with Bulgaria, Roumelia, or the fruitful plains of Wallachia; but it has certain resources peculiar to itself, which, if properly developed, would materially change the aspect of the country, and obtain for it a more desirable reputation. ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... not seem conclusive; for the only reference to the subject in the preface is as follows: 'What could my sterile and uncultivated genius produce but the history of a child, meagre, adust, and whimsical, full of various wild imaginations never thought of before; like one you may suppose born in a prison, where every inconvenience keeps its residence, and ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... in the sterile lands of Norway, and famine probably increased by immigration from the east and south, drove its people "at times in piracy and at times in commerce"[1] forth from the western fjords and The Vik across ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... is monoecious and has perfect blossoms, therefore, there is no such thing as male and female trees in the case of the almond, but most of the best soft-shelled almonds are self-sterile and need cross-pollination from another variety. This is discussed elsewhere in ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... world. The only supply of turf was on the mountain-top, and from thence it had to be brought, basket by basket, even in the snow. The only manure for such land is seaweed, and that must be carried from the shore to the tiny plats of sterile earth on the hillside. I remember it all, for I refused to buy a pair of stockings of a woman along the road. We had taken so many that my courage failed; but I saw her climbing the slopes patiently, wearily, a shawl over her ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... per family.[98] It must be remembered that this average, which is even higher than that found in Russia, the most prolific of European countries, is not quite the same as the number of children per marriage; but it indicates very great fertility, while it may be noted also that sterile marriages are comparatively rare among French Canadians, although among English Canadians the proportion of childless families is found to be almost exactly the same (nearly 20 per cent) as among the infertile Americans of Massachusetts. The annual Reports of ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... of the hotel, bright with the latest fastidiousness in modern decoration and art-furniture, and gay with pictured canvases and color, seemed to mock the sullen landscape, and the sterile crags amid which the building was set. An attempt to make a pleasance in this barren waste had resulted only in empty vases, bleak statuary, and iron settees, as cold and slippery to the touch as the ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a mile east from Port Man is the western extremity of the more sterile island of the Levant, 5 m. from E. to W., and 1 from N. to S. The culminating point is in the centre of the island, the Pierres Blanches, on which there is a signal-tower, 423 ft. above the sea. Mica, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... kept on its journey, which, I learned, took us to the Torres Strait, the Papuan coast, through the Red Sea, through a subterranean strait, under the Isthmus of Suez, to the island of Santorin, the Cretan Archipelago, to the South Pole, on whose sterile wastes Captain Nemo reared his black flag with a white "N" upon it, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... fell into line and filed away over the barren mountains of Judea, and along rocky ridges and through sterile gorges, where eternal silence and solitude reigned. Even the scattering groups of armed shepherds we met the afternoon before, tending their flocks of long-haired goats, were wanting here. We saw but two living creatures. They were gazelles, of "soft-eyed" ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... three long years they will not sow Or root or seedling there: For three long years the unblessed spot Will sterile be and bare, And look upon the wondering sky With ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... mind and conscience by looking at the disastrous effects of letting resolutions remain sterile. Consider how apt we are to deceive ourselves with unfulfilled purposes. The quick response which an easily-moved nature may make to some appeal of noble thought or lofty principle is mistaken for action, and we ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Sterile and vain the tributes which we pay— It is the Past that consecrates today The spot where rests one of the noble few Who saw the right, and dared the right to do. True to himself and to his fellow men, With patient hand he moved the potent pen, ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... sterile Elizabeth is therefore adduced, not as a sufficient argument, but as a kind of figurative example: consequently in support of this instance, the convincing argument is added taken from the Divine ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas |
