"Esculent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... regard to species. But there is not a shadow of evidence in favour of this view: to assert that we could not breed our cart and race-horses, long and short-horned cattle, and poultry of various breeds, and esculent vegetables, for an almost infinite number of generations, would be opposed to all experience. I may add, that when under nature the conditions of life do change, variations and reversions of character probably do occur; but natural selection, ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... not afford any characters on which we can safely rely; yet it may be remarked, that in colour, the pure yellow, gold colour, bluish pale, dark or lustre brown, wine red, or the violet, belong to many that are esculent; whilst the pale or sulphur yellow, bright or blood red, and the greenish, belong to few but the poisonous. The safe kinds have most frequently a compact, brittle texture; the flesh is white; they grow more readily in open places, such as dry pastures ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... that breathes on earth has been made to produce so many varieties of form, complexion, and name as this homely root. It would be an interesting and instructive enterprise, to array all the varieties of this queen of esculent vegetables which Europe and America could exhibit, face to face with all the varieties which the dahlia, geranium, pansy, or even the fern has produced, and then see which has been numerically the most prolific in diversification of forms and ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... food, should be the instrument in the hands of the great Father to induce these impoverished, starving children of an unhappy country, to remove to lands where honest toil would be amply remunerated, and produce greater blessings for them than the precarious support afforded by an esculent root? We have faith, unbounded faith, in the benevolent care of the Universal Father,—faith in the fertility of the earth, and her capabilities of supporting to the end of time her ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... was not very substantial, and failed to keep up their wonted strength. This set them to looking up some other article which might impart variety to their fare. At last they succeeded in finding an esculent root, which they partook of at first with some caution, fearing that it might be unwholesome. Finding, however, that eating it produced no unpleasant effects, they continued the use of it. Even this, however, failed to afford them as ...
— Brave and Bold • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... true in fact as obscure in significance. The best plan seems to be to answer that I have entirely abandoned mere literature, and am contemplating a book on 'The Causes of Early Blight in the Potato,' a melancholy circumstance which threatens to deprive us of our chief esculent root. The inquirer would never be undeceived. One nymph who, like the rest, could not keep off the horrid topic of my occupation, said 'You never write anything but fairy books, do you?' A French gentleman, too, an educationist and expert in portraits of Queen Mary, once sent me a newspaper article ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... next two hours' weary struggle among trees, rocks, and waving creepers they only heard pigs once, and then it was as they dashed off unseen, grunting and squealing wildly. Birds were scarcer and very small, while they felt no temptation to try the esculent qualities of the lizards they saw glancing about over the hot lava, or of the snakes which hurriedly ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... of attire and punctuality in bathing. In short, this volume is as diversified in its aspect as the small garden of a judicious cultivator, where, in a limited space, useful cabbages, potatoes, and all the solid esculent greens, grow side by side with choice fruits and ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... bassiqui. These, together with rice, are raised in considerable quantities; besides which, the inhabitants in the vicinity of the towns and villages have gardens which produce onions, calavances, yams, cassavi, ground-nuts, pompions, gourds, water melons, and some other esculent plants. ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... southward of Lake Okeechobee. They have but little intercourse with the whites, and come out on the coast only at certain seasons to fish. We were very anxious to obtain some provisions from them, but excepting kountee they had nothing to spare. This is an esculent resembling arrowroot, which they dig, pulverize, and use as flour. Cooked in the ashes, it makes a palatable but tough cake, which we enjoyed after our long abstinence from bread. The old chief took advantage of our eagerness for ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... in the form of the sea growth from which it takes its name. The star cactus was in full flower, the scarlet buds starting out from the flat surface of the thick leaves after a queer and original fashion. The bread-fruit tree, with its large, melon-like product, hung heavy with the nourishing esculent. The Carolina tree, with gorgeous blossoms like military pompons, blazed here and there, overshadowing the large, pure white, and beautiful campanile, with hanging flowers, like metallic bells, after which the plant is named. Here too was a great variety ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... entertainment, three hundred Louis d'ors worth of these fruits have been eaten." It is situated on a hill, just above Vincennes, about three miles from the fauxbourg Saint Antoine, and is likewise celebrated for its grapes, strawberries, all sorts of wall fruit, pease, and every kind of esculent vegetables. In the garden called Mouceaux which belongs to the ci-devant Duke of Orleans; at the extremity of the fauxbourg du Roule are, it is said, magnificent hot-houses, of which I have no recollection, though I was in the garden in 1776. There ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... dreaming-place this for the lotus-eating monarch of a lotus-eating people. The lake is so full of the lotus and other water-lilies that more than sixty thousand tons of the edible nuts are gathered each year and ground into flour, the root besides serving as a popular esculent. What is an object of devotion with the Tibetans of the higher Himaliyas a few days' journey distant, as formerly with the Egyptians, is to the Kashmiris an article of food and trade. They might draw from the waters, which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... enthusiastic description of Dr. Badham, who certainly knew much more of fungology than Gerard, and did not recommend to others what he had not personally tried himself. After praising the beauty of an English autumn, even in comparison with Italy, he thus concludes his pleasant and useful book, "The Esculent Funguses of England": "I have myself witnessed whole hundredweights of rich, wholesome diet rotting under trees, woods teeming with food, and not one hand to gather it. . . . I have, indeed, grieved when I reflected on the straitened conditions of the lower orders to ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... days of Louis XIV. was only found in apothecary shops, and gave birth to many lucrative professions, such as pastry-cooks, confectioners, liquourists, &c. Mild oils also come from the vegetable kingdom. They are all esculent, but when mingled with other substances they should be looked on only as a seasoning. Gluten found in the greatest abundance in cheese, contributes greatly to the fermentation of the bread with which it is united. Chemists assign ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots, And am stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over, And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons, And call anything close again, when I ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... fishery, that fish being taken in incredible quantities in this neighborhood. Here, therefore, during the fishing season, the Snake Indians resort from far and near, to lay in their stock of salmon, which, with esculent roots, forms the principal food of the inhabitants of ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... we scarce saw the sun; for ten days the sextants lay idle. When at length the sun did condescend to slash the sky with his hopeful beams, we found we had made the satisfactory average of ten miles a day. Our potatoes, too,—that self-provided esculent upon which sailors depend so much, and without which the admiralty allowance assumes such skeleton proportions—now began to fail us. As it was useless to attempt to reach Chefoo under sail alone, steam was got up, and we managed to make the ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... with a virulence which kept the hospital tents generally supplied with patients. For those afflicted with this disorder, the advantage of fish or other fresh provisions could but rarely be procured; nor were esculent vegetables often obtained in sufficient plenty to produce any material alleviation of the complaint. In the dysentery, the red gum of the tree which principally abounds on this coast, was found a very powerful remedy. The yellow gum has been ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... Genevra softly. "Let him now listen. Are the acorns of the mountain sweeter than the esculent and nutritious bean of the Pale Face miner? Does my brother prize the edible qualities of the snail above that of the crisp and oleaginous bacon? Delicious are the grasshoppers that sport on the hillside,—are ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... Literature. In his treatment of Dickens, he writes very contemptuously of 'that Little Bethel to which Kit's mother went,' and he likens it to 'a monstrous mushroom that grows in the moonshine and dies in the dawn.' Now no man who was really fond of the esculent and homely fungus would have employed such a metaphor by way of disparagement. I can only infer that Mr. Chesterton thinks mushrooms very nasty. His opinion of Little Bethel does not concern me. It is neither here nor there. But Mr. Chesterton does not like ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... a country of plantation, first look about, what kind of victual the country yields of itself to hand; as chestnuts, walnuts, pineapples, olives, dates, plums, cherries, wild honey, and the like; and make use of them. Then consider what victual or esculent things there are, which grow speedily, and within the year; as parsnips, carrots, turnips, onions, radish, artichokes of Hierusalem, maize, and the like. For wheat, barley, and oats, they ask too much labor; but with pease and beans you may begin, ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... of the spring variety was quite equal in quantity and quality to the crop of that grain on any more southern farms; that in raising barley they could almost surpass the world; and the cereals generally, and all the esculent roots, were easily raised. Indian corn was not planted as a field crop, though it was grown in their gardens. In a word, the capacity of their land to produce almost everything plentifully and well, was established; but for all this, farming did not afford much profit. ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... the lily-root as if she had not eaten for a week. Sitting up like a squirrel, and clutching the end of the root with both little forepaws, she crushed the white esculent into her mouth and gnawed at it ravenously with the keen chisels of her teeth. The root was as long as herself, and its weight perhaps a sixth of her own. Yet when it was all eaten she wanted more. There were other pieces stored in the chamber; ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... made short work of the maize; the bandicoots and the township pigs dug up and devoured the sweet potatoes, just as they were becoming large enough for use—commend me to your half-starved pig to find out in a moment where the juiciest and finest esculent lies buried—and the chattering little opossums stripped the peach-trees of their wealth, in which labour of love they were eagerly assisted by the flying-foxes during the night, whilst any that had escaped these nocturnal depredators ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... to me, with only the profit of a meal or two to themselves. For their own sakes they ought at least to wait till the squashes are better grown. Why is it, I wonder, that Nature has provided such a host of enemies for every useful esculent, while the weeds are suffered to grow unmolested, and are provided with such tenacity of life, and such methods of propagation, that the gardener must maintain a continual struggle or they will hopelessly overwhelm him? What hidden virtue is there ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... Migrating Instinct of Animals.—Of the House Swallow of England; and the Esculent Swallow, whose Nest is eaten by the Chinese.—He tells also about the Passenger Pigeon of America; of the Myriads which are found in various parts of the United States; of the Land-Crab and its Migrations, and of those of the Salmon and ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley |
