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noun
Guano  n.  (pl. guanos)  A substance found in great abundance on some coasts or islands frequented by sea fowls, and composed chiefly of their excrement. It is rich in phosphates and ammonia, and is used as a powerful fertilizer.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Guano" Quotes from Famous Books



... much thought or too great admiration. Gardens are filled with beautiful flowers, and fields are fertile to-day because hundreds of years ago sea birds were devouring the carcasses of dead fish, acting as nature's scavengers, and building up the great guano fields of ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane

... frequent the same places year after year, so that, where they are numerous, the ground is often completely covered and discolored with their excrements, which in some cases accumulate in course of time to such an amount as to have given rise to the notion of carrying it away to be used as guano. The little blood-sucking Vampire Bats already mentioned take up their abode in caverns, and, according to Dr. Hensel, who observed their habits, they discharge their excrements, which are black and pasty, near the entrance ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various

... whaler too, I believe; in his own words—anything and everything a man may be at sea, but a pirate. The Pacific, north and south, was his proper hunting-ground; but he had wandered so far afield looking for a cheap steamer to buy. Lately he had discovered—so he said—a guano island somewhere, but its approaches were dangerous, and the anchorage, such as it was, could not be considered safe, to say the least of it. "As good as a gold-mine," he would exclaim. "Right bang ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... remember any one with red—any one named Maloney. Such a lot of college men seem to have misused their advantages. One of the best mathematicians of the class of '91 is selling lottery tickets in Belize. A Cornell man dropped off here last month. He was second steward on a guano boat. I'll write to the department if you like, Maloney. Or if there's ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry

... Carlyle, which beats to shatter the affectations and hypocrisies of a generation, and to summon a civilized world to the worship of righteousness and truth! Is this a Guinea trader or a prophet who is angry when Quashee prefers his pumpkins and millet, reared without the hot guano of the lash, and who will not accept the reduction of a bale of cotton or a tierce of sugar, though Church and State be disinfected of slavery?[E] It is a drop of planter's gall which the sham-hater shakes testily from his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various

... was perhaps ever offered to the House of Commons. Reminding the House that in the preceding year (1845) the farmers of England, at a cost of two millions sterling, had imported two hundred and eighty thousand tons of guano, he proceeded to estimate what would be the effect on the productive powers of the land of that novel application. Two hundred thousand tons, or, in other words, four million hundred-weight, were expended on ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli

... a cactus capable of being 'seeded' after the second year; if poor, a third is required. The plant lasts, with manure to defend it from exhaustion, a full decade. [Footnote: The compost was formerly natural, dry or liquid as in Switzerland; but for some years the costly guano and chemicals have been introduced. Formerly also potatoes were set between the stems; and well-watered lands gave an annual grain-crop as ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... alone. To hoed crops apply these articles twice, and always by sowing, and not by putting it around or upon the hills; the effect is much greater sowed, besides the labor that is saved. In applying guano, do not allow it to come in contact with the plants, as it ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden

... Bonanni. 'Guado—guano! Fancy! Try again. Think of a pretty Italian name. It must be very easy! Take an historical name, the name of a great family. Those ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford

... uncertain. But one cannot visit a new country without attempting to make a forecast of some kind; and the experience of other countries goes to show that, while deposits of the precious metals are, under our present conditions, no more an abiding source of wealth than is a guano island, they may immensely accelerate the development of a country, giving it a start in the world, and providing it with advantages, such as railway communication, which could not otherwise be looked for. ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce

... sold widely in the industrial world was guano. It is the naturally sun-dried droppings of nesting sea birds that accumulates in thick layers on rocky islands off the coast of South America. Guano is a potent nutrient source similar to dried chicken ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon

... rank and coarse, a dressing of sand will improve it; if it is poor and easily burned up, give it a sprinkling of soot, or guano, or wood ashes (or all three mixed) before rain. "Slops" are as welcome to parched grass as to half-starved flowers. If the weather is hot and the soil light, it is well occasionally to leave the short clippings of one mowing upon the ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... hundred years the uniform policy which they began and their sons continued has been acquisition, expansion, annexation, reaching out to remote wildernesses far more distant and inaccessible then than the Philippines are now—to disconnected regions like Alaska, to island regions like Midway, the Guano Islands, the Aleutians, the Sandwich Islands, and even to quasi-protectorates like Liberia and Samoa. Why mourn because of the precedent we are establishing? The precedent was established before we were born. Why distress ourselves with the thought that this is only the beginning, that it opens the ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid

... stalactites and stalagmites. The dome of one cavern is three hundred and fifty-five feet from floor to roof. An important fact connected with these caverns is that they contain thousands of tons of bats' manure, which may be as valuable as guano to future planters. Between the heavy clays and blue mud of the mangrove swamps and the granite and sandstone of the mountain ranges, the undulating rises are mainly composed of red clay, sandstones, shales, and granitic and feldspathic rocks, with extensive deposits of laterite in red ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... powerful fertilisers of the soil; but the three principles which constitute their manurial value—namely, nitrogen (ammonia), phosphoric acid, and potash—are purchasable at far lower prices in guano and other manures. Nevertheless, many farmers believe that the most economical way to produce good manure is to feed their stock with concentrated aliment, in order to greatly increase the value of their excreta. ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron

... of commerce, important to the agricultural interests of the United States, has within a few years past been opened with Peru. Notwithstanding the inexhaustible deposits of guano upon the islands of that country, considerable difficulties are experienced in obtaining the requisite supply. Measures have been taken to remove these difficulties and to secure a more abundant importation of the article. Unfortunately, there has been a serious collision between our citizens ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce

... cows—keeping only the red-and-white heifer. I guess you remember that heifer; they got her of old Joe Sanders, on the Creek. And they sold one of their horses—the sorrel—and a mule; they hadn't no use fur 'em here, fur the land's not worth much, and hasn't seen no guano nor nothin' fur three or four years; and the money they got was enough to start a mighty good cooper-shop, ef Sam don't spend it all, or most of it, in Richmond, which I think he will; and of course, he being away, Sarah Ann ...
— What Might Have Been Expected • Frank R. Stockton

... employed, the formation of ammonia preceded the production of nitric acid. Mr. C.F.A. Tuxen has already published in the present year two series of experiments on the formation of ammonia and nitric acids in soils to which bone-meal, fish-guano, or stable manure had been applied; in all cases he found the formation of ammonia preceded the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various

... be as genuine as guano. Only I fancy the 'wave' of young ladies will have to ebb for a little while; and I am exceedingly interested in speculating as to what will be the next 'cycle.' From 'information I have received,' emanating ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... and made possible their great public works. All accounts of the country at the time of the Conquest agree in the statement that they cultivated the soil in a very admirable way and with remarkable success, using aqueducts for irrigation, and employing guano as one of their most important fertilizers. Europeans learned from them the value of this fertilizer, and its name, guano, is Peruvian. The remains of their works show what they were as builders. Their skill in cutting stone and their wonderful masonry ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin

... breeze just rippling up the water. Before us lay the long wished-for Cape, with the Meal-sack,—a queer stump of basalt, that flops up out of the sea, fifteen miles south-west of Cape Reikianess, its flat top white with guano, like the mouth of a bag of flour,—five miles on our port bow; and seldom have I remembered a pleasanter four-and-twenty hours than those spent stealing up along the gnarled and crumpled lava flat ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)

... really wants is top-dressing with guano. Hullo! another man out. Adair's bowling better ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse

... the earth is discharged and the evacuation covered, all offensive exhalation entirely ceases. Under certain circumstances there may be, at times, a slight odor as of guano mixed with earth, but this is so trifling and so local that a commode arranged on this plan may, without the least annoyance, be kept ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various

... and every one has for years known, that in India there is a source of revenue, not from taxes levied on the people, but from opium, and which is very like the revenue derived by the Peruvian Government from guano. If we turn to those three years and see what relation the expenditure of the Government had to taxes levied on the people of India, we shall find, though we may hear that the taxes are not so much as we imagine, ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright

... tyrannous Star-chambers, branding-irons, chimerical Kings and Surplices at All-hallowtide, they are gone, or with immense velocity going. Oliver's works do follow him!—The works of a man, bury them under what guano-mountains and obscene owl-droppings you will, do not perish, cannot perish. What of Heroism, what of Eternal Light was in a Man and his Life, is with very great exactness added to the Eternities; remains forever a new divine portion of the Sum of Things; and no owl's voice, this way or that, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... shares or for so many bales of cotton; any old tools were used; corn, bacon, and other supplies were bought on credit, and a crop lien was given; a month later, corn and cotton were planted on soil that was not well broken up; the Negro "would not pay for no guano" to put on other people's land; by turns the farmer planted and fished, plowed and hunted, hoed and frolicked, or went to "meeting." At the end of the year he sold his cotton, paid part of his rent and some of ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming

... available as food for the plants; while the top-soil, containing the eggs and larvae of many insects, being deeply buried, the plants are less liable to be attacked by the club disease. Farm-yard manure is that most suitable for the cabbage, but artificial manures such as guano, superphosphate of lime or gypsum, together with lime-rubbish, wood-ashes and marl, may, if required, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... an easy matter to procure any amount of manure by a corresponding number of cattle; but, as it happened, the natural pasturage was so bad that no beast could thrive upon it. Thus everything, even grass-land, had to be manured; and, fortunately, a cargo of guano having arrived in the island, we were enabled to lay down some good clover ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... pigeon towers—a great institution in Central Persia. They are cylindrical in shape, with castellated top, and are solidly built with massive walls. They stand no less than thirty to forty feet in height, and possess a central well in which the guano is collected—the object for which the towers are erected. A quadrangular house on the top, and innumerable small cells, where pigeons lay their eggs and breed their young, are constructed all round the tower. These towers are quite formidable looking structures, and are so numerous, particularly ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... been carried over the cable in a suspended car or cars with much greater rapidity and safety than it was carried in lighters. Such devices are used, I think, at several points on the western coast of South America for putting guano and phosphates on board of vessels where communication with the shore is hazardous and uncertain on account ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan

... mile from Murrell's Cave is a small cavern, the roof not more than 4 feet above the floor. It has been inhabited from time immemorial by myriads of bats. Several tons of guano have been taken out for fertilizing purposes, but no evidence has been discovered that it was ever a habitation ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke

... of the eagle's nest. It was a terrible climb, before he lay on a ledge peering ever into the guano-stained structure of sticks from which the eagle soared again at his approach. As he looked, he laughed. The forequarters of a mountain goat lay in the nest. Hanging perilously by one hand, Enoch grasped the long, bloody hair ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow

... of the last few years has taught us one thing more certainly than another, it is the unfailing excellence of Guano for every kind ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson

... birds lived and died here but multiplied thousands of seal have come here to breed. The droppings of these millions of birds and animals and the accumulating bodies of the dead have decayed and made a kind of grayish powder. This substance is called guano and it is hundreds of ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols

... the barbarous cacophony of the clanking pump rose in the waist; and streams of ill-smelling water gushed on deck and made valleys in the slab guano. Nares leaned on the rail, watching the steady stream of bilge as though he found some interest ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... thousand francs. I sold in 1884, to the Prussian government, an iron-clad and two steam corvettes for seven million five hundred thousand francs, and received five per cent, commission." Then he professed to have had gigantic contracts in Chili, Peru and other parts of South America for artillery and guano. Altogether his story was ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... young volunteer on board, who had figured at Brighton reviews, and was now on his way to join his father in New Zealand, where he proposed to join the colonial army. We had also a Yankee gentleman, about to enter on his governorship of the Guano Island of Maldon, in the Pacific, situated almost due north of the Society Islands, said to have been purchased by ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles

... whole, the object being—as the object of all honest historical inquiry must be—to ascertain the truth about it, freed from those jealousies and prejudices which, so freely deposited at the time, tend to consolidate and petrify until, as with the guano massed hard on islets in Australasian seas, it is difficult to get at the solid rock beneath for the accretions upon it, and sometimes not easy ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott

... expenditure in bone manure. Its use had indeed raised many struggling farmers to comparative independence.[622] A very large quantity of the bones used came from South America.[623] Porter also noticed that 'since 1840 an extensive trade has been carried on in an article called Guano', the guana of Davy, 'from the islands of the Pacific and off the coast of Africa'. Nitrate of soda was just coming in, but was not much used till some years later. In 1840 Liebig suggested the treatment of bones with sulphuric acid, and in 1843 Lawes patented ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler

... announced that they will give 'L.1000 and a gold medal for the discovery of a manure equal in fertilising properties to the Peruvian guano, and of which an unlimited supply can be furnished to the English farmer at a rate not exceeding L.5 per ton.' Also, 'fifty sovereigns for the best account of the geographical distribution of guano, with suggestions for the discovery of any new source of supply, accompanied by specimens.' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various

... Mr. Piper, with a hazy idea that Mr. Cavendish had been trying some unwarrantable experiments upon his lemon and orange bushes. 'Don't you take and put any rubbish in the garden. I've got a new lot of guano, and I don't ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne

... you, it is nothing more nor less than a scurrilous scorpion, whose gentlest sting is worse than the stings of twenty wasps. If the brother of that now squashed brute should drop upon me, during my repose, from that roof (which I perceive is of 'guano' leaf, and admirably adapted for scorpion gymnastics), my appearance at the breakfast-table to-morrow, and for days after, will be hideous; to say nothing of personal discomfort and fever. Now, a mosquito net stretched over you on its frame, effectually ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman

... protects the place. It is in the territory of the Warsingali, and owns the rule of the Gerad or Prince, who sometimes lives here, and at other times inhabits the Jungle. Las Kuray exports gums, Dumbah sheep, and guano, the latter considered valuable, and sent to Makalla in Arabia, to manure the ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton

... Valparaiso they called at the Chincha Islands, took in a cargo of guano for China, and shaped their course then eastward across the calm southern ocean, whose lonely monotony was only broken by the occasional appearance of one of the larger kind of sea-birds, or by the distant spouting of a whale. On board, however, the same peace was far from ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie

... of Alaska have until recently held first place in her industries. Herrings furnish oil and guano, and the young fish are packed as "sardines'' at Juneau. Cod can be taken with comparatively little danger or hardship. During the Russian occupation a small amount was shipped to California and the Sandwich Islands. The take since 1879 has been practically constant. The take of halibut is ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... has already been formed from pyridine, we have here a true synthesis also. Both theobromine and caffeine, its methyl derivative, have been made from xanthine, which itself can be formed from guanine, a constituent of guano. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various

... of the smaller growers regard all kinds of artificial fertilizers with suspicion, but they may be interested, should they ever read these pages, in the following story. When Peruvian guano was first introduced into this country, the farmers could not be persuaded that it merited any reliance as a manure. The importers, in despair, caused some of the despised stuff to be sown in the form of huge letters spelling the word "FOOLS" upon a bare hillside, ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... room in general, and surveyed the well-dressed back of a gentleman who was busily figuring at a desk within. The apartment was carpetless, and the dust of a decade lay deep on the old books, shelves, and the familiar advertisements of guano and fertilizers which decorated the room. An old stove, rusty with the nicotine contributed by farmers during the previous season while waiting by its glowing sides for their cotton to be sold, stood straight up in a bed of sand, and festoons of cobwebs clung to the upper sashes of the ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various

... no delight so great as to have her beside him, and her as his own. But the inky devil sat close upon his shoulders. Where would he be at the end of three months if Mr. Wharton would do nothing for him,—and if a certain venture in guano, to which he had tempted Sexty Parker, should not turn out the right way? He believed in the guano and he believed in Mr. Wharton, but it is a terrible thing to have one's whole position in the world hanging upon either an unwilling father-in-law ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... luxuriance of vegetation furnishes itself, by decomposition, abundant materials for replenishing the fertility of the soil. But there are some substances, such as muriate of soda, gypsum, phosphate, and other compounds of lime, which may be advantageously applied. Guano and expensive artificial manures, are seldom required, and, indeed, will not repay ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... is endemic. In England, in spite of all we have done to stimulate it of late years with guano and other artificial manures, it is ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... brick margin. Rachel sat down upon it, her eyes upon that distant gleam below. The dusk was fast possessing itself of all the farm, and an evening wind was gustily blowing through the cart-shed, playing with some old guano sacks that had been left there, and whistling round the corners of the house. Outside, Rachel could hear the horse fidgeting, and old Jonathan coughing—no doubt as a signal to her that she ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Lord James held his glasses fixed on the barren guano- whitened ledges of the headland. But though he could discern with quickly increasing distinctness the seabirds that soared about the cliff crest and nested in its crevices, he perceived no sign of any signal such as castaways ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet

... portion of the Pacific coast. Naval officers more than once raised it over islands which they christened, and Congress authorized the President to exercise temporary authority over islands from which American citizens were removing guano and to prevent foreign encroachment while they were so engaged. In the eighties, fifty such islands of the Pacific were in the ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish

... pot, and half filled it. It was not like water, it did not bubble so high when some had been taken; so he just took what he could get. Pursuing his researches a little further he found a range of rocks with snowy summits apparently; but the snow was the guano of centuries. He got to the western extremity of the island, saw another deep bay or rather branch of the sea, and on the other side of it a tongue of high land running out to sea. On that promontory stood a gigantic palmtree. He recognized that with a certain thrill, but was ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade

... quack kind, suggested pleasing and poetic thoughts; for commerce is really as interesting as nature. The very names of the commodities were poetic, and as suggestive as if they had been inserted in a pleasing poem,—Lumber, Cotton, Sugar, Hides, Guano, Logwood. Some sober, private, and original thought would have been grateful to read there, and as much in harmony with the circumstances as if it had been written on a mountain-top; for it is of a fashion which never changes, and as respectable as hides ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... years, and when credit is abundant, not so unusual an occurrence as might be supposed, it is just possible for the peasant to struggle on; but he can never be said to live. His land is exhausted by the old Mayo rotation of "potatoes, oats, burn," and he has no manure but guano and seaweed. ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker

... down wid you. Suggin sacks was sewed together to make our mattress ticks and dem ticks was filled wid straw. Now, don't tell me you ain't heared of suggin sacks a-fore! Dem was coarse sacks sort of lak de guano sacks us uses now. Dey crowded jus' as many Niggers into each cabin as could sleep in one room, and marriage never meant a thing in dem days when dey was 'rangin' sleepin' quarters for slaves. Why, I knowed a man what had two wives livin' in de same ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration

... former "dunce," the one they had called "Good-luck" because his father had made an immense fortune in guano. Not one bit changed was Gustave! The same deep-set eyes and greenish complexion. But what style! English from the tips of his pointed shoes to the horseshoe scarfpin in his necktie. One would say that ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee

... for the Russians to capture the artful poachers of the Smoky Sea? And later a poacher herself, and still later stealing men, a black-birder, seizing the unoffending natives of these South Seas and selling them into slavery of mine or plantation, of guano-heap and sickening alien clime. Her decks have run blood, and heard the wailing of the gentle savage torn from his beloved home and lashed or clubbed into submission by the superior white. Name and color and rig had changed time and again, owners and masters ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... American sailor with a knife, in the Calle de San Francisco, if father had not paid five ounces, and become security for his good behavior. But he ran away, after all, and went as a common sailor in a nasty guano ship. Dolores cried very much, and it was long before she would sing for me again. Oh, she did know such delightful songs!—Mi Nina, and Yo ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... length, by one in greatest breadth. The rock is a coarse sienite, forming detached bare masses and ridges, but none of considerable height. In the hollows the soil appears rich, dark, and pulverulent, with much admixture of unformed bird-guano. The scanty vegetation is apparently limited to a grass growing in tussocks, and a few maritime plants. The ground resembles a rabbit warren, being everywhere undermined by the burrows of the mutton-bird, a dark shearwater (Puffinus brevicaudus) the size of a pigeon. A person ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray

... condiment which is repugnant to another. Locusts have been used from time immemorial for food by different tribes of Arabs. Snail soup was once regarded in Europe as a delicious dish. In the West Indies and South America the guano, a species of lizard, is devoured with gusto. Bird's nests command enormous prices as an edible in China, where also dogs and cats are ordinary food. At Rome camels' heels were a tidbit for an epicure. Whale's ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper

... when the earth is discharged, and the evacuation is covered, all offensive exhalation entirely ceases. Under certain circumstances, there may be, at times, a slight odor as of guano mixed with earth; but this is so trifling and so local, that a commode arranged on this plan may, without the least annoyance, be kept in use ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

... mentioned as asked in his note to Lord Scamperdale, viz. Washball, Charley Slapp, and Lumpleg, were Parson Blossomnose; Mr. Fossick of the Flat Hat Hunt, who declined—Mr. Crane of Crane Hall; Captain Guano, late of that noble corps the Spotted Horse Marines; and others who accepted. Mr. Spraggon was a sort of volunteer, at all events an undesired guest, unless his lordship accompanied him. It so happened that the least wanted ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... bell-shaped mass of rock, 500 feet in height, almost two miles in length and a mile in width. It reminded Columbus of a giant ship under full sail, wherefore he named it Alta Vela, or High Sail, sometimes corrupted to Alto Velo. The valuable deposits of guano on the rock induced a party of Americans in 1860 to take possession of it in the name of the United States as an ownerless guano island, but upon protest by the Dominican authorities the American government promptly recognized the superior ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... old. A dreadful mustiness pervaded the atmosphere. The dirt, too, the heavy deposit of guano upon the floor, made it almost revolting. There was no furniture of any sort, while yet it conveyed the suggestion that, at some remote period, it had been the ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum

... chapters and paragraphs, about life in the gold and silver mines of California and Nevada; about the Indians of the plains and deserts of the West, and their cannibalism; about the raising of vegetables in kegs of gunpowder by the aid of two or three teaspoons of guano; about the moving of small arms from place to place at night in wheelbarrows to avoid taxes; and about a sort of cows and mules in the Humboldt mines, that climb down chimneys and disturb the people at night. These matters are not only new, but are well worth knowing. It is a pity the ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain

... Pulo Sapata, a bald, solitary rock, standing in the midst of the China Sea, the resort of seafowl, as is indicated by its guano-like appearance. There it stands day after day, and year after year, affronting the scorching beams of this tropical sun. All ships pass by it between Singapore and China. So I am looking at it for the fourth time—the last time, we may hope. We have ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin

... nitrogen in a whole campaign as was freed in a few days' cannonading on the Somme. Now there is one place in the world—and so far as we know one only—where nitrates are to be found abundantly. This is in a desert on the western slope of the Andes where ancient guano deposits have decomposed and there was not enough rain to wash away their salts. Here is a bed two miles wide, two hundred miles long and five feet deep yielding some twenty to fifty per cent. of sodium nitrate. The deposit originally belonged to Peru, but Chile fought her for it and got it ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson

... Irish, playing pitch and toss and waiting for employment;—on along the railway, which came in at the same gates, and which branches down between each vast block—past a pilot-engine butting refractory trucks into their places—on to the last block, [and] down the branch, sniffing the guano-scented air, and detecting the old bones. The hartshorn flavour of the guano becomes very strong, as I near the docks, where, across the Elba's decks, a huge vessel is discharging her cargo of the brown dust, and where huge vessels have been discharging that same cargo ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the ice in the hold gave out, and in consequence the meat was in no fit state to eat. Every body and every thing seemed uncomfortable. It was a great change from the clean and pleasant Golden Age. We saw the islands of San Domingo, Narvasa, Jamaica, Cuba, Santa Inagua, and Mayo Guano, of ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson

... the exhibits, to be placed in two neighboring sheds, of the Native Guano Company and the Millowners' Association. The former will show all the patents used for the purification of the rivers from sewage, and the latter will display in action their method of rendering innocuous the chemical pollutions which factories pour ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various

... bringing back with him, at the two extremities of his bamboo pole, two full buckets of what we designate as filth. Thanks to human dung, the earth in China is still as young as in the days of Abraham. Chinese wheat yields a hundred fold of the seed. There is no guano comparable in fertility with the detritus of a capital. A great city is the most mighty of dung-makers. Certain success would attend the experiment of employing the city to manure the plain. If our gold is manure, our manure, on the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... into the State of Mississippi when my purse was empty. I stopped off at a little town, late at night, where there were no boarding-houses, and no one would admit me to a private house to sleep. I wandered about until I came upon an old guano-house, and crawled into this and slept until the break of day. Then I crawled out, pulled myself together, jumped astride my bicycle, and made my way toward Utica, through a wild and unfrequented part of Mississippi. But before I could reach Utica my wheel broke down, whereupon I put it ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various

... Germany, but finds no sylphs or sirens on the banks of the Rhine, while maidens with blue eyes and golden hair are no more abundant there than elsewhere. Greece next receives the wanderer, who hears in Athens of railroads and consolidated funds: on Olympus he finds a guano manufactory, and on Pindus a poet writing fourteen-syllable endecasyllabics. He visits with a similar disenchantment Constantinople, and then makes his way to England. There poor Pedro is disgusted by the sordid, selfish spirit of the people. An absurd scene at a village ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various

... Bay caught 300 of these animals at a cast of the net. Of the whales thus killed not only the blubber and hide are taken away, but also, when possible, the carcases, which, when cheap freight can be had, are utilised at the guano manufactories in the north of Norway. After having lain a whole year on the beach at Spitzbergen they may be taken on board a vessel without any great inconvenience, a proof that putrefaction proceeds with extreme ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... uses it to golden advantage,—now merely the phosphate of lime, but material that has passed through the operations of animal life, of organism. With whatever manure he work his land, be it wood-ashes or guano or compost, he knows that that which has received the action of organic tissues fattens it the best; and so a wise man may fertilize to-day better with the facts of an experience that he has once lived through, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various

... incurred the dislike of his native subjects by establishing a poi-factory of his own near Honolulu. Poi is sold in the streets in calabashes, but it is also shipped in considerable quantities to other islands, and especially to guano islands which lie southward and westward of this group. On these lonely islets, many of which have not even drinking-water for the laborers who live on them, poi and fish are the chief if not the only articles of food. The fish, of ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff

... Navassa, in the West Indian group, has, under the provisions of Title VII of the Revised Statutes, been recognized by the President as appertaining to the United States. It contains guano deposits, is owned by the Navassa Phosphate Company, and is occupied solely by its employees. In September, 1889, a revolt took place among these laborers, resulting in the killing of some of the agents ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison

... Athenaeum. Of late, Jack has found a good friend in animal magnetism, and his seances have been reasonably successful. When performing in the country districts, Jack varied the entertainments by a lecture on the properties of guano, which he threw in for nothing, and which was highly appreciated by the agricultural interest. Jack's books were principally works of travel. His Journey to the Fountains of the Niger is generally esteemed ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various

... have also the great group of fresh-water and marine microscopic plants known as Diatoms, which likewise secrete a siliceous skeleton, often of great beauty. The skeletons of Diatoms are found abundantly at the present day in lake-deposits, guano, the silt of estuaries, and in the mud which covers many parts of the sea-bottom; they have been detected in strata of great age; and in spite of their microscopic dimensions, they have not uncommonly ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... manufacturer to pay expenses and yield profit. The profitableness of making sugar from sorghum depends largely on utilizing all waste products. The scums and sediments make manure hardly inferior to guano. Bagasse, or crushed cane, can be turned into manure by being thrown into hog-pens, as at Rio Grande, N.J., or it will make a fair quality of printing paper. It is not economical to burn it. If the manufacture of sorghum-sugar ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... Umberto, bound from Callao to Genoa; she had carried a number of emigrants to Rio, had gone thence to Callao, where she had taken in a cargo of guano, and was now on her way home. The captain was a certain Giovanni Gianni, a native of Sestri; he has kindly allowed me to refer to him in case the truth of my story should be disputed; but I grieve to say that I suffered him to mislead himself in some important particulars. I ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... descend; the covering of the balloon gave indications of bursting, but in the meanwhile he had time to satisfy himself of the volcanic origin of the mountain, whose extinct craters are now but deep abysses. Immense accumulations of bird-guano gave the sides of Mount Mendif the appearance of calcareous rocks, and there was enough of the deposit there to manure all the lands ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne

... by the action of ammonia on alloxan, which is itself derived from the uric acid of guano by treatment with nitric acid, and was known nearly forty years back to stain the fingers and nails red. The first murexide sent into the market was a reddish-purple powder, dissolving in water with a fine purple tint, leaving a little ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field

... was told it paid L2 per acre. I wonder how it is possible to raise rent and taxes off these fields, never to mention support for the farmers. The land requires very stimulating manure to produce a crop. When bad years come, and render the tenant farmers unable to purchase guano, the crops are worthless almost. The necessity of buying artificial manure is a terrible necessity that American farmers know ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall

... found those prehistoric agriculturists utilizing the inexhaustible supply of guano found on all the islands of the Pacific. It was not till the middle of the nineteenth century that the British farmer found ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson

... passing to the calm Concord beyond, washes the edge of his land, yields him at least occasional beans and pease—or some friend, agriculturally enthusiastic and an original Brook-Farmer, experiments with guano in the garden, and produces melons and other vines with a success that relieves Brook Farm from every slur of inadequate practical genius. Mr. Emerson has shaded his originally bare land with trees, and counts ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis

... I know about Chili is, not its guano beds, but this fact which I learn from Darwin's "Voyage," namely, that the apple thrives well there. Darwin saw a town there so completely buried in a wood of apple-trees, that its streets were merely paths in an orchard. The tree, indeed, thrives so well, that large ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... with alligator, alpaca, bigot, cannibal, cargo, filibuster, freebooter, guano, hurricane, mosquito, negro, stampede, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin

... unbroken weeks of brilliant sunshine, when nature lolls in the warmth and stirs herself only at night under the moon and the stars. That dingy trader, the Unser Fritz, ostensibly carrying wool and guano from the Argentine to Hamburg, was now swinging west at less than half speed over the long rollers which alone bore testimony to the recent gale. Already a deep tint of crimson haze over the western horizon was eloquent, in nature's speech, of land ahead. At her present ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy

... circumstances of the case would permit. Hasluck never wasted time on anything else than business. It was in his opera box on the first night of Verdi's Aida (I am speaking of course of days then to come) that he arranged the details of his celebrated deal in guano; and even his very religion, so I have been told and can believe, he varied to suit the enterprise of the moment, once during the protracted preliminaries of a cocoa scheme becoming converted ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... wheat will reimburse you for your labour and guano. I think you are right in improving your land. You will gain by cultivating less and cultivating that well, and I would endeavour to manure every crop—as to the kind of manure which will be the most profitable, you must experiment. Lime acts finely on your land and is more lasting than ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son

... with the divine necessity of getting down to the clear pavements and old veracities; who tremble before no amount of pedant exuviae, no loudest shrieking of doleful creatures; who tremble only to live, themselves, like inane phantasms, and to leave their life as a paltry contribution to the guano mountains, and not as a divine eternal ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... or May. When 6 in. high pull up the superfluous plants, leaving the strongest one in each case. When they have attained the height of 1-1/2 ft, tie the leaves lightly to a stake and earth-up the stem. Keep them well supplied with water, adding a little guano. They will be ready for use in September. Another sowing may be made in June for a ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink

... Guano, n. popular corruptions for Iguana, the large Lace-lizard (q.v.), Varanus varius, Shaw. In New Zealand, the word Guano is applied to the lizard-like reptile Sphenodon punctatum. See Tuatara. In Tasmania, the name is given to Taliqua schincoides, White, and throughout Australia any lizard ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... both in this country and in Europe. It burnt freely and purely. The Cuban planters, although getting rich on the ordinary crops, were not satisfied with their gains, and attempted to increase their crops by the use of guano and artificial fertilizers. They secured heavier crops, but the quality became poorer. The prices fell off and the planters did not realize as much for their crops as formerly, although the growth was larger. About this time Connecticut seed leaf became known as a cigar ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings

... Europe has paid to South America millions upon millions of pounds for ammonia in the shape of guano, and more recently, since the supply of guano practically ceased, for nitrate of soda, which effectually serves the same purpose as ammonia. During the past year South America exported 750,000 tons of nitrate, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various

... about ten days ago. When I left you all I did not sail down the coast, but stood directly out to sea. My object was to reach a shipping-port, and to do this my best plan was to get into the track of coasting-vessels. This plan worked well, and in three days we were picked up by a Mexican guano brig, and were taken to Callao, which is the port of Lima. We all arrived ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton

... "you forget yourself. Besides, I didn't use a match. I kindled it by rubbing two sticks together. Same as they do in Guano, where ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates

... handsome hunters paraded, steam-engines pumping water, steam-engines slicing up roots, distant columns of smoke where steam-engines are tearing up the soil. All the while a scientific disquisition on ammonia and the constituent parts and probable value of town sewage as compared with guano. And at intervals, and at parting, a pressing invitation to dinner [when pineapples or hot-house grapes are certain to make their appearance at dessert]—such a flow of genial eloquence surely ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies

... hard climb on the rocks, perhaps with a burning sun making them almost too hot to hold, will bring you within reach of a Shag's nest; but I would not advise any one who tries it to put on his "go-to-meeting clothes," as the deposit of guano on the rocks will spoil anything; and only let him smell his hands after his exploit—they do smell so nice! One of the parents generally stands by the young after they are hatched, I suppose to prevent them from wandering about and falling off the rocks, as the positions of some of ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith

... a drug much used in headache remedies. It is derived from the kola nut, and from tea and coffee. It is also made artificially from uric acid occurring in the guano or bird manure deposits of South America. This bird manure product is said to be used in some of the drinks while in others caffeine obtained from refuse tea sweepings is used. The sales-manager of the Coca Cola Company says the caffeine in their product is made from tea. It is ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen

... claim, under the act of Congress of August 18, 1856, of citizens of the United States to guano on Alta Vela, an island in ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson



Words linked to "Guano" :   organic, excreta, excrement, organic fertiliser, organic fertilizer



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