"Tropical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... add, is about the size of our state of Ohio. It is rather an elevated tableland, though there are stretches of tropical forest, but it is not so tropical a country as many suppose it to be. There is much gold scattered throughout Honduras, though of late it has not been found in ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... and greenness, making all The winter birthday tropical, And the plain Quaker parlors gay, Have gone from bracket, stand, and wall; We saw them fade, and droop, and fall, And ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... skipper was a good sea salt; he was a Scotsman all right. His name was Gorn. I had been allotted my cabin. I was, of course, unable to move without help, but I did look forward to getting better as the good old ship moved to the south and worked into warmer tropical climes. The days are now past to go to the other end of the world—the farthest end, anyhow, then known—in a sailing ship. We had three months' voyage in front of us. We were to call nowhere; we were just to sail merrily along for three solid ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... these navies and armies and kings and things—in the service of humanity—they'd follow us. We ought to find a way to use them in cleaning up the tropics under our leadership and under our code of ethics—that everything must be done for the good of the tropical peoples and that nobody may annex a foot of land. They want a job. Then they'd quit sitting on their ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... walls, the subjects of which she explained to them; the egg-shell china, which she held up to the light that they might see how thin it was; and some Eastern and Western curios her father had brought home from various voyages. She told them of tropical heat and Canadian cold, and began to be elated herself when she found all that she had ever heard on the subject flowing fluently from ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... represented during the paleozoic age (or the Devonian, Carboniferous, and Permian periods) by a number of different genera. There are only three genera of the class living to-day: Protopterus annectens in the rivers of tropical Africa (the White Nile, the Niger, Quelliman, etc.), Lepidosiren paradoxa in tropical South America (in the tributaries of the Amazon), and Ceratodus Forsteri in the rivers of East Australia. This wide distribution of ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... place between narrow calli, and the plain eighteenth-century Grassi confronts us. The Campo of S. Samuele, with its traghetto, church, and charming campanile, now opens out. The church has had an ugly brown house built against it. Then the Malipiero, with its tropical garden, pretty marble rail and brown posts, and then two more antiquity stores with hideous facades, the unfinished stonework on the side of the second of which, with the steps and sottoportico, was to have been a palace for the Duke ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... it was once again in this fair ground of a country at peace in Wartime. This countryside pleased me ever so much better than British East or German East this Mashonaland. There to north I remembered without enthusiasm the tropical passions of the elements, I remembered rather miserably some of the things that a state of ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... in South America the lightning-bugs and glowworms of many kinds are the same as in North America; that the beetle, or elator, when placed upon its back, snaps itself up in the air and falls upon its feet, as our species does; that the obscene fungus, or Phallus, taints the tropical forests, as a similar species at times taints our dooryards and pasture-borders; and that the mud-dauber wasps stuff their clay cells with half-dead spiders for their young, just as in North America. Of course there ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... "Very well. It's a tropical concern. See hundreds of 'em around Punta every day. Here's the name on this tag tied to it. Know any ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... sea, have entailed various modifications of climate beyond those dependent on latitude; while a yet further series of such modifications have been produced by increasing differences of elevation in the land, which have in sundry places brought arctic, temperate, and tropical climates to within a few miles of each other. And the general result of these changes is, that not only has every extensive region its own meteorologic conditions, but that every locality in each region differs more or less from others in those ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... de Tombouctou had affected her, but much more powerfully. This was exactly how she put it to herself: it made her feel that she was violently in love with Claude Heath. What a lie that had been before the mirror after Max Elliot's party. How dreadful it was to walk in these exquisite and tropical gardens, to stand upon these terraces, to wander over these marble pavements and beneath these tiled colonnades, to hear these fountains singing under orange trees, to see these far stretches of turquoise and deep blue ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... much to amuse and instruct them when they arrived at this southwestern satrapy, for such—from its isolated position, its semi-tropical products, its swarthy and varied population, strange tongues, manners, and customs, and from its form of government—the Military Division of West Mississippi might well be termed. They, however, soon ...
— History of Company E of the Sixth Minnesota Regiment of Volunteer Infantry • Alfred J. Hill
... September 26, 1794: "All last night I was obliged to listen to the damned chatter of "Mortlock, our mayor, a fellow that would certainly be a pantisocrat "were his head and heart as highly illuminated as his face. In the tropical latitude of this fellow's nose was I obliged to fry" (Letters of S. T. Coleridge (1895), ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... flooding, landslides, drought, and famine depending on the timing, intensity, and duration of the summer monsoons international agreements: party to - Biodiversity, Climate Change, Endangered Species, Nuclear Test Ban, Ozone Layer Protection, Tropical Timber 83, Wetlands; signed, but not ratified - Desertification, Law of the Sea, ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... 'Refined Singers and Dancers,' appeared in sweeping confections of white silk, with deeply drooping, widely spreading white hats, and long-fringed white parasols heaped with artificial roses, and sang a little tropical romance, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Alas! they are neither many nor of quick recurrence. There "is" a something, an essential something, wanting in me. I feel it, I "know" it—though what it is, I can but guess. I have read somewhere, that in the tropical climates there are annuals as lofty and of as an ample girth as forest trees:—So by a very dim likeness I seem to myself to distinguish Power from Strength—and to have only the former. But of this I will speak again: ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... of a hundred and fifty species of melastomaceae, which we collected during the course of our expeditions, and which form one of the most beautiful ornaments of tropical vegetation. M. Bonpland has added the plants of the same family, which, among many other rich stores of natural history, M. Richard collected in his interesting expedition to the Antilles and French Guiana, and the descriptions of which he has ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... riser, and believe I owe much of my good health to this custom. I used to delight in a lovely tropical morning, when, with a cigar in my mouth, I walked into the market. What would Sir William Curtis, or Sir Charles Flower have said, could they have seen, as I did, the numbers of luxurious turtle ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... stirring; my father and Mr. Dinwiddie safe within their canvas curtains. It was very nice to be alone, for I wanted to think. The air was deliciously balmy and soft; another fair day had risen upon us in that region of tropical summer; the breath of the air was peace. Or was it the speech of the past? It is difficult to disentangle things sometimes. I had troublesome matters to think about, yet somehow I was not troubled. I did not lay hold of trouble, all the while I was in Palestine. ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... curious fact that these five species, as well as all others that have since been added, are of the American tropics. I have not worked over the "Hypoxylons" in the museums, but as far as the records go the genus Camillea does not occur in other tropical countries. ...
— Synopsis of Some Genera of the Large Pyrenomycetes - Camilla, Thamnomyces, Engleromyces • C. G. Lloyd
... Aral and their old country, where they settled. It is a peculiarity of Asia that its regions are either very hot or very cold. It has the highest mountains in the world, bleak table-lands, vast spaces of burning desert, tracts stretched out beneath the tropical sun. Siberia goes for a proverb for cold: India is a proverb for heat. It is not adequately supplied with rivers, and it has little of inland sea. In these respects it stands in singular contrast with Europe. If then the tribes ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... the shores as we proceeded was truly tropical, each curve revealed new beauties. With the soft chalky stone, of which most of the cliffs and bluffs are made, seen as we neared the mouth of the Malagarazi, the surf ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... scientific methods, that whatever is true of one of them, as our earth, will be true of the others (p. 34). Hence, they are all inhabited by human beings. It is true that human beings must find Venus rather warm, and are not unlikely to be seriously incommoded by the tropical climate of Mercury. But we must remember that "the men of Venus and Mercury are made by nature to resist heat, as those of Jupiter and Saturn are made to endure cold, and those of the Earth and Mars to live in a mean temperature: OTHERWISE THEY COULD NOT EXIST" ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... ought to have, the most transcendent interest for geologists and geographers. You know that geologists find traces of extraordinary variations of temperature on the surface of the earth. England was at one time tropical, at another time glacial. Far away north, in Spitzbergen, evidence of the luxuriant vegetation of past ages has been found; and the explanation of these great climatic changes has long been a puzzle. ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... play, broken only by the man's periods of labor. They basked in a boat near rushes, waiting for pickerel to strike, or waded a bog to a trout stream at the other end of the lake, hid in a forest full of windfalls and hoary moss and tropical growths of brake and fern. Gougou had new strong clothes and buckskin shoes. For the patois had not been a week in camp before Brown went to St. Ignace and brought back denim and white and black calico, which he presented ...
— The Cursed Patois - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... resolution passed at a great meeting of the inhabitants of the Tower Hamlets on the 26th of October:—"After an eloquent address, expository of the subject, G.Thompson, Esq., M.P., moved a resolution to the general effect that it had been demonstrated that India had the capacity of producing every tropical raw commodity required by England for the constant and profitable employment of her population. That England, although mistress of India, was rendered year by year more dependent upon the United States for her supply of raw cotton and tobacco; both being the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... year, but especially when in flower, and when the berries are red, which is usually during the winter. It is also cultivated in Persia, the East Indies, Liberia on the coast of Africa, the West Indies, Brazil and other parts of South America, as well as in most tropical climates. ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... like a censer lighted by a sunbeam; he flames, like a ship set on fire by lightning on the stormy sea. With you, my Maria, I have read more than once Shakspeare's Othello; and only the frantic Othello can give an idea of the tropical passion of Ammalat. He loves to speak long and often of his Seltanetta, and I love to hear his volcanic eloquence. At times it is a turbid cataract thrown out by a profound abyss—at times a fiery fountain of the naphtha of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... "we take peoples entirely different from our own, and stop their natural development by substituting a civilisation grown for our own use. Suppose, looking at a tropical fern in a hothouse, you were to say: 'This heat 's unhealthy for me; therefore it must be bad for the fern, I 'll take it up and plant it ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... in the possession of Mr G. B. Holmes, of Horsham, by whom these particulars are obligingly communicated. The animal which more nearly approximates to it, than any other now in existence, is the Iguana Cornuta a native of the tropical parts of America, and from its resemblance to which it has received its name; but more particularly on account of the teeth of the Iguanadon, which resemble those of no other animal than the Iguana, of which one species (the Cornuta,) has, like the Iguanadon, a single horn. If we take ...
— The History and Antiquities of Horsham • Howard Dudley
... she talked, making innocent observations concerning the tropical foliage surrounding us. Then silence crept in between us, accentuated by the ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... indefinable, milky haze stretched between us and the cloudless sky above. The sun's rays pierced it and gathered fire; the mighty river beside us rolled listless and sullen, flinging back the heat defiantly. And on our left was a tropical forest in all its bewildering luxuriance, the live-oak, the hackberry, the myrtle, the Spanish bayonet in bristling groups, and the shaded places gave out a scented moisture like an orangery; anon we passed fields of corn and cotton, swamps of rice, stretches of poverty-stricken ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... trip was planned, and he obtained permission to join it through the influence of his father, a famous naturalist, he saw himself sailing amid glorious islands, with gorgeous tropical foliage hanging over seas of intense blue, glittering like precious stones in the burning sunshine; coral reefs seen through transparent water with their groves of wondrous seaweeds, and fish of brilliant tints flashing their scale armour as they swam here and there. ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... of Annapolis is over a good road, but through barren country. Taken in the crisp days of autumn, by a northern visitor sufficiently misguided to have supposed that beyond Mason and Dixon's Line the winters are tropical it may prove an uncomfortable drive—unless he be able to borrow a fur overcoat. It was on this drive that my disillusionment concerning the fall and winter climate of the South began, for, wearing two cloth overcoats, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... upon her in six weeks. She looks superbly sound and healthy; she is tall and fully developed, and her colour, for all its delicacy, is pure and glowing. But, after all, she was born in a languid tropical climate, and it is the nervous strain, the rush, the incessant occupation of London which seem to be telling upon her. She gave me two or three times a painful impression of fatigue on Friday—fatigue and something like depression. ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... observances in a land where the slightest carelessness, or indifference, or cordiality—at the wrong moment—meant mortal offense to some important dignitary, caste, or interest; the physical trial of innumerable functions to a man clad in European costumes in a tropical climate; the infinite variety of his duties, the peculiar character of the hours maintained, the lack of sleep and the continuous round of banquets; must have tried the mind and heart and body about equally. In the end the experience must have ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... each other. We sat down outside the sagging wire fence that shut Mr. Shimerda's plot off from the rest of the world. The tall red grass had never been cut there. It had died down in winter and come up again in the spring until it was as thick and shrubby as some tropical garden-grass. I found myself telling her everything: why I had decided to study law and to go into the law office of one of my mother's relatives in New York City; about Gaston Cleric's death from pneumonia last ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... unerringly find an oasis of meaning. Therefore was Caput Magnus held in high honor among the pack of human hounds who bayed at the call of Huntsman Peckham's horn. Others might lose the scent of what it was all about in the tropical jungle of an indictment eleven pages long, but not he. Like the old dog in Masefield's "Reynard the Fox," Mr. Magnus would work through ditches full of legal slime, nose through thorn thickets of confusion, dash through copses ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... the worthless slip of paper to the Russian his glance chanced to pass across the starboard bow of the Kincaid. To his surprise he saw that the ship lay within a few hundred yards of land. Almost down to the water's edge ran a dense tropical jungle, and behind was higher land clothed ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and filled from floor to ceiling with a noble collection of books. Great snow-flakes fluttered against the plate glass, and an icy blast howled up the avenue, but in the glittering dining-room flowers bloomed, and birds sung, and tropical fruits perfumed the air; and radiant under the gas-light, beautiful Miss Dane flashed the light of her blue eyes, and looked like some lovely little ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... sheep on a hill? Ah, with all my experience, I had yet to learn that the narrowest human limits are wide enough to contain the grandest human emotions. I had seen the Drama of Life amid the turmoil of tropical revolutions. I was to see it again, with all its palpitating interest, in the breezy solitudes of ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... Prussian artillerymen, has been hit once. The shell has made a round hole in the roof, and it burst inside the church. In the Jardin des Plantes all the glass of the conservatories has been shattered by the concussion of the air, and the orchids and other tropical plants are dying. Although war and its horrors are thus brought home to our very doors, it is even still difficult to realise that great events are passing around us which history will celebrate in its most solemn and dignified style. Distance in battles lends grandeur to the view. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... over Abaco. A long, flat island, seventy miles or so in extreme length, and fairly wide, covered with a dense growth of tropical brush and forest, with here and there open spaces, near the seacoast an occasional farm-house. Dick dropped to five thousand, to three, to one. The moon made the whole land ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... good-night. I saw his lithe figure swing along through the sub-tropical darkness of a moonless summer night. Then the latch on the gate clicked with the ringing sound of metal striking against metal. I closed ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... like the United States as a home,—not because it is a republic, for I believe that is the only just form of government, whatever our aristocratic friends may say. I object to it simply because I wish to go south,—to some part of the tropical world, where one may equally be in the way of ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... tropical morning when the boat left the side of the Red Eric and landed Glynn and Ailie, Tim Rokens and Phil Briant on the wharf that ran out from the yellow beach of the harbour in which their vessel lay. The sun ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... sapphire crawled softly over a creamy crescent beach. In the pleasant noon stillness the mild whine of a patient puppy, broken by the chuckles of some young human thing, rose on the air. Jars of sweet flowers sent out their almost tropical odours with each tiny, invisible wind current: they seemed to puff it ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... often learn. He had been one of a small army of workers under the orders of an imposing head gardener, whose knowledge was a science. He had seen and taken part in what was done in orchid houses, orangeries, vineries, peach houses, conservatories full of wondrous tropical plants. But it was not easy for a man like himself, uneducated and lacking confidence of character, to advance as a bolder young man might have done. The all-ruling head gardener had inspired him ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... any one object, great or small, towards indemnity and security. I repeat it, without any advantage whatever: because, supposing that our conquest could comprise all that France ever possessed in the tropical America, it never can amount in any fair estimation to a fair equivalent for Holland, for the Austrian Netherlands, for the lower Germany, that is, for the whole ancient kingdom or circle of Burgundy, now under the yoke of regicide, to say nothing of almost all Italy under the same barbarous ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... unending duration? How does any one know that the mind of Jesus dialectically grasped the metaphysical notion of eternity and deliberately intended to express it? Certainly the intrinsic probabilities are all the other way. Such a conclusion is hardly compatible with the highly tropical style of speech employed throughout the discourse. Besides, had he wished to convey the overwhelming idea that the doom of the guilty would be strictly irremediable, their anguish literally infinite, would he not ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... dressing propensities of people that live "in many a place that's underneath the world." For all we care, Abd el Kader and his Arabs may stifle themselves up in their greasy blankets swarming with ancestral vermin under a nearly tropical sun; and the good people of Igloolik may bedeck themselves with the spoils of fish, flesh, and fowl, to set the fashions of the Arctic circle. We are going to speak merely of our home acquaintances and our European friends; if these only would ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... he replied, still keeping his eyes fixed upon the burning logs and striving to follow the outlines of a fairy island with palms and tropical plants and ferns as tall as forest trees, which, in his ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... prepared, as I imagined, for every emergency. The night we left our ship we anchored late under the shelter of a small island, and all hands being tired from a long row in a hot sun, I let my men go to sleep during the short tropical darkness. As soon as the day was breaking all hands were alert, and we saw with delight a beautiful rakish-looking brig, crammed with slaves, close to the island behind which we had taken shelter, steering for a creek on the mainland a short distance from us. I ought to mention that the island ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... 2nd August introduced on board a visitor of a new description. Through the heavy tropical rain which had been pouring almost incessantly since the arrival of the Sumter, covering the calm water of the harbour with little dancing jets, and drumming on the steamer's decks the most unmusical of tattoos, a little dingy was seen approaching, and in due time brought alongside ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... country. Myriads of dependants and partisans, scattered over the land, are ever ready to sing hosannas to him, and to laud to the skies whatever he does. He has swept over the government, during the last eight years, like a tropical tornado. Every department exhibits traces of the ravages of the storm. Take as one example the Bank of the United States. No institution could have been more popular with the people, with Congress, and with State Legislatures. None ever better fulfilled the great purposes of its establishment. ...
— Henry Clay's Remarks in House and Senate • Henry Clay
... the same school with me years ago," said Florence, flushing as she spoke. "Oh, do look at that beauty in the corner: a kind of dark electric-blue. What a wonderful creature! Oh, and that rose-coloured one near it! Sea-anemones are like great tropical flowers." ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... by a Negro in a tall hat and a long coat. In the moment that the door was ajar it seemed to Paul that he, too, entered. He seemed to feel himself go after her up the steps, into the warm, lighted building, into an exotic, tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and basking ease. He reflected upon the mysterious dishes that were brought into the dining room, the green bottles in buckets of ice, as he had seen them in the supper party pictures of the Sunday World supplement. A quick gust of wind brought ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... miles the adventurers pursued their devious course through the tropical forest, sometimes groping their way cautiously through the deep green twilight, and anon almost blinded by a sudden glare of dazzling sunshine, as they emerged into an open space caused either by fire or a windfall, and all the time Dyer kept up the curious cry, at frequent intervals, which ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... endeavor to make the house look well. People will sacrifice almost anything to that. They will strive their chambers into the roof,—they will have windows where they do not want them, or leave them out where they do,—in our tropical summers they will endure the glare and heat of the sun, rather than that blinds should interfere with the moulded window-caps, or with the style generally,—they will break up the outline with useless and expensive irregularity,—they will ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... shopkeepers in a civilised country—I will make a little more money than you; but—I will crush you, enslave you, exterminate you, eat you up. "Woe to the weak," seems to be Nature's watchword. The Psalmist says, "The righteous shall inherit the land." If you go to a tropical forest, or, indeed, if you observe carefully a square acre of any English land, cultivated or uncultivated, you will find that Nature's text at first sight looks a very different one. She seems to say—Not the righteous, but the strong, shall inherit the land. Plant, insect, bird, what ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... walnut has several characteristics which make it desirable as an ornamental and as a nut-bearing tree. It grows rapidly, has large numerous luxuriant leaves which give it a tropical effect, and usually has a symmetrical outline. It bears early, sometimes in the second year from the graft, yields heavily and is often ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... lounge, half awake and half asleep, I dreamed this dream: I was in a far country. It was not Persia, although more than Oriental luxuriance crowned the cities. It was not the tropics, although more than tropical fruitfulness filled the gardens. It was not Italy, although more than Italian softness filled the air. And I wandered around looking for thorns and nettles, but I found that none of them grew there, and I saw the sun rise, and I ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... to a two-story white-stuccoed house with wide galleries rising amid the deep green tropical foliage on a wooded hill that sloped gently ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... change, Mr. Alavero," said Hamilton the following morning, when he found himself at a table littered with maps and drawings of the island, with papers in Spanish and English, with reports and circulars containing pictures of the sub-tropical landscapes and towns of Porto Rico. "I have been doing nothing but Alaska ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... of July was drawing to an end, and the hot sun was glaring down on the parched earth with an almost tropical heat. Even in the dark recesses of the woods, where only here and there a ray could penetrate the thick foliage, there was a sultry closeness that seemed to overpower the wayfarer, instead of his being refreshed by a grateful shade. Look at those two men yonder, one stretched ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... some land after the cyclone has made the village a heap and the harvest fields a waste. An outlook upon the generations reminds us of a highway along which the retreating army has passed, leaving abandoned guns and silent cannon with men dead and dying. Travelers from tropical Mexico describe ruined cities and lovely villages away from which civilized men journey, leaving temples and terraced gardens to moss and ivy. The deserted valleys are rich in tropic fruits and the climate soft and gentle. Yet Aztecs left the garden to journey northward ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... gathered hickories and walnuts. The house was a rambling, wooden mansion painted grey, with red scroll-work on its porches and horsehair furniture inside. Oh, the smell of its darkened interior on a midsummer day! Like the flavour of that choicest of tropical fruits, the mangosteen, it baffles analysis, and the nearest I can come to it is a mixture of matting and corn-bread, with another element ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... sitting in a small drawing-room, the windows of which looked out upon a wintry Boston street. It was a room rather empty and undecorated, but the idea of austerity was banished by a temperature so nearly tropical. There were rows of books on white shelves, a pale Donatello cast on the wall, and two fine bronze vases filled with roses on the mantelpiece. Over the roses hung a portrait in oils, very sleek and very accurate, of a commanding old gentleman in uniform, painted ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... God some men have! What can an Eskimo, whose highest conception of summer is a stunted bush, know of tropical orchards, of luscious peach, pear and plum? If the student has seen only the broken fragments of Phidias, what can he know of the Parthenon as it once stood in the zenith of its perfection, in the splendor of its beauty? But if man's reason can cull out all the lustrous ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... resumed their promenade. The place was intensely light, in the candour of a summer day which had no reserves; and the brilliancy was not broken by the simple decorations. Ropes of wild laurel twisted up the pine posts of the aisles, and swung in festoons overhead; masses of tropical plants in pots were set along between the posts on one side of the room; and on the other were the lunch tables, where a great many people were standing about, eating chicken and salmon salads, or strawberries and ice-cream, and drinking claret-cup. From the whole rose that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... require troops fitted for tropical service, capable officers and forces should be reviewed and inspected during times of peace and made note of accordingly. The division would make a suitable unit for large operations and could be formed from different army corps. These divisions should ...
— Operations Upon the Sea - A Study • Franz Edelsheim
... Ants (Oecodoma) of tropical America are often alluded to by travellers on account of their ravages on vegetation; and they are capable of destroying whole plantations of orange, mango, and lemon trees. They climb the tree, station themselves ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... little glittering lizards that die if they're not fed on some wonderful tropical fly? Well, my taste's like that, with one important difference—if it doesn't get its fly, it simply turns and feeds on me. Oh, it doesn't die, my taste—worse luck! It gets larger and stronger and more fastidious, and takes a ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... It's like those little tropical islands you've told me about, shining like jewels in the big blue sea—I can't wait to see the sea! The little island may be as perfect as a garden, but you always want to get back to your own big country, don't you? Even if it is bad ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... undeniable probation, in the light of so gross, so cold-blooded, and so black-hearted a villain, that I had a mind to have cast my brief upon the table. I was then boiling against the man with even a more tropical temperature than I had been boiling for him. But I said to myself: 'No, you have taken up his case; and because you have changed your mind it must not be suffered to let drop. All that rich tide of eloquence that you prepared last night with so much enthusiasm ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... yet, to a certain and very important extent, the experience of the south has a bearing upon conditions in the north. For example, the pawpaw, though not a nut tree, has seemed to edge itself into the affections and interest of many nut tree men. It is in reality a tropical fruit which has adapted itself to northern latitudes. The pecan seems to be trying to do the same thing. Both illustrate a way of working that nature practices more or less with all species. By cross pollination and selection, human hands are having a part in ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... Columbia, stretching from the river away to the far north, are incomparably rich, the soil of great depth and wondrous fertility, rainless harvests, and a luxuriance of farm and garden produce which is almost tropical in its wealth. This favored region has been for ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... cold weather and interminable rain made it hard to venture from under one's roof even in fancy of being better lodged elsewhere. This very day week it was the old story—cold—then followed the suffocating eight or nine tropical days which forbade any more delay, and we leave to-morrow for a place called Primiero, near Feltre—where my son and his wife assure us we may be comfortably—and coolly—housed, until we can accompany them to Venice, which we may stay at for a short time. You remember our troubles ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Australia,' 1863, vol. ii. On the Didelphis, Desmarest, 'Mammalogie,' p. 256.) In the Didelphis opossum of Cayenne the female is said to be a little more red than the male. Of the Rodents, Dr. Gray remarks: "African squirrels, especially those found in the tropical regions, have the fur much brighter and more vivid at some seasons of the year than at others, and the fur of the male is generally brighter than that of the female." (20. 'Annals and Magazine of Natural History,' Nov. 1867, p. 325. On the Mus ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... it was certain that he was not an Englishman, if dress and appearance could decide that fact. He was very tall and well-built, with a handsome face, so deeply tanned as to suggest a recent residence in a tropical country. His mustaches were twisted into waxed points, and there was a good deal of gray in his beard, which was parted German fashion in the middle, and carefully brushed to each side. His top hat was unmistakably French, with a flat rim, and his boots were of patent leather. As he ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... enchanted world. Stalwart natives, whom Laudonniere, one of the officers, describes as "mighty and as well shapen and proportioned of body as any people in the world," greeted them hospitably.[1] Overhead was the luxuriant semi-tropical vegetation, giant oaks festooned with gray moss trailing to the ground and towering magnolias opening their great white, fragrant cups. No wonder they thought this newly discovered land the "fairest, fruitfullest, and pleasantest of all the world." One of the Indians wore around ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... determine. It was destitute of vegetation, and was covered with black lava, which, from being hard and smooth, he supposed had long been exposed to the atmosphere. There were, however, level spots, in which grew a number of tropical trees, and he could see far off, a broad valley, through which a stream meandered. He looked round for signs of inhabitants, but could discover no huts or buildings of any sort, or traces of cultivation. ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... the drummer went on, quite enthusiastic over the subject in hand, "that the present North Polar regions were tropical in temperature and in animal and vegetable life, a long ...
— Boy Scouts in Mexico; or On Guard with Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... down; he dropped into an armchair and gazed into vacancy like the melancholy imbecile that he was, and forgot to shave. These alternations of tenderness and severity worked upon this feeble creature whose only life was through his amorous fibre, the same morbid effect which great changes from tropical heat to arctic cold produce upon the human body. It was a moral pleurisy, which wore him out like a physical disease. Flore alone could thus affect him; for to her, and to her alone, he was as good as ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... hour drew near, and, above deck, tranquillity reigned. It was, however, the comparative quiet that follows a storm. A threatening day had culminated in a fierce tropical downpour—a cloud-burst—when the very heavens had seemed to open. The Nevski, steaming forward at half speed, had come almost to a stop; struck by the masses of water, she had fairly staggered beneath the impact. Now she lay ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... Blackbeard's knees, the top showing above the curve of the gunwales. It was a sea-chest, uncommonly large, built of some dark tropical wood and strapped with iron. Old Trimble Rogers' fierce eyes glittered and he licked his lips. He leaned over to whisper in Bill Saxby's ear ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... affected languor, always well kept under by the laws of good-breeding,—but still it loves abundant life, opulent and showy organizations,—the spherical rather than the plane trigonometry of female architecture,—plenty of red blood, flashing eyes, tropical voices, and forms that bear the splendors of dress without growing pale beneath their lustre. Among these you will find the most delicious women you will ever meet,—women whom dress and flattery and the round of city gayeties cannot spoil,—talking with whom, you forget ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of France and Spain, the future of the Tropical Republics of Spanish America, is utterly blank and dark; not to be prophesied, I hold, by mortal man, simply because we have no like cases in the history of the past whereby to judge the tendencies ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... its beautifying and mellowing mist, all was changed. The teas and the lunches and the clubs appeared in the brightest tints; the shivering waits behind the front door changed into evening strolls into tropical gardens; the gray sprinkled hair of my wife changed into the sunny auburn of her youth, and she once more stood in the little church of our old home listening to the words, "For better or for worse." Happy the married Philosopher who wears ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... Peninsula; and we as Irishmen can take a legitimate pride in the fact that your muster-roll of glory is replete with familiar names which abound throughout the hills and valleys of our far-off motherland. The name and fame of your regiment are world-wide; and whether on frozen shores or in tropical climes, a light-heartedness, an uncomplaining endurance of hardship and fatigue, and a ready adaptability to circumstances, afford abundant proof that the best traditions of our race have been maintained ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... you have ever thought what a rare thing flame must be in the absence of man and in a temperate climate. The sun's heat is rarely strong enough to burn, even when it is focused by dewdrops, as is sometimes the case in more tropical districts. Lightning may blast and blacken, but it rarely gives rise to widespread fire. Decaying vegetation may occasionally smoulder with the heat of its fermentation, but this rarely results in flame. In this decadence, too, the art of fire-making had ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... enabled to understand the momentous part played by these rays in Nature. It is to them that we owe the warming and the consequent evaporation of the tropical ocean; it is to them, therefore, that we owe our rains and snows. They are absorbed close to the surface of the ocean, and warm the superficial water, while the luminous rays plunge to great depths without ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... of the lawn was the cliff; and below, a lovely little pebble beach covered with the most wonderful shells. Never were such shells as abounded upon that beach!—tropical, exotic varieties, such as were found nowhere else. And then—most ideal place of all for a child—there was a fascinating rocky island in the sea, connected by a neck of twenty yards of pebble covered hardly ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... studio of his friend Church, the painter, and watch day by day the progress of his picture, the Heart of the Andes. It so fired his imagination that he wrote a description of it, in which, as if rivalling the tropical and tangled richness of the picture, he threw together such heaps and masses of gorgeous words that the reader was dazzled ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... thy young lions." Chap. 2:13. In this last example, as often elsewhere, personification, which is properly a figure of thought, is added, the sword being represented as a beast of prey. The grand and gorgeous personifications of Scripture naturally clothe themselves in tropical language of inimitable beauty and exhaustless variety. "O thou sword of the Lord," says Jeremiah, "how long will it be ere thou be quiet? put up thyself into thy scabbard, rest, and be still. How can it be quiet, ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... said Penn; at which brief eulogium the whole rich, exuberant, tropical soul of the unselfish African seemed to expand and blossom forth with joy. "I shall be sure to get well and strong soon, under such treatment. You must let Carl go to Mrs. Sprowl's and fetch my clothes; I shall want some of them ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... patient, subdued kind of expression in his face which indicated a very fair portion of calamity; his eye seemed charged with affliction of the first water; on each side of his nose might be traced two dry channels, which, no doubt, were full enough while the tropical rains of his countenance lasted. Altogether, to conclude from appearances, it was a dead match in affliction between him and the tailor; both seemed ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... desolate waters, In the void of a flood-stricken plain, You will find them—the sons and the daughters Of tropical rain. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... Fuego, I never saw in this respect so poor a country. Even in the upper and damp region I procured very few, excepting some minute Diptera and Hymenoptera, mostly of common mundane forms. As before remarked, the insects, for a tropical region, are of very small size and dull colours. Of beetles I collected twenty-five species (excluding a Dermestes and Corynetes imported, wherever a ship touches); of these, two belong to the Harpalidae, two to the Hydrophilidae, ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... also to create and encourage a taste for this kind of culture of exotic and delicate fruits, as well as the exquisite but tender gems of the floral world. When we find that we can command, at comparatively small cost of money and attention, the beautiful and luscious fruits of southern and tropical climes—their rarest and choicest flowers—the most delicious grapes, the finest peaches, nectarines, and apricots, the fig, and the pineapple, if we will; and that we can command these in abundance, to load and adorn our tables daily, the time cannot be distant ...
— Woodward's Graperies and Horticultural Buildings • George E. Woodward
... the exercise of more openness of mind and toleration. To some people Yankee thrift is disagreeable; to others, Southern shiftlessness is intolerable. To some travelers the negro of the South, with his tropical nature, his capacity for picturesque attitudes, his abundant trust in Providence, is an element of restfulness; and if the chief object of life is happiness, the traveler may take a useful hint from the race whose utmost ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... than we felt; inasmuch as she had materially altered her position, while we had not moved a mile since we tacked. This was on the supposition that Marble would endeavour to follow the movements of the ship. At ten, the tempest broke upon us with tropical violence, and with a suddenness that took everybody by surprise. A squall had been expected; but no one anticipated its approach for several hours; and we had all looked for the return of the whale-boat, ere that moment ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... of entering Japan. The best is to descend upon it from America and the Pacific—from the barbarians and the deep sea. Coming from the East, the blaze of India and the insolent tropical vegetation of Singapore dull the eye to half-colours and little tones. It is at Bombay that the smell of All Asia boards the ship miles off shore, and holds the passenger's nose till he is clear of Asia again. That ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... Rio about a week, during which we visited the Palace, a few miles in the country, also the Botanic Gardens, a place of infinite interest, with its specimens of tropical fruits, spices; etc., etc., and indeed every place of note. The thing I best recall is a visit Halleck and I made to the Corcovado, a high mountain whence the water is conveyed for the supply of the city. We started to take a walk, and passed along the aqueduct, which approaches the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... a vague sense of their beauty about me. The dim sky of England has a most happy effect on the coloring of flowers, blending richness with delicacy in the same texture; but in this garden, as everywhere else, the exuberance of English verdure had a greater charm than any tropical splendor or diversity of hue. The hunger for natural beauty might be satisfied with grass and green leaves forever. Conscious of the triumph of England in this respect, and loyally anxious for the credit of my own country, it gratified me to observe what trouble and pains the English ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... nested lovingly, arose before his memory's eyes with a strange yearning. The recollection of those striped awnings in the white light of mid-day had potency to cool, even now, the fever of his thoughts. The barren dignity of Carrick's story had contrasted vividly with the tropical colorings in which its recital had ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... steadfastly frozen for some hundreds of thousands of years. Wegaruk had a habit of talking when alone, but Alan thought it odd that she should be explaining to herself that the tundra-soil, in spite of its almost tropical summer richness and luxuriance, never thawed deeper than three or four feet, below which point remained the icy cold placed there so long ago that "even the spirits did not know." He smiled when he heard Wegaruk measuring time and faith in terms of "spirits," which she had ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... prepared to handle metaphysical statements at all, though it be only for the purpose of getting rid of them, by showing them up as confused forms of something else. A chair in metaphysical philosophy becomes analogous to a chair in tropical diseases: what is taught from it is not the propagation ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... Mount much more readily than did the Jews from whom its matter was borrowed.[FN321] He did something to abolish the use of wine, which in the East means only its abuse; and he denounced games of chance, well knowing that the excitable races of sub-tropical climates cannot play with patience, fairness or moderation. He set aside certain sums for charity to be paid by every Believer and he was the first to establish a poor-rate (Zakat): thus he avoided the shame and scandal of mendicancy which, beginning in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... accompanied by a powerful steam fire-engine, he will probably discover that he has only succeeded in making a bag consisting of one singed "cheeper," the "shooting" is likely to prove more attractive to the amateur unfamiliar with the rifle, but accustomed to the tropical heat of a Central African Summer, than satisfactory to a professional marksman counting on dispatching from a breezy moorland fifty brace or so to his relatives and friends.—For terms, &c., apply to THE MAC SALAMANDER, Flaimhaugh, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 93, August 13, 1887 • Various
... it was, rich and sweet with tropical bloom and beauty, and the full moon in the sky now moving down to the west, for it was past ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... All journeys are made on horseback. Every visit paid from house to house is performed in this manner. Ladies young and old live before dinner in their riding-habits. The hospitality is free, easy, and unembarrassed. The scenery is magnificent. The tropical foliage is wild and luxuriant beyond measure. There may be enjoyed all that a southern climate has to offer of enjoyment, without the penalties which such ...
— Miss Sarah Jack, of Spanish Town, Jamaica • Anthony Trollope
... strength of the westerly monsoon, that is, in the months of December and January, the wind is regular between West-North-West and West-South-West, and, in the neighbourhood of the North-west Cape, sometimes blows hard; but even in these tropical regions, when the weather is very bad, the change is predicted by the barometer, which otherwise is ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... To the north rises the old crater, black at night against the unfathomable blue of the sky. From the little circular building, with its mushroom dome, the slopes plunge steeply downward into the black mysteries of the tropical forest beneath. The little house in which the observer and his assistant live is about fifty yards from the observatory, and beyond this are the huts ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Biloxi, on the Bock Bay, has received the chief premiums awarded for oranges grown on the Gulf coast outside of Florida. This lady has 1,000 bearing orange trees of the choicest varieties, and has devoted her attention to the production of these and other tropical fruits, with great success. She came to the South for health a few years ago, and has not only found that, but has established for herself a pleasing and profitable industry in fruit culture. Her oranges were exhibited ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... moonshine. I believe that what you call the instincts of race are only the prejudices which are the result of custom and education, and if there is any instinct in the matter it is rather the instinct of nature to make a Semi-tropical race in a Semi-tropical climate. Welland told me that he had met his wife when she was a slave, that he loved her then, and would have bought her had it been in his power, but now that freedom had come to her he was glad to have the privilege of making her his wife. He ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... such an example of a profound simplicity in deception. This is the sort of intelligence which now sits in the seat of the sane and honourable old Tory journalism. If it were really the triumph of the tropical exuberance of the Yankee press, it would be vulgar, but still tropical. But it is not. We are delivered over to the bramble, and from the meanest of the shrubs comes the fire upon the cedars ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... called serried ranks of human beings, who looked like immense banks of many-coloured shingle, and who, as they raised a million pairs of field-glasses to two million eyes, scintillated in the distance like a bank of shingle after a wave has broken on it on a tropical noon—it was certainly an amazing ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... and of Pedro Alvares Cabral in India and in Brazil, but if this is really so the carvers must have been left to their own imagination, for the towns do not look particularly Indian, nor do the forests suggest the tropical luxuriance of Brazil: perhaps the small three-masted ships alone, with their high bows and stern, represent the reality. ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... situated on the northeastern coast of South America, and its shores are washed by the main equatorial current. From the deck of a passing vessel you can obtain but little idea of Olancho or of the abundance and tropical beauty which lies hidden away behind the rampart of mountains on her shore. You can see only their desolate dark-green front, and the white caves at their base, into which the waves rush with an echoing roar, and in and out of which fly continually ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... yearning: if Sir Claude would only at last come the shillings would begin to ring. The companions paused, for want of one, before the Flowers of the Forest, a large presentment of bright brown ladies—they were brown all over—in a medium suggestive of tropical luxuriance, and there Maisie dolorously expressed her belief that he would never come at all. Mrs. Beale hereupon, though discernibly disappointed, reminded her that he had not been promised as a certainty—a remark that ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... rate, the trip is over now, and I write this in Manila, with its tropical heat and vegetation, its historic associations, its strange mixture of savage, Spanish, and American influences. The Pasig River, made famous in the war days of '98, flows past my hotel, and beautiful Manila Bay, glittering in the fierce December sunlight, recalls memories of Dewey and our navy. ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... iron-headed Peter sat enthroned the five kinds of courage described by Aristotle, and had the philosopher enumerated five hundred more, I verily believed he would have possessed them all. As to that better part of valor called discretion, it was too cold-blooded a virtue for his tropical temperament. ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... also influence the production of heat. A larger quantity of food is taken in winter than in summer. Among the inhabitants of the northern and Arctic regions, the daily consumption of food is far greater than in temperate and tropical climates. ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell |
