"Physical geography" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to roar and roll just beyond the horizon. It is only within a few decades that the geographies have abandoned the pleasing fiction of the maelstrom, and a few centuries ago the sudden downpour of the waters at the "end of the world" was a thoroughly accepted tenet of physical geography. Yet men, adventurous and inquisitive, kept ever pushing forward into the unknown, until now there remain no strange seas and few uncharted and unlighted. The mariner of these days has literally plain sailing in comparison with his forbears ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... complacency of youth, a German history of the English drama, in six volumes. I lost courage long before the author reached the age of Elizabeth, but I still recall the subject of the opening chapter: it was devoted to the physical geography of Great Britain. Writing, as the good German professor did, in the triumphant hour of Taine's theory as to the significance of place, period, and environment in determining the character of any literary production, what could be more logical than to begin at the beginning? Have ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... observer, and has perceived, for the first time since the invention of gunpowder, that a cannon ball, if it strikes a man, will kill him. To a thorough grasp of this remarkable discovery, he adds a highly evolved faculty for physical geography and for the calculation of times and distances. He has prodigious powers of work, and a clear, realistic knowledge of human nature in public affairs, having seen it exhaustively tested in that department during ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... a time when the enterprising burglar got his knowledge of the domestic and physical geography of a house from the servants. Now he reforms, with the great advantage that he can lay his plan of campaign from personal observation. It is a much more admirable method, and tends to avert suspicion from ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... group of hills, still within the limits of the ancient city, and here we dined in a cafe (kapheterion) kept by one Lycurgus, not on black broth, but on roast lamb, omelette, figs, oranges, and wine. Truly, if national character depended wholly on physical geography, we should be inclined to look in the valley of the Eurotas for the rich and luxurious Athens, and seek its stern and simple rival among the bleak hills and sterile plains of Attica. We had a short ride that afternoon up the valley of the Eurotas, with a keen north wind in our faces, and were ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... help "bringing forth," when the necessary telluric conditions favor, than the cold can help coming out of the north, or the clouds dropping rain, when the necessary meteorological conditions occur. Give the future American botanist the physical geography of a country—its average rain-fall, temperature, etc., and the plant zone in which it lies, and, whether explored or unexplored, he will give us the general character of its vegetation, and name most of the plants and trees peculiar to its soil. And he will do this, not because ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... might, the gray-haired man never failed. If for a rarity he chanced not to come, we said among ourselves in students' jargon, 'Alexander cuts the college to-day, because he's gone to King's to tea.' Once, on occasion of discussing an important problem of physical geography, Ritter quoted him, and every body looked up at him. Humboldt bowed to us, with his usual good nature, which put the youngsters into the happiest humor. We felt ourselves elevated by the presence of this great thinker and most laborious student. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... already been intimated, had been an excellent and kindly man, who desired to stand well with everybody, and who was always taking up one nostrum after another as a panacea for every spiritual ill. And at the time when Matabel was under instruction the nostrum was the physical geography of the Holy Land. The only thing the parson did not teach was a definite Christian belief, because he had entered into a compromise with a couple of Dissenting farmers not to do so, and to confine the instruction to such matters as ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... for the Fugitive Slave Law. You had a high and recent example of the kind of logic suited to your case. You might have indulged in transcendental nonsense, and talked about the climate, soil, and scenery of New England and the wonders of physical geography, and, assuming that negroes were created free, you might have contended that, in voting for a law to catch and enslave them, you had avoided the folly of reenacting the law of God. Reasons of this sort, you and others had declared, "had ...
— A Letter to the Hon. Samuel Eliot, Representative in Congress From the City of Boston, In Reply to His Apology For Voting For the Fugitive Slave Bill. • Hancock
... years 1855 and 1856, I heard the lectures of Lepsius, on Egyptology; August Boeckh, on the History of Greece; Friedrich von Raumer, on the History of Italy; Hirsch, on Modern History in general; and Carl Ritter, on Physical Geography. The lectures of Ranke, the most eminent of German historians, I could not follow. He had a habit of becoming so absorbed in his subject, as to slide down in his chair, hold his finger up toward the ceiling, and ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... at the head of our article, which we mean to devote to Physical Geography, the title of the latest edition that we have seen of the great work of Malte-Brun. This, which has already become well known to our American public in translation, has received some additions from its Belgian editors, but has not been fully brought up to the present state ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... being sufficient to visit them on a windy day to be convinced that it is unnecessary to seek for a more remote and obscure cause than that which is in present operation. It is, perhaps, with reference to the physical geography of Australia that the results of the Expedition are most important; as by connecting successively the explorations of Sir T. Mitchell, Mr. Kennedy, Captain Sturt, and Mr. Eyre, the waters of the tropical interior of ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory |
