"Columnar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... into trunks after the death of the primary trunk, if they are not taken off before. As to the structure of the palm trunks out of unconnected wood bundles, the assertion has been made that the palm stem does not grow thicker in the course of time, and that this is the explanation of the columnar almost evenly thick trunk. But careful measurements that were made for years have led Regel to the conclusion that a thickening of the trunk actually takes place, which probably amounts to an increase of about a third over the original circumference ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... against it while feeding in the aftermath. The scales of the bark are gone or smoothed down and level, so that insects have no hiding-place. There are no crevices for them, the horsehairs that were caught anywhere have been carried away by birds for their nests. The trunk is smooth and columnar, hard as iron. A hundred times the mowing-grass has grown up around it, the birds have built their nests, the butterflies fluttered by, and the acorns dropped from the oaks. It is a long, long time, counted by artificial hours or by the seasons, ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... columnar tables, often split across pages. These have been transformed in data sheets ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... curved, and always ready to laugh, attested, like the ruddiness in his full cheeks, to the purity and richness of his blood. His forehead, high, broad, and unwrinkled, save for a line between the eyes, and his neck, thick, round, and columnar, contrasted in their whiteness with the colour in the rest of the face. His hands were large and dimpled —"beautiful hands," his sister calls them. He was proud of them, and had a slight prejudice against any one with ugly extremities. His nose, about which he gave special directions ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... light blue with a large yellow five-pointed star in the center and a columnar arrangement of six small yellow five-pointed stars along ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... freedom!" said Toussaint more than once as he laid his hand on the bridle of his wife's horse, and seemed incapable, of uttering any other words. He looked up at the towering trees, as if measuring with his eye the columnar palms, which appeared to those in their shade as if crowned with stars. He glanced into the forest with an eye which, to Margot, appeared as if it could pierce through darkness itself. He raised his face in the direction of the central mountain-peaks, round which the white ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... of Kotlugja, in 1860, was accompanied by dreadful floods. It began with a number of earthquakes, which shook the surrounding country. Then a dark columnar cloud of vapor was seen to rise by day from the mountain, and by night balls of fire (volcanic bombs) and red-hot cinders to the height of 24,000 feet (nearly five miles), which were seen at a distance of 180 miles. Deluges of water rushed from the heights, bearing along whole fields of ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... Parthenon, Lord Elgin also procured some valuable inscriptions, written in the manner called Kionedon or columnar. The subjects of these monuments are public decrees of the people, accounts of the riches contained in the treasury, and delivered by the administrators to their successors in office, enumerations of the statues, the silver, gold, and precious stones, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... buttress, but who not only loves Truth even for itself, and when it reveals itself aloof from all interest, but who loves it with an indescribable awe, which too often withdraws the genial sap of his activity from the columnar trunk, the sheltering leaves, the bright and fragrant flower, and the foodful or medicinal fruitage, to the deep root, ramifying in obscurity and labyrinthine ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... leaves, spread forth, forming a graceful crown to the curious stem. He called it the Iriartes ventricosa, or bulging-stemmed palm. Again we passed through a grove of urucuri palms (Attalea excelsa). Their smooth columnar stems were about forty or fifty feet in height, while their broad, finely pinnated leaves interlocked above, and formed arches and woven canopies of varied and peculiarly graceful shapes. High above them rose the taller forest trees, whose ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... September with the Glasgow and South-Western), Mr. Wainwright handed to me a large sheet of closely printed figures, giving a detailed analysis and comparison of the accounts of five of the principal English and the three principal Scottish railways in columnar form, with a request that I should take out the figures and compile for printing a similar statement for the past half-year, from the accounts of the eight companies. I trembled inwardly for I had never yet looked at a railway account, ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... the columnar, self-reliant capital letter to signify that there is no disguise in its egoisms. If it were a chapter of autobiography, this is what the reader would look for as a matter of course. Let him consider it as being such a chapter, and its egoisms ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... In which the Little People of the Snow Were wont to take their pastime when their tasks Upon the mountain's side and in the clouds Were ended. Here they taught the silent frost To mock, in stem and spray, and leaf and flower, The growths of summer. Here the palm upreared Its white columnar trunk and spotless sheaf Of plume-like leaves; here cedars, huge as those Of Lebanon, stretched far their level boughs, Yet pale and shadowless; the sturdy oak Stood, with its huge gnarled roots of seeming strength, Fast anchored in the glistening bank; light sprays Of myrtle, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... whispering voices of the girls faded from the corridor; the lights were lowered in the central hall, only the red Cyclopean eye of an enormous columnar stove, like a lighthouse, gleamed through the darkness. Outside, the silent night sparkled, glistened, and finally paled. Towards morning, having invested the sturdy wooden outer walls of the house and filmed with delicate tracery every available inch ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... is of basaltic formation, but I could not observe any columnar regularity in it, although large blocks are exposed above the ground. The rock is extremely ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... their habits than most other palms are the urucuri palms—Attalea excelsa—groves of which beautify the higher lands, and grow in vast numbers under the crowns of the more lofty ordinary forest-trees; their smooth columnar stems being generally fifty feet in height, while their broad, finely pinnated leaves, interlocking above, form arches and woven canopies of elegant and diversified shapes. The fruit, in size and shape like the date, has ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... seen they may then be examined with a power of 200 or 250 diameters. (Pl. XI, fig. 5.) The appearance of the casts gives some clue to the condition of the kidneys. If made up of large, rounded or slightly columnar cells, with a single nucleus in each cell (epithelial), they imply comparatively slight and recent disease of the kidney tubes, the detachment of the epithelium being like what is seen in any inflamed mucous surface. If made up largely of the small, disk-shaped ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... he stood, like the marble column against which he had been reclining, upright, massy, and imperturbable. He was enveloped in a voluminous mantle, which, at this moment, with a leisurely motion, he suffered to fall at his feet, and displayed a figure in which the grace of an Antinous met with the columnar strength of a Grecian Hercules,— presenting, in its tout ensemble, the majestic proportions of a Jupiter. He stood—a breathing statue of gladiatorial beauty, towering above all who were near him, and eclipsing the noblest specimens of the ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... afternoon advanced, true to appointment, "Dora" Eweword arrived to take Dawn for a row. His chin was red from the razor, and he looked well in a navy-blue guernsey brightened by a scarlet tie knotted at the open collar, displaying a columnar throat which, if strength were measured by size, announced him capable of supporting not only a Dawn, but a Sunset. He sat on an Austrian chair, for which he was some sizes too large and too substantial, and reddened as he laughed and talked with Carry, till I appeared and spent some time ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... dust clouds acres in extent. Low down along the surface, the soil sifted and shifted continually, piling in windrows in spots, burying the young plants, leaving others bare. Odd little devils of whirlwinds, marked by columnar pillars of dust, danced deviously across the fields and along the trails. From the standpoint of a disinterested person, the ceaseless wind would have been unpleasant in its monotony; but from the viewpoint of a rancher it was ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... stateliest mourning—her thick corded silk, flounced with crape and her Mary Stuart bonnet, and went across the park, and up hill and down hill, for it was a country of hills and hollows—to the parish church of Wimperfield, a very ancient edifice, with massive columnar piers, Norman groined roof, and walls enriched by a grand array of memorial tablets, setting forth the honours and virtues of those dead and gone landowners whose bones were mouldering in the vaults below the square oaken ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... of his journey. The fog had delayed him a little, but he had paddled steadily, keeping in touch with the south bank. By-and-by daylight came like a glow in a ground glass globe. The shores made on each side of the river a dark smudge, in which one could detect hints of columnar forms and shadows of twisted branches high up. The mist was still thick on the water, but a good watch was being kept, for as Iamb' Itam approached the camp the figures of two men emerged out of the white ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... Cape Raoul at E. 5 deg. N., and the distance run from one to the other was nine miles. These two high, columnar capes are the extreme points of the land which captain Furneaux took to be Maria's Island. Between them, the shore falls back about four miles, and forms a small bay at the head, where there appeared to be shelter against all winds except those from the southward; and perhaps from those also, ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... 24-1/2 feet, and the base diameter 5 feet 10 inches. We find the same irregularity as to architraves. Their height is determined only by the taste of the architect or the necessities of the building. So also with the spacing of columns. Not only does the inter- columnar space vary considerably between temple and temple, or chamber and chamber, but sometimes—as in the first court at Medinet Habu—they vary in the same portico. We have thus far treated separately of each type; but when various ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... right," said Mark; but Mak only laughed and signed to them to come on, gliding in among the huge columnar trees for about half an hour, and in the most effortless way pressing on, looking back from time to time to see that ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... the forest, the odorous mists that infest those regions were drawn upward, giving out as the air grew warm a sickening and malarious influence. Vast and gloomy cypress, bay, swamp palm, ironwood, and other tropical woods reared their columnar trunks, from out a dark and noisome undergrowth, to an immense height. In those leafy depths no sun ever shone, and the absence of bird life ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... equal, vertical bands of red (hoist side), blue, and red; centered on the hoist-side red band in yellow is the national emblem ("soyombo" - a columnar arrangement of abstract and geometric representation for fire, sun, moon, earth, water, and the ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... may be described in general terms as plants having a woody axis, overlaid with thick masses of cellular tissue forming the fleshy stems. These are extremely various in character and form, being globose, cylindrical, columnar or flattened into leafy expansions or thick joint-like divisions, the surface being either ribbed like a melon, or developed into nipple-like protuberances, or variously angular, but in the greater number of the species furnished copiously with tufts of horny spines, some of which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... long aisle of columnar pines, Kut-le called the first halt. Rhoda reeled in her saddle. Before her horse had stopped, Kut-le was beside her, unfastening her waist strap and lifting her to the ground. He pulled the blanket from ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... mass of tiny, almost invisible spines, which the most careful manipulation of the fruit could not prevent. But the most astonishing of these growths was the pitahaya (correct name saguarro), or gigantic columnar cactus, growing to a height of thirty to fifty feet, bearing the fruit on their crowns; a favourite fruit of the Pima Indians, though by what means they pluck it it would be interesting to know. Besides an infinite variety of others of the cactus family, there ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... Holland-house, Longleat, Wollaton, Audley End, Longford-castle, &c. The roofs were either faced with notched and curved gables, or screened by parapets of ballustres or latticed work and decorated with obelisks and columnar chimney shafts; while turrets and pavilions broke the line of elevation. The windows were very large, and frequently bowed: thus Bacon remarks, in the Essay before referred to, that 'you shall have sometimes fair houses so full ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... fair palace has had fairer offspring, Thou art ruling the world still by the beautiful form; Out of thy mansion majestic was born in a song the Greek Temple, Sentineled round with a choir—Titans columnar of stone, Bearing forever their burden to hymns of a Parian measure, Wearing out heaviest Fate to a Pindaric high strain. Look! those boys of thy garden with tapers are moving to statues, Seeming to walk into stone while they are bringing the light; Hellas springs out ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... vertical bands of red (hoist side), blue, and red; centered on the hoist-side red band in yellow is a five-pointed star above the national emblem (soyombo—a columnar arrangement of abstract and geometric representations for fire, sun, moon, earth, water, and the ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the Parasmilia centralis, the catkin of the sea, recalls its terrene counterpart. There are other flowers in fascicles and corymbs. The rose is not lacking, but glows with the radiant beauty of its petaliferous sister; the columnar trunks of stony trees, covered with green, flossy mosses, are scattered about; and fresh fountains gush from the rocks, the white water as clearly distinguishable from the ultramarine as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... burners seemed to have but just departed; now purple wastes of heather, wild as the Chase itself; or again, dense thickets of bracken and fir, hiding primeval and impenetrable glooms. Maudeley House, behind them, a seemly Georgian pile, with a columnar front, had the good fortune to belong to a man not rich enough to live in or rebuild it, but sufficiently attached to it to spend upon its decent maintenance the money he got by letting it. So the delicately faded beauty of ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... vaulting included, are covered with paintings. The effect clashes with Northern taste, but the absence of a columnar system affords a plausible reason for relieving the sameness of these large surfaces with colour. The Gothic style of the North, holding in itself such decorative resources, gains nothing from mural paintings, but ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... present well, take aim well,—all in profound silence.'" The whole business of infantry in the field is summed up in the royal sentence, though some may think that line would be a better word than column; and the Prussian system did favor the linear rather than the columnar arrangement of troops, as it "presented a wide front, less exposed to the fire of the artillery, and more efficient from the force of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... of heat, far across the bare, dreamy hills of fallow and the blasted fields of wheat, stood up some huge white columnar clouds, a vivid ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... in the gorge a mass of greenstone projects some rods into the river from the west side of Holyoke, having a perpendicular face twenty to one hundred feet high. This mass exhibits a columnar structure similar to that of the Giant's Causeway. The structure is not very evident above the level of the river, but at low water, by rowing along the face of this rock one can find the tops of regular columns reaching nearly to the water's surface. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... chantry Mr. Knight wrote: "There can be but one opinion on the praise which belongs to the exquisiteness of finishing by which the several parts of it are distinguished; the entablature, wedged between two of the old pillars of the choir, and appearing to rest upon light columnar buttresses of singular beauty, give us an assemblage of filigree and fretwork, which may vie with the finest specimens of similar workmanship in the kingdom: the elegant palm-leaved parapet, which occurs in the division between the storeys,—the numerous escutcheons blazoned ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... You will get some notion of it still in Madison Avenue, say from Twenty-eighth to Forty-second streets, and perhaps you will think it was dull as well as proud. It is proud now, but it is certainly not dull. There is something of columnar majesty in the lofty flanks of these tall shops and hotels as you approach them, which makes you think of some capital decked for a national holiday. But in Fifth Avenue it is ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... the wide trough of the canyon beneath the white, steady stars, through scrub oak and chaparral, the air sweet scented with wild spice, through slopes set with sleeping folded poppies and Mariposa lilies, past cactus groves, columnar, stately, mystic; the mesa slopes receding, its great bulk dim mass, the twin notches that marked the Pass of the Goats hardly discernible against the sky. They crossed a white road, unfenced but evidently a main source ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... held a kind of grim humor, and he rolled them unblinkingly from the groom to the bride, and back again. His duck trousers, drenched and stained with sea-water, clung to the great muscles of his legs, particles of damp sand glistened upon his naked feet, and the hairless bronze of his chest and columnar throat glowed through the openings of his torn and buttonless shirt. Except for the life and vitality that literally sparkled from him, he was more like a statue of a shipwrecked sailor than the real article ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... slanting down upon the darkness of the canon, and as she stood shivering, wet through and utterly exhausted, wondering what next she should do, she caught sight of a form moving within the cave like a moving shadow, and ascending a steep natural stairway of columnar rocks piled one on top of the other. Affrighted as she was by the tomb-like aspect of the deep vault, she had not ventured so far that she should now shrink from further dangers or fail in her quest;—the ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... and proceeding upwards, we find that the lowermost cells of the rete mucosum, those that are set immediately on the corium, are columnar in shape. In animals that have a coloured skin these cells contain pigment granules. Directly superposed to these we find cells which in shape are polyhedral. Above them, and forming the most superficial layer of the rete mucosum, is a series of flattened, granular-looking ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... meal, and had lighted our manilas, the steersman turned the little launch sharply about, and headed directly for the shore. In a moment we had shot under and through the deep fringe of mangrove trees, and had emerged into the jungle. On all sides the trees rose, columnar and straight, and the ground was firm, although densely covered ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... broken by the columnar silhouette of the light house, and again, beyond it, by some puny scrub timber, above which rises the angular ruddy mass of the old brick fort, whose ditches swarm with crabs, and whose sluiceways are half choked by obsolete cannon-shot, now thickly ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... Between the flat cone on the front of the distress-torpedo, and the flat cone on the ground, a field of force existed. The field was not on the back surface of the torpedo's cone, but before the front surface. It went back to the moon from there, so all the torpedo and its batteries were in the columnar stressed space. And an amount of rocket-push that should have sent the four-foot torpedo maybe twenty miles during its period of burning, had actually extended its flight to more than thirty-seven hundred miles before the red sparks were too far separated ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Hepburn was ordered to attend to the result. We found the coast well covered with vegetation of moderate height, even in its outline, and easy of approach. The islands are rocky and barren, presenting high cliffs of a columnar structure. I have named the westernmost group of those we passed Berens' Isles in honour of the Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, and the easternmost Sir Graham Moore's Islands. At the spot where we landed some mussel-shells and a single piece of seaweed lay on the beach; ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... fine-grained, but sometimes grey and laminated; it contains some olivine, and high up the valley much glassy feldspar, where, also, it is often amygdaloidal; it is never highly vesicular, except on the sides of rents and on the upper and lower, spherically laminated surfaces. It is often columnar; and in one place I saw magnificent columns, each face twelve feet in width, with their interstices filled up with calcareous tuff. The streams rest conformably on the white sedimentary beds, but I nowhere saw the actual junction; nor did I anywhere see the white beds ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... from the neighbouring woods and its proximity to the hills. The church has a plain saddle-back tower, partly Norm. (observe corbel table), and one or two other features of interest. The piers of the arcade have some canopied niches on their S. face. Note (1) square columnar stoup in porch; (2) angels on rear arches of windows within, and devils on dripstone without; (3) rood staircase; (4) blocked squint on N. The churchyard contains some fine yew trees and the shaft of a cross. The neighbouring hamlet of Tivington possesses a ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... When these columnar masses are situated near the Orinoco, flamingoes, herons, and other wading birds perch on their summits, and look like sentinels. In the vicinity of cataracts, the moisture which is diffused in the air, produces ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... they form squamous epithelium (Figure VI.) such as we find lining the inside of a man's cheek (from which the cells sq.ep. were taken) or covering the mesentery of various types— sq.end. are from the mesentery (Section 16) of a frog. A short cylindroidal form of cell makes up columnar epithelium, seen typically in the cells covering the villi of the duodenum (Figure V.). This epithelium of the villi has the outer border curiously striated, and this is usually spoken of as leading towards "ciliated" epithelium, to be described ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... A large columnar Euphorbia (E. ligulata) is common all along the Soane, and I observed it to be used everywhere for fencing. I had not remarked the E. neriifolia; and the E. tereticaulis had been very rarely seen since leaving Calcutta. The Cactus ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... exquisite roundness and morbidezza. Upon her beautiful wrists she had heavy bracelets of dead gold, fashioned after some Etruscan device; and from her dainty ears hung great hoops of the same metal and design, which had the singular privilege of touching, now and then, her white columnar neck. A massive chain or necklace, also Etruscan, and also gold, rose and fell at her throat, and on one little ungloved hand glittered a multitude of rings. This hand was very expressive, and took a principal part in the talk which the lady held with her companion, and was as alert and quick ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... the original character of the pedimental group, the Heraion at Olympia, probably the oldest Greek columnar structure known, furnishes important light. Pausanias says nothing whatever of any pedimental figures. Of course his silence does not prove that there were none; but with all the finds of acroteria, terracottas and the like, no trace of any such sculptures ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... must notice, in the treatment of the Niche and its accessories. In Northern Gothic the niche frequently consists only of a bracket and canopy—the latter attached to the wall, independent of columnar support, pierced into openwork profusely rich, and often prolonged upwards into a crocketed pinnacle of indefinite height. But in the niche of pure Italian Gothic the classic principle of columnar support is never lost sight of. Even when its canopy is actually supported by the wall ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Cook was exercising the very greatest precautions, as he fully recognised the dangers by which they were surrounded. He always stood off and on during the night, and only proceeded through unknown waters by day. Several of these islets were of a peculiar formation, and one high columnar rock was named the Monument; Forster gives its height as 140 yards, the other accounts are satisfied with feet. Many of the group were inhabited, but no favourable opportunity ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... environs of the large towns, with a dense umbrage of trees, I confess I do not exactly understand. In their rich soil, and in their perpetually genial climate, trees grow with great rapidity, and they have many noble ones both for size and foliage. The royal palm, with its tall straight columnar trunk of a whitish hue, only uplifts a Corinthian capital of leaves, and casts but a narrow shadow; but it mingles finely with other trees, and planted in avenues, forms a colonnade nobler than any of the porticoes ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... artistic mood—the mood which took her in town to see exhibitions of Brabazon or Steer—the woods were fairyland. The high slender oak of the middle wood, the spreading oak that lived on its borders, the tall columnar beech feathering into the sky, its grey stem shining as though by some magic property in the beautiful forest twilight—the gleams and the shadows, the sounds and scents of the woodland world—she could talk or write about these things as poetically, and ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... unpinned her hat and thrown it on the seat opposite, showing the immense mass of her black hair, rolled low in the nape of the columnar neck and looped over the left ear. But Conroy had no eyes except ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... limestone matter known as stalagmite. The same formations on the top and sides of the cave are called stalactites. In places where the drip is continuous the stalactite gradually assumes the shape of an immense icicle; while the stalagmite on the floor of the cave, underneath the drip, rises in a columnar mass to meet the descending stalactite. A union of these is not uncommon, and, we have pillars and columns presenting the strange, fantastic appearance on which tourists delight to dwell in their notes ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... tree-tops over our heads, a surf-like roar comes up the slope, and the yellow pine-needles fall across the deepest darks as motes sail down a sunbeam. One wearies of the constant perpendicular, always these stiff, columnar lines, varied only by the melancholy incline where some great pine-chieftain is leaning to his fall supported in the arms of his comrades, or by the tragic prostration of the 'down timber'—beautiful straight-cut English ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... land have been cleared round huge blocks of granite, the smaller stones, wrenched up, forming a fence or border, whilst between the immovable, columnar masses of rock, potatoes, rye, or other hardy crops, have been planted. Not an inch of available soil is wasted. These scenes of mingled sternness and grace are not marred by any eyesore: no hideous chimney of factory with its column of black smoke, as in the delicious valleys of the Jura; no roar ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... cumbered Avith the riches which archaeology has dug up for it by lowering the surface of the Cow Field fifteen or twenty feet; by scraping clean the buried pavements; by identifying the storied points; by multiplying the fragments of basal or columnar marbles and revealing the plans of temples and palaces and courts and tracing the Sacred Way on which the magnificence of the past went to dusty death. After all, the imagination is very childlike, and it prefers the elements of its pleas-ures simple and few; if the materials are very abundant ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... Bhamo for some miles, the road is macadamised, broad level and straight, with grand columnar trees on either side, and leaves on its surface. Every mile or so you meet or pass groups of Kachins, Chinese or Shans, or people you can't quite place. They walk in Indian file as they are accustomed to ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... Name whence derived. Minerals most abundant in Volcanic Rocks. Table of the Analysis of Minerals in the Volcanic and Hypogene Rocks. Similar Minerals in Meteorites. Theory of Isomorphism. Basaltic Rocks. Trachytic Rocks. Special Forms of Structure. The columnar and globular Forms. Trap Dikes and Veins. Alteration of Rocks by volcanic Dikes. Conversion of Chalk into Marble. Intrusion of Trap between Strata. Relation of trappean Rocks to the ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... this region everywhere carved by the hand of Nature. Before we came to the North Platte, we were astonished by a ship, equalling the Great Eastern in size, even surpassing it in beauty of outline, its masts of columnar sandstone snapped by a storm, its prodigious hulk laboring in a gloomy sea of hornblendic granite, its deck-houses, shapen with perfect accuracy of imitation, still remaining in their place, and a weird-looking demon at the wheel ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... species which grow here are the more or less modified representatives of plants which at some former period existed under very different conditions of life." Proceeding southward cacti become common, first a dwarfed species, and then a larger columnar form (Cereus quisco). The streams are fringed with willows; fruit trees and alfalfa fields fill the irrigated valleys, and the lower mountain slopes are better covered with a thorny arborescent growth. The divides between the streams, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... us and by. On its back were multitudinous breasts from which issued blinding flashes—sapphire blue, emerald green, sun yellow. It hung poised as had that other nightmare shape, standing out jet black and colossal, rearing upon columnar legs, whose outlines were those of alternate enormous angled arrow-points and lunettes. Swiftly its form shifted; an instant it hovered, ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... Drawing has made very creditable progress, and the subscribers will be gratified in learning, that one of the pupils sent in a design for the Nelson Testamonial, which would in all probability have been accepted, had not the decision been made in the usual preconcerted underhand manner. Following the columnar idea of Mr. Railton, our talented pupil had put forth a peculiarly appropriate idea: the shaft would have been formed by a sea-telescope of gigantic proportions, pulled out to its utmost extent. On the summit of this Nelson ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... it is well known, had no other images of their gods but cubical, or sometimes columnar, stones, of which Toland ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... curved surface, hypersphere; hyperdimensional surface. V. render spherical &c.adj.; form into a sphere, sphere, roll into a ball; give rotundity &c. n.; round. Adj. rotund; round &c. (circular) 247; cylindric, cylindrical, cylindroid[obs3]; columnar, lumbriciform[obs3]; conic, conical; spherical, spheroidal; globular, globated[obs3], globous[obs3], globose; egg shaped, bell shaped, pear shaped; ovoid, oviform; gibbous; rixiform[obs3]; campaniform[obs3], campanulate[obs3], campaniliform[obs3]; fungiform[obs3], bead-like, moniliform[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... velvet under their feet, and screened from the sun by the branches of the lofty elms which united over the path, and caused it to resemble, in the solemn obscurity of the light which they admitted, as well as from the range of columnar stems, and intricate union of their arched branches, one of the narrow side aisles in an ancient ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... met a crystal rivulet, and a multitude of flowers, coming down into a valley between dark, columnar cliffs. They greeted him friendlily, with familiar words. "Dear country-folk," said he, "where shall I find the sacred dwelling of Isis? Hereabouts it must be, and here, I guess, you are more at home than I." "We also are but passing ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... Humboldt and Bonpland in 1802 almost to the summit; but at a height of 19,300 feet by barometrical measurement, their further ascent was arrested by a wide chasm. Boussingault, in company with Colonel Hall, accomplished the ascent as far as the foot of the mass of columnar "trachyte," the upper surface of which, covered by a dome of snow, forms the summit of the mountain. The whole mass of the mountain consists of volcanic rock, varieties of andesite; there is no trace of a crater, nor of any fragmental ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... pedestrians walked by hurriedly because it was growing dark and the view that they had come to enjoy was fading. The wind wrapped their enveloping capes around them and made them all look abnormally tall and columnar. ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... was a well marked Bechera detected about two years ago by Dr. Macbean of Edinburgh, an accomplished naturalist and careful observer, in a thin argillaceous stratum, interposed, in the Queen's Park, between a bed of columnar basalt and a bed of trap-tuff, in the side of the eminence occupied atop by the ruins of St. Anthony's Chapel. The stratified bed in which it occurs seems, from its texture and color, to be composed mainly of trappean materials, but deposited and arranged in water; and ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... mucous coat is continuous through the fringed extremity of the fallopian tubes, with the peritoneum, and through the mouth of the womb (os uteri) with the mucous membrane of the vagina. This mucous membrane is lined in the body of the womb by epithelium arrayed in columns (Columnar Epithelium) which loses its ciliated (eye-lash) movement character during pregnancy. In the lower half of the Cervix, the epithelium (this kind of cell lines all canals having communication with the external air) is of the stratified (arranged in layers) ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... square or pointed architecture of the house may call for contrasts in pointed or broad-topped arborescence. If, at times, I dream behind all this a grove, with now and then one of its broad, steepling or columnar trees pushed forward upon the lawn, it is only there that I see anything so stalwart as a pine or ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cut work was much employed in Italy for large flowered arabesque designs, commonly in velvet or silk, making columnar wall hangings, which are often very effective; giving the rooms an architectural decoration, without interfering with the arrangement of works of art, pictures, statues and cabinets, placed in front of them. Besides, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... and subterranean; cool, dimly-illuminated grottoes, some in basaltic, columnar rock, some in emerald-glowing stalactite, invited all the fantastic creatures of the sea, both fabled and real, who were promenading about on the floor of the deep, to a sweet, life-long siesta in their softly-gleaming recesses. On the second floor luxuriant equatorial palm-groves ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... the hill a splendid hotel is erected for visitors to the Causeway; after passing this we descended to the base of the cliffs, which are here upwards of four hundred feet high, and soon began to find, in the columnar formation of the rocks, indications of our approach. The guide pointed out some columns which appeared to have been melted and run together, from which Sir Humphrey Davy attributed the formation of the Causeway to the action of fire. Near this is the Giant's Well, a spring of the ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... consists, not in the nature or proportions of its constituent parts, but in the uniformity of the sparry ground, and the regular shape of the quartz mixture. This siliceous substance, viewed in one direction, or longitudinally, may be considered as columnar, prismatical, or continued in lines running nearly parallel. These columnar bodies of quartz are beautifully impressed with a figure on the sides, where they are in contact with the spar. This figure is that of furrows or channels, which are perfectly parallel, ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... competitors and enemies and wore his purple cones like the tasseled honor badges of a soldier, with pendulous moving, plumy arms: yet to the eye of the Forester, the life history was there, in the fluted grooved columnar bark, in the knot scars where branches had been discarded to send the main trunk towering above its fellows for light and air, in the wood rings, where a branch had broken and fallen away in the struggle. Why, this noble fellow had been a straggling sapling ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... body. The head of the whale especially seemed a perfect net-work of writhing arms—naturally I suppose, for it appeared as if the whale had the tail part of the mollusc in his jaws, and, in a business-like, methodical way, was sawing through it. By the side of the black columnar head of the whale appeared the head of the great squid, as awful an object as one could well imagine even in a fevered dream. Judging as carefully as possible, I estimated it to be at least as large as one of our pipes, which ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... and identical with others that I had that morning obtained at Iquique with the living animal inhabiting them." This beach is elevated 2500 feet above the Pacific. The same observer says that near Potosi there is one uninterrupted mass of lava, having a columnar structure, not less than one hundred miles in length, fifty miles wide, and eight hundred feet thick. It overlies a bed of saliferous sandstone which has been worked for salt. Fifty feet within a mine, and in the undisturbed rock which forms its roof, the doctor found fragments of dicotyledonous ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... of Sidi-bel-Abbes. They were beautiful, but to Max it seemed the beauty of sadness; and even there, outside the wall which dead Legionnaires had built, everything spoke of the Legion. Men of the Legion had planted many of the tall trees of the cloistral avenue, whose columnar trunks were darkly draped with ivy. Men of the Legion swept dead leaves from the paths, as they swept away old memories. Men of the Legion walked in the gray shadow of the planes, as they walked in the shadows of life. Men of the Legion rested on the rough wooden benches, ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... gravelly soil on moist slopes; a very effective tree single or in groups, useful in shady places, and a favorite hedge plant; not affected by rust or insect enemies; in open ground retains its lower branches for many years. About twenty horticultural forms, with variations in foliage, of columnar, densely globular, or weeping habit, are offered ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... we were close to the pillar: its outline was most imposing. Upon reaching it, I found it to be a columnar structure, standing upon a pedestal, which is perhaps eighty feet high, and composed of loose white sandstone, having vast numbers of large blocks lying about in all directions. From the centre of the pedestal rises the pillar, composed also of the same kind of rock; at ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... empty expenditure of words; we must be satisfied with churches as they are; and, after all, let me readily admit that steeples are imposing in the distance, and of use as belfries; (probably of like intent were the strange columnar towers of Ireland;) and with regard to pews, let me confess that practice finds perfect what theory condemns as wrong, so—let ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... comparative ease, and with little of the waste which results from the squaring of shapeless masses. At the same time, as we saw while coming from Gweedore, the many lakes of this region offer all the water-power necessary for polishing-works, columnar lathes, and the general machinery used in developing such quarries. Without being an expert in granites, I have seen enough of the granite works at home to feel quite sure that a moderate and judiciously managed investment here ought to return a handsome result. If ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... the foolish creature's action and unable to restrain her impatience started stealthily to climb up the tree. Inch by inch she clambered up the columnar trunk. Warruk whimpered and Myla cooed low and stroked his back to quiet him; then she peered up and down and to both sides before again settling herself for sleep while Suma's claws dug deeply into the bark as she clung in dread suspense lest ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... 5.6. Long bladed crystals; also columnar and fibrous. Color, white and grayish. Sometimes nearly transparent. Found in the greenish talcose ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... a direct shock in the action of galloping and leaping is avoided. Take the skeleton of a horse, and you will observe that the scapula and humerus are set almost at right angles to each other. It is so in most other animals, but in the elephant, which requires great solidity and columnar strength, it not being given to bounding about, and having enormous bulk to be supported, the scapula, humerus, ulna and radius are all almost in a perpendicular line. Owing to this rigid formation, the elephant cannot spring. No greater ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... left the shanty door, and, concealed by the last bushes on the edge, he reached the open plain. Two hundred yards off was the buck, nosing among the herbage, and, from time to time, raising its superb head and columnar neck to look around. There was no cover but creeping herbage. Rolf suspected that the Indian would decoy the buck by some whistle or challenge, for the thickness of its neck showed the deer ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Buttertubs Pass in daylight is still a memorable place. The pot-holes can then be safely approached, and one can peer into the blackness below until the eyes become adapted to the gloom. Then one sees the wet walls of limestone and the curiously-formed isolated pieces of rock that almost suggest columnar basalt. In crevices far down delicate ferns are growing in the darkness. They shiver as the cool water drips upon them from above, and the drops they throw off fall down lower still into a stream of underground water that has its beginnings no man knows where. On a hot day it is cooling ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... Assyria derived from Chaldaea the first idea of those tall and slender columns, the shafts of which were of wood sheathed in metal, and the capitals of the latter material. The graceful and original forms of Chaldaean art would have prepared the way for a columnar architecture in stone, had that material been forthcoming. Babylon, however, saw no such architecture. Her plastic genius never came under the influence that would have led her to import stone from abroad; and the grace and variety of the orders remained unknown to her builders. ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... over the nutmegs, and form an unbroken roof of interlacing boughs, for the nutmeg, needing shelter to bring the fruit to perfection, is not suffered to attain a height of more than seventy feet. The columnar trunks of the majestic kanaris wreathe their huge girth with lace-like fern and broad-leaved epiphytal plants, and the symmetrical beauty of the conical nutmeg-trees in these forest aisles suggests a vast sanctuary of Nature, enshrining the mystic presence of Divinity. Here, as amid the shades ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... the low southern facade of the Art Museum to the northward, to the east the somber front of the Lenox Library,—as forbidding as the countenance of a rich collector is to him who would borrow,—and the columnar gable chimneys of ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... and millions of cubes, and the cubes themselves are forming into larger cubes, some square, some rectangular! In the midst of these formations are others, mostly columnar, each column consisting of cubes which have coalesced into the larger form from the same small cubes! The columnar formations are topped by globes ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... its edge and sifted by the wind, than an edge of the cloud itself. In fact, it rather partakes of the nature, and assumes the appearance, of real water in the state of spray, than of elastic vapor. This appearance is enhanced by the usual presence of formed rain, carried along with it in a columnar form, ordinarily, of course, reaching the ground like a veil, but very often suspended with the cloud, and hanging from it like a jagged fringe, or over it in light, rain being always lighter than the cloud it falls from. These columns, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... rounded outline, and precipitous sides,—it is indisputable that they have been formed by the growth of coral; and this makes the case much more remarkable. In Peros Banhos and in the Great Chagos Bank, some of these almost columnar masses are 200 feet high, and their summits lie only from two to eight fathoms beneath the surface; therefore, a small proportional amount more of growth would cause them to attain the surface, like those numerous knolls, which rise from an equally great depth within the Maldiva ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... heavenward in fantastic forms and groupings. At one time we saw semi-globular shapes like the domes of churches; at another, Gothic turrets rose before us; and the next opening brought in view sharp needle-pointed peaks, shooting upward into the blue sky. We saw columnar forms supporting others that lay horizontally: vast boulders of trap-rock, suggesting the idea of some antediluvian ruin, some temple ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... water, although the labour of carrying it on the men's shoulders in seven-gallon barecas was very great, the only road lying through the valley, which, as may be inferred from the rounded stones it is strewed with, sometimes conveys a torrent to the sea. Large columnar blocks of the greenstone of which the island is composed, present, as the sun falls on their iron rusty surface, an appearance as if the sides of the valley were lined with red warriors. The section presented to our view, by the deepest well we sank at the mouth of this valley, consisted of a light ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... nigh unto setting shines Through yon columnar pines, And on the deepening shadows of the lawn Its ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... that appeared to have poetic possibilities in it into the region of romance. He remembered having seen somewhere a statue of Clio whose features bore a remote resemblance to those of the young girl before him—the same massive, boldly sculptured chin, the same splendid, columnar throat, the same grave immobility of vision. It seemed sacrilege to approach such a divine creature with a trivial remark about the weather or the sights of Rome, and yet some commonplace was evidently required to pave the ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... capital'. The art of Greece could hardly have been more self-originated than is the science of Japan. Ideas of the temple and of the fortified town must have spread from the East, the square-roomed house, columnar orders, fine masonry, ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... the station-house. One of the agents with a picket of a few of our blacks, armed for the purpose, was keeping guard over the ivory; but deep within the forest, red gleams that wavered, that seemed to sink and rise from the ground amongst confused columnar shapes of intense blackness, showed the exact position of the camp where Mr. Kurtz's adorers were keeping their uneasy vigil. The monotonous beating of a big drum filled the air with muffled shocks and a lingering vibration. A steady droning sound of ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... wantonly strikes your cheek. You look up and behold! there is your host, axe in hand, playfully performing a number of passes over your unconscious head. His dress is designed admirably to suit the exercise. Coat and waistcoat are doffed; the immortal collars are turned down, displaying the columnar throat and the brawny chest; the snow-white shirt-sleeves are turned up to the elbow, disclosing biceps that SAMSON would envy and SANDOW covet. His braces are looped on either side of his supple ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... the high-forecastled galleons, from Oriental cocas with their massive hulls, from fragile lighters, lateen-sailed settees, flat-bottomed tafureas, and other vessels of the epoch; and in the great columnar hall of La Lonja, near the Solomonic pillars which disappeared within the shadows of the vaulted ceilings, his ancestors in regal majesty used to receive voyagers from the Orient who came clad in wide breeches and red fezzes; Genoese and Provencals wearing capes with monkish hoods; ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... 2.—In speech of flawless lucidity displaying perfect command of columnar figures upon which strength of British Navy is based, the WINSOME WINSTON moved Supplementary Estimates amounting to two and a-half millions. These raise total expenditure of year on the Navy to forty-eight millions. "A serious event," ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... were seen everywhere amongst the dwellings, amidst fragrant blossoming orange, lemon, and many other tropical fruit trees, some in flower, others in fruit, at varying stages of ripeness. Here and there, shooting above the more dome-like and sombre trees, were the smooth columnar stems of palms, bearing aloft their magnificent crowns of finely-cut fronds. Amongst the latter the slim assai-palm was especially noticeable, growing in groups of four or five; its smooth, gently-curving stem, twenty to thirty feet ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates |
