"Fecundity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reading of Sainte-Beuve gives me the same impression. Indeed his literary fecundity, the necessity of having the Causerie ready for each Monday's issue of the Constitutionnel or the Moniteur, precluded a study of words while composing, and his rapid and correct writing was undoubtedly due to the training obtained ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... part of the Old World, he says, has reason to rejoice that Columbus discovered the New. Its inhabitants—the countrymen of Washington and Franklin, of Adams and Jefferson—multiply, as he tells us, "with the fecundity of their own rattlesnakes." Of the fathers of our Revolution he speaks in no more flattering terms:—"Probably in America, as in other places, the chiefs are incendiaries, that hope to rob in the tumults of a conflagration, and toss brands among a rabble passively combustible." All these atrocities ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... the struggle for existence, it is not necessary for us to know exactly how this has come about; yet it is well to hear the opinions as to such subjects of men who have evidently thought much about them. Therefore we ask for your opinions on the question of the power of adaptation in fecundity. ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... to be considered brave and manly, desire for exaltation in the minds of descendants, to increase wealth, to secure abundance of wild game and fish, to secure general health and activity of the people, general favor at the hands of the women, fecundity of women, and ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... previous work, he was supposed to govern the generative proclivities and the sexual relations.[46-[]] Another of his names was Xiuhtecutli, which can be translated "God of the Green Leaf," that is, of vegetable fecundity and productiveness.[46-[]] ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... disproportion increases daily, since the negroes are transferred to one part of the Union as soon as slavery is abolished in the other. Thus the black population augments in the South, not only by its natural fecundity, but by the compulsory emigration of the negroes from the North; and the African race has causes of increase in the South very analogous to those which so powerfully accelerate the growth of the European race in ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... duodecimos he has pyramidized on our book-shelves. Look through any catalogue you will, and you will find that a large proportion of the works in it have been contributed by Anon. The only author who can in the least compete with him in fecundity is Ibid." ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... on one point the philosopher himself, had indeed been written before this, in London lodgings; but his pen was not idle at Claygate; and it was here he wrote (among other things) that review of "Fecundity, Fertility, Sterility, and Allied Topics," which Dr. Matthews Duncan prefixed by way of introduction to the second edition of the work. The mere act of writing seems to cheer the vanity of the most incompetent; but a correction accepted ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all the things that go to make up an understanding of a fellow mortal's real nature they still were to him as completely strangers as they had been on the day he landed in this place. Set down in the midst of a teeming fecundity he nevertheless remained as truly a castaway as though he had floated ashore on a bit of wreckage. He could have been no more and no less a maroon had the island which received him been a desert island ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... confined herself to any especial manner in her literary work. Her spontaneity of feeling and the actual fecundity, as it were, of her imaginative gift, could not be restrained, concentrated, and formally arranged as it was in the case of the two first masters of modern French novel-writing. Her work in this respect may be compared to a gold mine, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... and all the force that man is able to exert is necessary to accomplish such unions, even between species that have the nearest resemblances. And when the mule breeds that are thus produced by these forced conjunctions happen to be fruitful, which is seldom the case, this fecundity never continues beyond a few generations, and would not probably proceed so far without a continuance of the same cares which excited it at first. Thus we never see in a wild state intermediate productions between the hare and the rabbit, between the stag and the doe, or between the marten ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... ownership of land, as well as forms of government and the hierarchy of classes—may owe more to the deep influences of expanding numbers than to Lenin or to Nicholas; and the disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... strike, its head clothing the human head within, as Alexander, on some of his coins, looks out from the elephant's scalp, and Hercules out of the jaws of a lion, on the coins of Camarina. Those diminutive golden horns attached to the forehead, represent not fecundity merely, nor merely the crisp tossing of the waves of streams, but horns of offence. And our fingers must beware of the thyrsus, tossed about so wantonly by himself and his chorus. The pine-cone at its top does but cover a spear-point; and the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... at some islands where there were numerous roosts of passenger pigeons; and, in about fifteen minutes, they knocked on the head, and brought on board the boat, about three hundred. Mr. Pike, though he had frequently heard of the fecundity of these birds, had never given credit to it; but, he says, that the most fervid imagination cannot conceive their numbers. The noise, which they made in the woods, was like the continued roaring of the wind. The young ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... the symbol of worship; the word "virgin" then having a somewhat different meaning from that which we give it today, although we may trace the analogy in our use of the term "virgin soil," signifying fecundity. The virgin and child then, popularly supposed by those whose prejudices prevail over their desire for Truth, to have originated with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, antedates history, ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... to their yield of talent, the physical environment was found to have had no perceptible influence. The mountain-situated Geneva and the lowland Paris produced alike prolifically talented men. The valley of the Seine and that of the Loire competed for hegemony in fecundity. The facts contradicted the highland theory, the lowland theory, the coast theory, and every other theory of the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... status of the church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for state and church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church—But she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and patronage of ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... profounds the blind bathybus lies. Fecundity flings her seeds and spores into the glazed abysses, and they teem. There is a heaving in the broken, sunless bottoms; the continents and islands are upcast, rugged and black, shaking the roaring ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... ecstasy in the solemnities around, that it will assume a rarer and finer tincture, even more grateful to the understanding, if not to the senses, than that form of the emotion which arises from such companionship in spots where all is life, and growth, and fecundity. ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... of his august ministry,' and for the purpose, I suppose, of showing how strictly he fulfils the precepts of his mild Master and Redeemer, he styles the Society in question 'an infernal Society,' and speaks of 'its accursed fecundity.' Goodly words! Charitable words! May I be permitted to enquire in what part of the sacred writings he found them recommended? Perhaps in the following text of ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... which originally consisted of not more than seventy Bengal sheep, had increased in number to 4,000 head, although the wethers had been killed as they became fit for slaughter. It appears, however, that as the sheep approached to greater purity of blood, their extreme fecundity diminished. ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... power over the increase of population. The spring of the year, as has already been stated, is the most favourable to fecundity. It is not known whether day and night have ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... Far greater fecundity and a more directly successful appeal to the public, were, somewhat later, the characteristics of Perez y Galdos, whose vigorous novels, spoiled a little for a foreign reader by their didactic diffuseness, are well-known in this country. In the hands of Galdos, a further ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... in God there is greater power of fecundity than in us. But in us there is not only one procession of the word, but there are many: for in us from one word proceeds another; and also from one love proceeds another. Therefore in God there are more ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... expression of the individual activity, energy, and wonderful mobility of M. Girardin himself. The Presse is Emile de Girardin, with his boldness, his audacity, his rampant agility, his Jim Crowism, his inexhaustible cleverness, wonderful fecundity, and indisputable talent. The Presse is bold and daring; but no man can tell the color of its politics to-day, much less three days, or three months hence. On the 25th of July, 1848, it was as audacious, as unabashed, and as little ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... without deliberation or concert; so the carnal mind, being in its own nature enmity against God, produces, wherever it operates, substantially the same fruits. In an alienated heart there is an intense unwillingness to be or to abide near to God; and there is, consequently, great fecundity in the conception and production of partition walls to shield the conscience from ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... their operation to the blindness of chance. Steps in man and controls and directs them. For the first time in the history of life conscious intelligence forms and transforms life. These yearnings and desires, promptings of the "abysmal fecundity," have in man evolved into what is called "love." They arise in instinct and sensation and culminate in sentiment and emotion. They master man, and the intellect of man, as they master the beast and all the acts of ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... some other circumstances must have been responsible for suggesting the experiments out of which this empirical knowledge emerged. The use of a girdle (a) as a protection against danger to life, and (b) as a means of conferring fecundity on girls[266] provided the circumstances which enabled men to discover that the sexual attractiveness of maidens, which in a state of nature was originally associated with modesty and coyness, was profoundly intensified by the artifices ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... of Volumnia.[16] A car followed full of pimps; then a lot of debauched companions; and then his mother, utterly neglected, followed the mistress of her profligate son, as if she had been her daughter-in-law. O the disastrous fecundity of that miserable woman! With the marks of such wickedness as this did that fellow stamp every municipality, and prefecture, and colony, and, in ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... animals, the uterus is often divided into two long segments which afford room for the development of a number of young at once. Some ancient writers make most absurd statements with regard to the fecundity of females. One declares that the simultaneous birth of seven or eight infants by the same mother was an ordinary occurrence with Egyptian women! Other statements still more extravagant are made by writers. For example: A traveler in the seventeenth century wrote ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... both bodily and mental, is owing to the isolation in which each small tribe has lived, and to the narrow round of life and thought, and close intermarriages for countless generations which are the necessary results. Their fecundity is of a low degree, for it is very rare to find an Indian family having so many as four children, and we have seen how great is their liability to sickness and death on removal from ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... extraordinary Journey; for Dr. Johnson thus writes to Mrs. Thrale, Nov. 3, 1773:—'Boswell will praise my resolution and perseverance, and I shall in return celebrate his good humour and perpetual cheerfulness. He has better faculties than I had imagined; more justness of discernment, and more fecundity of images. It is very convenient to travel with him; for there is no house where he is not received with kindness and respect.' Let. 90, to Mrs. Thrale. [Piozzi Letters, i. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... of the year, being more favorable to fecundity, exerts an influence over the increase of population. Nursing mothers are as a rule sterile until after weaning time. This is not always so however, and the possibility of pregnancy taking place while nursing a baby, and before menstruation is reestablished must be reckoned with ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... difficult and expensive has become in the modern world the rearing and training of even one individual, in a manner suited to fit it for coping with the complexities and difficulties of civilised life, that, to the family as well as to the state, unlimited fecundity on the part of the female has already, in most cases, become irremediable evil; whether it be in the case of the artisan, who at the cost of immense self-sacrifice must support and train his children till their twelfth or ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... as to the elbow, and the feet, summarily indicated, emerge from a long sheath-form robe. As for the arms and hands, they project slightly and are rather outlined than sculptured. The left hand grasps a fruit, the emblem of fecundity, while the right held a painted crown, the traces of which have now entirely disappeared. It suffices to look at this sarcophagus to recognize the exclusively Phenician character of it, and the complete analogy with the monuments of the same species met with in Phenicia, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... The fecundity of the queen-bee is very great, for it is estimated that during breeding time, unless prevented by the cold weather, she lays at the rate of from one hundred to two hundred eggs a day, causing an increase of not less than eighty thousand ...
— A Description of the Bar-and-Frame-Hive • W. Augustus Munn
... double, all cunningly interlaced, is as complicated a piece of rhyme-harmony as the ear of the average lover of poetry can carry. It is needless to say that there are born rhymers, who think in rhyme and whose fecundity of imagery is multiplied by the excitement of matching sound with sound. They are often careless in their prodigality, inexact in their swift catching at any rhyme-word that will serve. At the other extreme are the self-conscious artists in verse who ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... anomaly becomes intelligible when I recall that a friend told me that the pores of her nose were enlarged, and I said mine were also; we had been talking of a quotation from Emerson relating to nature's fecundity; my friend was soon to be married; and a line from Emerson often in my thought is that in regard to pines "throwing out pollen for the benefit of the ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... very great. His fecundity was prodigious, and he wrote at will in seven languages. 'This polyglot facility was not in itself a very remarkable circumstance, for it grew out of his necessary education and geographical position. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... list of authors to be more brilliant. The Emperor may have instituted those prizes, as his apologists declared he himself said that he did, to keep active minds from occupying themselves with politics; but the exhibition of how the Empire had crushed out originality and fecundity in the French brain must have appalled him, whatever ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... "the great Italian Yankee," because of his multifarious and ingenious suggestions in the world of material things, so our own Edison may be called "the Yankee Leonardo," for, with a curiosity ranging over the whole world of nature, equal to that of the Italian, and with a fecundity of invention no less bewildering, he unites, like Leonardo, an imaginative and poetical vein that lifts his devices into the domain ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... culling Nature, crossed with its pollen the blossoms of his own soul, that Babylonian garden is his marvellous and best apology. For astounding figurative opulence he yields only to Shakespeare, and even to Shakespeare not in absolute fecundity but in images. The sources of his figurative wealth are specialised, sources of Shakespeare's are universal. It would have been as conscious an effort for him to speak without figure as it is for most men to speak with figure. Suspended in the dripping well of his imagination ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... which men sacrificed goats, and then dressed themselves partially in the skins, and ran about whipping every one whom they met, with thongs made likewise of the skins of goats, or of rabbits, or other animals remarkable for their fecundity. The meaning of the ceremonies, so far as such uncouth and absurd ceremonies could have any meaning, was to honor the God of fertility and fruitfulness, and to promote the fruitfulness of their flocks and herds, during the year ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... boiling in its veins, and shakes to the wind its enormous wonderful green locks, sprinkled on the damp earth, on the defaced statues, on the crumbling steps of the pavilion, and even on the pavement of the deserted street, flowers like stars, dew like pearls, fecundity, beauty, life, joy, perfumes. At midday, a thousand white butterflies took refuge there, and it was a divine spectacle to see that living summer snow whirling about there in flakes amid the shade. There, in those gay ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... flourished, as he said, the only corn-fields in the country, which supplied the whole nation, and were the property of one individual. So unrivalled was his agricultural science that the vulgar only accounted for his admirable produce by a miraculous fecundity! The proprietor of these hundred golden acres was a rather mysterious sort of personage. He was an aboriginal inhabitant, and, though the only one of the aborigines in existence, had lived many centuries, and, to the consternation of some of the Vraibleusians and the exultation of others, exhibited ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... comb-building and filling; the care and feeding of the young, the guardian-service of the queen; and far beyond that it would spread to the blue glory of the summer sky, the fresh winds, the endless beauty and sweetness of a thousand thousand flowers. It would treat of the vast fecundity of motherhood, the educative and selective processes of the group-mothers; and the passion of loyalty, of social service, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... green in the level evening light, to the darkening woods beyond, gilt-tipped in the setting sun. There were fields of ripening yellow grain, of lusty young corn that grew almost as we watched it: the warm winds of evening were heavy with the acrid odours of fecundity. Fecundity! In that lay the elusive yet insistent charm of that country; and Nancy's, of course, was the transforming touch that made it paradise. It was thus, in the country, I suggested that we should spend the rest of our existence. What was the use of amassing ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... her breasts, and pressed her breasts against him with his hands. And she with quivering hands pressed his head against her, as he lay suffused out, and she lay fully conscious. The lovely creative warmth flooded through him like a sleep of fecundity within the womb. Ah, if only she would grant him the flow of this living effluence, he would be restored, he would be complete again. He was afraid she would deny him before it was finished. Like a child at the breast, he cleaved intensely to her, and she could ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... unfortunate exiles, must excite the contempt of a philosophic emperor; but they deserved the friendship of Julian, by their implacable hatred of the Christian name. The barren synagogue abhorred and envied the fecundity of the rebellious church; the power of the Jews was not equal to their malice; but their gravest rabbis approved the private murder of an apostate; and their seditious clamors had often awakened the indolence ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... position, torches having been burnt on the wedding evening to insure prosperity to the newly-married couple, and both in Greece and Rome young married couples were crowned with marjoram. At Roman weddings, too, oaken boughs were carried during the ceremony as symbols of fecundity; and the bridal wreath was of verbena, plucked by the bride herself. Holly wreaths were sent as tokens of congratulation, and wreaths of parsley and rue were given under a belief that they were effectual preservatives against evil spirits. In Germany, nowadays, a wreath of ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... Chrysostom says: "What can be more unreasonable than to sow without land, without rain, without ploughs? All those who give themselves up to this damnable culture shall reap only tares. Let us cut off these monstrous births of gold and silver; let us stop this execrable fecundity." ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... back and forth through the light. The trees have put on a thin green pretense. Even the soil pretends to fecundity. Toothless jaws widen in a smile of real mirth. Bones lightened of flesh Flash in ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... The fecundity of this plant is marvellous. Linnaeus has calculated that a single plant of tobacco contains 40,320 grains, and says that if each seed came to perfection, the plants of tobacco in vegetation in ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... "The fecundity of the people of reason is extreme. It is very rare to find a married couple with less than five or six children, while there are hundreds who have from twelve to fifteen. Very few of them die in their ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... birth, with a fiery fecundity of invention, to book after book of the long list of Novels that make up his story of life, there took shape in his mind a definite intention: to become the Secretary of an Age of which he declared society to be the historian. He wished to ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... his recital, his verses pleased the Overseer and he wondered at his words and savoured their grace and fecundity and said to them, "By Allah, ye possess both beauty and eloquence. But now listen to me, you twain!" And he began chanting, and recited in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... foes, numberless enemies among the foxes, wolves, hawks, and other birds. The fecundity of the survivors, however, keeps pace with the many fatalities to which ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... credulous, and fanciful; but he is not mad. On the contrary, his earnest playfulness, the constant distraction of his attention from observation to daydreams, is the sign of an inward order and fecundity appropriate to his age. If children did not see visions, good men would have nothing to work for. It is the soul of observant persons, like Matthew Arnold, that is apt not to be quite sane and whole inwardly, but somewhat warped by familiarity with the perversities of real ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... to the southward," replied Swinton; "the migration of these animals is one of the most remarkable proofs of the fecundity of animal life. Like the ants, they devour everything before them; and if we journey in the direction they have come from, we shall find no food for the cattle until after the rains. After the rains fall, these animals will return ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... sake of health and happiness there is everything to be said for early marriage, but better late than never.[A] The chief obstacles to early and happy marriage are financial, and these would largely disappear if women were able to control fecundity. The chief obstacles to healthy marriage are the venereal diseases, and these could be extirpated in two or three generations if sexual cleanliness was properly taught to all adults, and if promiscuous intercourse was properly regulated during the same ...
— Safe Marriage - A Return to Sanity • Ettie A. Rout
... have known it if I had not chanced to meet her uncle. Helen did not speak; she was more voluptuous than her cousin, and swelled out like a dove, and came to life only to expire a moment afterwards. I wondered at her astonishing fecundity; while I was engaged in one operation she passed from death to life fourteen times. It is true that it was the sixth time with me, so I made my progress rather slower to enjoy the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... speculation like the authors of the great romances. But it produced some of the greatest matter, and some of not the least delightful handlings of matter, in book-history. And it is everywhere distinguished, first, by the adventurous fecundity of its experiments in form and kind, secondly, by the presence of that spirit which has been adumbrated in the last paragraph. In this last, we must own, the pupil countries far outdid their master or mistress. France was stronger relatively ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... which proves the presence of the god among the Canaanites long before the Philistine invasion, and we find two Beth-Dagons—one in the plain of Judah, the other in the tribe of Asher; Philo of Byblos makes Dagon a Phoenician deity, and declares him to be the genius of fecundity, master of grain and of labour. The representation of his statue which appears on the Graeco- Roman coins of Abydos, reminds us of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... fecundity, pours forth millions of human beings for whom there is no place on earth, and no means of subsistence, what affair is that of ours, my brethren? We did not make them; we did not ask Nature to make them. And it is Nature's business to feed them, not ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... shields, on which were represented the arms of the two empires; and behind this group came magistrates, warriors, and the people presenting crowns. At the two extremities of the transparencies were represented the Seine and the Danube, surrounded by children-image of fecundity. The twelve columns of the peristyle and the staircase were illuminated; and the columns were united by garlands of colored lights, the statues on the peristyle and the steps also bearing lights. The bridge Louis XV., by which this Temple of Hymen was reached, formed in itself an avenue, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... beardless, resembling in many respects the aborigines of North America, and as Columbus described them in his first communication to his royal patrons, were "loving, tractable, and peaceable; though entirely naked, their manners were decorous and praiseworthy." The wonderful fecundity of the soil, its range of noble mountains, its widespread and well-watered plains, with its extended coast line and excellent harbors, all challenged the admiration of the discoverers, so that Columbus recorded in his journal these words: "It is the most beautiful island that eyes ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... certain that this fecundity was a very potent factor in the development of the Dutch School of painting. Had Hals confined his talent to painting the portraits of the highest in the land, which would never have been seen by the public at large, it is improbable ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... described as a goddess of nature in general and of fertility in particular. We need not wonder, therefore, that in her sanctuary on the Aventine she was represented by an image copied from the many-breasted idol of the Ephesian Artemis, with all its crowded emblems of exuberant fecundity. Hence too we can understand why an ancient Roman law, attributed to King Tullus Hostilius, prescribed that, when incest had been committed, an expiatory sacrifice should be offered by the pontiffs in the grove of Diana. For we know that the crime of incest is commonly supposed to cause a ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... often to deal with, the whole of his vast view of the truth is recalled in his treatment of every one of them, as the whole sky is mirrored in a single drop of dew. What could be a more impressive proof of the fecundity of his mind than the fact that, amid the innumerable distractions of a second visit to his Greek converts, he should have written in half a year three such books as Romans, ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... after introducing himself as a plain and unlettered man, launched out into a wonderfully vigorous and picturesque description of those Islands of Paradise which bloom like gardens amid the blue waters of the Pacific Ocean. He described the fecundity and luxuriance of Nature, drew word-portraits of the mild, brown-skinned Polynesians, wept over their enthralment by a debased system of idolatry, and painted the blessings which would befall them when converted to the gentle religion of Christ. Baltic ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... from it is, that we can, as it were, extend the range of our experience to an immense duration. For, to continue the simile which I have borrowed from the vegetable kingdom, is it not almost the same thing whether we live successively to witness the germination, blooming, foliage, fecundity, fading, withering, and corruption of a plant, or whether a vast number of specimens, selected from every stage through which the plant passes in the course of its existence, be brought at ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... supported by the 'Trois Rats' and its frequenters. One series in particular, representing a robin overcome by the seduction of a glass of absinthe and passing through all the stages of delirium tremens, had a grim inventiveness, a fecundity of half humorous, half pathetic fancy, which held ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the civilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and demoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity. The confident and optimistic Radicalism of the earlier nineteenth century, and the humanitarian philanthropic type of Liberalism, have bogged themselves beyond hope in these realizations. The Socialist has shirked them as he has shirked the older crux of Malthus. Liberalism is a thing of ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... (for it is as truly a power as generalization) is what gives such vigour and greatness to single lines and sentiments of Wordsworth, and to poems developing a single thought or sentiment. It was this that made him so fond of the sonnet. That sequestered nook forced upon him the limits which his fecundity (if I may not say his garrulity) was never self-denying enough to impose on itself. It suits his solitary and meditative temper, and it was there that Lamb (an admirable judge of what was permanent in literature) liked him best. Its narrow bounds, but fourteen paces from end to end, turn into ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... difference in these two breeds may be due to their descent from distinct parent-species; but as the early maturity of the Southdowns has long been carefully attended to by breeders, the difference is more probably the result of such attention. Lastly, the fecundity of the several breeds differs much; some generally producing twins or even triplets at a birth, of which fact the curious Shangai sheep (with their truncated and rudimentary {98} ears, and great Roman noses), lately ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... degree up to 60 degrees, Specimen of which are placed in every Elementary School throughout the land. Owing to occasional retrogressions, to still more frequent moral and intellectual stagnation, and to the extraordinary fecundity of the Criminal and Vagabond classes, there is always a vast superfluity of individuals of the half degree and single degree class, and a fair abundance of Specimens up to 10 degrees. These are absolutely destitute of civil rights; and a great number of them, not having even intelligence ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... prize-man, the flower of the species. "Children" too?—very happy, beautiful, heart-gladdening creations—God bless them all, and scatter those who love them not!—but still for a proof of more than average humanity, somewhat common, somewhat overwhelming: rabbits beat us here, with all our fecundity, so offensive to Martineau and Malthus. But as to "books"—common enough, too, smirks gentle reader: pardon, courteous sir, most rare—at least in my sense; I speak not of flat current shillings, but the bold medallions of ancient Syracuse; I heed not the dull thousands of minted gold and ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... to him as possible of proof as of confutation and the nomenclature employed in its selenographical charts as attributable to verifiable intuition as to fallacious analogy: the lake of dreams, the sea of rains, the gulf of dews, the ocean of fecundity. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... of the prime qualities of genius, a faculty of vigorous yet minute analysis, and a wonderful fecundity of imagination. The first of these faculties is as needful to the artist in words, as a knowledge of anatomy is to the artist in colors or in stone. This enables him to conceive truly, to maintain a proper relation of parts, and to draw ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of the early wars for democracy. The seeds of universal freedom once sown, finally ripened not alone to the unshackling of a race, but to the fecundity and birth of a spirit that moved all nations and peoples to seek an enlarged liberty. The finger of disintegration and change is never still; is always on the move; always the old order is passing; always the new, although ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... of St. Victor.] A Saxon of the monastery of Saint Victor at Paris, who fed ill 1142 at the age of forty-four. "A man distinguished by the fecundity of his genius, who treated in his writings of all the branches of sacred and profane erudition that were known in his time, and who composed several dissertations that are not destitute of merit." Maclaine's Mosheim, Eccl. Hist. v. iii . cent. xii. p. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... one of the sources of power of the Emperor Napoleon, and perhaps the rarest among them, that the marvellous fecundity of his mind, and the inexhaustible variety of the projects and conceptions which he was constantly turning over, reciprocally sustained and complemented each other. This characteristic of his genius has been ignored; and ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... how to interest with the ordinary events of life, and by the portrayal of characters truly human. If the former is a talent, it must be owned that it is much commoner than the latter . . . . If we are to rate novelists according to their fecundity, or the riches of their invention, we must put Alexander Dumas above Cervantes. Cervantes wrote a novel with the simplest plot, without belying much or little the natural and logical course of events. This novel which was called 'Don Quixote,' is perhaps ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... from the Irish Channel to the Danube in which the name of Luther was not familiar as a word of hope and promise. Then rose a common cry for guidance. Books were called for,—above all things, the great book of all, the Bible. Luther's inexhaustible fecundity flowed with a steady stream, and the printing-presses in Germany and in the Free Towns of the Netherlands multiplied Testaments and tracts in hundreds of thousands. Printers published at their own expense as Luther wrote.[35] The continent was covered ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... have a more convenient hypothesis? Do you not perceive its fecundity? And, the task being so very difficult, will it not be benevolent in me to lend her my assistance? What think you? Is it not possible to prove that ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... New York to receive honours almost as great, if less vociferous, than those which had hailed him after the momentous Convention of 1788. Banquets were given in his honour, the bar extolled him, and the large body of his personal friends were triumphant at this new proof of his fecundity and his power over the minds of men. They were deeply disturbed on another point, however, and several days after his arrival, Troup rode out to The ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... The relation of plant carotinoids to growth, fecundity and reproduction of fowls. J. Biol. Chem., 1916, ...
— The Vitamine Manual • Walter H. Eddy
... are, given away at Easter throughout Europe, are not of Christian origin, but belong to the Roman celebration (at the same season, viz., April 12th to 15th) of the goddess of Plenty—Ceres. Eggs are the symbols of fecundity and the renewal of life in the spring. They were decorated and given in baskets by rich Romans to their friends and dependents at this season. "Hot-cross buns" are peculiar to England, and no doubt have a Christian significance. They have ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... and senses which are utterly dulled. The Calabrian doctors prescribed the dance as a remedy for the hysteric affections which are common among the women of their country; and the Arabs use a somewhat similar recipe for the highbred mares, whose too lively temperament hinders their fecundity. 'Dull as a dancer' is a familiar proverb at the theatre. In fact, the best brains of Europe are convinced that dancing brings with ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... were appreciated by his contemporaries, even if he himself did not set great store by them. He began to etch early in life: he ceased only when his eyesight failed. He found in etching a congenial and natural means of self-expression. His artistic fecundity threw them off in regal profusion. The mood seized him: he would take a prepared plate, and sometimes, having swiftly spent his emotion, he did not trouble to do more than indicate the secondary incidents in ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... possessed by many insects, their prodigious fecundity, the length of time they often remain in the different phases of their existence, [Footnote: In many insects, some of the stages of life regularly continue for several years, and they may, under peculiar circumstances, be almost indefinitely prolonged. Dr. Dwight ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... coffee at my own meals, so that the chief, or some one of the principal men, might partake along with me. They all soon become very fond of coffee; and, indeed, some of the tribes attribute greater fecundity to the daily use of this beverage. They were all well acquainted with the sugar-cane, as they cultivate it in the Barotse country, but knew nothing of the method of extracting the sugar from it. They use the cane only for chewing. Sekeletu, relishing the sweet coffee and biscuits, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... grim mouth of his yet again, and speak even more to the purpose. To these mothers who did not wish to be mothers, who threw the gift of Heaven back in the face of Heaven, preferring artificial barrenness to natural fecundity, and who made of their bodies, that should have brought forth healthy, wholesome sons and daughters of their race, tombs and sepulchres—to these he told the truth, in swift, sharp, trenchant sentences, that, like the keen sterilised blade of ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... case what nature does not obtain in any volume or in quantity from any one individual, she simply receives by the number of animals in question, through the enormous multiplicity of these animals, and their astonishing fecundity—namely, by the wonderful faculty they have of promptly regenerating, of multiplying in a short time their generations successively, and rapidly accumulating; finally, by the total amount of reunion of the products of these ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... ingenious and impecunious Eugene had not managed to forestall. Not a week went by that he did not tax the fertility of his active brain to wheedle Collins Shackelford, the cashier, into breaking into his envelope for five or ten dollars in advance. These appeals came in every form that Field's fecundity could invent. When all other methods failed the presence of "Pinny" or "Melvin" in the office would afford a messenger and plan of action that was always crowned with success. "Pinny" especially seemed to enter into his father's schemes to move Shackelford's sympathy ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... visitors to a coral islet found almost innumerable sea birds and eggs. The multitude of birds and their prodigious fecundity inspired the thought that the "rookery" for the whole breadth of the Indian Ocean had been discovered. Investigations showed that the islet was also the abiding-place of a certain species of lizard which subsisted entirely on eggs. It was calculated that ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... "Presents of beautiful baby clothes are arriving from friends and relatives." Same old gush, gush, gush! slop, slop, slop! that has set the nation retching three times already. Good Lord! will it never end? The fecundity of that family is becoming an American nightmare. Will the time ever come when a married woman of social prominence can get into "a delicate condition" without having the fact heralded over the country as brazenly as though she had ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... evidently the original of the woolly "baa-lamb" of the nursery, with long, fleecy wool. The Oxford Downs are a short-woolled sheep. One of the flocks of this breed has been improved by selection, mainly in regard to fecundity, to such an extent that I believe twins are the normal proportion among the lambs. The shepherds, as elsewhere on the large down farms, form a race apart. They are not always on the best of terms with the ordinary farm labourers, I notice. "The shepherd be a working ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... about the middle of the last century, and has since then increased to such an extent as to swarm over the whole country, and render the old English black rat a comparatively rare animal. From its ferocity and fecundity the brown rat is a veritable pest; if it cannot beat a retreat from an enemy it will show most determined fight, and in large numbers will attack and kill even men. A story is related by Robert Stephenson, the great engineer, that in a coal-pit in which many horses were employed, the rats, allured ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... images, and similes, we shall find the invention still predominant. To what else can we ascribe that vast comprehension of images of every sort, where we see each circumstance of art, and individual of nature, summoned together by the extent and fecundity of his imagination to which all things, in their various views presented themselves in an instant, and had their impressions taken off to perfection at a heat? Nay, he not only gives us the full prospects of things, but several unexpected peculiarities and side views, unobserved ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... if the soul should be nourished with body, it would carry itself better there, where the fecundity of the material is, (as Jamblichus argues); so that when a large fat body presents itself, we should imagine that it were the habitation of a strong soul, firm, ready and heroic, and we should say: Oh, fat soul, oh, fecund spirit, oh, fine ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... borne in mind that this is equal to 7,272 passengers every hour, and that the length of line worked by the company's engines, including that of the "foreign" line worked, is slightly less than 25 miles, the fecundity in traffic of the metropolitan district must be said to be marvelous. It is to be regretted that the official account from which these figures are given does not give any idea of the number of passengers in the different classes, for such a return would be of value. It is a marvelous ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... are not individually large rats. Occasionally very large ones are found among them, but these are exceptional cases. They are in general less distinguished for size, than for a fierce and spiteful disposition, combined with a great fecundity, which of course renders them exceedingly numerous and troublesome. It has been observed that wherever they make their appearance, in a few years the rats of all other species disappear; and it is therefore conjectured that the Norway rats destroy the other kinds! ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... cessation of the Black Plague, a greater fecundity in women was everywhere remarkable—a grand phenomenon, which, from its occurrence after every destructive pestilence, proves to conviction, if any occurrence can do so, the prevalence of a higher power in ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... said: 'Nay, pluck not,—let the first fruit be: Even as thou sayest, it is sweet and red, But let it ripen still. The tree's bent head Sees in the stream its own fecundity And bides the day of fulness. Shall not we At the sun's hour that day possess the shade, And claim our fruit before its ripeness fade, And eat it from the branch and ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... known to us in recent times by the rapid progress of geographical knowledge—the analogies presented by the varieties in the species of many wild and domesticated animals—and the more correct observations collected regarding the limits of fecundity in hybrids. The greater number of the contrasts which were formerly supposed to exist have disappeared before the laborious researches of Tiedemann on the brain of negroes and of Europeans, and the anatomical investigations of Vrolik and Weber ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... maliciousness of the world. This feeling will doubtless never change. The procession of friendly names which accompany my books mingles pleasure with the pain their great number causes me, for they are not written without anxiety, to say nothing of the reproach cast upon me for my alarming fecundity,—as if the world which poses before me were not more fecund still. Would it not be a fine thing, George, if some antiquary of long past literatures should find in that procession none but great names, noble hearts, pure and sacred friendships,—the glories of this century? ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... never be so plentiful as pigeons and antelopes; and the wild asses of the Tartarian deserts cannot equal in numbers the horses of the more luxuriant prairies and pampas of America. The greater or less fecundity of an animal is often considered to be one of the chief causes of its abundance or scarcity; but a consideration of the facts will show us that it really has little or nothing to do with the matter. Even the least prolific of animals would increase rapidly if unchecked, ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... and breadth of thought, by his profound understanding of life, by the intensity of his dreams, Alfred de Vigny is superior to Victor Hugo, whose genius was quite different, in his power to portray picturesque scenes, in his remarkable fecundity of imagination, and in his sovereign ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... luxuriance, of tropical climates. Tall reeds, in which the buffaloes are hid, in which a rhinoceros might lie concealed, spring up in the numerous pools or deep ditches with which the dreary flat surface is sprinkled. Wild grapes of extraordinary fecundity grow in the woods, and ascend in luxuriant clusters to the tops of the tallest trees. Nearer the sea, a band of noble chestnuts and evergreen oaks attests the riches of the soil, which is capable of producing such magnificent specimens ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... remarkable events in modern history. The energy and passion which convulsed society during his youth and early manhood undoubtedly had much to do in stimulating that robust and virile quality in his mind which gave such character to his compositions. The fecundity of his intellect is shown in the fact that he produced four hundred and thirty works, out of which only eighty have been published. In this catalogue there are twenty-five ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... which he was himself subject, aided him in the reproduction and comprehension of such a multiplicity of views. It would be impossible to follow the varied transformations occurring in these compositions, with their pervading melancholy, without admiring the fecundity of his creative force, even when not fully sustained by the higher powers of his inspiration. He did not always confine himself to the consideration of the pictures presented to him by his imagination ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... to the third and most curious day of the nuptials, which is still strictly observed. As the ceremony of the livrees is the symbol of taking possession of the heart and home of the bride, that of the chou is the type of the fecundity of marriage. After breakfast the next morning, this performance commenced—a custom of ancient Gallic origin, which became gradually a sort of Mystery or Morality of the middle ages. Two lads disappear during the breakfast, go and dress themselves up, and then ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... parsimony. If a man is killed in a duel, he is killed as many a one has been killed; but it is a sad thing for a man to lie down and die; to bleed to death, because he has not fortitude enough to sear the wound, or even to stitch it up.' I cannot but pause a moment to admire the fecundity of fancy, and choice of language, which in this instance, and, indeed, on almost all occasions, he displayed. It was well observed by Dr. Percy, now Bishop of Dromore, 'The conversation of Johnson is strong and clear, and may be compared to an antique statue, where every vein and muscle is distinct ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... the French custom of putting the ashes of the bonfires in the fowls' nests to make the hens lay eggs,[839] and from the German practice of mixing the ashes of the bonfires with the drink of cattle in order to make the animals thrive.[840] Further, there are clear indications that even human fecundity is supposed to be promoted by the genial heat of the fires. In Morocco the people think that childless couples can obtain offspring by leaping over the midsummer bonfire.[841] It is an Irish belief that a girl who jumps thrice over ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... constraint; that they will laugh at argument, and defeat violence; that the continent of North America contains three millions, not of men merely, but of whigs, of whigs fierce for liberty, and disdainful of dominion; that they multiply with the fecundity of their own rattlesnakes, so that every quarter of a century doubles ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... become a terrific property. No such property in the world, unless it were New York! There was a lot of hysteria in the papers nowadays; but any one who, like himself, could remember London sixty years ago, and see it now, realised the fecundity and elasticity of wealth. They had only to keep their heads, and go at it steadily. Why! he remembered cobblestones, and stinking straw on the floor of your cab. And old Timothy—what could he not have told them, if he had kept his memory! Things ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... nothing. Nevertheless, Nathan maintains his ground by the quickness of his mind, by those lucky hits which billiard-players call a "good stroke." He is the cleverest shot at ideas on the fly in all Paris. His fecundity is not his own, but that of his epoch; he lives on chance events, and to control them he distorts their meaning. In short, he is not true; his presentation is false; in him, as Comte Felix said, is the born ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... fondness. As Jack listened, the fragrance of flowers was in his nostrils and in intervals between Jasper Ewold's sentences he seemed to hear the rustle of borning leaf-fronds breaking the silence. But the narrative was not an idyll. Toil and patience had been the handmaidens of the fecundity of the soil. Prosperity had brought an entail of problems. Jasper Ewold mentioned them briefly, as if he would not ask a guest to share the shadows which they brought ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... de Marolles in the character of "a literary sinner;" but the extent of his sins never struck me so forcibly as when I observed his delinquencies counted up in chronological order in Niceron's "Hommes Illustres." It is extremely amusing to detect the swarming fecundity of his pen; from year to year, with author after author, was this translator wearying others, but remained himself unwearied. Sometimes two or three classical victims in a season were dragged into his slaughter-house. Of about seventy ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... above value to the student in the development of his mechanism and the formation of his style. A strong characteristic of the composer is his almost redundant profusion of ideas;[89] but his rich fecundity of invention is greatly counterbalanced by diffuseness of design, resulting from the want of that power of condensation by means of which greater interest is often ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... entire, or partial secessions from the agricultural body, was not so extensively beneficial as might at first be imagined. All this time the population was in a state of rapid progression, both from the daily influx of people from without, and from the amazing fecundity of the colonists within. The distress, therefore, of the colony continued increasing in proportion to its increasing population. And although it may appear strange, that while it was a subject of such notoriety, that the settlers were ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... South Panel; Vanity in center with handglass; man and woman with children, representing Fecundity, ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... another not; then, in all such cases, difference of structure proves difference of kind. (2.) Physiological; that is, the internal nature, indicated by habits and instincts, furnishes another safe criterion. (3.) Permanent fecundity. The progenitors of the same species reproduce their kind from generation to generation; the progeny of different species, although nearly allied, do not. It is a fixed law of nature that species never can be annihilated, except by all ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... an instance of delivery in a girl a little over ten years of age. There are instances of fecundity at nine years recorded by Ephemerides, Wolffius, Savonarola, and others. Gleaves reports from Wytheville, Va., the history of what he calls the case of the youngest mother in Virginia—Annie H.—who was born in Bland County, July 15, 1885, and, on September ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... comedy upon the gods, the institutions, the politicians, philosophers, poets, private citizens, specially named—and even the women, whose life was entirely domestic—of Athens. With this universal liberty in respect of subject there is combined a poignancy of derision and satire, a fecundity of imagination and variety of turns, and a richness of poetical expression such as cannot be surpassed, and such as fully explains the admiration expressed for him by the philosopher Plato, who in other respects must ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... movements in flight omens were drawn, but also spirits of fertility. When the childless Indian sage Mandapala of the Mahabharata was refused admittance to heaven until a son was born to him, he "pondered deeply" and "came to know that of all creatures birds alone were blest with fecundity"; so he ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... already! Nature's a dial whose shade no hand puts back, Trick as we may! My friend, you are forty-three This very year in the world— [JOSEPHINE breaks out sobbing again.] And in vain it is To think of waiting longer; pitiful To dream of coaxing shy fecundity To an unlikely freak by physicking With superstitious drugs and quackeries That work you harm, not good. The fact being so, I have looked it squarely down—against my heart! Solicitations voiced repeatedly ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... was therefore viewed as free, but at the same time responsible. Immediately, as if fecundity were the reward of correctness, the German theatre became filled with true and living characters. The stage widens under their steps that they may have room to move. History with its great proportions and its terrible ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... healthy can be accomplished. The sickly appearance of the inhabitants establishes but too well the facts related to me; and yet, strange to say, it would appear to be a provision of Providence, that a remarkable fecundity on the part of the women in the more healthy portions of their Western States, should meet the annual expenditure of life. Three children at a birth are more common here than twins are in England; and they, ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... previously requisite that they should have been conceived, combined, nourished, connected, and developed in the brain of a poet; where circumstances make them fructify, mature them, and bring them forth in perfection, by reason of the fecundity, generated by the genial warmth and the peculiar energy of the matrix, in which these intellectual seeds shall have been placed. Ideas in combining, expanding, connecting, and associating themselves, form a whole, like all the other bodies ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... finds in her wonderful fecundity wherewith to supply the new wants which arise in ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... is called the Blue Grass Region, and boasts itself as of peculiar fecundity in the matter of pasturage. Why the grass is called blue, or in what way or at what period it becomes blue, I did not learn; but the country is very lovely and very fertile. Between Lexington and ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... emblem of the fecundity of nature; it consisted of a representation, generally grotesquely exaggerated, of the male genital organs; the phallophori crowned with violets and ivy and their faces shaded with green foliage, sang improvised airs, called 'Phallics,' full ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... eggs, it helps the matter but very little. There is still an anomaly. There is but one perfect female in a nest to germinate eggs, and the myriads produced (being over 80,000 in twenty-four hours, according to some historians) shows that the fecundity of our queen-bee is not a parallel case by any means. And yet they are similar, by having their offspring provided for without an ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... the mother is conscientiously done. When a great French writer, Emil Zola, alarmed at the sterilization of his nation, wrote an eloquent and powerful book to restore the prestige of parentage, it was at once assumed in England that a work of this character, with such a title as Fecundity, was too abominable to be translated, and that any attempt to deal with the relations of the sexes from any other than the voluptuary or romantic point of view must be sternly put down. Now if this assumption were really founded on public ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... Sleep, is the crouched form of a woman, while successively come the Awakening, the Ecstatic Joy of Being - or it may be the Realization of Living; the Kiss of Life, with the human pair offering up their children, representative of the beginnings of fecundity; a female, strong of limb and superb of physique, enfolds in her arms two infants, while her mate, of no less powerful build and rude force, kneeling beside her, gives her an embrace typical of the overpowering parental instinct. Here is the suggestion of ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... in heaven, reflected how best he could obtain the largest number of offspring within the shortest period of time. The Rishi, after reflection, understood that of all creatures birds alone were blest with fecundity. Assuming the form of a Sarngaka the Rishi had connection with a female bird of the same species called by the name of Jarita. And he begat upon her four sons who were all reciters of the Vedas. Leaving all those sons of his with ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... The conical Syrian helmet of Reshef, a god of war and thunder, gradually gave place to the white Egyptian crown, so that as Reshpu he was represented as a royal warrior; and Qadesh, another form of Astarte, becoming popular with Egyptian women as a patroness of love and fecundity, was also sometimes ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... He is an adept at tying knots and impatient of unravelling them; his third acts are apt either to evaporate in talk or to find some unreal and unsatisfactory solution for the complexity he has created. But constructive weakness apart, his amazing brilliance and fecundity of dialogue ought to have given him an immediate and lasting grip of the stage. There has probably never been a dramatist who could invest conversation with the same vivacity and point, the same combination of surprise and inevitableness ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... occur when the circumferences of the circles of each are completed, which in short-lived existences pass over a short space, and in long-lived ones over a long space. But to the knowledge of human fecundity and sterility all the wisdom and education of your rulers will not attain; the laws which regulate them will not be discovered by an intelligence which is alloyed with sense, but will escape them, and they will bring children into the world when they ought ...
— The Republic • Plato
... Dissenters"; and we are told that from "June 1687 to almost the very week of his death in 1731 a stream of controversial books and pamphlets poured from his pen commenting upon and marking every important passing event." The fecundity of Defoe as a journalist alone surpasses that of any great journalist we can name, William Cobbett not excepted, and we may add that the style of "Captain Singleton," like that of "Robinson Crusoe," is so perfect that there is not a single ineffective passage, or indeed a weak sentence, ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... the scene of one of those terrible puerperal epidemics which breathe death upon human fecundity, of one of those cases of atmospheric poisoning which empty, in a twinkling and by whole rows, the beds of women lately delivered, and which once caused the closing of La Clinique. They believed that it was a visitation of the plague, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... lambs compared with man as a destroyer, we must conclude that nature has been able to find in man alone a sufficient barrier against the too great multiplication of other animals and of man himself, an equilibrating power against the fecundity of generation. While, in making these observations, my situation points my attention to the warfare of man in the physical world, yours may perhaps present him as equally ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Rousseau's. If he had been devoid of this feeling about women, his character might very possibly have remained sterile. That feeling was the complementary contribution, without which could be no fecundity. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... pupils upon yellowish eyeballs, sparkled with nervous activity. He flung himself into the air above her head, uttering sounds of such mellow richness and such infinite fecundity of modulation, that the old hovel almost burst with intoxicated song, combining gladness, welcome, fear, defiance, superstition, horror, and epithalamium all together, like Orpheus gone mad, and losing the continuity ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... the unmeasured and unsparing license of attack assumed by these comedies upon the gods, the institutions, the politicians, philosophers, poets, private citizens, and women of Athens. With this universal liberty of subject there is combined a poignancy of derision and satire, a fecundity of imagination, and a richness of poetical expression such as cannot be surpassed. Towards the end of the career of Aristophanes, however, this unrestricted license of the comedy began ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... love secrecy in their domestic economy, and are wonderfully pleased with the opportunity to hide away, and conceal themselves while laying. Indeed, such concealment, or the supposition of it, we have no doubt promotes fecundity, as it is well known that a hen can stop laying, almost at pleasure, when disturbed in her regular habits and settled plans of ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... melodiousness, which is one of Spenser's signal characteristics, may be perceived in his Eclogues, as also a native gracefulness of style, which is another distinguishing mark of him. Perceivable, too, are his great, perilous fluency of language and his immense fecundity of mind. The work at once secured him a front place in the poetical ranks of the day. Sidney mentions it in his Apologie for Poetrie;{5} Abraham Fraunce draws illustrations from it in his Lawyers Logicke, which appeared in 1588; Meres praises it; 'Maister Edmund Spenser,' says Drayton, ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... the fecundity of the literature of the Victorian Age in its middle period, and especially on the publications which adorned the decade from 1850 to 1859. He calls those years, very justly, "marvellous and almost unexampled" in their rich ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... feature, what was the supreme quality, the one characteristic which marked the nature of the man. Was it his incomparable genius for finance? Was it his splendid oratorical powers? Was it his marvellous fecundity of mind? In my estimation it was not any one of these qualities. Great as they were, there was one still more marked, and if I have to give my own impression, I would say that the one trait which was dominant in his nature, which marked the man more distinctly than any other, was his intense ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... most characteristic modern decorations employed by the Hopi, especially as a symbol of fecundity, is the butterfly or moth. It is a constant device on the beautiful white or cotton blankets woven by the men as wedding gifts, where it is embroidered on the margin in the forms of triangles or even in more realistic patterns. This symbol is a simple triangle, which becomes quite realistic ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... ranked in Assyria next to the Triad consisting of Anu, Bel, and Hoa. She is generally mentioned in close connection with Bel, her husband, in the Assyrian records. She appears to have been regarded in Assyria as especially "the queen of fertility," or "fecundity," and so as "the queen of the lands," thus resembling the Greek Demeter, who, like Beltis, was known as: "the Great Mother." Sargon placed one of his gates under the protection of Beltis in conjunction with her husband, Bel: and Asshur-bani-pal, his ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... marvelous example of Mr. De Morgan's inexhaustible fecundity of invention.... Shines as a romance quite as much as 'Joseph Vance' does among ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... to feel any spontaneous enthusiasm for fecundity such as that which Zola sings. Moreover, I regard the whole pose as a superstition. I may be a member of an exhausted race,—that is quite possible,—but between the devotion to our species which is professed by these would-be ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... darkness, Even as the banners And spear of the Morning; Sifting the nations, The Slag from the metal, The waste and the weak From the fit and the strong; Fighting the brute, The abysmal Fecundity; Checking the gross Multitudinous blunders, The groping, the purblind Excesses in service Of the Womb ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... Isaiah,[1] which was thought to foretell that the Messiah should be born of a virgin; or, lastly, it may be in consequence of the idea that the "breath of God," already regarded as a divine hypostasis, was a principle of fecundity.[2] Already, perhaps, there was current more than one anecdote about his infancy, conceived with the intention of showing in his biography the accomplishment of the Messianic ideal;[3] or, rather, of the prophecies ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... easy. Commonly the song came to him through the refrain;—he caught the butterfly by the wings;—when he had seized the refrain, he finished at intervals, and put in the nicer shadings at leisure. He wrote hardly ten songs a year at the time of his greatest fecundity. It has since been remarked that they smell of the lamp here and there; but at first no one had eyes except for the rose, the vine, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various |
