"Gneiss" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but cleared before noon, and at 11.30 A.M. we were on the river. That afternoon and the day following we passed the most picturesque part of the river. There were Maid Marion Falls, where the river drops fifty feet into a narrow gorge cut out of the gneiss and schists of the Laurentian rock over which it flows; Gertrude Falls, a direct drop of sixty feet, which for dignity and beauty is unsurpassed by any feature of the Nascaupee; and Isabella Falls, a system ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... pharmacy; its resources are boundless, but require the nicest discretion. I remember to have cured a disconsolate widower, who obstinately refused every other medicament, by a strict course of geology. I dipped him deep into gneiss and mica schist. Amidst the first strata I suffered the watery action to expend itself upon cooling, crystallized masses; and by the time I had got him into the tertiary period, amongst the transition chalks of Maestricht and the conchiferous marls of Gosau, he was ready for a new wife. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots, And am stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over, And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons, And call anything close again, when I ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... "This is gneiss. This is mica schist—siliceous mineral. Good again; this is the epoch of transition, at all events, we are close to them—and ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... celebrated of all is the print of the sacred foot on the top of the Amala Sri Pada, or Adam's Peak, in Ceylon. On the highest point of this hill there is a pagoda-like building, supported on slender pillars, and open on every side to the winds. Underneath this canopy, in the centre of a huge mass of gneiss and hornblende, forming the living rock, there is the rude outline of a gigantic foot about five feet ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... "Gneiss rock for eleven hundred feet and then some mica schist that we have had to shore up every time we move ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... stood on a bare granite slab, and looked over into Italy, as men might lean from the battlements of a fortress. Behind lies the Alpine valley, grim, declining slowly northward, with wind-lashed lakes and glaciers sprawling from storm-broken pyramids of gneiss. Below spread the unfathomable depths that lead to Lombardy, flooded with sunlight, filled with swirling vapour, but never wholly hidden from our sight. For the blast kept shifting the cloud-masses, and the sun streamed through in spears and bands of sheeny ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... but Swiss character and institutions, go back essentially to the high pasture and the well-filled byre. That this rich Swiss cow-pasture rests on limestone, and the poor Scottish sheep-grazing upon comparatively unmouldering and impermeable gneiss, is no mere matter of geologist's detail; it affords in each case the literal and concrete foundation-stone of the subsequent evolution of each region and population, and this not only in material ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... air was dry and the sky unclouded blue. At this elevation rain is unknown, and vapors only condense into snow or hail. Here and there peaks of porphyry or basalt pierced through the white winding-sheet like the bones of a skeleton; and at intervals fragments of quartz or gneiss, loosened by the action of the air, fell down with a faint, dull sound, which in a denser atmosphere would have ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... were found to consist chiefly of red sandstone. There was also a good deal of greenstone and gneiss, and some of the spires of these that shot up to a considerable height were particularly striking ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... region,—a famed part of this famed route. This is the Chaos, so-called and justly. The side of the mountain overhead appears to have broken off bodily and fallen into the valley, and its ruins almost choke the bottom. Huge masses of granite and gneiss are scattered everywhere in savage confusion, and the road barely twines a painful way through the labyrinth. Scarcely a blade of grass, a tint of green, is to be seen about us; the tract is given over ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... she has eight thousand miles: and whether through all that depth she is flame or fluid, hard or soft, I do not know, I do not know. Her method of forming coal, geysers and hot sulphur-springs, and the jewels, and the atols and coral reefs; the metamorphic rocks of sedimentary origin, like gneiss, the plutonic and volcanic rocks, rocks of fusion, and the unstratified masses which constitute the basis of the crust; and harvests, the burning flame of flowers, and the passage from the vegetable to the animal: I do not ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... chiefly from the district of Minas Novas in the state of Minas Geraes, where it occurs as small water-worn pebbles. The cymophane is mostly from the gem-gravels of Ceylon. Chrysoberyl is known as a constituent of certain kinds of granite, pegmatite and gneiss. In the United States it occurs at Haddam, Conn.; Greenfield Centre, near Saratoga Springs, N.Y.; and in Manhattan island. It is known also in the province of Quebec, Canada, and has been found near Gwelo in Rhodesia. (F. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... rest, of any good or evil extent, it is impossible to say what measure is owing to restraint, and what to license where the right is balanced between them. I was not a little provoked one day, a summer or two since, in Scotland, because the Duke of Athol hindered me from examining the gneiss and slate junctions in Glen Tilt, at the hour convenient to me; but I saw them at last, and in quietness; and to the very restriction that annoyed me, owed, probably, the fact of their being in existence, instead of being blasted away by a mob-company; while the "free" paths and inlets ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... contains nails, which was the case with those worn by the lads. The rail of a gate is harmless, while a smooth piece of slate makes a moderately good enough soft hone. But when it comes to rubbing a blade upon a piece of gneiss, quartz crystal, or granite, the result is most unsatisfactory, the edge of the knife being prone to look like a very bad imitation of a ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... blocks of wood, three feet in length, embedded in the ground, forming the foundation of the structure. Unfortunately, no such thing as earth or gravel existed in which to sink these posts, and the rock being of the variety known as gneiss, was more than ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson |
