"Shale" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the bottoms, where the way ran through soft shale, teaming wheels had cut hub-deep furrows where a beast could break a leg with a miscalculated step. Sometimes, higher up, a path wide enough only for the setting down of foot before foot skirted a cliff's edge—and the storm might at any point have washed even that precarious thoroughfare ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... wounds, for example, bullets, needles, splinters of wood, or fragments of clothing. The needles of hypodermic syringes sometimes break and a portion remains embedded in the tissues. As a result of explosions, particles of carbon, in the form of coal-dust or gunpowder, or portions of shale, may lodge in ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... usually on hand for the collection of tiny toll. Narrow bridges, rude steps cut in the face of the cliffs, trails along narrow ledges, over rocky ridges, down across gulches, and anon through loose shale on ticklishly sloping banks, characterize the passage through the canon. The sun is broiling hot, and my knee swollen and painful. It is barely possible to crawl along at a snail's pace by keeping ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... N. fuel, firing, combustible. [solid fuels] coal, wallsend[obs3], anthracite, culm[obs3], coke, carbon, charcoal, bituminous coal, tar shale; turf, peat, firewood, bobbing, faggot, log; cinder &c. (products of combustion) 384; ingle, tinder, touchwood; sulphur, brimstone; incense; port-fire; fire-barrel, fireball, brand; amadou[obs3], bavin[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... in search of fossils connected with the carboniferous system, and who must have frequently met with the substance which has caused all this excitement, but never imagined it to be gold. The face of the quarry, to the depth of twenty feet from the top, is an accumulation of shale or slate, lying in regular layers, and easily broken. It has been turned to good account of late in the manufacture of slate-pencils of superior quality. Among this shaly accumulation, there are frequent layers of a soft, wet clay or ochre; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... a mineral. "A resinous, reddish-brown, translucent, hydrocarbon derivative (C40H6202S), found in certain laminated shales of Tasmania, Resiniferous shale." ('Standard.') ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... streaked with muddy foam, brawled among the rocks, for the track had been dug out of a steep hillside. Festing knew this was difficult work; one could deal with rock, although it cost much to cut, but it was another matter to bed the rails in treacherous gravel, and the fan-shaped mounds of shale and soil that ran down to the water's edge showed how loose the ground was and the abruptness of the slope. Above, the silver mist drifted about the black firs that clung to the side of the mountain, and in the distance there was a gleam of snow. Some of the trees ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... obliging branch saw fit to let go its tenacious grip about that time, of course Noodles was soon drawn in triumph over the edge of the shale, protesting more or less because he was scratched in several places by ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... just a glimpse. But sometimes glimpses make more vivid memories than longer acquaintance. At the end of our hour we left Vence and hurried down the broad road of red shale past meadows thick with violets. We went through the deep pine-filled ravine over which we had crossed on the viaduct. Then the climb ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... pentangular bargain, in which all these parties were immensely benefited. The traveller blesses such liberal policy, as he flies along towards the land of oranges, or turns aside to measure mammoth beets or weigh extra-supernal corn, to "bore" or to "prospect," to pick at ooelite and shale or to "peep and botanize" through an inexhaustible Flora. The present writer has certainly reason to be grateful,—not, alas! with that gushing warmth of feeling which the owners of shares or bonds naturally experience,—but as an "'umble individual" who could not have found material ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... this singular-looking, black, inflammable rock? How many times was this question asked before Science could return an answer? This she can now do with confidence. Coal was once growing vegetable matter. On the surface of the shale, immediately above the coal, you will find innumerable impressions of leaves and branches, as perfect as artist ever drew. But how could this vegetable matter ever accumulate in such masses as to make beds of coal of such vast extent, ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... to heave before them in a succession of huge boulders, and as each one was scaled another appeared beyond it. At length they reached a piled confusion of rocks, where a little cairn had been built of small stones and loose pieces of shale. ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... portentously of a solemn coming. Ten minutes more and the note was lying neglected on the bureau, and Angela stood at her window, gazing out over dreary miles of almost desert landscape, of rock and shale and sand and cactus, with eyes from which the light had fled, and a new, strange trouble biting at her girlish heart. Confound ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... the southeast is uninterrupted. Mountain range rises beyond mountain range, until only the snowy summits are visible in the great distance, and one knows that beyond the last of them lies the open sea. The near-by peaks and ridges, red with granite or black with shale and gullied from top to bottom with snow and ice, the broad highways of the glaciers at their feet carrying parallel moraines that look like giant tram-lines, stand out with vivid distinction. A lofty peak, that we suppose is Mount Hunter, towers above the lesser summits. The two arms of the ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... is still the chief source of this valuable salt, is the gas-works, where it is obtained as one of the bye-products in the manufacture of gas. It is also obtained to a lesser extent from shale, iron, coke, and carbonising works. Bones, horn, leather, and certain other animal substances rich in nitrogen, when subjected to dry distillation, as is the case in certain manufactures, such as the ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... away once more, to stare again at the great, tumbled stretches of granite, the long spaces of green-black pines, showing in the distance like so many upright fronds of some strange, mossy fern; at the blank spaces, where cold stone and shifting shale had made jagged marks of bareness in the masses of evergreen, then on to the last gnarled bulwarks of foliage, struggling bravely, almost desperately, to hold on to life where life was impossible, the dividing ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... ground were 12 x 22 feet outside. It had been of two or three stories, and exhibited considerable skill on the part of the builders, the corners being plumb and square. Under the brink of the cliff was a sort of gallery formed by the erosion of a soft shale between heavy sandstone beds, forming a floor and roof about eight or ten feet wide, separated by six or seven feet in vertical height. A wall had been carried along the outer edge, and the space thus made was divided by cross walls into a number of rooms. Potsherds and arrow-heads, ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... decomposition. Marsh gas and carbonic acid are seen escaping from the surface of pools where recent vegetable matter is submerged, and they are also eliminated in the further decomposition of peat, lignite, coal, and carbonaceous shale. Fire damp and choke-damp, common names for the gases mentioned above, are produced in large quantities in the mines where Tertiary or Cretaceous lignites, or Carboniferous coals or anthracites are mined. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... grass made fine pasturage. These cliffs were the local wonder and gave the farm its name. They were a section of jagged "pudding-stone" wall composed of large and small fragments of gorgeously hued stones massed together in loose formation, like shale. Great heaps of these jeweled fragments, which crumbled easily from the cliff, lay piled up along the base of the wall and sparkled brilliantly when the sun shone upon them, or directly ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... of the safest, for it consisted in hewing logs out of the forest for framing the spidery trestles and snow-sheds, hauling sawn lumber into position, and doing general teamster's work. Risks there were of course—the rush of a charging boulder, or a sudden descent of shale, while occasionally a partly grubbed out trunk came thundering down before it was expected to. Comparatively few trained mechanics could be found among all the men about us, and, as usual, the hardest part of the struggle devolved ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... Charlie's Knob, and beyond it the range, which on close examination was not imposing, being a series of detached sandstone hills, their summits flat and slightly sloping to the South, capped with a hard reddish-brown rock (baked shale). On the cap, loose fragments of shale and thick scrub; forming its sides sheer cliffs, at most fifteen feet high, perforated by holes and caves, above rough, stony banks. The whole covered with tufts of spinifex, barren, ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... Brongniart) a fern which occurs in a stratum of ironstone at Newcastle, and in one of the same mineral on the southern coast, also in sandstone in the valley of the Hunter, and abundantly in the shale near the coal ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... soon as Walter's guard had been smashed down by a most unconventional attack, and Walter himself had been knocked senseless by a swing on the side of the jaw, Bill Shale leaped gaily forth ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... Sandhills of golden glow, Where'er the tempests blow, Like a great flood are spread. Sometimes the sacred spot Hears human sounds profane, when As from Ophir or from Memphre Stretches the caravan. From far the eyes, its trail Along the burning shale Bending its wavering tail, Like a mottled serpent scan. These deserts are of God! His are the bounds alone, Here, where no feet have trod, To Him its centre known! And from this smoking sea Veiled in obscurity, The foam one seems to see In fiery ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... the overturning of the smallest stone or bit of shale which might betray their position, they ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... see the marks his shoes made in the shale," said Trapper Jim, pointing to the ground in front, which sloped ...
— With Trapper Jim in the North Woods • Lawrence J. Leslie
... mare swerved suddenly behind a boulder and was gone. He spurred round the same great rock a minute later, and was faced by a blank wall of shale that brought his horse up all standing. It led steep up for a thousand feet to the sky-line. There was not so much as a goat-track to show in which direction the mare had gone, nor a sound of any kind to ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... The second zone—that is to say, the lower hills and mountains—is chiefly of miocene formation; but beneath this, and showing itself at the surface in various parts, are strata of what Lyell calls 'a subordinate member of that vast deposit of sandstone and shale which is provincially called "flysch," and which is believed to form part of the Eocene series.'[16] In this region, which is called by the Roumanians the region of vines, are to be found marl, sandstone, chalk, and gypsum, with rock-salt, petroleum, and lignite. The last-named is an important ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... is not necessary to believe in ghosts; but I'll go bail that story is true. We are but two stones' throw from the gaunt hulk of a Franciscan Church; a file of dusty cypresses marks the ruins of a painful Calvary cut in the waste and shale of the hill-side. Below, as in a green pasture, Florence shines like a dove's egg in her nest of hills; I can pick out among the sheaf of spears which hedge her about the daintiest of them all, the crocketed pinnacle of Santa Croce, grey on blue; and then ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... to be built over a natural spring of inflammable gas, and to be constantly illuminated therewith. What moral could be drawn from this? It is carburetted hydrogen gas, and is cooled from a soft shale or slate, which is sometimes bituminous, and contains more or less carbonate of lime. It appears in the vicinity of Lockport and Niagara Falls, and elsewhere in New York. I believe it indicates coal. At Fredonia, the whole ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... they were composed of a species of quartz or mineral, but observing one of them within reach at his side, he reached upward with his knife and extracted it from the shale in which ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... at this time had no water in its sandy channel for the first eight or ten miles. Willows, however, grow on the banks, and water soon began to appear in the hollows; and a few miles further up it was a fine flowing stream deliciously cold. As in many other streams from Chicova to near Sinamane shale and coal crop out in the bank; and here the large roots of stigmaria or its allied plants were found. We followed the course of the Zungwe to the foot of the Batoka highlands, up whose steep and rugged sides of red and white quartz we climbed till we attained ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... madman," said the sheriffe, "Thou sholdst have had a knightes fee; But seeing thy asking hath beene soe bad, Well granted it shale be." ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... galloping down the steep trail at breakneck speed, flinging down a small avalanche of shale with them. One of them caught sight of the girl, drew up so short that his horse slid to its haunches, and leaped from the saddle in a ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... had sounded the conch off Oomoa was lying on the shale, and those who had come in it were on the stones cooking breadfruit. The village, half a dozen rude straw shacks, stretched along a rocky stream. Beyond it, in a few acres enclosed by a fence, were a tiny church, two wretched wooden ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... to be part of a horizontal, stratified series of sandstones underlying the igneous rock. There were bands of coarse gravel and fine examples of stream-bedding interspersed with seams of carbonaceous shale and poor coal. Among the debris were several pieces of sandstone marked by black, fossilized plant-remains. The summits of the beacons were platforms of very hard rock, baked by the volcanic overflow. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... whence the carved trunk proceeded, somewhat resembled that of an enormous coach-wheel divested of the rim. Unfortunately we cannot yet complete our description of this strange plant. A specimen, traced for about forty feet across a shale bed, was found to bifurcate atop into two great branches,—a characteristic in which, with several others, it differed from most of the tree-ferns,—a class of plants to which Adolphe Brogniart is inclined to deem it related; but no specimen has yet shown the nature ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... the abutments a thick stratum of shale had been exposed that air-slaked as fast as it was uncovered. Jim gave orders that drifts be driven through the stratum until a safe distance from possible exposure was reached. These were to be filled with concrete immediately. It was careful and important work. The concrete of the dam must ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... for general crop production are on limestone, basalt, dolemite, dolerite, diorite and gabbro formations, whereas sandstones, aplites, granites, pierre shale, cretacious rocks and volcanic formations weather into inferior soils. Gneiss can be sometimes good, sometimes unfavorable for ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... climbing wildly, first saw the break in the trees ahead. He gave a muffled cry of delight, and in a few minutes they were all rushing, like men possessed, up a bare slope of broken shale. ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... what he was standing on—a little ledge of shale not over five or six feet in length and two feet wide—for in lower water I had often from its advantage cast a fly down below the big boulder. But I knew it to be surrounded by water fifteen feet deep. It was impossible to wade to the spot, impossible to swim to it. And ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... intrusive felspathic porphyry and ashes. The same formation occurs just within the county border at Cerrig-y-Druidion, Langum, Bettys-y-coed and in the Fairy Glen. Northwards from the Ceiriog to the limestone fringe at Llandrillo the Wenlock shale of the Silurian covers the entire mass of the Hiraethog and Clwydian hills, but verging on its western slopes into the Denbighshire grit, which may be traced southward in a continuous line from the mouth of the Conway as far as Llanddewi Ystrad Enni in Radnorshire, near Pentre-Voelas and Conway ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... laminated clays of many colors—red, orange, yellow, gray, black, and white. This is the beginning of that vast deposit which covers the whole Amazonian Valley. It rests upon a bed of lignite, or bituminous shale, and a coarse, iron-cemented conglomerate. The latter is not visible on the Napo, but crops out particularly at Obidos and Para. The Indians prepare their ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... now as we are going to stay here for a while we must get to work. We can't stay long, huddled together like this. Let us scoop out a hollow in the shale so as to have a place ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... deep weathered, narrow strata that here formed a fifty-foot terrace. These terraced strata gave back for half a mile in uneven and brittle striations that were not unlike rude steps. Above them rose a sheer orange wall, straight to the sky. Far below a great shale bank sloped from the river's edge up to a gigantic black butte, whose terraced front seemed to Enoch to offer some hope ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... of the rocks was a steep declivity of loose shale sprinkled over with large and small boulders of radically different formations, and in no manner resembling the friable, uncertain bed upon which ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... something is started with and in the end we have an entirely different thing. The clay soils are often called mud soils because of the amount of water used in their formation. The slate that Myron brought for road making belongs to the clay family, and so does shale. ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... were the staple amusements at Derreen. Nothing was more characteristic of Froude than his love of the sea and the open air. Sport, in the proper sense of the term, he also loved. "I always consider," he said, "that the proudest moment of my life was, when sliding down a shale heap, I got a right and left at woodcocks." For luxurious modes of making big bags with little trouble he never cared at all. But let him once more explain himself in his own words. "I delight in a mountain walk when I must work hard for my five brace of grouse. I see no amusement in dawdling ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... a hillside of shale, caught at a greasewood bush and waited. The sound of a rifle shot had drifted across the ridge to him. Friend or foe, it made no difference to him now. He had reached the end of his tether, must get to water soon or give ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... air polluted with sulfur dioxide from oil-shale burning power plants in northeast; however, the amount of pollutants emitted to the air have fallen steadily, the emissions of 2000 were 80% less than in 1980; the amount of unpurified wastewater discharged to water bodies in 2000 was one twentieth the ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Clyde Mystery. We stare at it and ask what are these slate spear heads engraved with rude ornament, and certainly never meant to be used as "lethal weapons"? What are these many-shaped perforated plaques of slate, shale, and schist, scratched with some of the old mysterious patterns that, in almost every part of the world, remain inscribed on slabs and faces of rock? Who incised similar patterns on the oyster-shells, some old and local, ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... difficult. A dense forest growth of cedar and tamarack pushed to the very edge of the water, and the rare open beaches were composed of smooth rocks too small to afford secure footing, and too large to be trodden under. The girl either slipped and stumbled on insecure and ankle-twisting shale, or forced a way through the awful tangle of a swamp. As the canoeing at this point was not at all difficult, her utmost efforts could not keep ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... and at length he could work hardly at all, their pleasant home was assured to the family; and at Sir Henry's death the nephew who succeeded him left the Rocketts undisturbed. But, under this new lordship, things were not quite as they had been. Sir Edwin Shale, a middle-aged man, had in his youth made a foolish marriage; his lady ruled him, not with the gentlest of tongues, nor always to the kindest purpose, and their daughter, Hilda, asserted her rights as only child with ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... give the reason. Dean gathered from what she could tell that a gas of some sort was formed, perhaps by the decomposing vegetation. Perhaps it combined with the sparkling white shale. But all this was of no consequence compared with his own problems. He did not argue the matter but followed ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... kind would be pounced upon by a tribal medicine-man or some other jealous enemy, and used to discredit me. A few days after telling the Sodom and Gomorrah story, I was on a walk-about with Yamba in my mountain region, when I suddenly discovered that shale existed in very considerable quantities, and I thereupon conceived the idea of demonstrating to the blacks that, not only was the Bible narrative a true one, but that it was quite possible to ignite stone; and I would even show them how it ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... at old stone houses, a story or two high on one side, three or four stories on the other, seeming to set their claws into the cliffs and cling there for dear life, I thought of houses in Capri and Amalfi, and in some towns in France; and again there were low cottages built of blocks of shale covered with a thin veneer of white plaster showing the outlines of the stones beneath, which, squatting down amid their trees and flowers, resembled peasant cottages in Normandy or Brittany, or ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... have sworn that a great sea was roaring below in the darkness. He could hear the waves, the boom and burst of them, the suck-back of the billows tearing the shrieking shale to their hearts, the profound and sonorous roar of leagues of coast. Imagination could do anything with that sound except figure the reality of it or paint the tremendous forest bending to the wind in billows of foliage a hundred leagues long; the roar ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... from the town, and rode down the crest of long, gently-sloping ridges, which seemed interminable. The rock over which we passed was red sandstone, mottled and streaked with green, red shale, and occasional patches of conglomerate. Crossing a little stream by a pretty bridge, we made an abrupt ascent, and soon saw the little town, Cuaquitepec, at the base of ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... Vedder, our outlook; "but wait a few minutes and they'll come up on higher ground. Here, here, you are looking a mile too far to the right—they're not following the cattle, but the wagon's trail. Keep your eyes to the left of that shale outcropping, and on a line with that lone tree on the Saw Log. Hold your horses a minute; I've been watching them for half an hour before I called you; be patient, and they'll rise like a trout. There! there comes one on ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... of the Katanga mineral treasure. Coal, iron, and tin have not only been discovered in quantity but are being mined commercially. Oil-shale is plentiful on the Congo River near Ponthierville and good indications of oil are recorded in other places. The discovery of oil in Central Africa would have a great influence on the development of transportation since it would supply fuel for steamers, railways, and motor transport. There ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... environment. For a quarter of a mile above him he could see the white spume between the chasm walls, darkening with the approach of night. He could hear more clearly the roar of the death-floods. But close to him was smooth water, and he stood now on a shelving tongue of rock and shale, upon which the current had flung him. In front of him was a rock wall. Behind him was another. There was no footing except where he stood. And Marette was ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... chamber, Tommy selected a large round piece of "gob," placed it in the center of the open space, and laid another small piece of shale on ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... oil which comes from wells bored deep down in the ground in Pennsylvania, in the south of Russia, in Burma, and elsewhere. Also it is distilled in Scotland from oil shale, from which paraffin oil and wax and similar substances are produced. When the oil is brought to the surface it contains many impurities, and in its native form is unsuitable for motor engines. The crude oil is composed of a number ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... whole scene, save for that running stream, produced the effect of a world burnt out. The hills of shale might have been vast heaps of ashes. It was a waste place of terrible unfruitfulness. And yet, not very far below the surface, the precious metal lay buried in the rock—the secret of the centuries which man at last had ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the north, taking a precipitous trail of shale that Phyllis judged to be a short cut. It was rough going, but their mountain ponies were good for anything less than a perpendicular wall. They clambered up and down like cats, as sure-footed as ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... in her stony bosom, hid for ages,— The hieroglyphics of primeval rocks, Are glibly written out on short-hand pages. Within that rocky scroll, her palimpsest, The hand of time still writes, and still effaces Records in dolomite—and shale—and schist, The ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... toward the eastern range until he came to a narrow tongue of shale almost as hard to the hoofs as asphalt, that ran like a shoal across that sea of sand. Rest had given the great equine trio renewed life. P.D., reduced in rank to second place, could not think of allowing more than a foot between his muzzle and the ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... an impracticable slope of shale stuff and went on. The herder followed. When he was within twelve feet or so of the bottom, there was a sound of pebbles knocked loose in haste, a scrambling, and then came the impact of his body. Andy teetered, lost his balance, and went to the bottom in one glorious slide. He ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... without sticking at all to it, then is it enough: and then you put it into flat shallow Tin forms, first wetted with cold water, and let it stand in them four or five hours in a cold place, till it be quite cold. Then reverse the plates, that it may shale and fall out, and so put ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... skeleton of these monster Dinosaurs is recovered. While our western states, in certain places, are rich in fossil remains, there is very seldom a complete skeleton unearthed. At best there are but a few bones, or the impressions of bones, in the sandstone rocks or shale. But from these bones, from the impressions of those that have been eaten by time, and by their knowledge of what sort of anatomy was needed to keep these wonderful creatures on earth, it is possible for scientists to almost completely and perfectly restore them, in some ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... words, Uncle Ben led the way along a narrow passage, roofed with rock and floored with slate-coloured shale and shingle, and winding in and out, until we stopped at a great stone block or boulder, lying across the floor, and as large as my mother's best oaken wardrobe. Beside it were several sledge-hammers, battered, and ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... the ancient demon of water-force had excelled himself in enchantments. The slopes of the alluvial soil were dotted with little buttes of mingled sandstone and shale, varying from five to twenty feet in height, many of them bearing a grotesque likeness to artificial objects. There were columns, there were haystacks, there were enormous bells, there were inverted jars, there were junk bottles, there were rustic seats. Most of these fantastic figures were surmounted ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... its aid Tom was able to examine the nature of the ground about him, and presently saw at a short distance a dark, arched cavity in the face of a mass of gravelly rock which rose up on his left hand. It had the appearance of a cave, and Tom got off and carefully examined the loose shale round the mouth of it for the trace of recent footsteps. He did not want to fall into the hands of ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... make an excursion, under the superintendence of Miss Rowe, to obtain specimens of wild flowers, which they afterwards pressed and pasted in books; and once Miss Lincoln took the whole of the lower school to hunt for fossils among the heaps of shale lying at the mouth of an old quarry. She herself was both a keen geologist and naturalist, and tried to interest her girls in all the specimens of stones, flowers, birds, or insects which they found during their walks. "If you will only learn to talk about things instead of people," she ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... disgust rather than fear, and, like a hobbled horse on the jump, lifted his ponderous iron-shod fore hoofs and crashed down over the first rough step. Venters warmed to greater admiration of the sorrel; and, giving him a loose bridle, he stepped down foot by foot. Oftentimes the stones and shale started by Wrangle buried Venters to his knees; again he was hard put to it to dodge a rolling boulder, there were times when he could not see Wrangle for dust, and once he and the horse rode a sliding shelf of yellow, weathered cliff. It was a trail on ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... questions change. What were the mineral resources of the soil? It is not necessary to enlarge on these. The use of coal as a fuel is wholly recent. On the other hand, certain varieties of it were used as ornaments—the cannel coal, and the bituminous shale of Dorsetshire (Kimmeridge clay). So ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... her on the other side. We had our eyes on her as we ran, for we feared that she might catch, or capsize; and we were so intent upon our ship that we noticed nothing else. Now when we came to the end of the causeway, and turned to the right, along the shale and rubble tipped there from the quarry, we saw a man coming down the slope to the water, evidently bent on catching the Snail when she arrived. We could not see his face very clearly, for he wore a grey slouch-hat, and the brambles were so high just there that sometimes they hid him from ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... Divide and were in a great sunlit country of amazing beauty and grandeur, with wide valleys between the mountains. It was July. From up and down the valley, from the breaks between the peaks and from the little gullies cleft in shale and rock that crept up to the snow lines, came a soft and droning murmur. It was the music of running water. That music was always in the air, for the rivers, the creeks, and the tiny streams, gushing down from the snow that lay eternally ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... prompt and profound. It seemed to him but a few minutes after he had laid his head on the pillow when Jack Shale's voice again resounded ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... No watchman was in sight, in the mist of falling flakes, so the criminologist disappeared over the fence which separated the plot of ground from the sidewalk. Advancing with many a stumble through the blasted rock and shale, he obtained ingress to an alleyway in the rear. Following this brought him to the back of the Somerset. Shirley had an obstinate grandfather, and heredity was strong upon him. It seemed a foolhardy ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... loose, half a mile off the nearest town. Their entry into Harwich was thereby delayed until half-past nine at night. Full of consideration for the new mates now fast wedded to his heart by an accident. Matthew Shale proposed to Matthew Weyburn, instead of the bother of crossing the ferry with a portmanteau and a bag at that late hour, to sup at his house, try the neighbouring inn for a short sleep, and ship on board his yawl, the honest Susan, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and barren distant heights; behind them were brown hills. Far away in the blue southwest—Smith said it was more than eighty miles—there stood the mountains with their clean robes of snow, while scattered here and there about the vast plain through which they drove, were buttes of blue shale and red ledges, as symmetrical of side and smooth of top as if they had been raised by the architects of Tenochtitlan for sacrifice to ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... shape floundered out of the churned water, lumbered over the shale of the beach, its supple neck outstretched, its horned nose down for a gore-threatening charge. Ross had not realized that the salkars could operate out of what he thought was their natural element, but this wild-eyed dragon was plainly bent ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... feet touched bottom. I pulled myself out upon a weed-covered rock, and along it to a slate-strewn foreshore overhung by a low cliff of shale, grey and glimmering in the darkness. But even in the darkness a ridge of harder rock showed me a likely way. I remembered that the cliff hereabouts was of no great height and scalable in a score of places. Very cautiously, and sometimes sitting and straddling the ridge ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... hill, hurrying because she was later than she had intended to be, and it was cold for a person standing around in the snow. She crossed the deep gulch and climbed laboriously up the other side, over hidden shale rock and through clumps of bushes that snatched at her clothing like a witch's bony fingers. She had no more than reached the top when Jack stepped out from behind a pine tree as wide of girth as a hogshead. ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... the bushy screen, rode hastily along the ridge to the head of the little coulee and dismounted, leading Pard down a steep bank that was treacherous with loose shale. The coulee was more or less open, but it had convenient twists and windings; and if you think that Jean failed to go down it quietly and unseen, that merely proves ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... field for the natives. Yesterday, while prospecting on the southeastern side of the main ridge, I was surprised to find a part of a metal pot, evidently of cast iron. Quite a number of articles, of no particular value were lying near, but within the fragment of the pot, and protected by a shale of rock, was the enclosed scrap, which I thought might interest you, as you have a leaning in the direction of finding out hidden and abstruse things. Probably, you can decipher what it says. All the men are well, and are feeling jolly. We may be ready to return in a week. I hope ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... one of these visits he was captured. There were six or seven other buildings near the large stone building where we took our meals, so arranged that they made a short street, the upper row being built against a cliff of rock and shale, the other row being placed halfway between this row and the river. These buildings were all of rock, of which there was no lack, plastered with adobe, or mud. One, we were told, had been Lee's stronghold, it was a square building, with a few very small windows, and with loopholes ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... dazed, numbed, with the shallowness of it all—the shale of sham which did not even conceal the base sub-stratum of ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... enormous height can the difference in altitude between this point and its outlet be explained. The colors of the rock, which is shaly in character, are variegated with yellow, gray and brown, and the action of the water in its rapid passage down the sides of the canon has worn the fragments of shale into countless capricious forms. Jets of steam issue from the sides of the canon at frequent intervals, marking the presence of thermal springs and active volcanic forces. The evidence of a recession of the river through the canon is designated by the ridges apparent on its sides, and it ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... priest from out beyond the borders of Afghanistan, who sat on a slab of stone by the river-bank and preached a djehad. But above all it was the road—Linforth's road. It came winding down from the passes, over slopes of shale; it was built with wooden galleries along the precipitous sides of cliffs; it snaked treacherously further and further across the rich valley of Chiltistan towards the Hindu Kush, until the people of that valley could ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... of Bear Forks that start up on the side of the mountain, are choked, and the waters rushed in every direction, starting smaller slides by up-rooting trees and loose stones and shale. ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... left the train since entering the mountains, and she understood now why some one in the coach had spoken of the Miette Plain as Sunshine Pool. Where-ever she looked the mountains fronted her, with their splendid green slopes reaching up to their bald caps of gray shale and reddish rock or gleaming summits of snow. Into this "pool"—this pocket in the mountains—the sun descended in a wonderful flood. It stirred her blood like a tonic. She breathed more quickly; a soft glow coloured ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... winding higher and higher for a couple of miles. Pausing to rest for a moment, we could turn and see the entire valley outspread below us. Gradually the trail grew steeper, in spots pitched almost at a 50-degree angle, and was scattered with gravel, loose rock and shale, so that we placed our feet carefully, leaning forward to catch at handholds and steady ourselves against rocks. I tested each boulder carefully, since any weight placed against an unsteady rock might dislodge it on somebody below. One of the Darkovan brothers—Vardo, I thought—was ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... pick his way in the gathering dusk. I had just that desperate feeling of being lost, and with it went an acute sense of an imminent danger; the ground, no longer firm under my feet, had become a sliding shale sloping toward an unseen precipice. Perhaps, like the wayfarer, my fears were the sharper for the memory of the beauty of the morning on that same mountain, when, filled with vigour, I had gazed on it from the plain below and beheld the sun ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to me, and a great mass of shale broke away from his feet and rolled down the steep sides of the crag. But he managed to catch himself from slipping. Then we began breaking off fragments of shale and tried to see who could throw it the farthest out on the desert. We laid wagers, and one of the party said he would go down, after ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... was winter. We shouldn't have lasted six hours at this time of year. As it was, the sun was hot against the shale and the little stones of those cussed hills. We plodded along until late afternoon, toiling up one hill and down another, only to repeat immediately. Towards sundown we made the second bay, where we plunged ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... down the inclined plane, and been drowned. He never stirred a limb nor uttered a cry. His fate discouraged and alarmed us two survivors exceedingly. If help was coming, we now felt it would never come in time. We dug into the shale with the handles of our lamps and with our fingers, to make our position more secure. We did not venture to speak of our late companion's fate to one another. Horror overwhelmed us, so enfeebled had we become through famine and fatigue. ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... into a tangled and difficult region called Apremont, where the rocky ridges were broken into intractable ruins—the most savage portion of the forest. Strange cliffs of shale, eaten by weather and earthquake into the most picturesque columns and caves, confronted them. Here the signs became rare and the advance tedious, but the little column still breathlessly followed the woodsman. They were rewarded by finding a neighbourhood where the damp mosses ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... tell me he never heard of Fellsgarth? I am surprised. Where can you have been brought up that you have never heard of the venerable ivy-clad pile with its watch-tower and two wings, planted there, where the rivers Shale and Shargle mingle their waters, a mile or more above Hawkswater? My dear sir, Fellsgarth stood there before the days when Henry the Eighth, (of whom you may have possibly heard in the history books) abolished the monasteries and, some wicked people ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... or in the great corn belt having a naturally calcareous soil, is prosperous, or that a multitude of owners of such lime-deficient areas as the belt in a portion of southern New York and northern Pennsylvania, or the sandstone and shale regions of many states, have not overmatched natural conditions with fine skill. We treat only of averages when saying that a "lime country" shows a prosperity in its farm buildings and general appearance ...
— Right Use of Lime in Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... grape-vines, planted with the utmost precision and regularity. Every corner and cranny among the rocks was utilized. The original planting must have been difficult, for the soil was covered with slabs of shale. The cultivator should develop excellent lungs in scaling those hillsides. The leaves had fallen and the bare vines varied in hue from sepia brown to wine color, with occasional patches of evergreen to set off the whole. Once or twice the road left the river ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... a different country. It was flatter than that which they had already traversed and, if possible, more desolate, sun-bleached and parched. The ponies stumbled over loose shale, raising clouds of suffocating dust that tingled in the nostrils. Down they rode into its basin-like formation. All about the depression arose the craggy, stripped hills. Their jagged peaks seemed to shut out the rest of the world and compress the universe into this baked, burning ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... away to the north-east of the site of old Camp Almy a ridge of rock and shale stretches down from the foothills of the Black Mesa and shuts off all view of the rugged, and ofttimes jagged, landscape beyond—all save the peaks and precipitous cliffs of the Mogollon, and some of the pine-crested heights that hem the East Fork. Time was, toward the fag end of the Civil War, ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... helped him, making a ramp. Up it he went, a tiny trickle of dislodged shale dribbling away ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... and Fats, Hydrocarbon Oils, Uses of Oils.—II., Hydrocarbon Oils. Distillation, Simple Distillation, Destructive Distillation, Products of Distillation, Hydrocarbons, Paraffins, Olefins, Napthenes.—III., Scotch Shale Oils. Scotch Shales, Distillation of Scotch Oils, Shale Retorts, ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... hour later, and snowing fast, when they climbed out of the valley and floundered over shale and slippery rock amidst scattered pines to the forking of the trail. One arm of it dipped again, and wound through a deep sheltered hollow to the Somasco ranch, the other ran straight along the hillside to Townshead's dwelling. The hillside was also steep, the beasts were tired, and the trail ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... us, about a mile distant, rose one of the castle-like buttes, which I have mentioned, and to which, though with difficulty, we made our way. This butte was composed of alternate layers of chocolate-colored sandstone and shale about one thousand feet in height; its sides nearly perpendicular, but most curiously ornamented with columns and pilasters, porticos and colonnades, cornices and battlements, flanked here and there with tall outstanding towers, and crowned with spires so slender that it seemed as ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... frontispiece shows an interesting group, about ten miles from the foot of the canyon. These are situated only about forty feet above the bed of the creek, but still in a secure position. Here a bed of shale had been weathered out of the sandstone, leaving a sort of horizontal groove four feet high and from four to six feet deep. In this a row of minute houses had been built. They had been made to occupy ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... the Chalk period. Lastly, many great deposits, requiring a vast length of time for their accumulation, are entirely destitute of organic remains, without our being able to assign any reason: one of the most striking instances is that of the Flysch formation, which consists of shale and sandstone, several thousand, occasionally even six thousand feet in thickness, and extending for at least 300 miles from Vienna to Switzerland; and although this great mass has been most carefully searched, no fossils, except a few vegetable ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... plants of coal fields are found to be converted into coal, then the only difference between coal shale, and coal will consist in the very small proportion of vegetable matter ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... exclamation as she saw his arm rising, but she smothered her cry for her good sense told her that this experienced man would not endanger the lives of himself or his guests. The coal had been taken out very cleanly, and above them they saw not coal but shale. ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... rookery on the beach. Below it we entered an open cleft of some size to another squarer cave. It was now high tide; the water extended a scant ten fathoms to end on an interior shale beach. The cave was a perfectly straight passage following the line of the cleft. How far in it reached we could not determine, for it, too, was full of seals, and after we had driven them back a hundred feet or so their fiery eyes scared us out. We did not care to put them at bay. The next ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... somewhat advanced organisms, such as shell-fish and worms, are found in the higher and later rocks of the series, and more of the same comparatively high types will probably appear. In the earlier strata, representing an earlier stage of life, we find only thick seams of black shale, limestone, and ironstone, in which we seem to see the ashes of primitive organisms, cremated in the appalling fires of the volcanic age, or crushed out of recognition by the superimposed masses. Even if some wizardry of science ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... height, and stole, Nimrod with a carbine, I with the rifle, along a treacherous, shaly bank which ended, twenty feet below, in the steep rocky bluffs that formed the face of the cliff. Every step was an agony of uncertainty as to how far one would slide, and how much loose shale one would dislodge to rattle down over the cliff and startle the antelope we hoped were there. To move about on a squeaking floor without disturbing a light sleeper is child's play compared with our progress. A misstep would have sent us flying over the cliff, but I did not think of ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... Chaudefontaine, not far from the village of Magnee, where one of the rents communicating with the surface has been filled up to the brim with rounded and half-rounded stones, angular pieces of limestone and shale, besides sand and mud, together with bones, chiefly of the cave-bear. Connected with this main duct, which is from 1 to 2 feet in width, are several minor ones, each from 1 to 3 inches wide, also extending to the upper country or table-land, and choked up with similar materials. They are ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... back along the face of the precipice, stop where the rock offered foothold and begin slowly climbing almost vertically. At first, it was going up the tiers of a broken stone stair. Then, the weathered ledge gave place to slant shale. He saw Wayland dig his heels for grip, grasp a sharp edge overhead, and hoist himself to the overhanging branch of a recumbent pine; then, scramble along the fallen trunk to a ledge barely wide enough for footing. Along this, he cautiously worked, face in, hand over hand from rock block to rock ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... the guide along a narrow path covered with fragments of shale, with Table Rock above and the deep abyss below. A cold, damp wind blew against me, succeeded by a sharp pelting rain, and the path became more slippery and difficult. Still I was not near the sheet ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... follows: The road from the river after leaving Gasht brought us on to an alluvial fan, the ascent to which was short and steep; it was covered with boulders and intersected with nullahs; the road led across this fan and then along the foot of steep shale slopes and shoots, within five hundred yards of the line of sangars crowning the opposite side of the river bank, and totally devoid of any sort or description of cover for some two miles; it could also be swept by avalanches of stones set in motion by a few men ...
— With Kelly to Chitral • William George Laurence Beynon
... horse still struggled feebly, while the gurgle continued, and she was devoutly thankful when they continued their journey. The traveling was, if possible, more arduous than before. At times they forced a passage through climbing forest, and again over slopes of treacherous shale where a snow slide had plowed a great hollow in the breast of the hill. The puffs of snow which once more met them grew thicker until Millicent was sheeted white all over. At last the ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... of fossil shells and very hard; (4) sandstone, made under the sea from previous rock powdered, having huge concretionary masses with a shell or a pebble as a nucleus around which the concretion has taken place; (5) shale from the sea also; (6) conglomerate, or drift, deposited by ice in the famous glacial cold snap; (7) alluvium soil deposited in fresh water and composed partly of organic matter. In our second illustration some of these layers, or ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... turn he reined up and leaped from his horse. Below him he saw Challenge, riderless, and galloping along the edge of the hillside. On the trail lay Eleanor Loring, her black hair vivid against the gray of the shale. He plunged toward her and stooping caught her up in his arms. "Nell! Nell!" he cried, smoothing back her hair from her forehead. "God, ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... sprouting reeds, and carry them off to the station or timber-yard. The very stumps and roots will be dragged out for sale; the earthy banks, raw and torn, will fall in, muddying and clogging that pure mountain brook; and the hillside, turning into sliding shale, will dam it into puddles with the refuse from the quarries above. And thus, for less guineas than will buy a new motor or cover an hour of Monte Carlo, a corner of the world's loveliness and peace will be gone as utterly as those chairs and tables and vases ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... so easy, and it was so impossible that I could come to any harm this way, that I grew more confident, and passing my hand over the rough shale chips that were spread around amongst the short grass, I began to wonder how my uncles could have been so timid, and not have made a brave effort to escape from ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... saw the light. This time it burned suddenly clear and large and very bright, away off to the left of him where he had by daylight noticed a bare shale slide. The light seemed to stand in the very center of the slide, no more than ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... In shale and sandy soil, even in the gravel of hillsides, one finds the narrowly divided, finely cut leaves and the bicolored beardless blossom of the Bird's-foot Violet (V. pedata), pale bluish purple on the ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... winding route, with which he was evidently familiar, as he avoided the water and the bogs, and kept on firm ground. I made an attempt to come up with him; but in my haste trod upon a piece of loose shale, which, sliding beneath me, threw me upon the ground, and badly wounded my right foot, so that for the moment I ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... Shale (with Wine).— Boil 1 cup sugar with 3 cups water and the peel of 1 lemon for 10 minutes, when cold add 1 bottle white wine, the juice of 2 lemons and 1/4 pound rice which has been boiled in 2 waters till tender; place the kalte ...
— Desserts and Salads • Gesine Lemcke
... County, as far as has been explored, is confined to the creek and river bottoms. In connection with wells that have been opened, there is a superincumbent stratum of earth, varying from ten to sixty feet in thickness: underlying this is a stratum of argillaceous shale, generally about one hundred and eighty feet in thickness, and then a stratum of white sandstone. Sometimes this sandstone is intermingled with red, presenting a ruddy appearance as the sand is withdrawn from the well in the process ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... from clay or ground shale, are burned until the materials begin to fuse superficially, forming their own glaze. Other forms of brick and tile are not glazed at all, but are left porous. The red color of ordinary brick and earthenware is due to an oxide of iron formed ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... used by the Zunians in the manufacture of pottery is a dark, bluish, carbonaceous, clayey shale found in layers usually near the tops of the mesas. Several of these elevated mesas are situated near Zuni, from which the natives obtain this material. This carbonaceous clay is first mixed with water and then kneaded as a baker kneads dough until it reaches the proper consistency; with ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson
... window of leaded glass Mistress Yordas and her widowed sister sat for an hour, without many words, watching the zigzag of shale and rock which formed their chief communication with the peopled world. They did not care to improve their access, or increase their traffic; not through cold morosity, or even proud indifference, but because they had been so brought up, and so confirmed by ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... iron, and on its way deposits on the beds of the streamlets conveying it, and on the stones, red or brown oxide of iron. All water of this kind ought to be avoided in dyeing and similar operations. The iron in water from old coal pits and shale deposits is usually present as sulphate due to the oxidation of pyrites, a sulphuret or sulphide of iron. Water from heaths and moorlands is often acid from certain vegetable acids termed "peaty acids." This acidity places the water in the ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... stamped in impatience. Into the light there came another figure, strong, ruddy, and with a calico skirt tucked up. One was refinement, the other strength; one nerves, the other muscle. Onward he strode, the road damp from its nearness to the creek. Out upon the higher land he turned, the shale clicking under his feet. He had the feeling that some one was walking slowly behind him, stealing the noise of his footsteps to conceal a stealthier tread, and he smiled at his fear, but he halted to ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... paper on the coal mines of the mountains of Cevennes (Choix de Memoires d'Hist. Nat., 1792) he made the first careful study of the coal formation in the Cevennes, including its beds of coal, sandstone, and shale. A. de Jussieu had previously supposed that the immense deposits of coal were due to sudden cataclysms or to one of the great revolutions of the earth during which the seas of the East or West Indies, having been driven as far as into Europe, had deposited on its soil all these exotic plants ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... like that in vogue a generation ago in this country, using leaves, etc., as forms. The rocks at Wolgan Gap are a coarse sandstone stained almost black by an iron oxide derived from included bands of ironstone. These black surfaces were selected by the artists. Nearby in the rock is a band of shale which had disintegrated at its exposed edge to a white powder. The native artist put some of this white powder in his mouth, placed his hand or foot upon the rock, and blew the moistened powder upon and around his outstretched fingers or toes. When he removed them they ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... The States Railway Company are the great owners of mines in this district. They confine their attention to iron and coal. There are extensive paraffine-works in Oravicza; the crude oil is distilled from the black shale of the Steirdorf coal, yielding five per cent of petroleum. At Moldova, where we were recently, the same company have large sulphuric acid works, employing as material the iron pyrites of the old mines. Moldova ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... coldness to his story of a wonderful oil seepage and had turned a deaf ear on natural gas. He had baited a hook with a stratum of gypsum which would furnish the world with cement. Capital had barely sniffed at the bait. Nor had banks of shale adapted to the making of a perfect brick appealed to its jaded palate. But Symes was never at a loss for something to promote, for there was always a nebula of schemes vaguely present in his prolific brain. Irrigation was the opportunity of ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... dynamite in town now that would be just the thing to blast out your trench. Of course, it will scatter the dirt around some, for dynamite is usually used to make an open ditch rather than one that is to be re-filled, but it will be less work to gather up the dirt than to dig through the hard shale, and that reminds me," he continued, "when you come to put in your concrete fence posts, don't break your back digging holes if you strike hard shale; just put in a stick of dynamite and loosen her up—you'll find it will save ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... outside," said Ned, and he stepped back, passed out of the window-opening, and returned with a piece of shale as big ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... say, was passed upon Adam, in case he ate of the apple, was not, that thou shalt surely be crucified, but, thou shale surely die. The sentence was death, and not the manner of dying. Crucifixion, therefore, or any other particular manner of dying, made no part of the sentence that Adam was to suffer, and consequently, even upon their own tactic, it could make ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... empty ones are running back to be loaded where the miners are at work. Taking lamps in our hands and keeping out of the way of the trucks, we will first throw the light on the roof, which is made of shale or hardened clay. We shall not have gone many yards before we see impressions of plants in the shale, like those in this specimen (Fig. 47), which was taken out of a coal-mine at Neath in Glamorganshire, a few days ago, and sent up ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley |
