"Whorl" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Asterophyllites, having whorl-like leaves, and allied to the Naiades, with araucaria-like Coniferae',* which exhibit faint traces ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... was, their hands plied labour unceasing. 310 Each in her left upheld with soft fleece clothed a distaff, Then did the right that drew forth thread with upturn of fingers Gently fashion the yarn which deftly twisted by thumb-ball Speeded the spindle poised by thread-whorl perfect of polish; Thus as the work was wrought, the lengths were trimmed wi' the fore-teeth, 315 While to their thin, dry lips stuck wool-flecks severed by biting, Which at the first outstood from yarn-hanks evenly fine-drawn. Still at their feet in front soft fleece-flecks ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... robins, appear. Walking in the deep, moist woods suddenly one sees a mass of big leaves and white flowers. The same irresistably lovely trilliums have come again. Three big leaves, then a flower stalk shooting up from the centre of this whorl of leaves, and on top the crowning glory—the three-petaled trillium flower. A fragrant white or pink form is called the nodding wake robin. These in a glance tell their wishes. The plant sometimes is nearly two feet ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... curious terraces fashioned by them for the growing of their grain, and discover querns, or hand millstones, and stones for bruising the corn. The bones of young oxen a few days old, discovered in the mounds, show that they knew the use of milk, and how to get a good supply. A rude spindle-whorl shows that they knew how to weave stuffs for their clothing, and the numerous buttons, fasteners, and belts prove that the clothes were fitted to the wearer, ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... the evergreens, although they renew their leaves, too, are never left without verdure of some sort. Late in October you may see the yellow or brown foliage of the pines, then ready to fall, surrounding the branches of the previous year's growth, forming a whorl of brown fringe surmounted by a tuft of green leaves of the present year's growth. Their leaves always turn yellow before ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... among a tangle of Roman wormwood and garlic; and though they exhibited great tenacity of life, they also exhibited great irregularity of purpose. In one spot there would be nothing, in an adjacent spot a whorl of beets, big and little, crowding and jostling and elbowing each other, like school-boys round the red-hot stove on a winter's morning. I knew they had been planted in a right line, and I don't, even now, comprehend why they should not come up in a right ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... anthomania, anthophagous, anthophilous, anthotaxy, bouquet, bract, corona, corymb, cyme, chloranthy, efflorescence, Flora, perianth, pistil, pistillate, staminate, pollen, prefloration raceme, reflorescence, pollinate, pollination, stamen, stigma, umbel, verticil, verticillate, whorl, spadix, spathe, floriated, floriation. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... wisp of hair?— Nay, but its wildest, its most frolic whorl Stands for a slim, enamoured, sweet-fleshed girl! And so, a tangle of dream and charm and fun, Its every crook a promise and a snare, Its every dowle, or genially gadding Or crisply curled, Heartening and madding, Empales a novel and peculiar world Of right, essential fantasies, And shining acts ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... it in graduated whorls of width and spread: yet all concentric and so timed that all complete the full circle punctually together—'The Spindle turns on the knees of Necessity; and on the rim of each whorl sits perched a Siren who goes round with it, hymning a single note; the eight notes ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... a tendency towards a trochi-form contour. The ground colour appears as a white band on the body whorl marking its most prominent portion just below the centre. The sinuation of the outer lip and impression of the whorl behind the peristome, give a slightly ringent aspect to the mouth. It is very distinct from any known species; its affinities are more with Australian ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her Dead to the Kentish Knock; And she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her keel: The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock; And canvas and compass, the whorl and the wheel Idle for ever to waft her or wind ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... father over on the bed. He fought to a sitting posture again ... got his finger in my eye and made me see a whorl of dancing sparks. With irritation and a curse ... then both laughing hysterically and sobbing ... I bore ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... a lovely shell, Small and pure as a pearl, Lying close to my foot, Frail, but a work divine, Made so fairily well With delicate spire and whorl, How exquisitely minute, ...
— Beauties of Tennyson • Alfred Tennyson
... light which binds together the whole universe. The ends of the column were fastened to heaven, and from them hung the distaff of Necessity, on which all the heavenly bodies turned—the hook and spindle were of adamant, and the whorl of a mixed substance. The whorl was in form like a number of boxes fitting into one another with their edges turned upwards, making together a single whorl which was pierced by the spindle. The outermost had the rim broadest, and the inner whorls were smaller and smaller, and had their ...
— The Republic • Plato
... century, Romanesque in style, decorated with seven pieces of rock-crystal arranged diagonally, and with a knop of the same, set at a later date. The crook is set with precious stones, rubies, turquoises, aquamarine, and lapis lazuli. Within is the Lamb holding a cross; under it the whorl finishes with a dragon. A much older bishop's staff is of worm-eaten wood—set in metal at a later date to preserve it from destruction—said to have been given to S. Hermagoras by S. Peter or S. Mark. There is also a great crucifix ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... myself that I could ever be happy away from home, and again I compared my lot with that of one of the speckled soldier-crabs that roamed about in my Father's aquarium, dragging after them great whorl-shells. They, if by chance they were turned out of their whelk-habitations, trailed about a pale soft body in search of another house, visibly broken-hearted and the ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... Enemy and Wife of my Enemy and Mother of my Enemy,' said the Cat, 'take a strand of the wire that you are spinning and tie it to your spinning-whorl and drag it along the floor, and I will show you a magic that shall make your Baby laugh as loudly as ...
— Just So Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... coincide. This fact has been well shown by Dutrochet, {14} who found different individuals of Solanum dulcamara twining in opposite directions, and these had their leaves in each case spirally arranged in the same direction. A dense whorl of many leaves would apparently be incommodious for a twining plant, and some authors assert that none have their leaves thus arranged; but a twining Siphomeris has whorls of ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... corolla, which means a garland, or a kind of crown; and the word is a very good one, because it indicates that the flower-cup is made, as our clay cups are, on a potter's wheel; that it is essentially a revolute form—a whirl or (botanically) 'whorl' of leaves; in reality successive round the base of the ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... the print of a man's hand or foot or ear is enough to distinguish him from all other men, it is impossible to believe that the mask of his mind, the very imprint, form and pressure of his soul should be less distinctive. Just as Monsieur Bertillon's whorl-pictures of a thumb afford overwhelming proofs of a man's identity, so it is possible from Shakespeare's writings to establish beyond doubt the main features of his character and the chief incidents of his life. The time for random assertion about Shakespeare and unlimited eulogy of him has passed ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... usually classed under three modes: the alternate, the opposite, and the whorled; but the opposite is the simplest form of the whorled arrangement, the leaves being in circles of two. In this arrangement, the leaves of each whorl stand over the spaces of the whorl just below. The pupils have observed and noted this in Horsechestnut and Lilac. In these there are four vertical rows or ranks of leaves. In whorls of three leaves there would be six ranks, in whorls of four, ...
— Outlines of Lessons in Botany, Part I; From Seed to Leaf • Jane H. Newell
... yards along the ledge and, rounding a corner, faced the end of one of the slender bridges. From this vantage point the oddly shaped vehicles were plain, and we could see they were, indeed, like the shell of the Nautilus and elfinly beautiful. Their drivers sat high upon the forward whorl. Their bodies were piled high with cushions, upon which lay women half-swathed in gay silken webs. From the pavilioned gardens smaller channels of glistening green ran into the broad way, much as automobile runways do on earth; ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... conscious choice. This nasty little wrecker, scavenger, and squatter has learned the value of a spotted house; so it be of the right colour he will choose the smallest shard, tuck himself in a mere corner of a broken whorl, and go about the world half naked; but I never found him in this imperfect armour unless it was marked with the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... will sometimes produce a second and even a third whorl or crown of flowers, and the flat-stalked ones which are monsters, have been known to produce seventy-two blossoms, but none of these are ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 6 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... passing allusion to my acquaintance with a character who created quite a sensation at the time. This "character" was no other than "Old Three Laps"—an individual who at his baptism was known as William Sharp. This singularly eccentric specimen of humanity lived at Whorl's Farm, and, as it will be generally known took to his bed through being "blighted" in love. He kept to his bed for about forty years. During the period he was "bed-fast," I often used to go and peep through the window at this freak of nature—for I can scarcely call it anything ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... this moment is of this sort. It is a stem that sometimes attains a height of four or five feet. I think it lengthens as long as it is blossoming, and, to look at its preparations, that must be all summer. Every two or three inches of the stout stem is a whorl of leaves and buds and blossoms. Except the number of buds, it is all in fours. Opposite each other, making a cross, are four leaves, like a carnation leaf at first, but broadening and lengthening till it is two inches at the base and eight or ten long. Rising ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... accipitrinus, still inhabits the coasts of Florida. Its extinct prototype, S. Leidy, was discovered a few years ago by Prof. Heilprin in the Pliocene formations of the interior of Florida. The peculiar shape of the wing, and tuberculation of the whorl, are thus proved to have grown but of a previously more ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... The whorl of a sea shell,[8] ground and polished into white heavy rings, whose cross section is an isosceles triangle, form a very common forearm adornment for women on the upper Agsan. Sometimes as many as five ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... you," said Edith. And so they watched and listened. A tightly twisted bud loosened half a petal—then another half—and another—until it was all a shimmering whorl of petals, each caught at one side to the honeyed crosspiece of the pistil; then: "There!" said Maurice. "Did you hear it?"—all the silken disks were loose, and the flower cup, silver-gilt, spilled its ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... scarious, more or less fimbriate, bud-scale. Buds from which normal growth develops appear only at the nodes of the branches. On uninodal branchlets they form an apical group consisting of a terminal bud with a whorl of subterminal buds about its base. On multinodal branchlets the inner nodes bear lateral buds which may ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... motion could not but produce a certain sound or note, depending upon their distances and velocities; and as these were regulated by harmonic laws, they necessarily formed as a whole a complete musical scale." "In the whorl of the distaff of necessity there are eight concentric whorls. These whorls represent respectively the sun and moon, the five planets, and the fixed stars. On each whorl sits a siren singing. Their eight tones make one exquisite harmony." Milton added a ninth whorl,—"that swift ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... psychology Bain and others use it of association of ideas and action; in pathology an adhesion is an abnormal union of surfaces; and in botany "adhesion'' is used of dissimilar parts, e.g. in floral whorls, in opposition to "cohesion,'' which applies to similar parts, e.g. of the same whorl. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and the birds are brought near; but still the object attracting them cannot be seen. It may be down among the artemisias, or perhaps behind a large yucca, whose dark whorl rises several feet above the sage, and over ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... continental architect, but to any English clerk who travelled, as all did who could, across the Alps to Rome. The fir-tree, not growing on level ground, like the oaks of Fontainebleau, into one flat roof of foliage, but clinging to the hillside and the crag, old above young, spire above spire, whorl above whorl—for the young shoots of each whorl of boughs point upward in the spring; and now and then a whole bough breaking away, as it were, into free space, turns upward altogether, and forms a secondary spire on the same tree—this surely ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... is literally 'rampant'; and the course of a great breaker, whether in its first proud likeness to a rearing horse, or in the humble and subdued gaining of the outmost verge of its foam on the sand, or the intermediate spiral whorl which gathers into a lustrous precision, like that of a polished shell, the grasping force of a giant, you have the most vivid sight and embodiment of literally rampant energy; which the Greeks expressed in their symbolic Poseidon, Scylla, and ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... woman, rightly viewed, that union has in it latent, other, and even higher forms, of creative energy and life-dispensing power, and that its history on earth has only begun. As the first wild rose when it hung from its stem with its centre of stamens and pistils and its single whorl of pale petals, had only begun its course, and was destined, as the ages passed, to develop stamen upon stamen and petal upon petal, till it assumed a hundred ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... Tokosusi, which is said to rise at Nombe Rume, about twenty yards wide and knee deep, swollen by the rains: it had left a cake of black tenacious mud on its banks. Here I got a pallah antelope, and a very strange flower called "katende," which was a whorl of seventy-two flowers sprung from a flat, round root; but it cannot be described. Our guide would have crossed the Tokosusi, which was running north-west to join the Loangwa, and then gone to that river; but always when we have any difficulty the "lazies" exhibit themselves. We had no grain; and ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone |
