"Fertility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Rollin exhibited its most useful and honest side. From a due sense of decency, I refrain from mentioning the names of Freron and Des Fontaines. But nowhere yet had criticism acquired anything like vividness, fertility, and penetration; it had not yet found its soul. Diderot was the first to find it. Naturally inclined to look over defects, and to admire good qualities, "I am more affected," he remarked, "by the charms of virtue than the deformity of vice; I quietly turn away from the ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... These water-works, of the most ingenious construction, many of them invented and contrived by scientific engineers, were the weapons with which man had conquered the desert that originally surrounded this lake, forcing it into green fertility and productiveness of grain and fruit. Nay, the desert had, for many centuries, here ceased to exist. Dionysus the generous, and the kindly garden-gods had blest the toil of men, and yet, now, in many a plot—in all which belonged to Christian owners—their ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... The ready wit and fertility of resource, shown by Paymaster Bullen on the speedy journey he had just accomplished, gave Donald such a different impression of the man, from that conceived at their first meeting, that he was now quite willing to accept him as a ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... fertility and growth of the plants was astounding. They seemed to be shooting up out of a natural hothouse, but where to attempt to pass them meant ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... that fertility can be possible in a seething world-furnace, is too far beyond our philosophy to be conceivable. Alpha Centaurus is so large a sun that although it has a population ten times greater than our globe, yet its surface is ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... country the land is of prodigious fertility. More than a fourth of it will grow corn. Wheat yields a return of fifteen for one on the best land, thirteen on middling, and nine on the worst. Fields thrown out of cultivation become admirable natural pastures. The hemp is of very ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... anything else." Val accepted one, and in default of a match Lawrence made him light it from his own. He was entirely at his ease, though the situation struck him as bizarre, but he did not believe that Val was at ease, no, not for all his natural manner and fertility in commonplace. Lawrence was faintly sorry for the poor devil, but only faintly: after all, an awkward interview once in ten years was a low price to pay for that night which Lawrence never had forgotten and never would ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... but what is not known is the genius, the fertility of resources, and the ingenuity of expedients, which Goudar displayed in obtaining such a success. M. Folgat, however, was fully aware of it; for he had been the counsel of the stockholders of the Mutual Discount Society; and he had vowed, that, if ever the opportunity should ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... small, the workers nearly all white, and the yield per acre better than on the fertile Black Belt lands; third, the regions in which the races were nearly equal in numbers or where the whites were in a slight majority, with soil of medium fertility, good methods of agriculture, and, owing to better controlled labor, the best yield. In ether words, Negroes, fertile soil, and poor crops went together; and on the other hand the whites got better crops ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... INCUBATION Fertility of Eggs The Wisdom of the Egyptians Principles of Incubation Moisture and Evaporation Ventilation—Carbon Dioxide Turning Eggs Cooling Eggs Searching for the "Open Sesame" of Incubation The Box Type of Incubator in Actual Use The ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... in a hand-to-hand struggle for bare existence his sole care was to obtain food, and that during this stage of his existence his religious observances took almost exclusively the form of magical inducements to the earth to renew that fertility which, by the periodicity of the seasons, was at times temporarily suspended. It was only at a later period, when the struggle for existence had become less arduous, that the belief in the efficacy of magical rites decayed, and that in matters of ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... were men who loved an orderly adherence to traditional methods. They shivered in the emotional gale; they obstructed and the gale became destructive. They felt that, along with obviously good things, this sudden national fertility might breed a monster—that a leadership like Roosevelt's might indeed prove dangerous, as giving birth may lead ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... pictures and statues could move their eyes and other parts. They found various ways of expressing approbation of the pious, and frowning upon scoffers. Crucifixes and Madonnas, carried by freshets over barren fields, brought fertility. The devil, too, figured more largely in the narratives of days before printed books formed the basis of education. He generally appeared in the persons of giants and witches, which latter were his agents by special contract. Their freaks had ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... pastures with their 14,000 buffaloes, oxen, and cows, and as many sheep and goats; and the large dairies, where butter and cheese were made on the most approved system, and marvelled afresh at the industry of the Milanese farmers and the wealth and fertility of this wonderful land. The next day the king went on to Pavia, where triumphal arches had been prepared for his reception, and the clergy and professors of the university hailed his presence in long harangues and complimentary speeches. At first lodgings had been ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... court, the rocks frequently rising from the water's edge in perpendicular masses. None of the lakes of this remarkable region possess a greater variety of scenery than that of Geneva, which changes from the smiling aspect of fertility and cultivation, at its lower extremity, to the sublimity of a savage and sublime nature at its upper. Vevey, the haven for which the Winkelried was bound, lies at the distance of three leagues from the ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... remarkable for its fertility, and its luxuriant growth of plants of all sorts, from the productions of the torrid zone to those of the temperate in the hilly regions of the north. It is abundantly watered by the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Jumna, ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... surely he was armed for better conflicts than these succinct sketches and flying leaves of verse? I look on, I admire, I rejoice for myself; but in a kind of ambition we all have for our tongue and literature I am wounded. If I had this man's fertility and courage, it seems to me I could ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... farther in the interior are pretty high mountains (generally exhibiting great appearance of minerals) between which flow a great number of small rivers. In some places there are even some lofty ones of extraordinary height, but not many. Its fertility falls behind no province in Europe in excellence of fruits and seeds. There are three principal rivers, to wit: the Fresh, the Mauritius and the South River,(1) all three reasonably wide and deep, ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... circumstances which would give them a palpable advantage in the contest of the sea. No nation will have it more in its power to repay what it borrows than this. Our debts are hitherto small. The vast and valuable tracts of unlocated lands, the variety and fertility of climates and soils, the advantages of every kind, which we possess for commerce, insure to this country a rapid advancement in population and prosperity, and a certainty (its independence being established) ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... Mic-co, "and a prophetic one. Symbolic of the spirit of progress which hangs now above the Glades, is it not? The world is destined to reap much one day from the exuberant fertility of this ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... creators of ideal societies there is one, almost contemporary, who would deserve a study of individual psychology—Ch. Fourier. If it is a question merely of fertility in pure construction, I doubt whether we could find one superior to him—he is equal to the highest, with the special characteristic of being at the same time exuberant to delirium and exact in details to the least minutiae. He is such a fine type of the imaginative intellect that he deserves ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... spectacle of early grief and unmerited calamity which had clouded the youthful prospects of her mistress; she was delighted with the honor of the confidence reposed in her: and she immediately set her little head to work, which (to do her justice) was a very woman's head for its fertility in plots and wiles, to consider of the best means for accomplishing the deliverance of the prisoner. Political offences are naturally no offences at all in the eyes of women: and independently of the deeper ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... the Apo, although no longer in eruption, exhibits abundant traces of volcanic action in acres of lava and blackened scoriae. Between the numberless forest-clad ranges are luxuriant plains glowing in all the splendour of tropical vegetation. The valleys, generally of rich fertility, are about ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... Atlantic States. Above the Highlands, the west side of the river becomes a fertile, though narrower and more broken agricultural tract; and at the head of navigation, the Hudson opens into another valley of exhaustless fertility,—that of the Mohawk,—coming eastward from the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... senses; the country being a large plain, and hills in it so easy of ascent, and of such a moderate height, that they seem rather an artificial ornament to it, than one of the accidents of nature. The abundance of rivers and brooks is no little help to the almost incredible fertility of the soil. ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveller Burton says of it—"Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded. . . . In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence." They who have ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... the gap in the cliffs, and then for the first time saw the real Matterplay. A valley appeared, like a jewel enveloped by naked rock. All the hill country was bare and lifeless, but this valley lying in the heart of it was extremely fertile; he had never seen such fertility. It wound up among the hills, and all that he was looking at was its broad lower end. The floor of the valley was about half a mile wide; the stream that ran down its middle was nearly a hundred feet across, but was exceedingly shallow—in most places ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... cultivation, than from the confusion of hill and valley which marks the face of the soil, and the precipitous eminences, with their sides covered by forests, and their summits barren of all vegetation, or terminating perhaps in a naked rock, that often rise close beside the most sheltered spots of fertility and verdure. ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... memory of St. Foutin and the old, dethroned Priapus became commingled, and finally the former was unconsciously made to take the place of the latter. St. Foutin was immensely popular. He was believed to have a wonderful influence in restoring fertility to barren women and vigor and virility to impotent men. It is related that, in the church at Varages, in Provence, to such a degree of reputation had the shrine of this saint risen, it was customary for the afflicted to make ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... his fate, when it seemed that nothing could save Moses from a conflict with the mass of his followers, who had renounced him, Moses showed that audacity and fertility of resource, which had hitherto enabled him, and was destined until his death to enable him, to maintain his position, at least as a prophet, ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... "Singapore cane," so highly prized by makers of rattan and wicker furniture, comes from its west coast. It is a well-watered island, and its level plains, which receive the wash from its heavily forested mountains, have a soil of unsurpassed fertility in which cocoanuts come to bearing in five years or even less. Incidentally, the greater part of the island lies south of the typhoon belt. Malampaya Sound, situated near its northwestern extremity, is one of ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... they have a harder task before them, for in the interval the Arabs have arrived in the country. It is they, with their roving and pastoral habits, who have done the mischief, changing arable land into pasture, which grows ever poorer, and finally desert. The fertility of these regions may be said to have been annihilated by the goats of a nomad race, whose faith has made it improvident ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... were certain moments—once when we saw that it had not been painted for twenty years, once when the freight bill was handed us, and again when we contracted for the removal of our gift from the station to the river-bank—when we regretted the fertility of imagination that had led us to these lengths; but when we finally saw the car by the water-side, there was no room left for regret. Benella said that, with the assistance of the Button Boy, she could paint it easily herself; but we engaged an expert, who put on a coat of dark green ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of "Henry VI.," but, for dramatic reasons, perhaps, he is painted very much blacker than he deserved. That he was a militant ecclesiastic, scheming and unscrupulous, is no doubt true; but he was a statesman and possessed firmness of purpose, fertility of resource, and confidence in those whom he selected to carry out his designs. His wealth was very great, for he was able to lend his nephew the king L20,000, besides spending an enormous amount in charities, including L400,000 devoted to the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... dank bottom of a valley, the herbage was rank and rich, and the sheep fed and got heavy, but braxy at the close of autumn fell upon them like a pestilence, and more than neutralized to the farmer every advantage of the superior fertility of the soil. It was not uninteresting, even for one not a sheep-farmer, to learn that the life of the sheep is worth fewer years' purchase in one little track of country than in another adjacent one; ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... influences, Robert Dinsmore, the author of the poem I have quoted, was born, about the middle of the last century. His paternal ancestor, John, younger son of a Laird of Achenmead, who left the banks of the Tweed for the green fertility of Northern Ireland, had emigrated to New England some forty years before, and, after a rough experience of Indian captivity in the wild woods of Maine, had settled down among his old neighbors in Londonderry. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the three seas which form the boundaries of southern England, you shall find yourself on a small knoll, covered with antique elm, walnut, and sycamore trees, which rises out of a vale famous in all time for the natural fertility of its soil, and the moral virtues of its people. On this knoll, fitly called by our ancestors "the Heart of South Britain," stood, distant about half a mile from each other, two monasteries, known by the flowery appellatives of Lilies and Roses; not unaptly setting forth a promise ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various
... Thule of the ancients), they showed Ulysses bits of wood that the equatorial current had brought thither from the Antilles. On the coasts of Norway, as he watched the herring during the spawning season, he marveled at the formidable fertility of the sea. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... for the fertility and peculiar productiveness of her soil, both of a vegetable and mineral character, though the former is very largely dependent upon irrigation, and almost everywhere suffers for want of intelligent treatment. ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... The villages are generally in the deep-cut notches of the hills, where the interior can be conveniently reached by a wagon-road—a country "rumpled like this," they say, for ten or twelve miles back, and then stretching off into level plains of fertility. Now and then, a deserted cabin on the terraces,—windowless and gaunt,—tells the story of some "cracker" family that malaria had killed off, or that has "pulled up stakes" and gone to ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... pass through the mountains of the Jebel Aweibid range, and find the Haj road, which, glory to Allah, will be free of pilgrims until next moon. That road we will follow as far as the fertility of Airud, passing that spot afar off, as even in this month caravans will congregate there; then crossing the canal a space higher than Suez, where crowds embark and disembark, we will pick up the Haj road on the far side, making use ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... depravity and corruption, I had some of those principles implanted in my mind which were afterwards to spring up with such amazing fertility among the heroes of the faith and the promises. In particular, I felt great indignation against all the wicked of this world, and often wished for the means of ridding it of such a noxious burden. I liked John Barnet, my reverend father's ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... they have a natural affinity to the fruitful grain, which they speak of as becoming pregnant. Women sometimes sleep out in the PADI fields while the crop is growing, probably for the purpose of increasing their own fertility or that of the PADI; but they are very ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... commend the substance of Disco's opinions to the reader, for there is urgent need for action. There is death where life should be; ashes instead of beauty; desolation in place of fertility, and, even while we write, terrible activity in the horrible ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... the cross was regarded by the ancient Egyptians as the emblem of fruitfulness. Thus the Rev. Mr. Maurice describes a statue bearing a kind, of cross in its hand as the symbol of fertility, or, in other words, of the procreative and generative powers.[24] The cross [Symbol: Tau] so common upon Egyptian monuments was known to the Buddhists and to the Lama of Thibet 700 years before Christ. The Lama takes his name from the ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... ancient Egypt; Assyria; Rome; Mexico; Peru; Syria and Greece. Domestication is only possible when the species has certain natural faculties, viz.—great hardiness; fondness for man; desire of comfort; usefulness to man; fertility; being easy to tend. Habitual selection of the tamest to breed from. ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... considerable distance of the Austrian front line, but this, we were told, did not matter. We were here, we were informed, "for a special purpose" and for action against distant targets only. There was an orchard on the flat just behind our guns, a little oasis of fertility in that barren land, and wooden crosses marking the graves of some of the Italian Trench Mortar ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... "artificial wants" to be encouraged? Not the love of luxuries, like the tobacco and slaves of, I believe, his native Virginia, nor the ice and granite and other material wealth of our native New England; nor are "the great resources of a country" that fertility or barrenness of soil which produces these. The chief want, in every State that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants. This alone draws out "the great resources" of Nature, and at, last taxes her beyond her resources; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... elements, some of them apparently the most heterogeneous, became amalgamated, and were combined into the early forms of art;—how the Madonna, when she assumed the characteristics of the great Diana of Ephesus, at once the type of Fertility, and the Goddess of Chastity, became, as the impersonation of motherhood, all beauty, bounty and graciousness; and at the same time, by virtue of her perpetual virginity, the patroness of single and ascetic ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... objection is obvious; but our ignorance of the conditions of fertility and sterility, the want of carefully conducted experiments extending over long series of years, and the strange anomalies presented by the results of the cross-fertilization of many plants, should all, as Mr. Darwin has urged, be taken into account ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... the opinion of a Jesuit Father, the author of an anonymous work in, manuscript on that country, written in the year 1762 at Alamo, it was thought also to be the most important among the many Provinces of Mexico, whether for fertility of soil, gold washings, or silver mines; and not less distinguishable for the docility and loyalty of those aboriginal inhabitants who had early given their adhesion to the government to ...
— Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language - Shea's Library Of American Linguistics. Volume III. • Buckingham Smith
... dealt with, which I confess is seldom the case. I shall name only one, and it is the deanery of Derry; the revenue whereof, if the dean could get his dues, exceeding that of some bishoprics, both by the compass and fertility of the soil, the number as well as industry of the inhabitants, the conveniency of exporting their corn to Dublin and foreign parts; and, lastly, by the accidental discovery of marl in many places of the several parishes. Yet all this ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... day of the bonfire does not always fall on the 16th of March. It is not considered lucky to begin harvest till the Holi has been burnt. Mr. Crooke holds that 'on the whole, there seems to be some reason to believe that the intention to promote the fertility of men, animals, and crops, supplies the basis of the rites' ('The Holi, a Vernal Festival of the Hindus', Folklore, vol. xxv (1914), p. 83). ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... signal for action, he began to prepare arms against the king; his being one of the first troops in the field, and engaged in almost every action of importance in the western counties. His superiority to the men about him lay in the 'marvellous fertility, energy, and comprehensiveness of his military genius.' Prince Rupert alone, in the Royalist camp, could rival him as a 'partisan soldier.' His first distinguished exploit was his defence of Prior's Hill fort, at the siege of Bristol—which contrasts so remarkably with ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... offices for municipal work, and we know in our land how such a 'job' would be carried out by 'the architect to the Board.' But all over Flemish France and Belgium proper we find an inexhaustible fancy and fertility in such designs. It is always difficult to describe architectural beauties. This had its tower in the centre, flanked by two short wings. Everything was original—the disposition of the windows, the air of space and largeness. Yet the whole ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... was the whirlwind of the war! Here was the place for no holiday magistrate, no fair-weather sailor; the new pilot was hurled to the helm in a tornado. In four years,—four years of battle-days,— his endurance, his fertility of resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never found wanting. There, by his courage, his justice, his even temper, his fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in the center of a heroic epoch. He is the true history of the American people in his time. Step by step he ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... if Houdon's felicitous harmony of style and individual force are forgotten, there is hardly any recognized succession to the imaginative freedom, the verve, the triumphant personal fertility of Rude and Carpeaux. At least, such as there is has not preserved the dignity and in many instances scarcely the decorum of those splendid artists. Much of the sculpture which figures at the yearly Salons is, to be sure, the ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... land; not merely to the needy, but to all alike. The loan was to be compulsory, and interest was to be paid on it at the rate of 2% per month. The soil was to be divided into equal areas and taxed according to its fertility in each case, without reference to the number of inhabitants contained in each area. All these, and other important reforms, failed to find favour with a rigidly conservative people, and Wang An-shih lived long enough to see the whole of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... and trusting in God to prosper me, I mean to have a home and farm that I can call mine. And while clearing a farm, and bringing field after field to culture and beauty, will I not be clearing my life, and bringing mind and heart to culture, fertility, light and bloom? ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... position comparable with that held by Durga, Cybele or Astarte, though there are some remarkable hymns[684] addressed to the Earth. But there is no doubt that the worship of goddesses (especially goddesses of fertility) as great powers is both ancient and widespread. We find it among the Egyptians and Semites, in Asia Minor, in Greece, Italy, and among the Kelts. The goddess Anahit, who was worshipped with immoral rites in Bactria, is figured on the ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... honor. On every side he is shackled and bound, dependent on the laws of Fricka and on the lies of Loki, forced to traffic with dwarfs for handicraft and with giants for strength, and to pay them both in false coin. After all, a god is a pitiful thing. But the fertility of the First Mother is not yet exhausted. The life that came from her has ever climbed up to a higher and higher organization. From toad and serpent to dwarf, from bear and elephant to giant, from dwarf and giant to a ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... supplies at fat profits. The leader from Virginia, untutored in such things, was astounded at the greedy scramble. Before the year 1775 ended Washington wrote to his friend Lee that he prayed God he might never again have to witness such lack of public spirit, such jobbing and self-seeking, such "fertility in all the low arts," as now he found at Cambridge. He declared that if he could have foreseen all this nothing would have induced him to take the command. Later, the young La Fayette, who had left behind him in France wealth and luxury in order to ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... insular position, especially in early times, is isolation. An extreme case of isolation is presented by Egypt, which is in fact a great island in the desert. The extraordinary fertility of the valley of the Nile produced an early development, which was afterwards arrested by its isolation, the isolation being probably intensified by the jealous exclusiveness of a powerful priesthood which discouraged maritime pursuits. The isolation of England, though comparatively slight, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... is responsible for the illustration of so many important collections of fairy tales that it is vexing not to be able to reproduce a selection of his drawings, to show the fertility of his invention and his consistent improvement in technique. The series, "Fairy Tales of the British Empire," collected and edited by Mr. Jacobs, already include five volumes—English, More English, Celtic, More Celtic, and ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... and extensive island which has by travellers and historians been often denominated the "paradise of the New World," seems from its situation, extent, climate, and fertility peculiarly suited to become an object of interest and attention to the many distinguished and enlightened philanthropists whom God has been graciously pleased to inspire with a zeal for the promotion of the best interests of the descendants ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... low in fertility and much deficient in humus, it may be necessary to apply fertilizers in some form before clovers will grow vigorously. Such are sandy soils that have been much worn by cropping, and also stiff clays ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... territory, and possessed equal authority with the other three in all matters concerning the whole republic, the affairs of which were settled by a council consisting of the four chiefs and the inferior nobles. They were an agricultural people, and the fertility of their new country was signified by its name—'Tlascala' meaning the land of bread. Presently their neighbours began to be envious of their prosperity, and they were frequently obliged to defend themselves against the Cholulans, and were always ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... accumulated deposits of the ages have produced a soil seventy or eighty feet deep. Owing to its peculiarities, this meadow land retains its fertility in a marvelous way, producing heavy crops of hay annually without diminution and without renewal for ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... succulent weed known as "fat-hen," and so were kept alive. The Colonists knowing now what the soil could produce obtained small quantities of grain and even with their defective means of cultivation, in the next year demonstrated the fertility of ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... any circumstances was limited to some three or four of the most ordinary vegetable productions of Greece and to one sea-shell. This wise reserve and self-restraint, among the boundless riches of a delicious climate and a soil teeming with fertility, present to us the best proof of the fastidious purity of artistic intentions. Nature poured out at the feet of the Greek artist a most plenteous offering, and the lap of Flora overflowed for him with tempting garlands of Beauty; but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... the black earth, at the earth mute and promising, at the mysterious earth doing its work of life in death-like stillness under the veiled sorrow of the sky. And it seemed to him that to a man worse than childless there was no promise in the fertility of fields, that from him the earth escaped, defied him, frowned at him like the clouds, sombre and hurried above his head. Having to face alone his own fields, he felt the inferiority of man who passes away before the clod that remains. Must he give up the hope of having by his side a son ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... small one—so small that the break-van of his own "Flyin' Dutchman" could have contained it easily—but it was not too small to present a luxuriance, fertility, and brilliance of colour that was absolutely magnificent! Surrounded as that garden was by "ballast" from the embankment, broken wheels and rail, bricks and stones, and other miscellaneous refuse and debris of the line, it could only be compared to an oasis in the desert, or ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... was made Governor of the Shantung province, and the court was compelled to flee to Hsian. It was while the court was thus in hiding that an incident occurred which indicates the fertility of the Empress Dowager and the elasticity of all Chinese social customs. Governor Yuan's mother died. In a case of this kind customs dictate, and the rules of filial affection demand, that a man shall resign all his ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... drains; the soil naturally is uncommonly fertile: and whatever springs from it, whether planted by the hand of man, and nourished, while growing, by his attention and skill, or its spontaneous production, bears witness to this uncommon fertility. The country abounds in corn and vineyards; the produce of the latter consists principally in white vines. At the season of the year when I passed through it, the intermixture of the rich and soft yellow of the wheat nearly ripe, with the light green foliage of the vines, produced a most pleasing ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... stockade at Jamestown, only the most persistent bent toward letters had chance of surviving. Joyful as the landing had been, the Colony had no sturdy backbone of practical workers. Their first summer was unutterably forlorn, the beauty and fertility that had seemed to promise to the sea-sad eyes a life of instant ease, bringing with it only a "horrible trail of homesickness, discord, starvation, pestilence and Indian hostility." No common purpose united them, as in the Northern Colony. Save for the ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... finished world, but in one which is going on, and where our main task is prospective, and where retrospect—and all knowledge as distinct from thought is retrospect—is of value in the solidity, security, and fertility it affords our ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... standing, thirty years ago, upon the cupola of a court-house in New Jersey, and, while enjoying the whole panorama, being particularly impressed with the superior fertility and luxuriance of one farm on the outskirts of the town. We recollect further, that, on inquiry, we found this farm to belong to a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, who also exercised the trade of a potter, and underdrained ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... Avon. Cadbury Rings opposite, Cadchurch to the extreme left: you can't see it. You were there last night. It is famous for the drunken parson and the railway-station. Then Cad Dauntsey. Then Cadford, that side of the stream, connected with Cadover, this. Observe the fertility of the Wiltshire mind." ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... enchanting variety of its scenery, joined to the inexhaustible productiveness of its soil, constitutes a challenge to the charms of every other region, except, perhaps, the country watered by the great river of China. Through an immense, continuous level of unfailing fertility, the Meinam rolls slowly, reposefully, grandly, in its course receiving draughts from many a lesser stream, filling many a useful canal in its turn, and, from the abundance the generous rains bestow, distributing supplies of refreshment and fatness ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... positions, the different sets of stamens occupy the other two. In a long series of experiments on flowers occurring in two and three forms - dimorphic and trimorphic - Darwin proved that perfect fertility can be obtained only when the stigma in each form is pollenized with grains carried from the stamens of a corresponding height. For example, a bee on entering the flower must get his abdomen dusted with pollen from the long stamens, his chest covered ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... spring or rippling rivulet, served these mighty trains for a resting-place, where man and beast halted to recover from the fatigues of their weary journeys. Occasionally, on these spots where the soil was of sufficient fertility to sustain a population, villages grew up. In rarer instances and in earlier ages, large cities had been built upon these stopping-places and were for the time the centres of the traffic.... Travellers of the present day occasionally visit their sites, and tell wonderful ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... upon the streams, and upon them alone, that the soil has to depend for its fertility; all those lands to which they never reach are doomed to barrenness and death. It is fortunate for the prosperity of the country through which they flow, that the Tigris and Euphrates swell and rise annually from their beds, not indeed ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... was prevented by their approach to the village, which was built at the foot of a precipitous kopje, the spot having been chosen originally for its fertility consequent upon the fact that a copious spring of fresh water rose high up among the rocks to form the little stream and gully at whose mouth the young officers had met with their ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... whole island presents a luxuriant appearance, being covered with cocoa-palms and other trees, and on the high ground several large fenced enclosures of cultivated ground—where among other plants we could distinguish the banana and sugar-cane—attested the fertility of the soil. The western, and at present the leeward side of the island, as viewed from our anchorage exhibits the appearance of a broken ridge on its southern half with several eminences topped by immense detached blocks of rock, partially concealed by the trees—to this, in the centre, succeeds ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... daughter Kore, though here again Demeter appears with a clinging epithet, Thesmophoros. We know pretty clearly the whole course of the ritual: there is the carrying by women of certain magic charms, fir-cones and snakes and unnameable objects made of paste, to ensure fertility; there is a sacrifice of pigs, who were thrown into a deep cleft of the earth, and their remains afterwards collected and scattered as a charm over the fields. There is more magic ritual, more carrying of sacred objects, a fast followed by a ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... cultivation new and virgin acres, which have in their bountiful yield kept up the general average. One authority says that, taking the country by regions and by districts and considering what has actually happened, he is led to the conclusion that the fertility of the soil for 50 per cent of our country has been lessened. [Footnote: ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... seen two or three miles to westward. In time he came to a sloping hillside and looking beyond he saw a splendid stream of swiftly flowing water. At the foot of the hill was a narrow tract of about four acres almost bare of trees, though deep grass spoke of the soil's fertility. Rising above the river was a large knoll sloping down ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... had not seen the desert or felt the sun heavily on his shoulders would hardly admire the fertility of the riparian scrub. Unnourishing reeds and grasses grow rank and coarse from the water's edge. The dark, rotten soil between the tussocks is cracked and granulated by the drying up of the annual flood. The character of the vegetation is inhospitable. Thorn-bushes, bristling like hedgehogs ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... Occasionally an adventurous French or Spanish trader would cross the towering mountains and penetrate the vales beyond. They vied with the Indians in their account of the salubrity of the climate, the brilliance of the skies, the grandeur of the forests, the magnificence of the rivers, the marvelous fertility of the soil and the abundance ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... century is described by Cassiodorus—a picture glowing with admiration and tenderness. It lay, he says, upon the side of a hill; nay, it hung there "like a cluster of grapes," in such glorious light and warmth that, to his mind, it deserved to be called the native region of the sun. The fertility of the Country around was unexampled; nowhere did earth yield to mortals a more luxurious life. Quoting this description, Lenormant holds that, with due regard to time's changes, it exactly fits ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... fear'd and esteem'd by their Neighbours. Their Blood was pure, without being mix'd with that of the Owls, Magpies, Eagles, Vulturs, Jays, Partridges, Herns, Hawks, or any other Species; the Scum of which Nation, by the Fertility of the Country, and the want of Foresight in the Cacklogallinians, has been allured to, and permitted to settle in Cacklogallinia, and by their Intermarriages has caused the great Degeneracy those Families, which have kept their Blood ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... overpassed, and its decorative quality quite lost sight of in the attempt to rival a form of art the requirements of which were quite different. The beautiful arabesques, which the designers of the early Renaissance poured forth with exhaustless fertility, show the capabilities of the process for decorating flat surfaces, and the perspectives of cupboards and buildings were often most successful without passing the limits imposed by ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... the young braves. The Greek mysteries best known to us are the Thesmophoria and the Eleusinia. In the former the rites (as will appear later) partook of the nature of savage "medicine" or magic, and were mainly intended to secure fertility in husbandry and in the family. In the Eleusinia the purpose was the purification of the initiated, secured by ablutions and by standing on the "ram's-skin of Zeus," and after purifications the mystae engaged in sacred dances, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... and thrown into jail, where I passed a most uncomfortable night, being unable to sleep because of the profanity of my fellow-prisoners, two clergymen, whose theological training had given them a fertility of impious ideas and a command of blasphemous language altogether unparalleled. But along toward morning the jailer, who, sleeping in an adjoining room, had been equally disturbed, entered the cell ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... mining, while the girls are called upon to participate in farm work to the extent of caring for chickens and pigs, and sometimes for milk. In such an agricultural community the same outline for study might apply, except that in training for occupations boys should be taught the facts regarding soil fertility, fruit culture, dairying, market gardening, and other agricultural problems, while girls need instruction which will fit them for domestic life and ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... Olaf himself was evidently a highly devout and pious man;—whosoever is born with Olaf's temper now will still find, as Olaf did, new and infinite field for it! Christianity in Norway had the like fertility as in other countries; or even rose to a higher, and what Dahlmann thinks, exuberant pitch, in the course of the two centuries which followed that of Olaf. Him all testimony represents to us as a most ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... the apparent limits of Man's life are not the real limits; that the one earth-life of which each of us is conscious, far from being the whole of one's life, is but a tiny fragment of it,—one term of its ascending "series," one day in its cycle of years. In other words, the spiritual fertility of the average Utopian child, taken in conjunction with the spiritual sterility of the average non-Utopian child (and man), points to the conclusion which the thinkers of the Far East reached thousands of years ago,—that for the full development of human nature a plurality of lives is ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... crowd was like most southwestern crowds of the period, and no sooner did the judge appear than there were clamorous demands for a speech. He cast a glance of triumph at Mahaffy, and nimbly mounted a convenient stump. He extolled the climate of middle Tennessee, the unsurpassed fertility of the soil; he touched on the future that awaited Pleasantville; he apostrophized the jail; this simple structure of logs in the shadow of the primeval woods was significant of their love of justice and order; ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... laughingly, and varied as to the mood or fertility of fancy. But on so grave a subject as shirt buttons, Mrs. Jones had no heart for a joke. The fact that her vigilance had proved all in vain, and that, spite of constant care, a shirt had found its way into my drawer, lacking its full complement of buttons, was something ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... curious to notice how a critic, possessing no little cultivation and fertility, will, in speaking of a work of art, let fall almost accidentally some apparently trivial comment, which reveals to us with an instantaneous and complete mental illumination the fact that he does not, so ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... the scarab as a charm or amulet, to increase bravery;[8] the women, to increase fertility. The Greeks called it, Helio-cantharus, and, not understanding its significance, were disposed to ridicule it, as is apparent from the travesty upon it by Aristophanes in his comedy of Peace. Pliny also again speaks of it in his Natural ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... pressure from civilization in the Nile valley and rising culture around Lake Chad was at this time reenforced by expansion of the Yoruba-Benin culture on the west coast. Perhaps, too, developing culture around the Great Lakes in the east beckoned or the riotous fertility of the Congo valleys became known. At any rate the movement commenced, now by slow stages, now in wild forays. There may have been a preliminary movement from east to west to the Gulf of Guinea. The main movement, however, was eastward, skirting the Congo forests ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois |
