"Silt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and unbroken. But on walking seaward I was continually surprised by drainage channels. These channels serpentined everywhere, and were deep and wide. Sometimes they contained nothing but silt, and sometimes they were salt-water rivers. I came upon each canyon unexpectedly. The first warning was a sudden eruption from it, a flock of dunlin, a flock which then passed seawards in a regimented flight that was an alternate flash of light and a swift shadow. Dunlin, ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... must be clean, free from organic matter and sand, must contain no appreciable amount of mica, feldspar, alkali, shale or similar deleterious substances and not exceed two and one-half per cent of clay and silt. The sand is of such a range of sizes that all will pass the one-fourth-inch sieve and that not exceeding about five per cent will pass ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... A few stars glinted above them, winking through the drifting silt that blew across ...
— The Gun • Philip K. Dick
... Banerjea's tales has been won from the sea by alluvial action. Its soil, enriched by yearly deposits of silt, yields abundantly without the aid of manure. A hothouse climate and regular rainfall made Bengal the predestined breeding-ground of mankind; the seat of an ancient and complex civilisation. But subsistence is too easily secured in those fertile ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... junction of these rivers with the Wash, and still more to seaward, was South Holland Sluice, through which the waters of the South Holland Drain entered the estuary. At that point a great mass of silt had accumulated, which tended to choke up the mouths of the rivers further inland, rendering their navigation difficult and precarious, and seriously interrupting the drainage of the whole lowland district traversed by both the Old and New Nene. Indeed ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... mounted day by day we crossed dozens of swift little streams cold and gray with silt. Our rate of speed was very low. One of our horses became very weak and ill, evidently poisoned, and we were forced to stop often to rest him. All the horses were ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... extending a hundred and seventy miles north of the shore that takes their wash to-day. Slowly, through the centuries of that age of all beginnings, the river, cutting canyons and valleys in the north and carrying southward its load of silt, built from the east across the gulf to Lone Mountain a mighty ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... contradictory but the flood refers to the valley of the Nene and the lowlands which are apt to be flooded when the river overflows its banks. The mud and dirt consequently settle on the grass and make it unfit for hay, but the rainfall does good, causes the grass to grow and it is not injured by the silt. ...
— Weather and Folk Lore of Peterborough and District • Charles Dack
... small winch attached to one pair of the legs lifted and lowered the pile, through a block and tackle. When the pile was ready to be sunk, a 2 in iron pipe was let down the centre, and coupled to a force-pump by means of a hose; a jet of water was then forced down this pipe, driving the sand and silt away from below the pile. The pile was then rotated backwards and forwards about a quarter of a turn, by men pulling on the arms; the pile, of course, sank by its own weight, the water-jet driving the sand up through the hollow centre ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... reservoirs. By restraining the streams in flood and replenishing them in drought they make possible the use of waters otherwise wasted. They prevent the soil from washing, and so protect the storage reservoirs from filling up with silt. Forest conservation is therefore an ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt
... water channels and reservoirs become clotted with silt and mud, a side effect of deforestation and ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... ground should be plowed deep and thoroughly pulverized. Plant the nuts 6 to 12 inches apart in rows about 3 feet apart. Put a handful of the sand from the boxes around each walnut. Our soil will appreciate the sand or silt from the drifts along the valley streams, as it has proven to be one of the best fertilizers known. If anyone doubts this let him try a quantity of it on his ...
— Walnut Growing in Oregon • Various
... throwing his splendidly antlered head back, sniffing the air and pawing the ground. Boyton raised his revolver and fired. The great head swayed from side to side and the noble animal dropped to his knees. Thinking the shot was fatal, Paul seized the hunting knife and sprang forward to silt its throat, having first flung a lot of brush on the smoldering fire. As the flames shot up, the elk rose to his feet and commenced to retreat slowly across the bar. Fully expecting to see him fall at every step, ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... of disconnected information—silt bands, crevasses were mentioned. Finally he put the ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... advocates do not mean splashing and lifting the feet above the surface, sending the water hither and yon on to the banks, into the pools, with the soil of silt or mud or fine gravel from the bottom, polluting the stream many yards ahead, and causing every fish to scurry to the shelter of a hole in the bank or under a shelving rock. They intend that the rodster ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... suffer, without being greatly affected, a far greater amount of wearing and knocking about when being transported by the agency of currents and rivers, than will a softer substance, such as clay. An equal amount of this wearing action upon clay will reduce it to a fine impalpable silt. The grains of sand, however, will still remain of an appreciable average size, and where both sand and clay are being transported to the sea in one and the same stream, the clay will be transported to long distances, whilst the sand, being heavier, bulk for bulk, and also consisting ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... stream, now a muddy tributary from agricultural lands, now the clear waters from a limestone plateau, while all the time its racing current bears a burden of soil torn from its own banks. Now it rests in a lake, where it lays down its weight of silt, then goes on, perhaps across an arid stretch where its water is sucked up by the thirsty air or diverted to irrigate fields of grain. So with those rivers of men which we call migrations. The ethnic stream may start ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... parallel to the basal plane. Its lustre is sometimes resinous, sometimes vitreous, and it crystallises in the 2nd (hexagonal) system. It occurs in somewhat long, hexagonal prisms, with smooth, truncated planes, and is often found in granite and the silt brought down by rivers from granite, gneiss, and similar rocks. It is found in Great Britain and in many parts of Europe, Asia, and America, in crystals of all sizes, from small to the weight of several tons. The common kinds are too opaque and colourless ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... been before there was a wider and deeper creek, its sides cumbered with huge boulders and tree-trunks; and the mixture of silt and gravel which formed its cut banks already had set like cement. It was cement, the same natural concrete which Nature combines everywhere on the desert—gravel and lime and bone-dry clay, sluiced and ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... fluttered along the hillside under the stately surveillance of the mother bird. Wild cats prowled boldly on the southern slopes. Cotton-tails huddled beneath the greasewood brush and nibbled at the grasses. The canon stream ran clear again now that the storm-washed silt had settled. On the peaks the high winds were cold and cutting, but on the slopes and in the valleys the ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... driven into the leathery, pulpy body of the monster, but with no other effect than the sudden snapping of the inch line like thread. It was subsequent to this that, as the diver stayed his steps in the unsteady current, his staff was seized below. The water was murky with the river-silt above the salt brine, and he could see nothing, but after an effort the staff was rescued or released. Curious to know what it was, he probed again, and the stick was wrenched from his hand. With a thrill he recognized in such power the monster of the sea, the devil-fish. He returned anxious, doubtful, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... of the Cecil silt loam consists of 12 inches of a light gray or white silt loam. This material is underlain by a subsoil of yellow silt loam slightly heavier than the soil. The type is locally termed "white land," and is closely related to the Penn loam and the Iredell clay loam, these types surrounding and grading ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... dams founded on the drift and silt of ages, through which water habitually percolates, to be increased by the pressure of the 85-foot lock when made, have been referred to by many of our technical advisers as another element of danger. The vast masses of earth piled on this alluvial base to the height of 135 feet will certainly ...
— The American Type of Isthmian Canal - Speech by Hon. John Fairfield Dryden in the Senate of the - United States, June 14, 1906 • John Fairfield Dryden
... of nuts. It is a plant of no interest to the common observer, but of much to the geologist, from the nuts of a similar plant abounding in the tertiary formations at the mouth of the Thames, and having floated about there in as great profusion as here, till buried deep in the silt and mud that now forms the island of Sheppey.* [Bowerbank "On the Fossil Fruits and Seeds of the Isle of Sheppey," and Lyell's "Elements of Geology," 3rd ed. ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... opportunities for fishing and trading; for this river, which in the North divides the two states of Vermont and New Hampshire, flows through Massachusetts and Connecticut, where it pours rich deposits of silt into ...
— Three Young Pioneers - A Story of the Early Settlement of Our Country • John Theodore Mueller
... to make an exact chronological statement throwing light on the length of the various prehistoric periods, the most notable have been those by M. Morlot, on the accumulated strata of the Lake of Geneva; by Gillieron, on the silt of Lake Neufchatel; by Horner, in the delta deposits of Egypt; and by Riddle, in the delta of the Mississippi. But while these have failed to give anything like an exact result, all these investigations together point to the central truth, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... flint-producing animals, we have also the great group of fresh-water and marine microscopic plants known as Diatoms, which likewise secrete a siliceous skeleton, often of great beauty. The skeletons of Diatoms are found abundantly at the present day in lake-deposits, guano, the silt of estuaries, and in the mud which covers many parts of the sea-bottom; they have been detected in strata of great age; and in spite of their microscopic dimensions, they have not uncommonly accumulated to form deposits of great thickness, and of considerable superficial ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... Luzon is made up of four distinct types. First is the coastal plain — a consistently narrow strip of land, generally not over 3 or 4 miles wide. The soil is sandy silt with a considerable admixture of vegetable matter. In some places it is loose, and shifts readily before the winds; here and there are stretches of alluvial clay loam. The sandy areas are often covered with coconut ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... source great torrents of water came rolling through the cave. We know this to be so, because in places it broke up this layer of stalagmite and washed it away, as well as large portions of the breccia below, and after the floods had ceased, occasionally inundations still threw down layers of mud and silt. This accumulation is known as cave earth, and is the layer containing the numerous remains of the Cave-men. Here the explorers were not only struck with the large number of implements, but at once noticed that they were of a higher form and better made. Instead ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... drear. Clouds hung heavily in the sky and the moorland was wrapt in a fine mist so peculiar to that district. The roads were heavy, and one could hear the silt crush beneath her ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... channels between the islands; tides and rivers were opening new passages and closing old ones; and, more than all, those mightiest tools of the great Engineer, the glaciers, were furrowing valleys, dumping millions of tons of silt into the sea, forming islands, promontories and isthmuses, and by their recession letting the sea into deep and long fiords, forming great bays, inlets and passages, many of which did not exist in Vancouver's time. In certain localities the living glacier stream was breaking off bergs so fast ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... half a mile wide, and something like a mile and a half long, extending southward into Jersey City. The surface is a network of matted vegetation and roots perhaps five feet deep, and under that lies a mass of blue clay or river silt 100 feet or more in depth. The original tidal flow over these marsh lands has been obstructed by viaducts for railroads and streets, leaving only two natural outlets, a sluice way at Fifteenth street on the north, and ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... surface from freezing, yet the ice accumulates in large bodies in the shallow water near the shores, and is driven by the wind into the mouths of the rivers. A barrier being thus formed to the force of the lake-waves, the sudden check of velocity causes them to deposit a portion of the silt they hold in suspension upon the upper surface of this stratum of ice. By repeated accumulations in this way, the weight becomes sufficient to sink the whole mass to the bottom. There it rests, together with other strata, which are sunk in the same way, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... that some of you look at me as though I had used a strange word. Silt is the deposit of mud, sand, or earth of any kind carried up and down streams by the tide or other current. But the river engineers here are constantly removing it; the course is kept open, and the Hoogly pilots are very skilful. The river has also a bore, ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... in number) are in private grounds belonging to Mrs Law. They have probably been created by the action of water, and when discovered were filled with the bones of wild animals (many of them now extinct) embedded in silt, which had been washed into them. In one of them there is now stacked a quantity of these bones, whilst a selection of them is deposited in Taunton Museum. The caves are shown by some of the outdoor servants of the house. Unlike the caves at Cheddar and Burrington, ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... matter, and by it has so silted up the Lake of Constance as to abolish it for a large fraction of its length. The Rhone is charged with it, and tens of thousands of acres of cultivable land are formed by the silt above the Lake ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... therefore of importance. A party of convicts were employed in building a breakwater, connecting a cliffy island at the entrance with the south point of the river, for the purpose of deepening the mouth, but I much question whether it will answer, as the silt that is washed down by the stream not finding its former exit may by meeting the ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... site. Three current meters were tried for some time with a special lift, contrived to grip the meter firmly parallel to the current axis, so as to register only forward velocity, and with a nearly rigid gearing wire. No useful general results were obtained. Ninety specimens of silt were collected, but no connection could be traced between silt and velocity; it seemed that the silt at any point varied greatly from instant to instant, and that the quantity depended not on the mean velocity, but probably on ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... increased by the fact that the flood-water of the Mesopotamian rivers contains five times as much sediment as the Nile. In fact, one of the most pressing of the problems the Sumerian and early Babylonian engineers had to solve was the keeping of the canals free from silt.(1) What the floods, if left unchecked, may do in Mesopotamia, is well illustrated by the decay of the ancient canal-system, which has been the immediate cause of the country's present state of sordid desolation. That the decay was gradual was not the fault of ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... ditches on higher elevations is being successfully used on small areas in the foothills. For gardens the most promising arrangement seems to be a laying of drain tiles rather near the surface, which shall be taken up each year, cleaned of silt and plant roots, and relaid along the rows before planting; but this calls for too much labor, except perhaps for amateur gardeners. The kind of soil best suited to such a system is a medium loam which will ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... has been utilized in reclaiming land; much has been carried out to sea and heaped into a break-water three miles long, which runs out from the Panama or southern end of the Canal, and will check a coast-ways current that might, if uncontrolled, silt up the approach. The Canal is a triumph, not of man's hands, but of machinery. Regiments of steam shovels attack the banks, exhibiting a grotesque appearance of animal intelligence in their behavior. An iron grabber is lowered by a crane, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... of considerable practical importance, especially in the eastern third of the United States. Generally speaking, clay and silt soils have a greater natural fertility than sandy soils; limestone soils than those that are deficient in lime. Thus soils that naturally grow chestnut trees, indicating a low lime content, have a tendency to ...
— The Young Farmer: Some Things He Should Know • Thomas Forsyth Hunt
... of the interior," he continued, "is formed by a vast alluvial deposit carried down as silt by the Mississippi. East of this the range of the Alleghanies, nowhere more than eight thousand feet in height, forms a secondary or subordinate axis from which the ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... the channel, the river had cut into some of these mounds, exposing brick vaults, some so low as to be under water part of the time, and we wonder if the fact does not also record a slow subsidence of the delta plain under the ever increasing load of river silt. ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... stream of men, fragments of the shattered right, caught her in its rush, and she was borne back to the open fields lying along the pike. There, as when a turbulent river empties into a bay, the force of the current subsided, and she was dropped like silt. The cowardly ones, hatless and weaponless, ran off toward the pike, but the greater portion halted, formed in line, called for their comrades to join them, ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... or a gradual process, this "putting off the old man?" It is both. It is a resolve taken once for all, but carried out in detail day by day. The first hour that the sap begins to withdraw, and the leaf-stalk begins to silt up, the leaf's fate is sealed: there is never a moment's reversal of the decision. Each day that follows is a steady carrying out of the plant's purpose: "this old leaf shall die, and the new leaf shall live." So with ...
— Parables of the Cross • I. Lilias Trotter
... river has shifted even in my little life." Indian rivers are nearly always moving about in their beds, and will shift, sometimes, as much as two or three miles in a season, drowning the fields on one bank, and spreading good silt ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... anchored off the sandbar. This was a notorious whiskey boat, and just below it was a flight of steps up the steep bank. No plantation darky ever used those steps. He would rather scramble in the loose silt and risk his neck than climb ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... flushing gallery, piercing the lower part of the dam, was closed by iron doors on the down stream face and blocked with timber at the upper end. When required to be flushed out, laborers passed through the gallery and broke down the timber barrier, the silt forming a wall sufficiently thick to resist the pressure of the water for the time being, and allow of the retreat of the Forlorn Hope—if the latter had ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... with their thin pine-forest of masts, there lie the forlorn flat lands of Holderness. Field after field, they stretch, lands level as water, only raised above the river by a fringe of turf and a belt of silt and sand. Earth and water are of one form and of one colour, for, beyond the brown belt, the widening river lies like a brown furrowed field, with a clayey gleam on the crests of its furrows. When the grey days come, ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... magnificent in guilt, Splendid in scorn, rapt in a cloudy dream, He paused at last upon the Stygian silt, And raised calm eyes above the angry stream.... Hand in his breast, he stood till Charon came, While Hades hummed with ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... STREAMS. This consists of the silt which the stream carries in suspension, and the sand and gravel and larger stones which it pushes along its bed. Especially in times of flood one may note the muddy water, its silt being kept from settling by the rolling, eddying ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton |
