"Sterile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... people given over to the meditative, if sympathetic, silence. It was an artificial city sprung from the sterile seeds of legislature, and thriving on the arid food of Bills. It was a mere habitation of governments. It was a freak city created coldly by an act of Solomonic wisdom. Before 1858 it was a drowsy French portage village, sitting inertly at the fork of the Ottawa and Rideau rivers, concerning ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... did sing of One, The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind;[279] Again I seize the theme, then but begun, And bear it with me, as the rushing wind Bears the cloud onwards: in that Tale I find The furrows of long thought, and dried-up tears, Which, ebbing, leave a sterile track behind, O'er which all heavily the journeying years Plod the last sands of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... the oldest son of a poor New Hampshire farmer, who found great difficulty is wresting from his few sterile acres a living for his family. Nearly a year before, he had lost his only cow by a prevalent disease, and being without money, was compelled to buy another of Squire Green, a rich but mean neighbor, on a six months' note, on very unfavorable ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... have of late, (but wherefore I know not), lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... the wretched Svend hid was probably the last representative of great forests that grew where now is sterile moor. In the bogs trunks of oak and fir are found lying as they fell centuries ago. The local names preserve the tradition, with here and there patches of scrub oak that hug the ground close, to escape the blast ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... results from these singular unions, especially when they are very incongruous, as the individuals which result from them are usually sterile; but also, when the disparities are less great, it is known that the drawbacks (defauts) with which it has to do no longer exist. However, this means alone suffices to gradually create the varieties which have afterwards ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... of most of the great forms of Protestantism, and got his personal testimony as to the emptiness of them all. Brownson was a competent witness, for he had been an accepted disciple of every school, from sterile Presbyterianism to rank Transcendentalism. Although of a certain testiness of temper, he bore malice to no man and to no body of men. His testimony was in the presence of patent facts, and his condemnation ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... the feelings are dwarfed, as the thought may be in certain sterile imaginations. Thus, just as some minds have the faculty of comprehending the connections existing between different things without formal deduction; and as they have the faculty of seizing upon each formula separately, without combining them, or without the power of insight, comparison and expression; ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... no thought of disdain, but it will, sooner or later, evolve into full comprehension. The thought that can travel scornfully over the heads of that great silent throng without recognising its myriad brothers and sisters that are slumbering there in its midst, is only too often merely a sterile, vicious dream. We do well to remind ourselves at times that the spiritual, no less than the physical, atmosphere demands more nitrogen than oxygen for the air to ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... majority of the small mounds in the lower counties of southeastern Missouri are composed either of the hard, reddish, sandy clay which forms the subsoil of the land above overflow; or of the tough, waxy, black "gumbo" of the swampy or flat lowlands. In either case they are almost invariably sterile, so that in a cultivated field the position of a mound is easily determined even from a considerable distance by the feebler growth on its surface. Moreover, in many places, hundreds of them occurring within an area of a few square miles are built on clay ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... the general belief that hybrids are sterile, or, at least, that they are incapable of propagation inter se. This may be true with respect to the hybrids of species not very closely allied; but that there are exceptions to the rule is quite clear from ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... from want of water, as little or no rain fell there, and the few streams, in their short and hurried course from the mountains, exerted only a very limited influence on the wide extent of territory. The soil, it is true, was, for the most part, sandy and sterile; but many places were capable of being reclaimed, and, indeed, needed only to be properly irrigated to be susceptible of extraordinary production. To these spots water was conveyed by means of canals and subterraneous aqueducts, executed on a ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... traversed over many consecutive pages with increasing interest and with enraptured pleasure. I have read of old deeds worthy of an honored remembrance, where I least expected to find them. I have met with instances of faith as strong as death bringing forth fruit in abundance in those sterile times, and glorying God with its lasting incense. I have met with instances of piety exalted to the heavens—glowing like burning lava, and warming the cold dull cloisters of the monks. I have read of many a student who spent the long night in exploring mysteries of the Bible truths; and have ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... consistent with himself, he would as legislator vote against all restriction; or else as farmer, he would practice in his fields the same principle which he proclaims in the public councils. We should then see him sowing his grain in his most sterile fields, because he would thus succeed in laboring much, to obtain little. We should see him forbidding the use of the plough, because he could, by scratching up the soil with his nails, fully gratify his double wish of "dear bread and ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... "Hearth-fires" (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up. His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and feel how little it contained; but Winsett's, after all, contained still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiosities made ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... separation into a privileged and a subject-class prevents social endosmosis. The evils thereby affecting the superior class are less material and less perceptible, but equally real. Their culture tends to be sterile, to be turned back to feed on itself; their art becomes a showy display and artificial; their wealth luxurious; their knowledge overspecialized; their manners fastidious rather ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... the lagoon, "and if adopted, they go from one home to the other as they will. Parents are not as willing as before to let go their children; for whereas my grandmother had fifteen, I have none, and few of us have many. We are made sterile by your civilization. Tetuanui and I were happy and able to persuade the mothers of twenty-five to give their infants to us because we were childless and were chiefs and well-to-do. Our race is passing so fast through the miseries the white has brought us that little ones are as ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... countries, with all their possessions, fail to enjoy peace and happiness. On the contrary, they are so acutely unhappy that many of them have come to regard acquisition and accumulation as a sterile rat-race. Consequently multitudes of people, young and old, have turned their backs on civilization, separating themselves from their affluent homes with their glut of consumer goods to live at non-civilized or pre-civilized levels. These individuals ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... settlements will follow; towns and villages will be established, gold-fields probably discovered, and waves of population will overflow and will fertilize vast tracts of country which we have hitherto concluded to be a sterile desert. These events will owe their initiation to the adventurous pioneers who first crossed the continent from sea to sea. Theirs was the arduous effort; theirs the courage, endurance, and sustaining hope; theirs the conflict with danger and the great triumph over difficulties; theirs the ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... corner some abrupt, an' sa'nters across to whar they're at. Leanin' over Sarah Ann's off-shoulder, bein' the one furthest from that onmitigated Jenks, I says, "Sweetheart, how can you waste time talkin' to this yere hooman Sahara, whose intellects is that sterile they wouldn't ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... slightest infection of the wound. I attribute this freedom from sepsis to careful cleansing of the conjunctival sac and to other pre-operative precautions, but especially to the use, before and after the operation, of White's ointment—a preparation of 1-3000 mercuric chloride in sterile vaseline. One cannot use sublimate in such a strong watery solution, but the vaseline seems to modify it and to allow of such slow absorption that it is not only a non-irritant but a most excellent antiseptic application in operations on ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... owing to the vow of celibacy, had become more and more stagnant, while the civil communities increased in power to adapt themselves to the age. All that was virile and creative combined in the towns; all that was inadequate, sterile, useless, coagulated in the monasteries, which thus became cesspools, and ultimately took on the character of festering sores by which the civil bodies which had at first been purged into them were endangered. Luther tells us how there was a Bishop of Wuerzburg who used to say when he saw a rogue, ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... opposite shore the rock is nearly perpendicular, the dog-rose and the bramble hiding its crevices, and the crawling campanula wreathing its bright bells about the sterile front, from which its sustenance was derived, like youth clinging to the cold and insensate bosom of age. The declivity sloping abruptly from the tower was then covered with a wild and luxuriant underwood, stunted ash and hazel twigs thinly occupying a succession ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Mr. Shaw takes count of. There is a great living writer who has brought to bear on human problems as consistent a logic as Mr. Shaw's, together with something which Mr. Shaw disdains. Mr. Shaw's logic is sterile, because it is without sense of touch, sense of sight, or sense of hearing; once set going it is warranted to go straight, and to go through every obstacle. Tolstoi's logic is fruitful, because it allows for human weakness, because it understands, and because to understand is, among other things, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... the mask, smooth and sterile, of the hunger for adornment, for gold bands and jewels and perfume, for goffered linen and draperies of silk and scarlet. She was the naked idler stained with antimony in the clay courts of Sumeria; the Paphian with painted feet loitering on the roofs of ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... about four hours until we came again from a region of summer into the region of snow, and the height from the sea was greater than we had at any time previously attained. The scenery around us, too, was wilder and more sterile. The Apennines here are very grand, assuming every variety of shape and color. Long slopes of clay color were interlocked with dark browns sprinkled with golden yellow; slate blue and grey, mixed with greens and purples, and the pure, deep ultramarine blue ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... III or the Alabama. You may meet him in front of a bulletin board, or in a drawing-room. He is amongst us everywhere, in the street and in the house. He may be a paid propagandist or merely a silly ignorant puppet. But whatever he is, he will not find much to say in response, unless it be vain, sterile chatter. True come-back will fail him as it failed that man by the bulletin board who asked, "What is England doing, anyhow?" and his neighbor answered, "Her fleet's keeping the Kaiser ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... Waterloo; Russia, the land of the Czar, by Moscow, The Kremlin; St. Petersburg, the Winter Palace. Thence our photographers travelled across the steppes to Lapland, Finland, Poland, and over the tundras to sterile Siberia, inflicting its cruel tortures on unhappy ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... gifted the Barren Ground caribou with such tastes and habits, that a fertile country and a genial clime would not be a pleasant home for it. It seems adapted to the bleak, sterile countries in which it dwells, and where its favourite food—the mosses and lichens—is found. In the short summer of the Arctic regions, it ranges still farther north; and its traces have been found wherever the Northern navigators ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... completely under control. With the Hwang ho confined to its channel, the adjacent low lands can be better drained by canalization and freed from the accumulating saline deposits which are rendering them sterile. Warping may be resorted to during the flood season to raise the level of adjacent low-lying fields, rendering them at the same time more fertile. Where the river is running above the adjacent plains there is no difficulty in drawing off the turbid water by gravity, under controlled conditions, ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... beautiful walks towards the Smith town hills, and along the banks that overlook the river. The summit of this ridge is sterile, and is thickly set with loose blocks of red and grey granite, interspersed with large masses of limestone scattered in every direction; they are mostly smooth and rounded, as if by the action of water. As they are detached, and merely occupy ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... boiled and kept wrapped in a clean towel until needed. The udder and teats and the hands of the operator must be well disinfected, and the solution must be freshly made with recently boiled water kept in a sterile bottle. The udder should be emptied of milk before the injection is made. After all these precautions have been observed the milking tube may be inserted and through it one-half pint of solution introduced by gravity air pressure or by syringe. There is practically ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... generally sterile, especially in the first months which follow the accouchement, because the vital forces are then concentrated on the ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... the Mount of Olives to its summit is a walk of three quarters of an hour. The whole mountain is desert and sterile; nothing is found growing upon it but olives; and from the summit of this mountain our Saviour ascended into heaven. The spot was once marked by a church, which was afterwards replaced by a mosque: even this building is now ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... Government in the course of the elections which followed, but in vain. The Progressist Party returned in overwhelming strength to the new Parliament; the voice of the country seemed unmistakably to condemn the policy to which the King and his advisers were committed. After a long and sterile discussion in the Budget Committee, the debate on the Army Bill began in the Lower House on the 11th of September. Its principal clauses were rejected by an almost unanimous vote. An attempt made by ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... upon the general condition of the patient. If the injury is a severe one, and attended with a profound degree of shock, it is better to wait for twenty-four or forty-eight hours. Meanwhile the wound is purified, and the limb wrapped in a sterile dressing. Means are taken to counteract shock and to maintain the patient's strength, and evidence of infection or of haemorrhage is carefully watched for. When the shock has passed off, the operation is then performed under more ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... take it, is old turf not good enough to use for edging, so after removing this have it broken into bits and put in a heap by itself. When the earth beneath is loosened, examine it carefully. If it is good old mellow loam without the pale yellow colour that denotes the sterile, undigested soil unworked by roots or earthworms, have it taken out to eighteen inches in depth and shovelled to one side. When the bad soil is reached, which will be soon, have it removed so that the pit will be three ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... of rude Raedwald, in his candor how king-like he towers! Have the centuries, over his slumber, only borne sterile falsehoods for flowers? Pray you, what if Christ found him the nobler, having weighed his frank manhood ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... shred of polygamy does not vanish. From first to last, of course, it has been assumed that a prolific polygamy alone can be intended, for long before we have plumbed the bottom of the human heart we shall know enough to imagine what the ugly and pointless consequences of permitting sterile polygamy ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... were always few in number. The conditions of the country secured that Australia, kept from civilization for so long, is yet the one land of the world which, whilst capable of great production with the aid of man's skill, is in its natural state hopelessly sterile. Australia produced no grain of any sort naturally; neither wheat, oats, barley nor maize. It produced practically no edible fruit, excepting a few berries, and one or two nuts, the outer rind of which was eatable. There were no useful roots such as the potato, the ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... the country should be sitting amongst the first row of the spectators, close to the statue of Dionysus[72] and loaded with perfumes. Crates,[73] again, have you done hounding him with your rage and your hisses? True, 'twas but meagre fare that his sterile Muse could offer you; a few ingenious fancies formed the sole ingredients, but nevertheless he knew how to stand firm and to recover from his falls. 'Tis such examples that frighten our poet; in ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... wastes of Speculation, nor the sterile din of Politics, were "the haunts meet for thee." Watching the yellow bees in the ivy bloom, and the reflected pine forest in the water-pools, watching the sunset as it faded, and the dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... from the Nueces to the valley of the Rio Grande is poor, sterile, sandy, and barren, with not a single tree of any size or value on our whole route. The only tree which we saw was the musquit-tree, and very few of these. The musquit is a small tree, resembling an old ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... varied waterfall scenery, and had I not seen the Gairsoppa Falls I should have thought that it would have been difficult to find anywhere in the world scenes more varied and beautiful. But the beauties of the falls of Cauvery are set in comparatively speaking sterile surroundings of rock and scrubby jungle, trees and shrubs scattered over ground partly undulating, and partly over hills of moderate height and uninteresting form. Then the grandeur arising from their great height, and the charms ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... which I can be only very seldom. I have an almost continuous craving for something new and strange, like Hedda. But somehow reading and thinking about her calmed me. I can find new emotions in books, and this satisfies me for a time, but they are never vital enough to last me long. It is only sterile emotions we derive from literature, and so I turn ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... cease to live. Individually and nationally they are happy who accept the rigorous climate of lofty ethical ideals, who are not content to take life as they find it, but who seek to cultivate flowers and fruits of paradise on the sterile, rocky soil of the human heart. This is the life that Jesus shows, the life that seeks and finds the truth, that with passionate ardour seeks right relations both with His fellows and with His Father. Out of ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... valued his poor father, ma'am—but he comes too late for me. At your age, ma'am, friendships come naturally; they spring like loves in the soft heart of youth: at seventy, the gate is not so open; the soil is more sterile. I shall never care for another Christopher; never see another ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... need is there for a king that is not competent to grant protection? As an elephant made of wood, or a deer made of leather, as a person without wealth, or one that is a eunuch, or a field that is sterile, even so is a Brahmana that is void of Vedic lore and a king incapable of granting protection. Both of them are like a cloud that does not pour rain. That person who always protects the good and restrains the wicked ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... Nepenthe. Forthwith a chapel was built on the spot, to commemorate the event and preserve the sacred relic which soon began working wonders for the good of the island, such as warding off Saracenic invasions, procuring plentiful vintages, and causing sterile cattle to ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... bones of dead men. The tribute exacted by the Kansas prairie: bones. A waste of bones, a sepulcher that did not hide its bones, but spread them, exulting in its treasures, to bleach and crumble under the stern sun upon its sterile wastes. Bones of deserted houses, skeletons of men's hopes sketched in the dimming furrows which the grasses ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... malbonodoro. Stenographer stenografisto. Stenography stenografio. Step sxtupo. Step pasxi. Step by step pasxo post pasxo, pasxo pasxe. Step (relationship) duon. Stepfather duonpatro. Steppe stepo. Stereotype stereotipo. Stereotype plate klisxajxo. Stereometry stereometrio. Sterile senfrukta. Sterility senfrukteco. Sterling vera. Stern (of ship) posta parto. Stern severega. Stertorous stertora. Stew boleti. Steward (of ship) sxipintendanto. Steward intendanto. Stick bastono. Stick glui. Stick bills afisxi. Sticky gluanta. Stiff rigida. Stiff neck ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Confederate arms, and the worst had been accomplished before he had reached the theatre of operations; the Alleghanies there constituted the dividing line between the hostile forces, and in this network of mountains, sterile and rendered absolutely impracticable by a prolonged season of rain, Nature had provided an insurmountable barrier to operations in this transmontane country.... It was doubtless because of similar embarrassments that the Federal general ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... a cross (crucial) cut, like this (x). The cut must reach through the mass to sound tissue beneath and beyond it. Then scrape out all the dead tissue. Dress with iodoform or sterile gauze. An antiseptic like listerine, glyco-thymoline, etc., can be used to wet the gauze, put on as a dressing afterwards and then more dry gauze above, strapped with adhesive plaster. Water and instruments must be boiled, hands must be ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... The same connection of ideas is illustrated by the practice of sterile women who desire children sleeping upon the freshly gathered ears in the ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... in. "All they care about is their damned sterile destiny! They don't care about people. Well we do! We care about something to live for. The hell with the destiny of the Galaxies! They don't know, and we'll be ...
— Dead World • Jack Douglas
... story of German duplicity, and the nations of Europe had no excuse for being surprised. When the Prussian Monarchy was first bestowed on the relatively humble family of the Hoehenzollerns, they found their territory for the most part sterile, the soil round Berlin and about Potsdam—the favourite residence of the Margraves—a sandy desert that could scarcely be made to yield a crop of rye or oats, so they set themselves to enlarge and enrich it by help of an army out of all proportion to the size ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... imaginative rhetorician and the measured, scrutinising scholar, the contrast was wide. One of the many pupils and rare disciples of the former complained that his friend supplied interminable matter for the sterile and unavailing Mystik, in order to amuse him with ropes of sand: and the severest censure of Doellinger's art as an historian was pronounced by Goerres when he said, "I always see analogies, and ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... grow on almost any kind of soil reasonably free from an excess of ground moisture. Its power to grow on poor and light soils, even light enough to lift with the wind, is very considerable. Its highest use will probably be found on soils so light and sterile that better forms of useful vegetation are not ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... flames By Juno's Iris: all th' AEoliaen realm; The islands blazing with sulphuric fire; And rocks of Acheloues' siren nymphs, He left. The vessel now, of him who rul'd The helm, bereft, along AEnaria's shore; And Prochytas; and Pithecusa, plac'd Upon a sterile hill, its name deriv'd From those who dwelt there, coasted. Erst the sire Of gods, detesting perjuries and fraud, Which that deceitful race so much employ'd, Chang'd to an animal deform'd their shapes; Where still a likeness ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... insignificant and debased, by all the conventions and petty, unoriginal judgments that go to the making of the rule of our society. The woman had to make her choice between love in an undignified poverty for which all her training had unfitted her, and a sterile ease and magnificence that gave her those opportunities which her temperament and education demanded. She chose for dignity and opportunity, was tempted to grasp at love, and thus finally came into ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... carrying our "ameliorating system" so far. The navigation of the coast is exceedingly dangerous, from the continual presence of ice, and the extraordinary force of the currents. While the coast proved so inaccessible, the interior of the country wears a still more dreary and sterile aspect; not a tree, nor shrub, nor plant of any land, is to be seen, save the lichens that cover the rocks, and a few willows. The native Esquimaux, whom our people had seen, evinced the same amicable ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... little preface. As I was saying then, when I was twenty years old or so, the name of old Raynier, of the Mount of Sorrow, was a by-word of terror through the region round, as the name of his father was, and his father before him. He had no other property than the sterile farm half-way up the mountain, and almost inaccessible—in winter entirely inaccessible—where he raised not half a support on the slips of earth among the ledges; his few starved sheep and goats did what they could for him, and his rifle did the rest. The first Raynier of them all was possibly ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... may have been a hoax (and there have been several scientific hoaxes) which, however, took in an American Agricultural Journal. It related to the formation in Holland of a new breed of oxen by the crossing of distinct species of Bos (some of which I happen to know are sterile together), and the author had the impudence to state that he had corresponded with me, and that I had been deeply impressed with the importance of his result. The article was sent to me by the editor of an English Agricultural Journal, asking for ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... mused. "I haven't much regard for Industrial Feudalism myself. It starts off with a bang, but tends to go sterile." ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... they will not sow Or root or seedling there: For three long years the unblessed spot Will sterile be and bare, And look upon the ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... love, so far as it goes beyond what is amusing and Gilbertian, is the statement of a kind of arid soul-culture more sterile than that of any cloister, the soul-culture of the scientist who thinks he has found out, and can master, the soul. It is a new asceticism, a denial of nature, a suicide of the senses which may lead to some literal suicide such as that in Rosmersholm, or may feed the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... treatment of male rats with certain types of hard radiations, which not only renders them reproductively sterile but leaves the rodents so treated in full possession of all other sexual functions and impulses. Furthermore, this condition of sterility is venereally contagious, so that one male rat so treated will sterilize all female rats with which it comes in contact, and these, ...
— Operation R.S.V.P. • Henry Beam Piper
... I perceived how intolerably false many of our cherished ideals are; that apart from lives of pure selfishness and annexation, many a professed philanthropist or active statesman is merely following a sterile sort of ambition; that it is rare on the whole for so-called public men to live for the sake of the public; while the simple, kindly, uncalculating, friendly attitude to life is a real source of grace and beauty, and leaves behind ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the path a small enclosure, the gate of which was quickly opened by the Parrot. The soil was arid and stony but a magnificent, majestic rose-bush adorned with one Rose, which was more beautiful than all the roses of the world grew in the midst of this sterile spot. ...
— Old French Fairy Tales • Comtesse de Segur
... thought with heaven fraught Into a sterile plain, Whose atmosphere is dank and drear— A wild ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... But it was like a bubble floating in the darkness. At any moment it might burst and leave him in chaos. He would not die. He knew that. He would go on living, but the meaning would have collapsed out of him, his divine reason would be gone. In a strangely indifferent, sterile way, he was frightened. But he could not react even to the fear. It was as if his centres of feeling were drying up. He remained calm, calculative and healthy, and quite freely deliberate, even whilst he felt, with faint, small but final sterile horror, that his mystic ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... reading no outline of any such argument as this, and believing it to be fruitful of the very noblest results, I have done my best to point out its possibilities to other earnest searchers after truth. Not until this new field has been faithfully examined and explored and proved to be sterile, shall I cease to recommend it to the attention of all who would fain see reason to believe that the Ethical Ideal is no Unreality, but rather the innermost Reality of the real universe itself. I speak only to those who have souls to hear and to respond; ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... thirteenth or fourteenth century—the abbey church of Coulombs, in the diocese of Chartres, in France, became possessed in some miraculous manner of the holy prepuce. This holy relic had the power of rendering all the sterile women in the neighborhood fruitful,—a virtue, we are told, which filled the benevolent monks of the abbey with a pardonable amount of pride. It had the additional virtue of inducing a subsequent easy delivery, which also added to the reputation and pardonable vanity of the good monks. This last ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... of love. Elsa was "the woman who drew Lohengrin from the sunny heights to the depths of earth's warm heart. . . . Thus yearned he for woman—for the human heart. And thus did he step down from out his loneliness of sterile bliss when he heard this woman's cry for succor, this heart cry from humanity below." This is all very well, and it would be churlish to say that it is not beautifully reflected in Wagner's drama; but it does not explain the need of the prohibition. A woman who loves must have unquestioning ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... little colony of Louisiana, at the point on the Gulf of Mexico now known as Biloxi, in the present State of Mississippi, had been in existence nine years. In 1708, the population of the colony did not exceed 279 persons. The land about this region is particularly sterile, and the colonists were little disposed to undertake the laborious task of tilling the soil. Indian slavery was attempted but found unprofitable and exceedingly precarious. So Bienville, lacking the sympathy of De las Casas for the Indians, wrote his government to obtain the authorization ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... where it is an object of envy. In pursuing my investigation, I do not find that I am led to more advantageous ideas of the liberty of the savage; on the contrary, I sees in him only the slave of his wants, and of the freaks of a sterile and parsimonious nature. Food he has not at hand; rest is not at his command; he must run, weary himself, endure hunger and thirst, heat and cold, and all the inclemency of the elements and seasons; and as the ignorance in which he was born and bred gives him or ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... north. Farnham Castle, for seven centuries a Bishop's palace, links Surrey to the See of Winchester. The Farnham oasthouses and hop-grounds bridge the crossing from the fertile Hampshire border to the Bagshot sands and the wild and sterile moors of Frensham and Hindhead. The town, set in its cultured plot of vines and flower-beds, with its historic castle, its tranquil church, and the Wey watering the pastures under its walls, stands like a garden between the military rigidity ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... laboratory, so far as the glass apparatus is concerned, differs but little from that of a chemical laboratory, and the cleanliness of the apparatus is equally important. The glassware comprised in the following list, in addition to being clean, must be stored in a sterile or ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... and widower Deans struggled with poverty, and the hard and sterile soil of "those parts and portions" of the lands of Dumbiedikes which it was their lot to occupy, it became gradually apparent that Deans was to gain the strife, and his ally in the conflict was to lose it. The former was a Man, and not ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... water, our travellers had their eyes on the alert, sending glances of inquiry in every direction, in the hope of discovering where the much-desired element was kept. They saw not the slightest indications of stream or pool, well or water-hole, of any kind. The place all around had the same sterile appearance as that of the country over which they had journeyed for the last two days, and certainly things looked confirmatory of the Bechuanas' statement. After all, they might be telling the truth! It was not very cheering to think so; and ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... substance. But this is the fertilizing part. Therefore, an insect which by chance displaces the pollen mass carries it off, as one may say, the wrong side up. On entering the next flower, it does not commonly present the surface necessary for impregnation, but a sterile globule which is the backing thereof. We may suppose that in the earlier age, when this genus flourished as the later forms of orchid do now, it enjoyed some means of fertilization ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... exclaimed Muller, "I have not labored in vain, although a German author feels sometimes tempted to believe that all his labors, all his writing and thinking were useless efforts, and nothing but seed scattered upon barren and sterile soil, and unable to bear fruit. Oh, my friend, what unfortunate days of humiliation and disgrace are still in store for Germany! But let us not talk of this now, but of you. Come, let us seat ourselves ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... this moment the stronger one. You received nothing from me, but you gave me much. And now I seem like a thief since you have awakened and find I possess what is your loss. How could it be otherwise when everything is worthless and sterile in your hands? You can never keep a man's love with your tulips and your passions—but I can keep it. You can't learn how to live from your authors, as I have learned. You have no little Eskil to cherish, even if your father's name was Eskil. And why are you always silent, silent, ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... of Her Majesty's Dominions in South Africa. The tide of confederation, and corporate union is manifestly rising, the wave of extended British influence is flowing northwards, the various nationalities and states of this vast country are educating themselves by experience to see the folly and sterile weakness of isolation, and are learning to realise the inherent strength, and vitality of mutual co-operation, based on a self respecting, yet unselfish responsibility to South Africa as ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young
... Trinidad. Steering to its eastern extremity, he saw a rock resembling a galley under sail off a headland, which, in consequence, he called Punta de la Galera. No safe anchorage appearing, he coasted westward in search of a harbour and water. Instead of a sterile land, he saw the country covered with groves of palm-trees, cultivated in many places, and enlivened by hamlets and scattered habitations, while streams came rushing down ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... or the same process set up by uterine pessaries used for displacements, may induce adhesive inflammation in the tubes, and simple and permanent sterility is the incurable result. It is a well known fact that prostitutes are usually sterile, and this arises from the prevalence of venereal disease, which produces gonorrhoeal inflammation of the Fallopian tubes, resulting in complete and ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... around her anything that could revive it; and the most distant reminiscences, like the most immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as what she imagined, her voluptuous desires that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the domestic tete-a-tete—she gathered it all up, took everything, and made it all serve ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... boats. An Alligator. Stokes' Bay. Narrow escape of an Officer. Change of Landscape. Pheasant-Cuckoos. A new Vine. Compass Hill. Port Usborne. Explore the eastern shore of King's Sound. Cone Bay. Native Fires. Whirlpool Channel. Group of Islands. Sterile aspect of the Coast. Visited by a Native. Bathurst Island. Native Hut and Raft. Return to Port Usborne. Native Spears. Cascade Bay. Result of Explorations in King's Sound. Interview with Natives. Coral Reefs. ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... degrees of moral cultivation that each nation has received? And our answer is, that we are inclined to believe the capacities for improvement of races, as of individuals, to have been differently bestowed by nature; but that none are actually incapable of culture. There is no land, however sterile, that the art of man may not make to produce fruit; but the difficulty and expense of tillage must be in proportion to the intrinsic richness or poverty of the soil. We fear that the soil of the Negroes[3], of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... out of the hard soil of the Puritan thought and character, out of the sterile rocks of the New England conscience, have sprung the flowers of poetry which you bid me celebrate to-night? From those songless beginnings have burst, in later generations, melodies that charm and uplift our land—now a deep organ peal filling ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... agitation of the sea, an agitation which is essential to the purposes of a living world. Without those operations, which wear and waste the coast, there would not be wind and rain; and, without those operations which wear and waste the solid land, the surface of the earth would become sterile. But showers of rain and fertile soil are necessarily required in the system of this world; consequently, the dissolution of the rocks, and solid strata of the earth, and the gradual, flow, but sure destruction ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... the influence of his artistic henchman, Lebrun; the slavish worship of Graeco-Roman and Roman models, fostered by the creation of the Ecole de Rome; and the teachings of critics like Lessing and Winkelmann, who drew their inspiration not from pure Greek models, but from the decadent and sterile art of the Empire, stored in the Vatican. Among the artists whose individuality stands forth from the mass of sculptures in these rooms is Charles Antoine Coysevox (1640-1720), who gives his name to Room I. to the L. of the vestibule. His chief works are in the "royal pandemonium," at Versailles, ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... boiled nipples in a jar, as already suggested, or you can use nursing bottles with caps that make it possible to reverse the nipples into the bottle and thus keep them sterile. ...
— If Your Baby Must Travel in Wartime • United States Department of Labor, Children's Bureau
... eyes over the place he perceived that the oak, the tree of heaven, was wanting. The acorn planted in the sterile soil developed not until Tursas, the giant, arose from the ocean, burned some meadow grasses, and raking together the ashes, planted therein the acorn, from which soon sprang up a mighty oak-tree whose branches hid the sun rays and ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... thee not, oh sterile flower! thou wast never enwoven in its chaplets of delirious perfume. In that vigorous and healthy society they would have spurned thee under foot disdainfully. Purity, mysticism, melancholy—three words unknown ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... shut in the valley when he reached higher ground, and a long stretch of moor rolled away ahead. Foster thought these sharp transitions from intensive cultivation to the sterile wilds were characteristic of southern Scotland. It had rained since he left Hawick, but now the sun shone down between the clouds and bright gleams and flying shadows chased each other across the waste. To the south the sky was ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... begins with the usual opposition between two brothers, the Cain and Abel of savage legend. One of the brothers, named Ioskeha, slew the other, and became the father of mankind (as known to the Red Indians) and the guardian of the Iroquois. The earth was at first arid and sterile, but Ioskeha destroyed the gigantic frog which had swallowed all the waters, and guided the torrents into ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... longer be pursued with impunity to its edges. Fear stalks the classroom. The teacher is no longer a stimulant to adventurous thinking; she becomes instead a pipe line for safe and sound information. A deadening dogma takes the place of free inquiry. Instruction tends to become sterile; pursuit of knowledge is discouraged; discussion often leaves off where ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... Provinces [of Britain] would join us, spontaneously, to-day—sterile as they may be in the soil under a sky of steel—still with their hardy population, their harbours, fisheries, and seamen, they would greatly strengthen and improve our position, and aid us in our struggle for equality upon the ocean. If we would succeed upon the deep, we must either maintain ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... the blitz and the lush plantlife observed in Hiroshima. Why hadnt the allwise scientists remembered and taken them into account before the bomb was dropped? Why had they been blind to this obvious danger? Fortunately the anger and terror were assuaged. Observers soon discovered the mutants were sterile, incapable of reproduction. More than that: though the new clumps spread and flourished and grew rapidly, they lacked the tenacity and stamina of the parent. Eventually they withered and dwindled and were in the end no different ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Boulter expressed his belief that those outlaws made four-fifths of the population, and the English colony only one-fifth; but the colonists held the rich lands; the bulk of the people, who formed the real nation, were in the bogs, the lonely glens, and on the sterile mountains, where agriculture was all but impossible, except to the great capitalist. Capital they had none, and they were forced to subsist, as best they could, on little patches of tillage among the rocks, whose debris made the land around them in some sort susceptible of cultivation. By degrees ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... charmer like Carlyle. But the illusion will some day be dissipated, and many of his readers in Great Britain and America will feel deeply and almost despairingly that, in the original fountain of his teaching, there was "a poison-drop which killed the plants it was expected to nourish, and left a sterile waste where men looked for the bloom and the opulence of a garden of God." It behooves those who idolize him to examine the image before which they stand. He is a man of unquestioned boldness and some originality, and no one of the present generation has greater ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... the sterile theorists of the new illiterate literature, who are as incapable of appreciating his refined and subtle perversities as they are of admiring the beautiful form in which his full-blooded and exuberant imagination clothes his conceptions. He is an aesthete, but his aestheticism has never expressed ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... small, a perilous journey or a mere day's travel, according to the mind and the transportation facilities of the voyager. Before four o'clock in the afternoon the coast was low and sandy to the westward, and it continued sterile and bare for long hours while the plane hung high against the sky with a following wind driving it on vastly more swiftly than its own engines could ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... almost made them giddy; to the left the tumultuous foam of the Chaudiere cast a delicate veil of spray over the sharp outlines of the bridge traced against a yellow sky; to the right, the water stretched away in a dull gray expanse, bordered by grim pines and flat sterile country. Around them the three mighty cliffs on which the Capital is built, above them the cold gray of an autumnal sky, and opposite them the long undulations of purplish brown hills that break the monotony of the view, and beyond which stretch ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... Alexandria became a centre of bitter theological and political factions, the story of which haunts the memory of anyone who was so fortunate as to read in his youth Kingsley's "Hypatia." These centuries, with their potent influence of neoplatonism on Christianity, appear to have been sterile enough in medicine. I have already referred to the late Greeks, Aetius and Alexander of Tralles. The last of the Alexandrians was a remarkable man, Paul of AEgina, a great name in medicine and in surgery, who lived in the early part ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... intercourse of the sexes. Among the Ehstonians, at the end of the eighteenth century, thousands of persons would gather around an old ruined church (in the Fellinschen) on the Eve of St. John, light a bonfire, and throw sacrificial gifts into it. Sterile women danced naked among the ruins; much eating and drinking went on, while the young men and maidens disappeared into the woods to do what they would. Festivals of this character still take place at the end of June in some districts. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... day-tide, on some grassy lea, My nets would be spread out, and I at rest. The poor folk of the sea-country I blest 370 With daily boon of fish most delicate: They knew not whence this bounty, and elate Would strew sweet flowers on a sterile beach. ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... me that the fields are sterile, the barn small, the stable crazy, the woods scanty. These would be powerful objections to a mere tiller of the earth, but they ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... better sense than to read anything of this kind to Mrs. Cynic. In the presence of such people, that which is fresh, beautiful, and holy withers, as a cluster of dewy wild flowers is parched and killed by the hot, sterile breath of a furnace. ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... trivial pleasures are often charming, and as often they are merely frivolous or merely depraved. Grecourt; Piron; Bernard, the curled and powdered Anacreon; Bernis, Voltaire's "Babet la Bouquetiere," King Frederick's poet of "sterile abundance"; Dorat, who could flutter at times with an airy grace; Bertin, born in the tropics, and with the heat of the senses in his verse; Parny, an estray in Paris from the palms and fountains of the Isle Bourbon, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... young unpolluted heart His gusts should fertilize, amend, As vernal storms the fields athwart. Youth freshens beneath Passion's showers, Develops and matures its powers, And thus in season the rich field Gay flowers and luscious fruit doth yield. But at a later, sterile age, The solstice of our earthly years, Mournful Love's deadly trace appears As storms which in chill autumn rage And leave a marsh the fertile ground And devastate ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin |
