"Sterility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a less quantity than nature requires, or there is no prolific faculty in it; or there is a deficiency of a due proportion of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness; or there is a resolution of the generative parts. The Stoics attribute sterility to the obliquity of the yard, by which means it is not able to ejaculate in a due manner, or to the unproportionable magnitude of the parts, the matrix being so contracted as not to have a capacity to receive. Erasistratus ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... been wrongfully hanged at Montgomery; and, when the rope was round his neck, he declared in proof of his innocence that grass would never grow on his grave. Curious to relate, be the cause what it may, there is yet to be seen a strip of sterility—in the form of a ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... one of the principal cities of Siberia, a country the name of which excites exaggerated ideas of sterility and desolation. Watered by rivers, which in every direction do the work of railways, with richly-wooded mountains and valleys, with green slopes, cultivated fields, soft meadows, gardens, and grassy ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... the sterility of hybrids, that can no longer be insisted upon as absolutely true, nor be practically used as a test between species and varieties, unless we allow that hares and rabbits are of one species. That it subserves a purpose in keeping ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... is one reason for the sterility of America in Art. But it is not the only one. Literature and Art in Europe rest on a long tradition which has not only produced books and pictures, but has left its mark on the language, the manners, the ideas, the architecture, the physical features of the country. The books ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... worthlessness, is to men and women of this time wholly inconceivable. That nothing ethically valuable can be accomplished except after instant prayer, or after copious outpourings of Divine grace, that the curse of absolute sterility is upon all our attempts to conform to the dictates of the moral law, unless God be with us in prayer, is ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... up to the vivacity of its d'ebut, you will have no reason to complain of the sterility of my letters. I do not say this from the spirit of the House of Commons on the first day,(341) which was the most fatiguing and dull debate I ever heard, dull as I have heard many; and yet for the first quarter of an hour it looked as if we ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... Antipodes. It was only a repetition of the scenes witnessed at the same time wherever the Irish strove to propagate the true faith. Later on it will be our pleasure to come back to this field and wonder at the growth of a blooming garden which has replaced the old sterility. ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... the oasis of Tozeur, and the Chott Djerid beyond it, has often been praised. To me, arriving at the water-shed on a cloudy afternoon, that line of inky-black palm trees with its background of blanched sterility melting into a lowering, leaden-hued sky, conveyed a most uncanny impression: the prospect was absolutely familiar! Yes, there was no doubt about it: I had seen the place before; not in Africa, of course, but—somewhere else. Where—where? ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... afternoon till dark exploring the Harle, or gap between Wangeroog and Spiekeroog; the sea breaking heavily on the banks outside ... Fine as the day was, the scene from the offing was desolate to the last degree. The naked spots of the two islands are hideous in their sterility: melancholy bits of wreck-wood their only relief, save for one or two grotesque beacons, and, most bizarre of all, a great church-tower, standing actually in the water, on the north side of Wangeroog, a striking ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... on importations, in a state of unexampled vigour and efficiency. Was this attended, as we were constantly told it would be, by a corresponding impulse given to our fabrics? Has the increased activity of our manufacturing cities compensated for the sterility of so large a part of our fields? The fact is just the reverse. Though free-trade has only been in operation for the last six months of 1846, they were signalised by a universal decline in all the principal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... would put their trust in the encouraged breeding of the best and the compulsory sterility of the rest. But what is the best, and who are the best, and where will you find them when they are not inextricably emulsified with the worst? It's a long, long way to the day of a segregating out and in of Mendelian unit-characters. ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... does not die upon the broken sword; one has to live on. Would that I could dissuade you from this inky pestilence! This poetizing spirit, which gives all life so much significance to the imagination, strikes it with sterility in every thing which should beget or prosper a personal career. It opens the heart—true, but keeps it open; it closes in on nothing—shuts in nothing for itself. It is an open heart, and the sunshine enters there, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... were not improved by the antagonism between the Roman Catholic and Presbyterian missions and the traders; each worked against the others, offering the natives the best of opportunities to fish in troubled waters. The result of all this was a rapid decrease of the population and frequent artificial sterility. The primitive population has disappeared completely in some places, and is only to be found in any numbers far inland among the western mountains. The situation is a little better in the north, where we find a number of flourishing villages along ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... the plains of Egypt with the inundation. This comes regularly about the month of July, or three weeks after the beginning of a rainy season in AEthiopia. The different degrees of this flood are such certain indications of the fruitfulness or sterility of the ensuing year, that it is publicly proclaimed in Cairo how much the water hath gained each night. This is all I have to inform the reader of concerning the Nile, which the Egyptians adored as the deity, in whose choice it was ...
— A Voyage to Abyssinia • Jerome Lobo
... therefore I am glad to be backed by your opinion. I must confess, however, I rather doubt the truth of the now very prevalent doctrine of all our domestic animals having descended from several wild stocks; though I do not doubt that it is so in some cases. I think there is rather better evidence on the sterility of hybrid animals than you seem to admit: and in regard to plants, the collection of carefully recorded facts by Koelreuter and Gaertner (and Herbert) is enormous. I most entirely agree with you on the little effect of "climatic conditions" which one sees referred to ad nauseam in all books: ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... afterwards it became an object of great consequence to the Lacedaemonians, who fortified, at great expence, and with much labour and skill, its two harbours, Cythera and Scandea. The convenience of these harbours to the Lacedaemonians compensated for the sterility of the island, which was so great that when the Athenians conquered it, they could raise from it only four Attic talents annually. The chief employment and source of wealth to the inhabitants consisted ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... human race give birth to children from puberty to sterility. She may give birth a dozen times, but nature finally calls a halt, and the whole system of life sustaining nerves of the womb which are in the fascia, with blood in great abundance to supply foetal life, ceases to go ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... theory of the Physiocrates, only transfers already existing wealth from one hand to another. What the merchants gain by it is at the cost of the nation. Hence, it is desirable that this loss should be as small as possible. Hence sterility!(316) But, the more important branches of business, especially wholesale trade, are connected with a transportation of goods (Verri), either from one place or from one period of time, into another. Here the genuine merchant ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... appearances of the declining and the setting sun are much more fitted to be types and characters of the Infinite. And thirdly (which is the main reason), the exuberant and riotous prodigality of life naturally forces the mind more powerfully upon the antagonist thought of death, and the wintry sterility of the grave. For it may be observed generally, that wherever two thoughts stand related to each other by a law of antagonism, and exist, as it were, by mutual repulsion, they are apt to suggest each other. On these accounts ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... said Fannie Ravenel behind the blinds of her highest window, to one who loved her still, but rarely had time to visit her now, "look. That's John March's room. O sweet, how's he ever again to match himself to our littleness and sterility without shriveling down to it himself? And yet that, and not the catching of scamps or recovery of lands, is going to be his big task. For I don't think he'll ever go 'way from here; he's just the kind that'll always feel too many obligations to stay; and I think his sickness will be ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... Constantinople in the Middle Ages, when it hung ripe on the bough, so to say, and waiting to fall into Latin, Turkish, Bulgar, or even Russian jaws, whichever at the psychic moment should be gaping and ready beneath. There too was the sense of old age and sterility; of disillusionment; of all fountains and inspirations run dry.—In ancient Grecce, it was no such far cry back from the essential modernity of Pericles' or of Plato's time to the antiquity of Homer's. In India, the faery light of an immemorial dawn mingles ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... receives in autumn, year by year, the deposit of its own dead leaves and weeds and grasses without either the winds and waters to clear these away or the soil to reabsorb and reconvert them into the materials of reproduction. Thus year by year the land tends farther toward sterility by the very accumulation of what was once its life. But send a forest fire across those smothering strata of vegetable decay; give once more a chance for every root below to meet the sun above; for every seed above to reach the ground below; ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... impossible for us to think of anything as God, or as forming part of God, which we cannot also think of as a Person, or as a part of a Person, as it is to produce a hybrid between two widely distinct animals. If I am not mistaken, the barrenness of inconsistent ideas, and the sterility of widely distant species or genera of plants and animals, are one in principle-sterility of hybrids being due to barrenness of ideas, and barrenness of ideas arising from inability to fuse unfamiliar thoughts into a coherent conception. I have ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... peasants, who think that if you give the first fruit of a tree to a woman with child to eat, the tree will bring forth abundantly next year. On the other hand, the Baganda believe that a barren wife infects her husband's garden with her own sterility and prevents the trees from bearing fruit; hence a childless woman is generally divorced. The Greeks and Romans sacrificed pregnant victims to the goddesses of the corn and of the earth, doubtless in order that the earth might ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... much farther south, the life is utterly chilled out of it. Now Hopedale lies behind a rampart of islands twenty miles deep; while the portion of the Arctic current which splits off at the head of Newfoundland, and pushes down through the strait, presses close past Caribou Island. This explains the sterility of the latter. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... consequence than the matter." In the eyes of the poet the advantage rests with the lower classes, for they seldom fail to give a certain character of rude poetry to their thoughts. Perhaps also this same observation may explain the sterility of the salons, their emptiness, their shallowness, and the repugnance felt by men of ability for bartering their ideas for such pitiful ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... that the wealth of these mines lies in certain mountains, in a district of four or five leguas in extent, and included between two large rivers which flow into the province of Pangasinan. The natives do not cultivate the land—for one reason, because of its great sterility, and the lack of ground to cultivate; and, on the other hand (which can more easily be believed), because, confident in their gold mines, they have thereby sufficient to purchase whatever they wish from Pangasinan, where the nearest abundant ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XIV., 1606-1609 • Various
... sanctuary to be erected for its reception, and a full period of twenty-five years occurred before the monks of Coulombs again regained possession of their prize, during which period the population of the neighborhood must have suffered from the natural increase of sterility and the physicians must have reaped a rich harvest owing to the increased difficulty and complications of labor induced by the absence of the relic. On its return, the relic was found to have lost none of its virtues, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... (You will understand this better when I explain about the development and birth of the child.) If this tear is repaired immediately no inconvenience usually results but if it is neglected it may produce a series of complications, some of which are falling of the womb, inflammation and even sterility. ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... doubt it smacks of wenching. Come, be seated, both. 'Tis as cheap sitting as standing. Mr Mulligan accepted of the invitation and, expatiating upon his design, told his hearers that he had been led into this thought by a consideration of the causes of sterility, both the inhibitory and the prohibitory, whether the inhibition in its turn were due to conjugal vexations or to a parsimony of the balance as well as whether the prohibition proceeded from defects congenital or from proclivities acquired. It grieved him plaguily, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... there is a tree which nobody looks at without curiosity and without wondering how it came there. For a long time it was the only one of its kind known in the state, and from its isolated position it has always been cursed with sterility. It reminds one of the warm climes of Africa or Asia, and wears the aspect of a stranger of distinction driven from his native country. Indeed with its sharp and thin foliage, sighing mournfully under the blast of one of ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... against the cold, lingering northern twilight. As the vehicle turned, and rolled between two square stone gate-posts, the long avenue before him, though as well kept as the road, was but a slight improvement upon the outer sterility, and the dark iron-gray rectangular mansion beyond, guiltless of external decoration, even to the outlines of its small lustreless windows, opposed the grim inhospitable prospect with an equally grim inhospitable front. There were ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of the Sampo, Louhi sent nine diseases upon Wainamoinen's people,—colic, pleurisy, fever, ulcer, plague, consumption, gout, sterility, and cancer, the offspring of the fell Lowyatar; but by the use of vapor baths and balsams Wainamoinen healed his people. Then Louhi sent Otso the Bear, the honey-eater, but he was slain by the hero, who made a banquet of his flesh for ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... landscape is like a park, and is so thoroughly rural and mellow and bosky that the temptation to walk amid its scenes is ever present to one. In comparison, nature here is rude, raw, and forbidding; has not that maternal and beneficent look, is less mindful of man, runs to briers and weeds or to naked sterility. ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... to the hierarchic order, ... they wished to substitute the mystical licence of sensual passions to wise Christian sobriety and obedience to laws.... Enemies of the family, they wished to produce sterility by ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... disease had originated. It was plain enough that it used to be known in many localities where it has long ceased to be feared. Still it was and is remarkable to see what a clean bill of health in this particular respect our barren soil inherited with its sterility. There are some malarious spots on the edge of Lake Champlain, and there have been some temporary centres of malaria, within the memory of man, on one or more of our Massachusetts rivers, but these are harmless ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... reason why: his soul had not much to say. This was the trouble with them all. There was not a spark of genuine poetic fire in the Seven. They sang without an ear for music; they strewed their pages with faded artificial flowers which they mistook for Nature, and endeavored to overcome sterility of imagination and want of passion by veneering with magniloquent epithets. They padded their ill-favored Muse, belaced and beruffled her, and covered her with garments stiffened with tawdry embroidery to hide her leanness; they overpowdered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... the flower, thus reversing the natural order of things. He considers that there is a radical antagonism between the normal organizing forces and the teratological disorganizing forces, and explains in this way the frequent sterility of monsters from an imperfect formation of stamens, ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... 9. STERILITY IN FEMALES.—Sterility in the female is sometimes caused by a morbid adhesion of the tube to a portion of the ovary. By what power the mouth of the tube is directed toward a particular portion of ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... distinct regions—of pasture, of pine, of bare, eternal sterility. On inquiring the name of the mountain, I was told that it was the "Aiguille" something, I forget what; but I discovered that almost all the peaks in this region of the Alps are called Aiguille, (needle,) ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... stared at Jaime with the fiery aggressiveness of the woman who, secure in the respect produced by sex, is more audacious and impetuous than a man. She muttered threats and insults which the senor could not hear, furious that anyone would venture to oppose her nephew, the beloved whelp on whom, in her sterility, she had lavished all ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... rutted through its clay surface by the hauling of lumber. It was metaled and smooth. There were many changes in the character of things hereabouts—all changes which attested that the curse of decay and hopeless sterility had been lifted. Off through a rift in the hills loomed the white concrete abutment of an aqueduct—and through the valley wound a railroad. A man might have walked many miles and come upon few deserted habitations, preyed upon by the twin vandals Time and ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... bad song, which the rocks echoed back, and all the goitred women at the roadside stopped with their pack burdens to listen. He told a thousand anecdotes. He knew all the story of the pass; how the Swiss, filing through it, had scattered the Milanese; how Suwarrow and Massena had made its sterility fertile ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... hay the animals live. It had not now rained for an entire year. When the island was discovered, the immediate neighbourhood of Porto Praya was clothed with trees, [1] the reckless destruction of which has caused here, as at St. Helena, and at some of the Canary islands, almost entire sterility. The broad, flat-bottomed valleys, many of which serve during a few days only in the season as water-courses, are clothed with thickets of leafless bushes. Few living creatures inhabit these valleys. The commonest bird is a kingfisher (Dacelo Iagoensis), which tamely sits on the branches of the ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... nor the lovely women,' Cunningham regrets, 'produced any serious effect on his muse.' This is a rash statement. Poets do not sow and reap at the same time—not even Burns. If his friends were disappointed at what they considered the sterility of his muse on this occasion, the fault did not lie with the poet, but with their absurd expectations. It may be as well to point out here that the greatest harm Edinburgh did to Burns was that it gathered round him a number of impatient and injudicious admirers who ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... fulfilment of the prophecy that the old men and matrons utter as they salute them. "Beautiful cabbage," they say, "live and flourish, so that our young bride may have a fine little baby before the end of the year; for if you die too quickly, it will be a sign of sterility, and you will be stuck up there on top of the house ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... barbarism," are the falsest of false prophets. They resolutely shut their eyes to facts all around them, and devote columns upon columns of newspaper, magazine and book argument—imaginary pictures—to the immorality, mental sterility and innate improvidence of this people; and they do this for various reasons, none of them honorable, many of them really disreputable. In dealing with this negro problem they always start off upon a false premise; their conclusions ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... able to avoid, at the same time, the dry sterility of epitomes, which convey no distinct idea to the mind; and the tedious accuracy of long histories, which tire the reader's patience. I am sensible that it is difficult to steer exactly between the two extremes; ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... amount of variation in the course of long ages is a limited quantity; no clear distinction has been, or can be, drawn between species and well-marked varieties. It cannot be maintained that species when intercrossed are invariably sterile and varieties invariably fertile; or that sterility is a special endowment and sign of creation. The belief that species were immutable productions was almost unavoidable as long as the history of the world was thought to be of short duration; and now that we have acquired some idea of the lapse of time, we are too ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... up: but if it was poverty-stricken as compared with the abundant resources of our own day,—if the Hartford of 1765 is to be contrasted with that of 1881, to the manifest disadvantage of the former,—one would wish to remember that in the very sterility of that life there was a certain iron which entered into the constitution of the people who lived it. If there were not the leisure and culture of the present day, neither were there the mental indolence and dissipation. Ames's Almanac was a joyless ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... Will it be charged that the splendid achievements of such thinkers are hybrids between things which Nature has meant to remain apart? Nature usually solves such problems for herself. Inappropriate hybridism is checked by the Law of Sterility. Judged by this great Law these modern developments of our knowledge stand uncondemned. Within their own sphere the results of Mr. Herbert Spencer are far from sterile—the application of Biology to ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... much as they please those gesticulations and contortions which poets are apt to make in the act of composing; it is certain, however, that they greatly assist in putting the imagination into motion. These kinds of agitation do not always show a mind which labours with its sterility; they frequently proceed from a mind which excites and animates itself. Quintilian has nobly compared them to those lashings of his tail which a lion gives himself when he is preparing to combat. Persius, when he would give us an idea of a cold and languishing ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... More hideous, when thou show'st in a child, Than the sea monster! Hear, nature, hear! Dear goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose, if Thou did'st intend to make this creature fruitful! Into her womb convey sterility! Dry up in her the organs of increase; And from her degraded body never spring A babe to honor her! If she must teem, Create her a child of spleen; that it may live And be a thwart disnatured torment to ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... there be considerable attention paid to other parts of the land, besides those appropriated to the raising of tobacco, the manure will no longer be found on the plantation, and general exhaustion and sterility ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... growth. What is not heath is nakedness, a little diversified by now and then a stream rushing down the steep. An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility. The appearance is that of matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by nature from her care and disinherited of her favours, left in its original elemental state, or quickened only with one sullen power of ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... become acquainted. And to one or another of these patterns life fits each of us as we grow up. Not one in ten thousand glances into human faces is arrested because it has lit upon a personality that cannot be immediately located, measured, accounted for. The reason for this sterility of variety which soon makes the world rather monotonous to the seeing eye is that few of us are born with any considerable amount of personality, and what little we have is speedily suppressed by a system of training which is throughout based upon an abhorrence of originality. We obey the law of ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... believe their ears and eyes. The friar passed for saint:—Feronde his fruit; None durst presume to doubt nor to dispute; A double miracle at once appeared The dead's return: the lady's state revered. With treble force Te Deum round was sung; Sterility in marriage oft was rung, And near the convent many offered prayers, In hopes their fervent ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... world. But this prodigious conjuncture does not scatter their wits; they still contrive to reconcile the two principles that they appear to regard in the light of divine commands. The first is that of unique maternity, never infringed except in the case of sterility in the reigning queen, and even then only very exceptionally; the second is more curious still, and, although never transgressed, susceptible of what may almost be termed a Judaic evasion. It is the law that invests the person of a queen, whoever she be, with a sort of inviolability. It would ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... terms; and by so doing renew, enrich and explicate the content of those terms for those who follow them. Those who could not harmonize their own vision of reality with the current formulae—Fox, Wesley or Blake, driven into opposition by the sterility of the contemporary Church—were forced to find elsewhere some tradition through which to maintain contact with the past. Fox found it in the Bible; Wesley in patristic Christianity. Even Blake's prophetic system, when closely examined, is found to have many historic ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... no form nor comeliness; and when they should see him, there was no beauty that they should desire him.' Meagre were his looks; sharp misery had worn him to the bone. His crown of thorns indicated the sterility of the territories over which he reigned. The reed in his hand, gathered from the banks of the Nile, indicated that it was only the mighty river, by keeping within its banks, and thus withholding its wonted munificence, that ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... he matched the small economies of the Chinese against the opulence of the Californian soil. The "garden patch" prospered; the neighbors spoke well of it and of him. But Jackson knew that this fierce harvest of early spring was to be followed by the sterility of the dry season, and that irrigation could alone make his work profitable in the end. He brought a pump to force the water from the little stream at the foot of the slope to the top, and allowed it to flow back through parallel trenches. ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... caught it. It seems to some people no more serious than a common cold, yet it is able to inflict much prolonged misery on its victims, while on the race its influence in the long run is even more deadly than that of syphilis, for gonorrhoea is the chief cause of sterility in women, that is to say, in from 30 to 50 per cent. of such cases, while of cases of sterility in men (which form a quarter to a third of the whole) gonorrhoea is the cause in from 70 to 90 per cent. The ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... acknowledged method of all modern, as it had been of all antique, thought, nay, of all modern, all antique, all healthy spiritual life—this was the most damnable habit of Abelard; and, as the letters show, of Heloise. What shall we think, in consequence, of the intellectual and moral sterility of the orthodox world of the eleventh century, when we find this heretical man, this rebellious woman, arguing incessantly about unrealities, crushing out all human feeling, judging all questions of cause and effect, settling all relations of life, with reference to a system of intricate ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... quite commonly in interspecific hybrids either because the chromosomes fail to pair in meiosis or because the parent genes when brought together in the hybrid interact in some way deleterious to the formation of sex-cells. Furthermore, cytoplasmic sterility is likely to occur in ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... something of the creative instinct of the artist is stirred to life within every one of us ... however unconscious of it in our countrified simplicity we may be. The sympathy we feel for a distressed neighbor has none of the impotent sterility of a reader's sympathy for a distressed character in a book. There is always a chance to try to help, and if that fail, to try again and yet again. Death writes the only Finis to our stories, and since a chance to start over ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... different stocks are used by the leaders in pecan breeding. Varieties also are known to differ greatly in their degree of hardiness. However, failure upon the part of otherwise normal trees to bear paying crops with regularity is not necessarily due to low temperatures. Other factors, such as self-sterility, may be wholly responsible for at least the lightness ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... than the sterility of Genoa and of Rome. Neither in sculpture nor in painting did these cities produce anything memorable, though Genoa was well placed for receiving the influences of Pisa, and had the command of the marble quarries of Carrara, while Rome ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... anathema. She was young and pleasure-loving, and at last her nature could no longer stand this general rejection, the absence of the simple pleasures of life. It was not their quarrels, even when they came to blows, that determined her action. It was a revolt from the radical sterility of Terry's philosophy. Katie furnished her with the necessary money, and she went away to California. There this tired creature, this civilised product of the slums, this thoughtful prostitute, this striving ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... governments, savage nations, and savage indolence, have left those countries almost in a state of nature; yet it is within the tropics that the true productiveness of the earth is alone to be looked for. Our long winters, our mountains, and the comparative sterility of Europe, prohibit that richness of produce which only waits the hand of man in the South, and it is only when the industry of the European shall be suffered to throw its strength into the Asiatic soil, that man will ever ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... like poetry in England in the sixteenth century, like music in Germany in the eighteenth century. At this moment, and in these countries, the conditions for one art and not for the others are fulfilled, and one branch only has bloomed out amidst the general sterility. It is these laws of human vegetation which history must now search for; it is this special psychology of each special formation which must be got at; it is the composition of a complete table of these peculiar conditions that must ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... extraordinary law of compensation which seems to be the most general law of the universe, the effects differed as much in quantity and time as in character—a remarkable efflorescence of literature in Germany being at once produced, to relapse shortly into a long sterility, a tardier but more constant growth following in England and Italy, while the effect in Spain was the most partial and obscure of all. The great names of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide hardly meet with any others in these literatures representing writers ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... enters on the exit of a discontented and resentful expectant mother, a woman, very much alone in the world—perhaps a bachelor maid or a barren wife, who, as she sits in the office, bitterly weeps and wails over her state of loneliness or sterility; and so we are led to realize that discontentment is the lot of many women; and we are sometimes led to regret that ours is not the power to take from her that hath and give ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... the ruins of some vast edifice, and carried our thoughts back to the remote period when submarine volcanoes gave birth to new islands, or rent continents asunder. Every thing which surrounded us seemed to indicate destruction and sterility; but the back-ground of the picture, the coasts of Lancerota presented a more smiling aspect. In a narrow pass between two hills, crowned with scattered tufts of trees, marks of cultivation were visible. The last rays of the sun gilded the corn ready for the sickle. Even the desert is animated wherever ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... culture of the septic vibrio in the heart's blood of an animal recently dead of septicemia. This was what happened, but a new difficulty presented itself; all our cultures remained sterile. Furthermore this sterility was accompanied by loss in the culture media of ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... peculiarly keen expression in his eyes, and as his words had been repeated to me I knew of what he was thinking. He was the first man of his condition who to my knowledge called rocks beautiful. The peasant class abhor rocks on account of their sterility, and because the rustic idea of a beautiful landscape is the fertile and level plain. In searching for the picturesque and the grandeur of nature, it is perfectly safe to go to those places which the peasant declares to be ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... repel them. And since amongst all the diseases to which human nature is subject, there is none that more diametrically opposes the very end of our creation, and the design of nature in the formation of different sexes, and the power thereby given us for the work of generation, than that of sterility or barrenness which, where it prevails, renders the most accomplished midwife but a useless person, and destroys the design of our book; I think, therefore, that barrenness is an effect that deserves our first ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... striking the woman on the front of the body over the womb. It is also assisted by the wearing of the tight cane belt already mentioned. I could not hear of any system of using drugs or herbs to procure abortion; but herbs are used to produce general sterility, which they are believed to ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... spot of verdure is to be seen on this place, but the glorious hills rising on every side, vested in foliage of living green, make ample amends for the sterility of the tiny level upon which we camp. The surrounding scenery is infinitely more charming than that of Rich Bar. The river, in hue of a vivid emerald, as if it reflected the hue of the fir-trees above, bordered with a band of dark red, caused by the streams flowing into it ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... following years. The heat of youth may spread happiness into wild luxuriance, but the radical vigour requisite to make it perennial is exhausted, and all that can be hoped afterwards is languor and sterility. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... perishes which the sea-hawk chooses for its nest; while freedom, on the contrary, flourishes like the tannen, 'on the loftiest and least sheltered rocks,' and clothes with its refreshing verdure what, without it, would frown in naked and incurable sterility. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... states that were annihilated in the Roman empire. Some notion, however, may be formed of the revenue of the provinces where considerable wealth had been deposited by nature, or collected by man, if we observe the severe attention that was directed to the abodes of solitude and sterility. Augustus once received a petition from the inhabitants of Gyarus, humbly praying that they might be relieved from one third of their excessive impositions. Their whole tax amounted indeed to no more than one hundred and fifty drachms, or about five pounds: but Gyarus ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... coloured increase is due chiefly to propagation among the coloured people themselves then it forms a good argument against those who assert that the half-caste is relatively inclined to sterility, while if the increase is found to be due to cohabitation of white men with coloured women then it is a fair illation that the coloured section is in process of absorption by the whites. This assumed process of absorption will, no doubt, entail the presence of ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... which were useful to the extent that they aided the former,—to that new one in which was, and is, taught, that manufactures and commerce were the great and profitable pursuits of man, and that agriculture, because of the "constantly increasing sterility of the soil," was the least profitable of all. Hence it is that we see England to have been steadily passing on in the same direction, and devoting all her energies to the prevention of the establishment, in any country of the world, of markets in which the raw produce of the land ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... constantly done, as far as I am aware, if you take two mules, a male and a female, and endeavour to breed from them, you get no offspring whatever; no generation will take place. This is what is called the sterility of the ...
— The Conditions Of Existence As Affecting The Perpetuation Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... party have so often been hired bravos or wandering minstrels with whom it can share no common conviction. I never cease wondering why it cannot produce a man of its own faith. There must be something inherent in its creed that produces sterility. ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... blindness and idolatry. Their inhabitants were wild, and great sorcerers and magicians, who knew many herbs. They used the latter to kill by means of the breath or expiration infected with a poisonous herb, as we have said above. They are poor, not because of the sterility of the country, but because the Borneans, Camuzones, and others of their neighbors ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... they are, and since kind is prone to beget kind, it is necessary that his kind cease with him, that his progeny shall not be, that he play the eunuch's part in this twentieth century after Christ. And he plays it. He does not breed. Sterility is his portion, as it is the portion of the woman on the street. They might have been mates, but ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... them far too seriously and to belittle what they stand for. Left to themselves they float in an ineffectual stratum of the brain. They are understood and grow current precisely by not being pressed, like an idiom or a metaphor. The same aesthetic sterility appears at the other end of the scale, where fancy is anything but sacred. A Frenchman once saw in "Punch and Judy" a shocking proof of British brutality, destined further to demoralise the nation; and yet the scandal may pass. That black tragedy reflects not very pretty manners, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... and endurance of William Burness to the utmost; and what with the sterility of the soil, which was the poorest in the parish, and the loss of cattle by accidents and disease, it was with great difficulty that he managed to support his family. They lived so sparingly that butcher's meat was ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... greater part of the interior the rainfall is far less than the land requires. The ground becomes parched, the streets dry up, and the grasses wither, and the whole face of nature presents a scene of sterility. Sometimes there is no rain for long periods. There have been times when not a drop of rain fell for two years, and but for the heavy dews at night, a vast extent of land would have been absolutely turned to a desert. Cattle and sheep perished by the million, of starvation and ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... himself master of this branch of the Apennines, and descend at pleasure into the Casentino, the Val d'Arno, the Val di Chiane, or the Val di Tavere, as well as be prepared for every movement of the enemy. But Niccolo, considering the sterility of these places, told him, "his horses could not eat stones," and went to the Borgo San Sepolcro, where he was amicably received, but found that the people of Citta di Castello, who were friendly to the Florentines, could not be induced to yield ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... country, influenced, no doubt, by the unfavourable impression he had imbibed by spending a long protracted winter on the dreary northern shore, amid almost ever-during arctic ice, and surrounded by the most unpromising sterility; and though some of his companions represented the land as pleasing and fertile, the desire of visiting Iceland seems, for some time, to have lain dormant among the adventurous Norwegian navigators; probably because neither fame nor riches could be acquired, either by traffic or depredation, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... CAMPAGNA. Independent of the indelible associations with which it is connected, and the glorious deeds of which it has been the theatre, its appearance produces an extraordinary impression on the mind of the beholder. All is silent; the earth seems struck with sterility—desolation reigns in every direction. A space extending from Otricoli to Terracina, above sixty miles in length, and on an average twenty in breadth, between the Apennines and the sea, containing nearly four thousand square miles, in the finest part of Italy, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... difference between the two cases consisting in the fact that the variation in the flower is not a useful, but a disadvantageous one, which can only be preserved by artificial selection on the part of the gardener, while the transformations that have taken place parallel with the sterility of the ants are useful, since they procure for the colony an advantage in the struggle for existence, and they are therefore preserved by natural selection. Even the sterility itself in this case is not disadvantageous, since the fertility of the true females has at the same time considerably ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... eleven thousand feet in real altitude, yet their height from their immediate basis is not so great as might be imagined, as they swell up from elevated plains, several thousand feet above the level of the ocean. These plains are often of a desolate sterility; mere sandy wastes, formed of the detritus of the granite heights, destitute of trees and herbage, scorched by the ardent and reflected rays of the summer's sun, and in winter swept by chilling blasts from the snow-clad mountains. Such is a great ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... France. He stuck at nothing, either to advance his satellites or to destroy his enemies. The passion which he had long cherished for the queen had changed to dislike, and she had an aversion for Richelieu. The king was embittered against her by jealousy and by the sterility of their marriage. The queen was an amiable woman, without falsity of any kind, and with many virtues; her intimate friend was Madame de Chevreuse, who was of her own ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... forenoon, as we were slowly gliding over the blue surface of the deep. As we got up with it, we saw that it was a long, low, almost barren island, a few trees only in the higher parts retrieving it from actual sterility. It was a wild, desolate, melancholy-looking spot, such as would make a man shudder at the very thought of being wrecked on it. At one end, inside a reef over which the surf was breaking violently, lay a dark object. As the officers were inspecting it through their glasses, they pronounced it ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... been regarded as a thing apart, owing to a general instinctive repugnance to admit that a phenomenon, whose extrinsications are so extensive and penetrate every fibre of social life, derives, in fact, from the same causes as socially insignificant forms like rickets, sterility, etc. But this repugnance is really only a sensory illusion, like many ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... before we go any further, that, notwithstanding the sterility of this part of the coast; it is not without importance, on account of the rich produce of the sea which bathes it. The agriculture of the waters as a celebrated naturalist has said, offers too many ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... birth rate, things change. There are manners and customs evolved that would seem strange to you. There come laws and religions, all made to match current requirements. Celibacy and sterility become a crime. Virginity becomes a disgrace, a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... leaders, but all with that ink-mark on the brow which is as much on the Continent the badge of action, as it is in England the symbol of sterility; all believing more or less naively that the pen is mightier ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... verdure. A few boats may be seen with their equipments, and two or three straggling nets upon the shore. A distant sail occasionally glides across the horizon; but the usual aspect is that of solitude, still and uninterrupted, the abode of sterility and sadness. Now, the narrow bay by the island was glittering with gallant streamers. Ships of war, in all their pride and panoply, majestically reposed upon its bosom. All was bustle and impatience. The trumpet-note of war brayed fiercely from the battlements. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... that loves not God's truth. And therefore this is true love indeed, the cause of all good to mortal men, that reconciles all creatures, and glues them together in perpetual amity and firm league; and can no more abide bitterness, hate, malice, than fair and foul weather, light and darkness, sterility and plenty may be together; as the sun in the firmament (I say), so is love in the world; and for this cause 'tis love without an addition, love [Greek: kat' exochaen], love of God, and love of men. [4603]"The love of God begets ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... new ideas, and she sinks into deeper moral dissolution. She hates all that has been done, yet can herself do nothing, and she represents, in symbol, that detestable condition of spirit which cannot create, though it sees the need of creation, and can only show the irritation which its own sterility awakens within it by destruction. All Hedda can actually do, to assert her energy, is to burn the MS. of Loevborg, and to kill herself with General Gabler's pistol. The race must be reformed or die; the Hedda Gablers which adorn its latest phase ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... as can well be imagined in land whose hummocks are no one of them more lofty than another. This small group appears to be formed of granite, which is imperfectly concealed by long straggling dwarfish brush, and some few still more diminutive trees, and seems cursed with a sterility that might safely bid defiance to Chinese industry itself. Nature is either working very slowly with those islands, or has altogether ceased to work upon them, since a more wild deserted place is not easily to be met with. Even ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... and that character shares in the loss of strength which ought only to affect the passions. This is the reason why, in ages assumed to be refined, it is not a rare thing to see gentleness degenerate into effeminacy, politeness into platitude, correctness into empty sterility, liberal ways into arbitrary caprice, ease into frivolity, calm into apathy, and, lastly, a most miserable caricature treads on the heels of the noblest, the most beautiful type of humanity. Gentle and graceful ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... application; and prisoners of the first grade may subscribe for newspapers that contain no objectionable matter. But only a small proportion of the inmates is addicted to reading, and the opportunities for doing so are limited. And as months and years go by, the desolation and sterility of the place weigh heavier upon the spirit, the mind reduces its radius and grows inert, and stimulants stronger than current fiction are needed to rouse it. Prison, prison, prison; steel walls and gratings; the predestinate ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... the tissues and the comparative anatomy of Institutions, and to go through all the drudgery which sluggards loathe and fools deride, the light of truth will be dim for us all; our Ethical, equally with our political Philosophy must remain in a condition of hopeless sterility. Nevertheless History too has her mission, though her time has not yet come. It will not always be that the past will be to us "as the words of a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read this, I pray ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... most dreary; vast ranges strewn over with huge blocks of sandstone, rose in desolate grandeur around; chasms, ravines, and thirsty stony valleys yawned on every side; all was broken, rugged, and arid, as if the curse of sterility had fallen on the land; in short, the contrast was complete between this desert place and the country we had so lately traversed up the river. I was able, accordingly, to procure nothing in the shape of a fresh meal, save a few black cockatoos and some of the pigeons of a dark brown colour, ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... occur in the yields from Rotundifolia vines. At times there are record-breaking yields and, again, small yields are reported, the small yields resulting from black-rot, coulure, wet weather, self-sterility, lack of cultivation, fertilization, lack of pruning, age of vines, and various other causes. In spite of this, Rotundifolia vines are said to be among the safest and most prolific of fruit-bearing plants. While in one of the largest ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... him in fire every night. When his mother discovered this, she wept and lamented. After that the bestowal of immortality was impossible. Demeter left the house. Keleus then built a temple. The grief of Demeter for Persephone was limitless. She spread sterility over the earth. The gods had to appease her, to prevent a great catastrophe. Then Zeus induced Hades (Pluto) to release Persephone into the upper world, but before letting her go, he gave her a pomegranate to eat. This obliged her to return periodically to the nether-world for evermore. ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... novel, has been felt to be peculiarly dependent upon the fashion of life in Britain. Blankenburg, another eighteenth-century student of German literary conditions, in his treatise on the novel[7], has similar theories concerning the sterility of German life as compared with English, especially in the production of humorous characters[8]. He asserts theoretically that humor (Laune) should never be employed in a novel of German life, because "Germany's political institutions and laws, and our nice Frenchified customs would not permit ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... intertwining with each other, added to the roughness below, made the passage infinitely toilsome. Scattered over this space were single cedars with their ragged spines and wreaths of moss, and copses of dwarf oaks, which were only new emblems of sterility. ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown |
