"Subsoil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... countries of abundant rainfall, a great distinction exists between the soil and the subsoil. The soil is represented by the upper few inches which are filled with the remnants of decayed vegetable matter and modified by plowing, harrowing, and other cultural operations. The subsoil has been profoundly modified by the action of the heavy rainfall, which, in soaking ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... minutes the detective and the volcanologist joined him in the cavern. The top surface of the ground was rolled up into waves like the sea. The sides of the hole were almost sheer. The naked rock was exposed for thirty feet. Above the rock could be seen the subsoil, and then the layer of top soil and vegetation. Dr. Bird was carefully ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... by removing the surface-soil to the depth of about three feet, a work of no small labour, until the subsoil, or "pay-dirt," was reached. Of this they dug out a small quantity, and washed it; put the produce of black sand and gold into leathern bags, and then, digging out another panful, washed it as before. Thus they laboured till ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... remains. The huge banks of rock salt often met with in the vicinity of sulphur mines, and which in some places stretch for a distance of several miles, seem to indicate that the sea has worked its way into the subsoil. Fish and insects, which are frequently found in strata of tripoli, which lie under sulphur beds, induce the belief that lakes ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... is applied and slow combustion goes on, most of the products of the burning being retained in the ground, much of the soil is incinerated. The final preparation is effected by the men digging up the subsoil round the mound, passing each hoeful into the left hand, where it pulverizes, and is then thrown on to the heap. It is thus virgin soil on the top of the ashes and burned ground of the original heap, very clear of weeds. At present ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... region are imperfect valleys which have no outlet. As a consequence of this, the water cannot escape by an overground bed, so it forces itself through the porous surface to reappear in a lower valley, undermining the subsoil, which in time collapses, and forms the oases of this otherwise barren land. The rain washes down the little earth that there is on the hillside, the chemical action of the limestone oxidises the same, and the so-called "terra rossa" is formed in these depressions, sufficient to give ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... aided by the situation, locality, and appearance of the soil, whether a certain portion of land is fitted for the profitable growth of any particular plant. Depth of soil, and facilities for deepening it, with the nature of the subsoil, so as to know whether it retains or parts with water, are also important considerations, because tap-rooted plants require free scope for ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... century, this miserable village, with various other hamlets and almost all the cottages attached to farms on the Melrose estate, were the scandal of the countryside. Roofs that let in rain and wind, clay floors, a subsoil soaked in every possible abomination, bedrooms "more like dens for wild animals than sleeping-places for men and women," to quote a recent Government report, and a polluted water supply!—what more could reckless human living, aided by human carelessness and cruelty, have done ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... potent influence, especially in his earlier days; but the chief source of his liberty was another. It was his personal spontaneity, similar to that of Emerson, and his personal vitality, similar to that of nobody else. Convictions and ideas came to him, so to speak, from the subsoil. He had a prophetic sympathy with the dawning sentiments of the age, with the moods of the dumb majority. His scattered words caught fire in many parts of the world. His way of thinking and feeling represented the true America, and represented in a ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... pecan belt made at one time. Next to the neglect, which some of the planters allowed their orchards to undergo, probably the selection of the wrong kind of land has been the cause of more disappointment than any other one source. A fertile soil deep, mellow, well drained sandy or gravelly clay subsoil should be ideal for pecans anywhere in the latitude in which they are hardy. However, many other types of soil are producing pecans, and if your home happens to be located where the soil is not ideal, you can still grow them by furnishing the elements ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... exalted or seemingly improved condition, whether of plant or animal, induced by human interference, is not the true and artistical ideal of it.[35] It has been well shown by Dr. Herbert,[36] that many plants are found alone on a certain soil or subsoil in a wild state, not because such soil is favorable to them, but because they alone are capable of existing on it, and because all dangerous rivals are by its inhospitality removed. Now if we withdraw the plant from this position, which it hardly ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... glades of the wood at Misdon, perforated by galleries and cells, out of which came and went a mysterious society, was called 'The Great City.' The gloomy Breton forests were servants and accomplices of rebellion. The subsoil of every forest was a sort of sponge, pierced and traversed in all directions by a secret highway of mines, cells and galleries. Each of these blind cells could shelter five or six men. Usually the cover, made of moss and branches, ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... invariably clean, and her crew are connected in one's mind with nautical stories which charmed one in the long-past days of youth. A steamer is very much the reverse. "Sam Slick," with his usual force and aptitude of illustration, says that "she goes through the water like a subsoil-plough with an eight-horse team." There is so much noise and groaning, and smoke and dirt, so much mystery also, and the ship leaves so much commotion in the water behind her. There do not seem to be any regular ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... those who for the most part have nothing to do at the end of the race, which they run as if they were so many Mercuries speeding with messages from Jupiter. Look at our scientific drainage, which turns refuse into poison. Look at the subsoil of London, whenever it is turned up to the air, converted by gas leakage into one mass of pestilent blackness, in which no vegetation can flourish, and above which, with the rapid growth of the ever-growing nuisance, no living thing will breathe with impunity. Look at our scientific ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... pines, next year, to leeward of a clump of cone-bearing trees. In the Moor such self-sown woods come to no ripeness. The pines are unhealthy and stunted, hung with gray moss, and eaten out with canker. The excessive moisture and the impenetrable subsoil, and the shallowness of the congenial sand that encouraged them to root make the young trees ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... and private libraries, and he religiously meant to make an exhaustive study of them all; but sermons and parish calls and funerals, and that little affair of Mrs. Samuel Nute, have forced him, by a process of which we all know something, to forego his projected subsoil ploughing and make such hasty ...
— Saint Patrick - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... streaks of red, will drop from its track, and it will leave a wake, six or seven times as wide as a high road, from which all soil, all cultivation, all semblance to cultivated or cultivatable land will have disappeared. It will not even be a track of soil. It will be a track of subsoil laid bare. It will be a flayed strip of nature. In the course of its fighting the monster may have to turnabout. It will then halt and spin slowly round, grinding out an arena of desolation with a diameter equal to its length. If it has to retreat and advance again these streaks ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... country north of Lake Ontario is generally characterized by a limestone subsoil resting on granite. The rocks about Kingston are usually a very compact limestone, of a bluish-gray color, having a slight silicious admixture, increasing as the depth increases, with occasional intrusions of quartz or hornstone. The limestone ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... be deep and porous, so that the roots will strike far into it, and be enabled thereby to withstand droughts and cold winters. The best means of deepening the soil, as explained in Chapter IV, is by tile-draining; but it can also be accomplished to some extent by the use of the subsoil plow and by trenching. Since the lawn cannot be refitted, however, the subsoil is likely to fall back into a hard-pan in a few years if it has been subsoiled or trenched, whereas a good tile-drain affords a permanent ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... of the south of Ireland—the moory bog—varies in depth from nine inches to three feet, below which there is a clayey or sandy subsoil. On the average, about L4 per statute acre is required to bring it from a state of nature to one of cultivation, and then it will fetch a rent of from 5s. to 10s. per ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... Salisbury Plain is known for it, and I hear that all the ground that troops are now occupying is to be ploughed up when we leave. As far as that goes we have ploughed it up a bit already, but a systematic ploughing will make it more regular. The subsoil is only four inches, then you come to chalky clay. The tent-pegs when they are taken from the ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... etc.). Is this aesthetic? Is this exegetical? How glad I shall be if you can assure me that it is! But, nonsense apart and begged pardon for, pray write me a line to say how you are, directing to this pretty place. "The soil is in general a moist and retentive clay, with a subsoil or pan of an adhesive silicious brick formation; adapted to the growth of wheat, beans, and clover—requiring, however, a summer fallow (as is generally stipulated in the lease) every fourth year, etc." This is not ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of subsoil in it. The explanation is, of course, that in a great many thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest our attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness, until in some future ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... map, and to enter in his field book the value thereof, with all the special circumstances specially stated. The examination was to include digging to ascertain the depth of the soil and the nature of the subsoil. All land was to be valued at its agricultural worth, supposing it liberally set, leaving out the value of timber, turf, etc. Reductions were to be made for elevation above the sea, steepness, exposure to bad winds, patchiness of soil, ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... a 'bronk right down to subsoil.' "I never seen a white that wasn't soft, nor a chestnut that wasn't nervous, nor a bay that wasn't good if broke right, nor a black that wasn't hard as nails, an' full of the old Harry. All a black bronk wants is claws to be wus'n ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... representations are incorrect and inadequate, impress them much more than do the able and correct drawing of adults. For although theirs are incomplete they add to them a thousand things of their own seeing and imagining; and they add to them also the thousand things that grow in the deep subsoil of their consciousness—the things which no brush would be ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... the Deacon, "the roots of the clover go down deeper into the subsoil than the roots ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... These, in their simplest form, are tapes or stranded wires of iron or copper attached to the walls of the building. The lower end of the conductor is soldered to a copper plate buried in the moist subsoil, or, if the ground is rather dry, in a pit containing coke. Sometimes it is merely soldered to the water mains of the house. The upper end rises above the highest chimney, turret, or spire of the edifice, and branches ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... the surface of the prairie, and often in especially dry seasons cattle would perish were not these faithful little well-diggers and pumpers constantly at work for them. In the river valleys of Arizona although the air is dry the subsoil water is near the surface of the ground. Here flourishes the mesquit tree, Prosopis juliflora, with a tale to tell well worth knowing. When a mesquit seems stunted, it is because its strength is withdrawn for the task of delving to find water; where a tree grows ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... damp: the saltpetre which the waters had dissolved in their passage, crystallising on the limestone, would corrode and undermine everything, if precautions were not taken. When the inundation was over, the subsidence of the water which impregnated the subsoil caused in course of time settlements in the most solid foundations: the walls, disturbed by the unequal sinking of the ground, got out of the perpendicular and cracked; this shifting displaced the architraves which held the columns ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... gradually tending to become a thing of the past. In the wastes of Gascony it was formerly a means of locomotion adapted to the nature of the country. The waste lands were then great level plains covered with stunted bushes and dry heath. Moreover, on account of the permeability of the subsoil, all the declivities were transformed into marshes after ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... placed his house in Cheshire at Cavour's disposal to give him an opportunity of studying English agriculture. The chance was not thrown away. Cavour learnt everything about the management of a well-ordered English estate down to the minutest particulars. He admired much, especially the system of subsoil drainage, then a novelty to foreigners, but he was not carried away by the beautiful appearance of the English country so far as to think that the English farmer was in all respects ahead of the North Italian. ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... rainfall and temperature, and only secondarily on soil. A desert is a tract with a dry substratum and dry air, great heat during some part of the year, and bright sunshine. The soil may be loam or sand, and as regards vegetation a sandy desert is the worst owing to the rapid drying up of the subsoil after rain. In the third of the maps appended to Schimper's Plant Geography by far the greater part of the area dealt with in this book is shown as part of the vast desert extending from the Sahara to Manchuria. Seeing that the monsoon ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of subsoil in it.—The explanation is, of course, that in a great many thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest our attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness, until in some future ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... pulverizes easily—and, if possible, of volcanic origin—is best for coffee; also, soil rich in decomposed mold. In Brazil the best soil is known as terra roxa, a topsoil of red clay three or four feet thick with a gravel subsoil. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Columbia is probably the foremost Negro in the State. He has made many speeches, which, homely in manner, have, nevertheless, a subsoil of strong common sense. He has been employed by the Military authorities from time to time in aiding, by "moral suasion" to preserve peace; is about 45 years of age; was formerly a hotel servant in Columbia where ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... the island was merely the home of farmers and fishermen, a shipowner in need of easily handled ballast found that the subsoil contained just the thing he wanted. By turning up the thin surface he came upon a stratum of small, square slabs of rock rather like cakes of soap. These were easily lifted and easily carted ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... much labor put on this piece of land, as it was first reduced to a level by removing the soil and subsoil, and levelling the gravelly bottom; then returning the subsoil and soil to the top. Walks were next laid out with great care, and flower beds made. A border was also dug for the expected new greenhouse, ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... oil business has developed to an importance far beyond everything else down here. When this man, Carranza, went into office, he went in under what they call the Constitution of 1917. It provides that the State is entitled to retain what they call 'subsoil rights.' That is, they don't want to sell oil lands or mines ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... be a harder task than had been anticipated. Captain Smithers had expected to find the subsoil of the island all soft alluvial earth, in which, from the neighbourhood of the river, there would be an abundance of water. It had never occurred to him that if the island had been of soft earth it would ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn |
