"Superincumbent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from under the superincumbent snowdrift, and alighted from the carriage, expecting that a kind and hospitable reception would indemnify me for the toils and hardships of the day. A gentleman person in black opened the door, and admitted me into a spacious hall, lighted by an amber-coloured lamp suspended from the ceiling; ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... visits through the mines. He thus traversed the main gallery, the side walks, and the old, or abandoned works. In the latter the roof was propped up by perpendicular posts and horizontal beams. In many places the beams were so bent by the weight of the superincumbent earth, that it appeared they must before long give way. In many places they had to creep on hands and knees to pass through the old workings, which ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... and wore down many of these rocks, and, in the lapse of ages, deposited their remains, in thick layers of sand and mud, at the bottom of the seas. Baked by the heat from beneath, and pressed by the weight of superincumbent waters, these layers slowly hardened into stratified rocks. Forms of vegetable and animal life, though only of the lowest type, the origin of which is to be explained hereafter, now began to appear. Some sea-plants, zooephytes, infusory animalcules, and a few ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... under which friendship comes so often to a violent and sudden death as under the pressure of travel. It is like the fate which the Scientific ascribe to a box sunk in the sea; after a certain depth, which varies according to the strength of the box, the weight of the superincumbent water bursts it up. It is merely a question of how deep or how strong. Our travelling companion remains our friend for a day, for a week, for even a month; but at the month's end he is our friend no longer. Our relations have probably become what the diplomatists term 'strained' ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... which we found the nails so defective that we had reason to fear we might start some planks before we reached Port Jackson. . . When the repairs were completed, and the people were more at leisure, I made an excursion as far as Bat Island, off Cape Brewster. . . . Bat Island is a mass of sandstone superincumbent upon a quartzoze basis, and intersected by nearly vertical veins of white quartz, the surface of which was in a crystallised state. The floor of the cavern was covered with heaps of water-worn fragments of quartzoze rock containing copper pyrites, in some ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... level in sea and land still continue to attest their restless energies. That igneous matter has, during many periods, been protruded from below—that mountains have risen in succession from the sea, and injected their molten substance through cracks and fissures of superincumbent strata—are facts resting on indubitable evidence. Many masses of granite became the solid bottom of some portions of the sea before the secondary strata were laid gradually upon them. The granite of Mont Blanc rose during a recent tertiary period. "We can prove," says Professor ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... the height of forty feet or more, with blue drapery, adorned with well-stitched yellow lilies and the familiar coats of arms, while sheaves of many-coloured banners drooped at fit angles under this superincumbent blue—a gorgeous rainbow-lit shelter to the waiting spectators who leaned from the windows, and made a narrow border on the pavement, and wished for the ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... kinds. The more curious and probably the most ancient are false arches, formed of horizontal courses of stone, each a little overlapping the other, and carried on until the aperture at the top could be closed by a single superincumbent slab. Such is the construction of the Regulini-Galassi vault, at Cervetere, the ancient Caere." (Rawlinson's "Origin of Nations," ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... deposited in its periodical inundations, and which rests on a foundation of sand, like that of the adjacent desert. The French savans who accompanied Bonaparte in his Egyptian expedition made several experiments to ascertain the thickness and depth of this superincumbent bed. They dug about two hundred pits, and carefully measured the thickness in the transversal section of the valley, where the deposit had been free from obstacles, and had not been materially increased or lessened by ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... originally have been painted of a rather gaudy pattern. This was a Roman tessellated pavement, made of small colored bricks, or pieces of burnt clay. It was accidentally discovered here, and has not been meddled with, further than by removing the superincumbent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various |
