"Winnowing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wasted; and the like. (2.) The other sort of improvements, those which diminish labor, but without increasing the capacity of the land to produce, are such as the improved construction of tools; the introduction of new instruments which spare manual labor, as the winnowing and thrashing machines. These improvements do not add to the productiveness of the land, but they are equally calculated with the former to counteract the tendency in the cost of production of agricultural produce, to rise with the progress ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... Dasahra and during Phagun, and offer fowls to them. They have little faith in medicine, and in cases of sickness requisition the aid of the village sorcerer, who ascertains what deity is displeased with them by moving grain to and fro in a winnowing-fan and naming the village gods in turn. He goes on repeating the names until his hand slackens or stops at some name, and the offended god is thus indicated. He is then summoned and enters into the body of one of the persons ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... floating slowly, slowly, like a gull over the sea; he could make out its smooth nose, its low parapet beyond, the steersman's head motionless; he could even hear now the soft winnowing of the screw—and then he saw that for which ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... visited Chia Lakelet. On their way they met men and women eagerly reaping the corn in haste, to convey it to the stockades, while so much was found scattered along the paths by the Mazitu and the fugitives that some women were winnowing it from the sand. Dead bodies and burned villages showed that they were close upon the heels of the invaders. Among the reeds on the banks of the lake was seen a continuous village of temporary huts in which the people had taken ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... for only a small quantity of water was put into the pot. This process lasted two hours. They were then taken out, and allowed to dry; and after that shaken about in a pan, until all the legs and wings were broken off from the bodies. A winnowing process—Swartboy's thick lips acting as a fan—was next gone through; and the legs and wings were thus got rid of. The locusts were then ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... sheath of the parang; for making bottle-shaped receptacles for rice; for securing the axe to the handle, etc. Women were doing the same work with bamboo, first drying the stalks by standing them upright before a fire. These fine bamboo strings are later used in making winnowing trays and for various kinds of beautifully plaited work. When employed in this way, or on other occasions, the women smoke big cigarettes as nonchalantly ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... time, in thin layers over this circular space, which is paved with little cobblestones. More oxen and a patient mule are being driven over it—around and around—until every kernel is trodden out by their hoofs. Later will come the tossing and the winnowing; and, when the grain has been thoroughly cleaned, it will be stored in great earthen jars for the purpose of sale or against ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... was as little like a religious fete day as one can imagine. At an early hour the winnowing machine rumbled up the road to the square beside the chateau. Under the circumstances each one must take his turn at getting in his wheat and oats, and there was no choice of day or hour. Besides, the ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... son of Cnut, died in March 1040. The place indeed was fatal to kings, for St. Frideswyde, in her anger against King Algar, left her curse on it. Just as the old Irish kings were forbidden by their customs to do this or that, to cross a certain moor on May morning, or to listen to the winnowing of the night-fowl's wings in the dusk above the lake of Tara; so the kings of England shunned to enter Oxford, and to come within the walls of Frideswyde the maiden. Harold died there, as we have seen, but there he was not buried. His body was laid at Westminster, ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... efforts of every man. Those capable of performing military duty, must perform it; and those physically incapable of wielding the bayonet and the sword, must wield the pen. It is no time to stand on ceremony or antecedents. The post of duty is the post of honor. In the mighty winnowing we must go through, the wheat will be separated from the chaff. And many a true man who this day stands forth as a private, will end as a general. And the efficient subordinate in the departments may be likewise exalted if he deserves it, provided the people have ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... who has been sitting here and talking; is it not rather a common mind, Fowler, that has played about between us? You and I and all of us have added thought to thought, but the thread is neither you nor me. What is true we all have; when the individual has altogether brought himself to the test and winnowing of expression, then the individual is done. I feel as though I had already been emptied out of that little vessel, that Marcus Karenin, which in my youth held me so tightly and completely. Your beauty, dear Edith, and your broad brow, dear Rachel, and you, Fowler, ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... been foreseen, came an experience which taught us seasonably that these redundant materials, crude and miscellaneous, required a winnowing and sifting, which very soon we had; and the result was, an incomparable militia. Chester shone conspicuously in this noble competition. But here, as elsewhere, at first there was no cavalry. Upon that arose a knot of gentlemen, chiefly those who hunted, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... tends to give the farmer a little more leisure? What is harvesting now, compared with what it was in the old time? Think of the days of reaping, of cradling, of raking and binding and mowing. Think of threshing with the flail and winnowing with the wind. And now think of the reapers and mowers, the binders and threshing machines, the plows and cultivators, upon which the farmer rides protected from the sun. If, with all these advantages, you cannot get a living without rising in the middle of the night, ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... Republic of Venice fought a good fight; to note how, by a most curious perversion of Scripture in the Greek Church, many of the peasantry of Russia were prevented from raising and eating potatoes; how, in Scotland, at the beginning of this century, the use of fanning mills for winnowing grain was widely denounced as contrary to the text, "The wind bloweth where it listeth," etc., as leaguing with Satan, who is "Prince of the powers of the air," and therefore as sufficient cause for excommunication from the Scotch Church. Instructive it would be also to note how the introduction ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... sum and crown of what is to be done for technical education, I look to the provision of a machinery for winnowing out the capacities and giving them scope. When I was a member of the London School Board, I said, in the course of a speech, that our business was to provide a ladder, reaching from the gutter to the university, along which every child in ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... decision in these cases, it seemed on the whole preferable to take the risk of including too much rather than the opposite, and to leave the task of further winnowing ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... He did not quite measure up to John's expectations. The Messiah was to purge the people of evil elements, winnowing the chaff from the wheat and burning it. His symbol was the axe. Jesus was manifesting no such spirit. Was ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... another set, for, like the fox in the fable, he knew he should only fare the worse. If the estate was large enough to stand the strain for two or three years, and the manager was a man of self-control enough to keep his temper, and firmness enough to persevere in a winnowing of the whole region round about, treating them meanwhile with decency, and paying them honestly and promptly, he would at last be able to get a set of trusty hands, and give all the negroes of the neighborhood such an understanding of him that they would be ready, if they ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Durdun Dagh, and reached the village of Koord Keui, on his lower slope. As there was no place for our tent on the rank grass of the plain or the steep side of the hill, we took forcible possession of the winnowing-floor, a flat terrace built up under two sycamores, and still covered with the chaff of the last threshing. The Koords took the whole thing as a matter of course, and even brought us a felt carpet to rest ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... occasionally chased the Imbozhwa, we should have been routed. I did not go near the fighting, but remained in my house to defend my luggage if necessary. The women went up and down the village with sieves, as if winnowing, and singing songs, and lullilooing, to encourage their husbands and friends who were fighting, each had a branch of the Ficus indica in her hand, which she waved, I suppose as a charm. About ten of the Imbozhwa are said to have been killed, but ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... wooden pestle (hala) until all the kernels are beaten loose from the straw. [198] It is then placed in a wooden mortar (luson) of hourglass form or with straight sides, where it is again beaten until the outside husks are loosened, and the grain is somewhat broken (Plate LVI). Winnowing is accomplished by tossing the contents of the mortar in shallow traps (igau), so that the chaff is blown away, while the grain falls back into ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... the common jack snipe seemed not a whit less mysterious than partridge drumming. It was usually heard on cloudy evenings, a strange, unearthly, winnowing, spiritlike sound, yet easily heard at a distance of a third of a mile. Our sharp eyes soon detected the bird while making it, as it circled high in the air over the meadow with wonderfully strong and rapid wing-beats, suddenly descending and rising, again ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... ride and weapon to wear"—through the hard years which had followed. These were bad masters every way, unthrifty, profligate, needy, and narrow-minded. The younger men who were supplanting them were introducing machinery, threshing machines and winnowing machines, to take the little bread which a poor man was still able to earn out of the mouths of his wife and children—so at least the poor thought and muttered to one another; and the mutterings broke out every ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... and large camps were built by private enterprise to be taken in time by the Government. Of course mistakes were made. Of course there were some dishonest contractors and some incompetent officials. But the breath, the winnowing blast of the national need was behind it all. By the end of the first year of war, the "problem of quartering the troops in the chief training centres had ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... water from the stream that ran through the lower ground over the entire property, and even to the topmost storey of his house. He laid a light tramway across the widest part of his estate, and sent the labourers to and fro their work in trucks. The chaff-cutters, root-pulpers, the winnowing-machine—everything was driven by steam. Teams of horses and waggons seemed to be always going to the canal wharf for coal, which he ordered from ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... winnowing.—The coffee-peeler, used for separating the bean from the pellicle, was formerly a large wheel revolving in a trough, the disadvantage of which was the flattening more or less of the bean when not thoroughly dry. A ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... a rough basic rock, and many of them were exceedingly well made and finely shaped; results requiring much patience and no small artistic skill. Oftentimes these mortars were made in the solid granite rocks or boulders, found near the harvesting and winnowing places, and I have photographed many such during ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James |
