"Alluvium" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... accomplishing the passage. The banks on each side seemed to be composed of hard river-mud with a thick covering of vegetable mold, so that I should imagine this whole district originated in a gradual accumulation of alluvium, through which the endless labyrinths of channels have worked their deep and narrow beds. The flood-tide as we travelled northward became gradually of less assistance to us, as it caused only a feeble current upwards. ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... surrounded by the most pleasing woodland scenery, and everything in the vicinity looks fresh and green. The creek near its junction with the lagoon contains some good waterholes five to six feet deep. They are found in a sandy alluvium which is very boggy when wet. There was a large camp of not less than forty or fifty blacks near where we stopped. They brought us presents of fish, for which we gave them some beads and matches. These fish we found to be a most ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... threaded their way through the throng, which ran in back-currents and cross-currents, leaving behind it upon the bars and gaming-tables an alluvium of gold. Dr. Slavens was not at any of the tables; he was not reeling against any of the bars; nor was he to be seen anywhere in the sea of faces, mottled with ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... watered by the Loire, infallibly attracts the traveler's eye. Sancerre crowns the topmost height of a chain of hills, the last of the range that gives variety to the Nivernais. The Loire floods the flats at the foot of these slopes, leaving a yellow alluvium that is extremely fertile, excepting in those places where it has deluged them with sand and destroyed them forever, by one of those terrible risings which are also incidental to the Vistula—the Loire ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... intervals along both sides of the river are many benches and terraces of alluvium, varying in width from a few feet to several miles, and comprising all the cultivable land in the valley of the river. Since the Verde is a mountain stream with a great fall, its power of erosion is very great, and its channel changes frequently; in some places several times in a single ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... weight, usually in the form of bulls or oxen. In the centre of the continent, upon which so much light has been recently thrown by Livingston, Stanley, and others, rocks are to be met with quartz veins containing gold, and thus auriferous alluvium has been formed. Western Africa was the first field which supplied gold to mediaeval Europe. Its whole seaboard from Morocco to the equator produces more or less gold. This small section of the continent poured a flood of gold into Europe, and ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... picked up later and carried some distance farther on its way. One of the most striking features of the river therefore is the waste accumulated along its course, in bars and islands in the channel, beneath its bed, and in flood plains along its banks. All this alluvium, to use a general term for river deposits, with which the valley is cumbered is really en route to the sea; it is only temporarily laid aside to resume its journey later on. Constantly the river is destroying and rebuilding its alluvial deposits, here cutting and there depositing ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... ability was something quite new to their experience.[194] It is the Latin "Via strata" Anglicized, and describes no mere track, but the elaborately constructed Roman causeway, along which the soft alluvium was first dug away, and its place taken by layers of graduated road metal, with the surface frequently ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... which was in their day the property of the Memmi family, the famous pupils of Giotto. The site of this villa overlooks the Valley of the Ladies, which figures in the framework of the "Novelle," and in which then there was a lake to which Boccaccio alludes, now filled up by the alluvium of the Affrico, the author's beloved river, and which runs through the valley and under the villa. The valley now forms part of the estate of Professor Willard Fiske. As the entire adventure is imaginary, and the "merry company" had no existence except in the dreams of Boccaccio, it is useless ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... inches in depth. It is in such places that "specking" may be carried on, which consists in walking slowly about with eyes to the ground, and picking up any nuggets that may be seen. Many thousand ounces of gold have been found in this simple manner. Where, however, the alluvium is deeper, a considerable amount of labour must be expended before gold can be won. In countries blessed with abundant rainfall the nuggets can be separated from the dirt by a comparatively simple arrangement ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... the heap, as though the architects of this bit of savagery had wished to add a touch of the street urchin humor to their terror, presented its horseless, unharnessed pole to no one knows what horses of the air. This gigantic heap, the alluvium of the revolt, figured to the mind an Ossa on Pelion of all revolutions; '93 on '89, the 9th of Thermidor on the 10th of August, the 18th of Brumaire on the 11th of January, Vendemiaire on Prairial, 1848 on 1830. The situation deserved the trouble and this barricade was ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... residue; remains, remanent, remnant, rest, relic; leavings, heeltap[obs3], odds and ends, cheesepairings[obs3], candle ends, orts[obs3]; residuum; dregs &c. (dirt) 653; refuse &c. (useless) 645; stubble, result, educt[obs3]; fag-end; ruins, wreck, skeleton., stump; alluvium. surplus, overplus[obs3], excess; balance, complement; superplus[obs3], surplusage[obs3]; superfluity &c.(redundancy) 641; survival, survivance[obs3]. V. remain,; be left ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... cotton-wood trees. The gunboats had forced their way through, pushing aside trees a foot in diameter. In about four miles we overtook the gunboat fleet just as it was emerging into Deer Creek. Along Deer Creek the alluvium was higher, and there was a large cotton-plantation belonging to a Mr. Hill, who was absent, and the negroes were in charge of the place. Here I overtook Admiral Porter, and accompanied him a couple of miles up ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... where water flows continuously, effects are produced that are exactly the opposite of those ascribed to water erosion. Instead of the running water cutting deeper into the earth it has partly filled the canon with alluvium, thereby demonstrating nature's universal leveling process. Even the floods of water which pour through them during every rainy season with an almost irresistible force carry in more soil than they wash out and ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... children old enough to perform some kind of labor. They were employed in the mines, or in the rivers rather (for it was alluvium gold only that the island offered to the greed of the so-called conquerors); they were employed on the plantations as beasts of burden, and in every conceivable capacity under taskmasters who, in spite of ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... made a careful study of the subject of this section. The general conclusions at which they arrive are that the intensity of the shock was greatest at places built on pliocene conglomerates, beds of clay superposed on compact old rocks, patches of alluvium, miocene formations of some thickness formed of repeated alternations of strata of incoherent marls and limestones or compact sandstones, beds of chalk, or somewhat ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... Metamorphic. Recent. Coral, alluvium, sand. Tertiary. (?) Limestones of Harrar. Jurassic. Antalo Limestones. Triassic (?). Adigrat Sandstones. Archaean. Gneisses, schists, slaty rocks. Igneous. Recent. Aden Volcanic Series. Tertiary, Cretaceous (?). Magdala group. Jurassic. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the stream first entered the pond the deposit was much deeper, for this five feet of alluvium had, in fact, been brought down by one small brook in the course of little more than fifty years. The pond had been formed fifty years previously, but already in so short a period. geologically speaking, all that end was silting up, and the little brook was making a delta, ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... down both turf- covered sides of each valley. For every 100 yards in length in a valley with sides sloping as in the foregoing cases, 480 cubic inches of damp earth, weighing above 23 pounds, will annually reach the bottom. Here a thick bed of alluvium will accumulate, ready to be washed away in the course of centuries, as the stream in the middle ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... they reach the sea, and the rivers—the Caicus, the Hermos, the Cayster, and Meander—which flow through them are effective makers of soil, bringing down with them, as they do, a continual supply of alluvium, which, deposited at their mouths, causes the land to encroach there upon the sea. The littoral is penetrated here and there by deep creeks, and is fringed with beautiful islands—Lesbos, Chios, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero |
