"Detritus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... out-bulging front of the glacier is about two miles wide, two hundred feet high, and its surface for a mile or so above the front is strewn with moraine detritus, giving it a strangely dirty, dusky look, hence its name, the "Dirt Glacier," this detritus-laden portion being all that is seen in passing up the river. A mile or two beyond the moraine-covered part I was surprised to find alpine plants ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... boulders, and shingle, through the middle of which, among sand-banks and shallows, the river proper takes its devious course. In the freshets, which occur to a greater or less extent every year, enormous volumes of water pour over these wastes, carrying sand and detritus down to the mouths, which are all obstructed by bars. Of these rivers the Shinano, being the biggest, is the most refractory, and has piled up a bar at its entrance through which there is only a passage seven feet deep, which is ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... fossil bed where it now rests; for I cannot conceive that such a mass and mixture of animal remains could have been heaped together in any other way. From the outline of this bed, it struck me that some natural obstacle or other had checked the detritus, brought down by the current, as sand and gravel are checked and accumulated against a log or other impediment athwart a stream, presenting a gradual ascent on the side next the current and a sudden fall on the other. Such, in truth, ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... mother he had so remained to this incredible age. And age was the impression that he profoundly presented. But it was age that a tough vitality in the man resisted; as though the assault of time wore it down slowly and with almost an imperceptible detritus. The great naked head and the wide Mongolian face were unshrunken; they presented, rather, the aspect of some old child. He was dressed with extreme care, in the very best evening clothes that one could ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... a whole century. This mighty turf pit, measured from the bottom of certain ravines, is often not less than seventy feet deep, and presents to the eye the view of successive layers of black burned-up rocky detritus, separated by thin ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... species evidently act much in the same way, with differences only in detail. The little carpenter stops a fragment rather longer than his own body, lies on it and brings it in contact with other pieces along his own sides. He thus obtains the skeleton of a cylinder. The largest holes are filled up with detritus of all kinds. Then these materials are agglutinated by a special secretion. The larva overlays the interior of its tube with a covering of soft silk which renders the cylinder watertight and consolidates the ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... commonplace. Of such was Hubert Eldon. In him, despite his birth and breeding, there came to the surface a rich vein of independence, obscurely traceable, no doubt, in the characters of certain of his ancestors, appearing at length where nineteenth-century influences had thinned the detritus of convention and class prejudice. His nature abounded in contradictions, and as yet self-study—in itself the note of a mind striving for emancipation—had done little for him beyond making clear the manifold difficulties strewn in ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... all the plaster, as by magic. Here or there a heap of whitish dust betrayed where some of its detritus ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... that he did so promptly, for, in less than a minute, and without the slightest premonition, the immense bank above them slid with a terrific rumbling noise into the river. The enormous mass of sand and vegetable detritus thus detached could not have been much, if at all, less than half a mile in extent. It came surging and hurling down— trees and roots and rocks and mud intermingling in a chaos of grand confusion, the great cable-like ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... improve the closer relationship between the two, the water-tanks are placed amongst the graves! but there are but few tanks still in good condition. After heavy showers, the surface drainage finds its way into the reservoirs, carrying with it the detritus of all the accumulated filth of the last year or two, and adding an infusion of human bodies, in all stages of decomposition. Still, the water is highly prized, and, strange to say, seems to have no noxious effects, ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... hazardous descent, they found the others awaiting them in a rock-shrouded cove. The barest standing-room was afforded by a patch of shingle and detritus. Alongside a flat stone lay three broad planks tied together with cowhide. The center plank was turned up at one end. This was the catamaran, which de Sylva had dignified by the name of boat. The primitive craft rested in ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... they sometimes left the flint standing as pillars at pretty short intervals, or they propped up the galleries with even more resistant material, cementing them with clay or with calcareous earth taken from the detritus. In spite of these precautions, landslips frequently occurred, and implements of stag-horn (Fig. 75) have often been flattened by the fall of the roof of the gallery. It is really curious to find implements of an exactly similar kind used for exactly similar ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... moist and wooded regions of the earth. Deriving sustenance, as they for the most part do, in connection with the decomposition of organic matter, they are usually to be found upon or near decaying logs, sticks, leaves, and other masses of vegetable detritus, wherever the quantity of such material is sufficient to insure continuous moisture. In fruit, however, as will appear hereafter, slime-moulds may occur on objects of any and every sort. Their minuteness retires them from ordinary ken; but such is the extreme beauty of their microscopic structure, ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... of this gravel in the way described seems to indicate that the ditch was built along the slope of a low hill forming the edge of the bottom land at that time, and that subsequently detritus was deposited above it and over the adjacent bottom land forming a smooth ground surface. Against this hypothesis it must be stated that no evidence whatever was found of more than a single deposit of sandy loam, although the exposures are good; but perhaps ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... confined in a bowl-shaped rim, broken down at the east side, through which a rivulet, which flows across the meadow, finds outlet. This is undoubtedly one of the many mountain lakes of the region, too shallow and with too sluggish a flow of water into it to clear itself of the detritus washed down from the disintegrating slopes above, hence it ultimately filled up and entered upon a new ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... in Japan that agriculture has attained a national and aesthetic importance reached nowhere else. Of the 150,000 square miles constituting Japan proper, two-thirds are mountains; large tracts of lowlands are useless rock wastes, owing to the detritus carried down by inundating mountain torrents.[979] Hence to-day arable land forms only 15.7 per cent. of the whole area. During the two hundred and fifty years of exclusion when emigration and foreign trade ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple |
