"Sterile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Canaries, made it their custom to call on the coast of Guinea "to trade for negroes." Thus secured, they were disposed of in the slave-markets of Barbadoes and the West Indies. The New-England slave-market did not demand a large supply. Situated on a cold, bleak, and almost sterile coast, Massachusetts lacked the conditions to make slave-trading as lucrative as the Southern States; but, nevertheless, she disposed of quite a number, as the reader will observe when we examine the first census. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... Commons. The self-elected champions of the Christian faith who then ride into the lists are of a kind well calculated to make Piety hide her head for very shame. Rowdy noblemen, intemperate country gentlemen, sterile lawyers, cynical but wealthy sceptics who maintain religion as another fence round their property, hereditary Nonconformists whose God is respectability and whose goal a baronetcy, contrive, with a ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... largely made up of associations, memories, and suggestions that faithfulness of representation in picture or book gives to the natural man; but because of the fact that nature is almost infinitely rich, and the unassisted imagination of man but a poor and sterile thing, tending constantly towards some ossified convention. "Treasure Island" is a much better story than "The Wreckers," yet I, for one, shall never cease to regret that Mr Stevenson did not possess, when he wrote "Treasure Island," that knowledge of what men and schooners do in wild seas ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... more difficult to communicate on paper than this baseless ardour, this stimulation of the brain, this sterile joyousness of spirits. You wake every morning, see the gold upon the snow-peaks, become filled with courage, and bless God for your prolonged existence. The valleys are but a stride to you; you cast your shoe over the hilltops; your ears and your heart sing; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... we can see what a turning-point the time was in history. On the side of politics, selfishness and ambition were growing; on the side of personal life, vice. . . . It is a thing to be pondered on, that what has kept Greece sterile these last two thousand years or so is, I believe, the malaria; which is a thing that depends for its efficacy on mosquitos. Great men simply will not incarnate in malarial territory; because they would have no chance whatever of doing anything, with that oppression and enervation sapping ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the usurper of my property. Her husband as well as herself, were laborious and covetous; their good fortune had made no change in their mode of living, but they were as frugal and as eager to accumulate as ever. In their hands, money was inert and sterile, or it served to foster their vices. To take it from them would, therefore, be a benefit both to them and to myself; not even an imaginary injury would be inflicted. Restitution, if legally compelled to it, would be reluctant ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... here), and Heaven only to thank for it, which is a great fact. As for Mill's London Review (for he is quasi-editor), I do not recommend it to you. Hide-bound Radicalism; a to me well-nigh insupportable thing! Open it not: a breath as of Sahara and the Infinite Sterile comes from every page of it. A young Radical Baronet* has laid out L3,000 on getting the world instructed in that manner: it is very curious to see.—Alas! the bottom of the sheet! Take my hurried but kindest thanks for the prospect of your second Teufelsdrockh: ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Magellan Strait is great or small, a perilous journey or a mere day's travel, according to the mind and the transportation facilities of the voyager. Before four o'clock in the afternoon the coast was low and sandy to the westward, and it continued sterile and bare for long hours while the plane hung high against the sky with a following wind driving it on vastly more swiftly than its own engines could ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... object lesson not only to Akron but to all the state. It taught even the turbulent element that only harm could come through infraction of the law and through disrespect for rights of person and property. The remainder of the story is that I. W. W. disturbers have more sterile soil in Ohio to cultivate than in any of ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris
... powerful nations, became its strongholds. It was little Geneva in the midst of mighty foes plotting her destruction; it was Holland on her sand-banks by the northern sea, wrestling against the tyranny of Spain, then the greatest and most opulent of kingdoms; it was bleak, sterile Sweden, that gained victories ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... found ourselves in a bowlder-strewn basin amid rocky, sterile hills, evidently the offshoots and spurs of the Jeb-el-Gharr, which stood out a purple serrated mass on our left, and here we saw for the first time for many a month rain clouds piling up above the rocky heights. Their tops, catching the rosy glow from ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... the plan I pursued or the route I took; but they all reeled and staggered after me, the silence being only broken by groans and exclamations. I preserved a slow uniform pace, proceeding still in a south by east direction, that is, in a straight line for Perth. The same sandy sterile country was around, thinly clothed with ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... and twilled brims, Which spongy April at thy best betrims, 65 To make cold nymphs chaste crowns; and thy broom-groves, Whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves, Being lass-lorn; thy pole-clipt vineyard; And thy sea-marge, sterile and rocky-hard, Where thou thyself dost air;—the queen o' the sky, 70 Whose watery arch and messenger am I, Bids thee leave these; and with her sovereign grace, Here on this grass-plot, in this very place, To come and sport:—her peacocks fly amain: ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... accepted war in the hope of one day being able to dictate universal peace; for if peace obtained by glory and strength is great, fruitful, and magnificent, peace yielded by weakness and cowardice is sterile, disastrous, and dishonoring. The son of a workman, Pierre Simon still further admired the Emperor, because that imperial parvenu had always known how to make that popular heart beat nobly, and, remembering the people, from the masses of whom he first arose, had invited them ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... done and what ought not to be done, the liberty permitted to the husband, the liberty permitted to the wife, if the wife shall continue her work or profession or remain at home dependent on the husband's earnings, whether the marriage shall be fruitful or sterile—these are but a few of the questions left undecided. And thus to leave unguided each wife and each husband, with their own idea of what is good to do and what is evil, makes for narrowness and waste of effort; while further, our inability to set up a standard ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... explain the fact that he could pursue so long a road without ever issuing from its narrow rut? Whatever may be the variety of matter and of external forms, we see the inner form return everywhere with its sterile and eternal uniformity, and in spite of his so productive career, he never accomplished in himself the circle of humanity, that circle which we see joyfully traversed throughout by ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... south-western frontier outpost. In 1879 the Argentine Government determined to rid the country of the aborigines, or, at all events, to break their hostile and predatory spirit once for all; with the result that the entire area of the grassy pampas, with a great portion of the sterile pampas and Patagonia, has been made available to the emigrant. There is no longer anything to deter the starvelings of the Old World from possessing themselves of this new land of promise, flowing, like Australia, with milk and tallow, if not with honey; ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... is not as copious or rich as the Greek or Latin, this must not be laid to their charge, assuming that our language is not capable in itself of being barren and sterile; but it should rather be attributed to the ignorance of our ancestors, who, having (as some one says, speaking of the ancient Romans) held good doing in greater estimation than good talking and preferred to leave to their posterity examples of virtue rather than precepts, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... this immense waste. Ten days brought the caravan to Ummesogeir, a village situated upon a rock, with 120 inhabitants, who, separated by deserts, from the rest of the world, passed a peaceful and hospitable life, subsisting on dates, the chief produce of their arid and sterile soil. ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... later, the Etats Generaux assembled at Versailles; but their time was spent in bickerings and in sterile discussions while oppressed and panting France vainly awaited the salutary reforms they were expected to effect. From May, the date of their meeting, to the immortal night of the Fourth of August, when the nation entered upon an era that was to atone for so many disasters, ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... adieu—and, in doing so, naturally turn my thoughts to that country where the rights of the people consist not of sterile and metaphysic declarations, but of real defence and protection. May they for ever remain uninterrupted by the devastating chimeras of their neighbours; and if they seek reform, may it be moderate and permanent, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... the course of a long life. But in the active years, for this kind of woman, the mental life becomes one with the spiritual. A lusty serviceableness will issue from their union. If mental interests seem sterile, the cure, as far as the college is concerned with it, is to deepen, not to lessen the love of learning. The renewal of sincerity, humility and enthusiasm in the age-old search for truth is more necessary than the introduction of new courses, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... Impediments in the River. Return of the boats. An Alligator. Stokes' Bay. Narrow escape of an Officer. Change of Landscape. Pheasant-Cuckoos. A new Vine. Compass Hill. Port Usborne. Explore the eastern shore of King's Sound. Cone Bay. Native Fires. Whirlpool Channel. Group of Islands. Sterile aspect of the Coast. Visited by a Native. Bathurst Island. Native Hut and Raft. Return to Port Usborne. Native Spears. Cascade Bay. Result of Explorations in King's Sound. Interview with Natives. Coral Reefs. Discover ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... a deathless wreath may crown, Though he may win a sterile, hard renown, His name shall ne'er a sudden glow impart, Nor make the tear of admiration start; Ne'er in his plaudits shall warm blessings join! None cry, "The triumph of that man is mine!" But, when his greatness crumbles in the dust, Coldly exclaim, ...
— Vignettes in Verse • Matilda Betham
... everything—THESE we smirch, burn, and rack, torture and destroy—these we stamp upon till we crush out God's image therefrom—these we spit and jeer at, crucify and drown! THERE is the difference between you, the strong and wise of a fruitful olden time, and we, the miserable, puny weaklings of a sterile modern age. ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... absolutely untrue that nervousness is a disease of wealth. There are cases enough where lack of purpose and lack of routine tasks, as in the case of wealthy women, lead to a rapid demoralization and deenergization. It is also true that the search for pleasure leads to a sterile sort of strenuousness that breaks down the health, as well as inflicting ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... an honest pride even among the representatives of the West, perhaps diverting them from building another capital on the banks of the Mississippi? Would this country be richer if great capitalists locked up their money in State securities, instead of spending their superfluous wealth in reclaiming sterile tracts and converting them into gardens and parks? The very magnificence of Louis impressed such a people as the French with the idea of his power, and tended to make the government secure, until subsequent wars imposed such excessive taxation as to impoverish the people and drain ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... Siemens and Wheatstone came at an apter time than Hjorth's, and was more conspicuously made. Above all, in the affluent and enterprising hands of the brothers Siemens, it was not suffered to lie sterile, and the Siemens dynamo-electric machine was its offspring. This dynamo, as is well known, differs from those of Gramme and Paccinotti chiefly in the longitudinal winding of the armature, and it is unnecessary to ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... and persistent for several years (except in Larix), scattered along the twigs, spirally arranged or tufted, linear, needle-shaped, or scale-like; sterile and fertile flowers separate upon the same plant; stamens (subtended by scales) spirally arranged upon a central axis, each bearing two pollen-sacs surmounted by a broad-toothed connective; fertile flowers composed of spirally ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... edging, so after removing this have it broken into bits and put in a heap by itself. When the earth beneath is loosened, examine it carefully. If it is good old mellow loam without the pale yellow colour that denotes the sterile, undigested soil unworked by roots or earthworms, have it taken out to eighteen inches in depth and shovelled to one side. When the bad soil is reached, which will be soon, have it removed so that the pit will be ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... warned his audience of the one missing link in the chain of evidence—the fact that selective breeding has not yet produced species sterile to one another. But it is to be adopted as a working hypothesis like other scientific generalisations,] "subject to the production of proof that physiological species may be produced by selective breeding; just as a physical philosopher may ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... are a troop of soldiers so averse to this English expedition, that their serjeant is obliged to goad them forward with his halberd. To intimate that agriculture suffers by the invasion having engaged the masculine inhabitants, two women, ploughing a sterile promontory in the distance, complete this catalogue of wretchedness, misery, ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... which had first grown up on the inclement shores of Massachusetts Bay, and had been nourished and protected and spread abroad throughout the North and West as the richest heritage which sterile New England could give to the states her sons had planted; that outgrowth of absurd and fanatical ideas which had made the North free, and whose absence had enabled the South to remain "slave"—the township system, with its free discussion of all matters, even of the ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... suffered severely from this; indeed, in our theatres we have reached the topsy-turvydom of having the dramatist write for the players instead of having the players act for the dramatist. Sterile art is the general outcome. A great form of architecture perished with the architect who, forgetful of noble design, indulged in desperate tours de force and offered to the stonemason the opportunity of executing miracles ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... the caravan threw a giant shadow upon the sand. Ridge and wave of sterile earth broke it, confused it, made it an unintelligible, ragged, moving, and monstrous shade. The sun was red and huge. As it lowered to the desert rim Zeyn al-Din gave the order for the seven-hour halt. The orb touched the ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... This being a vital condition, the moth fails to withdraw the pollen; and inasmuch as the pollen is usually deposited close to the head of the moth, this flower would receive no pollen upon its stigma. This particular blossom would thus be both barren and sterile. None of its pollen would be carried to other stigmas, nor would it set a seed to perpetuate ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... hazel "gay-circles of anemones dance on their stalks." In the more open places the little wind flower, with its pretty leaves and solitary white blossoms, blooms in cheerful companionship with its fellows, and the more sterile parts of the hillside are snowed with the white plumes of the plantain-leaved everlasting. Downy yellow violets and the common blue violets grow everywhere and down on the sand near the river the birdfoot violet, with ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... when it becomes convenient. In such cases, even although examination of the pelvic organ shows nothing abnormal, all one's endeavours to secure conception frequently go unrewarded. Sometimes such a woman is not only sterile, but nervous, and in generally poor health; but the more common occurrence is that she remains fairly well until the time of the change of life, when she frequently suffers more, on the nervous side, than does the woman who has lived a ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... the trees, which the rich and luscious flesh of the fruit amply attested. Like a true Provencal, he passed from the gloom of despair to a joy that was half insane. He ran back to the top of the hill, and busied himself for the rest of the day in cutting down one of the sterile trees which had been ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... had little use for slaves at home, but for slave ships she had abundant use. With a sterile soil, and with the sea at her doors swarming with edible fish and beckoning to her sails, her hardy industry found its best field on the ocean. The fisheries were the foundation of her commerce. The thrifty Yankee sold the best ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... of thought does he give us fresh proof of the truism that no two opposing elements meet and fuse without both losing their original identity. You may place the bit of contentment in the mouth of ambition, so to speak, and jog along in your sterile course between the vast wheat fields groaning under the thousand-toothed plough and the gardens of delight swooning with devotion and sensuality. But cross ambition with contentment and you get the hinny of indifference or the monster of fatalism. We do not say that indifference ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... to keep it, and so occupied with pursuits most apt for acquiring it, that they had come to be the sponge of Spanish wealth. The best proof of this, continued the reverend sage, was that, inhabiting in general poor little villages and sterile tracts of country, paying to the lords of the manor one third of the crops, and being overladen with special taxes imposed only upon them, they nevertheless became rich, while the Christians, cultivating the most fertile land, were in ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... grasses at this season on dry and sandy fields and hill-sides. The culms of both, not to mention their pretty flowers, reflect a purple tinge, and help to declare the ripeness of the year. Perhaps I have the more sympathy with them because they are despised by the farmer, and occupy sterile and neglected soil. They are high-colored, like ripe grapes, and express a maturity which the spring did not suggest. Only the August sun could have thus burnished these culms and leaves. The farmer has long ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... custom of marriage was so subtile and so pervasive, that his heart demanded her sympathy for what he was suffering in abandoning her. The solitude into which he had plunged stretched before him so vast, so sterile and hopeless, that he had not the courage to realize it; he insensibly began to give it limits: he would return after so many ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... itself, a large, prominent structure, stands out on the slope of a sterile mountain side, the road sweeping up to its level in a long, elliptic curve. We find much people here congregated, and omnibuses and footfarers are still arriving and departing. Among the throng are three veritable Capuchin monks, thickly weighted with enfolding hoods ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... Petrarch has given to so beloved a fame. Sheltered by rocks, and in this part winding through the greenest banks, enamelled with a thousand wild flowers and water-weeds, went the crystal Sorgia. Advancing farther, the landscape assumed a more sombre and sterile aspect. The valley seemed enclosed or shut in by fantastic rocks of a thousand shapes, down which dashed and glittered a thousand rivulets. And, in the very wildest of the scene, the ground suddenly ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... to our village one winter day a stranger who had neither the air of a Schnorrer (beggar) nor of an itinerant preacher; nor, from the brief time he spent at the Beth-Hamidrash, where I sat pursuing droningly my sterile studies, did he appear to be a scholar. He was a lean, emaciated, sickly young man, but his eyes had the fire of a lion's, and his glance was as a god's. When he spoke his voice pierced you, and when he was silent his presence filled the room. From Eliphaz ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... society, and the simple, typical objects, forces, and laws of nature constitute the basis of all knowledge. These elements we desire to master. But to make them attractive to children, they should not be presented in bald and sterile outlines, but in typical forms. All actions and human relations must ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... the windows and upon the remaining woodwork was a crowd of military men, with here and there an Abbe with cross and mitre, a Commander of Malta, and a solemn Canon, sterile branches of this genealogical tree. Several among the military ones wore sashes and plumes of the colors of Lorraine; others, even before the union of this province to France, had served the latter ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... on the brink of the chasm, and gazed down at the bottom some hundred feet below, we could see that it was a wild stony place, more sterile than that we had traversed. In places there were traces of moisture, as if water sometimes trickled down, and where this was the case I could see that ferns were growing pretty freely, but on the whole the place was ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... . . a species of Triodia ('porcupine grass' or, incorrectly, 'spinifex' of explorers and residents) dominates sand ground and the sterile slopes and tops of ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... of life like one of the shallow pools which the ebbing sea has left upon its sands, numbers scarcely a hundred and a half. The men are fishers, for there is no other occupation to be followed on the sterile rock. Every day also the level sweep of sands is wandered over by the women and children, who seek for cockles in the little pools; the babble of whose voices echoes far through the quiet air, and whose shadows fall long and unbroken on the ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... to live nine years at Carthage—nine years that he squandered in obscure tasks, in disputes sterile or unfortunate for himself and others—briefly, in an utter forgetfulness of his true vocation. "And during this time Thou wert silent, O my God!" he cries, in recalling only the faults of his early youth. Now, the silence of God lay heavy. ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... there was no progression toward higher ideals of fitness and beauty. Rudimentary art displayed itself mainly in objects of worship, or in carvings on canoes and weapons, executed as talismans to ward off misfortune or to charm the unseen powers; but even this art was sterile and never grew of itself into civilized and ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... before marriage. This serves to disseminate venereal diseases among the general population, especially among innocent women and children. The consequence is, on the one hand, a considerable number of sterile marriages and on the other hand a high infant mortality. It need not be assumed, as we have already said, that vice is more prevalent to-day than in previous generations, but on account of the conditions of our social life diseases which accompany vice are now more widely disseminated than they ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... principle of association invoked by most schools (he means the various Socialist schools), "a principle essentially sterile, is neither an industrial force nor an economic law ... it supposes government and obedience, two terms excluded by the Revolution." (Idee Generale de la Revolution au XIX Siecle, 2 ed., Paris 1851, ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... I no longer expected any solution to the problem set before me for my grief, a grief, too, that was both sterile and mortal, a day came on which I had a conversation with my mother so startling and appalling that to this hour my heart stands still when I think of it. I have spoken of dates; among them is the 25th ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... and the standard-bearer of the counter-revolution. Disturbed by this reputation, and fearing to confirm it by his acts, M. de Polignac did nothing. His Cabinet, sworn to conquer the Revolution and to save the Monarchy, remained motionless and sterile. The Opposition insultingly taxed them with their impotence: they were christened "the Braggadocio Ministry," "the most helpless of Cabinets;" and to all this they gave no answer, except by preparing the expedition to Algiers, and by convoking the assembly ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... track joins the main road at Koom. By taking the less frequented track, we were unable to go through the "Malak al Niote," or "Valley of the Angel of Death," which lies about half-way between the capital and Koom. The valley is so called from its desolate and sterile appearance, though, if this be so, the greater part of Persia might with reason bear the same name. Be this as it may, the Shagirds and natives have the greatest objection to passing through it after dark. A legend avers that it is haunted by monsters having the bodies of men and heads of beasts ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... Dictionary," I must confess I have no wish to turn over another page of Voltaire. It is simply incredible to me that human beings possessed of the same senses as ours could find satisfaction for their imagination in the sterile moralising, stilted sentiment, superficial wit, and tiresome persiflage of that queer generation. I suppose they didn't really. I suppose they used to go off on the sly, and read Rabelais and Villon. I suppose it was only the preposterous "social world" of those days who ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... created in the foaming liquid by the straw, forgetting everything else. The luxurious leisure in which she consumed her potation made it last a long time, and it was not until her suction made only a sterile rattling in the straw that she looked up at ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... teachings of experience. But in England, limeing and manuring are so much matters of constant practice, that few soils are so improverished as many are in the United States, With land as naked and sterile as is much that can be found in the whole thirteen colonies between Maine and Alabama, English farmers could hardly pay their tithes and poor rates, to say nothing of other taxes, rent, and the coat ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... scale than ourselves. To combat these fallen spirits, to help the pure spirits who help us, and to help them to help us, such is our duty in this life, which is a medicine, the medicine of Plato, namely a punishment; sterile when it is not accepted by us, salutary when gratefully accepted by us, it then becomes expiation and in consequence purification. The part of the Redeemer in all this is the same as that of the spirits, ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... madness; for in the serene temples of the wise, the inmost shrine, which we carefully keep locked, is full of spiders' webs. All men, all, are fundamentally useless; nature tolerates, she does not need, she does not use them: sterile flowers! All—down to the fellow swinking in a byre, whom fools point out for the exception—all are useless; all weave ropes of sand; or, like a child that has breathed on a window, write and obliterate, write and obliterate, idle words! Talk of it no more. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on the door and went through. Medical-Surgical Officer Kelly Lightfoot was sitting on the deck, stowing sterile bandage packs into a lower locker. She looked up at Clay and smiled. "Well, well, you DID manage to tear yourself away from your adoring bevies," she said. She flicked back a wisp of golden-red hair ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... full of peril! The path that runs through the fairest meads, On the sunniest side of the valley, leads Into a region bleak and sterile! Alike in the high-born and the lowly, The will is feeble, and passion strong. We cannot sever right from wrong; Some falsehood mingles with all truth; Nor is it strange the heart of youth Should waver and comprehend ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... and the few streams, in their short and hurried course from the mountains, exerted only a very limited influence on the wide extent of territory. The soil, it is true, was, for the most part, sandy and sterile; but many places were capable of being reclaimed, and, indeed, needed only to be properly irrigated to be susceptible of extraordinary production. To these spots water was conveyed by means of canals and subterraneous aqueducts, ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... dignity at its best,—poor and broken, and half choked with weeds and briers; but even thus the weeds are fragrant herbs, and the briers are wild roses, of few and misshapen petals, but sweet, nevertheless. For this ruin was once a shrine too, that his mean hands and sterile soul did try most ineffectually to build up as a shelter for all that was ever worthy ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... was not the general sense of unfitness in the conditions of her life, neither was it dissatisfaction with Lady Bellair, or the want of the pressure of authority upon her unstable being; it was not the sense of loneliness and unshelteredness in the sterile waste of fashionable life, neither was it weariness with the same and its shows, or all these things together, that could have waked the youth of Florimel and kept it awake at this hour of the night —for night that hour is, ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... we found to be uninhabited, and even more bare and sterile than the one we had landed on; so, hoisting the small lugsail which the jolly-boat carried, we made over more to the north-west, towards Wollaston Island, the largest in the archipelago, and about the same distance away from us ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... instance one wishes to isolate the different varieties of bacteria found in milk. The method of procedure is as follows: Sterile gelatin in glass tubes is melted and cooled down so as to be barely warm. To this gelatin which is germ-free a drop of milk is added. The gelatin is then gently shaken so as to thoroughly distribute ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell
... the oldest son of a poor New Hampshire farmer, who found great difficulty is wresting from his few sterile acres a living for his family. Nearly a year before, he had lost his only cow by a prevalent disease, and being without money, was compelled to buy another of Squire Green, a rich but mean neighbor, on a six months' note, on very unfavorable ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... wife provided for him was a beautiful princess; Jacobea of Baden. The Pope blessed the nuptials, and sent the bride a golden rose, but the union was sterile and unhappy. The Duke, who was in the habit of careering through his palace in full armour, slashing at and wounding anyone that came in his way, was at last locked up. The hapless Jacobea, accused by Sibylla of witchcraft and other crimes possible and impossible, was ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... husband in his doorway, and her defiance had moved him from her path. Then she had been inspired by the fact that the man she loved was near her, that she had been wrongfully accused and was ready to fight. Afterwards, however, when she was alone, the sterile presence of Joel Mazarine, his merciless eyes, his hopeless religious tyranny, had worn upon her as his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... layer of cells, which is called the hymenium. This hymenium is composed of a number of swollen, club-shaped cells, called basidia, and close to them, side by side, are sterile, elongated cells, named paraphyses. In the family called Hymenomycetes there are mixed with these, and closely packed together, one-celled ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... golden-haired girl. But Baldassare was fifty-seven, and there was no sign of issue. The neighbours, who had nudged each other at one season, whose heads had wagged as their winks flew about, now accepted the sterile mating as of the order of things. Pretty Vanna, mother as she had been to her brothers and sisters, was to be a mother no more. There was talk of May and December. Baldassare was advised to lock up other treasure beside his florins; some, indeed, ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... sterile. Verdi seemed to have ceased writing. There were whisperings of an "Iago" written in collaboration with Boito, but it was awaiting ultimate criticism and final polish while the wonderful old master was engaged in revamping some of his early ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... "Example, alone, is sterile, I think," said the ex-girl-soldier of the Battalion of Death, buttering a crescent. She ate it with the delightful appetite of flawless health, and ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... curiosity and incentive; even reasoning from analogy is strictly forbidden him; he is shut up from Nature as in a room with no windows; the dictionary is his authority as absolute and final as it is flat and sterile. His very industry, being forced rather than spontaneous, makes him mentally, no less than physically, stoop-shouldered and near-sighted. It seems to be one of those mistakes of the past still so well lodged in tradition and class rivalry that ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... were then the fashion in Italy, and every part of the peninsula abounded in them. They bore names fanciful or grotesque, such as The Ardent, The Illuminated, The Unconquered, The Intrepid, or The Dissonant, The Sterile, The Insipid, The Obtuse, The Astray, The Stunned, and they were all devoted to one purpose, namely, the production and the perpetuation of twaddle. It is prodigious to think of the incessant wash of slip-slop ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... low fellow, to be heard of at the bar of the Black Badger. Mr. Toots selects this man as his instructor in fencing, betting, and self-defence. The Chicken has short hair, a low forehead, a broken nose, and "a considerable tract of bare and sterile country behind each ear."—C. Dickens, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... this occasion. Not only it was probable that Clithero had fled far away, but, should he have concealed himself in some nook or cavern within these precincts, his concealment was not to be traced. This arose from the nature of that sterile region. ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... driven out. They had turned Valencia into a prolific garden,—even to-day it is called the huerta,—their silk manufactures were known and valued throughout the world; their industry and frugality were, in fact, their worst crimes; they were able to draw wealth from the sterile lands which "Christians" found wholly unproductive. "Since it is impossible to kill them all," said Ribera, the representative of Christ, he again and again urged on the ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... sterile and uninteresting desert of early Russian history, towers, like the gigantic Sphynx of Ghizeh over the sand of the Thebaid, one colossal figure—that of Vladimir Sviatoslavitch; the first to surmount the bloody ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... the seasons short, the soil sterile, and so the settlers of Cape Cod were obliged to work hard to obtain a living. In consequence, they and their descendants became active, industrious, and energetic. Thus they laid the foundations for ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... and the dissemination of knowledge tending to support them. But the very opposite is, in fact, the case. From childhood upward, everything is done to make the minds of men and women conventional and sterile. And if, by misadventure, some spark of imagination remains, its unfortunate possessor is considered unsound and dangerous, worthy only of contempt in time of peace and of prison or a traitor's death in time of war. Yet such men are known to have ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... sterile assurance of these people. Their confession of faith was not a living, blooming thing that under continuous distress and delight, daily revealed itself as richer and more beautiful; not a constantly changing, flowing stream, with its ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... of the earth's surface is more irremediably sterile, none more hopelessly lost to human occupation, and yet, an eminent geologist has said, it is the wreck of a region once rich and beautiful, changed and impoverished by the deepening of its draining streams—the most striking and suggestive ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... time, they pass through the village of Lynn, with a glance at High Rock on the one side and a longer look on the beautiful peninsula of Nahant on the other. Between Lynn and Salem lies a rocky and sterile tract, to this day almost without an inhabitant, but not without its picturesque and beautiful spots, like that for instance about the little pond, which is crossed by the floating bridge, through the cracks of whose rude floor the water spouts ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... dark mind;[279] Again I seize the theme, then but begun, And bear it with me, as the rushing wind Bears the cloud onwards: in that Tale I find The furrows of long thought, and dried-up tears, Which, ebbing, leave a sterile track behind, O'er which all heavily the journeying years Plod the last sands of life,—where ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... one has died as a maker one may still live as a critic, and I will confess I am all for laxness and variety in this as in every field of art. Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me the instinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund. It is the tired man with a headache who values a work of art for what it does not contain. I suppose it is the lot of every critic nowadays to suffer from indigestion and a fatigued appreciation, and to develop a self-protective tendency ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... pleased to call the theoretical side of his labours—labours from which the youngest and least impressionable planeur might well have shrunk. He had traced through cold and heat, across the deeps of the oceans, with instruments of his own invention, over the inhospitable heart of the polar ice and the sterile visage of the deserts, league by league, patiently, unweariedly, remorselessly, from their ever-shifting cradle under the magnetic pole to their exalted death-bed in the utmost ether of the upper ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... fragrance of the hay; to hear the song of the Boblink, or the rhythmic whetting of the scythe; or passes the ends of those primitive, those pilgrim-fences of post and rail, that enter the brink of the river to mark the boundaries of the small, paternal, and though frequently sterile, the much loved fields into which this home of ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... measure. He said nothing, but one night took the book himself. He read things to her that had made his heart throb and dimmed his eyes, or filled him with delightful laughter, and they wearied or puzzled her, and seemed cold and sterile to himself. He began to lose courage, but he persevered. One night he read to her in Ruskin's eloquent prose, and came to that powerful and impassioned, if somewhat mystical, interpretation of the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... appear insignificant and debased, by all the conventions and petty, unoriginal judgments that go to the making of the rule of our society. The woman had to make her choice between love in an undignified poverty for which all her training had unfitted her, and a sterile ease and magnificence that gave her those opportunities which her temperament and education demanded. She chose for dignity and opportunity, was tempted to grasp at love, and thus finally came into a blind alley from which death was the ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... party soon stood, was not of an inviting aspect. It was sterile, naked, and very rocky, as Biarne had described it, and not a blade of grass was to be seen. There was a range of high snow-capped mountains in the interior, and all the way from the coast up to these mountains the land was covered with snow. In truth, a more forbidding spot could not easily have ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... to the wilderness that had lain sterile long, and he could forecast the grimness, but not the end of the coming struggle with rock and flood and snow. Other men had gone down vanquished in such a fight, he knew, and the forest they slept in had closed once more upon and hidden the little scars they made. Jimmy had also challenged savage ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... soil its growth is rapid; but the most valuable trees grow slowly among rocks on sterile soil, and seem to gather compactness and beauty from the very struggle which they make for an existence. In the Bahamas, in the most desolate regions, once flourished that curiously veined and much esteemed variety once known in Europe as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... is applied or in the diseased part. The bandage is only applied for a few hours each day, either two hours at a time or twice a day for one hour, and, while it is on, all dressings are removed save a piece of sterile gauze over any wound or sinus that may be present. The process of cure takes a long time—nine or even twelve months in the case ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... only studying, only analyzing the finite, is very apt to inspire the savant with a peculiar distrust of all spontaneous emotion. Ceasing to open his heart to that light from the Absolute, which ought to quicken it into bloom, it learns to dwell only in the sterile world of abstract formulas. If he could find algebraic signs for its expression, he would willingly believe in the immortality of the soul: the characters which he can never learn to comprehend, are precisely those in which dwell the intuitions of the infinite. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... fields and the forests. It is one thing to talk about plans or policies, but a plan or policy without a religious motive is like a watch without a spring or a body without the breath of life. The trouble, to-day, is that we are trying to hatch chickens from sterile eggs. We may have the finest incubator in the world and operate it according to the most improved regulations—moreover, the eggs may appear perfect specimens—but unless they have the germ of life in them all our efforts ...
— Fundamentals of Prosperity - What They Are and Whence They Come • Roger W. Babson
... barren, a. sterile, agenestic, infecund, unprolific, unprocreant; unproductive, unfruitful, unfertile, effete, desert; unprofitable, fruitless, unremunerative, empty; stupid, dull, unimaginative, prosaic, devoid, uninspiring, uninteresting. Antonyms: prolific, fecund, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... pleasant to the man of letters, his essays were arid and tedious. I never heard him lecture, but should imagine that he was an ideal University Extension lecturer. I do not mean this to be in the least complimentary to him as a critic. His book, "Illustrations Tennyson," was an entirely sterile exercise proving on every page that the author had no real perceptions about literature. It simply made creative artists laugh. They knew. His more recent book on modern tendencies displayed in an acute degree the characteristic inability of ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... named the New Forest.[1] It was said that William destroyed many churches and estates in order to form this forest, but these accounts appear to have been greatly exaggerated. The real grievance was not so much the appropriation of the land, which was sterile and of little value, but it was the enactment of the savage Forest Laws. These ordinances made he life of a stag of more value than that of a man, and decreed that anyone found hunting the royal deer should have both ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... these forms were created! And is it over now? Has the destroying element exhausted itself; or does it only rest, like the hundred-headed Hydra, to break forth with renewed strength, and desolate those regions which, pushed to the verge of the sea-shore, encircle the sterile interior as a modest wreath? I thank God that he has permitted me to behold this chaos in his creation; but I thank him more heartily that he has placed me to dwell in regions where the sun does more than merely give light; where it inspires and fertilises animals and plants, and fills the human ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... Or would you confine talking to the weather or the contents of the public prints? Would you have our ideas get hard and sterile for want of being moved? Do you advise that, like some tactful persons we—you—yes, you—all know and detest—we systematically let every subject ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... this ogress and child-queller was in a steep bye-street at Brighton; where the soil was more than unusually chalky, flinty, and sterile, and the houses were more than usually brittle and thin; where the small front-gardens had the unaccountable property of producing nothing but marigolds, whatever was sown in them; and where snails were constantly discovered holding on to the street doors, and other ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... central point of the the negative truth that nothing can be known is in fact a truth that guides us. [Transcriber's note: sic.] It leads us away from sterile and irreclaimable tracts of thought and emotion, and so inevitably compels the energies which would otherwise have been wasted, to feel after a more profitable direction. By leaving the old guide-marks undisturbed, you may give ease to an existing generation, but the present ease is ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... showed that there were some 180,000 souls in the twelve Masai tribes scattered over a district of nearly 20,000 square miles, from Lykipia in the extreme north to Kilimanjaro in the south. The country, although dry and sterile in the south-west, is exuberantly fertile in the east and north, and—particularly around the numerous ranges of hills, which rise to a height of 15,000 feet—equals in beauty the Teita, Kilima, and Kenia districts, and could well support a population a hundred times as large as the present ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... becomes conscious it is so obsessed by the shams and the shamelessness that surround it, that instead of devoting itself to the joys and enrichment of life, it feels impelled by the horrors on every side to take up the social system and attempt to put it right. This sterile pitfall is now the temptation of the greatest minds. Your Shelley, your Coleridge, even your Byron,—what did they do? Menaced by this same vortex of negative effort, sentenced to intellectual annihilation if they attempted to ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... family.[98] It must be remembered that this average, which is even higher than that found in Russia, the most prolific of European countries, is not quite the same as the number of children per marriage; but it indicates very great fertility, while it may be noted also that sterile marriages are comparatively rare among French Canadians, although among English Canadians the proportion of childless families is found to be almost exactly the same (nearly 20 per cent) as among the infertile Americans of Massachusetts. The annual Reports of the Registrar-General ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Lady Garnett and her intimates, of persons (the phrase of Steele's recurred to her as meeting it appropriately) "who had seen the world enough to undervalue it with good breeding," must seem to her at last a little sterile when she was conscious—never more than now—of how clearly and swiftly the healthy young blood coursed through her veins, dissipating any morbid imaginations that she might feel inclined to cherish. She looked out at life, in her conviction that ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... eyes rested with a curious smile on one of the bookcases. It contained works on hypnotism, telepathy, and psychological speculations in general; he had studied some of them with ironical amusement and others with a quickening of his interest. Amid much that he thought of as sterile chaff he saw germs of truth; and once or twice he had been led to the brink of a startling discovery. There the elusive clue had failed him, though he felt that strange secrets might be revealed ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... name, he had darted like a javelin at the legs of the refugee, startling him so much out of the perpendicular that the superstructure of plastic art came to the ground with a crash, top-dressing the sterile soil of the Campus Martius with a coat of manufactured plaster of Paris. Marius, blubbering over the shattered chimney-stacks of Carthage, could not have displayed a more touching classical spectacle than did that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... Indeed, the history of difficulty would be but a history of all the great and good things that have yet been accomplished by men. It is hard to say how much northern nations owe to their encounter with a comparatively rude and changeable climate and an originally sterile soil, which is one of the necessities of their condition,—involving a perennial struggle with difficulties such as the natives of sunnier climes know nothing of. And thus it may be, that though our finest products are exotic, the skill and industry which have been necessary to rear them, have ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... physical canon. The absurdity of these theories is well shown in the "Rules of Drawing Caricatures," illustrated by "mathematical diagrams."[20] Development and animation are impossible wherever an art is governed by this sterile and deadening code of law. The religious art of the Eastern Church has been stationary for centuries, confined within the narrow limits of hieratic conventions. Mount Athos has the pathetic interest of showing ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... harmless and inoffensive people, from Nova Scotia, is another instance of the revenge that natural laws inflict upon tyranny and injustice. Next to the persecuted Pilgrims crossing a dreary ocean in mid-winter to the sterile coasts of a land of savages for freedom's sake, history hardly furnishes a more touching picture than that of forty thousand homeless, friendless, starving Negroes going to a land already consecrated with the blood of the martyrs to the cause of ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... wasn't so, for what I read out of your words was our destiny, the curse of the Orzos; from the way of your thinking, I found out that everything is in vain; you too turned your head backward, you too looked into yourself and noticed there the thing that makes the perceiver sterile forever. You did not even notice what you have done; you could not grasp it with your reason, but the ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... the Archilette, distant seven miles, where the Mexican party had been attacked, and, leaving our encampment early, we traversed a part of the desert the most sterile and repulsive we had yet seen. Its prominent features were dark sierras, naked and dry; on the plains a few straggling shrubs—among them, cactus of several varieties. Fuentes pointed out one called by the Spaniards bisnada, which has ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... our spirits rose. We straightened in our saddles, we breathed deep, we joked. The country was scorched and sterile; the wagon-trail, almost paralleling the mountains themselves on a long easy slant toward the high country, was ankle-deep in dust; the ravines were still dry of water. But it was not the Inferno, and that one fact sufficed. After a while we crossed high above a river ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... knowledge or of experience? It is again the result of that untaught knowledge called instinct. Some kinds of eggs hatch in two weeks, some in three, others in four. The mother bird has no knowledge of this period. It is not important that she should have. If the eggs are addled or sterile, she will often continue to sit beyond the normal period. If the continuance of the species depended upon her knowing the exact time required to hatch her eggs, as it depends upon her having the incubating fever, of course she ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... out somehow that he had been wild and extravagant, that he had been sent to rusticate among rocks and hills so sterile there would be little chance for his wild acts to take root; but then, to some old ladies and young ones too, this ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... a mile east from Port Man is the western extremity of the more sterile island of the Levant, 5 m. from E. to W., and 1 from N. to S. The culminating point is in the centre of the island, the Pierres Blanches, on which there is a signal-tower, 423 ft. above the sea. Mica, amianthus, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... invaded by the genius of Moloch. In spite of the rebellion of his conscience, he performed terrible deeds, imagining that he was thus obeying the voice of a god. When he could not ravage the fields, Matho would cast stones into them to render them sterile. ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... toward the distant schoolhouse,—the eye cannot help but note them: they are black specks upon square miles of luminous white. What a multitude of sins this unstinted charity of the snow covers! How it flatters the ground! Yonder sterile field might be a garden, and you would never suspect that that gentle slope with its pretty dimples and curves was not the smoothest of meadows, yet it is paved ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... borne with resignation and without a murmur;" it also signifies "excitement, agitation, rancor, revolt full of reproach, premeditated vengeance, menace never ceasing to threaten if retaliation should ever become possible, feeding itself meanwhile with a bitter if sterile hatred." ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... that state. It is only remotely and potentially evil. It is a seed of evil, which however will not germinate in the good and blissful surroundings to which the soul has been transplanted, but remain for ever sterile, or rather, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... the country became far more dreary: it appeared nothing but a dry and sterile region, the soil being remarkably hard and slatey. Here we saw many curious figures, and we soon found that the inhabitants of this desert were mere ciphers. Sometimes they appeared in vast numbers, but only to be ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... Calcutta. On the following morning I was travelling over a flat and apparently rising country, along an excellent road, with groves of bamboos and stunted trees on either hand, few villages or palms, a sterile soil, with stunted grass and but little cultivation; altogether a country as unlike what I had expected to find in India as well might be. All around was a dead flat or table-land, out of which a few conical hills rose in the west, about 1000 feet high, covered with a ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... And the terrible omens before and after Actium, and the stars—the stars! Everything points to speedy destruction, everything! Every hour brings news of the desertion of some prince or general. As if from a watch-tower, I now overlook what is growing from the seed I sowed. Sterile ears or poisonous vegetation, wherever I turn my eyes. And yet! You, who know my life from its beginning, tell me—must I veil my head in shame when the question is asked, what powers of intellect, what talents industry, and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... by the ocean, on some sterile length of sand or rock, and amongst sea-faring people? Still, you are girls to be envied; for the sea has grand thoughts to tell you, and the rocks are full of meaning. The bracing air, the salt breeze, ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... process we as yet know very little. That it is a fermentation is certain, and it has been proved that it is produced by a definite species of bacterium which occurs on the indigo leaves. If the sterilized leaves are placed in sterile water no fermentation occurs and no indigo is formed. If, however, some of the specific bacteria are added to the mass the fermentation soon begins and the blue colour of the indigo makes its appearance. It is plain, therefore, that indigo is a product of ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... they are spoken of as the colony of Botany Bay, as a matter of fact there is no establishment there. Botany Bay is a humid, marshy, rather sterile place, not healthy, and the anchorage for vessels ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... of service validates its rightness by its intellectual results. Predatory and parasitic classes become intellectually sterile and ignorant of real life. A man who wants to serve men, must get close to them. If we carry a load uphill, we have to choose our footing, and will perforce become intimately acquainted with the law of gravitation. Nothing develops the intellect like heading a just cause ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... was that star's malignant gleam That ruled my hapless birth; and dim the morn That darted on my infant eyes the beam; And harsh the wail, that told a man was born; And hard the sterile earth, which first was worn Beneath my infant feet; but harder far, And harsher still, the tyrant maid, whose scorn, In league with savage Love, inflamed the war Of all my passions.—Love himself ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... left at or before daylight—that being the time they set in; by noon all is again quiet. Bezout Island is of the same formation as Depuch; and so are many of the broken ridges, with bare stony summits, of a dark brown hue, on the main near Cape Lambert, trending South-South-West. A more dreary sterile country can scarcely be seen; yet ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... be too strongly emphasized that consumption is transmitted by way of the floor; and if this relay-station be kept sterile there is little danger of its ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... character upon the mind of the worshippers. But he who offers his petitions expecting nothing more will not even attain this. 'If prayers,' says Mr. Lecky, 'were offered up solely with a view to this benefit, they would be absolutely sterile and would speedily cease.'[33] The purely subjective view of prayer as consisting solely in 'beneficent self-suggestion' empties the term of significance. Even Frederick Meyers, who lays so much stress upon the importance of self-suggestion ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... softly to the roadside. The ground was covered with rocky masses, scattered among shrub-oaks and dwarf-cedars, emblems of its sterile and uncultivated state. Among these it was possible to elude observation and yet approach near enough to gain an accurate ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... was indeed uninviting. Barren, sterile, brown as an autumn field; grey cliffs rose on all sides, the tops of which could not be discerned, for a heavy fog hung upon them and revealed only the dark base. Gulls and terns flew screaming overhead, and swooped about the strange ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... entered a fertile tract of country which had been literally turned into a garden by the skill and industry of the Carthaginian cultivators, at that time celebrated throughout the world for their knowledge of the science of agriculture. The rougher and more sterile ground was covered with groves of olive trees, while rich vineyards and orchards of fig and other fruit trees occupied the better soil. Wherever it was possible little canals leading water from reservoirs and dammed ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... the dust, and lived on dust, and out of the dust drew elements of beauty such as roses and lilies couldn't boast of. "That means," the crazy woman said, "that there's nothing so dry, or parched, or sterile, that God can't take it and fashion from it the most priceless treasures of loveliness, if we only had the eyes ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... marriage, especially if the couple fails to obtain a child for adoption; the parties hope to procure offspring by taking new partners; for the desire for children and pride and joy in the possession of them are strongly felt by all. The husband of a sterile wife may leave the house for a long period, living in the jungle and visiting other houses, in the hope that his wife may divorce him on the ground of desertion, or give him ground for divorcing her. On discovery of misconduct on the woman's part the husband will usually ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... up to similar views, Hamlet 'lost all his mirth.' This is the cause of his heavy disposition; of his having 'foregone all custom of exercise'—so 'that this goodly frame, the earth,' seems to him 'a sterile promontory,' a mere place of preparation for gaining the next world through penance and prayer. Verily, 'this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,' appears ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... Behind them was Ascher, Ascher and I suppose Stutz, who expressed realities in formulae, and, when the sums were done, extracted realities from the formulae again, achieving through the seemingly sterile processes new facts, fresh grasp of the things which are, greater power to deal with them. They knew and understood and held the whole world in leading strings, delicate as silk, ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... the Doctor and Lord Chatterino were good practical geographers, after they were once within the parallel of 77 degrees south, and Captain Poke, according to his own account of himself, had passed half his life in poking about among the sterile and uninhabited islands of the frozen ocean. What was there to prevent the most earnest wishes of all present from being gratified? The captain was out of employment, and no doubt would be glad to get the command of a good tight sea-boat; the strangers pined for home, and it was ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... General Hodgson, took its course across the Channel. Great things were expected as the result of this expedition, but it only enacted the old story of "The mountain in labour." The point against which this force was directed was the sterile rock of Bellisle, which, at the expense of two thousand lives, was captured. Thus disappointed, the people complained of the obstinacy of Pitt, and asked, sarcastically, what could be done with it? Nevertheless, if it was no use to England, it was a place of importance ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... world. Without those operations, which wear and waste the coast, there would not be wind and rain; and, without those operations which wear and waste the solid land, the surface of the earth would become sterile. But showers of rain and fertile soil are necessarily required in the system of this world; consequently, the dissolution of the rocks, and solid strata of the earth, and the gradual, flow, but sure destruction of the present land, ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... of bog-bean bloom and walked round the big boulders with which this sterile region is thickly strewn. The natives know nothing of Home or any other Rule, and you might as well speak to them of the Darwinian theory, or the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, or the Homeric studies of the ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... exemplification of the traditional Englishman whose trains of ideas run on the freight schedule—and was one of the most popular fellows in Lattimore. He gloried in his slavery to Antonia, and seemed to glean hope from the most sterile circumstances. ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... which in itself the judicious will hardly venture to ignore. It stands a little way off the loneliest reach of the Marshall and Harriston road, in an opening which was once a farm and is still disfigured with strips of rotting fence and half covered with brambles overrunning a stony and sterile soil long unacquainted with the plow. The house itself is in tolerably good condition, though badly weather-stained and in dire need of attention from the glazier, the smaller male population of the region having ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... Saint-Etienne, however, there was a change for the worse, and the road from bad became abominable, rising by an easy ascent between great sterile fields in which the only signs of vegetation were the everlasting pine woods with their dark verdure, forming a dismal contrast with the gray-white soil. It was the most forlorn spot they had seen yet. The ill-paved road, washed by the recent rains, was a lake of mud, of tenacious, slippery ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... the soul, Torn from its every stay, and crushed beneath Its many griefs, and spurning faith's control, Pants with an earnest longing for the death Which would for ever close its dark career, With the pale shroud and the remorseless bier; When the harsh, sterile nothingness of life, First breaks upon the hope-deluded breast, And the heart sickens with the bootless strife That wrings its chords, and longs to be at rest; Ev'n if the blow that frees it from distress, Should strike it into ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... observes, that all who apply themselves to polite literature do not always find from their own funds a sufficient supply to insure success. For such he labours; and teaches to gather, in the gardens of others, those fruits of which their own sterile grounds are destitute; but so artfully to gather, that the public shall not perceive their depredations. He dignifies this fine art by the title of PLAGIANISM, and thus ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... between State and State in the Confederation, there were everywhere groups of men who confronted much the same economic conditions. Between the farmer who tilled his sterile hillside acres in the interior of New England and the cultivator of the richer soil of the Piedmont in Virginia and the Carolinas, a greater identity of economic interests existed than the casual observer would have suspected. The feeling of hostility which circumstances bred in the followers ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... slowly up the leafy avenue at Fellside. He had been across the valley and up the hill to Easedale Tarn, and then by rough untrodden ways, across a chaos of rock and heather, into a second valley, long, narrow, and sterile, known as Far Easedale, a desolate gorge, a rugged cleft in the heart of the mountains. The walk had been long and laborious; but only in such clambering and toiling, such expenditure of muscular force and latent heat, could the man's restless soul endure ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... done That we should live and loathe the sterile sun, And with the moon wax paler as she wanes, And pulse by pulse feel ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... into the Waters of Fable, even the old stream Plegathanees. These, together, enter her northern gate rejoicing. Of old they flowed in the dark through the Hill that Nehemoth, the first of Pharaohs, carved into the City of Marvel. Sterile and desolate they float far through the desert, each in the appointed cleft, with life upon neither bank, but give birth in Babbulkund to the sacred purple garden whereof all nations sing. Thither all the bees come on a pilgrimage ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... even beautiful outcroppings are sometimes indications of noxious weeds hidden below the surface. Weeds are not unfrequently born from the very richness and exuberance of the soil, whilst many a dark and seemingly sterile stem conceals the embryo of fruit and flowers which a genial sunshine will call into ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... Abilech desertum.] Primo tendant de Ierusalem in supra dictam Gazam Palestinorum, inde ad Castellum Dayre, atque ex tunc exitur de terra Syriae, et intratur a superiori parte in desertum longum arenosum, et sterile, prope ad septem dietas, quod lingua eorum vocatur Abilech; tamen per illud inueniantur plura hospitia, vbi haberi possunt ad victum nccessaria. Et qui in eundo rectum iter tenet, veniet in Ciuitatem dictam, Balbes, quae ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation. v. 8 - Asia, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... at St. Kentigern stepped gloomily from the train at Whistlecrankie station. For the last twenty minutes his spirits had been slowly sinking before the drifting procession past the carriage windows of dull gray and brown hills—mammiform in shape, but so cold and sterile in expression that the swathes of yellow mist which lay in their hollows, like soiled guipure, seemed a gratuitous affectation of modesty. And when the train moved away, mingling its escaping steam with the slower mists of the mountain, he found himself ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a ride through the desolate plains and rugged rocks of Palestine, was diversified with startling adventures; and the fact of several of the powers of Europe and many of the tribes of Asia having chosen that sterile region for their battle-place, gave rise to some very odd coincidences. People from all the ends of the earth, who were lounging away their existence some three or four months before, without any anticipation of treading ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... the Sigurd Slembe of our own day, happier than his prototype in the consciousness that the ambition to serve his people has not been; altogether thwarted, and that his beneficent activity is not made sterile even ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... in the wastes of Speculation, nor the sterile din of Politics, were "the haunts meet for thee." Watching the yellow bees in the ivy bloom, and the reflected pine forest in the water-pools, watching the sunset as it faded, and the dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair and fleeting things into a tissue where light and ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... from one home to the other as they will. Parents are not as willing as before to let go their children; for whereas my grandmother had fifteen, I have none, and few of us have many. We are made sterile by your civilization. Tetuanui and I were happy and able to persuade the mothers of twenty-five to give their infants to us because we were childless and were chiefs and well-to-do. Our race is passing so fast through the miseries the white has brought us that ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... and it clings to any intruding substance. But this is the fertilizing part. Therefore, an insect which by chance displaces the pollen mass carries it off, as one may say, the wrong side up. On entering the next flower, it does not commonly present the surface necessary for impregnation, but a sterile globule which is the backing thereof. We may suppose that in the earlier age, when this genus flourished as the later forms of orchid do now, it enjoyed some means ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... thin line of flame extending from north to south. After all, I believe that it was not so destructive as we had supposed. At the same time, such fires constantly occurring on the prairies render them arid and sterile and prevent the growth of forest trees. Were any means taken to put a stop to their occurrence, willows and other trees would soon sprout up, and the prairies would be converted into humid tracts in which vegetable matter would accumulate, ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... the place that ought to have been filled in the literature of revolutionary preparation by the democracy of utility. Rousseau's fiction of the Sovereignty of the People was an arbitrary and intrinsically sterile rendering of the real truth in ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... dry bed of a winter stream, and, looking up the glen, I saw the Arab village of Kulonieh, at the entrance of the valley of Elah, glorious with the memories of the shepherd-boy, David. Our road turned off to the right, and commenced ascending a long, dry glen between mountains which grew more sterile the further we went. It was nearly two hours past noon, the sun fiercely hot, and our horses were nigh jaded out with the rough road and our impatient spurring. I began to fancy we could see Jerusalem from the top of the pass, and tried to think ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor |
