"Sterility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... about the development and birth of the child.) If this tear is repaired immediately no inconvenience usually results but if it is neglected it may produce a series of complications, some of which are falling of the womb, inflammation and even sterility. ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... theory of the Physiocrates, only transfers already existing wealth from one hand to another. What the merchants gain by it is at the cost of the nation. Hence, it is desirable that this loss should be as small as possible. Hence sterility!(316) But, the more important branches of business, especially wholesale trade, are connected with a transportation of goods (Verri), either from one place or from one period of time, into another. Here the genuine merchant ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... Lisbon. The distribution to their own friends of the 'loaves and fishes' was, as Morier says, the one steady aim of all aspirants to power; and measures of reform, much needed in education, in commerce, in law, were doomed to sterility by the factiousness of the men who should have carried them out. In the absence of principles Morier had to study the strife of parties, and his correspondence gives us lively pictures of the eloquent Castelar, the champion of a visionary Republic, the harsh, domineering Romero y Robledo, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... and the balloon moved slowly over a vast plateau of mountains: there, were extinct craters; here, barren ravines; not a drop of water on those parched crests; piles of broken rocks; huge stony masses scattered hither and thither, and, interspersed with whitish marl, all indicated the most complete sterility. ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... of the hill was strewed about with ant-hills constructed of dry dusty sand, and this was the only substance that could be called soil; but notwithstanding all this sterility there were trees of the eucalyptus family growing from twenty to forty feet high; and one was measured whose diameter was ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... disease had originated. It was plain enough that it used to be known in many localities where it has long ceased to be feared. Still it was and is remarkable to see what a clean bill of health in this particular respect our barren soil inherited with its sterility. There are some malarious spots on the edge of Lake Champlain, and there have been some temporary centres of malaria, within the memory of man, on one or more of our Massachusetts rivers, but these are harmless enough, for the most part, unless the millers dam them, when they are ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... etymology, in deriving the name, 'the valley of blessing,' from that morning's worship. Perhaps the name was older than that, and was given from a feeling of the contrast between the waste wilderness, which in its gaunt sterility seemed an accursed land, and the glen which with its trees and stream was indeed a 'valley of blessing.' If so, the name would be doubly appropriate after that day's experience. Be that as it may, here we have in vivid ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Panhellenic Gangs, organized juvenile Genius, early development of Germany, will-training in Girl graduates aversion to marriage of fecundity of sterility of Girls and boys, differences between coeducation for, dangers of education of education of, humanistic education of, manners in education of, more difficult than of boys education of, nature in education of, regularity in education of, religion in ideal school and curriculum ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... usually does in Egypt. The atmosphere was sad. Clouds of wild pigeons flew up to right and left of them, circling over the now diminishing crops and the little runlets of water that soon would die away where sterility's empire began. In low, yet penetrating, voices the camel men sang the songs of the sands, as they ran on, treading softly with naked feet. Hamza, who accompanied the little caravan with his donkey in case Mrs. Armine grew ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... father and mother first met over an operating table, dressed in the white sterility that leaves only the eyes visible. She wielded the trephine that laid the patient's brain bare, he kept track of the patient's life by observing the squiggles on the roll of graph paper that emerged from his encephalograph. She knew ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... people no more serious than a common cold, yet it is able to inflict much prolonged misery on its victims, while on the race its influence in the long run is even more deadly than that of syphilis, for gonorrhoea is the chief cause of sterility in women, that is to say, in from 30 to 50 per cent. of such cases, while of cases of sterility in men (which form a quarter to a third of the whole) gonorrhoea is the cause in from 70 to 90 per cent. The inflammation of the ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... worse effect. The upper classes, charmed and dazzled by the glare and glitter of Western science, threw themselves impulsively on the newly found treasures, and thereby condemned themselves to moral slavery and intellectual sterility. Fortunately—and herein lay one of the fundamental principles of the Slavophil doctrine—the imported civilisation had not at all infected the common people. Through all the changes which the administration and the Noblesse underwent ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... pistil to occupy a central position. Naturally, a fifth stamen would be only in its way, an encumbrance to be banished in time. In the figwort, for example, we have seen the fifth stamen reduced, from long sterility, to a mere scale on the roof of the corolla tube in other lipped flowers, the useless organ has disappeared; but in the beard-tongue, it goes through a series of curious curves from the upper to the under side ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... always admirable in a spectator, but from a leader we want something more.' 'It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art,' said another; while a third sighed over what he called 'the fatal sterility of the judicial mind,' and expressed a perfectly groundless fear that the Century Guild was becoming rational. For, with a courtesy and a generosity that we strongly recommend to other lecturers, Mr. Image provided refreshments for his audience after his address was over, ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... its haunting enigmas and unsolved mysteries an answer to the enigma of self. Like life, like truth, like love, like all realities viewed from the angle of human vision, the desert is a paradox. Its vast emptiness is more than full; its unashamed sterility is but the simile ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... is interesting about the ancient Persians. All the old authorities, especially Herodotus, testify to the comparative purity of their lives, to their love of truth, to their heroism in war, to the simplicity of their habits, to their industry and thrift in battling sterility of soil and the elements of Nature, to their love of agricultural pursuits, to kindness towards women and slaves, and above all other things to a strong personality of character which implied a powerful will. The early Persians chose the bravest and most capable of their nobles for kings, and these ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... qualities that flower in literature, eloquence, or statesmanship. Scarcely one of them has produced a book worth printing, a poem worth reading, or a speech worth listening to. They are struck with intellectual sterility. They go to college; they travel abroad; they hire the dearest masters; they keep libraries among their furniture; and some of them buy works of art. But, for all that, their brains wither under luxury, often by their own vices or tomfooleries, and ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... very efficiency eliminated itself. War had finally progressed to the point where even a minor nation, such as Cuba or Portugal, could completely destroy the whole planet. Eliminated wasn't quite the word. In spite of their sterility, the military machines still claimed their million masses of men, still drained a third of the products of the ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... that the constant insecurity of life and property in all but the central parts of the republic is such as to keep down the natural increase of a population never prolific, being made up of a combination of uncongenial races—whites and Indians, whose intermixture leads to sterility. ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... seem to be nature's most available means of producing new species." Yet the sterility of hybrids defeats that possibility, and rebukes the untruthful claim of the formation of new species. Nature, with sword in hand, decrees the death of hybrids, lest they might produce a new species. Moses wrote the rigid unchanging law ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... as he listened to the musical hum of the great humble-bees, or marked their ponderous flight from flower to flower, and watched the unpacking of their trunks for their work of suction, would have supposed that the multiplication or diminution of their race, or the fruitfulness and sterility of the red clover, depend as directly on the vigilance of our cats as do those of our well-guarded game-preserves on the watching of our keepers? Yet this Mr. Darwin has discovered ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... sheltered cove under the shadow of uplands on which a quaint village perched and dispersed itself on a country road in summer cottages; above these in turn rose loftier heights of barren sand or rock, with here and there a rank of sickly pines dying along their sterility. It had been harsh and cold all day when the boat moved, for it was running full in the face of the northeast; the river had widened almost to a sea, growing more and more desolate, with a few lonely islands breaking its expanse, and the shores sinking lower and ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... pleasure, but by anticipating some of the satisfaction which should exhilarate the following years. The heat of youth may spread happiness into wild luxuriance, but the radical vigour requisite to make it perennial is exhausted, and all that can be hoped afterwards is languor and sterility. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... a little examination. Butler claimed, justly, that his "Life and Habit" was an advance on Hering in its dealing with questions of hybridity, and of longevity puberty and sterility. Since Semon's extended treatment of the phenomena of crosses might almost be regarded as the rewriting of the corresponding section of "Life and Habit" in the "Mneme" terminology, we may infer that this view of ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... between the two cases consisting in the fact that the variation in the flower is not a useful, but a disadvantageous one, which can only be preserved by artificial selection on the part of the gardener, while the transformations that have taken place parallel with the sterility of the ants are useful, since they procure for the colony an advantage in the struggle for existence, and they are therefore preserved by natural selection. Even the sterility itself in this case is not disadvantageous, since the fertility of the true females has at the same time considerably ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... the disadvantage of the small part kept rich at the expense of the whole; for unless there be considerable attention paid to other parts of the land, besides those appropriated to the raising of tobacco, the manure will no longer be found on the plantation, and general exhaustion and sterility must follow. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... remark, however, before we go any further, that, notwithstanding the sterility of this part of the coast; it is not without importance, on account of the rich produce of the sea which bathes it. The agriculture of the waters as a celebrated naturalist has said, offers too many advantages, for the places that are adapted to ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... this purpose hid him in fire every night. When his mother discovered this, she wept and lamented. After that the bestowal of immortality was impossible. Demeter left the house. Keleus then built a temple. The grief of Demeter for Persephone was limitless. She spread sterility over the earth. The gods had to appease her, to prevent a great catastrophe. Then Zeus induced Hades (Pluto) to release Persephone into the upper world, but before letting her go, he gave her a pomegranate to eat. This ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... series of gentle inclinations, the mountain-torrent diverted or restrained, and the means of artificial irrigation, to sustain nature during the long droughts of summer, obtained. By the incessant labour of centuries this prodigy has been completed, and the very stony sterility of nature converted into the means of heightening, by artificial means, the heat of summer.... No room is lost in these little but precious freeholds; the vine extends its tendrils along the terrace walls ... in the corners formed ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Bavarian and Austrian peasants, who think that if you give the first fruit of a tree to a woman with child to eat, the tree will bring forth abundantly next year. On the other hand, the Baganda believe that a barren wife infects her husband's garden with her own sterility and prevents the trees from bearing fruit; hence a childless woman is generally divorced. The Greeks and Romans sacrificed pregnant victims to the goddesses of the corn and of the earth, doubtless in order that the earth might teem and the corn swell in the ear. When a Catholic priest remonstrated ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Catholic terms; and by so doing renew, enrich and explicate the content of those terms for those who follow them. Those who could not harmonize their own vision of reality with the current formulae—Fox, Wesley or Blake, driven into opposition by the sterility of the contemporary Church—were forced to find elsewhere some tradition through which to maintain contact with the past. Fox found it in the Bible; Wesley in patristic Christianity. Even Blake's prophetic ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... art to its external manifestation, we shall find similar reasons for its failure to delight or satisfy. The ambition of the Caracci was to combine in one the salient qualities of earlier masters. This ambition doomed their style to the sterility of hybrids. Moreover, in selecting, they omitted just those features which had given grace and character to their models. The substitution of generic types for portraiture, the avoidance of individuality, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Sterility, in whatever form, is what we want to avoid. Creativity is what we must recover—aliveness, growth, moving, wonder, reverence, a sense of being related to the vast motions of that ...
— An Interpretation of Friends Worship • N. Jean Toomer
... behind the blinds of her highest window, to one who loved her still, but rarely had time to visit her now, "look. That's John March's room. O sweet, how's he ever again to match himself to our littleness and sterility without shriveling down to it himself? And yet that, and not the catching of scamps or recovery of lands, is going to be his big task. For I don't think he'll ever go 'way from here; he's just the kind that'll always feel too many obligations ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... on both sides. But if one took the larger historic view, it would certainly have to be admitted that, while the excellence of French poetry was a magnificent Renaissance after a long period of something like sterility, the excellence of the novel was something more—an achievement of things never yet achieved; an acquisition and settlement of territory which had ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... is a tomb without cypresses, without inscriptions, without monuments, of which they have broken the gravestones, and the ashes of which appear to cover the earth which surrounds it with mourning, silence, and sterility. We cast our eyes back frequently from the top of every hill which we passed on this mournful and desolate region, and at length we saw for the last time, the crown of olives which surmounts the Mount of the same name, and which long rises above the horizon after ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... fourth killing disease. The victims of gonorrhoea are incalculable. Venereal diseases fill our hospitals, asylums, and workhouses. They are the principal causes of heart disease, apoplexy, paralysis, insanity, blindness in children, and of that life of sterility and pain to which so many women are condemned. It is said that chastity is the only real safeguard against venereal disease. But this is always said by people who have never stirred a finger to teach chastity, but who have only preached it. At any time there are at least a million of perfectly ...
— Safe Marriage - A Return to Sanity • Ettie A. Rout
... considerable elevation, as also most of the inland ones. They seemed to be composed of naked rocks, whose summits were capt with snow. Nor did the valleys appear to greater advantage. To whatever quarter we directed our glasses, nothing but sterility was ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... cattle-driven from one end of the civilized world to the other, cheated, beaten, bullied, and hunted into the streets to disgusting overwork, without daring to utter the cry for help that brings, not rescue, but exposure and infamy, yet revenging herself terribly in the end by scattering blindness and sterility, pain and disfigurement, insanity and death among us with the certainty that we are much too pious and genteel to allow such things to be mentioned with a view to saving either her or ourselves from them. And all the time we shall keep enthusiastically investing her trade with ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... produced it, wholly divested of ornament, would have been as foreign to my habits as repugnant to my feelings. I have therefore, as I would willingly conclude, hit upon the happy medium—between sterility and excess of decoration. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... smacks of wenching. Come, be seated, both. 'Tis as cheap sitting as standing. Mr Mulligan accepted of the invitation and, expatiating upon his design, told his hearers that he had been led into this thought by a consideration of the causes of sterility, both the inhibitory and the prohibitory, whether the inhibition in its turn were due to conjugal vexations or to a parsimony of the balance as well as whether the prohibition proceeded from defects congenital or ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the profession, anaemia forms the basis of a great number of morbid conditions. Hysteria, general debility, emaciation, sterility, various nervous affections, phthisis, in short, a perversion of almost any of the various physiological functions may be the direct result of anaemia. On the other hand, anaemia may be only a symptom or sequel of some other morbid condition—but ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... this time to write. His paper on Darwin, which had the merit of convincing on one point the philosopher himself, had indeed been written before this, in London lodgings; but his pen was not idle at Claygate; and it was here he wrote (among other things) that review of "Fecundity, Fertility, Sterility, and Allied Topics," which Dr. Matthews Duncan prefixed by way of introduction to the second edition of the work. The mere act of writing seems to cheer the vanity of the most incompetent; but a correction accepted by Darwin, and a whole review borrowed and reprinted ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has run its course, nature cries 'habet,' and nothing can alter its fate. It was not alone the merciless onslaughts of the white man that exterminated the buffalo. They died, and none came to take their places. They vanished, less on account of man's cruelty than by reason of their own sterility. Degenerates or regenerates, can't we leave the decision with a power that forever builds or destroys, in accordance with a law we do not understand, a higher law that comes from the source of all law, whatever that source may be? Don't think any more, but play for me. In spite ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... Diary of the too-much-neglected Celia Fiennes; to Pepys[55] and Grammont's Memoirs; to the days when hapless Catherine of Braganza, with the baleful "belle Stewart" in her train, made fruitless pilgrimage to Bladud's spring as a remedy against sterility. He sketches, with due acknowledgments to Goldsmith's unique little book, the biography of that archquack, poseur, and very clever organiser, Mr. Richard Nash, the first real Master of the Ceremonies; and he gives a full account of his followers ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... the shedding of the fruit just as the pits are hardening. When they are hard the fruit does not fall. So this June-drop question ties in with the complications of pollination and nutrition. We know from experiments on the sterility of the pear tree, if highly fed and cultivated, such as those I worked on in the city of Rochester, that those highly fed trees will have some self-fertilized pears. In all of the pears we got no pears resulted when pollinized with the pollen of the same variety, except on those well ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... of anything as God, or as forming part of God, which we cannot also think of as a Person, or as a part of a Person, as it is to produce a hybrid between two widely distinct animals. If I am not mistaken, the barrenness of inconsistent ideas, and the sterility of widely distant species or genera of plants and animals, are one in principle-sterility of hybrids being due to barrenness of ideas, and barrenness of ideas arising from inability to fuse unfamiliar thoughts into a coherent conception. I have insisted on this at some length ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... long-continued drought and heat; the ground is parched and rent; scarcely a blade of verdure is to be seen except in the beds of rivers, where the last pools of water seem about to evaporate, and leave the land under the dominion of perpetual sterility. Man and beast pant for fresh air and cool water; but no cool breeze comes. A blast, as if from the mouth of a furnace, greets the burning cheek; no blessed drops descend; the sky is clear as a mirror, without a single cloud to mitigate the intensity ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... for bark cloth beating, and striking the woman on the front of the body over the womb. It is also assisted by the wearing of the tight cane belt already mentioned. I could not hear of any system of using drugs or herbs to procure abortion; but herbs are used to produce general sterility, which they are believed to be effective ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... objects only for immediate pleasure, afford matter of the most instructive speculation to the philosopher, who studies the wisdom of nature through the medium of things. As, on the one hand, the summit of the mountain may be supposed the point of absolute sterility, so, on the other, the sandy desert, moved by nothing but the parching winds of continents distant from the sources of abundant rains, finishes the scale of natural fertility, which thus diminishes in the two opposite extremes of hot and dry, of cold and wet; thus is provided an indefinite ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... and St. Mark, against sudden death. St. Clara, against sore eyes. St. Erasmus, against the colic. St. Eutrope, against dropsy. St. Genow and St. Maur, against the gout. St. Germanus, against diseases of children. St. Giles and St. Hyacinth, against sterility. St. Herbert, against hydrophobia. St. Job and St. Fiage, against syphilis. St. John, against epilepsy and poison. St. Lawrence, against diseases of the back and shoulders. St. Liberius, against ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... increases in proportion to the inheritance we leave our children, no one could experience more fully than Napoleon, for no one had yet possessed so formidable a power on the earth; that the course of nature having made her sterility a hopeless evil, it was her duty to be the first to sacrifice the sentiments of her heart to the good of the state, and the personal happiness of Napoleon sad but powerful reasoning, which policy invoked in aid of the divorce, and of which this excellent ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the fluent mind in which every thought and feeling came readily to the lips. "Loose the knots of the heart," he says. We absorb elements enough, but have not leaves and lungs for healthy perspiration and growth. An air of sterility, of incompetence to their proper aims, belongs to many who have both experience and wisdom. But a large utterance, a river that makes its own shores, quick perception and corresponding expression, a constitution to which every morrow is a new day, which is equal ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... will observe the laws and ordinances of Parmenides. Empedocles brought to justice some of the principal of his city, and caused them to be condemned for their insolent behavior and embezzling of the public treasure, and also delivered his country from sterility and the plague—to which calamities it was before subject—by immuring and stopping up the holes of certain mountains, whence there issued an hot south wind, which overspread all the plain country and blasted ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the peasantry are built; for the Romans consecrated an extensive space and vast edifices to the funereal urns of their friends or their illustrious fellow-citizens. They were not influenced by that dry principle of utility which fertilized a few corners of the earth, while blasting with sterility the vast domain of sentiment and ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... the Whigs. Fox was defeated so hopelessly, that he gave up Parliament altogether, and his party followed his example. Pitt had not merely cut down the statelier trunks of Opposition, but he had swept away the brushwood, and smote the ground with sterility. His bold enterprise had not merely taken the citadel Of faction by storm, and driven its defenders, faint-hearted and fugitive, over the face of the land, but he had sown the foundations with salt. The total solitude of the Opposition benches, during the greater ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... camel. After proceeding for some miles they began to climb a range of mountains covered with heath, along beaten paths. On the summit there was suddenly a change of scenery. Behind was the monotonous sterility of the desert, and before a cultivated country, in every part of which were considerable camps in circular enclosures of from sixty to eighty tents over the plain. They perceived numerous horses and mules, as well as camels, ...
— Roger Willoughby - A Story of the Times of Benbow • William H. G. Kingston
... improved by the antagonism between the Roman Catholic and Presbyterian missions and the traders; each worked against the others, offering the natives the best of opportunities to fish in troubled waters. The result of all this was a rapid decrease of the population and frequent artificial sterility. The primitive population has disappeared completely in some places, and is only to be found in any numbers far inland among the western mountains. The situation is a little better in the north, where we find a number of flourishing villages along ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... like the distinctions of geography—existing to-day, forgotten to-morrow—and abolished by a stroke of the pen, or a trick of diplomacy. Russia, again, a mighty empire, as respects the simple grandeur of magnitude, builds her power upon sterility. She has it in her power to seduce an invading foe into vast circles of starvation, of which the radii measure a thousand leagues. Frost and snow are confederates of her strength. She is strong by her very weakness. But Rome laid a belt about the Mediterranean ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... the former,—to that new one in which was, and is, taught, that manufactures and commerce were the great and profitable pursuits of man, and that agriculture, because of the "constantly increasing sterility of the soil," was the least profitable of all. Hence it is that we see England to have been steadily passing on in the same direction, and devoting all her energies to the prevention of the establishment, in any country of the world, of markets in which the raw produce of the land could be ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... train of thought by an article in the North China Daily News of 10th July 1874, in which the writer speaks of China as "a luxuriant mental oasis amidst the sterility of Eastern Asia," and "possessing a literature in vastness and antiquarian value surpassed by no other." He goes on to say that the translations hitherto made "have conveyed to us a faint notion of the compass, variety, solidity, and linguistic beauties of that literature." ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... The phenomenon is so striking here that it is called New Englandism. Why are there so few large families outside the Irish and Canadian elements? Why are there seen so few children in the fashionable districts of our large cities? Why this blast of sterility with which the land is cursed? Look behind the phenomenon, and you will find the cause; and the finding will make you shudder. And if only those shudder who are free from stain, the shuddering will be scarcely audible. Onan and Malthus as ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... Good," is to Goethe simply the eternal stream of life, working slowly upwards, onwards, to unknown goals. All that opposes itself to this Life-stream is evil. Morality, a man-made local convention, is our present blundering method of assisting this great Force, and preventing its sterility, or dissipation. In his conception of the nature of this Life-stream Goethe is more Catholic and more ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... variations occurring in an individual advantageous to it (not to its associates), in the struggle for life, is perpetuated by inheritance, it is no wonder that the case of sterile ants gave him so much trouble. Accidental sterility is not favorable to the individual, and its being made permanent by inheritance, is out of the question, for the sterile have no descendants. Yet these sterile females are not degenerations, they are in general larger and ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... canons of usage; on the contrary, it recognizes in the variety of local and dialectical peculiarities a source of wealth which would be impaired by any normalization, and the drying up of which would threaten literature with sterility. Cultivated Germany is not an anarchy, but a federation of many small states, with a much more democratic constitution than such a unified state as France, of which state Paris is the monarch. The influence of Prussia, mostly misunderstood abroad, is confined to military and civil administration; ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... self-conscious introspection, grew that sterility of soul and mind, that dwindling of capacity, and individuality, which Amiel felt was taking place within him. A constant, aimless, inevitable habit of self-introspection was killing his mental life, before ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... winter keeps up to the vivacity of its d'ebut, you will have no reason to complain of the sterility of my letters. I do not say this from the spirit of the House of Commons on the first day,(341) which was the most fatiguing and dull debate I ever heard, dull as I have heard many; and yet for the first quarter of an hour it looked as if we were met ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... flame of burning wood was felt to be akin to the rays of the sun, and its very upward motion seemed an aspiration to its source. Sun and fire alike gave warmth, which meant life and joy; without them there reigned sterility and death. Do we not still speak of the sunshine of prosperity, and of basking in the rays of fortune? Do we not still speak of the fire of life, of inspiration, of love, of heroism? And thus when the tide of our being is at the flood, we instinctively think of our father ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... In the course of the same day that they have given way to some outbreak of temper, they may act with great self-denial and watchful kindness; but they can hardly expect their subordinates to be at ease with them. Another defect which prevents confidence, is a certain sterility of character, which does not allow of sympathy with other people's fancies and pursuits. A man of this character does not understand any likings but his own. He will be kind to you, if you will be happy in his way; but he has nothing but ridicule ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... fighting corruption, fighting the Servile State. Above all things he was fighting sterility, fighting it in the name of life—life with its richness, its variety, its sins and its virtues, with its positively outrageous sanity. "Thank you for being alive," wrote an ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... sculptured upon the Copan stelae. See, for example, Maudslay's pictures of stele N, Plate 82 (Biologia Centrali-Americana; Archaeology) inter alia. But they were much more widely used by women, not merely by maidens, but also by brides and married women, to heighten their fertility and cure sterility, and by pregnant women to ensure safe delivery in childbirth. It was their wider employment by women that gives these shells their peculiar ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... clothe their sentiments in the dress of imagery. To them nothing appears so disgusting as dry and lifeless uniformity; and instead of pursuing a middle course betwixt the extremes of profusion and sterility, they are only solicitous to shun that error of which Prejudice hath shown the most distorted resemblance. It is indeed but seldom, that Nature adjusts the intellectual balance so accurately as not to throw an unequal ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... features France is the same as ever. An oppressive air of solitude seems to hover over these rich and extended plains, while we are sensible that, whatever is the motive of the desolation, it cannot be sterility. The towns are small, and have a poor appearance, and more frequently exhibit signs of decayed splendour than of thriving and increasing prosperity. The chateau, the abode of the gentleman, and the villa, the retreat of the ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... of a few poor houses, with a small chapel distinguished from the rest by a belfry. Cultivation ceases just at the village; a few stunted pines are found still higher up, but there is no wood worth mentioning in the valley above Venose. This excessive sterility peculiarly characterises the valleys of Dauphin. The village of La Berarde is at a height of only 5710 ft., that of St. Christophe is 4825, and of Venose 3365, but the character of the scenery is, like that of Switzerland, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... by so few as almost to merit this description, and with a hazy background of remote mountains to the north-east. The margin of the actual coast nearest to the ship was indented with bays; and even rocks appeared in places; but the general character of the scene was that of a fierce and burning sterility. On this picture of desolation all stood gazing in awe and admiration for some minutes, as the day gradually brightened, until a cry arose from ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... decay from that Christian city, for surely it was yet more stiff and sterile when it had become a Moslem city. I am not so exacting as to ask any one to popularise such a word as "Constantinopolitan." But it would surely be a better word for stiffness and sterility to call it Stamboulish. But for the Moslems and other men of the Near East what counted about Byzantium was that it still inherited the huge weight of the name of Rome. Rome had come east and reared ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... it; whilst the boldly prudent, the thriftily selfish and ambitious, the imaginative and poetic, the lovers of money and solid comfort, the worshippers of success, art, and of love, will all oppose to the Force of Life the device of sterility. ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... cannot do better just here than to quote, even at some length, from his facile pen: "To say of man or woman that they have no imagination is to convict them of many actual and potential sins. Such a defect means obtuseness in manners and morals, sterility in arts and science, blundering in the general conduct of life. Children are often accused of having too much imagination, but in reality that is hardly possible. The imagination may run riot, and, growing by what it feeds upon, come dangerously ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... exception of the narrow districts around a few towns and villages, where small groups of population have retained something of their former energy and diligence, Mesopotamia is now, during the greater part of the year, given over to sterility and desolation. As it is almost entirely covered with a deep layer of vegetable earth, the spring clothes even its most abandoned solitudes with a luxuriant growth of herbs and flowers. Horses and cattle sink to their bellies in the perfumed leafage,[25] but after ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... sources for information about the Jewish religion is that, whatever else Judaism might be, it certainly offers no field for the exercise of deep insight or broad vision. This largely accounts for the manifest sterility and uncreativeness of present-day Judaism. To give new impetus to fruitful and creative thinking in Jewish life, it is necessary, in the first place, to counteract the paralyzing spell of these routine and conventional interpretations ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... me, returning the conversation, and replying it! a manner to make it drop. Acting thus, it is easy to see that I was mixed up in nothing, and what I shall have to relate now will have less of the singularity and instructiveness of good and faithful memoirs, than of the dryness and sterility ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... cultivated the arts; they were men who had descended from a cold northern climate, where nature did little to supply their wants, where hunger and cold could not be avoided but by industry and exertion; where, in one word, the sterility of nature was counteracted by the energy ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... with every element of prosperity and wealth showered upon it with Nature's fullest and most unwithdrawing hand, and sees, that, notwithstanding all this, the share of public wealth and strength drawn thence is almost inappreciable by the side of what is poured into the common stock by the strenuous sterility of the North. With every opportunity and means that Nature can supply for commerce, with navigable rivers searching its remotest corners, with admirable harbors in which the navies of the world might ride, with the chief articles of export for its staple productions, it still depends upon its Northern ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... moral dissolution. She hates all that has been done, yet can herself do nothing, and she represents, in symbol, that detestable condition of spirit which cannot create, though it sees the need of creation, and can only show the irritation which its own sterility awakens within it by destruction. All Hedda can actually do, to assert her energy, is to burn the MS. of Loevborg, and to kill herself with General Gabler's pistol. The race must be reformed or die; the Hedda Gablers which adorn its latest phase do ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... those fifty thousand soldiers who were to join our army as soon as the standard of liberty should be displayed in Belgium? Have we ever seen those treasures which they were to count into our hands? Can we either accuse the sterility of their country, or the penury of their treasure, or the coldness of their love for liberty? No! despotism and anarchy, these are the benefits which we have transplanted into their soil. We have acted, we have spoken, like ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... quack. I speak French, gentlemen; I speak nine languages, and can tell you the Hebrew for an old umbrella. The Gypsy's Elixir cures colds, gout, all nervous affections, with such cutaneous disorders as are diseases of the skin, debility, sterility, hostility, and all the illities that flesh is heir to except what it can't, such as small-pox and cholera. It has cured cholera, but it don't claim to do it. Others claim to cure, but can't. I am not a charlatan, but an Ann-Eliza. That is the ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... of primitive innocence, would not have required so much space as at present. Having no need of rearing animals for subsistence, no land would have been required for pasturage; and the earth not being cursed with sterility, there would have been no need of extensive tracts of country to permit of fallow land and the alternation of crops required in husbandry. The spontaneous and never-failing fruits of the garden would have been abundant for the simple wants of man. Still, that the human race might not be ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... New Orleans, there is a tree which nobody looks at without curiosity and without wondering how it came there. For a long time it was the only one of its kind known in the state, and from its isolated position it has always been cursed with sterility. It reminds one of the warm climes of Africa or Asia, and wears the aspect of a stranger of distinction driven from his native country. Indeed with its sharp and thin foliage, sighing mournfully under the blast of one of our ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... was idler and took itself less seriously than ours. The primal curse was not imposed on everybody as a duty. In seven years of growing appreciation Congreve came to think the little graces and humours the better part. That I believe to have been the first cause of his early sterility; but others helped to determine the effect. A certain indolence is of course implied in what has been said. There was the gout, and there were his unfortunate obesity and his failing sight. There was Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... spirit in the most revolting ways.... Rebels to the hierarchic order, ... they wished to substitute the mystical licence of sensual passions to wise Christian sobriety and obedience to laws.... Enemies of the family, they wished to produce sterility by increasing debauchery."[118] ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... The precious hours in gazing, but should haste To assimilate her offerings, and we From high life-elements, as doth the tree, Should grow to higher; so what we call Taste Is a slow living as of roots encased In the grim chinks of some sterility Both cramping and withholding. Art is Truth, But Truth dammed up and frozen, gagged and bound As is a streamlet icy and uncouth Which pebbles hath and channel but no sound: Give it again its summer heart of youth And it will be ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... earth"—[Greek text]; "in opere tuo," "in thy works." Man's work is too often the curse of the very planet which he misuses. None should know that better than the botanist, who sees whole regions desolate, and given up to sterility and literal thorns and thistles, on account of man's sin and folly, ignorance and greedy waste. Well said that veteran botanist, the venerable Elias ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... portabantur." 2, That at the time when Tacitus wrote, in the days of the Emperor Trajan, it had ceased to be so, and had come to import largely from Africa and Lybia, "sed nunc Africam potius et Egyptum exercemus." 3, That this was not the result of any supervening sterility or unfruitfulness, "nec nunc infecunditate laboratur," but was from causes which made it more profitable to purchase grain in the Egyptian or Lybian markets, "sed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... great Conservative party have so often been hired bravos or wandering minstrels with whom it can share no common conviction. I never cease wondering why it cannot produce a man of its own faith. There must be something inherent in its creed that produces sterility. ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... During these days a woman could never herself take the initiative in divorce; the husband was all-powerful. The first divorce of which we have any record took place in the year 231 B.C., when Spurius Carvilius Ruga put away his wife for sterility. Public opinion censured him severely for it "because people thought that not even the desire for children ought to have been preferred to conjugal fidelity and affection."[96] As the Empire extended and Rome became more worldly ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... to eat, and to enable them to eat all they want as often as they want. Subsistence will be pushed back, temporarily, an exceedingly long way. In consequence, the flood of life will rise like a tidal wave. There will be more marriages and more children born. The enforced sterility that obtains to-day for many millions, will no longer obtain. Nor will the fecund millions in the slums and labour-ghettos, who to-day die of all the ills due to chronic underfeeding and overcrowding, and who die with their fecundity largely unrealised, ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... which like the sea seem to present every where the same appearance, we contrived to lose ourselves completely. It was already midnight, and we knew not what road to take, in a country every where the same, and where fertility is as monotonous as sterility is elsewhere, when a young man on horseback, perceiving our embarrassment, came and requested us to pass the night in the chateau of his parents.* We accepted his invitation, which was doing us a real service, and we found ourselves all ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... world-worn, the over-subtle, the corrupted, while it ignores all normal healthy life, virtuous habits, pure affections, steady labor, honesty, and duty. It is an affectation, and because it is an affectation the school is struck with sterility. The reader desires in the poem something better than a juggler in rhyme, or a conjurer in verse; he looks 'to find in him a painter of life, a being who thinks, loves, and has a conscience, who ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... earth for human use have been multiplied twentyfold, while the wealth of the rich and the comforts of the poor have been extended in the same proportion. And all this in a country where the rigour of the climate, and sterility of the soil, seem united to set improvement at defiance. Let those who remember Scotland forty years since, bear witness if I speak truth ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... yoke. In Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and Maryland, at different times, strong movements have been made for emancipation,—movements enforced by a comparison of the progressive march of the adjoining free States with the poverty and sterility and ignorance produced by a system which in a few years wastes and exhausts all the resources of the soil without the ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... curiosity: it was not therefore without reason, that she grew weary of the life she was forced to lead at Peckham. The melancholy retired situation of the place was to her insupportable; and as she had the folly, incident to many other women, of believing sterility to be a kind of reproach, she was very much hurt to see that she might fall under that suspicion; for she was persuaded, that although heaven had denied her children, she nevertheless had all the necessary requisites on her part, if ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... farther south, the life is utterly chilled out of it. Now Hopedale lies behind a rampart of islands twenty miles deep; while the portion of the Arctic current which splits off at the head of Newfoundland, and pushes down through the strait, presses close past Caribou Island. This explains the sterility of the latter. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... be proved that all the races of men were perfectly fertile together, he who was inclined from other reasons to rank them as distinct species, might with justice argue that fertility and sterility are not safe criterions of specific distinctness. We know that these qualities are easily affected by changed conditions of life, or by close inter-breeding, and that they are governed by highly complex laws, for instance, that of the unequal fertility ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... country, supposed by many to be the region of cold and sterility, I could not have believed there was in it such a store of blessings yet to be drawn forth by the labor and enterprise of man, for succeeding generations. As yet, there are too many objects to tempt and attract the avarice of man to more mild, but more dangerous climates. But ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... selection, are: (1) A proof that all specific characters are (or once have been) either useful in themselves or correlated with useful characters (Chap. VI); (2) a proof that natural selection can, in certain cases, increase the sterility of crosses (Chap. VII); (3) a fuller discussion of the colour relations of animals, with additional facts and arguments on the origin of sexual differences of colour (Chaps. VIII-X); (4) an attempted solution of the difficulty presented by the occurrence of both very simple and very complex ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... occur in the yields from Rotundifolia vines. At times there are record-breaking yields and, again, small yields are reported, the small yields resulting from black-rot, coulure, wet weather, self-sterility, lack of cultivation, fertilization, lack of pruning, age of vines, and various other causes. In spite of this, Rotundifolia vines are said to be among the safest and most prolific of fruit-bearing plants. While in one of the largest Rotundifolia vineyards there ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... hide in a book-stall shop—made goods, and romance writers or dramatic authors who pride themselves on living to write, and who seek inspiration elsewhere than in regularity of habits and the work-table, have their efforts marked from the first by sterility. Obscure or famous, rich or poor, an artist must be an artisan and practise these fruitful virtues—patient application, conscientious technicality, absorption in work. When he seated himself at his table Dorsenne ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... traveller. Nevertheless, these conditions alternate with those of the handsome and extensive cities of the plateau and with the great mining regions, all of which—in point of interest and value—compensate for sterility elsewhere. As for the branch line from San Luis Potosi to Tampico, it passes through the same remarkable tropical zone as the Vera Cruz line. The mountain scenery upon this route is impressive, with dense woods and ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... establishment of parochial schools. What followed? An improvement such as the world had never seen took place in the moral and intellectual character of the people. Soon, in spite of the rigour of the climate, in spite of the sterility of the earth, Scotland became a country which had no reason to envy the fairest portions of the globe. Wherever the Scotchman went,—and there were few parts of the world to which he did not go,—he carried his superiority with him. If he was ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... have been essential to the accumulation and preservation of these great fortunes, or the mode of life which has accompanied their use or abuse, tend to diminish the number of children. Heiresses to very large fortunes usually therefore belong to families which are tending to sterility. And this has very probably been no unimportant factor in ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... should hardly be surprised, if some morose readers were to conjecture, that the poet had been thus simple rather from necessity than choice; that he had been restrained not so much by chastity of judgement, as sterility of imagination. ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... a horse in poor condition and in warm weather cannot go much over a day without water, and when the sterility of the country is considered, it will be readily seen what a disadvantage one labours under without camels, which can go ten days without water. Well can I sympathize with Mr. Giles when he states in his journal: "All I coveted from my brother ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... element of the English novel, has been felt to be peculiarly dependent upon the fashion of life in Britain. Blankenburg, another eighteenth-century student of German literary conditions, in his treatise on the novel[7], has similar theories concerning the sterility of German life as compared with English, especially in the production of humorous characters[8]. He asserts theoretically that humor (Laune) should never be employed in a novel of German life, because "Germany's political institutions and laws, and our nice Frenchified customs would not permit ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... said the Professor, "is a little spot of exquisite beauty in the midst of the glaciers, where a knoll of green grass and flowers peeps up in the surrounding sterility. It is one of ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... seldomer happens to the male sex than sterility to the female sex. Sometimes a temporary impotence occurs from bashfulness, or the interference of some voluntary exertion in the production of an effect, which should be performed ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... nest; while freedom, on the contrary, flourishes like the tannen, 'on the loftiest and least sheltered rocks,' and clothes with its refreshing verdure what, without it, would frown in naked and incurable sterility. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... between the sterility of first crosses and of hybrids—Sterility various in degree, not universal, affected by close interbreeding, removed by domestication—Laws governing the sterility of hybrids—Sterility not a special endowment, but incidental on other differences, not accumulated by natural ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... Sterility may be in the male or in the female. If due to the stallion, then all the mares put to him remain barren; if the fault is in the mare, she alone fails to conceive, while other mares served by the same stallion ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... interspecific hybrids either because the chromosomes fail to pair in meiosis or because the parent genes when brought together in the hybrid interact in some way deleterious to the formation of sex-cells. Furthermore, cytoplasmic sterility is likely to occur ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... six hundred miles further south, is a fertile land of plenty, but an exile told me that even in midsummer the forests around Verkhoyansk appear withered and grey, the very grass seems colourless, and the daisies and violets scentless immortelles. This sterility of nature seems to be confined to a radius of about twenty miles of Verkhoyansk, for beyond this arid circle trees flourish, grass grows freely as far as the timber line, while beyond it the tundra, from May until August, is gaily ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... husband was continually prying about to detect her secret hoards, and many and fierce were the conflicts that took place about what ought to have been common property. They lived in a forlorn-looking house, that stood alone and had an air of starvation. A few straggling savin trees, emblems of sterility, grew near it; no smoke ever curled from its chimney; no traveller stopped at its door. A miserable horse, whose ribs were as articulate as the bars of a gridiron, stalked about a field where a thin ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... in a less quantity than nature requires, or there is no prolific faculty in it; or there is a deficiency of a due proportion of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness; or there is a resolution of the generative parts. The Stoics attribute sterility to the obliquity of the yard, by which means it is not able to ejaculate in a due manner, or to the unproportionable magnitude of the parts, the matrix being so contracted as not to have a capacity to receive. ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... instincts and tendencies of man and beast; all the multitudinous forms of struggle, terror, anxiety and grief; all that makes life bitter to any living being, and, even as the Fathers were accustomed to say, the briars and weeds and sterility of the earth. Paradise Regained was believed to be indissolubly connected with Paradise Lost. The one was the explanation of the other. The one introduced the disease, the other provided ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... with an extra spice of mirthfulness in their composition, have given public record of their impressions in this respect. There are, however, certain facts to be considered which at least relieve him from the charge of literary sterility. A lecture often becomes famous, and is demanded by each succeeding audience, whatever the lecturer's preferences may be. There are lectures called for every year by audiences and committees which the lecturer would be glad never to see again, and which he never would see again, if he were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... then, briefly finish up the argument. Divorce cases are rare because they are almost exclusively based upon incompatibility of temper or persistent sterility. ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... upon written application; and prisoners of the first grade may subscribe for newspapers that contain no objectionable matter. But only a small proportion of the inmates is addicted to reading, and the opportunities for doing so are limited. And as months and years go by, the desolation and sterility of the place weigh heavier upon the spirit, the mind reduces its radius and grows inert, and stimulants stronger than current fiction are needed to rouse it. Prison, prison, prison; steel walls and gratings; the predestinate screechings and clangings of ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... greater part of the interior the rainfall is far less than the land requires. The ground becomes parched, the streets dry up, and the grasses wither, and the whole face of nature presents a scene of sterility. Sometimes there is no rain for long periods. There have been times when not a drop of rain fell for two years, and but for the heavy dews at night, a vast extent of land would have been absolutely turned to a desert. Cattle and sheep perished by the million, of starvation and thirst. ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... than any thing else, is all that ultimately remains of the immense body which time or accident had prostrated. Thus it would appear, that it is not less to the character of its woods than to the ravages of fire that New South Wales owes its general sterility. ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... Independent of the indelible associations with which it is connected, and the glorious deeds of which it has been the theatre, its appearance produces an extraordinary impression on the mind of the beholder. All is silent; the earth seems struck with sterility—desolation reigns in every direction. A space extending from Otricoli to Terracina, above sixty miles in length, and on an average twenty in breadth, between the Apennines and the sea, containing nearly four thousand square miles, in the finest part of Italy, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... avenue without having exchanged a single word. I felt deeply, as you may believe, how much this silence, on my part at least, was awkward, stiff, and ridiculous; but, as it often happens in circumstances which demand most imperatively the resources of eloquence, I was stricken with an invincible sterility of mind. I tried in vain to find some plausible subject of conversation, and the more annoyed I felt at finding none, the less capable I became ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... intense patriotism, his vital interest in politics, his large issues and his delight in vigorous national life. He confesses the decay of oratory under the blighting influences of imperialism, and the sterility of those pedantic disquisitions upon style which are the inevitable consequence of the lack of healthy subject-matter. Indeed, on the last page of his history Mr. Mahaffy makes a formal recantation of most of his political prejudices. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the falsest of false prophets. They resolutely shut their eyes to facts all around them, and devote columns upon columns of newspaper, magazine and book argument—imaginary pictures—to the immorality, mental sterility and innate improvidence of this people; and they do this for various reasons, none of them honorable, many of them really disreputable. In dealing with this negro problem they always start off upon a false premise; their conclusions must, necessarily, be false. In the first place, ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... feels on these Carnival days amidst the throngs of people. This solitude in the crowd is far more intense than solitude in a forest. It brought to my mind the thousand absurdities one commits; the sterility of my own life. 'I'm going to waste my life in some grubbing profession,' I said to myself. 'I'll wind up by becoming a teacher, a sort of English instructress. No; never that. I must seek an opportunity and the means to emancipate myself from this petty existence, or else plunge into ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... commandership. Colmenares, whom I have mentioned above, was commanded to search along those coasts where it was thought Nicuesa wandered abandoned. It was known that the latter had left Veragua, because of the sterility of the soil. The colonists instructed Colmenares to bring Nicuesa back as soon as he could find him and to assure him they would be grateful to him if, on his arrival, he succeeded in calming the dissensions which rent the colony. Colmenares accepted this mission, for he was a personal friend ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... commonwealth are at hand. There are regions in our land, and classes of our population, where the birth rate has sunk below the death rate. Surely it should need no demonstration to show that wilful sterility is, from the standpoint of the nation, from the standpoint of the human race, the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death; a sin for which there is no atonement; a sin which is the more dreadful exactly in proportion as the men and women ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... which, in some degree the Elizabethan poets offer, disappear; until filling the central years of the seventeenth century we reach an age as barren for inspiration of new song as the Wars of the Roses; although the great survivors from earlier years mask this sterility;—masking also the revolution in poetical manner and matter which we can see secretly preparing in the later 'Cavalier' poets, but which was not clearly recognised before the time ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... opposite errour, from torpid despondency, can come no advantage; it is the frost of the soul, which binds up all its powers, and congeals life in perpetual sterility. He that has no hopes of success, will make no attempts; and where nothing is attempted, nothing ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... the revolution in the woman's world, the woman in the modern American family, the career of the child, the passing of patriarchism and familiarism, the precarious hour, the trend as to marriage, race sterility and race suicide, divorce, the attitude of the church, the family, and the social revolution. The author finds that during the past half century the American family possesses unity, due to the fact that the period itself is marked by intrinsic oneness as the expression of an economic epoch, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... surveyed the generation to which he himself belongs, and after having scanned these wide domains of emasculation, these prairies of spiritual sterility, these vast plains of servility and irresolution, he has addressed to himself the questions: How does a whole generation become such? How was it possible to nip in the bud all that was fertile and eminent? And he has painted a ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... particular organ or part of the body. It may have a chief effect in one kind of organ, e.g. the wings or eyes, but usually affects several parts of the body. Thus the factor that causes rudimentary wings also produces sterility in females, general loss of vigour, ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... amid its scenes is ever present to one. In comparison, nature here is rude, raw, and forbidding; has not that maternal and beneficent look, is less mindful of man, runs to briers and weeds or to naked sterility. ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... steps, and very soon emerged from the cover of the woods, into an open space of more level ground, that had evidently been cleared of its timber, for the purpose of cultivation. But either the war or the sterility of the soil had compelled the adventurer to abandon the advantages that he had obtained over the wilderness, and already the bushes and briers were springing up afresh, as if the plow had never traced ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... leg of his trouser as he spoke. Mr. Plumer got up and stood in front of the fireplace. Mrs. Plumer laughed like a straightforward friendly fellow. In short, anything more horrible than the scene, the setting, the prospect, even the May garden being afflicted with chill sterility and a cloud choosing that moment to cross the sun, cannot be imagined. There was the garden, of course. Every one at the same moment looked at it. Owing to the cloud, the leaves ruffled grey, and the sparrows—there ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... in agricultural speculations',[534] and large sums were sunk in lands and improvements in the spirit of mercantile enterprise. The land was considered as a kind of manufacturing establishment, and 'such powers of capital and labour were applied as forced almost sterility itself to become fertile.' Even good pastures were ploughed up to grow wheat at a guinea a bushel, and much worthless land was sown with corn. Manure was procured from the most remote quarters, and we are told a new science rose up, agricultural chemistry, which, 'with much frivolity and many ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... her own wedded life turned to tragedy. Nero fell madly in love with Poppaea, and resolved to put away Octavia. At Poppaea's instigation she was accused of a base intrigue. The plot failed; the false charge could not be pressed home; she was divorced on the ground of sterility, and imprisoned in a town of Campania. A rumour arose that she was to be reinstated; the mob of Rome declared itself in her favour and gave wild expression to its joy. Poppaea's statues were cast down, Octavia's replaced. Poppaea was furious. She laid siege to Nero and won him ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... from the foretopmast-head one forenoon, as we were slowly gliding over the blue surface of the deep. As we got up with it, we saw that it was a long, low, almost barren island, a few trees only in the higher parts retrieving it from actual sterility. It was a wild, desolate, melancholy-looking spot, such as would make a man shudder at the very thought of being wrecked on it. At one end, inside a reef over which the surf was breaking violently, lay a dark object. As the officers were inspecting ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... flow towards the tributaries of the Rhone, and we were consequently in the high region where the waters of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean divide. Still there were no other signs of our being at such an elevation, except in the air of sterility that reigned around. It really seemed as if the river, so notoriously affluent in mud, had taken down ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... newly-acquired gold and garnered it to himself, fearful lest another stroke of ill-fortune should fall upon him. But instead of making him a coward it gave him courage. It did not warp his mind or steel his heart against humanity. No sterility settled upon him. His wrongs seemed to have fertilized his generosity, and ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... 9. STERILITY IN FEMALES.—Sterility in the female is sometimes caused by a morbid adhesion of the tube to a portion of the ovary. By what power the mouth of the tube is directed toward a particular portion ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... region of perpetual snows, and are upwards of eleven thousand feet in real altitude, yet their height from their immediate basis is not so great as might be imagined, as they swell up from elevated plains, several thousand feet above the level of the ocean. These plains are often of a desolate sterility; mere sandy wastes, formed of the detritus of the granite heights, destitute of trees and herbage, scorched by the ardent and reflected rays of the summer's sun, and in winter swept by chilling blasts from the snow-clad mountains. Such is a great part of that vast region extending north and south ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... Here however, by that extraordinary law of compensation which seems to be the most general law of the universe, the effects differed as much in quantity and time as in character—a remarkable efflorescence of literature in Germany being at once produced, to relapse shortly into a long sterility, a tardier but more constant growth following in England and Italy, while the effect in Spain was the most partial and obscure of all. The great names of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... tricks which Mr. Burbank has played with flowers and fruits. But the smiling Dame Nature sets her inexorable limits to "Burbanking"; she allows it to go about so far, and no farther. Freakish free verse, like freakish plants and animals, gets punished by sterility. Some of the "imagist" verse patterns are uniquely and intricately beautiful. Wrought in a medium which is neither wholly verse nor wholly prose, but which borrows some of the beauty peculiar to each art, they ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... over the big pile of manuscript before me certain things become clearer to me, and particularly the immense inconsequences of my experiences. It is, I see now that I have it all before me, a story of activity and urgency and sterility. I have called it Tono-Bungay, but I had far better have called it Waste. I have told of childless Marion, of my childless aunt, of Beatrice wasted and wasteful and futile. What hope is there for a people whose women become ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... and schools, to say nothing about sex relations, normal or abnormal; and in society at large to do nothing about the ancient evil of prostitution, to provide neither isolation nor treatment for the worst of contagious diseases, and to regard the blindness, feeble-mindedness, sterility, paralysis, and insanity which result from those diseases as afflictions which could not be prevented. The progress of medicine within twenty years, both preventive and curative, has greatly changed the ethical as well as the physical situation. The policy of silence ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... and idolatry. Their inhabitants were wild, and great sorcerers and magicians, who knew many herbs. They used the latter to kill by means of the breath or expiration infected with a poisonous herb, as we have said above. They are poor, not because of the sterility of the country, but because the Borneans, Camuzones, and others of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... gigantic—enterprises as are to be referred to them; for it was then that he composed his voluminous Pisgah-sight of Palestine, Church History and Worthies, not to speak of many minor writings. But the secret of his prolificness amidst surroundings which would have paralyzed most men into stark sterility admits of ready elucidation. Besides being endowed with great physical vigor and enjoying uninterrupted health. Fuller never wasted a moment, was an unweariable student at odd hours, and moreover supplemented the advantage of a matchless memory ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... diet is more suited to them than animal, which favours a denser population. Talent is elicited by the efforts required to overcome difficulties and hardships; and their natural birth-place is a country of frost and snow—of tempests—of sterility enough to give a spur to exertion, but not enough to extinguish hope. Where these difficulties exist, and give occasion to war and emulation, the powers of the human mind ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... a repetition of the scenes witnessed at the same time wherever the Irish strove to propagate the true faith. Later on it will be our pleasure to come back to this field and wonder at the growth of a blooming garden which has replaced the old sterility. ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... intimidated people who have not measured its essential weakness; but it will prevail with those degenerates only in whom the instinct of fertility has faded into a mere itching for pleasure. The modern devices for combining pleasure with sterility, now universally known and accessible, enable these persons to weed themselves out of the race, a process already vigorously at work; and the consequent survival of the intelligently fertile means the survival of the partizans of the Superman; for what is proposed is nothing ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... schemes, he had not been mistaken in foreseeing material for journalism, even for a book. Yes, he should certainly write a book on the Bahamas, if only to expose the monstrous system of misgovernment which accounted for the sterility into which these islands had fallen. The climate, in winter at all events, was superb. Sutherland and he lay about in delicious sunshine, under a marvellous sky, smoking excellent cigars, and talking over old Oxford ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing |
