"Uninhabitable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... green, in the crisp frosts of October. The air on these mountain-tops is much rarefied, and so very clear and pure that objects at a great distance seem within the reach of an easy walk. The Yellowstone flows in the eastern portion of Montana through an uninhabitable desert called the Mauvaises Terres, or Bad Lands, which, mingling their soil with its waters, give it the yellow color from which it is named. These lands are vast wastes, covered with what appears to be pine ashes. No signs of vegetation are found, but they are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... then, it could not have been the purpose for which, before that date, our territorial system was devised. It is not clear that the founders of the Government expected even all the territory we possessed at the outset to be made into States. Much of it was supposed to be worthless and uninhabitable. But it is certain that they planned for outside accessions. Even in the Articles of Confederation they provided for the admission of Canada and of British colonies which included Jamaica as well as Nova Scotia. Madison, in referring to this, construes it as ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... living creatures, the world out of its own propensity made an inclination toward the south. Perhaps this may be attributed to a wise Providence (they affirm), that thereby some parts of the world may be habitable, others uninhabitable, according as the various climates are affected with a rigorous cold, or a scorching heat, or a just temperament of cold and heat. Empedocles, that the air yielding to the impetuous force of the solar ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... having, doubtless, existed for thousands of centuries. Then gradually the atmosphere becoming rarefied, the disc will again be uninhabitable like the terrestrial globe will one day become ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... built, over on the mainland," I told him. "They're all abandoned now. The first one was a conventional city, the buildings all on the surface. After one day-and-night cycle, they found that it was uninhabitable. It was left unfinished. Then they started digging in. The Chartered Fenris Company shipped in huge quantities of mining and earth-moving equipment—that put the company in the red more than anything else—and they began making burrow-cities, like the ones ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... in the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. Most of this country was practically unknown to Americans, and the great stretches of arid land which comprised large portions of it were considered worthless and uninhabitable. But a good many Americans had drifted across the border into the fertile plains of Texas, and settled there. As time went on, the stream of immigration increased, until there were in the country enough American settlers ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... other galaxy. It would take God Himself to do anything with such material, and I am not God. Therefore, when we have rid this world of atomics we will leave and you will start all over again. If you really try, you can not only kill all animal life on your planet, but make it absolutely uninhabitable for...." ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... are of rough unhewn stone. They are divided into large square rooms, always damp, cold, and uninhabitable. Beneath the straw roofs there usually hang long rows of the stuffed skins of foxes; for every Indian who kills an old fox receives, by way of reward, a sheep, and for a young one a lamb. The Cholos are therefore zealous fox-hunters, and they may possibly succeed in altogether extirpating ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... Genji Gartner had died there, after seeing Storisende grow to a metropolis and Poictesme become a Member Republic in the Terran Federation. The other planets were uninhabitable except in airtight dome cities, but they were rich in minerals. Companies had been formed to exploit them. No food could be produced on any of them except by carniculture and hydroponic farming, and it had been cheaper to produce it naturally on Poictesme. So Poictesme had concentrated ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... days have passed. A pension proving uninhabitable, and most of the better-class hotels being closed for the winter, I threw myself upon the mercy of an octroi official who stood guarding a forlorn gate somewhere in the wilderness. He has sent me to a villa ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... windiest, highest (on average), and driest continent; during summer, more solar radiation reaches the surface at the South Pole than is received at the Equator in an equivalent period; mostly uninhabitable ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... sailor, but also entails a great amount of labour on the light-keepers, and injury to the lantern. The combustion of the oil also produces a large quantity of carbonic acid gas, which is of a very deleterious nature, and in many cases rendered the light-keepers' rooms almost uninhabitable. Under these circumstances, the Trinity House made application to Dr. Faraday to investigate the subject, with a view to the discovery of some remedy. With his usual skill and sagacity, Dr. Faraday instituted a number of inquiries and experiments, and visited some of the principal ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... degree of which would be troublesome to us. Why, therefore, should it not be considered troublesome also to the Deity? For the earth itself, as it is part of the world, is part also of the Deity. We see vast tracts of land barren and uninhabitable; some, because they are scorched by the too near approach of the sun; others, because they are bound up with frost and snow, through the great distance which the sun is from them. Therefore, if the world is a Deity, as these are parts of ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... these I shall speak as plainly as I know how. But also, being an American and therefore by birth more indiscreet than Ian Hay, I shall speak as plainly as I know how of those traits in the English which have helped to keep warm our ancient grudge. Thus I may render both countries forever uninhabitable to me, but shall at least take with me into exile a character for ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... foresee was that, like army cholera, it would spread to the other camp, and once installed in the hostile countries it could not be dislodged until it had infected the whole of Europe, and rendered it uninhabitable for centuries. In all the madness of this atrocious war, in all its violence, Germany set the example. Her big body, better fed, more fleshly than others, offered a greater target to the attacks of the epidemic. ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... to make up his mind, though he obtained a respite from the Archbishop, to resign (which in the recurring frost of Whig hopes was not to be thought of), to exchange, which he found impossible, or to bury himself in Yorkshire. This was a real hardship upon him, because Foston, as it was, was uninhabitable, and had had no resident clergyman since the seventeenth century. But whatever bad things could be said of Sydney (and I really do not know what they are, except that the combination of a sharp wit, a ready pen, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... formerly occupied by Macedon and the other states of Greece is now Turkey in Europe. In the northern part of it is a vast chain of mountains called now the Balkan. In Alexander's day it was Mount Haemus. This chain forms a broad belt of lofty and uninhabitable land, and extends from the Black Sea ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... lectularii potens remedium contra quartanum est, si ab inscio aegro cum vehiculo congrua potentur; mulierum morbis medentur et uterum prolapsum solo odore in mum locum restituunt.] Let him note that most of the inns of this region are quite uninhabitable, for this and other reasons, unless he takes the most elaborate precautions. . ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... in the house, which could be construed into a spiritual visitation. Has such a manifestation occurred?" he eagerly inquired. "Has it? has it? Am I to add her name to the list of those who have found the house uninhabitable?" ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... our projectile experts. The first time I ever saw one he came into my mountain hut. Knowing only that he was "varmint" I endeavoured to kill him quickly with a spade. Alas! the spade fell just a moment too late and henceforth that hut was uninhabitable for a month. The only way to get one out of the house is to pour buckets of cold water on it. That keeps the tail down (unlike a horse, which cannot kick when his tail is up); but when his tail goes up, then look out! The skunk is also more dreaded by the cowboy ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... the equinoctial line, which cuts the islands of Maluco. There are many others on the other side of the line, in the tropic of Capricorn, which extend for twelve degrees in south latitude. [40] The ancients affirmed that each and all of them were desert and uninhabitable, [41] but now experience has demonstrated that they deceived themselves; for good climates, many people, and food and other things necessary for human life are found there, besides many mines of rich metals, with precious gems and pearls, and animals ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... looped, turned back upon themselves, narrowed into gleaming veins, widened to miniature lakes on whose bosom the clouds, the birds and the stars were mirrored. They were like a crystal inlay covering the face of the tules with an intricate, shining pattern. No place was ever more deserted, alien, uninhabitable, making no compromise with ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... supplied a system of balances if left to itself. Some forms of insect life are so prolific that but for the voracity and industry of the birds the world would become almost uninhabitable. ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... owing to the continual exactions of the neighbouring Bedouins, who descend in winter from the mountains of Belka and Kerek, and pasture their cattle amidst the fields. The heat of the climate of this low valley, during the summer, renders it almost uninhabitable; the people then go nearly naked; but their low huts, instead of affording shelter from the mid-day heat rather increase it. At this period violent intermittent fevers prevail, to which, however, they are so much accustomed, that they labour in the ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... land-mark tower, closing in the horizon-altogether, as Carey said, a thorough "allegro" landscape, even to "the tanned haycock in the mead." But the summer sun made the place dazzling and almost uninhabitable, and the visitors, turning from the glare, could hardly see the casts and models that filled the shelves; nor was there anything in hand; so that they let themselves be hurried away to share the midday ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... order makes one sun sufficient for the whole earth. If it were of a larger size at the same distance, it would set the whole globe on fire and the earth would be burnt to ashes; and if, at the same distance, it were lesser, the earth would be all over frozen and uninhabitable. Again, if in the same magnitude it were nearer us, it would set us in flames; and if more remote, we should not be able to live on the terrestrial globe for want of heat. What pair of compasses, whose circumference encircles both heaven and earth, has fixed such just dimensions? That star does ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... was speedily rendered uninhabitable, and was destroyed by the falling stones; but two others—Herculaneum and Pompeii—which already had suffered from the down-pour of ashes, were gradually filled with a flood of water, sand, and ashes, which came down the side of the ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... domestic animals. The fruit of this immense plant is aromatic and delicate, and its seeds are at present worth far more than their weight in gold, since from them are to spring thousands of plants by means of which it is believed the uninhabitable portions of the desert may be made to support ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... water by draining all subsoil water into certain water courses, either artificial or natural. Subsoil drainage is not a modern discovery, as it was used in many ancient lands, and was extensively employed in ancient Rome, the valleys and suburbs of which would have been uninhabitable but for the draining of the marshes by the so-called "cloacae" or drains, which lowered the ground-water level of the low parts of the city and made them fit to build upon. The drains for the conduction of subsoil water are placed at a certain depth, with a fall toward ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... might add, for the benefit of those who have forgotten their maps of the universe, is a satellite of A-411, which, in turn, is one of the largest bodies of the universe, and both uninhabited and uninhabitable. Antri is somewhat larger than the moon, Earth's satellite, and considerably ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... house, had left it with precipitation, alledging, among other causes of retreat, that they could not sleep for frightful noises, and that my poor brother certainly walked after his death. — In a word, the house appeared uninhabitable; the barn, stable, and outhouses were in ruins; all the fences broken down, and the fields ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... WEST.—West of Missouri the country was still a wilderness overrun by Indians, and by buffalo and other wild animals. Many believed it to be almost uninhabitable. Pike, who (1806-7) marched across the plains from St. Louis to the neighborhood of Pikes Peak and on to the upper waters of the Rio Grande, and Long, who (1820) followed Pike, brought back dismal accounts of the country. Pike ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... of the State of Nevada has been completed in conformity with law, and thus our excellent system is firmly established in the mountains, which once seemed a barren and uninhabitable waste between the Atlantic States and those which have grown up on the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the priest, to the general surprise of all present, fed upon grass, asserting that, in times of need, the inhabitants of that country were accustomed to live upon herbs and roots. The knight returning to the king, and relating what had happened, affirmed that the country was uninhabitable, vile, and inaccessible, and only affording food to a beastly nation, living like brutes. At length the king released Rhys, having first bound him to fealty by solemn oaths ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... says Grote, "showing that he must have conceived the history of Sybaris in a very different form from that in which it is commonly represented"; third volume of De Non, who disagrees with Magnan as to the site of Sybaris, and says the sea-shore is uninhabitable! Tuccagni Orlandini, Vol. XI., Supplement, p. 294; besides the dictionaries and books of travels, including Murray. I have availed myself, without other reference, of most ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... Ispahan in Persia, 1619, in his letter to the Marquess of Bedmar, makes mention of greater cold in Ispahan, whose lat. is 31. gr. than ever he felt in Spain, or any part of Europe. The torrid zone was by our predecessors held to be uninhabitable, but by our modern travellers found to be most temperate, bedewed with frequent rains, and moistening showers, the breeze and cooling blasts in some parts, as [3062]Acosta describes, most pleasant and fertile. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... their asylum. He opened door after door, went up and down creaking steps, disturbed the birds who had flown in through the open archway, and still clung to their last summer's nest; but he found nothing save uninhabitable rooms, with dirty plastered walls, or without any plaster at all. Every where draughts, gaping doors, and windows boarded up. Some oats had been shaken out in the large saloon; and a few rooms looked as if they might have been ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... rushed into the region of the dreaded Pole. All signs of the canal had disappeared, and before us lay only a vast uninhabitable field of ice. I stood at the levers, frozen rigid with the intense cold, but with my eyes ever on the flying object before me, while visions of my beloved one, now so close to death, passed rapidly through my fevered brain. As if Death had thus planned to torture me, before ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood
... survived might be nothing but lichens, diatoms, and such microscopic organisms as those which give red snow its colour; while, if it became hotter, the pleasant valleys of the Thames and Isis might, be uninhabitable by any animated beings save those that flourish in a tropical jungle. They, as the fittest, the best adapted to the ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... an end, if only we can conceive it in complete isolation, and be sure that so isolated it remains valuable. Bread is good. Is bread good as an end or as a means? Conceive a loaf existing in an uninhabited and uninhabitable planet. Does it seem to lose its value? That is a little too easy. The physical universe appears to most people immensely good, for towards nature they feel violently that emotional reaction which brings to the lips the epithet "good"; but if the physical universe were not ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... the space of fifty-five years; and this carried on without aid from us, or from any one:—This unfortunate land has resisted to the utmost of its powers and is doing so still; and it has been surrounded for long by our said enemies, and is as it were destroyed and uninhabitable, and the greater number of its towns, castles, and strongholds have become desert and wild, covered with forest and scrub, inhabited by wild beasts, with the exception of some few small places that are very poor and miserable, and though at ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... After his choice had been narrowed down by a process of elimination he had to spend several hours in each of two or three hotels, in the room intended for J. P., so that he could detect any of the hundred noises which might make the room uninhabitable to its ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... the entire population of the satellite. Then—for like all dangerous vermin they multiplied rapidly—they had overflowed to the first and fifth satellites—the others were uninhabitable—and finally to the dangerous surface of Jupiter itself. Everywhere they had gone, they had taken droves of Greca's people to be their slaves, "and the source of their food," added Greca, with a shudder; a statement that was at the moment ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... refuge for our sinners. Besides convicts and assigned servants whom we transported to our colonies, we discharged on their shores scapegraces and younger sons, for whom dissipation, despair, and bailiffs made the old country uninhabitable. And as Mr. Cook, in his voyages, made his newly discovered islanders presents of English animals (and other specimens of European civilisation), we used to take care to send samples of our black sheep over to the colonies, there to browse as best they might, and propagate their precious ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... unconscious now. The doctor said he would remain so for at least twenty-four hours, and it didn't seem to me that the journey would do him any particular harm. The roof had been stripped off the inn where we were, and the place was quite uninhabitable, so we should have had to have moved him somewhere. We put him in the tonneau of the car and covered him up. They have carried him now into a bedroom, and Sarson ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... construction highly useful in a river peculiarly liable to floods from sudden thaws; which sometimes occasion such an increase of the waters, as to render the lower stories of the houses in the adjacent parts of the city uninhabitable. The bridge itself was destroyed by a similar accident, in 1709, for want of a timely removal. Its plan is commonly attributed to a monk of the order of St. Augustine, by whom it was erected in 1626, about ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... allotted us instead of our bivouac field, and as on the following day it rained hard, we were not sorry. Our satisfaction, however, was short-lived, for the hut roofs were of wood only, and leaked in so many places that many were absolutely uninhabitable and had to be abandoned. At the same time some short lengths of shelter trench which we had dug in case of shelling were completely filled with water, so that anyone desiring shelter must needs have ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... substances cannot be evaporated, they would accumulate to such a degree as to render the ocean uninhabitable by living creatures, had not God provided against this by the most beautiful compensation. He has filled the ocean with innumerable animals and marine plants, whose special duty it is to seize and make use of the substances thus swept ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... mile from here there lives in an almost uninhabitable cabin an old lady who is called "Aunt Eliza." I saw her first one cold day last winter, when I called and found her in bed sick with pneumonia. We ministered unto her as we best could, providing ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 49, No. 3, March, 1895 • Various
... to much the same thing whether we depend for our enjoyment entirely on the regular order of custom, or entirely on the caprices of accident. I have never had to vex myself now, because this thing is mislaid, or that thing is lost; because the room in which I live is uninhabitable, and I must have it repaired; because somebody has broken my favorite cup, and for a long time nothing tastes well out of any other. All this I am happily raised above. If the house catches fire about my ears, my people quietly pack my things up, and we pass away out of the town in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... young girl, as if the tone of her companion had patronized and piqued her. She turned as she spoke and looked up the sad, lonely river. The moon was making its veiled face seen through the gray heaven, and touching the black stream with hints of melancholy light. On either hand the uninhabitable shore rose in desolate grandeur, friendless heights of rock with a thin covering of pines seen in dim outline along their tops and deepening into the solid dark of hollows and ravines upon their sides. The cry of ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... who, in the midst of their brags of the great Hannibal, and the nobility of their Phoenician original, fell by the hand of Scipio. Nor indeed have the Cyrenians, derived from the Lacedemonians, nor the Marmaridite, a nation extended as far as the regions uninhabitable for want of water, nor have the Syrtes, a place terrible to such as barely hear it described, the Nasamons and Moors, and the immense multitude of the Numidians, been able to put a stop to the Roman valor. And as for the third part of the habitable earth, [Akica,] whose nations ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... winds, made a deep impression upon visitors from the Mediterranean;[362] and when such facts were contrasted with the scorching blasts that came from Sahara, the resulting theory was undeniably plausible. In the extreme north the ocean must be frozen and the country uninhabitable by reason of the cold; contrariwise, in the far south the ocean must be boiling hot and the country inhabitable only by gnomes and salamanders. Applying these ideas to the conception of the earth as a sphere, Pomponius Mela tells us that the surface ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... Mars' gravity to help them, they began bombarding the two stations, and anything that attempted to approach them, with gamma and atomic explosive bombs. Meanwhile they amused themselves occasionally by planting a gamma-ray bomb in each of Mars' major cities. They made Mars uninhabitable for Solarians as well as for Mirans, at least until the deadly slow-action atomic explosives wore off, ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... This little village of Kamsk lies, like an island, habitable and healthy, in the midst of the uninhabitable district. It is situated in the very center of the Baraba. The emigration caused by the Tartar invasion had not yet depopulated this little town of Kamsk. Its inhabitants probably fancied themselves safe in the center of the Baraba, whence at least they thought they ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... and many others fell sick and died. News came of the death of Sir John Popham in England, and presently the weary and disappointed settlers abandoned their enterprise and returned to their old homes. Their failure spread abroad in England the opinion that North Virginia was uninhabitable by reason of the cold, and no further attempts were made upon that coast until in 1614 it was visited by Captain John Smith. [Sidenote: First exploration of ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... distributed by the authorities, each soldier went to seek his borrowed home. They were received by their hosts with a very ill grace and assigned the most atrociously uninhabitable parts of the houses. The girls of the city were not indeed among those who were most dissatisfied, but a strict watch was kept over them, and it was considered not decent to show pleasure at the visit of ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... cats. It will be remembered that Columbus married Philippa, third daughter of the navigator Perestrello, lived as a mapper with his father-in-law, and thence travelled, between 1470 and 1484, to Guinea, where he found that the equatorial regions are not uninhabitable by reason of the heat. He inherited the old seaman's papers, and thus arose the legend of his learning from a castaway pilot the way to the New World. [Footnote: Fructuoso writes that in 1486 Columbus gave food and shelter to the crew of a shattered Biscayan ship; the pilot ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... of the two ladies. Such of the crew as had saved their hammocks have been told to place them under the forecastle where they would have to stow themselves as best they could, their ordinary quarters being absolutely uninhabitable. ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... question whether that portion of the world on the equinoctial line is or is not an inaccessible desert. The Spaniards affirm that it is inhabited by numerous peoples,[3] while the ancient writers maintain that it is uninhabitable because of the perpendicular rays of the sun. I must admit, however, that even amongst ancient authorities some have been found who sought to maintain that that part of the world was habitable.[4] When I asked the sailors of the Pinzons if they had seen the polar star to the south, they ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... tenant of M. Molineux, Cour Batave, in 1818. According to his landlord, the artist was a profoundly immoral man who drew caricatures against the government, brought bad women home with him and made the hall uninhabitable. [Cesar Birotteau.] ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... daisy—those friends of the unaspiring— routed out years ago, the borders exquisite examples of taste, the turf so faultless that you hardly like to walk on it for fear of making it dusty, and the whole quite uninhabitable for people of my solitary tendencies because, go where you will, you are overlooked. Since I have lived in this big straggling place, full of paths and copses where I am sure of being left alone, with wide fields and heath and forests beyond, and so much ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... still less capacity to imitate the ancient architects. Farther south in the forested region of southern Yucatan and northern Guatemala the conditions are still more surprising, for today these regions are almost uninhabitable and are occupied by only a few sickly, degraded natives who live largely by the chase. Yet in the past this region was the scene of by far the highest culture that ever developed in America. There alone in this great continent did men develop an ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... penalty of enforced labour was more logical, useful, and advantageous both for the culprit and the community than all modern punishments. The Mormons of America and the religious sects persecuted in Russia by an omnipotent bureaucracy, have by their energy transformed uninhabitable regions into lands of extraordinary fertility. Still greater results might be obtained, if the abnormal tendencies of certain individuals were turned into useful channels, instead of being pent up until ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... hold the eternity of the world hold that some region was changed an infinite number of times, from being uninhabitable to being inhabitable and "vice versa," and likewise they hold that the arts, by reason of various corruptions and accidents, were subject to an infinite variety of advance and decay. Hence Aristotle says (Meteor. i), that it is absurd from such particular changes to hold the opinion of the newness ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... uninhabitable zone was gradually reduced by the improvements of ancient geography, from forty-five to twenty-four, or even sixteen degrees of latitude. See a learned and judicious note of Dr. Robertson, Hist. of America, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... again exclude from it, the entire regions drained by that river. The only portion occupied by Mexicans, or of which any distinct accounts have been obtained, is that between the great chain of mountains and the ocean; the country east of that ridge to the Colorado appears to be an uninhabitable desert. ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... Christian housekeepers. Oh, what a change from here to there—from the time when they put down the rolling-pin to when they take up the sceptre! If Chatsworth Park and the Vanderbilt mansion on Fifth Avenue were to be lifted into the celestial city they would be considered uninhabitable rookeries, and glorified Lazarus would be ashamed to be seen going in and out of either ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... events while polishing her wings. If some claimant puts in an appearance, forthwith the other turns her out with a volley of blows. In this way the old nests are employed so long as they have not become uninhabitable hovels. ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... countess, eagerly, "don't deceive me, there is something serious going on. Your wife is frightened, and if there are many persons like Pere Fourchon, this part of the country will be uninhabitable—" ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... was proposed to stay till the next day, lest Fleda might not be able to bear so much travelling at first. But the country inn was not found inviting; the dinner was bad, and the rooms were worse; uninhabitable, the ladies said; and about the middle of the afternoon they began to cast about for the means of reaching Albany that night. None very comfortable could be had; however, it was thought better to push on at any rate than wear out the night in such a place. ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... I wished to give her a Vassar pamphlet; so I took a cab and drove; it was at an enormous distance from my lodging—she told me it was six miles. I was as much surprised as delighted when the girl said she was at home, for the house had painters in it, the carpets were up, and everything looked uninhabitable. The girl came back, after taking my card, and asked me if I would go into the studio, and so took me through a pretty garden into a small building of two rooms, the outer one filled with pictures and books. I had never heard that ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... one of those people of exalted principles; one of those opinionated puritans, of which England produces so many; one of those good and insupportable old maids who haunt the tables d'hote of every hotel in Europe, who spoil Italy, poison Switzerland, render the charming cities of the Mediterranean uninhabitable, carry everywhere their fantastic manias their manners of petrified vestals, their indescribable toilets and a certain odor of india-rubber which makes one believe that at night they are slipped into a ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... total. In a pueblo like Hano, on the first or east mesa of Tusayan, for instance, there are many uninhabited rooms, and others serve as storage chambers, while in places the pueblo has so far fallen into ruin as to be uninhabitable. If a pueblo is very much concentrated the population varies at different seasons of the year. In summer it is sparsely inhabited; in winter it is rather densely populated. While Palatki and Honanki together had rooms sufficient to house 500 people, ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... foam, a river kindred to the mountains which feed its flood. Between the two cataracts, linked to the river banks with great arched bridges, stood Marcian's villa. Never more than a modest country house, during the last fifty years an almost total neglect had made of the greater part an uninhabitable ruin. A score of slaves and peasants looked after what remained of the dwelling and cultivated the land attached to it, garden, oliveyard, vineyard, partly on the island, partly beyond the river in the direction of Arpinum, which historic city, now but ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... and dignity, it released, it let fall at regular intervals flights of jackdaws which for a little while would wheel and caw, as though the ancient stones which allowed them to sport thus and never seemed to see them, becoming of a sudden uninhabitable and discharging some infinitely disturbing element, had struck them and driven them forth. Then after patterning everywhere the violet velvet of the evening air, abruptly soothed, they would return and be absorbed in the tower, deadly ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... disgusted her to such a point that she would have preferred to do it with her own hands in secret rather than see others do it openly in all its squalor. The business might be more efficiently organized—for example, there was no reason why the sitting-room should be made uninhabitable between breakfast and dinner once a week—but it could never be other than odious. The kitchen floor must inevitably be washed every day by a girl on her knees in sackcloth with terrible hands. She was witnessing now the first stage in the ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... Superior—though the ground is covered for several months in the year with snow—and often appear in the regions to the west, in the same latitude, up to the Rocky Mountains. They would render some districts uninhabitable, were it not for the signal-giving rattles with which they are armed. Even quadrupeds are alarmed at the sound, and endeavour to make their escape from them; and horses, it is said, lately arrived from Europe, ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... Consecration, luncheon, dinner, &c., and as she is the widow of the last Vicar, we are in duty bound to be civil to her, and I must go and call upon her. Oh! you poor thing, I forgot how deserted you will be, and really the drawing-room is almost uninhabitable with that Bengal tiger in it. Here is that delightful Norman Conquest for you to read; pray look at the ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and barren, uninhabitable and desolate; the cold winds of the snow-borne North may blow across it, and freeze it into ice-bound sterility; or the blazing fury of the tropic sun may pour down upon it, and scorch it into a dreary waste of glaring, burning sand; but if there is gold in it, and ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... how she could have a more magnificent mood than Madeira. It can never be represented by my art, but it may be measurably stated: low lying sea; the town scattering and fraying everywhere into outlying hamlets, villas and cottages; steep rising upon steep, till they reach uninhabitable climaxes where the woods darken upward into the everlasting snows, in one whole of grandeur resuming in its ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... that the smell of the paint at Longwood was very disagreeable, etc. Napoleon himself was quite ready to go, and seemed much vexed when Count Bertrand and General Gourgaud arrived from Longwood with the intelligence that the place was as yet uninhabitable. His displeasure, however, was much more seriously excited by the appearance of Count Montholon with the information that all was ready at Longwood within a few minutes after receiving the contrary accounts from Bertrand ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... to admit of being called constant and permanent. The predominant influence of the blacks in the Cotton States is already (even putting aside the results of slavery) exhibiting itself in the lowering of the whites. These States are becoming uninhabitable for the whites,—not by reason of climate, or of slavery as an institution, but by reason of the operation of the inevitable increase of the slaves. They must have the land, and the stronger race will be driven out by the weaker, on account of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... has its billet," they must all have lodged somewhere. Of course, nothing else is talked of as yet, and every one has his own personal experiences to recount. Some houses have become nearly uninhabitable—glass, pictures, clocks, plaster, all lying in morsels about the floor, and air-holes in the roofs and walls, through which these winged messengers of destruction have passed. Ladies and children escaped, in many instances, by the azoteas, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... the most part, from the lowest class." With this purged militia the club expels nuns, drives off unsworn priests, organizes expeditions in the neighborhood, and goes so far as to purify suspected municipalities.[2128]—So many acts of violence committed in town and country, render town and country uninhabitable, and for the elite of the propriety owners, or for well-bred persons, there is no longer any asylum but Paris. After the first disarmament seven or eight families take refuge there, and a dozen or fifteen more join them after a threat of having their throats cut; after the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... narrow causeway extended betwixt the islet and the shore. But the fortress was larger in appearance than in reality; and of the buildings which it actually contained, many had become ruinous and uninhabitable. In the times of the grandeur of the Avenel family, these had been occupied by a considerable garrison of followers and retainers, but they were now in a great measure deserted; and Julian Avenel would probably have fixed his habitation in a residence better suited to his diminished ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... in physics the greater body draws to itself the lesser, would we not feel an overpowering attraction from that vast body of humanity which had passed into the unknown? How would the end come? Would it be from a return of the poison? Or would the earth be uninhabitable from the mephitic products of universal decay? Or, finally, might our awful situation prey upon and unbalance our minds? A group of insane folk upon a dead world! My mind was brooding upon this last dreadful idea when some slight noise caused me to ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of four or five seaport towns, each with its own tributary agricultural and mining area, strung out, at distances varying from 500 to 1300 miles, along the southern and eastern third of a coast line of nearly 9000 miles looped round an unexplored and reputedly uninhabitable interior. Each of these seaports traded directly with the United Kingdom and Europe in competition with the others. With economic motives for union practically non-existent, with external factors awakening a general apprehension rather than confronting Australia with any immediate ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... the place uninhabitable any longer to the Tascherons. Their deep religious feeling took them to church that morning; for how could they let the mass be offered to God asking Him to inspire their son with repentance that alone could restore to him life eternal, and not share in it? Besides, ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... from the principal courtyard into a back yard, and contains three rooms separated by a passage; the first floor contains five rooms. One of the three rooms on the ground floor is only a little ante-room, almost uninhabitable; there they lodged M. Baze. In the remaining lower chambers they installed General Lamoriciere and General Changarnier. The five other prisoners were distributed in the five rooms of ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... by-lane in the outskirts of Timber Town stood a dilapidated wooden cottage. Its windows lacked many panes, its walls were bare of paint, the shingles of its roof were rotten and scanty; it seemed uninhabitable and empty, and yet, as night fell, within it there burned a light. Moreover, there were other signs of life within its crazy walls, for when all without was quiet and dark, the door opened ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... commotions. Aethiopia produces very near the same kinds of provision as Portugal, though, by the extreme laziness of the inhabitants, in a much less quantity. What the ancients imagined of the torrid zone being a part of the world uninhabitable, is so far from being true, that the climate is very temperate. The blacks have better features than in other countries, and are not without wit and ingenuity. Their apprehension is quick, and their judgment sound. ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... road, the Boche, himself, would have been hindered in his last preparations for his retreat. Everything was done with military ends in view. The villages were left in such a condition as to make them uninhabitable, the more to add to our discomfort and to make our hardships severer. The trees were cut down only on those parts of the road which were screened from observation from his balloons and present trenches. In ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... is the Cause of Rain, is another great Benefit to the World, in as much as this is very probably supposed to be the Source of Fountains, Rivers, Lakes, and other Magazines of fresh Water, without which the Earth would be uninhabitable, and to which in a very great Measure its Fertility is owing. We ought likewise to remember that though this be in itself so clear, and at the same Time so certain, yet there are Countries in the World where it very seldom rains, as in Egypt, and ...
— The Shepherd of Banbury's Rules to Judge of the Changes of the Weather, Grounded on Forty Years' Experience • John Claridge
... incorporated in The Blithedale Romance), a cottage in the Berkshire Hills was spoken of, and upon examination seemed practicable. Lenox, at that time, was as little known as Mount Desert; it was not until long afterwards that fashion found them out and made them uninhabitable to any but fashionable folks. Moreover, my father had seen something of Lenox a ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... United States is in New York. The proportion between surface and inhabitants is not very different between New England and Switzerland, if Maine be excluded. Parts of the cantons are crowded with people, as Zurich for instance, while a large part is uninhabitable rocks and ice. ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... sir, previously to the birth of the monikinia; since which time a great, salutary, harmonious, and contemplated alteration has occurred. Nature had reserved the polar region for the new species, with divers obvious and benevolent purposes. They were rendered uninhabitable by the obliquity of the sun's rays; and though matter, in the shape of mastodons and whales, with an instinct of its antagonistic destination, had frequently invaded their precincts, it was only to leave the remains of the first embedded in fields of ice, memorials of the uselessness ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... to every decent person in the neighbourhood. It was well his mother was a widow, for where she was only powerless to restrain, the father would have encouraged. He was a big, idle, sneering, insolent lad—such that had there been two more of the sort, they would have made the village uninhabitable. It was all the peaceable vicar could do to keep ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... was still "a minor," Byron entered upon his inheritance. Hitherto the less ruinous portions of the abbey had been occupied by a tenant, Lord Grey de Ruthven. The banqueting hall, the grand drawing-room, and other parts of the monastic building were uninhabitable, but by incurring fresh debts, two sets of apartments were refurnished for Byron and for his mother. Dismantled and ruinous, it was still a splendid inheritance. In line with the front of the abbey is the west front of the priory church, with its hollow arch, once a "mighty window," ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... degrees nearer the equator from the south than from the north. Within the arctic circle there are tribes of men living on the borders of the icy ocean on both the east and west hemispheres, but within the antarctic all is one dreary, uninhabitable waste. In the extreme north the reindeer and the musk-ox are found in numbers, but not a single land quadruped exists beyond 50 degrees of southern latitude. Flowers are seen in summer by the arctic navigator as far as 78 degrees north, but no plant of any ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... not think," asked Professor Alexander Jones, "that there will be a tremendous outburst of volcanic energy, if such upheavals occur, and may not that render the re-emerging lands uninhabitable?" ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... "Yes—an uninhabitable old stone structure that has stood there for nearly a century. For years I have tried in vain to rent or sell it. I have left no stone unturned, Quinby. I know I am regarded as a visionary, a dreamer, but ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... was pitched on the rath of Tara—a fact which would seem to indicate that already, in little more than a century since the interdict had fallen on it, the edifices which made so fine a show in the days of Patrick were ruined and uninhabitable. Either at Tara, or some other of the royal residences, Adamnan on this visit procured the passing of a law, (A.D. 684,) forbidding women to accompany an army to battle, or to engage personally in the conflict. The mild maternal ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... at any minute," said I, contemplating the unstable stone crest of the northeast turret with some uneasiness. My face brightened suddenly. "That particular section of the castle is uninhabitable, I am told. It really doesn't matter if it collapses. Ah, Britton! Here you are, I ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... for all this, there exists not a single instance of a swarm refusing its duty, or allowing itself to be baffled or discouraged by the strangeness of its surroundings, except only in the case of the new dwelling being absolutely uninhabitable, or impregnated with evil odours. And even then the bees will not be disheartened or bewildered; even then they will not abandon their mission. The swarm will simply forsake the inhospitable abode, to seek better fortune some little ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the damage done by the great Napoleonic flood was almost impossible. Age-old fences had been washed away. The palaces of two score dynasties had been damaged to such an extent that they had to be condemned as uninhabitable. Other royal residences had been greatly enlarged at the expense of less fortunate neighbours. Strange odds and ends of revolutionary doctrine had been left behind by the receding waters and could not be dislodged without ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... carried through, because the people of Dalmatia would have risen in revolt; moreover, the most fertile regions had been so neglected that too many of them were now marshes or through other causes uninhabitable. Thus von Thurn assisted the Italianized party; they would, at any rate, unlike the other Serbo-Croats of Dalmatia, not strive for union with anybody else. Before the French Revolution no one in Italy dreamed that it would be possible ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... Stein's big house and the two immense reception-rooms, uninhabited and uninhabitable, clean, full of solitude and of shining things that look as if never beheld by the eye of man? They are cool on the hottest days, and you enter them as you would a scrubbed cave underground. I passed through one, and ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... nobles by the Assembly is the same as the treatment of the Protestants by Louis XIV.[2236] In both cases the oppressed are a superior class of men. In both cases France has been made uninhabitable for them. In both cases they are reduced to exile, and they are punished because they exiled them selves. In both cases it ended in a confiscation of their property, and in the penalty of death to all who should harbor them. In both cases, by dint of persecution, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... became aggressive. "What won't you have? There is no sense in what you say. As we have a child we must have a nurse. If I had spoken of nursing the little one myself you would have told me I was a fool. You would have found the house more uninhabitable than ever, if you had seen me with the child always in my arms. But I won't nurse—I can't. As you say, we will take a third nurse; it's simple enough, and we'll do so ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... the ugly step-child of parishes; but, then, I love all ugly step-children. It is gauche and ridiculous. It sprawls. It is permanently overhung with mist. It has all the virtues of the London County Council, and it is very nearly uninhabitable. Very nearly uninhabitable ... but ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... scarcely done so well, yet well; having enjoyed a great deal in spite of drawbacks. Murray, the traitor, sent us to Fano as a 'delightful summer residence for an English family,' and we found it uninhabitable from the heat, vegetation scorched with paleness, the very air swooning in the sun, and the gloomy looks of the inhabitants sufficiently corroborative of their words, that no drop of rain or dew ever falls there during the summer. A 'circulating library' 'which doesn't give out books,' ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... changed, indeed. We no longer build on the bend. We don't have bends if we can help it. They are dangerous and hard to maintain. A house on one would be uninhabitable with the dust. We do not seek the neighborliness of the road, but retire as far as we can to the back of our lot, with our telephone and newspaper. The old house on the bend now stands deserted. From country estates ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... and scorchingly hot as it is. would be downright uninhabitable if it were not washed by the waters of the Cheliff. The necessities arising from our conquest of the country had made it a revictualling post for our columns, and a trial had just been made there of a new sort of provision, described as ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... either seen or heard of some house, shut up and uninhabitable, fallen into decay, and looking dusty and dreary, from which, at midnight, strange sounds have been heard to issue—aerial knockings—the rattling of chains, and the groaning of perturbed spirits?—a ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... this heart outcry was silent. Her kind old friends heard no word or murmur of complaint or dissatisfaction. If the forlorn old house were distasteful to Marjorie, she didn't show it; if her room seemed to her uninhabitable, nobody knew it from her. She ran out to the fields, and returned with an armful of ox-eyed daisies, and bunches of clover; and, with some grapevine trails, she made a real transformation of ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... bush-buck, the lesser kudu, zebra, wart-hog, baboons and monkeys, and any number of paa, the last being of a redder colour than those of the Tsavo valley. Of natives or of human habitations, however, we saw no signs, and indeed the whole region was so dry and waterless as to be quite uninhabitable. The animals that require water have to make a nightly journey to and from the Sabaki, which accounts for the thousands of animal paths leading from the ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... there was nothing south of the equinoctial line but an immense sea and some poor and barren islands. The sea they called the Atlantic, and if sometimes they confessed that there might be land in that region, they contended that it must be sterile, and could not be otherwise than uninhabitable. The present navigation has controverted their opinions, and openly demonstrated to all that they were very far from the truth. For, beyond the equinoctial line I found countries more fertile and more densely inhabited than I have ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... But, although the legal prosecution of this poor woman reached an end, her enemies did not cease their opposition. The mob made an attack upon her dwelling, which was also her schoolhouse. Doors and windows were broken in, and the building was so thoroughly wrecked as to be uninhabitable. Having no money with which to make repairs, she was forced to abandon the structure and her educational business ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... the lochs as the night was drawing in. The moor was sounding loud and eerie with the call of large birds. Very cold and uncharitable, a breeze came from Cruach-an-Lochain, and in the evening dusk the country seemed most woefully poor and uninhabitable. So it appeared to Gilian for a moment when at last he came to the head of the brae where he should have his first sight of the light that could make that wild as warm and hospitable and desirable as ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... as Bob had got a hawser to the whale and was ready to fill away for the South Cape channel again. The vessels passed each other cheering, and the governor admonished his friend not to carry the carcass too near the dwellings, lest it should render them uninhabitable. But Betts had his anchorage already in his eye, and away he went, with the wind on his quarter, towing his prize at the rate of four or five knots. It may be said, here, that the Martha went into the passage, and that the whale was floated into ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... and horror. The storm, which began shortly after midnight, and continued with gathering force, seriously hampered the work of rescue. More than three inches of snow covered the debris in the section of the city struck by the cyclone. It rendered uninhabitable the houses of many who had prepared to retain temporary homes in ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall |
