"British Isles" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an ethnic division of labor for geographical reasons. Castes or social classes, often distinguished by shades of color as in Brahman India, survive as differentiations indicating old lines of race cleavage. There is abundant evidence that the upper classes in Germany, France, Austria, and the British Isles are distinctly lighter of hair and eyes than the peasantry.[215] The high-class Japanese are taller and fairer than the masses. Nearly all the African tribes of the Sudan and bordering Sahara include two distinct classes, one of lighter ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... "Bad Times" (1885), and "Darwinism" (1889) were written at Godalming, also the series of lectures which he gave in America in 1886-7 and at various towns in the British Isles. He also continued to have examination papers[43] to correct each year—and a very strenuous time that was. Our mother used to assist him in this work, and also with ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... belligerent was forecast on January 31, 1917, when Germany announced its intention of sinking all vessels in a blockade zone around the British Isles. Count von Bernstorff was handed his passports on February 3d, and on April 2d President Wilson, in a remarkable address to Congress, advised a declaration of war by the United States against Germany. This was consummated by a formal vote ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... British Isles lie northwest of the Continent of Europe. They are separated from it by the Channel and the North Sea, at the narrowest only twenty miles wide, and at the broadest not more ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... landlocked harbour. This is typical of many another pleasant surprise. Labrador decidedly improves on acquaintance. The fogs have been grossly exaggerated. The Atlantic seaboard is clearer than the British Isles, which, by the way, lie in exactly the same latitudes. And the Gulf is far clearer than New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and the Banks. The climate is exceptionally healthy, the air a most invigorating tonic, and the cold ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... ancient plaster cabins, in high old edifices with pointed Huguenot roofs, in Georgian mansion tenements, there are 25,000 families whose homes are one-room homes. Dublin's proportion of those who live more than two to a room is higher than that of any other city in the British Isles—London has 16.8; Edinburgh, 31.1; Dublin, 37.9.[5] In one-room homes tuberculosis breeds fast. A table from the dispensary for tuberculosis patients, an institution built in Dublin as a memorial to the American, P.F. Collier, ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... by this gathering to-night. We are grateful to Dr. Augustus Jessopp, to Mr. Walter Rye, to Mr. Edward Clodd, and to our guest of this evening, Mr. William Dutt, for keeping alive the folk-lore, the literary history, the historical tradition of that portion of the British Isles to which we feel the most profound attachment by ties of ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... from Dakota and sent him on a trepid, reverent pilgrimage to Boston was the very impulse which, on another scale, had lately detached Henry James from his native country and had sent him to the ancient home of his forefathers in the British Isles. ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... September the 23d, and that we were near two months out of Groix with this tub of an Indiaman. In all that time we had not so much as got a whiff of an English frigate, though we had almost put a belt around the British Isles. Then straining my eyes through the mist, I made out two white blurs of sails ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... fourth century among the people of what are now the British Isles. It was influenced by Central Asia and Persia, ...
— Applied Design for Printers - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #43 • Harry Lawrence Gage
... captain were at hand, and the promised entertainment by no means slow in making its appearance. The former was an apartment that opened from a lesser gallery, which communicated with the principal passage already mentioned; and the latter was a bountiful but ungarnished supply of that staple of the British Isles, called roast beef; of which the kitchen of Colonel Howard was never without a due and loyal provision,—The sergeant, who certainly understood one of the signs of his captain to imply an attack on the citadel of the cockswain's brain, mingled, with his own hands, ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... English, just as "foreign" to them, as are the Scandinavians, Germans, Hollanders, and Huguenots—often more so. Such early families as the Welsh Shelbys, and Gaelic McAfees are no more English than are the Huguenot Seviers or the German Stoners. Even including merely the immigrants from the British Isles, the very fact that the Welsh, Irish, and Scotch, in a few generations, fuse with the English instead of each element remaining separate, makes the American population widely different from that of Britain; exactly as a flask of water is different from ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... giant smiles, And twirls the spotty globe to find it; This little speck, the British Isles? 'T is ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... city (Richmond) at the falls. Along the upper James, as on the Rappahannock, speculative planters bought headrights and located settlers and tenants to hold their grants.[93:3] Into this region came natives of Virginia, emigrants from the British isles, and scattered representatives of other lands, some of them coming up the James, others up the York, and still others arriving with the southward-moving current along both sides of ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... Christian Times") gives a high place to the forms of pagan art which prevailed in the British Isles, before the Roman civilization; and differing from and influencing that which came from Scandinavia. We must certainly allow that it was art, and that it contained no Greek or other classical element. His illustrations explain and give ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... prevailing emotion seemed to be mere curiosity. The people who would suffer most from the collapse of this high-sounding enterprise could not reach the scene of calamity at half an hour's notice; they were dwellers in many parts of the British Isles, strangers most of them to London city, with but a vague mental picture of the local habitation of the Britannia Loan, Assurance, Investment, ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... medical advisers were wringing their hands over the practical inaccessibility and the lack of amenity of Nauheim, whither they had despatched me unwilling in dreary summers before the war, and while they were suggesting even more depressing health resorts in the British Isles, it occurred to me to ask them whether Royat-les-Bains did not contain broken-down heart repairing works of the first ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... The British Isles furnished a very considerable percentage of the pioneers, the evidences whereof remain unto this day. The swinging signs over the hotels for one; another, the prevalence in all the mining towns of Bass's pale ale. You will find it in the most unpretentious hotels and ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... in London to which medical schools were attached. Our hospital was the largest in the British Isles, and in the midst of the poorest population in England, being located in the famous Whitechapel Road, and surrounded by all the purlieus of the East End of the great city. Patients came from Tilbury Docks to Billingsgate ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... echo among scientific people. At first, it stirred up a storm of incredulity; Dr. Ferguson passed for a purely chimerical personage of the Barnum stamp, who, after having gone through the United States, proposed to "do" the British Isles. ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... mutiny at the Nore shook and bewildered the British Isles. In the public journals and in Parliament it was declared that this outbreak, like that at Spithead, was due partly to political strife, but more extensively to agents of revolution ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a very small craft as we accomplished it in; but there are many men, I have no doubt, who would gladly receive a hint as to the most advantageous form for a small boat in which they might safely adventure, alone, or with a friend, a cruise, say round the British Isles, or across the Channel and along the French coast; and therefore, as this story is written for the amusement only of such people as love boats, I think I may venture to trespass so far on my readers' patience as to give such ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... retained their individuality as a peculiar people. They were to the conquered races of the country what the Romans were to the barbarous hordes of the Empire, or the Normans to the ancient inhabitants of the British Isles. Clustering around the throne, they formed an invincible phalanx, to shield it alike from secret conspiracy and open insurrection. Though living chiefly in the capital, they were also distributed throughout the country in all its high stations and strong military posts, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... and a more massive intellect than usually go to the achievement of a provincial renown such as Meshach's. The man's externals were deceptive, for he looked like a local curiosity who might never have been out of Bursley. Meshach, however, travelled sometimes in the British Isles, and thereby kept his ideas from congealing. And those who had met him in trains and hotels knew that porters, waiters, and drivers did not mistake his shrewdness for that of a simpleton determined not to be robbed; that he wanted the right ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... people is very largely made up of these contributions from the folk-songs of dwellers in the wilder and more mountainous parts of the British Isles. One rarely goes far out of the way in attributing to this source any air that he may hear that captivates him with its seductive opulence of harmony. Exquisite melodies, limpid and unstrained as the carol of ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... been opened up between some one in Birmingham and the enemy in Germany. Prisoners are frequently dying, new prisoners are frequently being taken. Under a haphazard system of individual parcels, despatched from all over the British Isles, it has been practically impossible to keep track of all the changes. For this, and other good reasons, we have had to make a clean sweep and to take over the feeding of British prisoners by means of a regular organisation which can ensure that nothing ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... felt. Many of us, far from deploring it, admire it. We say: "What intelligence it shows! How different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanor we have been seeing in the British Isles!" Intensity, rapidity, vivacity of appearance, are indeed with us something of a nationally accepted ideal; and the medical notion of 'irritable weakness' is not the first thing suggested by them to our mind, ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... emigrants towards the Teutonic tract, the change of importance between south-east and north-west, since the industrial development of the coal country, and the more rapid rate of increase among the Celts, it becomes highly probable that not one-half the population of the British Isles is really of Teutonic descent. Moreover, it must be remembered that, whatever may have been the case in the primitive Anglo-Saxon period, intermarriages between Celts and Teutons have been common for at least four centuries past; and that therefore almost ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... duties did not prevent the continuous increase in the amount of cacao consumed in the British Isles. When Queen Victoria came to the throne the cacao cleared for home consumption was about four or five thousand tons, more than half of which was consumed by the Navy. At the time of Queen Victoria's death it had increased to four times this amount, ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... the English Channel, the north and west coasts of France, and the waters around the British Isles a war area, and has officially given notice that all enemy ships found in that area will be destroyed, and that neutral vessels may ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Christendom had to sustain: part of a ceaseless pressure from without against civilization; and they were but a part of it. They were few, as pirates always must be. It was on the estuaries of a few continental rivers and in the British Isles that they counted most in the ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... of the National Assembly of France, "if the powers who have formed alliances with the States have dared to read that manifesto, or to interrogate their consciences after the perusal? I ask whether there be at this day one government in Europe—the Helvetic and Batavian confederations, and the British isles excepted, which, judged after the principles of the Declaration of Congress on the fourth of July 1776, is not divested of its rights?" And Napoleon, afterward alluding to the same scene, said, "The finger ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... the rank of mate in an English ship trading in the West India Islands, and later he was made master. On the declaration of war with America, Jones joined the rebels, and was given command of a privateer, and from 1777 he became a terror to English shipping around the British Isles. ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... character pervades the ornamental works of the ancient nations that once inhabited the British Isles. ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... present only slight traces of tin-working, and it is far from likely that the tin-workers of Cornwall would have shipped their metal to this isolated spot in order to find a market with foreign traders. It is more probable that the name of Tin Islands was applied by the ancients to the British Isles in general, whose number and extent were little known in those days. Rome seems to have used the isles as a place of banishment and penal settlement, and in days of early Christianity two heretical bishops were exiled here. Early in the tenth century Athelstan made a progress through Cornwall, ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... German Foreign Office is transmitted to Washington through Ambassador Gerard, urging that American shipping circles be again warned against traversing the waters around the British Isles incautiously, and especially that they make their neutral markings on the vessels very plain, and that they light them promptly and sufficiently at night: American naval experts find the facts to indicate that the Nebraskan was torpedoed and not struck by a mine, so Ambassador ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... great activity in canal building, but it was left to private enterprise, with very little aid from the government. Over a hundred canal acts were passed by Parliament before the year 1800. The largest canal of the British Isles is the Caledonian, extending from Inverness to Fort William, a distance of sixty-three miles. It was commenced in 1803 and completed in 1847, and cost L1,256,000. Other canals of importance are the Great Canal, which connects the North Sea with the Atlantic Ocean, and the Grand ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... differential was now being wiped out, forcing England to face tremendously serious problems for the future. He quoted a British minister as saying that means would have to be found to send six or seven millions of Englishmen out of the British Isles and closer to the sources of food production, if continental conditions continued ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... thousand strong — all mounted men — and guns: There met, beneath the world-wide flag, the world-wide Empire's sons; They came to prove to all the earth that kinship conquers space, And those who fight the British Isles must fight the British race! From far New Zealand's flax and fern, from cold Canadian snows, From Queensland plains, where hot as fire the summer sunshine glows; And in the front the Lancers rode that New South Wales had sent: With easy stride across the plain their ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... years ago our shores were heavily invaded by the rising tide of an intense immigration from the British Isles and Continental Europe, the Church had to face conditions heretofore unknown. Without doubt, the most complex in its elements, the most serious in its consequences, was the Ruthenian issue. It was a case of providing for the spiritual wants of ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... 'Blue Water' policy, of trusting the national fortunes entirely to the Navy. The orthodox theory was that so long as the Navy was kept at the 'Two Power' standard, no considerable invasion of the British Isles ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... with a wonderful keenness to it, was the climate of the cave region in the valley of the present Thames. Even in the days of the cave men, the Gulf Stream, swinging from the equator in the great warm current already formed, laved the then peninsula as it now laves the British Isles. The climate, as has been told, was almost as equable then as now, but with a certain crispness which was a heritage from the glacial epoch. It was a time to live in, and the two were merry on their ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... For prescription of the whipping-post by Sir Thomas More, see D. H. Tuke's History of Insanity in the British Isles, London, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... but if we take a dip into history and consider the conditions which prevailed there from the earliest times up to only a few hundred years ago, we will find a race of human beings which in no wise resemble the present output except in form and stature. And our own forefathers—the people of the British Isles, the Anglo-Saxons who are to-day leading in the social world—were not one iota better throughout those pages than many of the smallest and most unpretentious of obscure tribes living here and there in ignorant, local isolation. One of the strongest points in our argument ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... negotiations with him, and her constant endeavours to raise enemies against France, prevailed upon him to issue the decree, which I could only regard as an act of madness and tyranny. It was not a decree, but fleets, that were wanting. Without a navy it was ridiculous to declare the British Isles in a state of blockade, whilst the English fleets were in fact blockading all the French ports. This declaration was, however, made in the Berlin Decree. This is what was called the Continental system! which, in plain terms, was nothing but a system ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... with screws instead of paddle-wheels. For some reason, however, not easy now to conjecture, shipbuilders clung to the paddle-wheels for vessels making the transatlantic voyage, long after they were discarded on the shorter runs along the coasts of the British isles. It so happened, too, that the first vessel to use the screw in transatlantic voyages, was also first iron ship built. She was the "Great Britain," a ship of 3,000 tons, built for the Great Western Company at Bristol, ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... soldiers aboard the S. S. Morvada when it came to debarking on foreign soil. As the ship plied the channel waters on the night of July 30th, 1918, but few on board knew what port was its destination; but not so with the people of the British Isles. They knew the plans for the arrival of the American army transports. On July 31st, the people of Barry and Cardiff, in common with Newport, in the province of South Wales, did honor to ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... can well be added to the above testimony regarding Evelyn's influence on Arboriculture throughout the British Isles. Economic conditions have changed entirely since his time, but the spirit living and breathing in Sylva is still that which is found influencing many of our great landowners. And it is an influence which cannot be indicated in any mere ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... too, is discovering not only the love of song, but, to some extent, the power of improvisation in the more remote corners of the British Isles. Instances of popular balladry in the west of Ireland are givrn by Lady Gregory in her Poets ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... Rome, the Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse, who harried and burnt their Protestant brethren whenever she could lay hands upon them. That she was eager to repeat her ill-starred attempt of 1588 and introduce into the British Isles the accursed Inquisition was patent to everyone. Protestant England, therefore, filled with the enthusiasm and intolerance of a new faith, made no bones of despoiling the Spaniards, especially as the service of God was likely to be ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... yielded to her genuine impulse, and began to talk about the prospects of the Church, and what might be done to reconvert the British Isles to the true faith. Her cheek flushed, and her eye shone with the theme; and Francis smiled paternally; but the young priest drew back. Mrs. Gaunt saw in a moment that he disapproved of a woman meddling with so high ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... aid of quite an army of underlings, eventually so completely changed the aspect of the locality that it became one of the most lovely and picturesque little bits of landscape to be found within the confines of the British Isles. ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... was cited to the women of Hinsdale that the women of the British Isles are fair, very fair, indeed. What makes them so fair? The fog. And what is fog? It is rainwater in the vapor. Hence rainwater will make women fair. Let ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... the ancient worships were those of Isis, Orpheus, Dionusos, Ceres and Mithras. Many barbarous nations received the knowledge of the Mysteries in honor of these divinities from the Egyptians, before they arrived in Greece; and even in the British Isles the Druids celebrated those of Dionusos, learned by them from ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... made it impossible for Germany to manufacture war munitions and thereby to fight a war. They said they were in favour of an unlimited, ruthless submarine warfare against England and all ships going to the British Isles. Their opinions were best represented in an inspired editorial appearing in the Rhieinische Westfaelische Zeitung, ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... had overhauled and refitted his ship, and on the tenth of April, set sail from Brest, intending to make a complete circuit of the British Isles. Entering the Irish Sea, he spread terror along its shores, where his coming was like a bolt from the blue, engaged and captured the British ship-of-war Drake, took a number of prizes, and sailed into Brest again after an ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... sure that I could," said Flora. "And if I did, it would only be like looking at a map. Suppose somebody showed you a map of the British Isles, and put his finger on a little pink spot, and told you that was Selkirk. How much wiser would you be? You could not see the Yarrow and Ettrick, and breathe the caller air and gather the purple heather. And I don't think describing people ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... smiles, And twirls the spotty globe to find it;— This little speck the British Isles? 'Tis but a freckle,—never mind it!— He laughs, and all his prairies roll, Each gurgling cataract roars and chuckles, And ridges stretched from pole to pole Heave till they ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... by Captain Manby; seconded by Thomas Shirley Gooch, Esq. M.P.—That maritime counties or districts, the principal sea ports, and the inland counties of the united kingdom, and the British isles, be earnestly invited to form district associations, as branches of this Institution, for the purpose of promoting donations and subscriptions, and for assisting to carry its general ...
— An Appeal to the British Nation on the Humanity and Policy of Forming a National Institution for the Preservation of Lives and Property from Shipwreck (1825) • William Hillary
... London climate. This is seen at its best during the autumn and winter months. The climate of London and indeed of England generally is due to the influence of the Gulf Stream. The way it works is thus: The Gulf Stream, as it nears the shores of the British Isles and feels the propinquity of Ireland, rises into the air, turns into soup, and comes down on London. At times the soup is thin and is in fact little more than a mist: at other times it has the consistency of a thick Potage St. Germain. London people are a little sensitive on the point ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... as to make it certain that it preceded not merely the spread of the prevalent Indo-European group of languages, but even the present distribution of racial types. It certainly reached Italy, and the Atlantic seaboard as the British Isles, before the brachycephalic 'Alpine' men arrived there; and still more before the Boreal invasions of Britain and the opposite coasts. Indeed, it would be truer to say that in general each breed of man which has changed its distribution has had to adopt sooner or later the types of culture ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... about the British Isles and there he fell in with a man named Asmund Ashenside, who also was a great champion and had worsted many vikings and men of war. These two heard tell of one another and challenges passed between them. They came together and fought. Asmund had the greater following, but he ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown
... had refered to that psalm (LXXII) in which men who have judged unjustly and accepted the persons of the wicked (including by anticipation practically all the white inhabitants of the British Isles and the North American continent, to mention no other places) are condemned in the words, "I have said, ye are gods; and all of ye are children of the Most High; but ye shall die like men, and fall like one ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... advance into the unknown; even the south-west lines of Northern invasion and settlement, though they hardly yield any general results to discovery, certainly led to a more thorough inclusion of every part of the British isles in the civilised West, through the Viking earldoms in Caithness, in the Orkneys and the Shetlands, in Man and the Hebrides, and on the coast of Ireland, where the Ostman colonies grew into kingdoms. From about 840, when the first of these ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... alone are friends of ours In all the British isles; Who sorrow for our darkened hours And greet our luck with smiles. "And who may those twain outcasts be Whose favor ye have won?" The first is Queen of England's realm, The other ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... new forms of government, which may secure posterity from a repetition of such calamities as the present age has brought forth. The materials of a new balance of power exist in the language, and name, and territory of Spain, in those of France, and those of Italy, Germany, Russia, and the British Isles. The smaller States must disappear, and merge in the large nations and wide-spread languages. The possibility of this remodelling of Europe I see clearly; earnestly do I pray for it; and I have in my mind a strong conviction that your invaluable ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Gilgamesh also figures in Indian mythology as Yama, the first man, who explored the way to the Paradise called "The Land of Ancestors", and over which he subsequently presided as a god. Other Babylonian myths link with those found in Egypt, Greece, Scandinavia, Iceland, and the British Isles and Ireland. The Sargon myth, for instance, resembles closely the myth of Scyld (Sceaf), the patriarch, in the Beowulf epic, and both appear to be variations of the Tammuz-Adonis story. Tammuz also resembles in one of his phases the Celtic hero Diarmid, ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... colonies was a very different sort of institution from slavery in our own islands, or from the actual trade in slaves. The ordinary Englishman, when he troubled himself to consider such questions at all, had settled it in his own mind that slavery in England, or in any part of the British Isles, was incompatible with the free constitution of the realm, and that the forcible abduction of men and women from African sea-shores in order to sell them into slavery was an offence against civilization and Christianity. But this average Englishman did not see that there was anything ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Central Europe. The vanguard of these peoples are known as the Celts. After them came the Teutonic tribes, who crowded the former out on the westernmost edge of Europe—into Gaul and Spain, and out upon the British Isles. These hard-pressed Celts are represented to-day by the Welsh, the Irish, and the Highland Scots. Behind the Teutonic peoples were the Slavonic folk, who pushed the former hard against the Celts, and, when they could urge them no farther ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... we let America interfere with our plan to starve England?" was the question I heard repeatedly. Their belief that they could starve England was absolute. What could be simpler than putting a ring of U-boats round the British Isles and cutting off all trade until the pangs of hunger should compel Britain to yield? I heard no talk then about the "base crime of starving women and children," which became their whine a year later when the knife began to ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... of the first colonists contained in the venerable Landnama Book—the Book of Lots, the Doomsday of Iceland, and far livelier reading than that of the Conqueror—are those of Northmen who had been before settled in the British Isles. Our own country then was the great stepping-stone between Norway and Iceland; and this one fact is enough to account for the close connection which the Icelanders ever afterwards kept up with their kinsmen who had remained behind in the ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... in contact with a man like Cahoon, and I was very much interested in him. His contempt, not only for our fellow-countrymen in Leinster, Munster and Connacht, but for all the other inhabitants of the British Isles was absolute. He had a way of pronouncing final judgment on all the problems of life ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... amply sufficient to bring the war to an honorable issue. Our nation is in number more than half that of the British Isles. It is composed of a brave, a free, a virtuous, and an intelligent people. Our country abounds in the necessaries, the arts, and the comforts of life. A general prosperity is visible in the public countenance. The means employed by the British cabinet to undermine it ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... the north of Scotland and the Orkney Islands, varies from five and a half to eight miles in breadth, and is by repute the most dangerous passage in the British Isles. We were told in one of the books that if we wanted to witness a regular "passage of arms" between two mighty seas, the Atlantic at Dunnet Head on the west, and the North Sea at Duncansbay Head on the east, we must cross ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... July, nineteen-fourteen, a month remarkable in the British Isles because of the fine weather and the disturbances in the political atmosphere due ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... almost beyond toleration, yet her share of the world's commerce has not been augmented thereby. So would it be with England. True, Germany might commit some depredations and hinder the passage of trade, but what would be her motive? How could she gain? Even if the British Isles were depopulated, it is doubtful whether Germany would benefit. For by what miracle would Germany be able to develop the facilities, the shipyards, mills, factories, foundries, mines and machinery, to supply the trade which the foremost of commercial nations has been generations ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... vessels took three months for the trip from New Orleans to Louisville. With the coming of the steamboat a strong impetus was given alike to settlement and to export trade. By the forties New Orleans ranked the fourth port in the world and the Mississippi valley exceeded the British Isles in the ownership of ships' tonnage. In 1850 the Mississippi still carried to the sea cargoes twice the value of those that sought the Lakes and the Erie Canal, though in the import trade these proportions were reversed. At this time a line drawn east and west through the centre of Ohio marked ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... I would go further than that. I would stimulate the waning enthusiasm for Christianity in this country by labelling it as the exclusive possession of a privileged few. If one could induce the Duchess of Pelm, for instance, to assert that the Kingdom of Heaven, as far as the British Isles are concerned, is strictly limited to herself, two of the under-gardeners at Pelmby, and, possibly, but not certainly, the Dean of Dunster, there would be an instant reshaping of the popular attitude ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... France and of the British isles are said to have proceeded from an other language yet more ancient, called the Celtic; so that, from one common source, are supposed to have sprung the present Welsh, the present Irish, and the present Highland Scotch.[46] The term Celtic Dr. Webster defines, as ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... benefactor of the race, Sir Francis Galton, in his work entitled "Hereditary Genius" made a computation of the number of men of eminence in the British Isles. This estimate was made nearly a half-century ago and has generally been accepted as representing actual conditions. One means of discovering the number was by taking a catalogue of "Men of The Times" which contained about 2,500 names, one half of which were Americans ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... in certain cases, where the colonies, e.g. Canada, grant preferential duties, or practical free trade, in certain articles exported to the British Isles. ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... that the English Channel, the north and west coasts of France, and the waters around the British Isles are a war area and has officially notified that all enemy ships found in that area will be destroyed, and that neutral vessels may be exposed to danger. This is in effect a claim to torpedo at sight, without regard to the safety of the crew or passengers, any merchant vessel ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... on the point of seeing the solution of the vast problem of the practicability of descents in great force, if it is true that Napoleon seriously contemplated the transportation of one hundred and sixty thousand veterans from Boulogne to the British Isles: unfortunately, his failure to execute this gigantic undertaking has left us entirely in the dark as to ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... GEOGRAPHY, illustrating, in a Series of Original Designs, the Elementary Facts of Geology, Hydrology, Meteorology, and Natural History. A New and Enlarged Edition. 19 Maps, including coloured Geological Maps of Europe and of the British Isles. Half-bound, ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie
... identity of the land-shells of all the hundreds of British Isles be owing to their having been united since the Glacial period, and the discordance, almost total, of the shells of Porto Santo and Madeira be owing to their having been separated [during] all the newer and possibly older Pliocene periods, then it ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... highest rank in the esteem and love of the people. The tide of invasion had been rolled back after the bloodiest and most stubbornly contested field of the war. The numbers on each side differed but little from the numbers engaged at Waterloo, and the tenacity with which the soldiers of the British Isles stood that day against the hosts of Napoleon, was rivaled on the field of Gettysburg by men of the same blood, fighting in ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... said everything slowed down: I was wrong. Studying intensified for me. The folklore of the British Isles intrigued me. I delved into the Black Welsh tales, the mischievous fancies of the Irish, the English legends of the prowling werewolf. For me it was a relief from political science, which suddenly palled and which smacked of treason in the light of current events. My extracurricular research ...
— Each Man Kills • Victoria Glad
... not only in the British Isles but on the Continent as well. No such form of political satire had ever appeared, and everyone was excited over its possibilities. Not all parts of the work were considered equally good; some parts were thought to be failures, and the Fourth Voyage was ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... Jeff introduced to the skipper of the coasting vessel in which he spent the succeeding six years of his life. At the end of that time his schooner was totally wrecked in a gale that sent more than two hundred vessels on the rocks of the British Isles. The skipper was washed overboard and drowned, but Jeff was saved along with the rest of the crew, by ...
— Jeff Benson, or the Young Coastguardsman • R.M. Ballantyne
... drawings were made, the estimates prepared, and the spades and trowels even beginning to work on the foundations, when, one sad December night, a terrible gale arose. All through the hours of darkness it roared and shrieked across the British Isles, working havoc upon sea and land, but, when morning came at last, few were prepared for the appalling catastrophe it had caused. Sweeping up the Firth of Tay, it had torn away a portion of the great railway bridge that crossed ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... such matters were settled, and the Cabinet was free to face the steady demand of the women leaders of the Suffrage movement; a demand that at any rate some measure of enfranchisement should be granted to the women of the British Isles ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... Holland scarcely outlasted a generation. Within a dozen years after the philosopher's death, the Cartesian philosophy was prohibited by ecclesiastical authorities and excluded from the schools. In the British Isles and in Germany the system has been usually considered as an interesting curiosity in the cabinet of philosophies. Yet the unity of all truth through relations vital, subtle, firm, and universal, though seen only in a vision of the night, abides ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... three separate people is a problem. "Fin" appears to have been at one time a not uncommon name, whatever its etymology and that of "Fian" may be. At any rate, there is nothing in history (which speaks of a close intercourse between Scandinavia and the British Isles, in former times), and nothing in the ethnology of North-Western Europe, to make us regard as mythical the capture and enthralment of any one of these three "little Fins." If Fin of the Fians, therefore, was a typical Fian, they ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie
... place, possibly in Egypt itself, but certainly upon the neighbouring Mediterranean coasts. In some respects the least altered copies of the mastaba are found in the so-called "giant's graves" of Sardinia and the "horned cairns" of the British Isles. But the real features of the Egyptian serdab, which was the essential part, the nucleus so to speak, of the mastaba, are best preserved in the so-called "holed dolmens" of the Levant, the Caucasus, and India. [They also occur sporadically ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... of East and another boy in the same form, and had more interest for Tom than Windsor Castle, or any other residence in the British Isles. For was he not about to become the joint owner of a similar home, the first place he could call his own? One's own! What a charm there is in the words! How long it takes boy and man to find out their worth! How fast most of us hold on to them—faster ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... race—bearing ourselves always courteous, always deferential, indebted beyond measure to the mother-world, to all its nations dead, as all its nations living—the offspring, this America of ours, the daughter, not by any means of the British isles exclusively, but of the continent, and all continents. Indeed, it is time we should realize and fully fructify those germs we also hold from Italy, France, Spain, especially in the best imaginative productions of those lands, which ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Spain, but in 380 the council of Saragossa forbade priests to assume monkish habits. Germany received the institution some time in the fifth century. The introduction of Christianity as well as of monasticism into the British Isles is shrouded in darkness. A few jewels of fact may be gathered from the legendary rubbish. It is probable that before the days of Benedict, Saint Patrick, independently of Rome, established monasteries in Ireland and ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... a revelation from heaven—revelation of higher authority than the Bible, for the reason, that it is of more recent origin. Well, she is invited to England by the nation en masse; and if the Saviour of the world should perchance make his advent into the British Isles, on the day that she lands in that country, I think it highly probable, that he would be forced a second time to take lodgings in a manger. He might wander through the country unnoticed and unknown, while the whole nation ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... as if I had taken a lifelong vow of separation from the British Isles and all things civilized, when after all it is only one short year out of my allotted span of life that I have promised to Mission work? Your steamer letter, with its Machiavellian arguments for returning immediately ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... expressed as to this. It has been estimated that the amount of heat arising from the stream on a winter's day, is sufficient to raise the atmosphere over the British Isles from the freezing point to a ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... Travels of Kerim Khan; being a narrative of his Journey from Delhi to Calcutta, and thence by Sea to England: containing his remarks upon the manners, customs, laws, constitutions, literature, arts, manufactures, &c., of the people of the British Isles. Translated from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... not only by his own energy but by stirring up energy in others; as William Wilberforce the philanthrophist said, 'I have myself seen collected in that small room several of the noblemen and gentlemen of the greatest properties in the British Isles, all of them catching and cultivating an agricultural spirit, and going forth to spend in the employment of labourers, and I hope in the improvement of land, immense sums which might otherwise have been lavished on hounds and horses, ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... "governing" brain. A born commander, utterly without fear, yet always cool-headed and never rash. If there are more Englishmen like him, I don't think you will find them in London or anywhere in the British Isles. You must go for them to the British colonies. There, rather than at home, the sacred faith in the British Empire is still kept passionately alive. And, at all events, Charlie Webster may truly be said to ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... means of these concerts brought before the English public the works of many composers who would have remained unknown perhaps for years but for his efforts. In this work he was ably supported by this talented violinist, afterwards his wife, and with her he made many tours all over the British Isles. ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... Lord druv down Creation's spiles 'Thout no gret helpin' from the British Isles, An' could contrive to keep things pooty stiff Ef they withdrawed from business in a miff; I han't no patience with such swelling fellers ez Think God can't forge 'thout them to blow ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... grew graver. Napoleon, in December, 1806, issued from Berlin a decree declaring that, in retaliation for the aggressions of England upon neutral commerce, the British Isles were in blockade and all trade with them was forbidden. British goods were to be absolutely excluded from the continent. The reply of the Grenville Ministry to this was an Order in Council, January, 1807, prohibiting ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... that Great Britain alone will have to face in the next year or so. (And her task is, if anything, less than that of any of her antagonists or Allies, except Japan and Italy.) She has now probably from six to ten million people in the British Isles, men and women, either engaged directly in warfare or in the manufacture of munitions or in employments such as transit, nursing, and so forth, directly subserving these main ends. At least five-sixths of these millions must be got back to employment ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... And if the presents are on view, dogs are of no use, nor bolts, nor bars:—he's worse than Cupid. The only protection to be found, singular as it may be thought, is in a couple of bottles of the oldest Jamaica rum in the British isles." ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... had never been in the Blue Land and knew little even of the British Isles except for London—chiefly around St Paul's School, Hammersmith—and the Scotch Manse where he had occasionally spent his holidays—even he was transported from the Government House drawing-room. ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... reports which reached the outside world sounded like the Arabian Nights or some fairy-tale. The whole world took fire. Cariboo was on every man's lips, as were Transvaal {46} and Klondike half a century later. The New England States, Canada, the Maritime Provinces, the British Isles—all were set agog by the reports of the new gold-camps where it was only necessary to dig to find nuggets. By way of Panama, by way of San Francisco, by way of Spokane, by way of Victoria, by way of Winnipeg and Edmonton came the gold-seekers, indifferent alike to ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... who lived in the British Isles long ago were not English. It will be simplest for us to call them all Celts and to divide them into two families, the Gaels and the Cymry. The Gaels lived in Ireland and in Scotland, and the Cymry in ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... lowest degrees of temperature, although the mean of the two would be the same. And herein we have an explanation of what at first sight appear to be anomalies: we know, for instance, 'that plants will flourish perennially in the British isles which are killed by the frosts of winter in places lying considerably to the south upon the continent; thus the laurel, that bears our winters steadily in Ireland and the west of England, and is only affected by very severe frosts ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... punishment of the balls that are not kept in the fairway. These are the chief considerations which lead me to give an emphatic vote in favour of Sandwich when I am asked which is the best course—that is to say, the best test of golf—that is to be found in the British Isles, or elsewhere so far as I know, and I ask to be given no more favourable opportunity of studying a golfer's points, than to see him play a round or two ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... fallacious? Our position is not that of the British Isles half a century since, exhausted by a war of twenty years, without a railway, with less than half the wealth and half the population, and one twentieth of the land and mineral resources that we possess, while their debt was fifty per cent more than our own. They were almost ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... of the accurate but limited portolani of the Italian navigators, and finally of the more pretentious, if vague and often misleading, world maps of learned geographers. If a sailor wished to navigate the Mediterranean and its adjacent waters, if he planned to sail up the coast of Europe to the British Isles and on into the Baltic, or to pass down the Atlantic coast of Africa to Cape Nun, he might rely on the maps and charts which the Italian geographers could furnish him. Or if he launched his galleys on the Red Sea he might use their guidance ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... rigours of an arctic winter. The South of Iceland also suffers less from cold than do the great central plains of Europe. And why? Simply because their different climates are the result of special conditions or influences of Nature, and what the Gulf Stream does for the British Isles the deserts of Africa effect not only for Egypt, but for the whole of Southern Europe, whose genial climate is mainly caused by the warm air generated ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... weren't, rightly speaking, convictions at all. She could not see the world divided into separate compartments of good people and bad people, any more than she could believe so implicitly in the rightness of her own thought as to wish to bring the population of the British Isles into agreement with it. She looked at the lemon-colored leaflet, and thought almost enviously of the faith which could find comfort in the issue of such documents; for herself she would be content to remain silent for ever if a share of personal happiness were granted her. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... 93. The Age of Justinian 94. The Byzantine State Church under Justinian 95. The Definitive Type of Religion in the East: Dionysius the Areopagite Chapter II. The Transition To The Middle Ages. The Foundation Of The Germanic National Churches 96. The Celtic Church in the British Isles 97. The Conversion of the Franks. The Establishment of Catholicism in the Germanic Kingdoms 98. The State Church in the Germanic Kingdoms 99. Gregory the Great and the Roman Church in the Second Half of the Sixth Century 100. The Foundation of the Anglo-Saxon ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... to be expressed nor conceived. When the snow falls, with the largest flakes and with the least interval between them, the air is not so full of them as that which surrounded the Ephemerae." The occurrence of such prodigious numbers is, I believe, unknown in the British isles. In the perfect or imago state the May-fly lives but a short time. The word ephemera means "living only for a day;" and though individuals may live longer, yet the term is fairly correct as expressing their short existence. The May-flies (Ephemerae) ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... Camden (1551-1623). Pausanias was a traveller and geographer in the 2d century A.D., who wrote an Itinerary of Greece. Camden wrote in Latin his "Brittania," a survey of the British Isles. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... said the doctor. "They must have made Silbury Hill long before 2000 B.C. It may be five thousand years old or even more. It is the most important historical relic in the British Isles. And the most neglected." ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... indeed in the British Isles the favourite time for forecasting the future, and various methods ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... on consulting a chart or map of the south-west and west of the British Isles can easily see that the above was just a crude form of sailing directions to guide the ship to land the goods at various places in Ireland, especially when the box also contained a ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton
... overhead, his rays strike down with much more force than when he is low. It is, for instance, hotter at mid-day than in the evening. Now, when the North Pole is bowed toward the sun, the sun appears to us to be higher in the sky. In the British Isles he never climbs quite to the zenith, as we call the point straight above our heads; he always keeps on the southern side of that, so that our shadows are thrown northward at mid-day, but yet he gets nearer to it than he does in winter. Look at the picture of the earth as it is in winter. Then ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... the wretched Pretender what all the kings of Europe could not do for his body—placed it on the throne of these realms; and for Popery, what Popes and Cardinals strove in vain to do for three centuries—brought back its mummeries and nonsense into the temples of the British Isles. ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... of the Birds which have been observed in the British Isles; their Haunts and Habits; their systematic, common, and provincial Names; together with a Synopsis of Genera; and a brief Summary of Specific characters. By the late Rev. C. A. JOHNS, B.A., F.L.S. Post 8vo. ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... and depressions on the surface. Secondly, one should take any place as centre, and draw about it circles of 50 or 100 miles radius, and see what lies within them; and note the extent of the influence exerted by the central point. At the same time, one should always compare the British Isles to scale. For instance, the Aegean is about as big as Britain; while the smallness of Judaea is remarkable. After the Exile, the Jewish part was about as big as the county of Gloucester. How few boys realise this, though they are taught ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... systems, his bold soundings of the universe, his grandiose ideas, and the elevated yet simple language in which they were conveyed—formed a combination powerfully effective to those least susceptible of new impressions. Nor was the evoked enthusiasm limited to the British Isles. In Germany, Schroeter followed—longo intervallo—in Herschel's track. Von Zach set on foot from Gotha that general communication of ideas which gives life to a forward movement. Bode wrote much and well for unlearned readers. Lalande, by his ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... of these phases may have passed unnoticed owing to the alarm occasioned by the shock, and to the fact that most of the observers were asleep when the earthquake began. Defects of memory must also have an influence not to be neglected, for, even with the simple shocks felt in the British Isles, persons in the same or neighbouring places differ greatly in ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... could he assume more than this without assuming to himself that to which he was not entitled,—the office of a bishop in the Church. Under these strange and irregular circumstances was the infant Church, brought from the British isles and planted in the wilderness of Australia, allowed to continue for about twelve years. The witness of a layman concerning this state of things may be here repeated: "I myself then saw a church without a bishop, and I trust in God I may never see it ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden |
