"Fissure" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mountain falls abruptly away, its summit presenting a red and bare appearance, owing to the alternate action of summer sun and winter frost. As the slopes approach the valley they become clothed with a garb of wild vegetation, which bursts forth from every fissure, and finds a foothold on every projecting rock: the base of the mountain is hidden in a tangled mass of glowing green, which the moist yet sunny Spring calls forth in abundance whenever the slopes are not too steep to retain a shallow layer of nourishing mould. It would ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... love; and beautiful as your incredulity may be, you will find it more comforting to confide in my knowledge of the selfishness of the world. My sweetest, you will?—you do! For a breath of difference between us is intolerable. Do you not feel how it breaks our magic ring? One small fissure, and we have the world with its muddy deluge!—But my subject was old Vernon. Yes, I pay for Crossjay, if Vernon consents to stay. I waive my own scheme for the lad, though I think it the better one. Now, then, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of an explosion lit up the black smoke of burning buildings and fields in the valley, or showed the white puff-like low clouds of the bursting shrapnel. Not for an instant did the roar diminish, not for a second was the kindly veil of night left unrent by a fissure of vengeful flame. Yet, all night long, as ceaselessly as the great guns poured out their angry fury, so did men pour out their indomitable will, and in that hell light of battle flame engineers labored to construct bridges, small bodies of troops moved forward to ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... out after our voice, is always ready to follow us and show its leering shape when we pass under dark, vaulted bridges or stand in the secret shadow of churches. The echo! What is the echo, Olivie, you discoursed of so sweetly? It is the sound of our souls escaping from some fissure of the brain. It has color, is a living thing, the thin wraith that pursues man ever to his grave. Patel was an echo. When his soul leans naked against the chill bar of heaven and bears false witness, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... gorge is the deepest, opposite the Castle of Belfort (the modern Kulat-esh-Shukif), the river suddenly makes a turn at right angles, altering its course from nearly due south to nearly due west, and cuts through the remaining roots of Lebanon, still at the bottom of a tremendous fissure, and still raging and chafing for a distance of fifteen miles, until at length it debouches on the coast plain, and meanders slowly through meadows to the sea,[147] which it enters about five miles to the north of Tyre. The course of the ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... tempting, but the descent was rather hazardous at first; great square blocks of rock one below another, and these rude steps were coated with mosses of rich hue, but wet and slippery; Hazel began to be alarmed for his companion. However, after one or two difficulties, the fissure opened wider to the sun, and they descended from the slimy rocks into a sloping hot-bed of exotic flowers, and those huge succulent leaves that are the glory of the tropics. The ground was carpeted a yard deep ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... the interior (of which was exposed) to the wind, which entered through (the fissure) of the door; and was perfectly empty and bare; and the weather being, at this time, that of December, and the night too very long, the northerly wind, with its biting gusts, was sufficient to penetrate the flesh and to cleave the bones, so that ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... keep outside, use your post-mortem method, try to build the philosophy up out of the single phrases, taking first one and then another and seeking to make them fit, and of course you fail. You crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists. I hope that some of the philosophers in this audience may occasionally have had something different from this intellectualist type of criticism applied to ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... Evanton, and pursued the course of the river Auldgrande, first through intermingled fields and patches of copsewood, and then through a thick fir wood, to where the bed of the stream contracts from a boulder-strewed bottom of ample breadth, to a gloomy fissure, so deep and dark, that in many places the water cannot be seen, and so narrow, that the trees which shoot out from the opposite sides interlace their branches atop. Large banks of the gray boulder-clay, laid open by the river, and charged with fragments of dingy sandstone and dark-colored ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... was still to be seen, and in the fissure made by the saint the flowers and ferns were still growing; but there did not appear to be any danger of the immediate fulfilment of ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... knees tremble, my heart break, must note the rumbling, heed only the shuddering down in the fissure beneath the rock of the ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... they should be removed with a snare made of hair. For fall of the uvula he suggests gargles, but when these fail he advises resection and cauterization. Among the affections of the tongue he numbers abscess, fissure, ulcer, cancer, ranula, shortening of the ligaments, hypertrophy, erythema of the mucous membrane, and inflammatory swelling. In general his treatment of the upper respiratory tract is much farther advanced than we might think possible at this time. He advises tracheotomy whenever ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... Watchet, on the coast of Somersetshire, a molar tooth of Microlestes, enabling him to refer to the Trias strata formerly supposed to be Liassic. Mr. Charles Moore had previously discovered many teeth of mammalia of the same family near Frome, in Somersetshire, in the contents of a vertical fissure traversing a mass of carboniferous limestone. The top of this fissure must have communicated with the bed of the Triassic sea, and probably at a point not far from the ancient shore on which the small marsupials ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... about two feet from the bank, quite close to the vortex of the whirlpool. This rock was Martin's only hope. To miss it would be certain destruction. But if he should gain a footing on it he knew that he could climb by a narrow fissure into a wild, cavernous spot, which it was exceedingly difficult to reach from any other point. A bend in the river concealed this rock and the vortex from the place whereon he stood, so that he hoped to be able to reach the point of escape before the ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... his negro man to go down into the cavern and shoot the wolf; but he declined the hazardous service. Then it was that the master resolved himself to destroy the ferocious beast, lest she should escape through some unknown fissure of the rock. His neighbors strongly remonstrated against the perilous enterprise; but he, knowing that wild animals were intimidated by fire, and having provided several strips of birch-bark, the only combustible material he could obtain that would afford light in this deep and ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... aside to explore an opening between the trees. A moment more and Tom heard a crash, followed by a faint scream. He looked round, to see the edge of Miss Goldthwaite's fur cloak disappearing through a huge fissure in the ice! He had presence of mind to utter one wild, despairing cry, which re-echoed far off in the lonely pine wood, and then he plunged after her and caught her dress. Superhuman strength seemed to ...
— Thankful Rest • Annie S. Swan
... already described in connection with oil (pp. 140-144). In some cases the asphaltic material is found as impregnations of sediments, and appears to have remained in place while the lighter organic materials were volatilized and migrated upward. In other cases it occurs in distinct fissure veins; the fissures and cavities apparently were once filled with liquid petroleum, which has subsequently undergone further distillation. The original liquid character of some of these bitumens is ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... beating it violently against his head. The inflammation is thus increased, and the tip of the ear becomes exceedingly sore. This causes him to shake his head still more violently, and the ulcer spreads and is indisposed to heal, and at length a fissure or crack appears on the tip of the cartilage, and extends to a greater or less distance ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... speak) a complete slice of the shaft, is just as strong as the block pillar of one stone, so long as no forces are brought into action upon it which would have a tendency to cause horizontal dislocation. But the pillar which is built as a filled-up tower is of course liable to fissure in any direction, if its cement ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... understand. If any rich magician rubs his double-eagles before me, woe is me, if I don't paint! When the magicians send their eagles on other errands, I am free from their drudgery. Meanwhile, I live on air, flattened out and packed away, like a Mexican horned-frog, or a dreaming toad, in a fissure of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... at the stem of a cedar projecting from a fissure in the rock, and swung himself up to the cleft. The Indian followed, and with silence and caution they commenced their dangerous journey. Landless was no novice at such work. When a boy, he had often rounded the face of frowning white cliffs with the sea breaking ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... smaller of the two terminal branches of the digital, is situated inside the basilar process of the os pedis. It turns round this to gain the fissure between the basilar and retrossal processes, and becomes lodged in the preplantar fissure. Here it terminates in several divisions which bury themselves in the os pedis. Before leaving the inner aspect of the pedal wing it supplies a deep branch to ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... into soft, fantastic shapes, no longer capped the crater; its place had been usurped by thick, dark fumes of smoke swirling sullenly about. In the fading light I marked the red, malignant glow of a fissure newly broken out in the side of the ragged cone, from which came a thin, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Catriona beautiful in sound and suggestion of romance: and Kidnapped (as everyone knows) is a capital tale, though imperfect; and Catriona (as the critics began to point out, the day after its issue) a capital tale with an awkward fissure midway in it. "It is the fate of sequels"—thus Mr. Stevenson begins his Dedication—"to disappoint those who have waited for them"; and it is possible that the boys of Merry England (who, it may be remembered, thought more of Treasure ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... towards me then, and, as I laid one hand across her arm, I felt her relax to a relieved trembling. Before us the night crowded down over the countryside, masking its ugliness like a film, through which our lights cut a white fissure towards town. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of the projecting rock and wedging her slender body into a small fissure, peered cautiously through the cleft. So close that she could almost touch him, alert and motionless, stood the weasel-faced man. His small eyes were fixed upon the water. The hand which was nearest her ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... frontal lobes were surprisingly small, and that there was a partial deficiency of the median longitudinal fissure. The fissure did not begin till beyond the crown of the head, in the region of the occiput. The anterior half of the cerebrum consequently lacked the division into lateral hemispheres. It had few convolutions also, and the smoothness of its surface was at once obvious. The corpus callosum and ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... of December, about the warmest period of the year, during my rambles through the forest in search of insects, I met with this manna in the above-mentioned state, but could never find in any part of the bark a fissure or break whence such a substance could flow. Wherever it appeared, moreover, the red-eyed cicadae were in abundance. I was inclined to think that the puncture produced by these suctorial insects into the tender shoots for juice, would in all probability give an exit for such a substance; but ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... destructive earthquake of April 2, the ground south of Hilo burst open with a crash and roar which at once answered all questions concerning the volcano. The molten river, after travelling underground for twenty miles, emerged through a fissure two miles in length with a tremendous force and volume. It was in a pleasant pastoral region, supposed to be at rest for ever, at the top of a grass-covered plateau sprinkled with native and foreign houses, and rich in herds of cattle. Four huge fountains boiled up with terrific fury, ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... And since if these sharp flakes broke straight across the masses of mountain, when once the fissure took place, all hold would be lost between flake and flake, it is ordered (and herein is the most notable thing in the whole matter) that they shall not break straight, but in curves, round the body of the aiguilles, somewhat in the manner of the coats of an onion; so that, ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... is, Dick. Probably she drove in here, had a hole smashed in her bow, and then sank. The earth has settled in between the masses of rock above and around her, and hidden her, but there is still the fissure down which ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... we journey on, and the sunken ledges more numerous, and the protruding rocks more dangerous, splinters of strata piercing the sea-surface from a depth of thirty fathoms. Then suddenly our boat makes a dash for the black cliff, and shoots into a tremendous cleft of it—an earthquake fissure with sides lofty and perpendicular as the walls of a canon-and lo! there is daylight ahead. This is a miniature strait, a short cut to the bay. We glide through it in ten minutes, reach open water again, and ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... as, rapid, I ran over Parnes' ridge; Gully and gap I clambered and cleared till, sudden, a bar Jutted, a stoppage of stone against me, blocking the way. Right! for I minded the hollow to traverse, the fissure across: "Where I could enter, there I depart by! Night in the fosse? Athens to aid? Tho' the dive were thro' Erebos, thus I obey— Out of the day dive, into the day as bravely arise! No bridge Better!"—when—ha! what was it I came on, ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... unmistakable. But the winds were inconstant and drifting clouds occasionally obscured the moon. Watching, I saw him distinctly; then, as the moonlight darkened, the after part of the ship became as a single shadow against a sea almost as black. While I still watched, there came through a small fissure in the clouds a single moonbeam that swept from the sea across the quarter-deck and on over the sea again. By that momentary light I saw that Mr. Falk had ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... silence fell profound; and this silence was the ruin of the islanders. A sound of stones rattling caught the ear of Teina. He looked, thinking to perceive a crab, and saw instead the brown hand of a human being issue from a fissure in the ground. A shout recalled the search parties and announced their doom to the buried caitiffs. In the cave below, sixteen were found crouching among human bones and singular and horrid curiosities. ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for fear that the cliff might cave in. Indeed, the cliffs all around were cracked off, and in some places leaning over, apparently ready to fall; and even at the spot where the spectators stood looking into the crater, there was a fissure running along parallel to the cliff, some feet behind them. At first Mr. George was afraid to step over ...
— Rollo in Naples • Jacob Abbott
... of strata are strictly applicable to mechanical deposits, and only partially to those of a mixed nature. Such as are purely chemical may be formed on a very steep slope, or may even incrust the vertical walls of a fissure, and be of equal thickness throughout; but such deposits are of small extent, and for the most part ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... wind, we mount or descend at the will of the hollows and the earthy mounds in the gigantic fissure dug and blackened and burned by furious flames. The soil clings to the feet and we tear them out angrily. The accouterments and stuffs that cover the soft soil, the linen that is scattered about from sundered knapsacks, prevent us from sticking fast in it, and we are careful to plant our feet in ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... earth. The narrow valley that it waters is a gorge 500 or 600 feet deep through the greater part of its distance. The traveller at the bottom supposes, or is ready to suppose, that he is in some ravine of the high mountains; in reality, it is simply a fissure of the plateau that was once the bed of the sea. There is no igneous, no metamorphic rock here; nothing but limestone of the Jurassic formation. The convexities on one side of the fissure correspond with marked regularity to the ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... Conard Fissure, a Pleistocene bone deposit in northern Arkansas: with description of two new genera and twenty new species and subspecies of mammals. Mem. Amer. Mus. Nat., ...
— Pleistocene Bats from San Josecito Cave, Nuevo Leon, Mexico • J. Knox Jones, Jr.
... laughs again, again the sky is cold, And down that fissure now no star-beam glides. Yet they whose sweep of vision grows not old Still at the central point of space behold Another pole-star: for ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... bathroom run through the office. In the last blizzard they burst. The fire in the fireplace was a conflagration; the steam radiator was singing a credible song; and as the water trickled down the pipe from the little fissure, it froze solid before it was ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... that the door was not a door; it had neither hinges, cross-bars, lock, nor fissure in the middle; the iron bands traversed it from side to side without any break. Through the crevices in the planks he caught a view of unhewn slabs and blocks of stone roughly cemented together, which passers-by might still have seen there ten ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... bed with an attentive eye, Colwyn next looked for the small door in the wall. It was not apparent: the wall-paper appeared to cover the whole of the wall on that side of the room in unbroken continuity. But a closer inspection revealed a slight fissure or crack, barely noticeable in the dark green wall-paper, extending an inch or so beyond a small picture suspended near the door of the room. When the picture was taken down the crack was more apparent, for it ran nearly the whole length of the space. The door ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... lay in the slab of rock was probably, your father thought, about five feet from the surface, but he could not say with certainty. He was sure there was no fissure or opening in it communicating with ...
— Harper's Young People, June 29, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... came so near Cleggett, had been flung to a distance, but for the most part the shivered crowns and broken bulks had been served otherwise; the force of the blast had disintegrated them, but had not scattered them; the greater part of this newly-rent stone had toppled into the fissure in the ground, and lay there mixed with earth, almost filling the hole. It was impossible to determine just where and how the blast had been set off; the rocks hid the facts. But Cleggett judged that the force must have come from below the bowlders; mightily smitten ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... mule Hercules, as he had been many a time while riding over the lonely trail. In truth, there was some foundation for his declaration that he could sleep more soundly on the back of his animal than while wrapped up in his blanket in some fissure among the rocks. Fortunately for him, however, these naps were of short duration, and, while indulging in them, he relied upon his animal, which had acquired a wonderful quickness in detecting danger. The slightest lagging in his gait, ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... industries include not only very great acreage of coal measures, which have been producing coal for commercial purposes for local and foreign trade for thirty years and are scarcely scratched as yet, but also fissure veins of the precious metals—gold, silver, lead, [Page 63] copper, antimony, arsenic, and also iron, asbestos, fire clays, kaolin, granite, sandstones, lime ...
— A Review of the Resources and Industries of the State of Washington, 1909 • Ithamar Howell
... Buxton abounds in the most wild and romantic scenery—steep rocks, dark chasms, and wooded hills, mixed in delightful confusion. Among the favourite places of resort are Ashwood Dale, with its famous Lover's Leap rock; Shirbrook Dale, with its fissure and cascade; Diamond Hill, so called from the quartz crystals or "Buxton diamonds" found there; Chee Tor, a huge limestone rock 350 feet high, which rises sheer from the bed of the Wye, washing its base; and Axe Edge, 2-1/2 ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... placid and reverential contemplation, on the Mighty Maker of the world—a world majestically and inevitably ordered; a world where, he argued, each object—each fissure in the fells, the winding course of each tumbling stream—possesses its mysterious purport, ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... after fissure like a young roe, fled to the top of the Downfall and looked over. Did the light show through the tarpaulin? Alack!—there must be a rent somewhere—for he saw a dim glow-worm light beyond the cliff, on the dark rib of the mountain. It was invisible from below, but any roving ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... moment, for a voice among them cried out, and the whole pack gave tongue shrilly and surged on again. But that instant of check had given the stranger his chance. He was up the ladder, and, gripping the parapet, found rest for his feet in a fissure. Then he bent down, drew up the ladder, handed it to McGuffog, and with a mighty heave pulled himself over ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... a favorite among the men; they teased, and played practical jokes upon him. Sunday was his only day of rest and relaxation. Then, with one of Dr. Rivals' books, Jack sought a quiet nook on the bank of the river. He had found a deep fissure in the rocks, where he sat quite concealed from view, his book open on his knee, the rush, the magic, and the extent of the water before him. The distant church-bells rang out praises to the Lord, and all was rest and peace. Occasionally ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... The waters from which Bath gets its fame are believed to owe their origin to the surface drainage of the E. Mendips, which percolates through some vertical fissure, perhaps at Downhead, to the heart of the hills, and are conducted by some natural culvert beneath the intervening coal measures, washing out as they go the soluble mineral salts, and whilst still retaining their heat emerge ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... days, those evenings so fraternal in their very violence, when nothing had as yet separated them, when not one of them had thought of keeping his part of glory to himself? Nowadays the battle was beginning. Each hungry one was eagerly biting. And a fissure was there, a scarcely perceptible crack that had rent the old, sworn friendships, and some day would make them crumble into ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... finally gets to the bottom after a hundred tumbles. It cannot be better described than in Southey's verses, though it is worthy of better poetry than that. After all, I do not know that the cascade is anything more than a beautiful fringe to the grandeur of the scene; for it is very grand,—this fissure through the cliff,—with a steep, lofty precipice on the right hand, sheer up and down, and on the other hand, too, another lofty precipice, with a slope of its own ruin on which trees and shrubbery have grown. The right-hand precipice, however, has shelves affording sufficient ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... fugitive removed to the Island of Wia, where he was received by Ranald Macdonald; thence he visited places called Rossinish and Aikersideallich, and at the latter had to sleep in a fissure in the rocks. Returning once more to South Uist, Charles (accompanied by O'Neal and Mackechan) found a hiding-place up in the hills, as the militia appeared to be dangerously near, and at night tramped towards Benbecula, near to which another place of safety ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... become fissured and superficially ulcerated, and the discharge then becomes abundant and may crust on the surface, forming yellow scabs. At the angle of the mouth the condylomatous patches may spread to the cheek, and when they ulcerate may leave fissure-like scars radiating from the mouth—an appearance best seen in ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... men to leave their horses and "take cover," and he himself sought the only cover near him—a wide fissure in the wall of the long slope below the point where the attackers ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... frog is the division in the middle line of the frog. In healthy feet, it consists of only a slight depression. In a disease, called "thrush," of the sensitive part which secretes the frog, the cleft forms a deep, damp and foul-smelling fissure, and the frog becomes more or less shrivelled up. The frog similar to the skin of the palms of our hands, requires frequent pressure to make it thick and strong. The horn of the hoof is merely a modification of the cuticle ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... almost reached her, his hands outstretched to grasp her neck. But, at that instant, the frightened woman's strength suddenly gave way; her knees received the fall of the limp body. For a second she seemed huddled in a posture of prayer, then toppled over, slipped easily forward through a fissure in the wall and plunged headforemost into the ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... them gathering up the glittering scales with great eagerness, came forward, and with his hatchet struck a few heavy blows against a fragment that projected from a fissure in the rock, when it split from the solid mass, and revealed the precious ore, intermixed with quartz rock; then turning away with disdain, left them to amuse themselves, and took up his former ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... the manner of the famous Mexican barrancas. In some places might be traced a sort of correspondence on the opposite sides; a recess on one side into which a projection on the other would have nearly fitted, could some Antaeus have closed the fissure. This, however, was only here and there; generally speaking, the rocky brink was worn by the action of time and water, and the rock composing it sloped slightly downwards. The chasm was of various width, but was narrowest at the spot at which we reached it, and really did not appear so very terrible ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... seams that have been turned up on edge, so as to be vertical instead of horizontal. They run for a great distance. Near Santo Domingo they had been traced for two miles in length, and probably they extend much further. They are what are called fissure-veins, owing their origin to cracks or fractures in the rocks that have been filled up with mineral substances through chemical, thermal, aqueous, or plutonic agencies. In depth, the bottom of fissure-veins ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... of others, and the inference drawn by himself, satisfied him that the spectacle was tame compared with what occurs during the rainy season, when the river flows between banks many miles apart, and still forces its augmented waters through the same fissure into the same trough. At these times the columns of spray may be seen, and the sound heard ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... mingled together instead of showing as a rule clearly defined walls. It is much more rational to suppose that the increased hardness imparted to the slates and schists at or near their contact with the lode is due to an infiltration of silica from the silicated solution which at one time filled the fissure. Few scientists can now be found to advance the purely igneous theory of lode formation, though it must be admitted that volcanic action has probably had much influence not only in the formation of mineral veins, but also on the occurrence of the minerals therein. ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... put ajar! Or, after nightfall, a great many of the stars might be loosened from their places, and shower down, like fiery rain, upon the people's heads! And how ashamed would the hero be if, owing to his unsteadiness beneath its weight, the sky should crack and show a great fissure quite ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... caves to lock their granite feet, Heave their broad spines, expand each breathing lobe, And with their massy members rib the globe, Her cauldron'd floods of fire their blast prepare; Her wallowing womb of subterranean war Waits but the fissure that my wave shall find, To force the foldings of the rocky rind, Crash your curst continent, and whirl on high The vast avulsion vaulting thro the sky, Fling far the bursting fragments, scattering wide Rocks, mountains, nations ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... reveal the presence of the fracture (f. 88a). In the treatment of such fissures he directs that the scalp wound be enlarged, the cranium perforated very cautiously with a trepan (trepano) at each extremity of the fissure and the two openings then connected by a chisel (spata?), in order to enable the surgeon to remove the discharges by a delicate bit of silk or linen introduced with a feather. If a portion of the cranium is depressed so that it cannot be easily ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... where he last saw the end of a bernouse vanishing, wandered further than the others, perhaps, and came suddenly on a hole in the side of the rock. Not a natural fissure, but evidently a man-made doorway; oval, with carved pillars at the sides, and an inscription over the door. Kavanagh's first impulse was to go in, his second one not to. Why, there might be an army inside! But by the time the risk occurred to him he ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... external things and their specific types, but he also, by an exercise of memory, animates the psychical image of these special perceptions. If, for example, the primitive man personifies a stream of water which he has seen to issue from a fissure of the rocks, and ascribes to it voluntary and intentional motion, he also animates the image which reappears in his sphere of thought, and conceives it to have a real existence. He does not merely believe it to be a psychical ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... Gonye have not been made by wearing back, like those of Niagara, but are of a fissure form. For many miles below, the river is confined in a narrow space of not more than one hundred yards wide. The water goes boiling along, and gives the idea of great masses of it rolling over and over, so that even the most expert swimmer would find it difficult to keep ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... At a point on the river about forty miles from the sea, where the first houses come into view, there can be seen rising above the level of the forests the summits of two steep hills very close together, and separated by what looks like a deep fissure, the cleavage of some mighty stroke. As a matter of fact, the valley between is nothing but a narrow ravine; the appearance from the settlement is of one irregularly conical hill split in two, and with the two halves leaning slightly apart. On ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... He is acquainted with a subterranean passage—in the time of Trajan, he has informed me, a public conduit, but long since much choked and dry—by which one may pass from the city under and beyond the lines of the Roman intrenchments, emerging into a deep ravine or fissure, grown thickly over with vines and olives. Once it was of size sufficient to admit an elephant with his rider; now, he says, has it become so obstructed, and in some places so fallen in, that it is with ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... fissure, breach, rent, split, rift, crack, slit, incision. dissection anatomy; decomposition &c. 49; cutting instrument &c (sharpness) 253; buzzsaw, circular saw, rip saw. separatist. V. be disjoined &c.; come off, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... thrusting the bushes aside with his rifle barrel, judged that Betty had done well. Here was a perpendicular cleft in the rock, one of those cracks which not infrequently result from the splitting of gigantic masses of rock along a well-defined flaw. In some ancient convulsion this fissure had developed, the two monster fragments of the mountain had been divided, one had slipped a little, and thereafter through the ages they had stood face to face, close together. Kendric could barely squeeze his body through; he found ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... the scene was well calculated to affect a nervous mind. It was a fit scene for the painter of the supernatural. The small apartment in which they were, was formed in great part from the natural rock; where a fissure presented itself, a huge pine-tree, overthrown so as to fill the vacuity, completed what nature had left undone; and, bating the one or two rude cavities left here and there in the sides—themselves so covered as to lie hidden from all without—there was all the compactness of a regularly-constructed ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... absently, still staring at the interweaving crowd beyond them, trying to figure out what made them different from last trip. "Creativity fuel. Cranky. Explodes through the parietal fissure if you look ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... the King's son stepped into their fighting place, and fierce was the combat that arose between them, as when two roaring surges of the sea dash against each other in a fissure of the rocks, and the spray-cloud bursts from them high into the air. Long they fought, and many red wounds did each of them give and receive, till at last Oscar beat the Greek prince to the earth and smote off his head. Then one host groaned for ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... remain idle. A cleft was before me, through which I must pass; so pressing my knees and back against its opposite sides, I gradually worked myself to the top. I descended the other face of the rock, and then, through a second ragged fissure, to the summit of another pinnacle. The highest point of the mountain was now at hand, separated from me merely by a short saddle, carved by weathering out the crest of the mountain. I could hear Lauener clattering after me, through the rocks behind. I dropt down upon the saddle, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by carpenter's measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; a sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more. A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... manner which it does even where the coating is impermanent. This supposition is easily confirmed: by observing the field we find that the sheet is everywhere drawing away from the cliffs, leaving a deep fissure between the neve and the precipices. This crevice is called by the German-Swiss guides the Bergschrund. Passage over it is often one of the most difficult feats to accomplish which the Alpine explorer has ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... of Roland. His hands, his feet, his horse, his sword, his voice, have left their puissant mark on almost every crest, in almost every glen. Above Gavarnie, amidst the eternal snow, gapes the slashed fissure hewn by Durandal, his sword; ten miles off in a gorge you see the indents of the hoofs of Bayard on a rock which served as his half-way touching-point when he sprang in two flying bounds from the Breach to the Peak of the Chevalier near ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... ink-stained desk a man and a woman faced each other. Threads of gray lightened the hair of each. Faint lines, delicate as pencillings, marked the forehead of the woman and radiated from the angles of her eyes. A deep fissure unequally separated the brows of the man, and on his shaven face another furrow added firmness to the mouth. Their eyes met squarely, without a motion from faces imperturbable in middle age ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... grade of dermatitis, may be brought about. The parasite seeks preferably tender and protected situations, as between the fingers, on the wrists, especially the flexor surface, in the folds of the axilla, on the abdomen, about the anal fissure, about the genitalia, and in females also about the nipples, and hence the eruption is most abundant about these regions. The inside of the thighs and the feet are also attacked, as, indeed, may be almost every portion of the body. The scalp and face are ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... however, a large number of other subcastes, and the tendency to fissure in a large caste, and to the formation of small local groups which marry among themselves, is nowhere more strikingly apparent than among the Brahmans. This is only natural, as they, more than any other caste, attach importance to strict ceremonial observance in ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... entirely cellular. This small globule, the commencement of the receptacle, is not long in increasing, preserving its rounded form up to the development of the asci. At this period, under the influence of the rapid growth of these organs, it soon produces at its summit a fissure of the external membrane, which becomes a more marked depression in the marginate species. The receptacle thus formed increases rapidly, becomes plane, more convex, or more or less undulated at the margin, if at all of large size. Fixed to the place where ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... religions which he had gained in boyhood as an electrical engineer. Later he became one of our greatest geologists; and achieved that bold and bright outlook upon the future of Socialism which only geology can give. At first there seemed something like a rift, a faint, but perceptible, fissure, between his views and those of his aristocratic wife. For she was in favour (to use her own powerful epigram) of protecting the poor against themselves; while he declared pitilessly, in a new and striking metaphor, that the weakest must go to the wall. Eventually, however, the married ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... safe my hiding-place was, and showed that the opening was so curiously hidden that a stranger might pass it a hundred times and not see it. So I helped her to climb up the cliff until I got to a small platform, and afterward passed along the fissure between the rocks and drew her after me, and then, when she had followed me a few steps, she saw how cunningly Nature had concealed the place, and fearful as she was, she uttered a low exclamation of pleased surprise. For from this place we ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... first finger down the aperture, and at last managed to make a slight further fissure in the piping. The light that came up from beyond was very faint, and apparently indirect; it seemed to fall from some hole or window higher up. As he was screwing his eye to peer at this grey and greasy twilight he was astonished to see another human finger very long and ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... old age, paralysis, lead poisoning and some troubles of local origin, like fissure of the rectum, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... 5000. Inns: Cheval Blanc, La St. Marie. The vineyards in this neighbourhood produce a good white Macon. Afew miles distant is the Vallon de Vaux-Chignon, below cliffs 200 ft. high. In a deep fissure is the source of the Cusane. 3 m. E. are the ruins of the castle Rochepot, 15th cent. In the church of the village is a remarkable echo. 8 m. beyond is Epinac, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... May 1886, in which he shows that great beds of bituminous limestone extend below the Jordan valley and much of the Dead Sea, and that the escape of inflammable gag from these through the opening of a fissure along a great 'line of fault,' is capable of producing all the effects described. The 'brimstone' of the Authorised Version is probably rather some form of bituminous matter which would be carried into ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... herd trumpeted madly and barged for the higher ground of safety. Too late did instinct warn it of the widening fissure underfoot. Before it could stop the pressure of the herd ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... own creation has only been obtained by falsifying the direct intuition of what is. From time to time, a genius, in passing contact with the earth, suddenly perceives the torrent of reality, overflowing the continents of art. The dykes crack for a moment. Nature creeps in through a fissure. But at once the gap is stopped up. It must be done to safeguard the reason of mankind. It would perish if its eyes met the eyes of Jehovah. Then once more it begins to strengthen the walls of its cell, which nothing enters from without, except it have ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... path ran on to this plateau I saw, on the further side of this tableland, the yellow robe of the mendicant. He was walking straight for the face of the precipice, and straight for the spot at which, from a fissure in the rock, a little stream leapt out, to fall sheerly ten or fifteen feet into a winding channel, along which it bubbled away westward, doubtless to form ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... heathen stood on his ancient mound, Looking over the desert bound Into the distant, hazy South, Over the dusty and broad champaign, Where, with many a gaping mouth And fissure, cracked by the fervid drouth, For seven months had the wasted plain Known no moisture of dew or rain. The wells were empty and choked with sand; The rivers had perished from the land; Only the sea-fogs to and fro Slipped like ghosts of the streams ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... and the thaw, and there was a sort of icy wave cast up near the land, over which it was indispensable to pass, in order to get fairly on the river. As the top of this ridge, or wave, was broken, it exposed a fissure that enabled us to see the thickness of the ice, and this Guert pointed out in proof of its strength. There was nothing unusual in a small movement of the covering of the river, which the current often produces; but, unless the vast fields below got in motion, it was impossible ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... a place which seemed like a fissure rent in a mountain side, by some extraordinary convulsion of nature. All around rose black, precipitous cliffs. On the side nearest was the precipice by whose base he had passed; while over opposite was a gigantic wall of dark rock, Which extended far out into ...
— The Errand Boy • Horatio Alger
... his strength, but never ostentatious of it—acquainted with every line and hue of the deep sea—chiseling his waves with unhesitating knowledge of every curve of their anatomy, and every moment of their motion—building his mountains rock by rock, with wind in every fissure, and weight in every stone—and modeling the masses of his sky with the strength of tempest in their every fold." It is curious—yet a searcher after nature's truths ought to know, as he is here told, that waves may be anatomized, and must be chiseled, and that mountains are and ought to be built ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... garish day waste, turn pale, and die. Seek a cypress grove, whose moaning boughs will be harmony befitting; seek some cave, deep embowered in earth's dark entrails, where no light will penetrate, save that which struggles, red and flickering, through a single fissure, staining thy page ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... procurable around. But by and by there arose sectarian quarrels with other backwoods folk who also wished to worship God in Kentucky, and hot personal disputes among the members—as is the eternal law. So that the church grew as grow infusorians and certain worms,—by fissure, by periodical splittings and breakings to pieces, each spontaneous division becoming a new organism. The first church, however, for all that it split off and cast off, seemed to lose nothing of its vitality or fighting qualities spiritual and physical (the strenuous life in those days!); ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... from every crack and cranny of the riven earth. Perhaps it is as well for us selfish and self-satisfied mortals to possess a memento mori close at hand in a spot so teeming with the joy of life; yet somehow the first sight of that mass of broken headland and the dark ominous fissure in the hill-side, flung across the sunlit scene, is apt to send a slight shiver through ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... woodmen, bent a forest pine to split, Into each fissure sundry wedges fit, To keep the void and render work more light. Out groaned the pine, "Why should I vent my spite Against the axe which never touched my root, So much as these cursed wedges, mine own fruit; Which rend me ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... first appears. The effect is not dreary as might be imagined, and parties are generally photographed here because one side of the room is white and greatly assists the flash. This is a smooth, perpendicular wall marking the line of the fissure and showing the strata of the rock in horizontal position whitened with a thin coating of carbonate of lime. All visitors are cordially invited to please themselves in leaving cards, letters or papers in this chamber, which is reserved ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... bounded on either side by titanic masses of volcanic rock, rugged and moss-grown, with little patches of herbage here and there, or an occasional stunted pine growing out of an almost imperceptible fissure. The only signs of life in this wild spot consisted of a diminutive musk-ox here and there cropping the scanty herbage half-way up the apparently inaccessible height in spots from which it appeared equally impossible for the creature to advance or ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... The fissure down the front of the Pink Lady's Slipper is not so wide but that a bee must use some force to push against its elastic sloping sides and enter the large banquet chamber where he finds generous entertainment secreted among the fine white hairs in the upper part. Presently ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... death in it, and when the lights of Lone Hollow had faded behind the obscurity closed round me like a thick curtain. Still, trusting to an instinctive sense of direction men acquire in that land, I pushed on for the big coulee—one of those deep ravines that fissure the prairie and much resemble a railway cutting. This one was larger than the rest, and Carrington Manor stood near one end of it. The horse evidently had little liking for the journey, and did his best to shorten it, while I had hard ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... too much under the spell of Parson Dorrance's recent words to sympathize in this; but she had already learned to avoid dissent from Stephen's opinions, and she made no reply. They were sitting on the edge of a great fissure in the mountain. Some terrible convulsion must have shaken the huge mass to its centre, to have made such a rift. At the bottom ran a stream, looking from this height like little more than a silver thread. Shrubs and low flowering things ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... the western side of the town, cats away the clayey soil with an appetite which each spring increases, and which, carrying the soil down to the river, is gradually clogging the river's flow, diverting the muddy water towards the marshes, and converting those marshes into a lagoon outright. The fissure in question is named "The Great Ravine," and has its steep flanks so overgrown with chestnuts and laburnums that even in summertime its recesses are cool and moist, and so serve as a convenient trysting place for the poorer lovers of the suburb and the town, and witness ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... must be well hidden to have escaped observation so long," Tom decided. "And it must be a natural shaft, or hole, for we are boring into native rock, and it isn't likely that these Indians ever tried to make a tunnel here. There must be some natural fissure communicating with the outside of the mountain, in a place where no one would ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... crimson colour rose from the crater, and floated in the air. Many of the small craters still smoked, one quite at the base of the cone, which is a good deal changed—it is lower, the small northern cone has disappeared, and part of the walls of the crater have fallen in, and there is a fissure in them through which smoke ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... fact was Nature's handiwork, was seen, and every point of spar, from the lofty roof to the stalagmites below, was glittering in the light of a huge fire of brushwood fed by Curly Tom. A small rill of water trickled from a fissure in the rock above, and wound its way through the sand towards the sea. It was the very beau-ideal of a robber's cave. Its existence was known to few: only accessible at low water, the entrance had escaped notice, and the few that did find it were discouraged on entering by the ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... the edge of the fosse, that they suspected that he was a foe. Running to the walls they opened fire with arrows upon him, but by this time Archie had seen all that he required. Across the promontory ran a sort of fissure, some ten yards wide and as many deep. From the opposite edge of this the wall rose abruptly. Here assault would be difficult, and it was upon the gateway that an attack must be made. Several arrows had struck his armour and glanced off, and Archie now turned and quietly rode ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... more plainly than in that same number! Also you have extended your sweep of power—the sea-weed is thrown farther (if not higher) than it was found before; and one may calculate surely now how a few more waves will cover the brown stones and float the sight up away through the fissure of the rocks. The rhythm (to touch one of the various things) the rhythm of that 'Duchess' does more and more strike me as a new thing; something like (if like anything) what the Greeks called pedestrian-metre, ... between metre and ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... middle is of brass. And downward all beneath well-temper'd steel, Save the right foot of potter's clay, on which Than on the other more erect he stands, Each part except the gold, is rent throughout; And from the fissure tears distil, which join'd Penetrate to that cave. They in their course Thus far precipitated down the rock Form Acheron, and Styx, and Phlegethon; Then by this straiten'd channel passing hence Beneath, e'en to the lowest depth of all, Form there Cocytus, of whose lake ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... heavier footprints as they passed. Their boots crackled and scorched beneath them; their shreds of clothing were on fire; their breathing became more difficult, until, providentially, they fell upon an abrupt, fissure-like depression of the soil, which the fire had leaped, and into which they blindly plunged and rolled together. A moment of relief and coolness followed, as they crept along the fissure, filled with damp ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of the ravine, you come to its very foot. You find yourself then in a deep chasm, bridged over by a narrow arch of rock; the water falls at the farther end in a narrow column. Looking up, you see the sky through a fissure so narrow as to make it look very pure and distant. One of our party, passing in, stood some time at the foot of the waterfall, and added much to its effect, as his height gave a measure by which to appreciate that of surrounding objects, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... half-hour before we neared the island, yet neither of us spoke during that time; then, as the "grey gull" shaped itself into rock and tree and crag, I noticed in the very centre a stupendous pile of stone lifting itself skyward, without fissure or cleft; but a peculiar haziness about the base made me peer narrowly ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... either side of him—one straight, perpendicular, the other overhanging, arching out above the first. As he lay there in the semi-gloom, his first thought was that he was in a cave; a further glance, however, convinced him that the place was a gigantic fissure or rift. But how had he ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... encountered two serious breaches in the formation where the animals nearly lost their footing, the hind limbs of one, indeed, sliding into the muck, but finally reached the island end, clambering up through a fissure in the rock and emerging upon the higher, dry ground. The island thus attained proved a small one, not exceeding a hundred yards wide, rather sparsely covered with forest trees, the space between these, thick with undergrowth. What first attracted my gaze after penetrating the tree fringe was the ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... in any direction. The character of the place may best be illustrated by stating that Steward, who had gone up by a different route, was unable to reach us, though we could talk to him across a fissure. Many of these breaks could be jumped, but some of them were too wide for safety. The surface was largely barren sandstone, only a patch of sand here and there sustaining sometimes a bush or stunted cedar. It is the ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... fortune to follow its trails and shimmering waters is already half a poet," wrote Professor Harris of the road that leads down from the verdant hills of the Alleghanies over picturesque gorge and crag and fissure into the quiet of the valley and brings us by exquisite stages to the beautiful town of Lexington, Virginia. Making that journey in taking my boy, fourteen years old, to the Virginia Military Institute, ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... connected (if the whole were bared and dissected) with the vent by a column or cone (see my elegant drawing) of lava [Figure 4]. I do not doubt that the dikes are thus indirectly connected with eruptive vents. E. de B. seems to have observed many of his T; now without he supposes the whole line of fissure or dike to have poured out lava (which implies, as above remarked, craters of an elliptic or almost linear shape) on both sides, how extraordinarily improbable it is, that there should have been in a single line of section so many intersections ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Peter, Sogrange and Dory, whose nerves were of iron, faced one another, doubting and amazed. The floor beneath them rocked and billowed like the waves of a canvas sea. The windows were filled with flashes of red light, a great fissure parted the wall, the pictures and book-cases came crashing down beneath a shower of masonry. It was the affair of a second. Above them shone the stars and around them a noise like thunder. Bernadine, ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... are noted for containing great fissures through which subterranean waters penetrate far into the ground. We can readily see how this percolating water would dissolve and wear away the surface of the rocks along such a fissure, and in process of time we would have the phenomenon of a stream of water ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... patterns, supports the joint surface of the mould entirely. This is, at first sight, an ideal method of drawing patterns, and it has for years been the only method practiced on machines. It has two disadvantages. The patterns are separated from the stripping plate by the necessary joint fissure between the two. Fine sand continually falls into this and, adhering to the joint surfaces more or less, grinds the fissure wider. This leads to a gradual reduction of size of patterns on vertical surfaces and a widening of the joint fissure often to such an extent ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... range are porphyritic,** but the hills of Wingen present a variety of rocks, within a small space. In the adjacent gullies to the south of the hill, we find clay of a grey mottled appearance, and shale containing apparently a small quantity of decomposed vegetable matter; and near the fissure then on fire, occurred a coarse sandstone with an argillaceous basis. To the north-west, in a hollow containing water which drains from beneath the part ignited, is a coarse sandstone, in some places highly charged with decomposed felspar, and containing impressions of spirifers. The hill ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... arose from a confusion of "cliff," a precipice, and "cleft," a fissure. It was "exceedingly common in the 16th-18th cent.," according to the New English Dict., which gives examples from Captain ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... problem. Faith and zeal doubtless kept the blood moving through their veins. It is said that a knife, or dirk, and a pair of scissors of very ancient origin, which we were shown, were found by Mr. Marble in a fissure of this solid rock. That they were left there by pirates, years on years ago, no sane man can for a moment believe. The probabilities are that some one deceived ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... bulwark of the vessel. The alley from the gate ran on between houses abutting the towers. A ball from one of Mahommed's largest guns had passed through the right-hand building, leaving a ragged fissure. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... monsters lying low, In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky, In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs, In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods, In vain the razor-billed auk sails far north to Labrador, I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff. ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... motor center is the "motor area" of the brain, located in the cortex or external layer of gray matter, in the cerebrum. More precisely, the motor area is a long, narrow strip of cortex, lying just forward of what is called the "central fissure" or ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... SOLFATA'RA, a fissure or crevice in the earth which emits sulphurous and other vapours, and in regions where volcanoes have ceased to be active; they are met with in South Italy, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... they saw how slight was the probability of discovering water. There might be some trifling rivulet formed by the melting snow, but hitherto not a trace of moisture had been seen on the hard dry rock. They were climbing the rocks when, having passed a deep fissure, they saw before them a vast array of strange-looking birds perched on the crags above ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... promised the desired information, but gave Dietrich the magic sword Nagelring, which alone could pierce the giants' skin. Then he led both heroes to the cave, where Grim and Hilde were gloating over a magic helmet they had made and called Hildegrim. Peering through a fissure of the rock, Hildebrand was the first to gaze upon them, and in his eagerness to get at them he braced his shoulder against the huge mass of stone, forced it apart, and thus made a passage for himself and for his ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... King Rene's tower at Tarascon. From below, the winking light of the guides going up, looked like a glow-worm on the march. He was forced to follow, however, for the snow beneath his feet was not solid, and gurgling sounds of circulating water heard round a fissure told of more than could be seen at the foot of that wall of ice, of depths that were sending upward the ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... to be a fissure in the huge rock that covered the mouth of the pit, which allowed of Byzun's voice being heard, and bread and water was let down to him, so that they had the melancholy satisfaction of hearing ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... ascent, and now he was upon a broad ledge of rock covered with mosses and dwarf shrubs. Between this eminence and another of equal height, upon which the castle was built, there was a deep but narrow fissure, overgrown with the most profuse foliage, so that the eye could not penetrate many yards below the rugged surface of the abyss; but the profoundness might be well conjectured by the hoarse, low, monotonous roar of waters unseen that rolled below, and the subsequent course of ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Ligyans, on the road from the Caucasus to the Hesperides, belongs to a different sphere of ideas, being an attempt to explain mythically the origin of the round quartz blocks in the Ligyan field of stones at the mouth of the Rhone, which Aristotle supposes to have been ejected from a fissure during an earthquake, and Posidonius to have been caused by the force of the waves of an inland piece of water. In the fragments that we still possess of the play of ®schylus, the 'Prometheus Delivered', every thing proceeds, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Fissure and rent, where the intrusive dike's Creative and destructive agency Leaves many an enduring monument Of metamorphic and eruptive power; Of molten deluge, and volcanic flood; Fracture and break, the silent stories tell Of dire convulsion ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... the vertebrae of the spinal column and the brain. The brain consists of three parts: The cerebrum, or great brain, consisting of two hemispheres, which, though connected, are divided in great part by a longitudinal fissure; the cerebellum, or little brain; and the medulla oblongata, or bulb. The spinal nerves consist of thirty-one pairs, which branch out from the spinal cord. Each pair of nerves contains a right and left member, distributed to the right and the left side of the body respectively. ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... between the States had been growing louder. In June of 1856 he had written to Bridge, expressing great hope that all would yet turn out well. But so rapidly did the horizon blacken, that later in the same year he declared that "an actual fissure" seemed to him to be opening between the two sections of the country. In ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... this manner, more than half way along the stick, without encountering anything but the edges of the rocks. An inch or two further on, however, my patience was rewarded. In a narrow little fissure, just within reach of my forefinger, I felt the chain. Attempting, next, to follow it, by touch, in the direction of the quicksand, I found my progress stopped by a thick growth of seaweed—which had fastened itself into the fissure, no doubt, in the time that had elapsed ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... is it, then—except that you're ashamed of me, one way or another?" She made no answer, and he stood digging the tip of his walking-stick into a fissure of the asphalt. At length he went on in a tone that showed a first faint trace of irritation: "I don't want to break into your gilt-edged crowd, if ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... make him see eyes in every joint—loving eyes, looking at him in mute affection; enough to transform every limb into strong arms stretched out to protect the old man in his feebleness, and enable him to see a smile in every wrinkling crack and fissure in thy hard, weather-beaten bark. Dear old elm, there needs no apology if ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... The fissure and leaning in the upper part of the wall, which Procopius observed, (Goth. l. i. c. 13,) is visible to the present hour, (Douat. Roma Vetus, l. i. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... off over the small world below, there to dream of the great world outside, and of love, adventure, travel. Many a night, after the death of his beloved Alix, he had gone up there to mourn alone, to be nearer to the heaven which she had entered, to be closer to her. He knew well of the narrow fissure at the top,—six feet deep and the length of a grave! Filled only with the leaves ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... unwieldy animals eventually succeeded in surmounting all difficulties, and arrived late at our encampment near a village called Topechee, the whole distance being ten miles and a half. From the crest of the pass to Topechee was a gradual descent, the road bordering a tremendous fissure, deep and gloomy, along the bottom of which a pelting torrent forced its way. The variegated strata on the mountain side, forming distinct lines of red, yellow, blue, and brown, were very remarkable, and I much regret that I had ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... there was, no doubt, something in the claim if I could get the true contact with calcimine walls denoting a true fissure. He thought I ought to run a drift. I told him ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye |
