"Tropical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... affirmative, the dread of her mother still so strong upon her that she could think of nothing but the relief of escape. And then before she had time to prepare herself in any way for the sudden transition she found herself back in that tropical, brilliant atmosphere in which thenceforth she was to move and have ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... westerly monsoon, that is, in the months of December and January, the wind is regular between West-North-West and West-South-West, and, in the neighbourhood of the North-west Cape, sometimes blows hard; but even in these tropical regions, when the weather is very bad, the change is predicted by the barometer, which otherwise ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... equatorial-polar warm currents would be north-easterly in the northern hemisphere, and south- easterly in the southern. Hence, as a north-easterly current has the same direction as a south-westerly wind, the direction of the northern equatorial-polar current in the extra-tropical part of its course would pretty nearly coincide with that of the anti-trade winds. The freezing of the surface of the polar sea would not interfere with the movement thus set up. For, however bad a conductor of heat ice may be, the unfrozen sea-water immediately ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... disgusted with the ending of the century with two wars, it is a disgrace. I think the whole world is very horrible anyhow and I don't believe in worldly goods and possessions, or countries, or governments and I don't see why everyone by inhabiting tropical climes couldn't dispense with clothes and even the lazy could find food where the vegetation is luxuriant. I think it is artificial to live in a place where one's own skin is not sufficient protection against the weather. I think the whole organization ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... was neither masked, nor disguised, nor yelling, nor in any other way in harmony with the bedlam element of life. But I was not sad. I was merely in a state of sobriety. I had just returned from my second West Indies voyage. My eyes were still full of tropical splendour, my memory of my experiences, lawful and lawless, which had their charm and their thrill; for they had startled me a little and had amused me considerably. But they had left me untouched. Indeed they were other men's adventures, not mine. Except for a little ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... in the contrast between the gloomy sternness of the older robber-hold and the gaiety and attractiveness of the new. Nothing can be prettier than the gardens, rich in fountains and statues and tropical plants, which surround the neat Parisian square of buildings. The hotel is splendidly decorated and its cuisine claims to be the best in Europe; there is a pleasant cafe; the doors of the Casino itself stand hospitably open, and strangers ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... essential for a preacher is the power of lucid reasoning. That this faculty is ours is now abundantly established. The next talent requisite is imagination. That we have imagination, often teeming in tropical luxuriance, but shared in great or less degree by all, has never been questioned. One more requisite and the oratorical outfit ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... is larger. They are very rich tropical islands, inhabited by many varying tribes, representing widely different stages of progress toward civilization. Our earnest effort is to help these people upward along the stony and difficult path that leads ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt
... all things pertaining to it, swept over Riseholme like the amazing growth of some tropical forest, germinating and shooting out its surprising vegetation, and rearing into huge fantastic shapes. In the centre of this wonderful jungle was a temple, so to speak, and that temple was the house of ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... incongruities end here. After getting my evening meal I walked out in the warm December moonlight, past the shadows of the strange buildings and tropical trees—and all at once there burst out the full chorus of one of the world's great operas, the magnificent voice of a Campanini ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... genera which could not exist in water. One of two conditions of the globe seems necessary, on the basis of the Pentateuch, to account for their migration—either that a continental connection existed, or that the seas in northern latitudes were frozen over. But, in the latter case, how did the tropical animals subsist and exist? The Polar bear, the Arctic fox, and the musk ox would do well enough; but how was the armadillo, the cougar, the lama, and even the bison ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... terrible storm. The wind, with all the awful accompaniments of rain, hail, rattling thunders, and fiercely glaring lightnings, had burst down upon the liquid plains of the startled deep, in all the fury of a tropical tornado. The black heavens were in terrific commotion above; and the smitten and resilient waters, as if to escape the impending wrath of the aroused sister elements, were fleeing in galloping mountains athwart the surface of the boiling ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... fabric; and also hanging from the belt was a heavy sword of metal. Undoubtedly the men were savages; but there was a dignity in their manner which set them wholly apart from the known inhabitants of these South Sea Islands. Our captain, who understood many of the languages and dialects of the sub-tropical islanders, found himself at fault in attempting verbal intercourse with these visitors, but it was not long before we found them exceedingly apt in understanding signs. They showed much commiseration for ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... pace, but could not go fast enough to escape the water, which rolled in great sheets at their feet. Before two hours the cataracts of the sky opened and deluged the plain in true tropical torrents of rain. Never was there a finer occasion for displaying philosophic equanimity. There was no shelter, and nothing for it but to bear it stolidly. The ponchos were streaming like the overflowing gutter-spouts on the roof of a house, and ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... fixes the majority of a youth at the accomplished thirteenth year. From this epoch the youth becomes a member of the congregation and enjoys all the rights of an adult. Hence, his marriage at this age is regarded as having legal force, and is even required in the tropical countries. In Europe, however, owing to the influence of local laws and to nature, which does not contribute here so powerfully as in warm climates to the physical development, this custom is no more in force and has lost ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... proper and the fort, there is at Biskra a negro village, while scattered throughout the oasis there are numerous mud-built mosques and cottages, which contrast charmingly with the tropical vegetation and add greatly to the picturesque beauty of the scene. In addition to these abodes of the settled population, there are also groups of real black Arab tents, which form the habitations of the more nomadic races. These are here to-day and away to-morrow, carrying all their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... who have considered the question of the probable anterior home of the Mound-Builders, are inclined to derive them from Central America. The ground for this opinion seems to be the fact that horticulture must have originated in a semi-tropical region, where this type of village life was first developed, and, therefore, that all the forms of this life were derived from thence. It would be a mistake, as it seems to the writer, to adopt the track of horticulture as that of Indian migration. In its first spread horticulture ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... before by some volcanic action. Olancho, as many people know, is situated on the northeastern coast of South America, and its shores are washed by the main equatorial current. From the deck of a passing vessel you can obtain but little idea of Olancho or of the abundance and tropical beauty which lies hidden away behind the rampart of mountains on her shore. You can see only their desolate dark-green front, and the white caves at their base, into which the waves rush with an echoing roar, and in and out of which fly continually ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... nature by effects. We know that vegetation planted in native soil and properly attended with light, heat and moisture, will grow and yield a certain species of fruit. We may infer how it does this, but we cannot explain the process of transformation any more than we can explain why certain tropical birds are burnished with glowing colors, and that other birds under the murky skies are gray and brown, while in the ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... Tower Hamlets on the 26th of October:—"After an eloquent address, expository of the subject, G.Thompson, Esq., M.P., moved a resolution to the general effect that it had been demonstrated that India had the capacity of producing every tropical raw commodity required by England for the constant and profitable employment of her population. That England, although mistress of India, was rendered year by year more dependent upon the United States for her supply of raw cotton and tobacco; both being the produce ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... peculiar to themselves, and which are supposed not to have been derived from other quarters during modern geological times. Each may be considered as a centre of distribution in the latest process of dissemination of species over the surface of tropical America. Para lies midway between the two centres, each of which has a nucleus of elevated table-land, whilst the intermediate river- valley forms a wide extent of low-lying country. It is, therefore, ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... shape, finely serrated. These leafits were disposed in a circular form, radiating from the centre, like the leaves of the fan palm, though placed in a contrary plane to those of that magnificent ornament of the tropical forests. The central, or lower, leafits were the largest, each of them being 10 in. in length, and 4 in. in breadth, and the whole exterior of the foliage being disposed in an imbricated form, having a beautifully ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... project, however, all responsibilities were considered. Swift ocean currents around capes and coral reefs were taken into account; and above all else to be called dangerous we knew would be the fierce tropical storms ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... berries are red, which is usually during the winter. It is also cultivated in Persia, the East Indies, Liberia on the coast of Africa, the West Indies, Brazil and other parts of South America, as well as in most tropical climates. ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... young and old, looked with much interest at the faces, soft, piquant, tropical, which made the effect of pansies looking inquisitively over a snowdrift. The girls returned their glances with approval, for they were as fine and manly a set of men as ever had faced death or ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... of Rakata—the highest in the island—a little over 2600 feet, came in sight first; gradually the rest of the island rose out of the horizon, and ere long the rich tropical ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... to the southern horizon a little longer, he went and sat down on the edge of the ditch which bordered the road, turning his back on the mountains which rise like an amphitheatre to the north of the town, and having at his feet a rich plain covered with tropical vegetation, exotics of a conservatory, trees and flowers quite unknown in any ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... fearful struggle waged there in the stillness of the tropical woodland—a stillness broken only by the occasional wild scream of the ape, or the hoarse breathing of the boy as he fought to free himself from that ...
— The Broncho Rider Boys with Funston at Vera Cruz - Or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars and Stripes • Frank Fowler
... of an arched trellis, that led from the hardier flowers of the lawn to a rare collection of tropical plants under a lofty glass dome (connecting, as it were, the familiar vegetation of the North with that of the remotest East), was a form that instantaneously caught and fixed my gaze. The entrance of the arcade was covered with parasite creepers, in prodigal luxuriance, of variegated gorgeous ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... memories of early childhood, my internal economy seemed to have adapted itself to the changed environment, and after five o'clock with its tea and bread I no longer wished for more food. Exactly the same experience befalls those inexperienced travellers in tropical countries who, at first, are continually imbibing draughts of water, but soon learn the useful lesson of drinking at meal-time only, and before long do not even take the trouble to carry water-bottles with ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... a plain which extends from the sea-shore to the spurs of the mountains, are very fertile, and produce in great abundance all tropical plants. The climate is warm, but not enervating; the scenery is in many parts very beautiful. Thus the natives are tempted to lead an easy and idle life, exerting but little their physical and mental powers. It is, indeed, to their credit ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... drawn by reindeer on their way to suffrage meetings, from whence petitions went to the Parliament at Stockholm. At the same moment other women, in the midsummer of the southern hemisphere, protected by fans and umbrellas and riding in "rickshas," were doing the same thing under the fierce rays of a tropical sun; while petitions poured into the Parliament asking suffrage for the women of the Union of South Africa from every State and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... of the pleasure was due to the fact that we had an unobstructed view in all directions, usually not the case in the tropical forest. At one point we had a full view of Arayat, at another of Santo Tomas, near which we had passed yesterday on coming down from Baguio. But fine as were the distant views we got from time to time, the great attraction was the country itself, through which we were passing. Barring ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... found the satellite suitable for habitation, with fertile soil and an atmosphere similar to our own. With the aid of a few atmosphere booster stations, it should be as easy for a colonist to live there as he would on Venus—or any tropical planet." ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... tender, annual plant; and is a native of the East Indies, or of tropical origin. It has an angular, creeping stem; large, somewhat heart-shaped, leaves; and axillary staminate or pistillate flowers. The fruit is cylindrical, generally elongated, often somewhat angular, smooth, or with scattering black or white spines; the flesh is ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... up," was a pretty little euphemism for walking three long miles dead in the teeth of a gale of wind, with a fierce rushing tropical rain. One of the numerous tenders of the ship Jewel (74), had just arrived before the wind under bare poles, an attempt to set a rag of umbrella having ended in its being blown out of the bolt-ropes, and the aforesaid tender Jewel was ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... Biodiversity, Climate Change, Climate Change-Kyoto Protocol, Desertification, Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Marine Dumping, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Tropical Timber 83, Tropical Timber 94, Wetlands, Whaling signed, but not ratified: Air ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... seventies consisted, of the Nile, its valley and delta, and the country rendered fertile by that river. On either side of this fertile belt is dry, barren desert. On the north is the Mediterranean Sea, and on the south the tropical Soudan. Thus, in the hands of a power that holds the command of the sea, Egypt is well adapted for defence. The tropical Soudan makes a well-nigh impossible line of advance for a large hostile force from the south, and the routes of approach from the east and from the west, across ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... tropical scene with graceful palms adorning the marge of a pinkly sun-kissed sea. At a table in the background two officers consulted with a private above an important-looking map, while another pleased-looking private stood at attention near by. At the left foreground a rather obsequious-looking ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... way. Happily, by this time, Philosophy had come to my aid, and looking through its beautifying and mellowing mist, all was changed. The teas and the lunches and the clubs appeared in the brightest tints; the shivering waits behind the front door changed into evening strolls into tropical gardens; the gray sprinkled hair of my wife changed into the sunny auburn of her youth, and she once more stood in the little church of our old home listening to the words, "For better or for worse." Happy the married Philosopher ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... waters, the sombre flux of immemorial forests under the crescent cone of night, and undergrowth overlapping the banks, the tragic chaos of rising storms, hordes of clouds sailing low on the horizon, the silhouettes of lazy, majestic mountains, the lugubrious magic of the tropical night, the mysterious drums of the natives, and the darkness that one can feel, taste, smell. What a gulf of incertitudes for white men is evoked for us in vivid, concrete terms. Unforgetable, too, the hallucinated ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... accumulated and intensified thought by the rapidity and terseness of electric messages. He has celebrated treaties. Go to the uttermost parts of the earth; go beneath the deep sea; to the land where snows are eternal, or to the tropical realms where the orange blooms in the air of mid-winter, and you will find this clicking, persistent, sleepless instrument ready to give its tireless ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... wooded dale, park-like plain and placid lake, and the snaking of silvery stream, it displays ever and anon beauties made all its own by borrowing from the heavens, in an atmosphere of passing transparency, reflections of magical splendours and of weird shadows proper to tropical skies. No rose-hue pinker than the virginal blush and dewy flush of dawn in contrast with the shivering reek of flaming noon-tide, when all brightness of colour seems burnt out of the world by the white heat of sun-glow. No brilliancy more gorgeous or more ravishing than the play of light and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... instance of international trade where one country has the advantage in both of the commodities entering into the exchange: "The inhabitants of Barbadoes, favored by their tropical climate and fertile soil, can raise provisions cheaper than we can in the United States. And yet Barbadoes buys nearly all her provisions from this country. Why is this so? Because, though Barbadoes has the advantage over us in the ability to raise provisions cheaply, she has a still ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... speed with a loose rein ere he delivers the meditated thrust that shall win first spear. Snipe, too, killed by the despairing lover while standing in a paddy-field up to his knees in water, with a tropical sun beating on his head, to be eaten afterwards in military society, not undiluted by pale ale and brandy-pawnee, afford a relief to the finer feelings of his nature as delightful as it is unaccountable; ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... the free use of ardent spirit. Dr. Mosely, after a long residence in the West Indies, declares, "that persons who drink nothing but cold water, or make it their principal drink, are but little affected by tropical climates; that they undergo the greatest fatigue without inconvenience, and are not so subject as others to dangerous diseases;" and Dr. Bell, "that rum, when used even moderately, always diminishes the strength, and renders men more susceptible of disease; ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... moments' longer, and set out for home. The rain had long ceased, and the sky was without a cloud. The semi-tropical shower had been followed by a rapid cooling of the atmosphere, and he shivered in his still damp clothes, as he ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... which music engenders, trouble me," he answered, bending his earnest searching eyes upon her, and wondering within himself whether such a small, slight gossamer thing of beauty, brilliant as a tropical humming-bird, soft and caressable as a dove, could possibly be expected to have the sweet yet austere fortitude and firmness needed to be a true "helpmeet" to him in the work he had undertaken, and the life he had determined to lead. He noted all the dainty trifles of ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the progress of years her tenure of life is somewhat precarious, but if haply she withers as she grows old, she lives for ever. Such promised to be the case with William the Testy, who grew tough in proportion as he dried. He had withered, in fact, not through the process of years, but through the tropical fervor of his soul, which burnt like a vehement rushlight in his bosom, inciting him to incessant broils and bickerings. Ancient traditions speak much of his learning, and of the gallant inroads he had ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... in the days before his unfortunate misunderstanding with the Geni and demanded the most beautiful of gardens, the fulfilment of his wish could have taken no fairer form than this. Strange, tropical flowers, vivid as flame, burned in green recesses; water-sprites upset their caskets of pearls over rock-shelves into translucent pools where lilies lay asleep, dreaming of their own pale beauty. Long, green pergolas, starred with flowers, framed blue-veiled ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... And now it was remarked that those who escaped were the lower-deck workers, those whose duties kept them off the upper deck and away from gunports and deadlights. It was also suggested that the cause was some deadly attribute of the night air in these tropical regions, to which the Americans succumbed; for, so far, the ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... me more interesting than the splendor of tropical scenery," said Lothair, "even if Galilee could offer it. I wish to visit the ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... consistent with itself, and is painted with trembling truth of touch and delicate tenderness of feeling. We feel it to be destitute of profound suggestiveness and massive thought, but its verse is solemnly dignified, its imagery is chastely grand, and a rich chiaroscuro rests like a tropical night upon the whole. Besides the stanzas we have already alluded to, it has some of those brief touches which show the master's hand: ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... "never tired of talking of it to his friends," and, in order to turn this poetic material to account, finally bethought him that Bligh's Narrative of the mutiny of the Bounty would serve as a framework or structure "for an embroidery of rare device"—the figures and foliage of a tropical pattern. That, at least, is the substance of Clinton's analysis of the "sources" of The Island, and whether he spoke, or only feigned to speak, with authority, his criticism is sound and to the point. The story of the mutiny of the Bounty, which is faithfully related in the first canto, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... portion as to generate gases, which, being thrown up through its atmosphere, to a height at least as great as the whole diameter of our globe, condense there again with an ineffably brilliant combustion. The solid crust of the sun, he thinks, may be comparatively cool,—as cool, perhaps, as our tropical climates,—by the favor of cloud-curtains, which operate as screens, and reflect off into space the heat of the combustion overhead. He might have given more reasons than he has for this conclusion. Whether our terrestrial aurora-borealis ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... world history. That one example, moreover, has been a success as unqualified as undeniable. I refer to this American Union of ours. We have here a country consisting of fifty local communities, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from tropical Porto Rico to glacial Alaska, representing every conceivable phase of soil, climate and material conditions, with diverse industrial systems. With a Union established on the principle of absolutely unrestricted commercial intercourse, you here in South Carolina, and more ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... the weather conditions heralded by the change of wind was right. As the two partook of their evening meal the complaining surf lashed the reef, and the tremulous branches of the taller trees voiced the approach of a gale. A tropical storm, not a typhoon, but a belated burst of the periodic rains, deluged the island before midnight. Hours earlier Iris retired, utterly worn by the events of the day. Needless to say, there was no ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... turned instinctively away from northern to southern Gothic; from rough border minstrelsy to the mythology and romance of the races that dwelt about the midland sea. Keats' sensuous nature longed for "a beaker full of the warm South." "I have tropical blood in my veins," wrote Hunt, deprecating "the criticism of a Northern climate" as applied to his "Story of Rimini." Keats' death may be said to have come to him from Scotland, not only by reason of the brutal ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... but an insane desire to maim or slay him, rode a man who in forty-eight hours had been transformed from a frank, guileless, plain-speaking human, to a rage-drunken savage—a monomaniac who, as he leaned over Nigger's mane, whispered and whined and mewed, as his forebears, in some tropical jungle, voiced their passions when they set forth to slay those who had sought to ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Malotte's house he saw a light through the drawn curtains. A heavy raindrop plashed upon his face, another followed, and then he heard the patter of falling water increasing swiftly. Before he could gain the door the storm had broken. It swept up the street with tropical violence, while a breath sighed out of the night, lifting the litter from underfoot and pelting him with flying particles. Over the roofs the wind rushed with the rising moan of a hurricane while the night grew suddenly ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... I have said, was a solitary one, and very small—not more than a mile broad, by about three miles long; but it was covered from summit to shore with the richest tropical verdure, and the trees and underwood were so thick that the cliffs could only be seen in places where gaps in the foliage occurred, or where an aspiring peak of rock shot up above the trees. In order to reach the ridge on which they stood, the castaways ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the unashamed newness of the Weatherford riches that the conservatory, a glass-and-iron greenhouse, built out as an extension of one of the drawing-rooms, was called "the herbarium." It was a reproduction, on a generous scale, of a tropical garden. Half-grown palms and banana-trees made a well-ordered jungle of the softly lighted interior; and if, in the gathering of her floral treasures, Mrs. Weatherford had omitted any precious bit of greenery whose cost would have shed additional lustre upon the Weatherford ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... the intense brilliancy of the tropical and semi- tropical sky comes as a revelation. Sometimes at noon it is painfully dazzling; but the evening is a vision of prismatic light holding carnival in the air, wherein Milton's "twilight gray" has no part. Unless the sky is held in the relentless grip of a winter storm, the ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... no scenes more characteristic and touching than those which were enacted beside these sources of fertility. Green and fruitful in the memory of the most sacred history repose these cool, refreshing pools under the burning glance of the tropical sun. Here, too, as in those distant lands, life is kept in constant freshness around the borders of the spring. The grass grows green and dense here the whole summer through, and here there is always a breath of cooler air when ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... another thing about this man to remind one of the old storekeeper. This stranger was burned to a rich mahogany hue. Not alone his shaven face, but his bared forearms and his chest where the shirt was left unbuttoned seemed stained by the tropical sun. Under jet-black brows the eyes that gazed upon Lawford ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... will barely take us a month, just long enough to put the vessel in trim. If we had to cross the continent in a lower latitude, at its wildest part, and traverse immense deserts, where there is no water and where the heat is tropical, and go where the most adventurous travelers have never yet ventured, that would be a different matter. But the 37th parallel cuts only through the province of Victoria, quite an English country, with roads and railways, ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... were but sparsely settled in 1846, yet the fame of the fruitfulness, the healthfulness, and the almost tropical beauty of the land bordering the Pacific, tempted the members of the Donner Party to leave their homes. These homes were situated in Illinois, Iowa, Tennessee, Missouri, and Ohio. Families from each of these States joined the train and participated in its terrible fate; yet the party ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... sitting in a small drawing-room, the windows of which looked out upon a wintry Boston street. It was a room rather empty and undecorated, but the idea of austerity was banished by a temperature so nearly tropical. There were rows of books on white shelves, a pale Donatello cast on the wall, and two fine bronze vases filled with roses on the mantelpiece. Over the roses hung a portrait in oils, very sleek and very accurate, of a commanding old gentleman in uniform, painted ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... correlation of serpent poison and the septic ferments of certain tropical and infectious fevers, they are not necessarily always contagious. It may be interesting to note that one Doctor Humboldt in 1852,[9] in an essay read before the Royal Academy of Medical Sciences at Havana, assumed their proximate identity, and advocated the inoculation of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... regarded Mercury and Venus as satellites of the sun. Some have maintained that the obelisks which the Egyptians erected served the purpose of gnomons for determining the obliquity of the ecliptic, the altitude of the pole, and the length of the tropical year. It is thought even that the Pyramids, by the position of their sides toward the cardinal points, attest Egyptian acquaintance with a meridional line. The Chinese boast of having noticed and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... of the hand toward this tropical preserve, Judge SWEENEY says: "You have a reputation, sir, as a man of taste. ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... sea had been climbing behind us till it looked like a monstrous wall of blue, pansy-blue, under the ever heightening horizon. The heat was like the heat of a vapor-bath, but the air was good to breathe with its tropical odor,—an odor made up of smells of strange saps, queer spicy scents of mould, exhalations of aromatic decay. Moreover, the views were glimpses of Paradise; and it was a joy to watch the torrents roaring down their gorges under shadows of tree-fern ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... beings, who looked like immense banks of many-coloured shingle, and who, as they raised a million pairs of field-glasses to two million eyes, scintillated in the distance like a bank of shingle after a wave has broken on it on a tropical noon—it was certainly an amazing medley of spectacle ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... of his house, for he had seen us in the distance, and guessed that it was I. His appearance was very homely and benevolent, short and stout, forty-five years old, perhaps, with a round, good-humoured face, burned brown with the tropical sun, and shot with a thousand wrinkles. He wore white linen clothes, in true planter style, with a cigar between his lips, and a large Panama hat upon the back of his head. It was such a figure as one associates with a verandahed bungalow, and it ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... leads past the mineral baths and then strikes uphill, at first through lanes cut deep in the black lava. The trees meet almost overhead. It is like Devonshire, except that one half hopes to see tropical foxgloves with violet bells and downy leaves sprouting among the lush grasses and sweet-scented ferns upon those gloomy, damp, warm walls. After this we skirted a thicket of arbutus, and came upon the long volcanic ridge, with divinest ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... stepping stone to posts of greater importance and responsibility; but, on the other hand, he had been married to the Hon. Alice Rutherford for scarce a three months, and it was the thought of taking this fair young girl into the dangers and isolation of tropical Africa that ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... being, glimpses of which were occasionally discernible through her eyes, in the tones of her voice, in her smile, in unconscious movements of her hands and limbs. Demonstrative she could never be; but she could, at will, feel with tropical intensity, and act with the swiftness and energy of ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... twilight's tranquil charm. Shadows haunted it, lurking in corners like spies set there to watch the man who stood among them mute and motionless as if himself a shadow. His eye turned often to the window with a glance both vigilant and eager, yet saw nothing but a tropical luxuriance of foliage scarcely stirred by the sultry air heavy with odors that seemed to oppress not refresh. He listened with the same intentness, yet heard only the clamor of voices, the tramp of feet, the ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... o'clock in the afternoon, all the fashionable world at Nice may be seen on the Promenade des Anglais—a charming place, for the wide walk, bordered with palms, flowers, and tropical shrubs, is bounded on one side by the sea, on the other by the grand drive, lined with hotels and villas, while beyond lie orange orchards and the hills. Many nations are represented, many languages spoken, many costumes ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... disturbing elements of the great public thoroughfare, the river, curious cries were borne upon the wind above the tall tree-tops like the chattering calls of parrots, to which my ear had become accustomed in the tropical forests of Cuba. As the noise grew louder with the approach of a feathered flock of visitors, and the screams of the birds became more discordant, I peered through the branches of the forest to catch ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... where the earth had remained steadfastly frozen for some hundreds of thousands of years. Wegaruk had a habit of talking when alone, but Alan thought it odd that she should be explaining to herself that the tundra-soil, in spite of its almost tropical summer richness and luxuriance, never thawed deeper than three or four feet, below which point remained the icy cold placed there so long ago that "even the spirits did not know." He smiled when he heard Wegaruk measuring time and faith in terms of "spirits," ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... time to catch the last of the sunrise, but when I went on deck, found that nearly half the passengers had been more enterprising than I. We were at anchor in the outer harbor, and Honolulu lay before us in all the enchantment of a first tropical vision. A mountain of pinky-brown volcanic soil—they call it Diamond Head—ran out into the sea on the right, and, between it and another hill which looks like an extinct crater and is called the Punch Bowl, a beach ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... of expression in his face, which indicated a very full-portion of calamity; his eye seemed charged with affliction of the first water; on each side of his nose might be traced two dry channels which, no doubt, were full enough while the tropical rains of his countenance lasted. Altogether, to conclude from appearances, it was a dead match in affliction between him and the tailor; both seemed sad, ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... hame in a tropical wildwood, Yet the fields o' my forefathers rose on my view; An' I wept when I thought on the days of my childhood, An' the vision was painful the brighter it grew. Sweet days! when my bosom with rapture was swelling, Though I ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the hottest day of all the tropical days we have been having, the Princess arrived in Berlin. The Emperor and the Empress met her at the station and drove her to Bellevue Castle, where there was a family lunch. She had numerous deputations ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... Climate: tropical marine, moderated by southeast trade winds; annual rainfall averages about 3 m; rainy season from November to April, dry season from May to October; little seasonal ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... strength abundantly justify their generic name, Dynastes, which is from the Greek and signifies powerful. The larvae of these beetles inhabit and feed upon decaying trees and other rotting vegetable matter, and correspond in size with the mature insects. Most of them inhabit tropical regions, where they perform a valuable service in hastening the destruction of dead ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... "Tropical loveliness has its drawbacks, Jack. Perhaps some day when your clothes are moulded, and your brain feels mouldy too with damp heat, and you can neither work in the sun nor be at peace in the shade, you may wish you were sitting on a ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... excellent keeping with the idea of the winter idler's home. The Ponce de Leon and the adjoining and more or less similar structures of the Alcazar, the Cordova, and the Villa Zorayda form indeed an architectural group which, taken along with the semi-tropical vegetation and atmosphere, alone repays a long journey to see. But let the strictly economical traveller take up his quarters in one of the more modest hostelries of the little town, unless he is willing to pay dearly (and yet not perhaps too dearly) for the privilege ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... across every sea and over every continent. In places the conquests have been ethnic; that is, there has been a new wandering of the peoples, and new commonwealths have sprung up in which the people are entirely or mainly of European blood. This is what happened in the temperate and sub-tropical regions of the Western Hemisphere, in Australia, in portions of northern Asia and southern Africa. In other places the conquest has been purely political, the Europeans representing for the most part ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... it was known even before Caesar that the solar year of 365 days 6 hours, which was the basis of the Egyptian calendar, and which he made the basis of his, was somewhat too long. the most exact calculation of the tropical year which the ancient world was acquainted with, that of Hipparchus, put it at 365 d. 5 h. 52' 12"; the true length is 365 d. 5 h. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... knife. When Barker arrived the patient was literally drenched with blood and to all appearance dead. He extracted a dead child from the abdomen and bandaged the mother, who lived only forty hours. In his discourses on Tropical Diseases Moseley speaks of a young negress in Jamaica who opened her uterus and extracted therefrom a child which lived six days; the woman recovered. Barker relates another case in Rensselaer County, N.Y., in which the incision was made with the razor, the woman likewise recovering. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... to step into the pilot house. Lord James faced about to the eastern sky, where the gray dawn was beginning to lessen the star-gemmed blackness above the watery horizon. Swiftly the faint glow brightened and became tinged with pink. The day was approaching with the suddenness of the tropical sunrise. In quick succession, the pink shaded to rose, the rose to crimson and scarlet splendor; and then the sun came leaping above the horizon, to flood sea and sky ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... superbly, reminded me of Nukahiva, one of the Marquesas Islands—the one where Herman Melville found his famed Typee. It seems extravagant to associate any feature in the Alaskan archipelago with the most romantic island in the tropical sea; but there are points of similarity, notwithstanding the geographical discrepancy—daring outlines, magnificent cloud and atmospheric effects, and a fragrance, a pungent balsamic odor ever noticeable. This impalpable, invisible balm permeates everything; it is wafted out ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... remembered. For Carlotty was a pickaninny four years old, and blacker than the Ace of Spades! Her purple calico dress, pink apron, and twenty little woolly braids tied with bits of yellow ribbon made her the most tropical of butterflies; and the children, having a strong sense of color and hardly any sense of humor, were always entirely carried ...
— The Story of Patsy • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... distance Nevis looks like a solitary peak in mid-ocean, her base sweeping out on either side. But behind the great central cone—rising three thousand two hundred feet—are five or six lesser peaks, between which are dense tropical gorges and mountain streams. In the old days, where the slopes were not vivid with the light green of the cane-field, there were the cool and sombre groves of the cocoanut ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... brought about one result, and that the most difficult in the development of a race from savagery, and especially a tropical race, a race that has always been idle in the luxuriance of a nature that supplied its physical needs with little labor. It taught the negro to work, it transformed him, by compulsion it is true, into an industrial being, and held him in the habit of industry for several generations. Perhaps ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... a native of Central or Tropical America. In its wild or natural state, as found growing on the mountains of Mexico or South America, the tubers rarely exceed an inch in diameter, and are comparatively unpalatable. During the last half-century, its cultivation within the United States has greatly increased; and ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... appointment as surgeon in the navy proved to be the entry to Huxley's great scientific career, for he was gazetted to the "Rattlesnake", commissioned for surveying work in Torres Straits. He was attracted by the teeming surface life of tropical seas and his study of it was the commencement of that revolution in scientific knowledge ultimately brought ...
— The Present Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... are the seeds of a gigantic tree which grows wild in the valleys of the Amazon, and throughout tropical America. The case containing these seeds is a hard, woody shell, globular in form, and about the size of a man's head. It is divided into four cells, in each of which are closely packed the seeds which constitute the so-called nuts, of commerce. These seeds are exceedingly rich in oil, one pound ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... cooking of the game, the building of houses, etc., is not altogether pleasant. It is uninteresting, and the heat and the humidity of the climate render it almost insupportable in certain seasons and hours of the day. The repugnance to labor of tropical people, whether natives or white immigrants, is proverbial. Every one in the banana zone, therefore, seeks to shift his burden upon another. As a first resort, he unloads it upon his wife, and she, finding it grievous, cries out, and he then relieves her by procuring ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... that two holes permit the passage of a string, by which the beads thus made are strung together. The fact that the genera to which the shells belong are found in the sea, as well as their highly polished surface show these to be marine; and not only so but from the tropical seas, either we suppose from the Gulf of Mexico or from the ...
— The Mound Builders • George Bryce
... flowed almost directly from a little lake of some three hundred yards in diameter. For about fifteen yards from the fall on either side the rock was bare; and although the level of the little lake was some three feet below it, Stephen had no doubt that in the case of a heavy tropical rain the water would rush down from the hills faster than the gap through which it fell below could carry it off, and that at such a time it would sweep over the rock on either side, and fall in a torrent thirty yards wide ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... a variety known to grow in tropical Japan, are floated into the Arctic basin as far as past Point Barrow, on the American side, but none are found on the Asiatic side, or near Wrangell Land, where a cold stream exists, and ice remains late in the season. On the northern side of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... than in Europe; in the United States there are more than one hundred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that attain this size." Later botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... during the Glacial period, I throw in your teeth your own facts, at the base of the Himalaya, on the possibility of the co-existence of at least forms of the tropical and temperate regions. I can give a parallel case for animals in Mexico. Oh! my dearly beloved puny child, how cruel men are to you! I am very glad you ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... the social union, obedience to a government of some sort, has not been found so easy a thing to establish in the world. Among a timid and spiritless race like the inhabitants of the vast plains of tropical countries, passive obedience may be of natural growth; though even there we doubt whether it has ever been found among any people with whom fatalism, or in other words, submission to the pressure of circumstances as a divine decree, did not ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... becalmed, I recollect; but, in spite of this, a strong set of tide, or some unknown current, was carrying us, in a west-nor'-west direction, away out of the Bay of Panama, at the mouth of which we had been rolling and roasting in the broiling tropical sun for a couple of days, without apparently advancing an inch on our way northwards towards San Francisco, our destination, which we were now comparatively near, so to speak, but still separated by a broad belt of latitude of between eighteen ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... swamps of the tropical country at Bahia the United States Consul had sent six cuttings of this peculiar orange to be planted in the Washington gardens. All died but the two at Riverside. In 1880 they bore half a bushel of fruit, and the new seedless oranges ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... nothing," said Harry, now assuming a treacherous, tropical calmness—"nothing, Redburn; nothing in the world. I'm the ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... blandishments and mechanism in the whole floral kingdom to secure the visits of that special insect to which each is adapted, and, having secured him, to compel him unwittingly to do their bidding. In the steaming tropical jungles, where vegetation is luxuriant to the point of suffocation, and where insect life swarms in myriads undreamed of here, we can see the best of reasons for orchids mounting into trees and living on air to escape strangulation on the ground, and for donning ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... upon the senna plant, some of the leaves of which our people plucked. Higher up, in Aheer, is apparently the native soil of this plant. We had also again the adwa, several trees, and the kaiou or kremka, the only plant we have yet seen with a truly tropical aspect. ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... of the mocking bird, the red bird, and a great variety of others, that visit you in the glimmer from South America. The fox squirrel too is scarce, and the gray squirrel almost white. We cannot cultivate the sweet, or tropical potatoe, but import it from Carolina. Even the peach is late, small, and acid. The coldness of the climate, and the fanaticism of the inhabitants, make the New England states by no means such desirable places of residence, as those ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... (arundo gigantea), growing like tall grass. The forest on the other side was more open; no doubt, because some former fire had burned down the underwood in that direction. The fan-like leaves of palmettos and yuccas growing all around, gave a southern and tropical ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... I ask whether you have locked to all the doors and windows? Tramps and thieves are so apt to break into shut-up houses, and it would be such a pity if anything happened to any of your pretty things. Ah, what an expanse of snow. Beautiful, isn't it? You may talk about your tropical scenery, Hen, but we shan't see anything finer than this the world over. What a contrast the south will be though, eh, old man?" and, drawing the detective's arm through his, leaning heavily upon him meanwhile, ...
— The Burglar and the Blizzard • Alice Duer Miller
... came, no market for the gas, the wells were lighted and at night great torches of flame lit the skies. Pipes were laid on the surface of the ground and by a day's work a laborer earned enough to heat his house at tropical heat through an entire winter. Farmers owning oil-producing land went to bed in the evening poor and owing money at the bank, and awoke in the morning rich. They moved into the towns and invested their money in the factories that sprang up everywhere. In one county in southern Michigan, over ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... from the west, cooling half the park with shadows, and lighting the rest with gleams of purplish gold. The paths around the margin of the lake, and all the sloping banks were alive with gayly dressed people, and a single boat, over which a flock of gay parasols hovered like tropical birds, mirrored itself ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... Domum[4] of the English schoolboy. Such is the Heimweh (home-sickness) of the German and Swiss soldier in foreign service. Such is the passion of the Calenture. Doubtless, reader, you have seen it described. The poor sailor is in tropical latitudes; deep, breathless calms have prevailed for weeks. Fever and delirium are upon him. Suddenly from his restless hammock he starts up; he will fret no longer in darkness; he ascends upon deck. How motionless are the deeps! How vast—how sweet are these shining zaarrahs of water! He ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... they took from their van had a magic air. The ringing of the door bell which meant that things were being delivered, the extra moving about of servants, the florists' men who went into the drawing-rooms and brought flowers and big tropical plants to re-arrange the conservatory and fill corners which were not always decorated—each and every one of them quickened the beating of her pulses. If she had belonged in her past to the ordinary cheerful world of children, she would have felt by this time no such elation. But ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... course after leaving the "Adonis," none may ever know. Whether some chance spark, touching the deadly stores of her magazine, sent vessel and crew to a sudden but merciful death; or whether, after gallantly battling with some fierce tropical hurricane, she drifted about the trackless ocean a helpless hulk, with a slowly dying crew, carried hither and yon before the winds and the currents, until her timbers, rotting asunder, gave a watery sepulchre ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... no longer in eruption, exhibits abundant traces of volcanic action in acres of lava and blackened scoriae. Between the numberless forest-clad ranges are luxuriant plains glowing in all the splendour of tropical vegetation. The valleys, generally of rich fertility, are about ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... them. The vital part of the air, called oxygene, is continually produced in this climate from the perspiration of vegetables in the sunshine, and probably from the action of light on clouds or on water in the tropical climates, where the sun has greater power, and may exert some yet unknown laws of luminous combination. Another part of the atmosphere, which is called azote, is perpetually set at liberty from animal and vegetable bodies by putrefaction ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... more perfect type of Spanish beauty had never sat upon the blue granite benches of the Madrid circus. With admiration amounting to ecstasy, Andres contemplated the delicate profile, the thin, well-formed nose, with nostrils pink-tinted, like the interior of a tropical shell; the full temples, where, beneath the slightest possible tint of amber, meandered an imperceptible network of blue veins; the mouth, fresh as a flower, ripe and ruddy as a fruit, slightly opened by a half smile, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... you in adequate language just how the tropical sun punishes the unacclimated Northerner, especially if he be a foot-soldier tramping along in a blinding dust, parched of throat, empty of belly, and loaded down with a pack that would make a quartermaster's mule to fake the glanders. ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... Jim! Massive intellect!" said I, laughing at the fantastic absurdity of his assertion. "Why, such knowledge as you possess is better than straight tips on all the races ever to be run. It's better than our tropical island and Spanish galleons. You get richer, and you don't have to look out for men-of-war. Do I hold my job ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... burning of all manuscripts was praiseworthy, since those differing from Holy Writ were noxious and those agreeing with it superfluous. It is only to the patient labor of the Maya sculptor who daily carved the symbols of his belief and creed upon enduring stone, and to the luxuriant growths of semi-tropical forests which concealed even these from the passing Spanish adventurer, that we owe the preservation of the memorials of past beliefs and ...
— Studies in Central American Picture-Writing • Edward S. Holden
... relief fleets from Holland. It was a strange and grim struggle of endurance, in which both Dutch and Portuguese suffered terribly, the one on the barren sea-shore, the other in the pathless woods under the glare of a tropical sun, both alike looking eagerly for succour from the Motherland. The Dutch succours were the first to arrive. The first detachment under Marten Thijssen reached the Reciff on December 18, 1630; the main fleet under Adrian Jansz Pater on April 14, 1631. ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... nearly two centuries after its introduction at Rome; and in the country of Struve and the Pulkova equatorial, they persist at the present day in adding eleven minutes and twelve seconds to the length of the tropical year. ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... grass grew here and there in carpet-size splotches, now yellow and dry, while that in the valley was at its best. Spiked plants, which looked tropical, and which were as green during the rigors of winter as during the doubtful blessings of summer, stood on the slopes, their thousand bayonets guarding against trespass where only pressing necessity could drive a human foot. Sheep-sage, which grew low upon the ground, and unostentatious ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... apparently understand, Lopez sent down an order for the two big states to leave the matter of Uruguayan politics to his impartial adjustment. At both Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires a roar of laughter went up from the press at this notion of an obscure chieftain of a band of Indians in the tropical backwoods daring to poise the equilibrium of much more than half a continent on his insolent hand. But the merriment soon subsided, as Brazilians and Argentinos came to realize what their peril might be from a huge ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... decay, and re-growth of three score years. The ground which it encloses is soft and swampy, for the serried lines of betel-trees, with their thick, broad crowns, prevent either sun or wind from penetrating to the spot, and the heavy tropical rains never permit it to dry. It is a dark, dismal-looking place, only visited by the savage inhabitants when they come to collect the areca-nuts, and its solitude is undisturbed save by the flapping of the hornbill's wings as ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... and fruit cooler, Lake Como; as at first it did seem; but a tropical dining table, its surface a slab of light blue St. Pons marble ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... are supposed to represent the great discoveries of Vasco da Gama and of Pedro Alvares Cabral in India and in Brazil, but if this is really so the carvers must have been left to their own imagination, for the towns do not look particularly Indian, nor do the forests suggest the tropical luxuriance of Brazil: perhaps the small three-masted ships alone, with their high bows and stern, represent the ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... Even in tropical Queensland there is a sense of revivification during the last half of August and first of September, and the soul of man responds thereto, as do plants and birds, in lawful manner. Perhaps it is that the alien dweller in lands of the sun, when he frisks ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... Spencer Stark, late Captain in His Majesty's Black Hussars, gambler, penniless, always well dressed, and always well fed—Terrible. Just as beetles are beetles, whether dressed in tropical splendour or the funereal black of the English type, so are detrimentals ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... were distinguished on the beach as we rounded the north-east point, and afforded us the pleasurable anticipation of some fresh food. We had explored tropical coasts for several months, without reaping any one of the advantages usually attending it, and been frequently tantalized with the sight of turtle in the water, and of bones and shells round the fire places on shore; but we now hoped to have found a place where the Indians had not forestalled ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... says the narrative, "is dry and somewhat sandy, which makes the verdure of the meadows and woods more delicate and more uniform than is usually the case in tropical climates. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... here and there an individual more enterprising than his or her fellows would make a spasmodic attempt at a constitutional, said attempt usually resolving itself into five and a half feeble turns, up and down the clear part of the deck, to culminate in abrupt collapse; for it is warm in the tropical seas. ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... burned, like a censer lighted by a sunbeam; he flames, like a ship set on fire by lightning on the stormy sea. With you, my Maria, I have read more than once Shakspeare's Othello; and only the frantic Othello can give an idea of the tropical passion of Ammalat. He loves to speak long and often of his Seltanetta, and I love to hear his volcanic eloquence. At times it is a turbid cataract thrown out by a profound abyss—at times a fiery fountain of the naphtha of Bakou. What stars his eyes scatter at that moment—what ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... Antarctic-Environmental Protocol, Antarctic Treaty, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Marine Dumping, Nuclear Test Ban, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Tropical Timber 83, Wetlands, Whaling; signed, ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... imagination we can recall a scene of this old age. The air is sultry and full of vapors. The soil seems hot and steaming. This is a veritable forest, but we see none of the beautiful flowers which we associate with tropical vegetation to-day. In the branches of the graceful tree-ferns, we will look in vain for birds. They were yet far in the future. Neither were there any of the higher orders of animals present. Not a single representative ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... tree-houses to fortify himself against imaginary enemies will enjoy these books, for they give a vivid chronicle of the doings and inventions of a group of boys who are shipwrecked, and have to make themselves snug and safe in tropical islands where the dangers are ...
— The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon - or The Hermit of the Cave • James Carson
... Homer. Macknight really did authenticate for himself the efficacy of impression with almost incredible feats of visual bravery. There is no array of pigment sufficient to satisfy him as for what heat and cold do to his sensibility, as experienced by the opposite poles of a New England winter and a tropical Mexican landscape. He is always in search of the highest height in contrasts, all this joined by what his sense of fierceness of light could bring to the fantastic dune stretches of Cape Cod in fiery autumn. His work in water-color ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... of species make. The box contains a good many geological specimens; I am well aware that the greater number are too small. But I maintain that no person has a right to accuse me, till he has tried carrying rocks under a tropical sun. I have endeavoured to get specimens of every variety of rock, and have written notes upon all. If you think it worth your while to examine any of them I shall be very glad of some mineralogical information, especially on any numbers between 1 and 254 which include Santiago rocks. By my catalogue ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... concerned, climates like the one we have just described cannot be considered as unhealthy; they debilitate and weaken the system, and predispose to tropical diseases, but seldom engender them. I expected to find many cases of scurvy, due to the brackish condition of the water and to the absence of vegetables; but either scurvy did not exist to a great extent or ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... cast down; he dropped into an armchair and gazed into vacancy like the melancholy imbecile that he was, and forgot to shave. These alternations of tenderness and severity worked upon this feeble creature whose only life was through his amorous fibre, the same morbid effect which great changes from tropical heat to arctic cold produce upon the human body. It was a moral pleurisy, which wore him out like a physical disease. Flore alone could thus affect him; for to her, and to her alone, he was as good as ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... be necessary for an exploring expedition to be lost sight of for months, or even years. Wedged in the Arctic ice floes, or contending with fever and savage animals in the depths of some tropical jungle, the explorers could keep in touch with the civilized world as easily as though bound on a week end fishing trip. The aeroplane soaring in the clouds far above the earth, or the submarine under the earth's waters, could be informed and guided by it. Certainly ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... wreaths like rays on every side. I tasted them out of compliment to Nature, though they were scarcely palatable. The sumach (Rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the embankment which I had made, and growing five or six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. The large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and sometimes, as I sat ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... and his successors had swept over Asia like a tropical storm, overturning in their progress the landmarks of ages. Kingdom after kingdom was cast down as they issued, innumerable, from the far recesses of the North and East, and, among others, the empire of Korasmin was overrun by ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... and their venerable appearance is largely augmented by the mould and discoloration of the sea-air; while the tout ensemble presents an ancient and dilapidated aspect strangely at variance with the luxuriant verdure of the tropical scenery and the brilliant tints of the picturesque Oriental costumes everywhere visible. The New City is a terrestrial Paradise, with broad avenues shaded by majestic trees, spacious parks, and palace-dwellings of indescribable elegance—a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... from him on the very day of their marriage by the rebellion of San Domingo—is very slight; but then, according to the story, she is not wanted to be anything more. The cruelty, treachery, etc., of the half-caste Biassou are not overdone, nor is the tropical scenery, nor indeed anything else. Even the character of Bug-Jargal himself, a modernised Oroonoko (whom probably Hugo did not know) and a more direct descendant of persons and things in Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and to some extent the "sensibility" ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... or ledges, their flesh being quite fresh and fit food for dogs, and even men, opens up a very interesting field of inquiry and conjecture. In the bowels of a mammoth recently revealed in North-Eastern Siberia vegetable food was found, probably tropical, at all events unknown to the botany of to-day. The foregoing facts seem to be at variance with the doctrine of Uniformity, or with anything like a slow process. The entombment of these animals must have been very sudden, and due, one would naturally think, to a tremendous cataclysm followed by ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... a little patch of land, with palm trees and tropical vegetation waving in the gusts and green in the sunshine. Captain Nat ordered the boats to be lowered. Much as he hated the thought, he saw that the Sea Mist had made her last voyage and must be abandoned. He went to the cabin, collected papers and charts ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... a garden, and everything temperate or semi-tropical grows with very little care. Yet Mexico does not figure as a great agricultural country, because, like every other land where nature is kind, man is lazy. Yet the people are picturesque, like all ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... General Otis, who took little heed of it. It was well known that the hospitals were crowded with American soldiers, a great many of whom were suffering solely from their persistence in habits contracted at home which were incompatible with good health in a tropical climate. Many volunteers, wearied of the war, were urging to be sent back to the States, and there was a marked lack of cordiality between the volunteer and the regular regiments. In the field the former might well compare ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... and seamed by the action of the water, its base marked by a tossing line of foam of ominous import, for it told of the sunken reefs hidden beneath its restless ebb and flow, and extending far out to sea. The southern and eastern end were covered with a dense growth of tropical vegetation, but fresh water he did not find, or any animal, great or small. Many varieties of brilliantly-plumaged birds flew screaming away at his approach, but they were the ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... endeavor to make the house look well. People will sacrifice almost anything to that. They will strive their chambers into the roof,—they will have windows where they do not want them, or leave them out where they do,—in our tropical summers they will endure the glare and heat of the sun, rather than that blinds should interfere with the moulded window-caps, or with the style generally,—they will break up the outline with useless and expensive irregularity,—they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... extent of pastures, hop gardens, and barley fields, has also a distinctive title in the 'beer and butter region.' The warm temperate zone, or region of 'wine and oil,' is characterised by the growth of the vine, olive, orange, lemon, citron, pomegranate, tea, wheat, maize, and rice; the sub-tropical zone, by dates, figs, the vine, sugar-cane, wheat, and maize; the tropical zone is characterised by coffee, cocoa-nut, cocoa, sago, palm, figs, arrowroot, and spices; and the equatorial by ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... navigator was no longer the powerful, enduring man of six years before. Exposure, months of sleepless watching, anxiety, and tropical fevers had at length done their work. The bright intellect, the vivid imagination, the great heart, the generous nature, would be the same until death, but the constitution was shattered. The admiral now suffered from ophthalmia, gout, and a complication of diseases. The last six years of his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... woodlands; studying soils that producers may cultivate with better knowledge of conditions, and helping to clothe desert places with grasses suitable to our and regions. Our island possessions are being considered that their peoples may be helped to produce the tropical products now so extensively brought into the United States. Inquiry into methods of improving our roads has been active during the year; help has been given to many localities, and scientific investigation of material in the States and Territories has been inaugurated. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various |
