"Tropics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... incredible in their magnificence, enormous clusters of cream-coloured and tinted and even of buff. There were smaller and humbler members of the family, which would have been glorious in any other companionship. There were residents of the rich regions of the tropics; and less superb members of the temperate zones; there were trees and shrubs; and there were little bushy, hardy denizens of the highest and barrenest elevations of rocks and snow to which inflorescence ever climbs. Faith almost ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... and this can either be regulated as occasion requires by hand, or else automatically. The temperature in the depositors being kept constant under all variations in cooling water, there is the same abstraction of moisture in the tropics as in colder climates, and the cold air finally discharged from the machine is also kept at ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... reader of only ten or twelve years of English literature, possessed a knowledge of our modern poetry as intimate as my own, and a love of it equally great. This feeling brought us together and made us two—the nervous olive-skinned Hispano-American of the tropics and the phlegmatic blue-eyed Saxon of the cold north—one in spirit and more than brothers. Many were the daylight hours we spent together and "tired the sun with talking"; many, past counting, the precious ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... under the great dome should not be passed by. A vivid bit of the tropics is the Cuban display. Here, in an atmosphere artificially heated and moistened to reproduce the steaming jungle, is massed a splendid exhibit of those island trees and flowers that most of us know only through pictures and stories of southern seas. Around the central source ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... confirmation of Mr. Belt's view, I may quote the following passage from Sir W. Denison ('Varieties of Vice-Regal Life,' vol. i. 1870, p. 440): "It is said to be a practice with the Australians, when the vermin get troublesome, to singe themselves.") that within the tropics it is an advantage to man to be destitute of hair, as he is thus enabled to free himself of the multitude of ticks (acari) and other parasites, with which he is often infested, and which sometimes cause ulceration. But whether this evil is of sufficient magnitude ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... delights to hide up in his little study among his books and his chemical experiments, and smoke his silver pipe, and look out on the clear Thames and the green Surrey hills, and dream about Guiana and the Tropics; or to sit in the society of antiquaries with Selden and Cotton, Camden and Stow; or in his own Mermaid Club, with Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Beaumont, and at last with Shakspeare's ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... wind hurried us on, under shortened sail, toward the softer "trades" of the tropics, but, veering to the eastward by midnight, it brought us well in with the land. Then, "Larboard watch, ahoy! all hands on deck and turn out reefs," was the cry. To weather Cape St. Thome we must lug on all ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... smallest degree in accordance with these indices, you discover a species of Methodist—of what do you call it?—of Quakeress. On the other hand, you encounter a tall, lean, angular person, without colour, without grace, all elbows and knees, and you find it's a nature of the tropics! The women of duty look like coquettes, and the others look like alpenstocks! However, we have still the handsome Madame Ruck—a real femme de Rubens, celle- la. It is very true that to talk to her one must know ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... room and dropped into a chair near Harryman; whereupon the Chinese boy, almost inaudible in his broad felt shoes, suddenly appeared beside him and set down the bottle with the pain expeller of the tropics before him. ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... of what starlight can be and what stars can look like. These hanging lamps of the vast heavens seemed so strangely different from the stars that "twinkle, twinkle," as the nursery book has it, through our misty skies at home. We were, in short, approaching the tropics. Very beautiful were the strange constellations of the midnight sky, the magic loveliness of the moonlight, and the phosphorescence of the warm waves, whilst the last exquisite touch of delight was given by the balmy air. By day the heat (especially as ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... intended for two other regiments, one of regulars and the other of volunteers, with the result that the volunteers and half of the regulars were left on shore. The clothing supplied for the Cuban campaign was better suited to a cold climate than to summer in the tropics. The health of the troops during the Santiago campaign was such that the general officers expressed the opinion that the army must immediately be removed from Cuba or suffer severe and unnecessary losses from malarial fever. When the men were removed, however, they were taken to ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... things are required to cultivate the germs, aside from the food. One is moisture and the other is heat. The earth is full of bacteria from which plants get their food; some places the bacteria go down only one or two feet; at other places, where it is warm, as in the tropics, they have been found five or six feet below the surface. When a hole is made, and the sun strikes it, the bottom of the hole gets warm, and thus facilitates the growth of the germs around the hole, so that the plants ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... greatly resembled existing species, yet there were others in these ancient days utterly unlike anything indigenous to England now. There were undoubted tree-ferns, similar to those which thrive now so luxuriously in the tropics, and which throw out their graceful crowns of ferns at the head of a naked stem, whilst on the bark are the marks at different levels of the points of attachment of former leaves. These have left in their places cicatrices or scars, showing the places from which they formerly grew. Amongst the ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... maroon, instead of pouring, bent his head toward the window, listened a moment, and then turned and lifted a warning hand. The soft breeze of the evening, laden with the fragrance of the tropics, swept up from the river and wafted to the Vice-Governor's ears the sound of hoof beats on the hard, dry road. With senses keenly alert, he, also, listened. There were a number of them, a troop possibly. They were drawing nearer; they were coming toward his ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... to the thunder of the tropics—I have held my breath as the artillery of a fleet vomited forth its fire, and rent the air with sudden concussions—I have heard the roar of the tumbling river of the Canadas, and I have stood aghast at the crashing of a forest ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... presents the appearance of a minute flower, somewhat like a daisy stuck flat to the surface, and that, when stretched out, resembles a small round tower, with a garland of leaves bound round it atop for a cornice. The Astrea viridis, a coral of the tropics, presents on a ground of velvety brown myriads of deep green florets, that ever and anon start up from the level in their tower-like shape, contract and expand their petals, and then, shrinking back into their cells, straightway became florets again. The Lower Lias presented in one of its ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... a tidal wave had swept over the southern ports. Coming in all the way from the tropics the storm had made itself felt over a great part of the world, in some places taking the ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore • Laura Lee Hope
... under the name acclimation. By this means the body is enabled to endure tropical heat and polar cold. Owing to this gradual adaptation of the system to different temperatures, we can bear a greater degree of heat in the summer between the tropics, than in the winter under the polar circles. On the other hand, we can endure a greater degree of cold in winter and in the arctic region, than in the summer ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... trousers. It was Alan Vernon, who in these surroundings looked larger and more commanding than he had done at the London office, or even in his own house of Yarleys. Perhaps the moustache and short brown beard which he had grown, or his skin, already altered and tanned by the tropics, had changed his appearance for the better. At any rate it was changed. So were his manner and bearing, whereof all the diffidence had gone. Now they were those of a man accustomed to command who found himself in his ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... the Professor, with the bland superiority of his tribe. "Well, well! Yet even you know something of the evils attending people who live in low, swampy areas; malaria, ague, fevers. In the tropics, these take the form of virulent maladies that sweep a man from earth in a few hours. Your lake was haunted, so was the house that once stood in its basin, as some vague instinct strove to warn the generations of Michells as well as you. Haunted by emanations ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... crucibles, retorts, mortars, and the names of a great variety of chemical combinations: In the domain of geography, globes, hemispheres, continents, islands, oceans, gulfs, bays, and straits; equator, tropics, circles, longitude, latitude, etc. These examples, will furnish an approximate idea of the wide scope in scientific names, covered by these key-words, when applied ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... in Pennsylvania; from the West Indies; around the world; between the tropics; toward the Pacific; on the 22d of February; during the reign of Elizabeth; before the application of steam to machinery; at ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... short Norwegian summer great variations in weather must be expected, and in the valleys I have experienced downpours of rain and spells of heat equal to what I knew in the tropics. But as a rule the angler has little to complain of. The warmer the air and the brighter the sun the better in reason for the glacier-fed rivers, but let no one wish for such floods as are caused by heavy rain in association with warm winds. Out of my four visits one ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... man, and had studied chemistry in his scanty spare time, with the object of understanding his business better. He found the composition of varnishes an interesting subject, and as the best gums employed came from the tropics and were expensive he began to experiment with the exudations from American trees. His employers hinted that he was wasting his time, but Harding continued, trying to test a theory that the texture and hardness of the gums might depend upon climatic temperature. ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... swiftly through my mind, that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran, 'Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dark and, what is a rare occurrence under the tropics, very still. They could hear only the cracking of the burning thorns and the hissing of flames which illumined the overhanging rocks forming a semi-circle. The moon did not shine into the depths of the ravine, but above twinkled ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Each year, by December—the south-polar midsummer month—vegetation has become colored; and its delicacy yet brilliancy of tintage is then very beautiful, and varied beyond that of perhaps any other spot in the world. Peters has travelled over much of the tropics and subtropics, and he says that only in Florida has he seen anything to compare with the beauty of Hili-li vegetation in October and November. I should imagine from what he says that the coloring of vegetation is in great part the merest tintage, the large admixture ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... perhaps, no part of America where the alligators grow to a greater size, and are more fierce in their nature, than upon the Magdalena, and other great rivers that run into it. These rivers flow through a low country within the tropics; their climate is of the hottest kind, and consequently most suitable to the development of the great reptiles. The indolent character of the natives, too— half-Indian, half-Spanish—prevents them from attacking and ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... lost soul!" exclaimed the shuddering maid, Whose ears had drunk like poison all he said: MOKANNA started—not abasht, afraid,— He knew no more of fear than one who dwells Beneath the tropics knows of icicles! But in those dismal words that reached his ear, "Oh my lost soul!" there was a sound so drear, So like that voice among the sinful dead In which the legend o'er Hell's Gate is read, That, new as 'twas from her whom naught could dim Or sink till now, it startled ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... these proceeds about one-third was to be spent for a cargo of 105 hogsheads of molasses at 8d. per gallon, and the rest of the money remitted to London, whither the gold dust was also to be sent. The molasses upon reaching Newport was expected to bring twice as much as it had cost in the tropics. After deducting factor's commissions of from 2-1/2 to 5 per cent. on all sales and purchases, and of "4 in 104" on the slave sales as the captain's allowance, after providing for insurance at four per cent. on ship and cargo for each leg of the voyage, and for ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... a hundred feet square. The floor was covered with a foot or more of soil in which the rich grass and plants of the tropics flourished. There were tiny flower beds in the center; baby palms, patchouli plants and a maze of interlacing vines marked the edges of this wonderful garden in mid-air. Cool fountains sprayed the air at either end of the green enclosure: ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... and elderly gentlemen a thousand or so miles away, whom they did not know and who did not know them. Continually, as their temporary habitations began to take on the semblance of homes, they were transferred, from mountains to plains, from the far north to the tropics. Their few household goods bore the scars of many movings—by rail, by steamer, by freight wagon, and even by ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... you do that?" she asked in a voice that rang with a low musical quality. Her voice and her beauty were of the tropics, as were the features which, molded together, gave form to that beauty; because her hair and eyes were of a color, dark like walnut, and her olive skin was like silk under silk, with the rosy color of her youth ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... as it does a vast island continent in the Southern world, lies to some extent within the tropical range, for the Tropic of Capricorn traverses its northern part. At present, however, its most densely populated portion lies just outside the tropics, and it is this semi-tropical part of Australia with which we have mostly to do. And apart, too, from the mere fact of Australia being between certain parallels of latitude, which makes its climate tropical or semi-tropical, ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... competition, they are one of the greatest of all highways. Nor does their significance stop here. Nature laid out the St Lawrence basin so that it not only {3} led into the heart of the continent, but connected with every other system from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Tropics to the Polar sea. Little by little the pioneers found out that they could paddle and portage the same canoe, by inland routes, many thousands of miles to all four points of the compass: eastward to the Atlantic between the Bay of Fundy and ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... we observed the clouds to gather more than usual in the horizon, which is a sure indication of land, as it is common between the tropics to be foggy over the land, though perfectly clear at sea; wherefore we kept an anxious look-out all this night, and early in the morning of the 11th, we saw the island of Magon W. ten leagues distant. This is a high woody island, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... Salahiyeh, the last slope of the Anti-Lebanon, it is the realization of all that you have dreamed of Oriental splendor; the world has no picture more dazzling. It is Beauty carried to the Sublime, as I have felt when overlooking some boundless forest of palms within the tropics. From the hill, whose ridges heave behind you until in the south they rise to the snowy head of Mount Hermon, the great Syrian plain stretches away to the Euphrates, broken at distances of ten and fifteen miles, by two detached mountain ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... the tropics are cool, but to-day, as the evening drew on, the wonted freshness did not return, but the air remained stifling and oppressive, while heavy masses of vapor hung ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... sign that men had stopped even temporarily upon this shore, though, of course, he knew that so quickly does the rank vegetation of the tropics erase all but the most permanent of human monuments that he might be ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... integral limit of value proposed for our currency, is the star, which is to be divided into one hundred equal parts, each part to be called a centime, namely: 10 centimes—1 tropic; 10 tropics—1 star; 10 ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... organized government, about the year 1695, made it a great rendezvous of pirates, where they might dispose of their booty and concert new depredations. As they brought home with them wealthy lading of all kinds, the luxuries of the tropics, and the sumptuous spoils of the Spanish provinces, and disposed of them with the proverbial carelessness of freebooters, they were welcome visitors to the thrifty traders of New-York. Crews of these desperadoes, therefore, the runagates of every country ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... development assistance programs have added emphasis to natural resource management and environmental protection. My 1979 Environmental Message called attention to the alarming loss of world forests, particularly in the tropics. An interagency task force on tropical forests has developed a U.S. government program to encourage conservation and wise management of tropical forests. The Administration is encouraging action by other nations and world organizations to the same purpose. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Jimmy Carter • Jimmy Carter
... been pretty much all over the world, and am just back now from the Orient. To him who knows the ocean with its radiant, transparent blue, or its terrible, deadly storms, to one who has basked in the witcheries of the warmth and light of the tropics, everything here seems cold and colorless; these eternal green forests are, in fact, the only ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... moss, and I border them with pearls from Ceylon and diamonds from Golconda. Here and there are fountains tossing in the sunlight, and ponds that ripple under the paddling of the swans. I gather me lilies from the Amazon, and orange groves from the tropics, and tamarinds from Goyaz. There are woodbine and honey-suckle climbing over the wall, and starred spaniels sprawling themselves on the grass. I invite amid these trees the larks, and the brown thrushes, ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... Verissimo's Scenes from Amazon Life as a successful national product is Inglez de Sousa's O Missionario. Antonio de Moraes, in this story, is not so strong in will as Taunay's vicar of sorrows. Antonio is a missionary "with the vocation of a martyr and the soul of an apostle," on duty in the tropics. The voluptuous magnetism of the Amazon seizes his body. Slowly, agonizingly, but surely he succumbs to the enchantment, overpowered ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... found a fresh ship. She was the Lady Stiggins, a fine brig, well armed, and bound round Cape Horn. We had a somewhat roving commission, and were first to touch out here at Jamaica, and one or two others of these gems of the tropics—these islands, full ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... of love through fire and water," said she; "this is the second. But it ought not to count, as it comes from the Tropics." ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... flush of the coming splendour spreads above the hills as we push off from the San Miguel. Deeper and deeper grow the purple and the saffron till long shafts of golden light shoot up from hilltop to high heaven, and the great red sun of the tropics peers an instant over the mountain wall that shuts ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... individuals and certain families, owing to some fortunate power of resistance which we cannot explain, acclimate successfully where their companions perish. Most of the instances of alleged successful acclimatization of Europeans in the tropics are due to such exceptions, the far greater number of the victims being left ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... the final pages of 'A Naturalist's Voyage' as an example of the style which characterizes the book. In it Darwin shows himself an ardent and profound lover of the luxuriant beauty of nature in the tropics, a kindly observer of men, whether missionaries or savages; an incessant student of natural things—rocks, plants, and animals; and one with a mind so keenly set upon explaining these things and assigning them to their causes, that none of his observations are ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... advocacy of the now scarcely intelligible pretensions of a little coterie of Her Majesty's subjects in the West Indies. These gentry are hostile, he urges, to the presence of progressive Negroes on the soil of the tropics! Yet are these self-same Negroes not only natives, but active improvers and embellishers of that very soil. We cannot help concluding that this impotent grudge has sprung out of the additional fact that these identical ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... a happy life was his death in the city he loved so well, in the arms of his dear ones, in the light of a world-wide fame. The silence to which the most eloquent of us must all one day lapse came upon him like the sudden seductive twilight of the Tropics, and just when he had bequeathed to us ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Lord Nelson himself had last set his foot on shore. It was much longer than that since I and most on board had trod dry ground. That was serving our country, you'll allow—most of the time, too, under weigh, battling with tempests, and broiling under the sun of the tropics. ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... cucuie, cucuie." This attracts the insects to them, when they are easily captured with a small net. What a blessing these cucuiuii would be to us be-bitten inhabitants of the United States if Mr. Cucuius would only treat our mosquitoes with the vigor that he does the gnats of the tropics! ...
— Harper's Young People, September 14, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... were surely engaged. The soldiers were called out; the batteries manned; but the cannonade died away, and all went to bed in wonder. On the 1st of May the clocks struck six, but the sun did not, as usual in the tropics, answer to the call. The darkness was still intense, and grew more intense as the morning wore on. A slow and silent rain of impalpable dust was falling over the whole island. The negroes rushed shrieking into the streets. ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... our planet becomes more and more humanized, and man asserts his proper lordship over Nature. This matter of vegetable and animal food is dictated by climate. In the temperate zone they go well mixed. In the tropics man is naturally a Pythagorean, but he is not so strong, or so healthy, or moral, or intellectual, as the flesh-eating ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... Admiral Mahu and a large proportion of the crew had meantime perished of fevers contracted by following the course marked out for them by their employers, and thus diminished in numbers, half-stripped of provisions, and enfeebled by the exhausting atmosphere of the tropics, the survivors were ill prepared to confront the antarctic ordeal which they were approaching. Five months longer the fleet, under command of Admiral de Cordes, who had succeeded to the command, struggled in those ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... curling hair, ruddy cheek, form prematurely developed into round robustness, frank, free, and manly bearing, returning ever and anon from his ocean wanderings, and bearing to his friends some rare bird or shell of the tropics as a memorial of his labours and his love. Before he was eighteen years of age, Providence supplied him with the materials whence he was to pile up the monument of his future fame. He became second mate in the ship 'Britannia', ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... been slain, yet cry for more blood; and then he puts the paper down and says, "Here in this language is material enough out of which to create a dozen bloody rebellions." How any race with the blood of the tropics boiling in their veins, with the traditions of old oppressions burning in their memory, can ever forget or forgive this language and these unbridled outrages is inconceivable. He is mad who does not see that the gulf of caste, too ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... share the comforts of a club (which may be enumerated as a billiard-board, absinthe, a map of the world on Mercator's projection, and one of the most agreeable verandahs in the tropics), a handful of whites of varying nationality, mostly French officials, German and Scottish merchant clerks, and the agents of the opium monopoly. There are besides three tavern-keepers, the shrewd Scot ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reached the tropics, and for three days the Doldrums held us. They had the usual festivities when crossing the Line, and Father Neptune visited us. Our worthy captain pleased all the passengers by the hearty way in which he entered into all their ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... Whose form and whose soul Are the spell and the life of each path we pursue; Whether sunned in the tropics or chilled at the pole, If woman be there, there is ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... believe that we are capable of being more than light-hearted children of the tropics and I want our young people to gain more persistence in their characters, perseverance in their efforts and that esprit de corps, which shall animate us with higher, nobler and holier purpose in the future than we have ever known in the past; and while I ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... Neal Emery, embark on the steam yacht Day Dream for a cruise to the tropics. The yacht is destroyed by fire, and then the boat is cast upon the coast of Yucatan. They hear of the wonderful Silver City, of the Chan Santa Cruz Indians, and with the help of a faithful Indian ally carry off a number of the golden images from the temples. ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... Lord Ormont for a perfect sphinx; unless they are so silly as to think they may despise him, or suppose him indifferent. Oh, that upper class! It's a garden, and we can't help pushing to enter it; and fair flowers, indeed, but serpents too, like the tropics. It tries us more than anything else in the world—well, just as good eating tries the constitution. He ought to know it and feel it, and give his wife all the protection of his name, instead of—not that he denies: I have brought him to that point; he cannot ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the actions achieved in the European seas by the naval force of Great Britain, within the compass of the present year, we shall now proceed to record the exploits of the British arms within the tropics, and particularly the expedition to Martinique and Guadaloupe, which is said to have succeeded even beyond the expectation of the ministry. A plan had been formed for improving the success of the preceding year in North America, by carrying the British arms up the river St. Laurence, and besieging ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... softly to strum on the violin strings—"this Imperial Valley seems to me like a magic spot of the tropics, some land of fable. Richer than the valley of the Nile it has lain here beneath the sea level for thousands of years, dead under the breath of the desert, until a little trickle of water was turned in from the Colorado River, and then it swiftly put forth such luxuriant wealth of food and clothes ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... than we are? To understand that we should have to imagine our sun increased to eight or nine times his apparent size, and pouring out far greater heat and light than anything that we have here, even in the tropics. It was at first supposed that Mercury must have an extra thick covering of clouds to protect him from this tremendous glare; but recent observations tend to prove that, far from this, he is singularly free from cloud. As this is so, no life ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... was left behind, and the weather proved glorious as they sped on towards the tropics, both going through all the drudgery to be learned by Government men, in company with ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... abounding. He is like a compensation pendulum which corrects expansions and contractions and keeps time anywhere. I remember hearing of a captain in an Arctic expedition who had been recalled from the Tropics and sent straight away to the North Pole. Sometimes God gives His children ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... diminishing the home market to thrice the extent that it increases the foreign one. The latest accounts inform us of new arrangements about to be made with a view to competition with this country for the passenger traffic to and within the tropics, while the greatest of all trades now left to British ships is represented to be the transport of British men, women, and children, so heavily taxed at home for the maintenance of this very system that they are compelled to seek an asylum abroad. In ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... growth of vegetation. But these are borrowed plumes. Bushropes, climbers, and vines have clothed it from root to topmost branch, but they are only examples of the legion of beautiful parasites that seem to abound in the tropics. They will sap the vitality of this masterpiece of Nature, until in its turn it will fall before some stormy night's blow. All along the shore there is a myriad life among the trees and beautifully coloured birds flash in and ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... to go South with Jervis? I appreciate your feeling (to a slight extent) about not wanting to be separated from a husband; but it does seem sort of hazardous to me to move so young a daughter to the tropics. ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... great surprise, sulked with him for several days before he left. I don't know whether it occurred to him that, for all her angelic profile, she was a very stupidly obstinate girl. She didn't like the tropics. He had brought her out there, where she had no friends, and now, she said, he was becoming inconsiderate. She had a presentiment of some misfortune, and notwithstanding Davidson's painstaking explanations, she could not see why her ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... is commonly a year, and the time of year when the ceremony takes place usually coincides with some well-marked change of season, such as the beginning or end of winter in the arctic and temperate zones, and the beginning or end of the rainy season in the tropics. The increased mortality which such climatic changes are apt to produce, especially amongst ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed savages, is set down by primitive man to the agency of demons, who ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the hillsides, and masses of cryptomeria give depth and shadow. Still, beautiful as it all is, one sighs for something which shall satisfy one's craving for startling individuality and grace of form, as in the coco-palm and banana of the tropics. The featheriness of the maple, and the arrowy straightness and pyramidal form of the cryptomeria, please me better than all else; but why criticise? Ten minutes of sunshine would transform the whole ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... tickets and rolling huge cigars between their lips. It was an old story to Clay and King, but none of the others had seen a Spanish-American city before; they were familiar with the Far East and the Mediterranean, but not with the fierce, hot tropics of their sister continent, and so their eyes were wide open, and they kept calling continually to one another to notice some new ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... how the soul seems to have a new birth in the midst of these new and splendid surroundings. Nowhere but under the equatorial skies is it permitted to man to behold at once and in the same sweep of the eye all the stars of both the Northern and Southern heavens; and nowhere but at the tropics does nature combine to produce the various forms of vegetation that are parceled ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... summer night in Serampore; the large stars of the tropics gleamed over our heads as I sat by Sri Yukteswar's side on the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... curiously and seemed to listen. Within seconds the others became aware of a new smell in the laboratory. It seemed to come from the Tube itself, and it was a warm, damp smell that could only be imagined as coming from a jungle in the tropics. There were the rich odors of feverishly growing things; the heavy fragrance of unknown tropic blossoms, and a background of some curious blend of scents and smells which was alien and luring, and exotic. The whole was like the smell of another planet of the jungles of a strange ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... snow-clad rocks and frozen soil, Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost Basked in the moonlight's ineffectual glow, Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night; 410 Nor where the tropics bound the realms of day With a broad belt of mingling cloud and flame, Where blue mists through the unmoving atmosphere Scattered the seeds of pestilence, and fed Unnatural vegetation, where the land 415 Teemed with all earthquake, tempest and disease, Was man ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Kemble's book yet. Have you read Calvert's "Gentleman"? It is charming. And "The Tropics," too. And here is Draper's book upon the "Intellectual Development of Europe" on my table. I augur much from ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... structure applies to every one of the plants belonging to the grass family; and in this family are included all the different kinds of canes and reeds that grow in swamps and marshy places, as well as the bamboo of the tropics. ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... Nature in the tropics, left to herself, is harsh, aggressive, savage; looks as though she wanted to hang you with her dangling ropes, or impale you on her thorns, or engulf you in her ranks of gigantic ferns. Her mood is never as placid and sane as in the North. There is a tree in the Hawaiian ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... tired at all. The journey over the enchanting road of the Corniche had awakened in her a fervor of admiration which prevented her from feeling any bodily needs, and now she seemed to have reached fairyland, where the verdure of the tropics was like the hanging gardens of Babylon, only those had never had a mirror to reflect back their ancient, far-famed splendor, like that before her eyes, as she looked down upon the Mediterranean, with the sun setting in the west in a sky all crimson ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... I remind you of the tropics this dreary winter night; so I'll bear out your fanciful conceit. Your face, a moment since, was ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... disadvantage by the absence of any such intermediate divisions as the Moon has suggested to Terrestrials. The revolutions of the satellites are too rapid and their periods too brief to be of service in dividing their year of 668-2/3 solar days. Martial civilisation having taken its rise within the tropics—indeed the equatorial continents, which only here and there extend far into the temperate zone, and two minor continents in the southern ocean, are the only well-peopled portions of the planet—the demarcation of the seasons afforded by the solstices have been comparatively ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... called by a distinctive title, named. 5. Yam, the root of a climbing plant, found in the tropics, which is used for food. 6. Im-paled', put to death by being fixed on an upright, sharp stake. 8. Di-late', to speak largely, to dwell in narration. 10. Rise (pro. ris, not riz), source, origin. Pro-jec'tor, one who ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... colour has made its way across Europe like some gorgeous bird of the tropics, and since the war has checked the output of Europe's factories, another channel has supplied the same wonderful colours in silks and gauze. They come to us by way of the Pacific, from China and from Japan. There is no escaping the colour spell. Writers from the front tell ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... real Kris Kringle. He stands at the centre of exchange, distributes from the tropics and the arctic zones. He deals out fur and feathers, books, toys, clothing, engines; ribbons, laces, silks, perfumes; bread-stuffs, sugar, cotton, iron, ice, steel; wheat, flour, beef, stone; lumber, drugs, coal, leather. ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... prelates! your mitre, your crozier, your mantle are those of Osiris; and that cross whose mystery you extol without comprehending it, is the cross of Serapis, traced by the hands of Egyptian priests on the plan of the figurative world; which, passing through the equinoxes and the tropics, became the emblem of the future life and of the resurrection, because it touched the gates of ivory and of horn, through which the soul ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... a fairly large and important tribe flourishing mostly in the warm regions and the tropics. It is very well represented in South India and fifteen genera are ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... essentially Tibetan, and the plateaus and mountain peaks range from altitudes of 8,000 feet to 20,000 feet above sea level. In the south and west along the borders of Burma and Tonking, in the low fever-stricken valleys, the climate is that of the mid-tropics, and the native life, as well as the fauna and flora, is of a totally different type from ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... ascend nor descend, but turns in a circle. Thus, being compounded of superior and inferior powers, with the superior it turns round the divinity, and with the inferior, towards the mass of the worlds, which is by it vivified and maintained between the tropics of generation and the corruption of living things in those worlds, serving its own life eternally; because the act of the divine providence, always preserves it with divine heat and light, with the same order and measure, in ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... destinies of nearly a thousand men. "Case hardened" to the attacks of mosquitos, his system overcharged with malarial germs until the scourge of the Coast failed to harm him, Colonel Quarrier possessed one of the principal qualifications for bush-fighting in the Tropics—a ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... long afternoons lying on the cabin-house, watching the frigates, the tropics, gulls, boobys, and other sea-birds that sported through the sky in great numbers. The frigate-birds were called by the sailors the man-of-war bird, and also the sea-hawk. They are marvelous flyers, owing to the size of ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... did as she was told. Vivie left her seated in one of the long series of glass houses overlooking Brussels from a terrace, wherein are assembled many glories of the tropics: palms, dracaenas, yuccas, aloes, tree-ferns, cycads, screw-pines, and bananas: promising to be back in an ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... until you are almost within the harbor that you get a fair view of the city, which lies embowered in palms and fine tamarind-trees, with the tall fronds of the banana peering above the low-roofed houses; and thus the tropics come after all somewhat suddenly upon you; for the land which you have skirted all the morning is by no means tropical in appearance, and the cocoa-nut groves of Waikiki will disappoint you on their first and too distant view, which gives them the insignificant appearance ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... you," said Trask, as he wrote his name in the register and took off his helmet. It was plain that the tropics had put their mark upon him, for in contrast to the deep tan of burnt umber over cheeks and chin, the upper part of his forehead showed a white band of skin, the helmet line of the veteran traveller in low latitudes. His black eyes were embedded in nests of tiny wrinkles, the "tropical squint," ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... "Within the tropics lime juice and sugar were made to suffice as antiscorbutics; on reaching a higher latitude, sour-krout and vinegar were substituted; the essence of malt was served for the passage to New Holland, and for future occasions, on consulting with the surgeon, I had thought ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... a thousand years into the past; but it dwells in the body and is more or less restrained by it. Bodily limitation narrows experience and compels ignorance. It makes large acquaintance impossible. The flowers beneath the ice on the Alps are small; the flowers of the tropics have the proportions of trees. Thus environment modifies growth. The body cannot put fetters on the will, but it may hold in captivity the powers which acquire knowledge, withhold from the emotions persons worthy of affection, and make the range ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... of it, the better he liked this suggestion. That Sibyl should voluntarily propose so long a journey surprised and delighted him. The tropics were not his favourite region, and those islands of the Pacific offered no scope for profitable energy; he did not want to climb volcanoes, still less to lounge beneath bananas and breadfruit-trees, ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... phrases can be written down. Such a phrase, for example, as this: Apa nama ini? ("What is the name of this?") will serve to supply the place of many vocabularies. The language, which from its soft sounding has been called "the Italian of the Tropics," is very simple, and seems to consist almost exclusively of nouns (i.e. substantives, adjectives, and pronouns). The verb "to be" and prepositions are often omitted, e.g. Pighi bawa ini Tuan X— "Go [and] take this [to] Mr. ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... time is taken up with courtship and love. Hence, the majority of the children are born nine months later, when the four months of perpetual night are beginning. A marked seasonal periodicity of this kind is not confined to the Arctic regions. We may also find it in the tropics. In Cambodia, Mondiere has found that twice a year, in April and September, men seem to experience a "veritable rut," and will sometimes even kill women ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... is high. We do not desire to do for the islanders merely what has elsewhere been done for tropic peoples by even the best foreign governments. We hope to do for them what has never before been done for any people of the tropics—to make them fit for self-government after the fashion ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt |
