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More "Sterility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hide in a book-stall shop—made goods, and romance writers or dramatic authors who pride themselves on living to write, and who seek inspiration elsewhere than in regularity of habits and the work-table, have their efforts marked from the first by sterility. Obscure or famous, rich or poor, an artist must be an artisan and practise these fruitful virtues—patient application, conscientious technicality, absorption in work. When he seated himself at his table Dorsenne was heart and soul in his business. He closed his door, ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... superseded by healthy progress, a German Empire of the first rank, the Empire of intellect, grew up in the domain of art and science, where German character and endeavour found the deepest and fullest expression. A great change had been effected in this land of political narrowness and social sterility since the year 1750. A literature and a science, born in the hearts of the nation, and deeply rooted in the moral teaching of Protestantism, had raised their minds far beyond the boundaries of practical ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... represent three of the spots that stud the Southern Pacific Ocean. The first beams with lovely luxuriance in its wood-crowned heights; while the second and third rise from the bosom of the sea in frowning sterility amidst the gay ripple that ever and anon laves their sides, and plashes in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various
... the Paleolithic Age. Of that remote time, the morning time of human life, we learn only from the labors of geologists and archaeologists. We are virtually dealing with a past geological age. The long term of years thus defined drew to its close amidst scenes of almost Arctic sterility. In all probability, glaciers reflected the sun's rays from all the considerable hills and mountains of Central and Northern Europe, though forming, perhaps, but a remnant of the great glaciers of the Ice Age. The neighboring seas must have been whitened by the ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... gentle inclinations, the mountain-torrent diverted or restrained, and the means of artificial irrigation, to sustain nature during the long droughts of summer, obtained. By the incessant labour of centuries this prodigy has been completed, and the very stony sterility of nature converted into the means of heightening, by artificial means, the heat of summer.... No room is lost in these little but precious freeholds; the vine extends its tendrils along the terrace walls ... in the corners formed by their meeting, a little sheltered ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... it enacted and voted. We order no innovation to be made in this regard, in consideration of the welfare and conservation of those provinces and their natives, and so that the choice of paying in money shall not occasion any lack of products and cause sterility." Felipe II, San Lorenzo, August 1589; Felipe ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... thriftily selfish and ambitious, the imaginative and poetic, the lovers of money and solid comfort, the worshippers of success, art, and of love, will all oppose to the Force of Life the device of sterility. ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... bolder margins of Ribble and Hodder on the other, instead of populous towns and villages, the castle, the old tower-built house, the elegant modern mansion, the artificial plantation, the park and pleasure ground, or instead of uninterrupted enclosures, which have driven sterility almost to the summit of the fells; how great must then have been the contrast, when, ranging either at a distance or immediately beneath, his eye must have caught vast tracts of forest ground stagnating with bog or darkened by native woods, where the wild ox, the roe, the stag, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... abounding in grape-vines. These tracts possess springs in abundance. The "islands" so often alluded to by travellers are most picturesque and beautiful features in the landscape. They must not be compared to oases, for they are surrounded by anything but sterility; but they are the evidence of springs, and generally of a slight rise in the ground, and the timber upon them is of almost tropical luxuriance. Herds of deer are feeding in their shade, the murmur of wild bees fills the air, and the sweet vine-smell invites birds and insects ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... without a sincere and single eye to the truth. The fatal sterility of the middle ages, and of our first and second University periods, had to do with the mistake of gagging men's mouths, and dictating all their conclusions. Things came to be so arranged that contradictory views ran side by side, like opposing electric ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... naive and awkward as is always the singing of English hymns in English churches by English citizens. The chapel, which had seemed before to be rising to some strange atmosphere of expectation, slipped back now to its native ugliness and sterility. The personality was in the man and in ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... country is pining under the influence of long-continued drought and heat; the ground is parched and rent; scarcely a blade of verdure is to be seen except in the beds of rivers, where the last pools of water seem about to evaporate, and leave the land under the dominion of perpetual sterility. Man and beast pant for fresh air and cool water; but no cool breeze comes. A blast, as if from the mouth of a furnace, greets the burning cheek; no blessed drops descend; the sky is clear as a mirror, without a single cloud to mitigate the intensity of the sun's withering rays. At ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... that was danger, but the course was clear towards obtaining from the greater assembly what he would have extracted from the less if he had held office in 1787. That is the secret of Necker's unforeseen weakness in the midst of so much power, and of his sterility when the crisis broke and it was discovered that the force which had been calculated equal to the carrying of a modest and obvious reform was as the rush of Niagara, and that France was in ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... too, according to a German belief, is said to attract rain, and in olden times was thought to produce sterility. Some critics have suggested that it is the plant referred to in "Macbeth" by Banquo (Act i. ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... queen will promise to say one word in his favor, not a hair will fall from his head," said Anna Danuta; "the king worships her for her piety and for her dowry, and especially now, when the shame of sterility has been taken from her. But the king's beloved sister, Princess Ziemowit lives in Krakow; you must go to her. For my part I will do anything I can; but the princess is his own sister, and I am only his ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... over a vast plateau of mountains: there, were extinct craters; here, barren ravines; not a drop of water on those parched crests; piles of broken rocks; huge stony masses scattered hither and thither, and, interspersed with whitish marl, all indicated the most complete sterility. ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... over-subtle, the corrupted, while it ignores all normal healthy life, virtuous habits, pure affections, steady labor, honesty, and duty. It is an affectation, and because it is an affectation the school is struck with sterility. The reader desires in the poem something better than a juggler in rhyme, or a conjurer in verse; he looks 'to find in him a painter of life, a being who thinks, loves, and has a conscience, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... considering what may seem to us the sterility and stiffness of the English poets from 1660 to 1740, that they were addressing a public which, after the irregular violence and anarchical fancy of the middle of the seventeenth century, had begun to yearn for regularity, common sense, and a moderation in relative variety. The simplest ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... done, as far as I am aware, if you take two mules, a male and a female, and endeavour to breed from them, you get no offspring whatever; no generation will take place. This is what is called the sterility of the ...
— The Conditions Of Existence As Affecting The Perpetuation Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... a few words respecting the argument which we drew from the peerage. Mr Sadler asserted that the peers were a class condemned by nature to sterility. We denied this, and showed from the last edition of Debrett, that the peers of the United Kingdom have considerably more than the average number of children to a marriage. Mr Sadler's answer has amused us much. He denies the accuracy of our counting, and, by reckoning ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... those based on broken chords, which, accustomed as he was by his constant intercourse with Liszt and Chopin during his stay of several years in Paris to the rich passage work of the new school, appeared to him old-fashioned. Mendelssohn, who in his letters repeatedly alludes to his sterility in the matter of new pianoforte passages, allowed himself to be persuaded by Hiller to rewrite the pianoforte part, and was pleased with the result. It is clear from the above that if Mendelssohn failed to give Chopin his due, Chopin did more ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... of fifty miles, through a succession of deep ravines, where no objects met the eye except barren sandstone rocks, and stunted trees. With the banksia and xanthorrhoea always in sight, the idea of hopeless sterility is ever present to the mind, for these productions, in sandy soils at least, grow only where nothing else can vegetate. The horizon is flat, affording no relief to the eye from the dreary and inhospitable scene, which ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... not differed widely. A spot eminently fruitful has never been discovered. That there are many spots cursed with everlasting and unconquerable sterility no one who has seen the country will deny. At the same time I am decidedly of opinion that many large tracts of land between Rose Hill and the Hawkesbury, even now, are of a nature sufficiently favourable to produce moderate crops of whatever may be sown in them. And provided a sufficient number ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... barren of those islands; it should send over to us the honest, primitive Hebrideans, settle them here on good lands, as a reward for their virtue and ancient poverty; and replace them with a colony of her wicked sons. The severity of the climate, the inclemency of the seasons, the sterility of the soil, the tempestuousness of the sea, would afflict and punish enough. Could there be found a spot better adapted to retaliate the injury it had received by their crimes? Some of those islands might be considered as the hell of Great ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... verses, she had a fixed belief in the excellence of those efforts of genius. The secret of Lady Mallow's silence rests between her husband and herself; and it is just possible that some too candid avowal of Lord Mallow's may be the reason of her poetic sterility. It is one thing to call the lady of one's choice a tenth muse before marriage, and another thing to foster a self-delusion in one's wife which can hardly fail to become a discordant element in domestic life. "If your genius had developed, and you had ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... sought to avoid—they could live as husband and wife. Other arrangement now was met by the cold reception meted out to her lord by the lady of the House. Any compunction Shu[u]zen might feel as to what he thought to be the enforced sterility of O'Hagi ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... we reached the same evening, has a very bleak and barren appearance, and is, seemingly, nothing better than a volcanic rock. Its apparent sterility does not, as a matter of fact, exist; for it produces an abundance of vegetables of all kinds, splendid corn with stalks above the ordinary height, fruits, roses, and other delightful and highly-scented flowers, in rank abundance. There is something thriving and go-a-head about the place, ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... which the bodily is but a symbol? If the first fine bloom of the soul has gone, if the dream that is only dreamed once has grown up in the imagination and been once given, the mere chastity of the body is a lie, and whatever its fecundity, the soul has nought but sterility to give to another. It is not those kisses of the lips—kisses that one forgets as one forgets the roses we smelt last year—which profane; they but soil the vessel of the sacrament, and it is the sacrament itself ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... on the exit of a discontented and resentful expectant mother, a woman, very much alone in the world—perhaps a bachelor maid or a barren wife, who, as she sits in the office, bitterly weeps and wails over her state of loneliness or sterility; and so we are led to realize that discontentment is the lot of many women; and we are sometimes led to regret that ours is not the power to take from her that hath and give ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... the road runs over a high level plateau, covered with miserable corn, or worse fallows, and having an aspect of sterility very different from what we were accustomed to in the rich provinces of France. In the midst of this dreary country, we beheld with delight several deep ravines, formed by streams which fall into the Aisne, sheltered from the chilling blasts that sweep along the high plains by which they are surrounded, ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... had not much to say. This was the trouble with them all. There was not a spark of genuine poetic fire in the Seven. They sang without an ear for music; they strewed their pages with faded artificial flowers which they mistook for Nature, and endeavored to overcome sterility of imagination and want of passion by veneering with magniloquent epithets. They padded their ill-favored Muse, belaced and beruffled her, and covered her with garments stiffened with tawdry embroidery ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... the most valuable. In the most important branch of industry—agriculture—the labors of the purely scientific man have as yet borne but scant fruit; whilst the unaided efforts of the husbandman have reclaimed from sterility extensive tracts, and caused them to "blossom as the rose." That practical men should have done so much, and scientific men so little, for agriculture, may easily be explained. Countless millions of men, during many thousands of years, have incessantly been occupied in improving the processes ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... desert is real desert, it does not give, to me, at any rate, the immense impression of naked sterility, of almost brassy, sun-baked fierceness, which often strikes one in the Sahara to the south of Algeria, where at midday one sometimes has a feeling of being lost upon a waste of metal, gleaming, angry, tigerish in color. Here, ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... HYBRIDISM is not a WEAK, but a STRONG chapter. You have done wonders there. But still you have not accounted, as you may be held to account, for divergence up to a certain extent producing increased fertility of the crosses, but carried one short almost imperceptible step more, giving rise to sterility, or reversing the tendency. Very likely you are on the right track; but you have something to do yet ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... haunting enigmas and unsolved mysteries an answer to the enigma of self. Like life, like truth, like love, like all realities viewed from the angle of human vision, the desert is a paradox. Its vast emptiness is more than full; its unashamed sterility is but the simile for ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... spread out like a sea, but they found no stream running into it. A desert extended around them, and stretched to the southwest, as far as the eye could reach, rivalling the deserts of Asia and Africa in sterility. There was neither tree, nor herbage, nor spring, nor pool, nor running stream, nothing but parched wastes of sand, where horse and rider were ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... immediate pleasure, afford matter of the most instructive speculation to the philosopher, who studies the wisdom of nature through the medium of things. As, on the one hand, the summit of the mountain may be supposed the point of absolute sterility, so, on the other, the sandy desert, moved by nothing but the parching winds of continents distant from the sources of abundant rains, finishes the scale of natural fertility, which thus diminishes in ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... whose human inhabitants had not only to subdue the wild beasts and teach the earth to bring forth wholesome food in place of useless plants, but also to battle with wintry climates, and overcome the adverse influences of cold, sterility of soil, and other hostile conditions of the ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... comparative sterility of post-Comtean (or at any rate post-Spencerian) sociology, which is so commonly reproached to us, and to which the difficult formation and slow growth of sociological societies and schools is largely ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... the theft of the Sampo, Louhi sent nine diseases upon Wainamoinen's people,—colic, pleurisy, fever, ulcer, plague, consumption, gout, sterility, and cancer, the offspring of the fell Lowyatar; but by the use of vapor baths and balsams Wainamoinen healed his people. Then Louhi sent Otso the Bear, the honey-eater, but he was slain by the hero, who made a banquet of his flesh for the people. Enraged at her failures, she stole the sun, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... cultures was correct, we ought to find a pure culture of the septic vibrio in the heart's blood of an animal recently dead of septicemia. This was what happened, but a new difficulty presented itself; all our cultures remained sterile. Furthermore this sterility was accompanied by loss in the culture media of ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... surveyed the generation to which he himself belongs, and after having scanned these wide domains of emasculation, these prairies of spiritual sterility, these vast plains of servility and irresolution, he has addressed to himself the questions: How does a whole generation become such? How was it possible to nip in the bud all that was fertile and eminent? And he has painted a picture ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... of first crosses and of hybrids—Sterility various in degree, not universal, affected by close interbreeding, removed by domestication—Laws governing the sterility of hybrids—Sterility not a special endowment, but incidental on other differences, not accumulated by natural selection—Causes ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... with pure water from the Vassie and the fragrant tea-pots of Gnihing. This sagacious sophist and dogmatizer also discovered that, among other evils, tea-drinking deprived its devotees of the power of expectoration, and entailed sterility; wherefore he hoped Europeans would thereafter keep to their natural beverages— wine and ale—and reject coffee, chocolate, and tea, which were all equally ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... The phenomenon is so striking here that it is called New Englandism. Why are there so few large families outside the Irish and Canadian elements? Why are there seen so few children in the fashionable districts of our large cities? Why this blast of sterility with which the land is cursed? Look behind the phenomenon, and you will find the cause; and the finding will make you shudder. And if only those shudder who are free from stain, the shuddering will be scarcely audible. Onan and Malthus as household gods are ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... savage indolence, have left those countries almost in a state of nature; yet it is within the tropics that the true productiveness of the earth is alone to be looked for. Our long winters, our mountains, and the comparative sterility of Europe, prohibit that richness of produce which only waits the hand of man in the South, and it is only when the industry of the European shall be suffered to throw its strength into the Asiatic soil, that man will ever be able to discover the true extent of the bounties provided ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... Europe. Of the gardens of Hesperides, we know nothing singular, but some golden apples. Of Alcinous his garden, we read nothing beyond figs, apples, olives; if we allow it to be any more than a fiction of Homer, unhappily placed in Corfu, where the sterility of the soil makes men believe there was no such thing at all. The gardens of Adonis were so empty that they afforded proverbial expression, and the principal part thereof was empty spaces, with herbs and flowers in pots. I think we little understand the pensile gardens of Semiramis, ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... the days of the Emperor Trajan, it had ceased to be so, and had come to import largely from Africa and Lybia, "sed nunc Africam potius et Egyptum exercemus." 3, That this was not the result of any supervening sterility or unfruitfulness, "nec nunc infecunditate laboratur," but was from causes which made it more profitable to purchase grain in the Egyptian or Lybian markets, "sed Africam POTIUS et ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... of male rats with certain types of hard radiations, which not only renders them reproductively sterile but leaves the rodents so treated in full possession of all other sexual functions and impulses. Furthermore, this condition of sterility is venereally contagious, so that one male rat so treated will sterilize all female rats with which it comes in contact, and these, in turn, will sterilize all male rats coming in contact with them. Our mathematicians estimate that under even moderately favorable circumstances, the ...
— Operation R.S.V.P. • Henry Beam Piper
... beyond the influence of the tanks is neither rich nor interesting. The cultivation seemed scanty and the population thin, owing to the irremediable sterility of soil, from the poverty of the primitive rock from whose detritus it is chiefly formed. Raghunath Rao told me that the wish of the people in the castle to adopt a child as the successor to his nephew arose from the desire to escape the scrutiny into the past accounts ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... human race give birth to children from puberty to sterility. She may give birth a dozen times, but nature finally calls a halt, and the whole system of life sustaining nerves of the womb which are in the fascia, with blood in great abundance to supply foetal life, ceases to go farther with the processes ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... The general sterility of Attica was the great safety of her people in their early history. "It drove them abroad; it filled them with a spirit of activity, which loved to grapple with danger and difficulty; it told them that, if they would maintain themselves in the dignity ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... sprung up amidst the rugged spar-stones that, intermixed with rude crags of granite, were thickly scattered over this wide waste, which, throughout its vast extent, afforded as perfect a picture of sterility as can be well conceived. With this brief outline of the scenery, we must next attempt to describe the parties who ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... they were men who had descended from a cold northern climate, where nature did little to supply their wants, where hunger and cold could not be avoided but by industry and exertion; where, in one word, the sterility of nature was counteracted ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... celebrated battles that were fought between the French and English armies in the Spanish territories, and which are told with great truth and develope the extraordinary powers of this celebrated writer. The divorce of Josephine, and marriage of Maria Louisa, commence the succeeding volume. The sterility of Bonaparte's wife was now an irremediable evil; and political motives were to supersede the ties of endearment, affection, talents, and virtue. Fouch the minister of police, made Josephine the means of suggesting to Napoleon, the measure of her own divorce, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... his words made her uneasy, though he was only saying aloud things that she knew well and that were strongly confirmed by Mairet's letters, namely, the criminal futility of these deaths, and the sterility of all this heroism. She tried to take back her confidences, or even to minimise the meaning of them, with an eagerness that did not seem perfectly sincere. She brought to mind sayings of her husband's which apparently ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... more attractive than the delicate proportions of his companion. He accordingly reigned paramount among those inamoratas who were turned of thirty, without being under the necessity of proceeding by tedious addresses, and was thought to have co-operated with the waters in removing the sterility of certain ladies, who had long undergone the reproach and disgust of their husbands; while Peregrine set up his throne among those who laboured under the disease of celibacy, from the pert miss of fifteen, who, with a fluttering heart, tosses her head, bridles up, and giggles involuntarily ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... civilization, that is, of Rome and of the Empire—had a third fortune differing both from death and from sterility: it survived to a resurrection. Its essential seeds were preserved for ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... that the leaders of the great Conservative party have so often been hired bravos or wandering minstrels with whom it can share no common conviction. I never cease wondering why it cannot produce a man of its own faith. There must be something inherent in its creed that produces sterility. ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... to be able to avoid, at the same time, the dry sterility of epitomes, which convey no distinct idea to the mind; and the tedious accuracy of long histories, which tire the reader's patience. I am sensible that it is difficult to steer exactly between the two extremes; and although, in the two parts of history of which this first volume consists, I have ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... rigid sky lines of Glenbogie House, standing starkly against the cold, lingering northern twilight. As the vehicle turned, and rolled between two square stone gate-posts, the long avenue before him, though as well kept as the road, was but a slight improvement upon the outer sterility, and the dark iron-gray rectangular mansion beyond, guiltless of external decoration, even to the outlines of its small lustreless windows, opposed the grim inhospitable prospect with an equally grim inhospitable front. There ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... hybrids, that can no longer be insisted upon as absolutely true, nor be practically used as a test between species and varieties, unless we allow that hares and rabbits are of one species. That such sterility, whether total or partial, subserves a purpose in keeping species apart, and was so designed, we do not doubt. But the critics fail to perceive that this sterility proves nothing whatever against the ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... more over the many worlds, the big oneness swallowing up the many small diversities in its insatiable gnawing appetite, leaving a dreary sameness throughout the world, that means at last complete sterility. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... inspirations of Nature, made up a factitious one among themselves, and assumed that they could operate without the intervention of the occult original. But Nature would not be mocked; and whenever this race of idolaters have worked without her agency, she has afflicted them with the most stubborn sterility. ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... (Works, vi. 129) Johnson describes Canada as a 'region of desolate sterility,' 'a cold, uncomfortable, uninviting region, from which nothing but furs and fish were ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... were not improved by the antagonism between the Roman Catholic and Presbyterian missions and the traders; each worked against the others, offering the natives the best of opportunities to fish in troubled waters. The result of all this was a rapid decrease of the population and frequent artificial sterility. The primitive population has disappeared completely in some places, and is only to be found in any numbers far inland among the western mountains. The situation is a little better in the north, where we find a number of flourishing villages along ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... patient's problem. There remained the adjustment to domestic life. This was hard, and though in part successful, it was delayed by the sterility of the marriage. The husband and wife agreed that pending a child she might well become active again in the larger world. Though the best place would have been her old work, pride and convention stood ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... just here than to quote, even at some length, from his facile pen: "To say of man or woman that they have no imagination is to convict them of many actual and potential sins. Such a defect means obtuseness in manners and morals, sterility in arts and science, blundering in the general conduct of life. Children are often accused of having too much imagination, but in reality that is hardly possible. The imagination may run riot, and, growing by what it ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... accuse the English Language of not being copious enough, do, in Truth, find a Sterility, ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... theory of the Physiocrates, only transfers already existing wealth from one hand to another. What the merchants gain by it is at the cost of the nation. Hence, it is desirable that this loss should be as small as possible. Hence sterility!(316) But, the more important branches of business, especially wholesale trade, are connected with a transportation of goods (Verri), either from one place or from one period of time, into another. Here the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... in which every thought and feeling came readily to the lips. "Loose the knots of the heart," he says. We absorb elements enough, but have not leaves and lungs for healthy perspiration and growth. An air of sterility, of incompetence to their proper aims, belongs to many who have both experience and wisdom. But a large utterance, a river that makes its own shores, quick perception and corresponding expression, a constitution ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... The chronicler gives a piece of popular etymology, in deriving the name, 'the valley of blessing,' from that morning's worship. Perhaps the name was older than that, and was given from a feeling of the contrast between the waste wilderness, which in its gaunt sterility seemed an accursed land, and the glen which with its trees and stream was indeed a 'valley of blessing.' If so, the name would be doubly appropriate after that day's experience. Be that as it may, here we have in vivid form the truth that all our struggles and fightings ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... romance of chivalry was another, but of this it had practically nothing left. The Amadis class, the late Renaissance pastorals, the immediately preceding or accompanying French romances of the Scudery type, were, in increasing degree, hybrid, artificial, and dead-alive. Impotence and sterility in every sense could but be its portion. Of the two great qualities of the novel—Variety and Life—it had never succeeded in attaining any considerable share, and it had now the merest show of variety and no life at all. There is hardly anything to be said in its favour, except that its vogue, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... with the countries which formed the seats of the two monarchies already described, the general character of the Median territory is undoubtedly one of sterility. The high table-land is everywhere intersected by rocky ranges, spurs from Zagros, which have a general direction from west to east, and separate the country into a number of parallel broad valleys, or ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... Descent not Inferable from Gradation. No such Imperceptible Blending in Nature. The Fact of the Present Existence of Distinct Species. Sterility of Hybrids. Geological Species Distinct. The Intermediate Forms not Found. The Gradation Does not Begin with the Lowest Forms. Four Kingdoms from the Beginning. The New Species Began with the Giants. The Gaps Fatal to the Theory. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... interest. Indeed, the chief antiquarian remains of this description which have been left on the surface of our soil are to be found on our mountain-tops, on our moors, or in our woods, where the very sterility or inaccessibility of the spot, or the kind protection and sympathy of the old forest-trees, have saved them, for a time at least, from reckless ruin and annihilation. Some of the antiquarian memorials that I allude to ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... methods in review, he accepts an operation known as tubo-ligature as being the best from all points of view. This operation will render the female permanently sterile without having any deleterious effect upon her health. Absolutely no result follows, he assures us, but sterility. If the wives of all defectives were operated upon in this way, Dr Chapple assures us that the problem concerning the defective would speedily be solved and society would be the happier and wealthier in every way. The proposal might give something of a shock to the moral conscience ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... It has fairly been said that the springs of originality in the brain of a great inventive genius are bound to bubble up more continuously and in fuller volume than could be confined within the narrow bounds of the poetry of Gray. But the sterility of the age, the east wind of discouragement steadily blowing across the poet's path, had much to do with this apparent want of fecundity, and it would be an error to insist too strongly on a general feature of the century in this individual ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... sterility, in spite of the woodlands so far down below, in spite of the attenuated grass on which they stood, inspired a profound sense of repugnance. To the mind of Bill Brudenell, at least, it was a land of hopelessness, a ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... diseases are other ultimate results of the habit; and these congestions to which it gives rise unduly hasten the advent of puberty. Any decided enlargement of the labia and clitoris in a young girl may be taken as a positive evidence of the existence of the habit of self-abuse. Sterility, and atrophy of the breasts—their deficient development—when the vice is begun ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... song, which the rocks echoed back, and all the goitred women at the roadside stopped with their pack burdens to listen. He told a thousand anecdotes. He knew all the story of the pass; how the Swiss, filing through it, had scattered the Milanese; how Suwarrow and Massena had made its sterility ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... Not even Barbara will I allow to witness the failure of my dreams, the downfall of my high castles, the sterility ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... said just now about the Absolute of transcendental idealism is a case in point. First, I called it majestic and said it yielded religious comfort to a class of minds, and then I accused it of remoteness and sterility. But so far as it affords such comfort, it surely is not sterile; it has that amount of value; it performs a concrete function. As a good pragmatist, I myself ought to call the Absolute true 'in so far forth,' then; and I ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... the Roman empire. Some notion, however, may be formed of the revenue of the provinces where considerable wealth had been deposited by nature, or collected by man, if we observe the severe attention that was directed to the abodes of solitude and sterility. Augustus once received a petition from the inhabitants of Gyarus, humbly praying that they might be relieved from one third of their excessive impositions. Their whole tax amounted indeed to no more than one hundred and fifty drachms, or about five pounds: but Gyarus was a little island, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... certain scents and odours were for ever tantalising his nose that could, his instinct told him, mean Rabbit and only Rabbit. These scents met him at the most tantalising times, pulling him this way and that, exciting the wildest hopes in him, afterwards condemned to sterility; as ghosts haunt the convinced and trusting spiritualist, so did rabbits haunt Hamlet. He dreamt of Rabbits at night, he tasted Rabbits in his food, he saw them scale the air and swim the stream—now, he was close on their trail, now he had them round that tree, up that hill, down that hole... sitting ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... the flour-barrels from the wharves to the store-houses seemed to emit joyous melodies from their wheels. The hum of the great business-streets sounded like grand symphonies of triumph. As one who has been travelling through a barren country without much heed feels with singular force the sterility of the lands he has passed through when he reaches the fertile plains that lie at the end of his journey, so the humpback, after his vision had been freshened with this blooming flower, remembered for the first time ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... understand how mothers manage to reconcile this teaching with their evident wish that their girls should marry. The ideal held up to girls nowadays is apparently the sexless sort of Diana one—not merely chastity, but sterility. ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... not die upon the broken sword; one has to live on. Would that I could dissuade you from this inky pestilence! This poetizing spirit, which gives all life so much significance to the imagination, strikes it with sterility in every thing which should beget or prosper a personal career. It opens the heart—true, but keeps it open; it closes in on nothing—shuts in nothing for itself. It is an open heart, and the sunshine enters there, and the bird alights there; but nothing retains ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... before you three distinct regions—of pasture, of pine, of bare, eternal sterility. On inquiring the name of the mountain, I was told that it was the "Aiguille" something, I forget what; but I discovered that almost all the peaks in this region of the Alps are called Aiguille, (needle,) I suppose ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... continued—"the real, real flame of feeling through another person—once, only once, if it only lasts three months. See, my mother looks as if she'd HAD everything that was necessary for her living and developing. There's not a tiny bit of feeling of sterility about her." ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... little discovery of mine ever gave me so much pleasure as the making out the meaning of heterostyled flowers. The results of crossing such flowers in an illegitimate manner, I believe to be very important, as bearing on the sterility of hybrids; although these results have been noticed ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... without the water; of the two pictures, the one over the mantelpiece was a steel-engraving of the Good Shepherd and the one over the sideboard was an oleograph of the Sacred Heart. Mark knew every fly speck on their glasses, every discoloration of their margins. While he was sighing over the sterility of the room, he heard the door of his father's study open, and his father and Mr. Astill do down the passage, both of them still talking unceasingly. Presently the front door slammed, and Mark watched them walk away in the direction of the new church. Here was an opportunity to go into his ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... one of those glorious afternoons that sometimes come in the African spring, although it was so intensely still. Everywhere appeared the proofs of evidences of life. The winter was over, and now, from the sadness and sterility of its withered age, sprang youth and lovely summer clad in sunshine, bediamonded with dew, and fragrant with the breath of flowers. Jess lay back and looked up into the infinite depths above. How blue they were, and how measureless! ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... distressing to walk in the glorious forest amidst such treasures and feel they are all thrown away upon one. My collection from the Abrolhos is interesting, as I suspect it nearly contains the whole flowering vegetation—and indeed from extreme sterility the same may almost be said of Santiago. I have sent home four bottles with animals in spirits, I have three more, but would not send them till I had a fourth. I shall be anxious to hear how they fare. I made an enormous collection ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... chopped down in a fury, and made firewood of it. But it too had served its turn. For as every man's life (and perhaps, but you must answer for this, every woman's life), awaits the hour of blossoming that makes it immortal, so this tree passed in a single night from sterility to immortality; and it mattered as little if its body were burned the next day, as it would have mattered had Gerard and Thea gone down through the waters that night instead of many years later, after a life-time of great ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... this train of thought by an article in the North China Daily News of 10th July 1874, in which the writer speaks of China as "a luxuriant mental oasis amidst the sterility of Eastern Asia," and "possessing a literature in vastness and antiquarian value surpassed by no other." He goes on to say that the translations hitherto made "have conveyed to us a faint notion of the compass, variety, solidity, ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... before they marry, and that a very large percentage of these men convey contagion to their wives. This condition, to a very large extent, accounts for the inefficiency of women as mothers. It is responsible for at least 75 per cent. of the sterility that exists. The effect of this deplorable condition is directly responsible, also, for the ill health that afflicts women and that renders necessary the daily operations of a serious nature that are conducted in every hospital in every city in the civilized world. As a result of the dissemination ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... the lakes,—was, indeed, full ten miles to the north of Keswick; but it was so placed that it enjoyed the beauty and the luxury of mountains and rivers, without the roughness of unmanageable rocks, or the sterility and dampness of moorland. Of rocky fragments, indeed, peeping out through the close turf, and here and there coming forth boldly so as to break the park into little depths, with now and again a real ravine, there were plenty. And there ran right ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... reservations. The eighteenth century was by no means without such a conception, as the satires of that period testify, being full of allusions to poetasters' physical defects, with the obvious implication that they are indicative of spiritual deformity, and of literary sterility. Then, from within the romantic movement itself, a critic might exhume verse indicating that faith in the beautiful singer was by no means universal;—that, on the other hand, the interestingly ugly bard enjoyed ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... I speak French, gentlemen; I speak nine languages, and can tell you the Hebrew for an old umbrella. The Gypsy's Elixir cures colds, gout, all nervous affections, with such cutaneous disorders as are diseases of the skin, debility, sterility, hostility, and all the illities that flesh is heir to except what it can't, such as small-pox and cholera. It has cured cholera, but it don't claim to do it. Others claim to cure, but can't. I am not a charlatan, but an Ann-Eliza. That is the ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... revelled in prodigality. The gloom of the oak forest was relieved and broken by a hundred plantations of every variety of tree that the climate would bear, and every hue, from the sombre evergreen to the early suspicions of the yellow leaf of autumn. Even the tops of the mountains were free from sterility, for they were capped with green as bright, with trees as lofty, and with pasture as rich, as ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... and women of this time wholly inconceivable. That nothing ethically valuable can be accomplished except after instant prayer, or after copious outpourings of Divine grace, that the curse of absolute sterility is upon all our attempts to conform to the dictates of the moral law, unless God be with us in prayer, ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... yields from Rotundifolia vines. At times there are record-breaking yields and, again, small yields are reported, the small yields resulting from black-rot, coulure, wet weather, self-sterility, lack of cultivation, fertilization, lack of pruning, age of vines, and various other causes. In spite of this, Rotundifolia vines are said to be among the safest and most prolific of fruit-bearing plants. While ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... first grade may subscribe for newspapers that contain no objectionable matter. But only a small proportion of the inmates is addicted to reading, and the opportunities for doing so are limited. And as months and years go by, the desolation and sterility of the place weigh heavier upon the spirit, the mind reduces its radius and grows inert, and stimulants stronger than current fiction are needed to rouse it. Prison, prison, prison; steel walls and gratings; the predestinate screechings and clangings of whistles ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... "Professor Bates would assign as one of the principal causes of the sterility which befel the genius of ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... came upon a single native, a female, young, but miserably thin and squalid, fit emblem of the sterility of the country. We could gain no information from her, she was so much alarmed, but not long after parting with her we came to a puddle of water in the plains, and encamped for the night. Our stage had been a tortuous, but not a long one, ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... the child.) If this tear is repaired immediately no inconvenience usually results but if it is neglected it may produce a series of complications, some of which are falling of the womb, inflammation and even sterility. ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... true that this sentiment increases in proportion to the inheritance we leave our children, no one could experience more fully than Napoleon, for no one had yet possessed so formidable a power on the earth; that the course of nature having made her sterility a hopeless evil, it was her duty to be the first to sacrifice the sentiments of her heart to the good of the state, and the personal happiness of Napoleon sad but powerful reasoning, which policy invoked ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... civilized world to the other, cheated, beaten, bullied, and hunted into the streets to disgusting overwork, without daring to utter the cry for help that brings, not rescue, but exposure and infamy, yet revenging herself terribly in the end by scattering blindness and sterility, pain and disfigurement, insanity and death among us with the certainty that we are much too pious and genteel to allow such things to be mentioned with a view to saving either her or ourselves from them. And all the time we shall keep ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... children, were brought forth—facts concerning infantile blindness, almost one-third of which is caused by excesses on the part of the fathers; facts concerning certain forms of ill health in married women, and the increase of sterility due to the spread of specific diseases among men. The horrible results to innocent women and children of these maladies, and their frightful prevalence,—seventy-five per cent of city men, according to reliable ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... emancipation, the new basis of American life, the revolution in the woman's world, the woman in the modern American family, the career of the child, the passing of patriarchism and familiarism, the precarious hour, the trend as to marriage, race sterility and race suicide, divorce, the attitude of the church, the family, and the social revolution. The author finds that during the past half century the American family possesses unity, due to the fact that the period itself is marked by intrinsic ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... The attempt to introduce foreign culture had a still worse effect. The upper classes, charmed and dazzled by the glare and glitter of Western science, threw themselves impulsively on the newly found treasures, and thereby condemned themselves to moral slavery and intellectual sterility. Fortunately—and herein lay one of the fundamental principles of the Slavophil doctrine—the imported civilisation had not at all infected the common people. Through all the changes which the administration and the Noblesse underwent the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... later in life. Probably gynaecologists are consulted more often by women who desire children but do not have them, than by those who wish to avoid having them—the truth being that the tendency among people in comfortable surroundings is towards relative sterility rather ...
— Conception Control and Its Effects on the Individual and the Nation • Florence E. Barrett
... the seven void ears smitten with drought, betoken seven years after them of great hunger and scarcity. Lo! there shall come first seven years of great fertility and plenty in all the land of Egypt, after whom shall follow other seven years of so great sterility, barrenness, and scarcity, that the abundance of the first shall be all forgotten. The great hunger of these latter years shall consume all the plenty of the first years. The latter dream pertaineth to the same, because God would that it should be fulfilled. Now therefore let the king provide ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... of the soil; and the soil had to be created. There were sand-banks, interspersed with layers of peat, broad downs swept by the winds, great tracts of barren land apparently condemned to an external sterility. The first elements of manufacture, iron and coal, were wanting; there was no wood, because the forests had already been destroyed by tempests when agriculture began; there was no stone, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... induced are known to physicians and to the sufferers as amenorrhoea, menorrhagia, dysmenorrhoea, hysteria, anemia, chorea, and the like. Some of these fasten themselves on their victim for a lifetime, and some are shaken off. Now and then they lead to an abortion of the function, and consequent sterility. Fortunate is the girls' school or college that does not furnish abundant examples of these sad cases. The more completely any such school or college succeeds, while adopting every detail and method of a boy's school, in ignoring and neglecting the physiological ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... weaknesses Of flesh, and its oft seen infirmities, And turn with hope and trustfulness to man; Let me not be a stunted thorn on earth, With jagged points to scare all fondness off, Unsweeten'd by a blossom or a bud, And branded deep with harsh sterility, But like a soft wind breathing to and fro, May love and sympathy wave through the Earth. Life without love, is ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... longer stand this general rejection, the absence of the simple pleasures of life. It was not their quarrels, even when they came to blows, that determined her action. It was a revolt from the radical sterility of Terry's philosophy. Katie furnished her with the necessary money, and she went away to California. There this tired creature, this civilised product of the slums, this thoughtful prostitute, this striving human being full ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... conversation, and replying it! a manner to make it drop. Acting thus, it is easy to see that I was mixed up in nothing, and what I shall have to relate now will have less of the singularity and instructiveness of good and faithful memoirs, than of the dryness and sterility of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... resemblance of the ruins of some vast edifice, and carried our thoughts back to the remote period when submarine volcanoes gave birth to new islands, or rent continents asunder. Every thing which surrounded us seemed to indicate destruction and sterility; but the back-ground of the picture, the coasts of Lancerota presented a more smiling aspect. In a narrow pass between two hills, crowned with scattered tufts of trees, marks of cultivation were visible. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... unimportant), with goods to sell. People accuse such a man of self-advertisement. But at least the cheap-jack does advertise his wares, whereas the don or dear-jack advertises nothing except himself. His very silence, nay his very sterility, are supposed to be marks of the richness of his erudition. He is too learned to teach, and sometimes too wise even to talk. St. Thomas Aquinas said: "In auctore auctoritas." But there is more than one man at Oxford or Cambridge who is considered an authority ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... receives in autumn, year by year, the deposit of its own dead leaves and weeds and grasses without either the winds and waters to clear these away or the soil to reabsorb and reconvert them into the materials of reproduction. Thus year by year the land tends farther toward sterility by the very accumulation of what was once its life. But send a forest fire across those smothering strata of vegetable decay; give once more a chance for every root below to meet the sun above; for every seed above to reach the ground below; soon again the barren will be the fertile, ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... to the disadvantage of the small part kept rich at the expense of the whole; for unless there be considerable attention paid to other parts of the land, besides those appropriated to the raising of tobacco, the manure will no longer be found on the plantation, and general exhaustion and sterility ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... affect only one particular organ or part of the body. It may have a chief effect in one kind of organ, e.g. the wings or eyes, but usually affects several parts of the body. Thus the factor that causes rudimentary wings also produces sterility in females, general loss of vigour, ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... propitious to the growth of the olive, is not fertile or abundant. In spite of painful and elaborate culture, the traces of which are yet visible, it never produced a sufficiency of corn to supply its population; and this, the comparative sterility of the land, may be ranked among the causes which conduced to the greatness of the people. The principal mountains of Attica are, the Cape of Sunium, Hymettus, renowned for its honey, and Pentelicus for its marble; the principal streams which water ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Whether the Shake be necessary in Singing, ask the Professors of the first Rank, who know better than any others how often they have been indebted to it; for, upon any Absence of Mind, they would have betrayed to the Publick the Sterility of their Art, without the prompt Assistance ...
— Observations on the Florid Song - or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers • Pier Francesco Tosi
... in all the ghettoes of Europe; their smile, when they smile, is restrained by a sort of ironic strength in the muscles of the face. Their eyes are more bright than should be eyes of happy men; they are, as it were, inured to sterility; there is nothing in them of that repose which we Westerners acquire from a continual contemplation of deep pastures and of innumerable leaves; they are at war, not only among themselves, but against the good earth; in a silent and powerful way ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... in considering what may seem to us the sterility and stiffness of the English poets from 1660 to 1740, that they were addressing a public which, after the irregular violence and anarchical fancy of the middle of the seventeenth century, had begun to yearn ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... by many to be the region of cold and sterility, I could not have believed there was in it such a store of blessings yet to be drawn forth by the labor and enterprise of man, for succeeding generations. As yet, there are too many objects to tempt and attract the avarice of man to more mild, but more dangerous climates. But the progress of population ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... people who have not measured its essential weakness; but it will prevail with those degenerates only in whom the instinct of fertility has faded into a mere itching for pleasure. The modern devices for combining pleasure with sterility, now universally known and accessible, enable these persons to weed themselves out of the race, a process already vigorously at work; and the consequent survival of the intelligently fertile means the survival of the partizans of the Superman; for what is proposed is nothing but the replacement ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... the soil is dry and sandy; and the road is covered with large, flat, chalky stones, of a bluish colour within, and the edges of which are round. The only trees that M. Michaux observed here, were white oaks and hickory; and the stinted growth and wretched appearance of these, clearly indicated the sterility of ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... time to write. His paper on Darwin, which had the merit of convincing on one point the philosopher himself, had indeed been written before this, in London lodgings; but his pen was not idle at Claygate; and it was here he wrote (among other things) that review of "Fecundity, Fertility, Sterility, and Allied Topics," which Dr. Matthews Duncan prefixed by way of introduction to the second edition of the work. The mere act of writing seems to cheer the vanity of the most incompetent; but a correction accepted by Darwin, and a whole review borrowed and reprinted ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... constant intercourse with Liszt and Chopin during his stay of several years in Paris to the rich passage work of the new school, appeared to him old-fashioned. Mendelssohn, who in his letters repeatedly alludes to his sterility in the matter of new pianoforte passages, allowed himself to be persuaded by Hiller to rewrite the pianoforte part, and was pleased with the result. It is clear from the above that if Mendelssohn failed to ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... two above them in the others. Their shape is often circular. In the centre they contain a basin of sea water, and the depth of water all round is not to be sounded. They produce little; cocoa-nuts appear to be the best of their productions; yet in spite of this sterility, and of their small extent, most of them are inhabited. It is not easy to conceive how these little settlements were peopled, and it is not less difficult to determine from whence the highest islands of the Southern Sea ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... surprise you with it. It is the pearl of my collection! What do you think of the idea—that lily which symbolizes triumphant purity, and those thistles, the plants which spring up among ruins, and which symbolize the sterility of the world, at last deserted, again won over to the only perfect felicity? All your work lies in those symbols, ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... to the theory of the Physiocrates, only transfers already existing wealth from one hand to another. What the merchants gain by it is at the cost of the nation. Hence, it is desirable that this loss should be as small as possible. Hence sterility!(316) But, the more important branches of business, especially wholesale trade, are connected with a transportation of goods (Verri), either from one place or from one period of time, into another. Here the genuine merchant ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... Independent of the indelible associations with which it is connected, and the glorious deeds of which it has been the theatre, its appearance produces an extraordinary impression on the mind of the beholder. All is silent; the earth seems struck with sterility—desolation reigns in every direction. A space extending from Otricoli to Terracina, above sixty miles in length, and on an average twenty in breadth, between the Apennines and the sea, containing nearly four thousand square miles, in the finest part of Italy, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... those glorious afternoons that sometimes come in the African spring, although it was so intensely still. Everywhere appeared the proofs of evidences of life. The winter was over, and now, from the sadness and sterility of its withered age, sprang youth and lovely summer clad in sunshine, bediamonded with dew, and fragrant with the breath of flowers. Jess lay back and looked up into the infinite depths above. How blue they were, and how measureless! She ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... is easy enough, and is constantly done, as far as I am aware, if you take two mules, a male and a female, and endeavour to breed from them, you get no offspring whatever; no generation will take place. This is what is called the sterility of the hybrids between two ...
— The Conditions Of Existence As Affecting The Perpetuation Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... introduction of the present decimal arithmetic, instead of the troublesome sexagesimal arithmetic of the Greeks. These ten digits, however, seem, says Professor Whewell, by the confession of the Arabians themselves, to be of Indian origin, and thus form no exception to the sterility of the Arabian genius in scientific inventions. Nevertheless we are bound, in all fairness, to set against his condemnation of the Arabs Professor De Morgan's opinion of the Moslem, in his article on Euclid: "Some writers speak slightingly of this progress, the results of which ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... Sterility had passed. Here were no barren hill-crests with a hundred weatherworn facets. Here were no fields of snow, driven by the fierce gales of the polar seas. Here were no glacial fields bound in an iron grip throughout the ages. The fires ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... Harle, or gap between Wangeroog and Spiekeroog; the sea breaking heavily on the banks outside ... Fine as the day was, the scene from the offing was desolate to the last degree. The naked spots of the two islands are hideous in their sterility: melancholy bits of wreck-wood their only relief, save for one or two grotesque beacons, and, most bizarre of all, a great church-tower, standing actually in the water, on the north side of Wangeroog, a striking witness ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... words, that so far as the sex factors are concerned there is a difference between the ovules and pollen grains borne by the same plant. Unfortunately further investigation of this case is rendered impossible owing to the complete sterility ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... mind of ALMORAN to the instructions of OMAR, as a rock slightly covered with earth, is to the waters of heaven: the craggs are left bare by the rain that washes them; and the same showers that fertilize the field can only discover the sterility of the rock. ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... imitators, and the new era had not dawned. Goldsmith and Gray, both recently dead, serve to illustrate the condition in which the most exquisite polish and refinement of language has been developed until there is a danger of sterility. The 'Elegy' and the 'Deserted Village' are in their way inimitable poems: but we feel that the intellectual fibre of the poets has become dangerously delicate. The critical faculty could not be stimulated further without destroying all spontaneous impulse. The reaction to a more masculine ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... had evidence that the disease had originated. It was plain enough that it used to be known in many localities where it has long ceased to be feared. Still it was and is remarkable to see what a clean bill of health in this particular respect our barren soil inherited with its sterility. There are some malarious spots on the edge of Lake Champlain, and there have been some temporary centres of malaria, within the memory of man, on one or more of our Massachusetts rivers, but these are harmless enough, for the most part, unless the millers ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... diseases. Charlatan is a French word for a quack. I speak French, gentlemen; I speak nine languages, and can tell you the Hebrew for an old umbrella. The Gypsy's Elixir cures colds, gout, all nervous affections, with such cutaneous disorders as are diseases of the skin, debility, sterility, hostility, and all the illities that flesh is heir to except what it can't, such as small-pox and cholera. It has cured cholera, but it don't claim to do it. Others claim to cure, but can't. I am not ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... St. Christopher and St. Mark, against sudden death. St. Clara, against sore eyes. St. Erasmus, against the colic. St. Eutrope, against dropsy. St. Genow and St. Maur, against the gout. St. Germanus, against diseases of children. St. Giles and St. Hyacinth, against sterility. St. Herbert, against hydrophobia. St. Job and St. Fiage, against syphilis. St. John, against epilepsy and poison. St. Lawrence, against diseases of the back and shoulders. St. Liberius, against the stone and fistula. St. ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... differ greatly in their degree of hardiness. However, failure upon the part of otherwise normal trees to bear paying crops with regularity is not necessarily due to low temperatures. Other factors, such as self-sterility, may be wholly responsible for at least the lightness ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... situated on the islands or the borders of the river, where a soil more genial or more easily tilled had tempted the settler to fix himself. At length we approached Gardiner, a flourishing village, beautifully situated among the hills on the right bank of the Kennebeck. All traces of sterility had already disappeared from the country; the shores of the river were no longer rock-bound, but disposed in green terraces, with woody eminences behind them. Leaving Gardiner behind us, we went on to Hallowell, ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... follow intercourse of the male and female. Impotency in the male and sterility in the female ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... whatever else it may be called, may be carried so far as to result in the production of double flowers, (an unnatural development,) and these accompanied with greater or less inability to perfect seed, so in animals, the same process may be carried far enough to produce sterility. Instances are not wanting, and particularly among the more recent improved Short-horns, of impotency among the males and of barrenness in the females, and in some cases where they have borne calves ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... presented a table which, although foreign to this subject, has a certain bearing on the matter. Matthews Duncan, believing that the absence of sexual desire and of sexual pleasure in coitus are powerful influences working for sterility, noted their presence or absence in a number of cases, and found that, among 191 sterile women between the ages of 15 and 45, 152, or 79 per cent., acknowledged the presence of sexual desire; and among 196 sterile women ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... fertility is known to Bavarian and Austrian peasants, who think that if you give the first fruit of a tree to a woman with child to eat, the tree will bring forth abundantly next year. On the other hand, the Baganda believe that a barren wife infects her husband's garden with her own sterility and prevents the trees from bearing fruit; hence a childless woman is generally divorced. The Greeks and Romans sacrificed pregnant victims to the goddesses of the corn and of the earth, doubtless in order ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... furnish an abundant and diversified supply, Mr. Back and Mr. Hood took views and sketches of the surrounding scenery, which is extremely picturesque in many parts, and wants only the addition of trees to make it beautiful. The hills present the bold character of rugged sterility, whilst the valleys, at this season, are clothed with ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... and memory and the corollaries relating to sports, the reversion to remote ancestors, the phenomena of old age, the causes of the sterility of hybrids and the principles underlying longevity—all of which follow as a matter of course. This ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... the new be too foreign, we cannot fuse the old and the new—nature seeming to hate equally too wide a deviation from ordinary practice and none at all. This fact reappears in heredity as the beneficial effects of occasional crossing on the one hand, and on the other, in the generally observed sterility of hybrids. If heredity be an affair of memory, how can an embryo, say of a mule, be expected to build up a mule on the strength of but two mule-memories? Hybridism causes a fault in the chain of memory, and it is to this cause that the usual sterility of hybrids must ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... with the exception of hicans, we are still dealing with pure species, and most, if not quite all, of our hicans are worthless at the present time, largely because of sterility. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... of that name, and an indefinite amount of painful poetry. Not a line, that we can recall, had ever been produced in America which was fit to sparkle upon the "stretched forefinger" of Time. Berkeley's "Westward the course of Empire" ought to have been written here; but the curse of sterility was on the Western Muse, or her offspring were too puny ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... in strictly Catholic terms; and by so doing renew, enrich and explicate the content of those terms for those who follow them. Those who could not harmonize their own vision of reality with the current formulae—Fox, Wesley or Blake, driven into opposition by the sterility of the contemporary Church—were forced to find elsewhere some tradition through which to maintain contact with the past. Fox found it in the Bible; Wesley in patristic Christianity. Even Blake's prophetic system, when closely examined, ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... of Lisbon. The distribution to their own friends of the 'loaves and fishes' was, as Morier says, the one steady aim of all aspirants to power; and measures of reform, much needed in education, in commerce, in law, were doomed to sterility by the factiousness of the men who should have carried them out. In the absence of principles Morier had to study the strife of parties, and his correspondence gives us lively pictures of the eloquent Castelar, the champion of a visionary Republic, the harsh, domineering Romero ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... could be found for them, is less strange, when every step one treads is upon the bones of martyrs; and who dares say that the surrounding campagna, so often drenched in innocent blood, may not have been cursed with pestilence and sterility to all succeeding ages? I have examined the place where Sylla massacred 8000 fellow-citizens at once, and find that it produces no herb but thistles, a weed almost unknown in any other part of Italy; and one of the first ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... stone circles and cairns, earth-raths, and various other objects of deep antiquarian interest. Indeed, the chief antiquarian remains of this description which have been left on the surface of our soil are to be found on our mountain-tops, on our moors, or in our woods, where the very sterility or inaccessibility of the spot, or the kind protection and sympathy of the old forest-trees, have saved them, for a time at least, from reckless ruin and annihilation. Some of the antiquarian memorials that I allude to would have endured for centuries to come, had it ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... who have the misfortune to lie thus at the mercy of those whose natural parts happen to be stronger than our own—let us, I say, make the most of our sterility! Let us double and treble the ranks of our thickness, that we may form an impregnable phalanx, and stand every way in front to the enemy! or, would you still be liable to less hazard, lay but yourselves down, as I do, flat and quiet upon your faces, when Pride, Malice, Envy, Wit, or Prejudice ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... basis of American life, the revolution in the woman's world, the woman in the modern American family, the career of the child, the passing of patriarchism and familiarism, the precarious hour, the trend as to marriage, race sterility and race suicide, divorce, the attitude of the church, the family, and the social revolution. The author finds that during the past half century the American family possesses unity, due to the fact that the period itself is marked by intrinsic oneness ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... commeatus in longinquas provincias portabantur." 2, That at the time when Tacitus wrote, in the days of the Emperor Trajan, it had ceased to be so, and had come to import largely from Africa and Lybia, "sed nunc Africam potius et Egyptum exercemus." 3, That this was not the result of any supervening sterility or unfruitfulness, "nec nunc infecunditate laboratur," but was from causes which made it more profitable to purchase grain in the Egyptian or Lybian markets, "sed Africam ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... examine all parts of this globe, I see the uncivilized as well as the civilized man in a perpetual struggle with Providence; he is compelled to ward off the blows which it sends in the form of hurricanes, tempests, frost, hail, inundations, sterility, and the divers accidents which so often render all their labors useless. In a word, I see the human race continually occupied in protecting itself from the wicked tricks of this Providence, which is said to be busy with the care ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... Age. Of that remote time, the morning time of human life, we learn only from the labors of geologists and archaeologists. We are virtually dealing with a past geological age. The long term of years thus defined drew to its close amidst scenes of almost Arctic sterility. In all probability, glaciers reflected the sun's rays from all the considerable hills and mountains of Central and Northern Europe, though forming, perhaps, but a remnant of the great glaciers of the Ice Age. ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... to the vivacity of its d'ebut, you will have no reason to complain of the sterility of my letters. I do not say this from the spirit of the House of Commons on the first day,(341) which was the most fatiguing and dull debate I ever heard, dull as I have heard many; and yet for the first quarter of an hour it looked as if we ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... slopes converted into a series of gentle inclinations, the mountain-torrent diverted or restrained, and the means of artificial irrigation, to sustain nature during the long droughts of summer, obtained. By the incessant labour of centuries this prodigy has been completed, and the very stony sterility of nature converted into the means of heightening, by artificial means, the heat of summer.... No room is lost in these little but precious freeholds; the vine extends its tendrils along the terrace walls ... in the corners formed by their meeting, a little sheltered nook is found, where fig-trees ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... the grim Big Injun Mountain to the right, with its bare, beetling sandstone crags. There was the long line of cherty hills to the left, covered by a dark growth of stunted pines. Between lay that melancholy stretch of sterility known as Poor Valley,—the poorest of the several valleys in Tennessee thus piteously denominated, because of the sorry contrast which they present to the rich coves and fertile vales so usual among the ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... plenty, but an exile told me that even in midsummer the forests around Verkhoyansk appear withered and grey, the very grass seems colourless, and the daisies and violets scentless immortelles. This sterility of nature seems to be confined to a radius of about twenty miles of Verkhoyansk, for beyond this arid circle trees flourish, grass grows freely as far as the timber line, while beyond it the tundra, from May until August, is gaily carpeted ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... paucity of his published work. It has fairly been said that the springs of originality in the brain of a great inventive genius are bound to bubble up more continuously and in fuller volume than could be confined within the narrow bounds of the poetry of Gray. But the sterility of the age, the east wind of discouragement steadily blowing across the poet's path, had much to do with this apparent want of fecundity, and it would be an error to insist too strongly on a general feature of the century in this individual case. When we turn to what Gray actually wrote, although ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... to which it has no other relation, are quite right in condemning that conception, only that is not, in fact, what the Christian Religion is. The content of the Christian dogmas is so full and so complex that there is never any danger of intellectual sterility in those who are called to deal with them; and their application to life is so rich and so manifold that there is not the least danger that those who set out to apply them to the problems of daily existence will become mere formalists. The attempt to live a truly Christian life is ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... represented by some admirable drawings exhibited in cases in the centre of the room. Readers of Vasari will remember numerous references in his pages to Italian artists who went to serve, and agents employed to buy Italian works for, the gran re Francesco nel suo luogo di Fontainebleo. But the sterility of the Fontainebleau school may be inferred from the fact that when Marie de' Medici desired to have the walls of the Luxembourg royally decorated, she was compelled to have recourse to a foreigner, Rubens. Neglecting for a moment Room XII. and ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... these islands. For that island is quite lacking in them, and altogether of little profit or substance to his Majesty, as it is a poor and wretched land, lacking in everything; and, even when it is pacified, the natives there would not be able to pay tribute, on account of its great sterility. It would likewise be impossible to come to close quarters with the Indians, because they never stand their ground, and are able to inflict injury with safety to themselves, shooting arrows from the heights at the Spanish camp without any possibility of being attacked in return, because ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume X, 1597-1599 • E. H. Blair
... person generally arrives at when he consults these sources for information about the Jewish religion is that, whatever else Judaism might be, it certainly offers no field for the exercise of deep insight or broad vision. This largely accounts for the manifest sterility and uncreativeness of present-day Judaism. To give new impetus to fruitful and creative thinking in Jewish life, it is necessary, in the first place, to counteract the paralyzing spell of these routine and conventional interpretations ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... perfectly at rest, a capacity for swift and terrible action seemed to hold itself in reserve, and a breath almost appeared to come from the half-opened jaws, momentarily dimming the crystal that smoothly gushed beneath. No scrap of vegetation could the rill persuade out of the inexorable sterility around, saving for some curdled greenish mosses that waved slowly from the sides of the basin, or pointed from root-hold on brick and shard, where the small current loitered a little. I am not a taker of ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... this life, are necessary consequences of the order of nature. They would perceive that a wise God, immutable in his conduct, cannot allow any thing to transpire but according to those laws of which he is regarded as the author. They would discover that the calamities, sterility, maladies, contagions, and even death itself are effects as necessary as happiness, abundance, health, and life itself. They would find that wars, wants, and famine are often the effects of human imprudence; that they ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... see the fruits of secularism or materialism in social disintegration, in the voluntary sterility and timorous acquisitiveness of the prosperous, and in the recklessness and bitterness of the lower strata. A godless civilization is a disease of which nations die by inches. I hope that this visitation has come just in time to ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... be the use of persecuting genius into absolute sterility if after years and years of suppression human instincts were left the same, only with no subtle criticism or free creative art to give them beauty, refinement, interpretation and the magic of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... novel and so brilliant. This fresh gaiety had amused the Marquess—he felt cheated when he found it gone. Caroline might be gentle, docile, submissive; but those virtues, though of higher quality than glad animal spirits, are not so entertaining. His own exceeding sterility of mind and feeling was not apparent till in the tetes-a-tetes of conjugal life. A good-looking young man, with a thoroughbred air, who rides well, dances well, and holds his tongue, may, in all mixed societies, pass for a shy youth of sensitive genius! But when he is your ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Chinese against the opulence of the Californian soil. The "garden patch" prospered; the neighbors spoke well of it and of him. But Jackson knew that this fierce harvest of early spring was to be followed by the sterility of the dry season, and that irrigation could alone make his work profitable in the end. He brought a pump to force the water from the little stream at the foot of the slope to the top, and allowed ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... between Chunar and the rocks of Monghyr. The origin of its component mineral matter must be sought in the denudation of the Himalayas within a very recent geological period. The contrast between the fertility of the alluvium and the sterility of the protruded quartzy rocks is very striking, cultivation running up to these fields of stones, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... sight of one of these death-stricken black filth-gutters makes one shudder as the picture rises, in one's mind, of a world in which all the rivers and the waters of the sea-shore will be thus dedicated to acrid sterility, and the meadows and hill-sides will be drenched with nauseating chemical manures. Such a state of things is possibly in store for future generations of men! It is not "science" that will be to blame for ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... wrote a treatise against certain superstitious persons in his time, who believed that storms, hail, and thunder were caused by certain sorcerers whom they called tempesters (tempestarios, or storm-brewers), who raised the rain in the air, caused storms and thunder, and brought sterility upon the earth. They called these extraordinary rains aura lavatitia, as if to indicate that they were raised by magic power. In this place the people still call these violent rains alvace. There were even persons sufficiently prejudiced to boast that they knew of ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... organized juvenile Genius, early development of Germany, will-training in Girl graduates aversion to marriage of fecundity of sterility of Girls and boys, differences between coeducation for, dangers of education of education of, humanistic education of, manners in education of, more difficult than of boys education of, nature in education of, regularity in education of, religion in ideal school and curriculum ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... deepened by the lethargies of aulic and ceremonial dulness; so that, if the reader represents to himself the very abstract of birthday odes, sycophantish dedications, and court sermons, he will have some adequate idea of the sterility and the mechanical formality which at that era spread the sleep of death over German literature. Literature, the very word literature, points the laughter of scorn to what passed under that name during the period of Gottsched. That such a man indeed as ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... made to the old and correct doctrine. These innovators are serious about nothing else in the world than their own priceless person, and it is this that they wish to make its mark. They bring this quickly about by beginning a paradox; the sterility of their own heads suggests their taking the path of negation; and truths that have long been recognised are now denied—for instance, the vital power, the sympathetic nervous system, generatio equivoca, Bichat's distinction between the working of the passions and the working of intelligence, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... tended to do, is to take them far too seriously and to belittle what they stand for. Left to themselves they float in an ineffectual stratum of the brain. They are understood and grow current precisely by not being pressed, like an idiom or a metaphor. The same aesthetic sterility appears at the other end of the scale, where fancy is anything but sacred. A Frenchman once saw in "Punch and Judy" a shocking proof of British brutality, destined further to demoralise the nation; and yet the scandal ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the hill was strewed about with ant-hills constructed of dry dusty sand, and this was the only substance that could be called soil; but notwithstanding all this sterility there were trees of the eucalyptus family growing from twenty to forty feet high; and one was measured whose diameter was as much ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... decided to go in search of Nicuesa in order that he might settle the dispute about the commandership. Colmenares, whom I have mentioned above, was commanded to search along those coasts where it was thought Nicuesa wandered abandoned. It was known that the latter had left Veragua, because of the sterility of the soil. The colonists instructed Colmenares to bring Nicuesa back as soon as he could find him and to assure him they would be grateful to him if, on his arrival, he succeeded in calming the dissensions which rent the colony. Colmenares accepted this ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... quantity; no clear distinction has been, or can be, drawn between species and well-marked varieties. It cannot be maintained that species when intercrossed are invariably sterile and varieties invariably fertile; or that sterility is a special endowment and sign of creation. The belief that species were immutable productions was almost unavoidable as long as the history of the world was thought to be of short duration; and now that we have acquired some idea of the lapse of time, we are too apt to assume, ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... replied: "I shall cry aloud like a savage bear, like the wild ass, like a woman in travail! The punishment of heaven has already visited itself upon thy incest! May God inflict thee with the sterility of mules!" ...
— Herodias • Gustave Flaubert
... leisure of pastoral life, under a mild heaven, had studied science, and cultivated the arts; they were men who had descended from a cold northern climate, where nature did little to supply their wants, where hunger and cold could not be avoided but by industry and exertion; where, in one word, the sterility of nature was counteracted ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... as these, not merely from their isolation, but from the sterility of the soil and the inhospitable air of the region, the struggle for existence is often a severe one. Perseverance and self-denial, however, triumphed over all difficulties. Year after year the trees bowed themselves before the axe, and the soil surrendered ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... economical husbandry which redeemed the rocky sierra from the curse of sterility, they dug below the arid soil of the valleys, and sought for a stratum where some natural moisture might be found. These excavations, called by the Spaniards hoyas, or "pits," were made on a great scale, comprehending frequently more than an acre, sunk to the depth of fifteen or twenty ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... farther south, the life is utterly chilled out of it. Now Hopedale lies behind a rampart of islands twenty miles deep; while the portion of the Arctic current which splits off at the head of Newfoundland, and pushes down through the strait, presses close past Caribou Island. This explains the sterility of the latter. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... Unproductiveness.— N. unproductiveness &c. adj.; infertility, sterility, infecundity[obs3]; masturbation; impotence &c. 158; unprofitableness &c. (inutility) 645. waste, desert, Sahara, wild, wilderness, howling wilderness. V. be - unproductive &c. adj.; hang fire, flash in the pan, come to nothing. [make unproductive] sterilize, addle; disable, inactivate. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Europe, whose human inhabitants had not only to subdue the wild beasts and teach the earth to bring forth wholesome food in place of useless plants, but also to battle with wintry climates, and overcome the adverse influences of cold, sterility of soil, and other hostile conditions ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... population. They are reliable when they state observed facts, such as the following: It is now established in medical science that (1) gonorrheal infection results in tens of thousands of cases in complications, such as heart disease, gonorrheal rheumatism, sterility of both men and women, blindness of infants, inflammatory diseases of female reproductive organs, and other well-marked sequelae of the disease; and (2) that syphilis is responsible for a large majority ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... appeared a collection of rhapsodies entitled "Milosao," which he had garnered from the lips of Albanian village maidens. It is his best-known work, and has been translated into Italian more than once. After his return to Macchia followed some years of apparent sterility, but later on, and especially during the last twenty years of his life, his literary activity became prodigious. Journalism, folklore, poetry, history, grammar, philology, ethnology, aesthetics, politics, morals—nothing ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... curiosity: it was not therefore without reason, that she grew weary of the life she was forced to lead at Peckham. The melancholy retired situation of the place was to her insupportable; and as she had the folly, incident to many other women, of believing sterility to be a kind of reproach, she was very much hurt to see that she might fall under that suspicion; for she was persuaded, that although heaven had denied her children, she nevertheless had all the necessary requisites on her part, if ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... nothing singular, but some golden apples. Of Alcinous his garden, we read nothing beyond figs, apples, olives; if we allow it to be any more than a fiction of Homer, unhappily placed in Corfu, where the sterility of the soil makes men believe there was no such thing at all. The gardens of Adonis were so empty that they afforded proverbial expression, and the principal part thereof was empty spaces, with herbs and flowers in pots. I think ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... clothe in words the visionary scenes derived from the world of dreams, where a single false note, a single word in a wrong key, ruins the whole music; and, secondly, I desire him to consider the utter sterility of universal literature in this one department of impassioned prose; which certainly argues some singular difficulty suggesting a singular duty of indulgence in criticizing any attempt that even imperfectly ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... no doubt delicious, since among them he will find the shaddock and the pine-apple; but for these, as well as for almost all their other comforts and luxuries, the Bermudians are indebted to the continent of America or to the West Indies. Whether this be owing to the natural sterility of the soil, or to the extreme indolence of the inhabitants, I cannot pretend to decide; though I should be inclined to suspect that both were, in some degree, to blame; but its consequences are felt by all visitors, in a very sensible manner, every article of living being here sold ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... the work of the Galician Maskilim would not have been doomed to perpetual sterility, with no hope of ever making an impression on the Jewish masses, if an Italian writer had not appeared on the scene, who possessed the Jewish feeling that was lacking in his predecessors. In Samuel David Luzzatto general culture and genuine breadth of mind were ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... to the profession, anaemia forms the basis of a great number of morbid conditions. Hysteria, general debility, emaciation, sterility, various nervous affections, phthisis, in short, a perversion of almost any of the various physiological functions may be the direct result of anaemia. On the other hand, anaemia may be only a symptom or sequel of some other morbid condition—but of such cases I ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... Aurelius and the Antonines came a "period of sterility and barrenness in human beings." Bounties were offered for marriage. Penalties were devised against race-suicide. "Marriage," says Metellus, "is a duty which, however painful, every citizen ought manfully to discharge." Wars were conducted in the face of a declining birth-rate, and the decline in ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... this mountain, and has given a description of it which leaves nothing unsaid. He tells us that it comprises five different zones—the zone of the vines, the zone of the laurels, the zone of the pines, the zone of the Alpine heaths, and, lastly, the zone of sterility. He set his foot on the very summit, and found that there was not even room enough to sit down. The view from the summit was very extensive, stretching over an area equal to Spain. Then he went right down into the volcano, and examined the extinct crater. What could I do, ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... Mr. Plumer got up and stood in front of the fireplace. Mrs. Plumer laughed like a straightforward friendly fellow. In short, anything more horrible than the scene, the setting, the prospect, even the May garden being afflicted with chill sterility and a cloud choosing that moment to cross the sun, cannot be imagined. There was the garden, of course. Every one at the same moment looked at it. Owing to the cloud, the leaves ruffled grey, and ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... Ravenel behind the blinds of her highest window, to one who loved her still, but rarely had time to visit her now, "look. That's John March's room. O sweet, how's he ever again to match himself to our littleness and sterility without shriveling down to it himself? And yet that, and not the catching of scamps or recovery of lands, is going to be his big task. For I don't think he'll ever go 'way from here; he's just the kind that'll always feel too many ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... fairly say that it is of just the same consequence to a man's immediate society, how he talks, as how he acts. Now of all those who furnish their share to rational conversation, a mere adept in his own art is universally admitted to be the worst. The sterility and uninstructiveness of such a person's social hours are quite proverbial. Or if he escape being dull, it is only by launching into ill-timed, learned loquacity. We do not desire of him lectures ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... The sterility of the country will apologise for the natives not contributing to the wants of the navigator. The sea may, perhaps, in some measure, compensate for the deficiency of the land; for a coast surrounded by reefs and shoals, as this is, cannot ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... would have startled him and that he would have clutched his newly-acquired gold and garnered it to himself, fearful lest another stroke of ill-fortune should fall upon him. But instead of making him a coward it gave him courage. It did not warp his mind or steel his heart against humanity. No sterility settled upon him. His wrongs seemed to have fertilized his generosity, and here ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... barbarism," are the falsest of false prophets. They resolutely shut their eyes to facts all around them, and devote columns upon columns of newspaper, magazine and book argument—imaginary pictures—to the immorality, mental sterility and innate improvidence of this people; and they do this for various reasons, none of them honorable, many of them really disreputable. In dealing with this negro problem they always start off upon a false premise; their conclusions must, ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... reached Tadoussac, and ran into a sheltered cove under the shadow of uplands on which a quaint village perched and dispersed itself on a country road in summer cottages; above these in turn rose loftier heights of barren sand or rock, with here and there a rank of sickly pines dying along their sterility. It had been harsh and cold all day when the boat moved, for it was running full in the face of the northeast; the river had widened almost to a sea, growing more and more desolate, with a few lonely islands breaking its expanse, and ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
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