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Shale  v. t.  To take off the shell or coat of; to shell. "Life, in its upper grades, was bursting its shell, or was shaling off its husk."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Shale" Quotes from Famous Books



... made from clay or ground shale, are burned until the materials begin to fuse superficially, forming their own glaze. Other forms of brick and tile are not glazed at all, but are left porous. The red color of ordinary brick and earthenware is due to an oxide of iron ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson

... said Burl Van Vedder, our outlook; "but wait a few minutes and they'll come up on higher ground. Here, here, you are looking a mile too far to the right—they're not following the cattle, but the wagon's trail. Keep your eyes to the left of that shale outcropping, and on a line with that lone tree on the Saw Log. Hold your horses a minute; I've been watching them for half an hour before I called you; be patient, and they'll rise like a trout. There! there comes ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams

... across the country they had mounted the top of a long, slender ridge, which reached down into the valley like a finger. Now her guide pulled up his horse so suddenly that it slid forward on stiff legs, its hoofs plowing the loose shale. ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden

... closely into its architrave and there was no crack through which a man might see into the stable. Once more his excitement revived. With a quick glance over his shoulder to satisfy himself no one was about he scrambled over the shale wall of the stock yard and passed to the rear of the building. High up under the gable a few pieces of stone had been removed for ventilation. A broken horse trough placed against the wall served him as a ladder and a moment later he was peering through the gap into the inky darkness ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee

... distilled from oil which comes from wells bored deep down in the ground in Pennsylvania, in the south of Russia, in Burma, and elsewhere. Also it is distilled in Scotland from oil shale, from which paraffin oil and wax and similar substances are produced. When the oil is brought to the surface it contains many impurities, and in its native form is unsuitable for motor engines. The crude oil is composed of a number of different kinds of oil; some being ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton

... to the north, taking a precipitous trail of shale that Phyllis judged to be a short cut. It was rough going, but their mountain ponies were good for anything less than a perpendicular wall. They clambered up and down like cats, as ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine

... there to build with? Now, however, the questions change. What were the mineral resources of the soil? It is not necessary to enlarge on these. The use of coal as a fuel is wholly recent. On the other hand, certain varieties of it were used as ornaments—the cannel coal, and the bituminous shale of Dorsetshire (Kimmeridge clay). So ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham

... River Bluestone Co., Ulster county. Silver medal Bluestone International Graphite Co., Ticonderoga Graphite International Pulp Co., Gouverneur Talc International Salt Co., Ithaca Salt Interstate Conduit & Brick Co., Ithaca Brick Jamestown Shale Paving Brick Co., Jamestown Brick Jewettville Pressed Brick & Paving Co., Jewettville Brick R. Jones, Prospect Graphite J. F. Kilgour, Lordville Bluestone F. H. Kinkel, Bedford Feldspar Quartz A. Gracie King, Garrisons Granite Francis Larkins, Ossining ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis

... ground the next morning brought us to Charlie's Knob, and beyond it the range, which on close examination was not imposing, being a series of detached sandstone hills, their summits flat and slightly sloping to the South, capped with a hard reddish-brown rock (baked shale). On the cap, loose fragments of shale and thick scrub; forming its sides sheer cliffs, at most fifteen feet high, perforated by holes and caves, above rough, stony banks. The whole covered with tufts of spinifex, barren, ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie

... out upon the central plaza, where stood a large church of typical colonial design and construction, and with a single lateral bell tower. The building was set well up on a platform of shale, with broad shale steps, much broken and worn, leading up to it on all sides. Jose stepped out and mingled with the crowd, first regarding the old church curiously, and then looking vainly for the little girl, and sighing his disappointment when he ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... and followed Gunson, who showed me the way he had descended by the help of the rocks, and projecting roots of the dwarf firs which began to grow freely as soon as the slaty shale ceased. ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn

... and down the valley, from the breaks between the peaks, and from the little gullies cleft in shale and rock that crept up to the snow-lines came a soft and droning murmur. It was the music of running water. That music was always in the air, for the rivers, the creeks, and the tiny streams gushing down from the snow that lay eternally up near ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood

... the road again, the team plodding heavily through the red shale. "It's a damned soil," said the doctor for the second time. He looked down at the young man beside him, and James again felt that resentful sense of youth and inexperience. "I don't know how you've been brought up," said the elder man. "I don't want to infuse ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman

... down a bare shale scarp to the willows growing near the river. The Indian camp below could be seen from the edge of the bluff. But the rush to cut off the Ute was so impetuous that the first riders could not check their horses. They plunged down the bare slope at a ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine

... voice came pealing down the cliff, waking the echoes on the shore, and with a sort of incredulous joy Mrs. Beauchamp listened to the sturdy steps coming slowly, surely, carefully down, with a little ripple of shale following them. ...
— Troublesome Comforts - A Story for Children • Geraldine Glasgow

... the town, and rode down the crest of long, gently-sloping ridges, which seemed interminable. The rock over which we passed was red sandstone, mottled and streaked with green, red shale, and occasional patches of conglomerate. Crossing a little stream by a pretty bridge, we made an abrupt ascent, and soon saw the little town, Cuaquitepec, at the ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr

... Uncle Ben led the way along a narrow passage, roofed with rock and floored with slate-coloured shale and shingle, and winding in and out, until we stopped at a great stone block or boulder, lying across the floor, and as large as my mother's best oaken wardrobe. Beside it were several sledge-hammers, battered, and some ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... billet to her cheek when the creaking stairway told her portentously of a solemn coming. Ten minutes more and the note was lying neglected on the bureau, and Angela stood at her window, gazing out over dreary miles of almost desert landscape, of rock and shale and sand and cactus, with eyes from which the light had fled, and a new, strange trouble biting at her girlish heart. ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King

... had reached one end of the many small valleys into which the larger vale was divided. They had been following the trail of the cattle that had been driven off—it was plain enough until they reached a rocky and shale-covered defile between two small hills. Then, for some reason or other, all "sign" came to an abrupt end. There were no further marks of hoofs in the earth, and none of the ordinary marks to indicate that cattle and horses had been beyond ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker

... "The cemetery is on shale, and I could not dig through it in time. We must get the body under ground at once. Caramba! If we put it in one of the bovedas in the cemetery the buzzards will eat it and scatter the plague all over the town. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... thereby destroyed; (3) limestone highly crystallized, composed of fossil shells and very hard; (4) sandstone, made under the sea from previous rock powdered, having huge concretionary masses with a shell or a pebble as a nucleus around which the concretion has taken place; (5) shale from the sea also; (6) conglomerate, or drift, deposited by ice in the famous glacial cold snap; (7) alluvium soil deposited in fresh water and composed partly of organic matter. In our second illustration some of these layers, ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren

... Sickle, so that instantly he shall prouide his Reapers, according to the quantitie of his graine: for if hee shall neglect his Rye but one day more then is fit, it is such a hasty graine, that it will shale forth of the huske to the ground, to the great losse of the Husbandman. When hee hath prouided his shearers, which he shall be carefull to haue very good, he shall then looke that neither out of their wantonnesse nor emulation, they ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham

... hewing logs out of the forest for framing the spidery trestles and snow-sheds, hauling sawn lumber into position, and doing general teamster's work. Risks there were of course—the rush of a charging boulder, or a sudden descent of shale, while occasionally a partly grubbed out trunk came thundering down before it was expected to. Comparatively few trained mechanics could be found among all the men about us, and, as usual, the hardest part of the struggle devolved upon the reckless ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... His descriptions of new species were clear and precise. In his paper on the coal mines of the mountains of Cevennes (Choix de Memoires d'Hist. Nat., 1792) he made the first careful study of the coal formation in the Cevennes, including its beds of coal, sandstone, and shale. A. de Jussieu had previously supposed that the immense deposits of coal were due to sudden cataclysms or to one of the great revolutions of the earth during which the seas of the East or West Indies, ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... could have produced this singular-looking, black, inflammable rock? How many times was this question asked before Science could return an answer? This she can now do with confidence. Coal was once growing vegetable matter. On the surface of the shale, immediately above the coal, you will find innumerable impressions of leaves and branches, as perfect as artist ever drew. But how could this vegetable matter ever accumulate in such masses as to make beds of coal of such vast ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness

... range rises beyond mountain range, until only the snowy summits are visible in the great distance, and one knows that beyond the last of them lies the open sea. The near-by peaks and ridges, red with granite or black with shale and gullied from top to bottom with snow and ice, the broad highways of the glaciers at their feet carrying parallel moraines that look like giant tram-lines, stand out with vivid distinction. A lofty peak, that we suppose is Mount Hunter, towers above the lesser summits. The two arms of ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck

... embayed window of leaded glass Mistress Yordas and her widowed sister sat for an hour, without many words, watching the zigzag of shale and rock which formed their chief communication with the peopled world. They did not care to improve their access, or increase their traffic; not through cold morosity, or even proud indifference, but because they had been so brought up, and so confirmed by circumstance. For the ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... land, sprang on to the rocks, and at once set about the tedious task of breasting the hill. Hill climbing, under the vertical sun of North Australia, is by no means an enjoyable undertaking, more particularly when the loose shale and rock gives way at every stride, bringing down an avalanche of rubbish on the heads of the rearmost of the party. Encumbered with our carbines, we made but slow progress, and it was nearly six o'clock before we attained the summit, from whence we saw several canoes ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden

... the matter of mineral wealth, Cape Colony is not so rich as some adjacent lands. It contains coal, but the individual beds of coal are thin, and owing to this thinness the coal necessarily alternates with shale, which is more conspicuous than in the coal fields of Britain. I remember that Professor Sedgwick, my old master in geology, told me that in his youth seams of coal only some four to six inches thick were worked on the sides of hills in Yorkshire, and ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young

... between, telling each its history of centuries long past. In one place no less than sixteen such beds of coal are found, one below another, each divided from the next above and the next underneath by beds of clay or sand or shale. The forests could not have grown in the sea, and the earth-layers could not have been formed on land, therefore many land-risings and sinkings must have taken place. Each bed probably tells the tale of a ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various

... Forks that start up on the side of the mountain, are choked, and the waters rushed in every direction, starting smaller slides by up-rooting trees and loose stones and shale. ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... and then vanished. It is not necessary to believe in ghosts; but I'll go bail that story is true. We are but two stones' throw from the gaunt hulk of a Franciscan Church; a file of dusty cypresses marks the ruins of a painful Calvary cut in the waste and shale of the hill-side. Below, as in a green pasture, Florence shines like a dove's egg in her nest of hills; I can pick out among the sheaf of spears which hedge her about the daintiest of them all, the crocketed pinnacle of Santa ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett

... saw was in the beautiful valley of Fond du Foret, above Chaudefontaine, not far from the village of Magnee, where one of the rents communicating with the surface has been filled up to the brim with rounded and half-rounded stones, angular pieces of limestone and shale, besides sand and mud, together with bones, chiefly of the cave-bear. Connected with this main duct, which is from 1 to 2 feet in width, are several minor ones, each from 1 to 3 inches wide, also extending to the upper country or table-land, ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell

... Into the light there came another figure, strong, ruddy, and with a calico skirt tucked up. One was refinement, the other strength; one nerves, the other muscle. Onward he strode, the road damp from its nearness to the creek. Out upon the higher land he turned, the shale clicking under his feet. He had the feeling that some one was walking slowly behind him, stealing the noise of his footsteps to conceal a stealthier tread, and he smiled at his fear, but he halted to listen. He thought of a poem, "The Stab," and he repeated it as he walked along, ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read

... restricted our movements. South of us, about a mile distant, rose one of the castle-like buttes, which I have mentioned, and to which, though with difficulty, we made our way. This butte was composed of alternate layers of chocolate-colored sandstone and shale about one thousand feet in height; its sides nearly perpendicular, but most curiously ornamented with columns and pilasters, porticos and colonnades, cornices and battlements, flanked here and there with tall outstanding towers, and crowned ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... precipices, and it is a matter of observation that military service on the Continent tends to induce a habit of body which is not the most suitable for doubtful climbing. The mountain seemed to be composed, in this part, of horizontal layers of crumbling shale, with a layer now and then of stone, about the thickness of an ordinary house-tile. The stone layers project from the looser masonry, and afford an excellent foot-hold; but a slip might be unpleasant. ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne

... complete skeleton of these monster Dinosaurs is recovered. While our western states, in certain places, are rich in fossil remains, there is very seldom a complete skeleton unearthed. At best there are but a few bones, or the impressions of bones, in the sandstone rocks or shale. But from these bones, from the impressions of those that have been eaten by time, and by their knowledge of what sort of anatomy was needed to keep these wonderful creatures on earth, it is possible for scientists to ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker

... running me down. I knew nothing of it. There was no time to speak, no time to think—it was on me. Had Blood left me there one second I never should have looked into your dear face. Up on the hill with Hailey and Brodie, under the gravel and shale, I should never have cost your heart an ache like this. Better the engine had struck me then and spared ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman

... yelped sharply and Scott spurred forward. The hunters were threading a grove of quaking asp and the dogs had come up with the bear on an opening of shale rock surrounded by down timber. Throwing his reins and advancing cautiously on foot, Stanley, followed by his companions, who spread themselves in a wide semicircle, took his place, the others, as they best ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman

... When the vertebrate vanished in Siluria, it disappeared instantly and forever. Neither vertebra nor scale nor print reappeared, nor any trace of ascent or descent to a lower type. The vertebrate began in the Ludlow shale, as complete as Adams himself — in some respects more so — at the top of the column of organic evolution: and geology offered no sort of proof that he had ever been anything else. Ponder over it as he might, Adams could see nothing ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... saw at once how the cove was being formed. The rocks are probably Silurian; and if so, of quite immeasurable antiquity. But instead of being hard, as Silurian rocks are wont to be, they are mere loose beds of dark sand and shale, yellow with sulphur, or black with carbonaceous matter, amid which strange flakes and nodules of white quartz lie loose, ready to drop out at the blow of every wave. The strata, too, sloped upward and outward toward the ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... has already been issued. After treating of methods of collecting and analyzing the gases found in mines, of investigations as to the rate of liberation of gas from coal, and of studies on coal dust, this bulletin discusses such factors as the restraining influence of shale dust and dampness on coal-dust explosions. It then takes up practical considerations as to the danger of explosions, including the relative inflammability of old and fresh coal dust. The problems involved are undergoing further investigation and elaboration, in ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson

... farmer, sparsely bearded, lank, and long-necked and seamy-skinned, his face ineffectual yet shrewd, a poor white of the South strung on wiry nerves, instead of lax muscles, the outcome of the New Jersey soil. He shuffled determinedly in his great boots, heavy with red shale, standing guard over his fine vegetables. He nodded phlegmatically at Anderson. He never smiled. Occasionally his long facial muscles relaxed, but they never widened. He was indefinably serious by nature, ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... distinct in every detail. It rose to the left of the road through the pass, above a hollow where great boulders stood out in the snow. Its sides were steep, so that the snow had slipped off in patches, leaving stretches of glistening black shale. The kranz at the top did not rise sheer, but sloped at an angle of forty-five, and on the very summit there seemed a hollow, as if the earth within the rock-rim had been beaten by weather ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan

... force is greatest, and the longest diameter of the body sets axial. On the other hand, when the body was suspended so that the laminae were vertical, the longest diameter set equatorial. Now, we know that the crust of the earth is composed of laminae, just as the piece of shale in Doctor Tyndal's experiments, and that these layers are disposed horizontally. And whatever force originally arranged the land and water on our globe, it is evident that the continents are longest from ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett

... — N. fuel, firing, combustible. [solid fuels] coal, wallsend[obs3], anthracite, culm[obs3], coke, carbon, charcoal, bituminous coal, tar shale; turf, peat, firewood, bobbing, faggot, log; cinder &c. (products of combustion) 384; ingle, tinder, touchwood; sulphur, brimstone; incense; port-fire; fire-barrel, fireball, brand; amadou[obs3], bavin[obs3]; blind coal, glance coal; German tinder, pyrotechnic ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... us now visit some pit where shale—a laminated and somewhat hardened clay—is quarried for the manufacture of brick. The laminae of this fine-grained rock may be as thin as cardboard in places, and close joints may break the rock into ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... awaiting explanation the corpus delicti of the Clyde Mystery. We stare at it and ask what are these slate spear heads engraved with rude ornament, and certainly never meant to be used as "lethal weapons"? What are these many-shaped perforated plaques of slate, shale, and schist, scratched with some of the old mysterious patterns that, in almost every part of the world, remain inscribed on slabs and faces of rock? Who incised similar patterns on the oyster-shells, ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang

... its feet, and bolted. Well, there I was with my laig busted, forty miles from even a whistlin' post in the desert, gettin' wetter and colder every blessed minute. Heaps of times in my life I've felt more comfortable than I did right then. I was hogtied to that shale ledge with my broken ankle, as you might say. And the weather and my game laig and things generally kept gettin' no better right ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine

... the light. This time it burned suddenly clear and large and very bright, away off to the left of him where he had by daylight noticed a bare shale slide. The light seemed to stand in the very center of the slide, no more than ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower

... up against the clay on which they were standing. He turned to the cliff and tore at it in a sort of exasperation, trying to scoop out footholes with his hands by which they might climb up; but the effort was futile, the soft shale crumbled as he scooped, and there was no hold to be had on it. His face had grown grey in the last few minutes, and his eyes ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... steep hillside. Festing knew this was difficult work; one could deal with rock, although it cost much to cut, but it was another matter to bed the rails in treacherous gravel, and the fan-shaped mounds of shale and soil that ran down to the water's edge showed how loose the ground was and the abruptness of the slope. Above, the silver mist drifted about the black firs that clung to the side of the mountain, and in the distance there was a gleam of snow. Some of the trees had fallen, ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss

... remained, though much disturbed with wonder and silly surmises, and ready to catch at any stray marvels that fell in their way. The subterraneous and half-concealed passage in the rock, or rather shale, on which the castle stands, always under the ban of some vague and silly apprehension, had been reported of late as manifesting more than equivocal symptoms of supernatural possession. Dick Empson, or long-nebbed Dick, a sort of shrewd, half-witted incarnation, it might be, of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby

... shape floundered out of the churned water, lumbered over the shale of the beach, its supple neck outstretched, its horned nose down for a gore-threatening charge. Ross had not realized that the salkars could operate out of what he thought was their natural element, but this wild-eyed dragon was plainly bent on ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton

... phase of the Katanga mineral treasure. Coal, iron, and tin have not only been discovered in quantity but are being mined commercially. Oil-shale is plentiful on the Congo River near Ponthierville and good indications of oil are recorded in other places. The discovery of oil in Central Africa would have a great influence on the development of transportation since it would supply fuel for steamers, ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson

... the noonday sun looking like a pale spot, a white wafer, through the dense thickness. Drenched through, and almost blown from my slippery footing by the whirling gusts that rush under the fall, with my feet naked for better safety, grasping the shale broken from the precipice against which I pressed myself, my delight was so intense that I really could ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... what he was standing on—a little ledge of shale not over five or six feet in length and two feet wide—for in lower water I had often from its advantage cast a fly down below the big boulder. But I knew it to be surrounded by water fifteen feet deep. It was impossible to wade to the spot, impossible to swim to it. And why in ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White

... the coal measures the world contains. A range of limestone rock 100 miles in length by 10 miles in width, and 1,000 yards in depth, would contain 743,000 million tons of carbon, or sufficient to provide carbon for 875,000 million tons of petroleum. Deposits of oil-bearing shale have also limestone close at hand; e.g., coral rag underlies Kimmeridge clay, as it also underlies the famous black shale in Kentucky, which is extraordinarily rich ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various

... ma'm'selle," he answered, for Guida had steered unsteadily for the instant. "Steadee—shale ben! that's right—I remember twenty years ago the black wasps they fly on the coast of France like that. Who can tell now?" He shrugged his shoulders. "P'rhaps they are coum out to play, but see you, when there is trouble ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... of the way across when the shale began to move, slowly at first, with a gentle rattle, then faster. He gave a shout of terror and floundered, panic-stricken, ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart

... beneath us—he had lost his balance, slid down the inclined plane, and been drowned. He never stirred a limb nor uttered a cry. His fate discouraged and alarmed us two survivors exceedingly. If help was coming, we now felt it would never come in time. We dug into the shale with the handles of our lamps and with our fingers, to make our position more secure. We did not venture to speak of our late companion's fate to one another. Horror overwhelmed us, so enfeebled had we become through famine ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn

... point to a time when the sandy clay which imbedded them was borne by water in a very tranquil manner, to be deposited where the ferns had grown, enveloping them gradually, and consolidating them into their mass of future shale. In one species known as the neuropteris, the nerves of the leaves are as clear and as apparent as in a newly-grown fern, the name being derived from two Greek words meaning "nerve-fern." It is interesting to consider the history of such a leaf, throughout the ages that have ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin

... with the shallowness of it all—the shale of sham which did not even conceal the base ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore

... organ pipes, so vertical are the ridges, so jagged the ascending outlines. And each pipe is painted a different colour ... pale slate green, purple, yellow, grey, orange, and chocolate, each colour corresponding with a layer of the slate, shale, limestone, or trap strata" (Neve's Picturesque Kashmir, ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie

... at Derreen. Nothing was more characteristic of Froude than his love of the sea and the open air. Sport, in the proper sense of the term, he also loved. "I always consider," he said, "that the proudest moment of my life was, when sliding down a shale heap, I got a right and left at woodcocks." For luxurious modes of making big bags with little trouble he never cared at all. But let him once more explain himself in his own words. "I delight in a mountain walk when I must work hard for my five brace of grouse. I see no amusement in dawdling ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... is not always a criterion of its permeability; a very fine grained marble, containing about 0.6 per cent. cell space, transmitted water and oil more freely than a shale that would hold 4 per cent. of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various

... Limestone, however, calcines when subjected to fire and is, therefore, objected to by many engineers for building construction. The harder and denser sandstones, mica-schists, granites and syanites make good stone for concrete and occasionally shale and slate may ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette

... weather, or by standing for some months in a wet condition. This "weathering" and "ageing" of clay is particularly important where bricks are made from tempered clay, i.e. clay in the wet or plastic state; where bricks are made from shale, in the semi-plastic condition, weathering is still ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... shale, shipbuilding, phosphates, electric motors, excavators, cement, furniture, ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... to be part of a horizontal, stratified series of sandstones underlying the igneous rock. There were bands of coarse gravel and fine examples of stream-bedding interspersed with seams of carbonaceous shale and poor coal. Among the debris were several pieces of sandstone marked by black, fossilized plant-remains. The summits of the beacons were platforms of very hard rock, baked by the volcanic overflow. The columns, roughly hexagonal and weathered to a dull-red, stood above in sheer perpendicular ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... we examined some of the old red sandstone which underlies all that part of Cape Breton Island, found some good specimens, and some very plain and deep glacial scratches. There is also some coal and a good deal of shale ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley

... torrents, and marshes bottomless abysses. Pits of quicksand develop in most unexpected places. Driven from smooth lake margins, the trailers' ponies are forced to climb ledges of rock, and to rattle over long slides of shale. In places the threadlike way itself becomes an aqueduct for a ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland

... trunk proceeded, somewhat resembled that of an enormous coach-wheel divested of the rim. Unfortunately we cannot yet complete our description of this strange plant. A specimen, traced for about forty feet across a shale bed, was found to bifurcate atop into two great branches,—a characteristic in which, with several others, it differed from most of the tree-ferns,—a class of plants to which Adolphe Brogniart is inclined ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... place, I do not know where I can more conveniently describe this little group of small islands. The lowest bed is a sandstone with ferruginous veins; it weathers into an extraordinary honeycombed mass; above it there is a dark-coloured argillaceous shale; above this a coarser sandstone—making a total thickness of about sixty feet; and lastly, above these sedimentary beds, there is a fine conformable mass of greenstone, in some parts having a columnar structure. All the strata, ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin

... generally quite shallow, being governed very much in contour and depth by the quality of the rock. The work of excavation has not been an extremely great one, even with the imperfect implements that must have been used, as the shale is for the most ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff

... inexperienced eye in all but dangerous proximity. The voices of birds and insects being hushed, nothing is audible but the harsh roar of the rivers, and occasionally, rising far above it, that of the forest fires. At night we were literally surrounded by them; some smouldering, like the shale-heaps at a colliery, others fitfully bursting forth, whilst others again stalked along with a steadily increasing and enlarging flame, shooting out great tongues of fire, which spared nothing as they advanced with irresistible might. Their ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... valley the ancient demon of water-force had excelled himself in enchantments. The slopes of the alluvial soil were dotted with little buttes of mingled sandstone and shale, varying from five to twenty feet in height, many of them bearing a grotesque likeness to artificial objects. There were columns, there were haystacks, there were enormous bells, there were inverted jars, there ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... floor was the post-office on the right, filthy with the foot tracks of the Fairbridge children who crowded it in a noisy rabble twice a day, and perpetually red-stained with the shale of New Jersey, brought in upon the boots of New Jersey farmers, who always bore about with them a goodly portion of their native soil. On the left, was the City Hall. This was vacant except upon the first Monday of every month, when the janitor of the Dutch Reformed ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... have sworn that a great sea was roaring below in the darkness. He could hear the waves, the boom and burst of them, the suck-back of the billows tearing the shrieking shale to their hearts, the profound and sonorous roar of leagues of coast. Imagination could do anything with that sound except figure the reality of it or paint the tremendous forest bending to the wind in billows of foliage a hundred ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... issues: air heavily polluted with sulfur dioxide from oil-shale burning power plants in northeast; contamination of soil and groundwater with petroleum products, chemicals at military bases natural hazards: flooding occurs frequently in the spring international agreements: party ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency

... madman," said the sheriffe, "Thou sholdst have had a knightes fee; But seeing thy asking hath beene soe bad, Well granted it shale be." ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards

... medicine-man or some other jealous enemy, and used to discredit me. A few days after telling the Sodom and Gomorrah story, I was on a walk-about with Yamba in my mountain region, when I suddenly discovered that shale existed in very considerable quantities, and I thereupon conceived the idea of demonstrating to the blacks that, not only was the Bible narrative a true one, but that it was quite possible to ignite stone; and I would even show them how it ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont

... The clerk corrected himself. "Well, there's another way out. The Producers & Developers Shale and Oil Company have a suite of offices that run into the Rockford Building. They've built an alley to connect between the two buildings. It's ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine

... my Waler was cautiously feeling his way over the loose shale, and Kitty was laughing and chattering at my side—while all Simla, that is to say as much of it as had then come from the Plains, was grouped round the Reading- room and Peliti's veranda,—I was aware that some one, apparently at a vast distance, was calling me by my Christian ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... fit to let go its tenacious grip about that time, of course Noodles was soon drawn in triumph over the edge of the shale, protesting more or less because he was scratched in several places by sharp edges ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher

... sailed across the sea upon their own soft melody, far away to foreign lands, to Negroland and China, for rare things. And when he was quite in the mood, he would bring out a broken knife and a piece of shale from a secret hiding-place, and set to work. There was a picture scratched on the stone, and he was now busy carving it in relief. He had worked at it on and off all through the summer, and now it was beginning to stand out. It was a bark in full sail, sailing over rippling water to ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... can the difference in altitude between this point and its outlet be explained. The colors of the rock, which is shaly in character, are variegated with yellow, gray and brown, and the action of the water in its rapid passage down the sides of the canon has worn the fragments of shale into countless capricious forms. Jets of steam issue from the sides of the canon at frequent intervals, marking the presence of thermal springs and active volcanic forces. The evidence of a recession of the river through the canon is designated by the ridges ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford

... turned toward the eastern range until he came to a narrow tongue of shale almost as hard to the hoofs as asphalt, that ran like a shoal across that sea of sand. Rest had given the great equine trio renewed life. P.D., reduced in rank to second place, could not think of allowing more than a foot between ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... carry them off to the station or timber-yard. The very stumps and roots will be dragged out for sale; the earthy banks, raw and torn, will fall in, muddying and clogging that pure mountain brook; and the hillside, turning into sliding shale, will dam it into puddles with the refuse from the quarries above. And thus, for less guineas than will buy a new motor or cover an hour of Monte Carlo, a corner of the world's loveliness and peace will be gone as utterly as those chairs and tables and vases and ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... be built over a natural spring of inflammable gas, and to be constantly illuminated therewith. What moral could be drawn from this? It is carburetted hydrogen gas, and is cooled from a soft shale or slate, which is sometimes bituminous, and contains more or less carbonate of lime. It appears in the vicinity of Lockport and Niagara Falls, and elsewhere in New York. I believe it indicates coal. At Fredonia, the whole village is lighted by it. Elsewhere, a farm-house was lighted by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... meet with it. Ah, I do trust that you never may, which is to say, so to speak, as I do trust as you'll never meet that black doctor. If ever a man, had the evil eye, that black doctor's got it, and old Mother Shale what lives in the cottage on the heath down against the windmill, she warned me, she did, three days after he come here. 'Mr. Corder,' she says, 'that black doctor has the evil eye!' And never was a truer word spoke. He's ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer

... Rupert de Malvoisie (the Crusader) suggested, by his accent and gestures, that he must have come from the East—how far East, it boots not to inquire. Miss FLORENCE DARLEY was a good Lady Alice, and Mr. J. A. SHALE an efficient "Craven." Later on an operatic performance is threatened. If the thrilling series of arrangements on the back of the Programme is to be accepted as authentic, the members of the Club will be invited to have Patience. It would be difficult to find a more appropriate accessory to ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various

... fore hoofs and crashed down over the first rough step. Venters warmed to greater admiration of the sorrel; and, giving him a loose bridle, he stepped down foot by foot. Oftentimes the stones and shale started by Wrangle buried Venters to his knees; again he was hard put to it to dodge a rolling boulder, there were times when he could not see Wrangle for dust, and once he and the horse rode a sliding shelf of yellow, weathered cliff. It ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey

... with the carboniferous system, and who must have frequently met with the substance which has caused all this excitement, but never imagined it to be gold. The face of the quarry, to the depth of twenty feet from the top, is an accumulation of shale or slate, lying in regular layers, and easily broken. It has been turned to good account of late in the manufacture of slate-pencils of superior quality. Among this shaly accumulation, there are frequent layers of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various

... happening to slide on a piece of shale at that moment, I sat down unexpectedly and the horse put ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... broke into a different country. It was flatter than that which they had already traversed and, if possible, more desolate, sun-bleached and parched. The ponies stumbled over loose shale, raising clouds of suffocating dust that tingled in the nostrils. Down they rode into its basin-like formation. All about the depression arose the craggy, stripped hills. Their jagged peaks seemed to shut out the rest of the world and compress the universe into this ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham

... so easy, and it was so impossible that I could come to any harm this way, that I grew more confident, and passing my hand over the rough shale chips that were spread around amongst the short grass, I began to wonder how my uncles could have been so timid, and not have made a brave effort to escape from ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn

... Firth. I have spent the season immediately following amid the ancient granite and contorted schists of the central Highlands. In the north I have laid open by thousands the shells and lignites of the oolite; in the south I have disinterred from their matrices of stone or of shale the huge reds and tree ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... the mine not eighteen months before. Picking out the main tunnel and keeping a close watch for rattlers with electric torches, the two men went cautiously ahead. In places earth had fallen and had to be cleared away, but the formation for the most part was a soft rock and shale. They went slowly, for fear of ...
— The Seed of the Toc-Toc Birds • Francis Flagg

... the way, and descended under the rim. It was up and down over rough shale, and up steps of broken rocks, and down little cliffs. We crossed the ridge twice, many times having to lend a ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey

... the sounds below now. Whoever came up the rock ladder must be unused to negotiating such a stairway, for they rattled small bits of loose shale down at times; and Frank felt sure he could hear a panting sound, very much like that which tired Bob had been making ...
— The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon - or The Hermit of the Cave • James Carson

... wild apples that ripen in August, and that do not need, if it could be had, Thoreau's sauce of sharp, November air to be eaten with. At the foot of a hill near me, and striking its roots deep in the shale, is a giant specimen of native tree that bears an apple that has about the clearest, waxiest, most transparent complexion I ever saw. It is of good size, and the color of a tea rose. Its quality is best appreciated in the kitchen. ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... on the banks of the Quilo or Kweelo, here a stream of about ten yards wide. It runs in a deep glen, the sides of which are almost five hundred yards of slope, and rocky, the rocks being hardened calcareous tufa lying on clay shale and sandstone below, with a capping of ferruginous conglomerate. The scenery would have been very pleasing, but fever took away much of the joy of life, and severe daily intermittents rendered me very weak and ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... my class on the preceding week some specimens of ferns neatly gummed on white paper. . . . This time I took a piece of coal- shale, with impressions of ferns, to show them. . . . I told each to examine the specimen, and tell me what he thought it was. W. gave so bright a smile that I saw he knew; none of the others could tell; he said they were ferns, like what I showed ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... away to the north-east of the site of old Camp Almy a ridge of rock and shale stretches down from the foothills of the Black Mesa and shuts off all view of the rugged, and ofttimes jagged, landscape beyond—all save the peaks and precipitous cliffs of the Mogollon, and some of the pine-crested heights that hem the East ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King

... fall of cliff helped him, making a ramp. Up it he went, a tiny trickle of dislodged shale dribbling away ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant

... I think. Older and dearer. The lift was a gift of William the Conqueror, some of the beds are prehistoric. They represent geological periods. Mine is the oldest. It is formed in strata of Old Red Sandstone, volcanic tufa, ignis fatuus, and bicarbonate of hornblende, superimposed upon argillaceous shale, and contains the prints of prehistoric man. It is in No. 149. Thousands of scientists come to see it. They consider it holy. They want to blast out the prints but ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... particle was not less than eight inches near the edge of the precipices. The result ... has been to produce an indescribable scene of desolation. Everywhere the hillsides facing the valley have been stripped bare from crest to base, and the seams of coal and partings of shale could be seen running in and out of the irregularities of the cliffs with a sharpness and distinctness which recalled the pictures of the caons of Colorado. At the bottom of the valley was a piled-up heap of dbris and broken trees, while the old stream had been obliterated ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison

... as the "coal-measures"; and in some regions, as in South Wales and in Nova Scotia, the coal-measures attain a thickness of twelve or fourteen thousand feet, and enclose eighty or a hundred seams of coal, each with its under-clay, and separated from those above and below by beds of sandstone and shale. ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... pace. The rapt Equator's crimson cincture holds Me close; my emerald ocean-robes flow free, And purple soar my mountains, folds on folds, With vale and plain. My bondmaid Moon to me Reveals her marbled snow in cusp and shale— Whilst in my flinty womb the valiant strife Of Fire proclaims me thine and bans the pale Usurper Death beyond my fields of Life. In Winds that wrap my path, lo, I shall sing To thee a choral eternal, Lord of Days, And Life with myriad hearts in me shall sing Thy glory to scan ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer

... a few steps farther brought them to a towering rock around the base of which the path turned, and then seemed to cease abruptly in a mass of loose shale. It was too clear now. They had lost their road and turned, whilst they were indulging those golden fancies, into a mere cattle-path worn by the numerous herds of goats and oxen, the music of whose jangling bells still came to them now and then in low sweet snatches ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar

... Jack's famous beanstalk, and where the old proverb about the steed starving whilst his grass is growing falls completely to the ground. There are numerous drives, made level by a coating of smooth black shale, and bordered by a double line of syringas and oaks, with hedges of myrtle or pomegranate. In some places the roads run alongside the little river—a very muddy torrent when I saw it—and then the oaks give way to great drooping willows, beneath whose trailing branches ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various

... of romance, singular in every aspect: in the formation of its rocks, in the birds that haunt its cliffs and the beasts that haunt its caves, in its antiquities, and the whole course of its adventurous history. It is a granite rock, with here and there patches of clay-shale, notably at the south-eastern corner; but the granite is differentiated from the granite of Devon, to which it is so proximate, and of so marked a character that it can be traced in many buildings along the northern coasts of Devon and Cornwall, principally in towers and churches, ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... of the rocks was a steep declivity of loose shale sprinkled over with large and small boulders of radically different formations, and in no manner resembling the friable, uncertain bed upon ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard

... the gully came shouts and yells, and then the distinct rattling sound of loose shale, as several horsemen descended the steep ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering

... forward, avoiding the overturning of the smallest stone or bit of shale which might betray their position, they soon neared ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell

... excavations for a new apartment house. No watchman was in sight, in the mist of falling flakes, so the criminologist disappeared over the fence which separated the plot of ground from the sidewalk. Advancing with many a stumble through the blasted rock and shale, he obtained ingress to an alleyway in the rear. Following this brought him to the back of the Somerset. Shirley had an obstinate grandfather, and heredity was strong upon him. It seemed a foolhardy attempt ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... limestone, with shale and marl, embracing two ranges of plaster beds with hopper-shaped ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland



Words linked to "Shale" :   oil shale, sedimentary rock, humic shale, shale oil



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