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Earth's surface   /ərθs sˈərfəs/   Listen
Earth's surface

noun
1.
The outermost level of the land or sea.  Synonym: surface.  "Three quarters of the Earth's surface is covered by water"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Earth's surface" Quotes from Famous Books



... fortune of those thus favoured with the vision of the Lady of the Plates was rumoured abroad. Wounds, money losses, even death fell on them or on their households. Men no longer were curious. They fled the neighbourhood of this ill omened gap in Earth's surface, unseemly exit for these foul spirits. On nights of rain and storm none passed that way. Even by day the children were rebuked and ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... may be due to the media through which the sun's rays pass. A sensitized photographic paper is not colored as much at an altitude of three miles in half an hour as is a similar paper upon the earth's surface in one moment. At any season of the year, gardeners can either stimulate or retard germination as they place a blue or yellow glass over the nursling. That the growth of plants is not due alone to the rays ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... birds of paradise remained in their cage, however, Lady Turnour glaring whenever she caught a glimpse of the chauffeur's head, as if he had bitten that hole in the tyre. But before us loomed mountains—disagreeable-looking mountains—more like embonpoints growing out of the earth's surface than ornamental elevations. On the tops there was something white, and I preferred having Lady Turnour glare at the chauffeur, no matter how unjustly, than that her attention should be caught by that ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... French the natural leaders of civilisation as commonly understood, and the English, however much they may rely on amateurish methods of organisation by emergency, have scattered the seeds of progress over a large part of the earth's surface. It is equally logical that the Germans should feel peculiar admiration and sympathy for the Turks, and find in Turkey, a State founded on military ideals, their own ally in the present war. That war, from our present ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... of old John Imsen. All around the man-made oasis of orchards and meadows, the sage and the sand, pushed from the river by the jumble of placer pits, emphasized by sharp contrast what man may do with the most unpromising parts of the earth's surface, once he sets himself heart and muscle to ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... came and told them that when Calako came to the earth's surface wherever he placed his foot a deep chasm was made; then they brought to the altar a huge rock, on which Calako might stand, and they set it between the two ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes

... prove that society needs a machinery of government able to legislate and enforce its laws, and the tendency has been for a comparatively small number of states to extend their authority over more and more of the earth's surface. This has become possible through the maintenance of efficient military forces and wise local administration, aided by increasing ease of communication and transportation. Once it was a question whether the United States could ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... from getting a clear idea of the geography of the North American Continent. But the ant was occupied and was apparently happy, and she must have learned something about a small fraction of that part of the earth's surface. ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... Ned laid the films aside for a time while he made a circuit of the old house, walking slowly as if out for chest exercise, but really seeing every square inch of the earth's surface where he walked. Once he dropped a pocketknife which he carried in his hand and stooped over to ...
— Boy Scouts on Motorcycles - With the Flying Squadron • G. Harvey Ralphson

... dread hour I would be inclined to dwell heavily on the admitted fact that a football match is not Waterloo, but simply a transient game in which two sets of youngsters bump up against one another in opposing endeavors to put a bouncing toy on two different spots of the earth's surface. The ultimate location of the inflated bauble will not affect the national destiny, and such moral value as the game has will not be increased but diminished by any enlargement of organization. After all, if the brains of the world gave themselves exclusively to football matches, ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett

... an hour or so, sometimes for three or four hours at a stretch. At these times he transmitted his earthward message, regardless of the fact that the relative position of the moon and points upon the earth's surface is constantly altering. As a consequence of this and of the necessary imperfections of our recording instruments his communication comes and goes in our records in an extremely fitful manner; it becomes blurred; it "fades out" in a mysterious and altogether exasperating way. And ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... heavily loaded, they were to help lessen the fall of the projectile, when drawn by the lunar attraction (after having passed the point of neutral attraction) on to the moon's surface; a fall which ought to be six times less rapid than it would have been on the earth's surface, thanks to the difference of bulk. The inspection ended with general satisfaction, when each returned to watch space through the side windows ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne

... is the lowest portion of the earth's surface. No other depressions are more than three hundred feet below sea level, but the Jordan is six hundred and eighty-two feet lower than the ocean at the Sea of Galilee, and nearly thirteen hundred feet lower ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes

... became afterward best known. Fearless as he undoubtedly was, an ascension was undertaken with the misgivings which usually preface an initial stepping from terra firma to the inconstant air. Once aloft, however, with the widespreading splendor and endless immensity of the earth's surface unrolling beneath him, and an exquisite physical exhilaration thrilling along his nerves, Donaldson became heart and soul an aeronaut. The novel and sensational expedients with which he embellished his subsequent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... transference to an extreme climate is often prejudicial to man, as it is to most animals and plants; but there is every reason to believe that, if the migration occurs step by step, man can be acclimatized to almost any part of the earth's surface in comparatively few generations. Some eminent writers have denied this. Sir Ranald Martin, from a consideration of the effects of the climate of India on Europeans and their offspring, believed that there is no such thing as acclimatization. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... is really happening, so strict is the censorship. But it seems inevitable to me that Germany will be beaten, that the horrid period of alliances and armaments will not come again, that England will gain even more of the earth's surface, that Russia may next play the menace; that all Europe (as much as survives) will be bankrupt; that relatively we shall be immensely stronger financially and politically—there must surely come many great changes—very many, yet undreamed of. ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick

... prehistoric open air temple, still standing upon Salsbury Plain, and bearing the name of Stonehenge, the most wonderful monument now standing upon the earth's surface. They built several other circular open air temples in the British Islands, and conspicuously among them, away up in the Orkneys, above Scotland, a very perfect and beautiful one called the ...
— Prehistoric Structures of Central America - Who Erected Them? • Martin Ingham Townsend

... hemp, and tobacco. Coal is dug even within the boundaries of the city, and iron mines are worked at a distance from it of a hundred miles. The iron is so pure that it is broken off in solid blocks, almost free from alloy; and as the metal stands up on the earth's surface in the guise almost of a gigantic metal pillar, instead of lying low within its bowels, it is worked at a cheap rate, and with great certainty. Nevertheless, at the present moment, the iron works of Pilot Knob, as the place is called, do not pay. As far as I could learn, nothing ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope

... a twinkle in his eye at her refusal to answer his question, "takes up the history of the earth's surface—its crust—the layers of this—as one might study the skin of an apple as large as the globe. In the course of an almost infinite time, as we measure things, it discovers the appearance of Life on ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen

... instructed the people in divers modes of life to dwell on mountain or on plain, to build lodges, or huts, or windbreaks. They distributed appropriate gifts among them and assigned each a pathway, and so the various families of mankind were dispersed over the earth's surface. ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various

... mastodon, the megatherium and Irish deer and of other quadrupeds large and small which are now extinct; but most of its animals were the same species as now exist. It was marked by the great episode of the Ice Age, when considerable parts of the earth's surface were buried under immense accumulations of ice, remnants of which are still with us in the icy covering ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew

... open country, like an unrolled map, simple in all its lines, with little variety in its scenery, devoid of sharp contrasts and sudden changes and hence lacking in the element of the picturesque which comes from these things. It is a part of the earth's surface that has never been subject to convulsion and upheaval. The stratified rock lies horizontally just as it was laid down in the bottom of the Devonian Seas millions of years ago. The mountains and the valleys are the result of vast ages of gentle ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs

... discovered by means of an instrument called the dipping needle, which is just a magnetised needle made for dipping perpendicularly instead of going round horizontally like the mariner's compass. A graduated arc is fitted to it so that the amount of dip at any place on the earth's surface can be ascertained. At the magnetic equator there is no dip at all, because the needle being equally distant from the north and south magnetic poles, remains horizontal. As you travel north the needle dips more and more until it reaches the region ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne

... people, and its laws. The territory is the only part which is of certain durability. "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever." It is of the first importance to duly consider and estimate this ever-enduring part. That portion of the earth's surface which is owned and inhabited by the people of the United States is well adapted to be the home of one national family, and it is not well adapted for two or more. Its vast extent and its variety of climate and productions are of advantage in this age for one people whatever ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln

... being at the furthest point he attained in the interior, about forty-five miles from where he had encamped on the watercourse he called Eyre's Creek, now a watering place for stock on a Queensland cattle run: "Halted at sunset in a country such as I verily believe has no parallel upon the earth's surface, and one which was terrible in its aspect." Sturt's views are only to be accounted for by the fact that what we now call excellent sheep and cattle country appeared to him like a desert, because his comparisons were made with the best alluvial lands he had left near the coast. Explorers as a rule, ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... Bulgaria, Roumania, and Bosnia, the final subjection of China and its southern tributaries must be added to complete the tale of Mongol triumph. The sphere of Mongol influence extended beyond this large portion of the earth's surface, just as the consequence of an explosion cannot be restricted to the immediate scene of the disaster. If we may include the remarkable achievements of his descendant Baber, and of that prince's grandson Akbar, in India ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... Ernest telling us that light travelled so rapidly, that the time it occupied in passing from one point to another of the earth's surface was scarcely ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien

... have quoted before, says that Porto Rico is one of the finest pieces of property on the earth's surface. May it prove so in the hands of the ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall

... absence of any marked changes in the physical configuration of the district since the same grotto was a place of sepulture, we must remember that it is the normal state of the earth's surface to be undergoing great alterations in one place, while other areas, often in close proximity, remain for ages without any modification. In one region, rivers are deepening and widening their channels, or the waves of the sea are undermining cliffs, or ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell

... he said, "has not yet become superfluous. Two-thirds of the earth's surface is still covered with water. But if a vessel here and there is swallowed up in the flood, the ark of humanity cannot sink, since God has set his rainbow in the heavens. The ocean is the cradle of heroism, it is the unifying, not ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... with a half-effaced carving of a coat of arms over its door, or of some hamlet at the dead end of a ravine with a stony slope at the back. It might have been a hill for all I know or perhaps a stream. A wood, or perhaps a combination of all these: just a bit of the earth's surface. Once I asked her where exactly it was situated and she answered, waving her hand cavalierly at the dead wall of the room: "Oh, over there." I thought that this was all that I was going to hear but she added moodily, "I used ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... The curvature of the earth's surface makes it impossible for the sides of townships to be truly north and south and at the same time six miles square. The excesses and the deficiencies due to the convergency of meridians and the curvature of the earth are by law added to or deducted from the western and northern ...
— The Young Farmer: Some Things He Should Know • Thomas Forsyth Hunt

... large numbers, and some portions of the Moon's surface appear honeycombed with them, the smaller craters resting on the sides of larger ones and occupying the bottoms of the more extensive areas. There is no kind of formation on the Earth's surface that can be compared with these crater mountains, which indicate that the Moon was at one time a fiery globe convulsed by internal forces which found an outlet in the numerous volcanoes scattered ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard

... to get accustomed to this troglodyte [l] life. I no longer thought of sun, moon, and stars, trees, houses, and towns, nor of any of those terrestrial superfluities which are necessaries of men who live upon the earth's surface. Being fossils, we looked upon all those things as ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne

... lecturer, "is, we may say, a species of mental geography, as it were; which—by a study of the skull—leads also to a study of the brain within, even as geology naturally follows the initial contemplation of the earth's surface. The brain, thurfur, or intellectual retort, as we may say, natively exerts a molding influence on the skull contour; thurfur is the expert in phrenology most readily enabled to accurately locate the multitudinous intellectual ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley

... is of great importance in the economy of Nature, since it prevents the excessive evaporation of the waters upon the earth's surface, and limits its extent by unalterable laws. Water boils at a certain temperature when at the earth's surface, where the weight of the atmosphere is greatest, but at different temperatures at different elevations ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various

... forms there is an ever-present contrast between those due directly to the processes which build up the earth's surface and those due to the erosive forces which destroy what the others have built. In the great plains of North America two of the divisions, that is, the Atlantic coastal plain of the southeast and the peneplain of the northwest, owe their present form ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington

... that Geology is a science: yet that Geology cannot foretell the future changes of the earth's surface. Geology is not a century old, and its periods are measured by millions of years. Yet, if Geology cannot foretell future facts, it enabled Sir Roderick Murchison to foretell the ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... extends, represents the extreme limit of great planetary size, may be too large ever to become the abode of living beings of a high organization. The force of gravitation on the surface of Jupiter exceeds that on the earth's surface as 2.64 to 1. Considering the effects of this on the weight and motion of bodies, the density of the atmosphere, etc., it is evident that Jupiter would, to say the very least, be an exceedingly uncomfortable place of abode for beings resembling ourselves. But Jupiter, ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss

... filling the earth with their shrieks. Resembling massive heaps of antimony, and of mountain-like proportions, those elephants with frontal globes split open, lying prostrate on the earth, seemed like mountains strewn over the earth's surface. The mighty bowman Yudhishthira, protected by a large force, afflicted the ruler of the Madras, encountering him in that dreadful battle. The ruler of the Madras, in return, displaying his prowess for the sake of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... Providence, it was a Bible. It was no doubt owing to it that Democrats became as scarce as moose in the Adirondacks. But it is not of its political aspect that I speak. I suppose that the most cultivated and best informed portion of the earth's surface—the Western Reserve of Ohio, as free from conceit as it is from a suspicion that it lacks anything owes its pre-eminence solely to this comprehensive journal. It received from it everything except a collegiate and a classical education,—things ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... was still a distinctive presence of the towering conifers, something such as are represented in the redwood forests of California to-day, or, in other forms, in some Australian woods. There was a suggestion of the fernlike but gigantic age of growth of the distant past, the past when the earth's surface was yet warm and its air misty, and there was an exuberance of all plant and forest growth, something compared with which the growth in the same latitude, just now, would make, it may be, but a stunted showing. ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo

... example, the distance of the moon from the earth was determined by a very circuitous process. The share which direct observation had in the work consisted in ascertaining, at one and the same instant, the zenith distances of the moon, as seen from two points very remote from one another on the earth's surface. The ascertainment of these angular distances ascertained their supplements; and since the angle at the earth's centre subtended by the distance between the two places of observation was deducible by spherical ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... of geological speculation, at which all the changes which have taken place upon the earth's surface, and have left their unmistakable marks in countless relics of animal and vegetable life, were attributed to the action of sudden and violent forces, of which, to-day, earthquake and tempest and volcano are only the feeble and transitory types. Those changes have manifestly been so great ...
— Beside the Still Waters - A Sermon • Charles Beard

... Scotland seem to have been formed when the land was undergoing a slow process of subsidence, or, as I should perhaps rather say, when a very considerable area of the earth's surface, including the sea-bottom, as well as the eminences that rose over it, was the subject of a gradual depression; for little or no alteration appears to have taken place at the time in the relative levels of the higher and lower portions of the sinking area: the features of the land in ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... useful. The innumerable millions of fibres and ganglion globules in the brain are beyond calculation, and their varieties of function are beyond all descriptive power. Geography does not attempt to describe every square mile of the earth's surface, nor does astronomy presume to know all the stars. In reference to the brain, psychic students will hereafter send forth ponderous volumes of descriptive detail, for which there is no demand at present. I willingly resign that task to my successors. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various

... up here on the earth's surface in the cheerful light of day—clothing ourselves with elemental sparks, and shooting with fiery speed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, from hemisphere to hemisphere, far down among the uncouth monsters that wallow in the nether seas, along the wreck-paved floor, thorough ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... races, compared with the waders and web-footed birds, is in accordance with the greater range which these latter orders have in all parts of the world. We shall hereafter see this law of aquatic forms, whether marine or fresh-water, being less peculiar at any given point of the earth's surface than the terrestrial forms of the same classes, strikingly illustrated in the shells, and in a lesser degree in ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... are turned toward the north. For all the earth which you inhabit, wide and narrow, is but a small island surrounded by that sea which you call the great Atlantic Ocean—which, however large as you deem it, how small it is! Has your name or has mine been able, over this small morsel of the earth's surface, to ascend Mount Caucasus or to cross the Ganges? Who in the regions of the rising or setting sun has heard of our fame? Cut off these regions, distant but a hand's breadth, and see within what narrow borders will your ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope

... Yet, in spite of this current of air, the thermometer stood at 85 deg. on deck, and 90 deg. in the cabin. For two or three days we had a temperature of 90 deg. to 95 deg.. This part of the Red Sea is considered to be the hottest portion of the earth's surface. In the summer the air is like that of a furnace, and the bare red mountains glow like heaps of live coals. The steamers at that time almost invariably lose some of their firemen and stewards. Cooking is quite ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... shore about 2 P.M. The heat by this time was most severe, and the air so dense as to occasion pains in my ears. The Dead Sea is 1,300 feet below the Mediterranean, and without doubt the lowest part of the earth's surface. I attribute the oppression I felt to this fact and to the sultriness of the day, rather than to any exhalation from the sea itself. Francois remarked, however, that had the wind—which by this time was veering ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... ninth and last circle they see the souls of traitors lying in a frozen lake and in the midst Lucifer, the fallen archangel, in the very center of the earth. They slide down his icy sides, and begin to ascend to the earth's surface through a cavern "and thence come forth to ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock

... with the facts to keep it straight. And it is unpopular and up-hill work to go on reminding people of the vastness of the duty and the responsibility which the control of so great a portion of the earth's surface, with a dependent population of three or four hundred millions, necessarily involves; to go on reminding them, too, how their own prosperity and even existence in these islands are linked by a hundred subtle but not always obvious or superficially apparent threads with the maintenance ...
— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner

... and second that the misery of non-achievement would outweigh the immediate pleasures of dallying. If this theory were not indestructible, for reasons connected with the secret nature of humanity, it would probably have been destroyed long ago by the mere cumulative battering of experience. For the earth's surface is everywhere thickly dotted with old men who have achieved ambition, old men drenched in luxury, old men as safe as Mont Blanc from overthrow, old men with the health of camels, old men who know more ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett

... THE VERTICAL. The difference between the geographical and geocentric latitudes of a place upon the earth's surface. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... the Christopher Columbus of this subterranean region, only ask of you one more day. If, when that time is expired, I have not found the water of which we are in search, I swear to you, I will give up my mighty enterprise and return to the earth's surface." ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne

... herd grazing. The hunters heard the young dog barking. The old fox heard the sportsman's horn sounding. Deep rivers float long rafts. Purling streams moisten the earth's surface. The sun approaching, melts the crusted snow. The slumbering seas calmed the grave old hermit's mind. Pale Cynthia declining, clips the horizon. Man beholds the twinkling stars adorning night's blue arch. The stranger saw the desert thistle bending ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham

... more intense, for Newton, knowing, had his doubts; I, not knowing, had no doubts at all. So epoch-making did this discovery appear to me that I noted the exact position of the bed so that a wondering posterity might ever afterward view and revere the exact spot on the earth's surface whence one of man's greatest thoughts had winged its ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... sword breaks before it touches Heiling, who invokes the help of his gnomes. They appear, but at the same moment the Queen is seen, exhorting her son to pardon and to forget. He willingly follows her away into his kingdom of night and darkness, never to see earth's surface again. The anxious peasants once more breathe freely and join in common ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley

... a million and a quarter), did not move quite freely enough as it is. Supply would at last have an opportunity of accommodating itself to demand without let or hindrance over a large portion of the earth's surface—as if more were necessary for this than the simple reduction of their tariffs, which is within the power of the protectionist colonies without federation, confederation, or any other device whatever. As it is, by the way, the colonies take nearly four times ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley

... to the preposterous. Then they'd dropped away and the giant steel thing had fired its own rockets—which made mile-long flames—and swept on out to emptiness. Before its rockets were consumed it was in an orbit 4,000 miles above the Earth's surface, and it hurtled through space at something over 12,000 miles an hour. It circled the Earth in exactly four hours, fourteen minutes, and twenty-two seconds. And it would continue its circling forever, needing no fuel and never descending. It was a second moon ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster

... had been derived from the earth by a most delightful scientific fabrication. A sun and its satellites in its course around some other center draws the earth and Mars so together that on some parts of the earth's surface the attraction of Mars would overcome that of the earth and gently suck up to itself inhabitants from the earth, who would not suffer death from loss of air, as the atmosphere of both bodies would ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... imagined that the like might be true of terrestrial changes; although no one recognized more clearly than he the fact that the dry land is being constantly washed down by rain and rivers and deposited in the sea; and that thus, in a longer or shorter time, the inequalities of the earth's surface must be leveled, and its high lards brought down to the ocean. But, taking into account the internal forces of the earth, which, upheaving the sea bottom, give rise to new land, he thought that these operations of degradation and elevation might compensate ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner

... several years has been spent by the writer continuing the observations upon which it was based. During this time most of the mining centers of the Western States and Territories, as well as some in Mexico and Canada, were visited and studied with more or less care. Perhaps no other portion of the earth's surface is so rich in mineral resources as that which has been covered by these observations, and nowhere else is to be found as great a variety of ore deposits, or those which illustrate as well their mode of formation. This ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various

... lookout towers, where, at the coming of a nautilus, the whole horizon and foreground would rain crossfires of shell and iron bolts, to sweep into annihilation the tiniest or the staunchest opposition from the earth's surface, and under the earth and above the earth death waited to leap up and draw the daring to its bosom. Not one, nor two, nor three lines of defences frowned down as we cautiously steamed along, but every precipice was bristling with defiance, as if the deep subterranean fires underlying our ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... Spain, for two centuries at the beginning of our modern epoch a chief power in Europe and the mistress of almost the whole Western world as well,—these countries have all sunk to positions of comparative insignificance, and Italy alone shows signs of effectual regeneration. And yet on the whole earth's surface there are no lands more richly endowed by nature as abodes for man than Italy, Turkey, ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various

... highly inflammable. A brilliant flame can be produced by the combustion of water. All the metals can be made to flash forth lightnings, under suitable electric and magnetic excitements. The crystals of several rocks give out light during the process of crystallization. Thousands of miles of the earth's surface must once have presented the lurid glow of a vast furnace full of igneous rocks. Even now, the copper color of the moon during an ellipse shows us that the earth is a source of light.[262] The mountains on the surface of Venus and the moon, and the continents and oceans of Mars, attest the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... 21st of March and 21st of September, the exact half of the earth along its axis is illuminated. On these dates, therefore, any point on the earth's surface is, during the rotation of the earth on its axis, half the time in light and half the time in darkness,—that is, day and night are twelve hours each all over ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu

... set by the geologist is not merely that of the sun's existence, but that during which the causes effecting geological changes have not undergone any complete revolution. If, at any time, the sun radiated much less than its present amount of heat, no water could have existed on the earth's surface except in the form of ice; there would have been scarcely any evaporation, and the geological changes due to erosion could not have taken place. Moreover, the commencement of the geological operations of which we speak is by no means the ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb

... until one reaches a high fence that marks the beginning of the Holden lot. Back of this fence is secreted a microcosmos, a world in little, where one may encounter strange races of people in their native dress and behold, by walking a block, cities actually apart by league upon league of the earth's surface and ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson

... strange situation. And to Stephen it was no less strange to be walking over a muddy road of the prairie with this most singular man and a newspaper correspondent, than it might have been to the sub-terrestrial inhabitant to emerge on the earth's surface. Stephen's mind was in the process of a chemical change: Suddenly it seemed to him as if he had known this tall Illinoisan always. The whim of the senatorial candidate in choosing him for a companion he did not then ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... of iron is found upon the mountains in various forms, from the small iron-stone gravel to large masses of many tons in weight protruding from the earth's surface. ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... be regarded either as a superficies or as a solid; that is, either as a part of the earth's surface slightly elevated above the rest, or as a diffused and heterogeneous body displacing a certain portion of free and mobile atmosphere. It is primarily in the first character that it attracts our attention, as a radiating and absorbing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... and dwell first in the mountain meadows, later in the palace of Valhalla on the heights. The giants are a great and strong race, but lack wisdom; they hate what is noble, and are enemies of the gods; they dwell in caves near the earth's surface. The dwarfs, or nibelungs, are black uncouth pigmies, hating the good, hating the gods; they are crafty and cunning, and dwell in the bowels of the earth. The nymphs are pure, innocent creatures of the water. The valkyrie are daughters of the gods, but mingled with a mortal strain; they gather ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... river, there is an extensive cavern, in which are deposited several mummies. Some tribes which roam this region have a tradition, that the first Indian ascended through this aperture, and settled on the earth's surface. ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall

... a gigantic one to have flung up that fossil tooth from strata far beneath the level of the earth's surface. More, there were even traces of archaean deposits around the borders of the pool, whose depth, in the center, was ascertained to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various

... certainty that we had reached the goal, there was not a thing in the world I wanted but sleep. But after I had a few hours of it, there succeeded a condition of mental exaltation which made further rest impossible. For more than a score of years that point on the earth's surface had been the object of my every effort. To its attainment my whole being, physical, mental, and moral, had been dedicated. Many times my own life and the lives of those with me had been risked. My own material and forces and those of my friends had been devoted to this object. ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary

... gyrations of all these planets on their axes, to the infinitely multiplied physical processes going on in each of these suns and planets? I cannot think of a single series of states of consciousness as causing even the relatively small groups of actions going on over the earth's surface. I cannot think of it even as antecedent to all the various winds and the dissolving clouds they bear, to the currents of all the rivers, and the grinding actions of all the glaciers; still less can I think of it as antecedent to the infinity of ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes

... the right of snubbing all before him, whether friends or foes, he, according to the feelings of Sir Timothy, would have gained an Elysium of creaminess not to be found in any other position on the earth's surface. No man was more warmly attached to parliamentary government than Sir Timothy Beeswax; but I do not think that he ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope

... life at Vavasor was melancholy enough for such a one as the Squire's son, who regarded London as the only place on the earth's surface in which a man could live with comfort. The moors offered no charms to him. Nor did he much appreciate the homely comforts of the Hall; for the house, though warm, was old-fashioned and small, and the Squire's cook was nearly as old as the Squire himself. John Vavasor's visits to Vavasor were ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope

... like a highly-charged thunder-cloud supported over the earth's surface. Now the tendency of a charged body is to move from a place of higher to a place of lower potential, and consequently the ink tends to flow downwards to the writing-tablet. The only avenue of escape for it is by the fine glass siphon, and through this it rushes ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro

... born in these Islands is born into a democracy which, apart from home affairs, stands committed to a high responsibility for the future welfare and good governance of Europe. For three centuries or so it has held rule over vast stretches of the earth's surface and many millions of strange peoples: while its obligations towards the general civilisation of Europe, if not intermittent, have been tightened or relaxed, now here, now there, by policy, by commerce, by dynastic alliances, by sudden revulsions or sympathies. But ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... fruit, and miles of forest. He had a plenty of money and everything that heart could wish. He was contented and happy. One evening a priest of Buddha visited him, and, sitting before the fire, explained to him how the world was made, and how the first beams of sunlight condensed on the earth's surface into diamonds. The old priest told that a drop of sunlight the size of his thumb was worth more than large mines of copper, silver, or gold; that with one of them he could buy many farms like his; that with a handful he could buy a province, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... of these prairies has caused much speculation. We might as well dispute about the origin of forests, upon the assumption that the natural covering of the earth was grass. Probably one half of the earth's surface, in a state of nature, was prairies or barrens. Much of it, like our western prairies, was covered with a luxuriant coat of grass and herbage. The steppes of Tartary, the pampas of South America, the savannas of the Southern, and the prairies ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck

... acquaintances—at least, I knew that I myself like to see what sort of a chair a man sits in, where he puts it, what books lie or stand on the shelves nearest his hand, what the objects are which he keeps most familiarly before him, in that particular nook of the earth's surface in which he is most at home, where he pulls off his coat, collar, and boots, and gets into an old easy shooting-jacket, and his broadest slippers. Fine houses and fine rooms have little attraction for most men, and those who ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes

... the earth it describes a circle, and every circle must have a centre; that we know already. This centre is invisible, it is in the middle of the earth, but we can mark out two opposite points on the earth's surface which correspond to it. A skewer passed through the three points and prolonged to the sky at either end would represent the earth's axis and the sun's daily course. A round teetotum revolving on its point represents the sky turning on its axis, the two points of the teetotum are the two poles; ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... three lectures on the History of Science; two on reasons why we should study Science; four on the Crust of the Earth, and the nature of Volcanoes and Earthquakes; two on the form of Earth's Surface and the elevation of the Continents; five on Physical Geography; five on the nature of Heat and Magnetism; sixteen on Astronomy; two on Mountains and how they are formed; three on the Nature of the Sea; three on the Distribution of Matter; ten on the Atmosphere as an Elastic ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... a rock in the Atlantic. The key to fame, which later took the form of mechanical invention, and later still of discovery in the region of science, took the form then of actual discovery of parts of the earth's surface. The thing was in the air; news was coming in every day of something new seen, something new charted. If others had done so much, and the field was still half unexplored, could not he do something also? It was not an unlikely ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... can contract distance and bring any mundane scene within its range while penetrating solid matter as if it did not exist at all. So by utilizing this power, which I possess to a considerable degree, it is my intention to make a hurried survey of the earth's surface in order to obtain an exact idea of present conditions. Furthermore, by the subtle concentration of our mind forces together I shall convey to your inner vision the actual scenes witnessed by myself, and you shall ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson

... discuss the gravest question of Church or State. It breaks the ice for him, like the remark upon the weather by which we open our interview with the person whom we have longed for years to meet. Beginning in this way at the level of the earth's surface, we can join hands and rise to the clouds. Begin in the clouds,—as some of my most esteemed friends are wont to do,— and you have to sit down before reaching ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... attenuated to produce intelligible signals; but when it was shown, from theoretical considerations, that these waves when traversing great distances are practically confined to the space between the earth's surface and the upper rarified strata of the atmosphere, the possibility of long-distance wireless telegraphic transmission was recognized. To increase the distance, it was only necessary either to increase the energy of the waves at the transmitting station, or to increase the delicacy of the receiving ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... is older than the discovery of the antiquated zipper," Spink orated. "Ha, you big plexidomes still believe the Earth was condensed from a filament, and was ejected by the sun under the gravitational attraction of a big star passing close to the Earth's surface. First it was a liquid drop and cooling solidified it after a period of a few million years. You citizens still think it has a liquid core. Some of you think it is pretty hot inside like they had atomic furnaces all fired up. Ha, the exterior ain't so hot either what with taxes we have ...
— Operation Earthworm • Joe Archibald

... truth the writing in the narrative form a precis of a strange human document, but the rendering—I perceive it now clearly—of the moral conditions ruling over a large portion of this earth's surface; conditions not easily to be understood, much less discovered in the limits of a story, till some key-word is found; a word that could stand at the back of all the words covering the pages; a word which, if not ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad

... architects of the pyramid could not have obtained, were also supernaturally communicated to them; so that the true mean density of the earth, her true shape, the configuration of land and water, the mean temperature of the earth's surface, and so forth, were either symbolised in the great pyramid's position, or in the shape and dimensions of its exterior and interior. In the pyramid also were preserved the true, because supernaturally communicated, standards of length, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... slowly fading before his eyes, was, of all agonies that could have fallen to his lot, the sharpest and most bitter. Not Ugolino sitting silent amidst his famishing children—not Helen, when she would fain that the tempest had swept her from earth's surface on that evil day when she was born—not Penelope, when she cried on Diana, the high-priestess of death, to release her from the weariness of her days—not Agamemnon, when the fatal edict had gone forth, and his fair young daughter looked into ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... listened a long time, and I almost envied his privilege, wishing that I might also hear the human voice from the earth's surface. ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris

... them, by the authority probably of Pope Alexander VI, on this plan, that a line should be drawn from the north to the south pole through a point three hundred and sixty leagues west of the Hesperides which they now call Cape Verde Islands, which would divide the earth's surface into two equal portions. All unknown lands hereafter discovered to the east of this line were assigned to the Portuguese; all on the west to the Castilians. Hence it came to pass that the Castilians ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair

... who have shone like gems upon the earth's surface, none have been more distinguished in their way than the Lazybones family; and were I so disposed I might recount their virtues and trace their talents from a long-forgotten period. But interesting as the study might prove, it would be a difficult task, and the attention I crave for Prince ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays

... wretches lay; nothing but earth's surface for a bed,—no blanket to cover them. They have eaten their measure of corn, and are sleeping; they sleep while chivalry revels! Harry has drawn his hat partly over his face, and made a pillow of the little bundle ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... ferruginous. Soft and working well with the axe while it retains the quarry-water, it soon hardens by exposure; and, thus weathered, it forms the best and ugliest of the local building materials. Embedded in the earth's surface are blocks and boulders apparently erratic, dislodged or washed down from the upper heights, where similar masses are seen. Many are scattered, as if by an eruption; others lie in slab or dome shape upon the shore. The shape is usually spheroidal, and the material hypersthene (a hard ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... examples we may see how important a supplement to geological evidence is the study of the geographical distribution of animals and plants, in determining the former condition of the earth's surface; and how impossible it is to understand the former without taking the latter into account. The productions of the Aru Islands offer the strangest evidence, that at no very distant epoch they formed a part of New Guinea; and the peculiar physical features which I have described, ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... popular lectures which were held in the lower deck, and treated of the history of the North-East Passage, the first circumnavigations of the globe, the Austrian-Hungarian Expedition, the changes of the earth's surface, the origin of man, the importance of the leaf to the plants, &c. It became both for the officers and scientific men and the crew a little interruption to the monotony of the Arctic winter life, and the lecturer could always be certain of finding his little auditory all present and highly interested. ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... ed.), book III., chap vi., 217, n.] It was only after more direct intercourse was opened up with the East that their true place of production became familiarly known in Europe. Nutmegs and mace, cloves and allspice were the native products of but one little spot on the earth's surface: a group of small islands, Banda, Amboyna, Ternate, Tidore, Pulaway, and Prelaroon, the southernmost of the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, just under the equator, in the midst of the Malay Archipelago. Their light, volcanic ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney

... became concentrated over the earth's surface; from the deposits sprang all kinds of vegetables and animals that flourish, and many more families than inhabit the ...
— ABC's of Science • Charles Oliver

... case it may be re-transformed), but it can never be destroyed. If a comet were to strike this globule of ours, and to knock it into a billion fragments, which were splashed all over the solar system—if its fiery breath were to lick up the earth's surface until it was peeled like an orange, still at the end of a hundred millions of years every tiniest particle of our bodies would exist—in other forms and combinations, it is true, but still those very atoms which now form the forefinger which traces these words. So the child with the same ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro

... is given only to man. Was the element of fire and the material for clothing given for any but man's use? This enables him to inhabit every clime. But the capacity to produce all the necessaries and luxuries of life is given only to a certain portion of the earth's surface; and its peculiar motions give the fructifying influences of the sun only to the middle belt of the planet. The use of this organization is evidenced in the production of this belt, and these productions must be the ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... explained the various number of instruments that were being included in the first rocket, to record its hurtling trip through the atmosphere to the outermost layers of the Earth's surface. ...
— The Monster • S. M. Tenneshaw

... of portions of the earth's surface, and their consequent interest to mankind, vary from time to time. The Mediterranean was for many ages the centre round which gathered all the influences and developments of those earlier civilizations from which our own, mediately or immediately, ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan

... doing," and Seaton started to walk toward one of the windows with his free, swinging stride. Instantly he was a-sprawl, the effort necessary to carry his weight upon the Earth's surface lifting him into the air in a succession of ludicrous hops, but he soon recovered ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby

... The man had not even made any effort to disguise himself further than to put on a different suit of clothes and get another horse; and why, in the name of all that was inconceivable, had he come back to Witton, instead of going to any other part of the earth's surface What could he expect here, except immediate detection, imprisonment, and ruin? Was he insane? He did not seem to be so; but that interpretation of his conduct was not only the most charitable one, but no other could be imagined that would account ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne

... amount of power has been proved to be experimentally possible. In the rarefied atmosphere at a height of five or ten miles from the earth's surface, electric discharges of very high voltage are conveyed without any other conducting medium than that of the air. By sending up balloons, carrying suspended wires, the positions of despatch and of receipt can be so elevated that the resistance of the atmosphere ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland

... time she would go back to their hotel and wait for them there; but she saw no chairs nor benches, and as for imitating the hundreds of well-dressed people who were sitting down in the dirt,—for to Miss Panney sand was as much dirt as any other pulverized portion of the earth's surface,—she had never done such a thing, and ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton

... mountain stations—that, though the general travel of the middle and higher clouds is much greater than that of the surface winds, the diurnal variation of speed at those levels is the reverse of what occurs near the ground. The greatest velocity on the earth's surface is usually about 2 p.m.; whereas the lowest rate of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various

... there are certain subtle changes in color values over the Earth's surface as one approaches more closely the outer fringe of atmosphere. While braking approaches are auto-controlled, the pilot taking over only after his ship is in atmosphere, the conscientious man makes himself familiar with the "feel" of a visually timed ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor

... truthfully written, and my intentions are good, success will not elevate me much, blame will not depress me. If the book is a fair picture, as far as it goes, of a vast and wonderful tract on the earth's surface, if it shows clearly the prevailing characteristics of the Americans, what there is for us (the English) to copy, what to avoid, if it prove of use to the ever-increasing class of emigrants, and if it is readable and amusing withal, I ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money

... passage not much wider than a fox burrow, which sloped downwards 10 or 12 ft. to the floor of the house; the inside was oval in shape, and was walled with overlapping rough stone slabs; the roof frequently reached to within a foot of the earth's surface; they probably served as store-houses, winter-quarters, and as places of refuge in times of war. Similar dwellings are found ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... air, as you know, is held to the earth's surface by gravitation, but, being gaseous, it is not held as closely as if it were in a solid state. Also, there is centrifugal force to be considered. Also the fact that the earth is not round, but flattened at the poles. Also the important ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... are such monsters on the earth's surface. There are individuals to be found, who boast of their inhuman depredations on those whom it ought to be their highest happiness to protect and aid, rather than injure. They can witness, almost without ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott

... Earth is, indeed, of primary importance in our conception of the longevity of planetary systems. The essay deals with the evidence, derived from the investigation of purely terrestrial phenomena, as to the period which has elapsed since the ocean condensed upon the Earth's surface. Dr. Decker's recent addition to the subject appeared too late for inclusion in it. He finds that the movements (termed isostatic) which geologists recognise as taking place deep in the Earth's crust, indicate an age of the same order ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... that men have accepted him in these characters, that the divine society has been founded, that it has lasted nearly two thousand years, that it has extended over a large and the most highly-civilised portion of the earth's surface, and that it continues full of ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... agricultural and pastoral industry involves an enlargement of the sphere of man's domain, by encroachment upon the forests which once covered the greater part of the earth's surface otherwise adapted to his occupation. The felling of the woods has been attended with momentous consequences to the drainage of the soil, to the external configuration of its surface, and probably, also, to local climate; and the importance of human life ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... highest elevation that could be given to the long guns—all varied to the right, though the day was perfectly calm. This variation appeared to be caused by a strong current of air at some height above the earth's surface; but it was so irregular that it was found impossible to make any correct allowance for it; and it was singular, that any wind perceptible on the deck of the Karteria blew in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... if there is a law of attraction which makes matter gravitate to the earth, and prevents its flying off into space, may not this law operate at every point on the round earth's surface'? ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders

... surrounded by France. There is Nice away to the west, and Mentone to the east, and the whole kingdom lies within the compass of a walk. Mentone, in France, at any rate, is within five miles of the monarch's residence. How happy it is that there should be so blessed a spot left in tranquillity on the earth's surface! ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope

... dominant industrial and maritime power of the 19th century, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland played a leading role in developing parliamentary democracy and in advancing literature and science. At its zenith, the British Empire stretched over one-fourth of the earth's surface. The first half of the 20th century saw the UK's strength seriously depleted in two World Wars and the Irish republic withdraw from the union. The second half witnessed the dismantling of the Empire and the UK rebuilding itself into a modern and prosperous European nation. As one of five permanent ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... summer more solar radiation reaches the surface at the South Pole than is received at the Equator in an equivalent period; in October 1991 it was reported that the ozone shield, which protects the Earth's surface from harmful ultraviolet radiation, had dwindled to its lowest level ever over Antarctica; active volcanism on Deception Island and isolated areas of West Antarctica; other seismic activity rare and weak Note: the coldest, windiest, highest, ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... solved a part is not the problem of inventing a machine, but the problem of using and storing the forces of nature which now go to waste. Now to us who live on the earth there is only one source of power—the sun. Darken the sun and every engine on the earth's surface would soon stop, every wheel cease to turn, and all movement cease. How prodigal this supply of power is we seldom stop to consider. Deducting the atmospheric absorption, it is still true that the sun delivers on each square ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie

... beginning has also an end, even a constitution such as yours will not last for ever, but will in time be dissolved. And this is the dissolution:—In plants that grow in the earth, as well as in animals that move on the earth's surface, fertility and sterility of soul and body occur when the circumferences of the circles of each are completed, which in short-lived existences pass over a short space, and in long-lived ones over a long space. But to the knowledge of human ...
— The Republic • Plato

... most interesting nation to recover something of its ancient prosperity and to once more take a position in the world worthy of the land of the hardy sailors and valiant captains who have left so imperishable a record over the earth's surface. ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street

... find in the central parts of Australia, from the nature of that portion which I had seen and the state of the weather throughout the winter. An almost perpetual sunshine had prevailed, dry cirro-cumulus clouds had arisen indeed sometimes, but no point of the earth's surface was of sufficient height to attract them or to arrest their progress in the sky. There seemed neither on the earth nor in the air sufficient humidity to feed a cloud. Dew was very uncommon, the moisture from the one or two slight ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... havaii" said Exploding Eggs, approaching to build the fire. Literally he said, "Aumia is dead and gone below," for the Marquesans locate the spirit world below the earth's surface, as they do the soul below ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... everything. How foolish of Stephen Candy and his tribe not to be born of the class of landlords! The inconvenience of having no foothold on the earth's surface is ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing

... cheated their thirst by pulling out blades of poor grass and chewing its roots. Nevertheless, there was almost no moisture in it, as the inexorable sun burnt it, even below the earth's surface.* [*About the waterless plains in this region see the excellent book, entitled "Kilima-Njaro," by the Rev. Mr. Le Roy, ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... as we have already seen, has an unlimited power of forming its own things, or objects of thought. Thus a particular peak in a mountain chain is as much one thing as the chain itself, though, physically speaking, it is inseparable from it, just as the chain itself is inseparable from the earth's surface. In the same way a necklace is as much one thing as the individual beads which ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock

... against a bilious lemon-yellow sky blending into a ghastly cinabrese red, which gradually vanished into a sort of lead blue. There are few countries where the sun appears and disappears above and from the earth's surface with less glow than in Persia. Of course, the lack of moisture in the atmosphere largely accounts for this. During the several months I was in the country—though for all I know this may have been my misfortune only—I ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... Tim Gibbs came in—and Booligal. Tradition in New South Wales puts the climate of Hay, Hell, and Booligal in that order. Tim had driven starving, rickety sheep across his native plains when the earth's surface had been powdered to red sand and driven by shrivelling westerlies in travelling sandhills from mirage to summer mirage. Tim was used to hot places. That is why he became a stretcher-bearer for his company in Gallipoli, and transferred to the regimental ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean

... that the habit of measuring herself by others, in this way, will hang like a millstone about her neck; and if it do not drown her in the depths of ignorance and imbecility, will at least make her forever a child, in comparison with what she should be. It will keep her grovelling on the earth's surface, when she ought to be exploring the highest heavens. It will keep her a near neighbor to the sisterhood of worms on which she treads, when she ought to be soaring towards those lofty heights which Gabriel once traversed—nay, which he even now ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott

... never lose their value and interest for the originality of the observations they contain. Many parts of them are admirably adapted for giving an insight into problems regarding the structure and changes of the earth's surface, and in fact they form a charming introduction to physical geology and physiography in their application to special domains. The books themselves cannot be obtained for many times the price of the present volume, and both ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin

... reproved than by Professor Hodge, of Princeton. "If the evidence of the constant revolution of the earth round its axis," says he, "were presented to a man, it would certainly be unreasonable in him to deny the fact, merely because he could not reconcile it with the stability of everything on the earth's surface. Or if he saw two rays of light made to produce darkness, must he resist the evidence of his senses, because he knows that two candles give more light than one? Men do not act thus irrationally in physical investigations. They let ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe

... cracks, then cools and deposits much of the material in solution as minerals in a vein—sometimes including metals such as gold and silver; (c) molten gaseous material squeezes into cracks near the earth's surface, then ...
— Let's collect rocks & shells • Shell Oil Company

... cave in the mountain. At their feet ran the stream that had carried them forward, disappearing under some overhanging rocks. On all sides were rocks and dirt, with here and there a decayed tree root, showing that they were not very far under the earth's surface. ...
— Four Boy Hunters • Captain Ralph Bonehill

... miles above earth's surface the great space platform sped from daylight into darkness. Once each two hours it circled the earth completely, spinning along through space like a mighty wheel of ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage

... walked down a street of those squalid brick tenements which coal-mining seems to germinate like a rash upon the earth's surface. The debris and the scaffoldings of pits were dotted about the adjacent countryside. Sooty cabbage-patches occupied the occasional interspaces in the ranks of houses. Briggs directed me across a cinder path in one of these cabbage-patches. "See ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir

... less an authority than Darwin, are soon made up. There is something terrifying in what the very modern science of geography has to tell us about the rapidity with which the remaining part of the earth's surface, available for the nourishment of man, is being exhausted. What problems will face the Rational Social Will in ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton

... world; prove incontestably that no scheme of emancipation could be carried into effect without the most intolerable mischiefs and calamities to both master and slave, or without probably throwing a large and fertile portion of the earth's surface out of the pale of civilization—and you have done nothing. They reply, that whatever may be the consequence, you are bound to do right; that man has a right to himself, and man cannot have property in man; that if the negro race be naturally inferior in mind ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... charm in things as they exist in the unconquered provinces of Nature's dominions, and who, not being over-anxious to reach the end of his journey, is content to perform it on horseback, or in a waggon drawn by bullocks, it is permissible to lament the altered aspect of the earth's surface, together with the disappearance of numberless noble and beautiful forms, both of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. For he cannot find it in his heart to love the forms by which they are replaced; these are cultivated and domesticated, and have only become useful to man at ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson

... Plagues from somewhere have attacked me, 190 From the realms of mighty sorcerers, From the meadows of the soothsayers, And the homes of evil spirits, And the plains where dwell the wizards, From the dreary heaths of Kalma, From beneath the firm earth's surface, From the dwellings of the dead men, From the realms of the departed, From the loose earth heaped in hillocks, From the regions of the landslips, 200 From the loose and gravelly districts, From the shaking sandy regions, From the valleys deeply sunken, From the moss-grown ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous

... Croll, in a letter to "Nature" (July 13, 1876), incidentally mentions the lessons that may be derived from the configurations of the earth's surface. ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various

... hoped to cut them off. But Ching Po must have had a like inspiration, for when I was almost within sight of my goal—fifty rods ahead—the Chinaman emerged from a side lane between me and it. He was running like the wind. Follet was nowhere to be seen. Ching Po and I were the only mites on earth's surface. The whole population, apparently, had piously gone up the mountain in order to let us have our little drama out alone. I do not know how it struck Ching Po; but I felt very small on that swept and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... only many kinds of igneous rocks, but the tilting up of sedimentary strata at all angles, the formation of faults and metallic veins, the production of endless dislocations and irregularities. Yet again, geologists teach us that the Earth's surface has been growing more varied in elevation—that the most ancient mountain systems are the smallest, and the Andes and Himalayas the most modern; while in all probability there have been corresponding changes in the bed of the ocean. As a consequence of these ceaseless differentiations, we ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... five-mile height was reached Earth's surface had changed definitely from concave to convex. The plane was ascending by then in a somewhat wider spiral, but its climb was as steady and sure as ever. Frost begin to form quickly on the cabin's windows, creeping out from the edges. Norman spoke a word over the motor's muffled thunder, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various

... some settlements, but could never have taken possession of the continent. Buffon has made the striking remark that the creative power appeared to have never had great vigour in America. He alluded to the abundance of the flora and fauna as compared with that of other great divisions of the earth's surface. Whether the numbers of the Indians are an illustration of the same fact, or whether there is some special cause, is beyond my very modest scientific attainments. When one reflects upon the countless herds of bison which used to cover the ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Even after it was conceded that the earth revolved, there were found writers who accounted for the diurnal revolution by attributing it to the movements of damned souls confined within, like restless squirrels in a revolving cage. On the earth's surface, between heaven and hell, was man, the common battleground of celestial and infernal hosts. At this time, of course, there was none of our modern knowledge of the heavens, nor of the age ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various

... far amiss. Take those black prairie soils with the grayish yellow clay subsoil, with an abundance of lime in it, which you find in a large part of the state, including a large part of Hennepin County, and you have as good a soil as you may expect to find anywhere on the earth's surface. But you can't keep a soil up to its full limit of fertility, no matter how good it is, unless you frequently ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... running hundreds and hundreds of miles, every way! I tell you, Robert—and it's no sacrilege either—after He did such a splendid and well-nigh perfect job He could stop for the night and call it a good and full day's work. I reckon that nowhere else on the earth's surface are so many fine and wonderful things crowded into ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler



Words linked to "Earth's surface" :   lithosphere, opening, body of water, water, geosphere, floor, layer, gap



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