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Lichen   Listen
noun
Lichen  n.  
1.
(Bot.) One of a class of cellular, flowerless plants, (technically called Lichenes), having no distinction of leaf and stem, usually of scaly, expanded, frond-like forms, but sometimes erect or pendulous and variously branched. They derive their nourishment from the air, and generate by means of spores. The species are very widely distributed, and form irregular spots or patches, usually of a greenish or yellowish color, upon rocks, trees, and various bodies, to which they adhere with great tenacity. They are often improperly called rock moss or tree moss. Note: A favorite modern theory of lichens (called after its inventor the Schwendener hypothesis), is that they are not autonomous plants, but that they consist of ascigerous fungi, parasitic on algae. Each lichen is composed of white filaments and green, or greenish, rounded cells, and it is argued that the two are of different nature, the one living at the expense of the other. See Hyphae, and Gonidia.
2.
(Med.) A name given to several varieties of skin disease, esp. to one characterized by the eruption of small, conical or flat, reddish pimples, which, if unchecked, tend to spread and produce great and even fatal exhaustion.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Lichen" Quotes from Famous Books



... feeding, when you are hot on their trail and steal forward expecting to see them every moment, it is the same exasperating story. They dig a hole through four feet of packed snow to nibble the reindeer lichen that grows everywhere on the barrens. Before it is half eaten they wander off to the next barren and dig a larger hole; then away to the woods for the gray-green hanging moss that grows on the spruces. Here is a fallen tree half covered with the rich ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long

... receding. A hanging tuft of yellow and red ivy nodded queerly in place of the face, some broken and discoloured masonry in perspective took up the outline and colouring of the arms and figure, and two imperfect red and yellow lichen streaks carried on the curved tracing of the long spindle shanks. Larry blessed himself, and drew his hand across his damp forehead, over his bewildered eyes, and could not speak for a minute. It was all some devilish trick; he could take his oath ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... truth of it was this: as Keawe undressed for his bath, he spied upon his flesh a patch like a patch of lichen on a rock, and it was then that he stopped singing. For he knew the likeness of that patch, and knew that he was fallen ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... turn it into a rabbit-warren, the most fatal policy of all. How hideous they are—those great stretches of downland, enclosed in big wire fences and rabbit netting, with little but wiry weeds, moss, and lichen growing on them, the earth dug up everywhere by the disorderly little beasts! For a while there is a profit—"it will serve me my time," the owner says—but the ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson

... garden; for pretentious brick and stucco houses had clustered about Antoine's cottage. They looked down scowling on the humble thatched roof. The city was edging up, trying to crowd him off his land. But he clung to it like lichen ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... three huge, dark caves into which the swell of the Caribbean Sea rolls with a dull, reverberating roar. The height of the castle above the water appears to be one hundred and fifty or two hundred feet. There are very few embrasures, or port-holes, in the gray, lichen-stained walls of the old fortification, and, so far as I could see, it had no armament whatever except two or three guns mounted en barbette on the parapet of the uppermost cube, ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan

... rock upon the loneliest heath Feels, in its barrenness, some touch of spring; And, in the April dew, or beam of May, Its moss and lichen freshen and revive; And thus the heart, most sear'd to human pleasure, Melts at the tear, joys in ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott

... land: 0% permanent crops: 0% meadows and pastures: 0% forest and woodland: 0% other: 100% (largely covered by permanent ice and snow with some sparse vegetation consisting of grass, moss, and lichen) ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency

... their way towards Old Moggy's abode. It was greatly changed for the better. A chimney was now to be seen rising above the roof, which had been fresh tiled; there was glass in the window, a latch on the door, which had been repaired, and the lichen-covered walls had been scraped, fresh pointed, and white-washed. When the party got inside they discovered an equally agreeable change. A thick curtain divided the room; a screen kept off the draught when the door was ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston

... with minute care, there is no doubt. In the "Principia" is a chapter on mosses wherein it is explained how the first vestige of lichen catches the dust particles of disintegrating rock, and we get the first tokens of a coming forest. Darwin never made a point better; and the nebular hypothesis and the origin of species are worked out ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... there are a few capitals lying about, as well as granite columns in the curious old crypt. A pillar stands all forlorn in a field; and quite close to the church are erected two others—the larger of cipollino, beautified by a patina of golden lichen; a marble well-head, worn half through with usage of ropes, may be found buried in the rank grass. The plain whereon stood the great city of Sipus is covered, now, with bristly herbage. The sea has retired from its old beach, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... to Mr. Mivart's other objections. Insects often resemble for the sake of protection various objects, such as green or decayed leaves, dead twigs, bits of lichen, flowers, spines, excrement of birds, and living insects; but to this latter point I shall hereafter recur. The resemblance is often wonderfully close, and is not confined to colour, but extends to form, and even to the manner in which the insects hold themselves. The caterpillars ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... fit spots for robber ambuscade; now presenting a fair smooth surface, now jagged, shattered, shelving, roughened with brushwood; sometimes bleached and hoary, as in the case of the pinnacled crag called the White Kirk; sometimes green with moss or grey with lichen; sometimes, though but rarely, shaded with timber, as in the approach to the cavern named the Earl's Bower; but generally bold and naked, and sombre in tint as the colours employed by the savage Rosa. Such were the distinguishing features of the gorge ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... brown bodies varying in size from a pea to a tomato. From their anchorage on the rock they stretched waving tentacles of soft iridescent hues, transforming the little pool into a marine fairyland. Between the anemones a bright yellow lichen-like growth almost covered the warm red granite, and tiny yellow, rose, and black and white striped snails were set like jewels on this background. Two or three sharp limpet shells ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown

... drink for a fiend-sick man, to be drunk out of a church bell: Githrife, cynoglossum, yarrow, lupin, flower-de-luce, fennel, lichen, lovage. Work up to a drink with clear ale, sing seven masses over it, add garlic and holy water, and let the possessed sing the Beati Immaculati; then let him drink the dose out of a church bell, and let the priest sing over him the Domine ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... ceased to be a blot in one of the fairest valleys in beautiful Derbyshire, for it was time-stained with a rich store of colours from Nature's palette; great cushions of green velvet moss clung to the ancient stone-work, rich orange rosettes of lichen dotted the ruddy tiles, huge ferns shot their glistening green spears from every crack and chasm of the mighty walls of the deep glen; and here and there, high overhead, silver birches hung their pensile tassels, and scrub oaks thrust ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn

... river. I see weird shapes: witches, Puritans, clergymen, little children, judges, mesmerized maidens, moving to the sound of melody that thrills me with its sweetness and purity. But, although carried along its calm and evenly flowing current, the shapes are strange and frightful: an eating lichen gnaws at the heart of each. Not only the clergymen, but witch, maiden, judge, and Puritan, all wear Scarlet Letters of some kind burned upon their hearts. I am fascinated and thrilled, but I feel a morbid sensitiveness creeping over me. I—I beg your pardon." The Goblin was yawning frightfully." ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... and night came on. As it approached, heavy clouds drifted up from eastward. Mali busied herself with laying out a rough bed in the hut for Muriel, and making her a pillow of soft moss and the curious lichen-like material that hangs parasitic from the trees, and is commonly known as "old man's beard." As both Mali and Felix assured her confidently no harm would come to her within so strict a Taboo, Muriel, worn out with fatigue and terror, lay down at last and slept soundly on this native substitute ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen

... fort are shelving masses of red granite, completely covered by a dark orange lichen, which gives them an added warmth and richness; and on the highest part stood a square lead sun-dial, which, at first sight, I thought had surely been set up by Franklin or Richardson, but which I was told was very modern indeed, and put up, if I am not mistaken, by Mr. ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... right interpretation of life. When Nature plants an oak in the forest, she does not say, Be a lichen, an Eozooen canadense, a small ground-creeping thing! She says, Grow! Become a tall, strong, mountain tree! When we hold our baby in our arms, we do not say, My child, be good for nothing! Neither does God say, Be nothing, do nothing! ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... live in a mountain or hill country, your only danger is redundance of subject. Be resolved, in the first place, to draw a piece of rounded rock, with its variegated lichens, quite rightly, getting its complete roundings, and all the patterns of the lichen in true local colour. Till you can do this, it is of no use your thinking of sketching among hills; but when once you have done this, the forms of distant hills will be ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... no ruin, though on the road to decay. One of the side walls was much lower than the other, and the roof had two great waves, and was heavily clothed, in natural patterns, with velvet moss, and sprinkled all over with bright amber lichen: a few tiles had slipped off in two places, and showed the rafters brown with time and weather: but the structure was solid and sound; the fallen tiles lay undisturbed beneath the eaves; not a brick, not a beam, not a gravestone had been ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade

... loath, obeyed his young master's behest as promptly as though he had fully understood the words. Meanwhile, Ralph found a mossy spot on the shady side of a big gray, lichen-covered boulder, and, seating himself thereon, with his back comfortably adjusted to a depression in the rock, he drew a worn account book from a pocket of his corduroy coat. Moistening his thumb he began to turn the pages rapidly, until he came to the place where he had made the last entry in ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Geological Survey • Robert Shaler

... surface of the skin, smooth or scaly, and as they are due to infiltration of the skin they are more persistent than the roseoles. They vary in size and distribution, being sometimes small, hard, polished, and closely aggregated like lichen, sometimes as large as a shilling-piece, with an accumulation of scales on the surface like that seen in psoriasis. The co-existence of scaly papules and faded roseoles ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... could find neither a plant nor a lichen on the island, and only a few insects and spiders, besides the boobies and noddies. I ought to have mentioned that we did not fail to meet with the moist and oppressive weather found under the belt of calms under the equator. Frequently I felt as if I could scarcely ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston

... sorts of herbs which have got their names from their virtues and operations, as Aristolochia, because it helpeth women in childbirth; Lichen, for that it cureth the disease of that name; Mallow, because it mollifieth; Callithricum, because it maketh the hair of a bright colour; Alyssum, Ephemerum, Bechium, Nasturtium, Aneban (Henbane), and ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... its attractions were but changed. The lichen-covered kings of the forest revealed their bold limbs undisguised by foliage, the feathery birch showed its delicate tracery against the clear winter sky, and Dutton sighed as he gazed on that fair demesne, and thought how hard it would ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston

... This Lichen contains starchy, heat-giving nourishment, about six parts of the same to one of flesh-forming food; therefore its jelly is found to be specially sustaining to persons suffering from pulmonary consumption, with an excessive waste of the bodily ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... they found that the road, instead of dipping suddenly down again, was level; and that to the right of it there started a high stone wall which followed the irregularities of the road for a considerable distance. It was covered with lichen and moss, and showed gaps here and there where the mortar had crumbled away and the stones fallen in a heap upon the ground; while in other places, the tangled growth of ivy vines almost ...
— The Girl Scouts' Good Turn • Edith Lavell

... with little noise and no celerity of pace, about the corner of the hill. On the far side the ground swelled into a bare heath, black with junipers, and spotted with the presence of the standing stones for which the place was famous. They were many in that part, shapeless, white with lichen—you would have said with age: and had made their abode there for untold centuries, since first the heathens shouted for their installation. The ancients had hallowed them to some ill religion, and their neighbourhood had long been avoided by the prudent before ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... made his escape, and did nothing. In the village it was as bad. Time, which had dealt so kindly with Vandon itself, had taken the straggling village in hand too. Nothing could be more picturesque than the crazy black-and-white houses, with lichen on their broken-in thatch, and the plaster peeling off from between the irregular beams of black wood; nothing ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley

... said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to me; the gray color and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, nawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neighbors I should have; but above all, the recollection I had of it from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... a king, had met And fought together; but their names were lost; And each had slain his brother at a blow; And down they fell and made the glen abhorr'd: And there they lay till all their bones were bleach'd, And lichen'd into colour with the crags: And he, that once was king, had on a crown Of diamonds, one in front, and four aside. And Arthur came, and labouring up the pass, All in a misty moonshine, unawares Had trodden that crown'd skeleton, ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang

... sizes and patterns, with here and there a dab of vermilion and light red, the whole brilliant against a china-blue sky. On the other runs the long brick wall of the garden,—soggy, begrimed; streaked with moss and lichen in bands of black-green and yellow ochre, over which mass and sway the great sycamores that Ziem loves, their lower branches interwoven with zinnober cedars gleaming in spots where the prying sun ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith

... zur endeckung des Nordeest-lichen Wegs nach Japan und China. Von J.C. Adelung. Halle, 1768. 4to.—Some of the above works, as well as others relating to attempts to discover a north-west and north-east passage, are inserted in ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson

... he could do—and who was not sorry that the Old Place was allowed to stand, undisturbed by any rich upstart, in the venerable silence of its own decay. And this is the moss-house that we helped to build with our own hands, at least to hang the lichen tapestry, and stud the cornice with shells! We were one of the paviers of that pebbled floor—and that bright scintillating piece of spar, the centre of the circle, came all the way from Derbyshire in the knapsack of a geologist, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson

... next devouring hung white-fish and scarce venison, in the sterile regions of Mackenzie River, or varying the meal with a little of that delectable substance often spoken of by Franklin, Back, and Richardson as their only dish—namely, tripe-de-roche, a lichen or moss which grows on the most barren rocks, and is only used as food in the ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne

... this remark, they cast a glance ahead of them, and perceived white rugged rocks looking, either like goblins, or resembling savage beasts, lying either crossways, or in horizontal or upright positions; on the surface of which grew moss and lichen with mottled hues, or parasitic plants, which screened off the light; while, slightly visible, wound, among the rocks, a narrow pathway like the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor—notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau

... mighty workmen worn away lorn away in the hard grip of the grave till a hundred ages of men-folk do pass. Oft this wall witnessed (weed-grown and lichen-spotted) one great man after another take shelter out ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle

... for the hollow tree somewhat resembled a treasure chest in its interior, she had a length of green of the same soft shade as the lichen of the woods around her. It was a green ribbon so thoroughly satisfying in its color that only to spread it out on the grass where her eyes might gaze upon it delighted ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox

... attested the careful training and attention which many years had bestowed. In the centre of this court, and surrounded by a wide border of luxuriant lilies, was a triangular pedestal of granite, now green with moss, and spotted with silver grey lichen groups, upon which stood a statue of St. Francis, bearing the stigmata, and wearing the hood drawn over his head, while the tunic was opened to display the wound in his side, and the skull and the crucifix lay at his feet. Close to the ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... rays threw gleams of gold between the thickly-serried ranks of the old trees—many of them with gnarled, crooked branches, covered with white lichen—some, more recently planted, spreading out straight boughs—the old and young alike all covered with the annual miracle of the spring's unfailing gift of lovely blossoms, which promised a full guerdon of ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall

... repose. Let us beware that our rest become not the rest of stones, which so long as they are torrent-tossed, and thunder-stricken, maintain their majesty, but when the stream is silent, and the storm passed, suffer the grass to cover them and the lichen to feed on them, and are ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... as a great bed of green and gray moss, where they had thrown themselves down under one of the great chestnut-trees. At their right, an aged birch drooped nearly to the earth; behind them, a pile of lichen-covered rocks cropped out from the moss, against which the twins were resting in an indiscriminate pile. To Mrs. McAlister's mind, there was something indescribably pleasant in this simple holiday-making, and she gave herself up as unreservedly ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray

... at vacancy. This distressed her very much; then to her great relief and joy she discovered that I was there with a motive which she could understand and appreciate: that I was watching some living thing, an insect perhaps, but oftener a bird—a pair of little scarlet flycatchers building a nest of lichen on a peach tree, or some such beautiful thing. And as she loved all living things herself she was quite satisfied that I was not going queer in my head, for that was ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson

... of vanilla. The abundance of things to be seen, learned, and enjoyed here was incredible. However, the next day I determined on the advice of Dr. Thwaites to make a tour up to the mountain localities proper, in order there to get a better sight of the lichen flora of Ceylon. ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... ago by local craftsmen, seemed absolutely in harmony with the landscape: walls, dormers, and mullions and long undulating roofs were all of limestone and conveyed an impression of sturdy self-respect. The rain-worn, lichen-covered roofs had weathered to charming irregularities of form and lovely tones of color. Ivy and clematis climbed over the porches and twisted themselves round the low chimneys. The little gardens were bright with ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... sheltered spots, or even in fissures and chasms of the rock, where they gather in dense quantities. Even in the sternest scenery of the Alps some sign of vegetation lingers; and I remember to have found a tuft of lichen growing on the only rock which pierced through the ice on the summit of the Jungfrau. The absolute solitude, the intense stillness of the upper Alps is most impressive; no cattle, no pasturage, no bird, nor ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various

... feature of the district consists in the masses of hard stone, gray with lichen, that lie about, here topping a sandhill, there dropped at random in the plain. There was at one time many more of these, but owing to their power of resisting heat they were largely exploited as hearthstones. These masses, there can be no doubt, are remains ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould

... thickness of ten or even twelve feet, still sweet and fresh in every fiber. The trunk is a remarkably smooth, round, delicately-tapered shaft, straight and regular as if turned in a lathe, mostly without limbs, purplish brown in color and usually enlivened with tufts of a yellow lichen. Toward the head of this magnificent column long branches sweep gracefully outward and downward, sometimes forming a palm-like crown, but far more impressive than any palm crown I ever beheld. The needles are about three inches long in fascicles of five, and ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir

... the ptarmigan is a fine example of protective colouring. Its summer plumage so exactly harmonizes with the lichen-coloured stones among which it delights to sit, that a person may walk through a flock of them without seeing a single bird; while in winter its white plumage is an almost equal protection. The snow-bunting, the jerfalcon, and the snowy owl are also white-coloured birds inhabiting ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various

... a lookout point, where a lichen-covered summerhouse stood, protected on the steeper side by a low stone wall. Below them lay the moat, green-scummed and starred with water-lilies; throbbing in the midday haze, the emerald sward of the parkland seemed to float. Against the wall she halted. "What ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... jaw, or leg, is a newt's, and never by any accident more like that of a frog. What is true of the newt is true of every animal and of every plant; the acorn tends to build itself up again into a woodland giant such as that from whose twig it fell; the spore of the humblest lichen reproduces the green or brown incrustation which gave it birth; and at the other end of the scale of life, the child that resembled neither the paternal nor the maternal side of the house would be regarded as a kind ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley

... green ivy up Its solitary tower of stone? What spirit lures the bindweed's cup Unfaltering on? Calls even the starry lichen to climb By agelong inches ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare

... the Lichen tribe, but also from the Algae, fungi, mosses and ferns man derives nutriment and valuable products. Some of the cryptogamic plants form considerable articles of commerce, particularly as food plants, affording gelatinous ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... sometimes grow weary for an abiding place?" Laura pulled off her gauntlets and laid her hot hands on the cool lichen-grown stones of the field-wall. The bridle-rein hung over her arm. Fitzgerald had drawn his through a stirrup. "Think of wandering here and there, with never a place to come ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath

... Emily, with gaiety which was unusual in her. 'No smoke; the hills blue against a lovely sky! trees covered to the very roots with greenness; rich old English homes and cottages—oh, you know the kind your ideal of a cottage—low tiled roofs, latticed windows, moss and lichen and climbing flowers. Farmyards sweet with hay, and gleaming dairies. That ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... not true that "the original substratum or material is in every instance alike," nor that the "primordial cell is in every instance the same," whether of the "lichen or the man;"[21] nor as others allege, "that chemical reagents detect no differences between them." Chemical reagents are very clumsy instruments for the analysis of living beings, and their properties and powers; which are the antagonists of ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... never throughout life denied himself any pleasure; and I can conscientiously say that I have never scrupled to trouble you; so here goes.—Have you travelled South, and can you tell me whether the trees, which Bignonia capreolata climbs, are covered with moss or filamentous lichen or Tillandsia? (He subsequently learned from Dr. Gray that Polypodium incanum abounds on the trees in the districts where this species of Bignonia grows. See 'Climbing Plants,' page 103.) I ask because its tendrils ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... this almost prodigal waste of life, we perceive that every being, from the puny insect which flutters in the evening ray; from the lichen which we can scarcely distinguish on the mouldering rock; from the fungus that springs up and re-animates the mass of dead and decomposing substances; that every living form possesses a structure as perfect in its sphere, an organization sometimes as complex, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... her to see if nothing had changed since last she had been there. She found again in the same places the foxgloves and wallflowers, the beds of nettles growing round the big stones, and the patches of lichen along the three windows, whose shutters, always closed, were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts, aimless at first, wandered at random, like her greyhound, who ran round and round in ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert

... it; she made a sweeping curve, skirted the treacherous-looking lawn, and disappeared in another cart-track, between silvery trunks of veteran beeches, self-sown in the dark ages, with here and there a gnarled old oak, rugged and lichen-mantled, with feathery tufts of fern nestling in the hollow places between his ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon

... was at times very difficult to find food for themselves, or pasture for their sheep, and there was nothing to eat but the "manna," which they believed their God provided for them, and which was perhaps in the nature of an edible moss or lichen. At times there was a terrible scarcity of water. Always there was the danger of losing their way on those trackless wastes, and in this matter also they learned to look to their God as their pillar of cloud by day and their pillar ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting

... now sitting opposite the fire, his frosty white hair and beard overgrowing his gnarled figure like the grey moss and lichen upon a leafless apple-tree. He wore breeches and the laced-up shoes called ankle-jacks; he kept his eyes fixed ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... began collecting dried grass, and herbs, and lichen from the rocks, and had soon a sufficiency to make a small fire; they struck a light, and cutting off steaks from the antelope, were in a short time very busy at the repast. When their hunger was appeased, they found that their ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat

... clump of stunted pine trees he came in sight of the house, grey, gaunt, and bare, not old enough to be picturesque, but too old to look neat and comfortable, on that wind-swept, storm-beaten cliff. Its grey walls, marked with patches of damp and lichen, looked like a tear-stained face, out of which the two upstairs windows stared like mournful eyes. Downstairs, in one room, there was a little sign of comfort and adornment; crimson curtains hung at ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine

... morning when the car refused to move, and she had taken a trolley car, halfway to San Gabriel. It would have seemed appropriate, somehow, to meet him strolling in front of the Mission, his hands in his pockets, gazing up at the beautiful half-ruined facade, with its delicate chain-armour of gold lichen, its tower, and its flowers ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... home return'd, far other thoughts he owns, Though still the same the scene that meets his view! The same sun glistens o'er the lichen'd stones— Scarce one year more seems to have gnarl'd the yew. There, too, the hamlet where his boyhood pass'd Sends, as of old, its curls of smoke to ken— So near, his stalwart arm a stone might cast Among the cots ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... tree, often many feet from the ground. It is composed almost entirely of soft plant fibres, fragments of spiders' webs sometimes being used to hold them in shape. The outer sides are thickly studded with bits of lichen, and practised, indeed, is the eye of the man or woman that can distinguish it from a knot on a limb. Although the Hummingbird's nest is exceedingly frail, there is nothing on record to show that {30} any great number ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson

... familiar scene, as they approached the back of the house, with its round tower and its confusion of picturesque, lichen-covered roofs. An irregular circle of stately trees stood as ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... noise, and though having nothing to fear, he instinctively steals about as if every tree concealed a foe. The first morning I sauntered along the lonely paths in silence, admiring for the hundredth time the trunks of the trees, with their varied decorations of lichen and their stately moss-grown insteps, and pausing a moment before the butternut which had divided itself in early youth, and now supported upon one root three tall and far-spreading trees. I had not heard the wren; and indeed the birds seemed unusually ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller

... 29.—This valuable lichen comes chiefly from Tumbez. It is not found on the rocks, like the orchilla of the Old World, but grows on various trees. The foliage of a tree disappears when the orchilla commences. The sea air is ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... the down stood a wayside inn; a desolate and villainous-looking lump of lichen-spotted granite, with windows paper-patched, and rotting thatch kept down by stones and straw-banks; and at the back a rambling court-ledge of barns and walls, around which pigs and barefoot children grunted in loving communion of dirt. At the door, rapt apparently in the contemplation ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... juniper are both abundant higher up the valley, they have been felled here for building materials, fuel, and export to Tibet. From the naked limbs and tall gaunt black trunks of those that remain, stringy masses of bleached lichen (Usnea) many feet long, stream in the wind. Both men and women seemed fond of decorating their hair with wreaths of this lichen, which they dye yellow with ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... Brittany, close on the bay, They show you a church, or rather the gray Ribs of a dead one, left there to bleach With the wreck lying near on the crest of the beach; Roofless and splintered with thunder-stone, 'Mid lichen-blurred gravestones all alone, 'Tis the kind of ruin strange sights to see That may have their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various

... chatelaine caught in the lichen and dragged at the chain. It angered me. I took it off the twisted ring and ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn

... old men to talk with, men as old as the orchards, Men to tell me of ancient days, of those who built and planted, Lichen gray, branch broken, bent and sighing, Hobbling for warmth in the sun and for places ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters

... nestled in a curve of the road between wheat fields on every side. A gray, moss-covered, lichen-hung wall surrounded it. The five American graves were under the shadow of the Western wall, and the sun was slowly sinking in his glory as the company of soldiers escorted the women into the cemetery. They passed between the ponderous ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill

... that our rest become not the rest of stones, which so long as they are torrent-tossed and thunder-stricken maintain their majesty; but when the stream is silent, and the storm past, suffer the grass to cover them, and the lichen to feed on them, and are ploughed down into the dust.... The rest which is glorious is of the chamois couched breathless in its granite bed, not of the stalled ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock

... then another. Where the joists of the stage went in, however, was a bit of cover for the unfortunate chap—just enough to keep him clear of the danger from above, and there he stuck, pressed to the rock like a lichen, with great stones going by so close that they curled his hair. All was black as pitch and the young devil up over had no thought that his poor uncle was still alive. Amos uttered no sound, and presently, his work done as he thought, Ernest began ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts

... fungus of every shade of red, brown, yellow, and gray. They seem to spring forth from a bed of sphagnum or bog moss of brightest emerald green; while a clump of the screw wall moss in fruit, with its curious little box-like capsules, supports a gray or yellow lichen, which has been gently removed from some old wall or tree. A bit of stick or a twig, incrusted with a bright orange-colored lichen, supports a trailing branch of delicate green ivy, the most beautiful and adaptable of all winter foliage. Over this little arrangement ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various

... horrible creatures came writhing and springing towards us across the surface of this putrid bog, and it was only by keeping our shot-guns for ever ready that we could feel safe from them. One funnel-shaped depression in the morass, of a livid green in color from some lichen which festered in it, will always remain as a nightmare memory in my mind. It seems to have been a special nest of these vermins, and the slopes were alive with them, all writhing in our direction, for it is a peculiarity of the Jaracaca that ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... bower. When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me; my most delicate experience is typified there. I am struck with the pleasing friendships and unanimities of nature, as when the lichen on the trees takes the form of their leaves. In the most stupendous scenes you will see delicate and fragile features, as slight wreaths of vapor, dewlines, feathery sprays, which suggest a high refinement, ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau

... rock, and a stream of water issues from the threshold. On entering the visitor is confronted by a great boulder, resembling an old-fashioned New England pulpit, reaching half way to the ceiling. The walls are almost perfectly arched, and garnished here and there with green moss and white lichen. A rift in the rocks extends the whole length of the chapel, over which trees hang their green foliage, which, ever rustling and trembling, form a trellis-work with the blue sky, while the spray rising from behind the rock-worn altar seems like the sprinkling of holy incense. After all these ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce

... walled in, and already lust-withered garden of your common desires. Your terrible lack of imagination, the one really fatal defect in your character, was entirely the result of the hate that lived in you. Subtly, silently, and in secret, hate gnawed at your nature, as the lichen bites at the root of some sallow plant, till you grew to see nothing but the most meagre interests and the most petty aims. That faculty in you which love would have fostered, ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris

... more highly organized; have cost—if I may so say, with all reverence, but I can only speak of the infinite in clumsy terms of the finite—the Creator more thought, more pains, than the giant cedars of Lebanon, and the giant cypresses of California. Remember that the smallest moss or lichen which clings upon the wall, is full of wonders and beauties, as inexplicable as unexpected; and that of every flower on your own window-sill the words of Christ stand literally true—that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these: and bow your hearts and souls before the magnificent ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley

... proposed would grow into an accomplished fact. There was no cottage where he might house his picture and materials within half a mile of Gorse Point, but a granite cow-byre rose considerably nearer, at a corner of an upland field. Wind-worn and lichen-stained it stood, situated not more than two hundred yards from the spot on which Barron's picture was to be painted. A pathway to outlying farms cut the fields hard by the byre, and about it lay implements of husbandry—a chain harrow ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... all things." Jesus is omniscient. He can see with microscopic eye the lichen on the grey stone, the enamel on the shell, the modest flower; and He can see the love that is in the disciple's heart, though it be but ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer

... All gone. My dearest brother, Edmund, sleeps, Not by the well-known stream and rustic spire, But unfamiliar Arno, and the dome Of Brunelleschi; sleeps in peace: and he, 190 Poor Philip, of all his lavish waste of words Remains the lean P. W. on his tomb: I scraped the lichen from it: Katie walks By the long wash of Australasian seas Far off, and holds her head to other stars, 195 And breathes in ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson

... wir nicht den lichen Inflows anzuerkennen, den ihre Philosophie auf die Sinnesaenderung der Franzosen ausuebte, um sie von dem starren Sensualism zu einer geschmeidigern Denkart auf dem Wege des gemeinen Menschenverstandes hinzuleiten. Wir verdankten ihnen ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... their hills they came, Lake Winter and the woman that he loved. He waited by a long brown garden wall, Mottled with moss and lichen, where in the dusk Like a great moth a late flycatcher wove, And watched her coming down a rutted path, Towards him. And the flowing of her body, Sure step through fugitive cadences of limb, Up to the little golden arch of hair, ...
— Preludes 1921-1922 • John Drinkwater

... the crevices the grass Had thrust the altar-slabs apart, the walls Were gray with stains unclean, the roof-beams swelled With many-coloured growth of rottenness, And lichen veiled the Image of Taman In leprosy. The Basin of the Blood Above the altar held the morning sun: A winking ruby on its heart: below, Face hid in hands, the ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling

... into the little garden—a charming place with yew hedges, a lichen-covered well and old thick apple-trees, and here I found an old man in a broad-brimmed straw hat tending the bees. The hives were open and he was working with a knife whilst the bees hung in a trembling hovering cloud about him. I spoke to him but he ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole

... gaping mouth, and the lips of it were livid grey. Sometimes it was like a cup into which the sunset poured a golden wine and filled it quivering to the brim. Sometimes it was like a grey grave full of silence. And here in this place of shadows, where the lichen strangled the trees, and under-foot the moss hushed the tread, where we spoke in whispers, and mirth seemed a mockery, where every stick and stone seemed eloquent of disenchantment and despair, here in this valley of Dead Things we ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... development hypothesis, we ascertain, as we proceed outwards, that the course is not one of progression from the low to the high, but of descent from the high to the low. Passing northwards, we meet, where the lichen-covered land projects into the frozen ocean, with the diminutive Laps, squat, ungraceful, with their flat features surmounted by pyramidal skulls of small capacity, and, as a race, unfitted for the arts either of ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... comes slowly forward. He is fabulously old, crowned with mistletoe and clad in a long green gown edged with moss and lichen. He is blind; his white beard streams in the wind. He leans with one hand on a knotty stick and with the other on a young OAKLING, who serves as his guide. The Blue Bird is perched on his shoulder. At his approach, the other trees draw themselves ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck

... pathway and walked on mosses—soft yellow beds, run over with grey lichen, and plots of emerald ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... through several solemn gateways, and up and up endless stairs rising far above the town and the noises of humanity into a sacred region filled with innumerable tombs. On all the pavements, in all the walls, are lichen and stonecrop; and over all the, gray tint of extreme age spreads ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... ducks. Artists would find a paradise of queer, cozy gables, and corners of gardens crowded with old-fashioned flowers that matter more than all the ancient books in the museum library. They would remember Easthampton for the green velvet moss and golden lichen on its ancient roofs, the faint rainbow tints in the old, old glass of its tiny window-panes; for the pink hollyhocks painted against backgrounds of dove-gray shingles; for its sky of peculiar hyacinth blue like a vast cup inverted over wide-stretching ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)

... parasitism in the matter, it is by no means of the alga upon the animal, but of the animal, like the fungus, upon the alga. Such an association is far more complex than that of the fungus and alga in the lichen, and indeed stands unique in physiology as the highest development, not of parasitism, but of the reciprocity between the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Thus, then, the list of supposed chlorophyl containing animals with which we ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various

... thoughtfully, "I shall always like you, because we have been friends so long, and you are overgrown with the lichen of old memories and associations. But you are not very interesting in the abstract, you see; you are nice and good, but you have not heart enough to be ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

... one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and, bending over her flower-bed, would gather a "posy," as she called it, for the little boy. Sally lies in the churchyard with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen- crusted, and leaning a little within the last few years. Cottage, garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling onions,— stateliest of vegetables,—all are gone, but the breath of a marigold brings ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... no spot was more inviting, the short moss-grass before its shattered door, the lichen on its crumbling stones. From its topmost platform one saw the distant mountains, faint like spectres, and the silent ships that came and vanished; and about one's feet the pleasant farm lands and the grave, ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... klar und tief mit feuchten Augen an. Wohl und wehe zugleich, Frulein Milla!—denn keine andere sind Sie, wiewohl ich Sie nie gesehen, die treueste Freundin meiner unvergelichen Elsa.—Er reichte ihr die Hand ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel

... with tender creeping ferns—the fronds of which were so fine and close, that it seemed as if the tree-fern were wrapped up in a lovely little fern coat. Even crumbling dead trees, and decaying tree-ferns, did not look dead, because some beautiful moss, or lichen, or little ferns had clung to them, and made them more beautiful than ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley

... to base the specific name D. radiatum is wholly inadequate. It appears also by the testimony of Linne fils, that L. radiatum Linne is a lichen! and the name is so applied by Persoon. But in the Linnaean herbarium preserved at London, teste Lister, the original type of Lycoperdon radiatum L. may yet be seen! to the confusion of fils, Persoon, and other followers of ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride

... piece of golden lichen," pleaded she. "It will look so pretty among the green moss, in the cross I am going to make you ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child

... trees, which skirted park lands where deer disported themselves. Giant oaks studded the park, and the house, I judged, was built in the Elizabethan period. An air of comfort and homeliness was everywhere; the grey walls were lichen-covered, and the diamond-paned, stone-mullioned windows seemed to suggest ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking

... merestone or landmark, the initials on which were hidden under moss. Up in the tree, near the gun, there was a dead branch that had decayed in the curious manner that seems peculiar to oak. Where it joined the trunk the bark still remained, though covered with lichen, and for a foot or so out; then there was a long space where the bark and much of the wood had mouldered away; finally, near the end the bough retained its original size and the bark adhered. At the junction with the trunk and at the extremity ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies

... stealthily nears his prey; the brilliant green of tropical birds; the leaf-like form and colors of certain insects; the dried, twig-like form of many caterpillars; the bark-like appearance of tree-frogs; the harmony of the ptarmigan's summer plumage with the lichen-colored stones upon which it sits; the dusky color of creatures that haunt the night; the bluish transparency of animals which live on the surface of the sea; the gravel-like color of flat-fish that live at ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... flattened the extinguishers. About half way down the dress was full, and some cushion-moss appeared that could not be passed by. Amabel sat down and reviewed her treasures. She could part with nothing, and she had just caught sight of some cup- moss lichen for dolls' wine-glasses. But, by good luck, she was provided with a white sun-bonnet, as clean and whole as her dress; and this she took off and filled. It was less fortunate that the scale-mosses and ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... Athens. He then fixed his residence in the house of a Greek; and soon occupied himself in tracing the faded records of ancient glory upon monuments that apparently, ashamed of chronicling the deeds of freemen only before slaves, had hidden themselves beneath the sheltering soil or many coloured lichen. Under the same roof as himself, existed a being, so beautiful and delicate, that she might have formed the model for a painter, wishing; to pourtray on canvass the promised hope of the faithful in Mahomet's paradise, save that her eyes spoke too much mind for any one ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori

... the remaining handfuls of corn dribble down very slowly, while the sunshine grew warmer and the shadows of the guardian griffins more distinct upon the lichen-encrusted stones, Helen de Vallorbes sank back into meditation—Yes, unquestionably the drama was alive. But it seemed so difficult to bring it to the birth. And she wanted, very badly, to hear its first half-articulate cries and watch its first staggering footsteps. All that is so entertaining, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... along the platforms and ramps. These were covered with layers of old advertising posters which peeled and were torn by the wind, revealing still more ancient posters underneath. They seemed to have grown there by themselves like lichen. It seemed entirely reasonable to Dewforth that the writing on the older posters underneath was runic or demotic and the faces were ochre-stained skulls, but his impulse was to hurry past and ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler

... placed on two side branches just where, about 6 inches apart, they shot out of the trunk. The nest was just like a Crow's—a broad platform of sticks, but rather more neatly built, and with a number of green juniper twigs with a little moss and a good deal of grey lichen intermingled. The nest was about 11 inches across and nearly 4 inches in external height. There was a broad, shallow, central depression 5 or 6 inches in diameter and perhaps 2 inches in depth, of which an inch was filled ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume

... 1868, Professor Schwendener first propounded his views,[J] and then briefly and vaguely, that all and every individual lichen was but an algal, which had collected about it a parasitic fungal growth, and that those peculiar bodies which, under the name of gonidia, were considered as special organs of lichens, were only ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

... the nest, and found it quite close to my feet, near the stem of a stunted bayberry bush. Mrs. Sandpiper had only drawn together a few bayberry leaves, brown and glossy, a little pale green lichen, and a twig or two, and that was a pretty enough house for her. Four eggs, about as large as robins', were within, all laid evenly with the small ends together, as is the tidy fashion of the Sandpiper family. No wonder I did ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... kept its successive builders too intent on solidity to indulge their fancy. The result was an austere uniformity of design that accorded fittingly with a landscape whose beauty was all of line and whose colour like the lichen on an old wall did not flauntingly reveal its gradations of tint to the transient observer. The bleak upland airs had taught the builders to be sparing with their windows; the result of such solicitude for the comfort of the inmates was a succession ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie

... nobody could possibly tell. Nobody in the village had ever been beyond the great rusty gates leading to a dark drive of Scotch firs, though one small boy bolder than the rest had once climbed the lichen-strewn stone wall and penetrated the thick undergrowth beyond. Hence he had returned, with white face and staring eyes, with the information that great wild dogs dwelt in the thickets. Subsequently the village poacher confirmed this ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White

... me, I stayed on with uncle at the farm until he died of that bronchitis I told you of, and the little wing was built up again, and the lichen has grown on it, so that now you could hardly tell it is only forty years old; and he left me all his money, and when he died, and Whitecroft went to a distant relation, I came here to do what bits ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit

... views are thus exhibited by Sir David Brewster: "The electric spark, escaping from the wild elements around it, struck life into an elementary and reproductive germ, and sea-plants, the food of animals, first decked the rude pavement of the ocean. The lichen and the moss reared their tiny fronds on the first rocks that emerged from the deep; land-plants, evolving the various forms of fruit and flower, next arose,—the Upas and the bread-fruit tree, the gnarled ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... lichen, it is not possible at the present day to see clearly the nature of the stones which go to make up Stonehenge. For that reason only the barest outline of the monument as it appears to the unknowing eye has been given, in order that the original plan may be grasped thoroughly before entering into ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens

... Jonathan, almost as the footpath near his home, was this winding trail. On the height above was a safe rendezvous, much frequented by him and Wetzel. Every lichen-covered stone, mossy bank, noisy brook and giant oak on the way up this mountain-side, could have told, had they spoken their secrets, stories of the bordermen. The fragile ferns and slender-bladed grasses peeping from ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey

... actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life?—How many times we must say Rome and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... is. It was scorched absolutely brown, thistles—especially yellow-flowered ones—alone showing signs of life, along with a pretty, dwarf Dianthus. The rocks are covered with an orange-coloured lichen which gives them a warm colour. When lying on the top I could almost imagine myself in Scotland, if I kept my eyes above the villages and valleys, and viewed the hill-tops only. Away to the north of us was a large, pure white lagoon, shut off from the sea by a sandbar. No ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson

... herself? Did she ever tire of those long pine vistas, with the narrow strip of clearest blue between the gently waving tree-tops? The dreamy murmur of the forest gave her an exquisite pleasure. To see the bloom on the pink and grey trunks of the pines, and the sun on the moss and lichen beneath, was so deep a satisfaction to her soul that the thought that others who had been knocked about by life would not feel it too, would not enter with profoundest thankfulness into this other world of peace, never struck her at all. ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp

... higher up to the great mouldering wall of rugged sculpture and confused arcades, shattered, and gray, and grisly with heads of dragons and mocking fiends, worn by the rain and swirling winds into yet unseemlier shape, and colored on their stony scales by the deep russet-orange lichen, melancholy gold; and so, higher still, to the bleak towers, so far above that the eye loses itself among the bosses of their traceries, though they are rude and strong, and only sees like a drift of eddying black points, now closing, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin

... herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and, bending over her flower-bed, would gather a "posy," as she called it, for the little boy. Sally lies in the churchyard with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen-crusted, and leaning a little within the last few years. Cottage, garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling onions,—stateliest of vegetables,—all are gone, but the breath of a marigold brings them ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... Lichens. They seem to have been used among peasant dyers from remote ages, but apparently none of the great French dyers used them, nor are they mentioned in any of the old books on dyeing. The only Lichen dyes that are known generally among dyers are Orchil and Cudbear, and these are preparations of lichens, not the lichens themselves. They are still used in some quantity and are prepared rather elaborately. But a great many of the ordinary lichens yield very ...
— Vegetable Dyes - Being a Book of Recipes and Other Information Useful to the Dyer • Ethel M. Mairet

... was a dark brown, almost black. It contained bits of meat, and mushrooms, and slices of hard-boiled egg, and yellow Martian rock lichen. It produced, on the light tunic, a most ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper

... capital of Wessex, lay amidst its convex and concave downlands in all the brightness and warmth of a July morning. The gabled brick, tile, and freestone houses had almost dried off for the season their integument of lichen, the streams in the meadows were low, and in the sloping High Street, from the West Gateway to the mediaeval cross, and from the mediaeval cross to the bridge, that leisurely dusting and sweeping was in progress which usually ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... desire to do him honour, and to give him pleasure, his hosts had provided the rarest delicacies, and of course he felt obliged to taste them all. Some of the dishes were excellent, but many of them were rather trying to a European digestion, especially the fungus and lichen. One sort had been grown on ice in the Antarctic Sea, the whale's sinews came from the Arctic Ocean, the shark's fins from the South Sea Islands, and the birds' nests were of a quality to be found only in one particular ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey

... great central arch was no new thing, for moss and lichen enamelled its jagged edges with green and gold. Some branches loosely strewn across the road were the only signposts indicating this tragedy, though perhaps it was a story as old as the great ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... the bee adding to his golden treasure as he swung in the bells of the campanula, the green fly darting hither and thither like an animated seedling, the spider weaving her gossamer from twig to twig, the woodpecker heedfully scrutinising the lichen on the gnarled oak-hole, the passage of the wind through leaves or across grass, the motions and shadows of the clouds, and so forth. These were his golden holidays. Much of the rest of his time, when not passed in his room in his father's ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp

... sea; while beyond, and toward the ocean, islands twenty miles deep close in and shelter all. To the left go up again the perpetual hills, hills. Everywhere around the bay save here, on island and main, the immitigable gneiss hills rise bold and sudden from the water, now dimly impurpled with lichen, now in nakedness of rock surface, yet beautified in their bare severity by alternating and finely waving stripes of lightest and darkest gray,—as if to show sympathy with the billowy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... we have noticed shrines with images of little foxes before them, some clean and new, but some weather-worn and grown over with lichen. As Yosoji unpacks the lunch he tells us these are Shinto shrines put up in honour of the god of rice. It seems very appropriate to hear this now, just as we are going to fare merrily on hard-boiled eggs, a tiny ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton

... spots into orange by great beds of polytrichum, and, in sunnier nooks, deepened to a herbal green. The rocks that are scattered everywhere are of a delicate lilac, but each is variegated with spreading frill-edged plasters of gray-green lichen or orange powder-streaks and beauty-spots of black. These rocks have great power to hold the heat, so that each of them is surrounded by a little belt of heat-loving plants that could not otherwise live so high. Dwarfed representatives of the birch and willow both are here, ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton

... accustomed, the material minutiae in which it originated could be realized as by touch. It was the united products of infinitesimal vegetable causes, and these were neither stems, leaves, fruit, blades, prickles, lichen, nor moss. ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy

... chimneys and the trees drip as steadily as though they were clocks and marked the seconds perfunctorily, with no real interest in the lapse of time. For the house, with its round-shouldered Jacobean gables, its stone-cropped roof, lichen-spotted plaster, and ill-kept yew hedge, has an air of resignation to decay, well-bred but spiritless, and communicates it to the whole of its small landscape. Our old builders chose their sites for shelter rather than for ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... said she, when the latter had descended, "there's a little barrel"; she pointed to something green and lichen-covered that lay between the trunks of two trees—something that eyes less sharp than the eyes of a child might have mistaken ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... threatening even while he slept. Many furrows, produced by the emotions of a warrior life, gave it a vague resemblance to the vermiculated stone which we see in the buildings of that period; his hair, like the whitish lichen of old oaks, gray before its time, surrounded without grace a cruel brow, where religious intolerance showed its passionate brutality. The shape of the aquiline nose, which resembled the beak of a bird of prey, the black and crinkled lids of the yellow eyes, the prominent ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac

... hillside, and on both margins of the graveled way, ancient elm trees stood at regular intervals, throwing their boughs across, to unite in lifting the superb groined arches, whose fine tracery of sinuous lines were here and there concealed by clustering mistletoe—and gray lichen masses—and ornamented with bosses of velvet moss; while the venerable columnar trunks were now and then wreathed with poison-oak vines, where red trumpet flowers insolently blared defiance to the waxen ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... moss, all these lovely old churches and palaces and monuments look as if history had covered them with a kind of delicate lichen," I said, more to Mr. Barrymore than to Beechy. "And it enhances their beauty, as the lace of a bride's veil enhances ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... "There was a story in every line," said he, "a history in every check, and we are odd creatures in the glens, Count, that we could never see the rags without minding what they told. Now the tartan's in the dye-pot, and you'll see about here but crotal-colour—the old stuff stained with lichen ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... thread of blue water, laughing, babbling, brawling, whooping, leaping, gliding, and stealing down from the mountains; great boulders worn smooth and ploughed hollow by the wash of ages; wet moss and lichen on the channel walls; deep, cool dubbs; tiny reefs; little cascades of boiling foam; lines of trees like sentinels on either side, making the light dim through the overshadowing leafage; gaunt trunks torn up by winds and thrown across the stream with their heads ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine

... of the doorway remained, but the door had gone, and in its place hung a piece of tattered sacking. There was one small window, but this had been boarded over. The building was largely covered with lichen, and weeds had grown out of the mud-filling daubed in between the logs. There was something very desolate but wondrously ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum

... spot near Amanges, half shrouded in trees, stood a small hovel of the rudest construction; its roof was of turf, and its walls were blotched with lichen. The garden to this cot was run to waste, and the fence round it broken through. As the hovel was far from any road, and was only reached by a path over moorland and through forest, it was seldom visited, ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould

... river glides in grandeur at the base of its mounds; no green date groves flourish near its ruins. The jackal and the hyaena appear to shun the dull aspect of its tombs. The king of birds never hovers over the deserted waste. A blade of grass or an insect finds no existence there. The shrivelled lichen alone, clinging to the weathered surface of the broken brick, seems to glory in its universal dominion over those barren walls. Of all the desolate pictures I have ever seen that of Warka incomparably surpasses all." Surely in this case it cannot be said ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin

... dyed with bark of alder for black, bark of willow for flesh colour. A lichen growing on stones supplied their violets and crimson.[311] The lichen on the birch-tree gives a good brown; heather gives red, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... the rolling moor, cloven by that one ribbonlike stretch of uneven road, broken here and there with great masses of lichen-covered grey rock, by huge clumps of purple heather, long, glittering streaks of yellow gorse. The morning was young, and little shrouds of white mist were still hanging around. His own clothes were damp. Little beads of moisture ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... sit down among these memorials without paying some attention to the lettering on them, and always with greatest interest in those which time and weather and the corrosive lichen have made illegible. The old stones that are no longer visited, on which no fresh-gathered flower is ever laid, which mark the last resting-places of the men and women who were once the leading members of the little rustic community, and are now forgotten for ever, ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson



Words linked to "Lichen" :   reindeer moss, lichen ruber planus, crottle, crotal, ascolichen, crottal, beard moss, manna lichen, Cetraria islandica, horsehair lichen, Lichenes, lecanora, lichen planus, reindeer lichen, Iceland lichen, horsetail lichen, beard lichen, roccella, skin disorder, division Lichenes, arctic moss, basidiolichen, Cladonia rangiferina, fungus, Roccella tinctoria, skin disease



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