"Subsoil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mountain ranges change often in a single night. At one time, centuries ago, this part of Flanders, which is now so bare, was, it is pretty clear, covered by forests, the remains of which are still sometimes found beneath the subsoil inland and under the sea. When the great change came is unknown, but the process was probably gradual. At an early period, here, as in Holland, the fight against the invasions of the sea began, and the first dykes are said to have been constructed in the tenth century. ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... Nitrifying Organism in the Soil.—Three series of experiments have been made on the distribution of the nitrifying organism in the clay soil and subsoil at Rothamsted. Advantage was taken of the fact that deep pits had been dug in one of the experimental fields for the purpose of obtaining samples of the soil and subsoil. Small quantities of soil were taken from freshly-cut surfaces on the sides of these ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... in China. Joking apart, they have been found sixty-eight feet below the surface of the prairie, and often in especially dry seasons cattle would perish were not these faithful little well-diggers and pumpers constantly at work for them. In the river valleys of Arizona although the air is dry the subsoil water is near the surface of the ground. Here flourishes the mesquit tree, Prosopis juliflora, with a tale to tell well worth knowing. When a mesquit seems stunted, it is because its strength is withdrawn for the task of delving to find water; where a tree ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... of the soil and subsoil will frequently afford most useful indications respecting the value of land. It may be laid down as an axiom that a soil to be fertile must contain all the chemical ingredients which a plant can only obtain from ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... studying English agriculture. The chance was not thrown away. Cavour learnt everything about the management of a well-ordered English estate down to the minutest particulars. He admired much, especially the system of subsoil drainage, then a novelty to foreigners, but he was not carried away by the beautiful appearance of the English country so far as to think that the English farmer was in all respects ahead of the North ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... impossible, had it not been for the innumerable hills of the white ants; these are the peculiar features of these swampy countries, and the intelligence of the insects directs their architecture to a height far above the level of the highest floods. The earth used in their construction is the subsoil, brought up from a considerable depth, as the ant-hills are yellow, while the surface soil is black. The earth is first swallowed by the insect and thus it becomes mixed with some albuminous matter which converts it into a cement that resists the ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... tropical latitudes, and, during certain months in summer, the sun, in passing to the zenith, darted its perpendicular rays there. There was, therefore, an enormous quantity of imprisoned heat in this earth, of which the subsoil preserved the damp. Also, nothing could be more magnificent than this succession of forests, ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... subways and the driving of tunnels would be impracticable. Even the farmer has awakened to the value of this concentrated source of power, and he uses it for the cheap and effective uprooting of large stumps over extended areas in Oregon, while an entire acre of subsoil in South Carolina, too refractory for the plow, is broken up and made available for successful cultivation by one explosion of a series of well-placed charges of dynamite. It has also been found by ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... may attribute to some unknown cause. Perhaps the atmosphere of my cabinet and the dryness of the sand serving them for a bed have been too much for my nurslings, whose tender skins are used to the warm moisture of the subsoil. Let us try ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... with nautical stories which charmed one in the long-past days of youth. A steamer is very much the reverse. "Sam Slick," with his usual force and aptitude of illustration, says that "she goes through the water like a subsoil-plough with an eight-horse team." There is so much noise and groaning, and smoke and dirt, so much mystery also, and the ship leaves so much commotion in the water behind her. There do not seem to be any regular sailors, and in their stead a collection of ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... amphitheaters, and cover perhaps half an acre of ground. When the mine exploded at 5.45 p. m. on March 2, 1916, a thing like a great black mushroom rose from the earth. Beneath it appeared, with the ponderous momentum of these big upheavals, a white growth like the mushroom's gills. It was the chalk subsoil following in the wake of the black loam. With this black and white upheaval went up, Heaven knows, how many bodies and limbs of Germans, scattered everywhere with the rest of the debris. And the explosion sent up many graves as well as the bodies ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... interesting spot we stood awhile to note the peculiarities of the place and its position. The soil is a loose clay, deep-red or brown, impregnated with iron and, where unclothed with humus, cold and infertile, as the spontaneous aloe shows. The subsoil is laterite, also highly 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. ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... greatest chance to manifest itself. But I repeat, I cannot express an opinion upon this point. I have gone forward with you as far as I can; I stop upon the threshold of the mystery. To explore the most secret depths of the unconscious, to labor in what I have just called the subsoil of consciousness, that will be the principal task of psychology in the century which is opening. I do not doubt that wonderful discoveries await it there, as important perhaps as have been in the preceding centuries the discoveries of the physical and natural sciences. That at least is the ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... been mowed three times. Two teams were at work turning up the other, which had already been cropped once or twice. One of two horses went first, and, with a common English plough, turned an ordinary furrow. Then the other followed, of twice the force of the first, in the same furrow, with a subsoil plough held to the work beam-deep. The iron-stones and ferruginous clods turned up by this "deep tillage" would make a prairie farmer of Illinois wonder, if not shudder, at the plucky and ingenious industry which competes with his ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... New World. For feudalism, caste, the ecclesiastic traditions, though palpably retreating from political institutions, still hold essentially, by their spirit, even in this country, entire possession of the more important fields, indeed the very subsoil, of education, and of ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of State Land Boards, water rights, flood water, ditches, laterals, subsoil and seepage, the rotation of crops and general productiveness until even the cynical politician who controlled the negro vote in his ward began to realize that it was a liberal education merely to know Andy P. Symes, not to mention the distinction ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... Lily's account. For the first time in the child's life, Maurice was aware of Jacky as a possession. The tornado of the night before—the anger and fear and pity—had plowed down below the surface of his mind, and touched that subsoil of conscious responsibility for creation, the realization that, whether through love or through selfishness, the man who brings a child into this terrible, squalid, glorious world, is a creator, even as God ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... was formerly a means of locomotion adapted to the nature of the country. The waste lands were then great level plains covered with stunted bushes and dry heath. Moreover, on account of the permeability of the subsoil, all the declivities were transformed into marshes after the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... is oolite and clay, and the subsoil, which you see in the cliffs, is yellow sandstone—the loveliest, goldenest soil in the ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... which the breadth of the territorial sea is measured (e.g. the US has claimed a 12-mile contiguous zone in addition to its 12-mile territorial sea) continental shelf - the LOS Convention (Article 76) defines the continental shelf of a coastal State as comprising the seabed and subsoil of the submarine areas that extend beyond its territorial sea throughout the natural prolongation of its land territory to the outer edge of the continental margin, or to a distance of 200 nautical miles ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the volcanologist joined him in the cavern. The top surface of the ground was rolled up into waves like the sea. The sides of the hole were almost sheer. The naked rock was exposed for thirty feet. Above the rock could be seen the subsoil, and then the layer of top soil and vegetation. Dr. Bird was carefully ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... excitement about Paris," he wrote. "A levity. I suspect the gypsum in the subsoil—some as yet undescribed radiations. Suddenly the world looks brightly cynical.... None of ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... of abundant rainfall, a great distinction exists between the soil and the subsoil. The soil is represented by the upper few inches which are filled with the remnants of decayed vegetable matter and modified by plowing, harrowing, and other cultural operations. The subsoil has been ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... subsoil.—In countries of abundant rainfall, a great distinction exists between the soil and the subsoil. The soil is represented by the upper few inches which are filled with the remnants of decayed vegetable matter and modified by plowing, harrowing, and other cultural ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... encamped on the Bogan where there was a good pond of water. This abundance was the more acceptable as we had now left behind a part of the bed of this little river which for thirty miles was quite dry; the total want of water there being chiefly owing to the absorbent nature of the subsoil. We were now drawing towards its sources amongst the hills, and the same scarcity no longer prevailed. The height and girt of some of the callitris trees were very considerable. Thus we found that Australia contains some extensive forests ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... of conflict, fear and grief, When the strong hand of God, put forth in might, Plows up the subsoil of the stagnant heart And brings the imprisoned truth-seed ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... this exegetical? How glad I shall be if you can assure me that it is! But, nonsense apart and begged pardon for, pray write me a line to say how you are, directing to this pretty place. "The soil is in general a moist and retentive clay, with a subsoil or pan of an adhesive silicious brick formation; adapted to the growth of wheat, beans, and clover—requiring, however, a summer fallow (as is generally stipulated in the lease) every fourth year, etc." This is not ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... had been made to dig a tank in the garden, but the subsoil water proving too low, it had been abandoned, unfinished, with the excavated earth left piled up into a hillock. On the top of this height my father used to sit for his morning prayer, and as he sat the sun would rise at the edge of the undulating expanse which stretched away to the eastern ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... source of his liberty was another. It was his personal spontaneity, similar to that of Emerson, and his personal vitality, similar to that of nobody else. Convictions and ideas came to him, so to speak, from the subsoil. He had a prophetic sympathy with the dawning sentiments of the age, with the moods of the dumb majority. His scattered words caught fire in many parts of the world. His way of thinking and feeling represented the true America, and represented in a measure the whole ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of subsoil in it.—The explanation is, of course, that in a great many thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest our attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... hard corn is to subsoil it with a hatchet, though a little judicious paring is good; soft corn sometimes does the pairing itself, though not judiciously. Soft corn is sometimes called sweet corn, on the principle, "sweet are the uses of adversity." The variety of this vegetable cultivated by roosters is called ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... when the island was merely the home of farmers and fishermen, a shipowner in need of easily handled ballast found that the subsoil contained just the thing he wanted. By turning up the thin surface he came upon a stratum of small, square slabs of rock rather like cakes of soap. These were easily lifted and easily carted ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... illustrious victims suffice for them. But the Second of December had its refinements of cruelty; it required in addition petty victims. Its appetite for extermination extended to the poor and to the obscure, its anger and animosity penetrated as far as the lowest class; it created fissures in the social subsoil in order to diffuse the proscription there; the local triumvirates, nicknamed "mixed mixtures," served it for that. Not one head escaped, however humble and puny. They found means to impoverish the indigent, ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... stillness of what one sees is in marked contrast to the turmoil of shells passing overhead. The only movement is the cloud of smoke and earth that marks the burst of a shell. Here and there long white lines are visible, when a trench has brought the chalky subsoil up to the top, but the number of trenches seen is very small compared to the number that exist, for one cannot see into the valleys, and the top of the ground is an unhealthy place to choose for seating a trench. The woods are pointed ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... which this example was taken was twelve inches deep; it abounded to the eye in vegetable matter, and was siliceous to the touch. There were no traces of phosphates or of animal matter, and doubtful traces of lime and potash. The subsoil of clay gave only 5.7 per cent. of water, and 5.55 of organic matter. The above analysis was conducted during the rainy month of September, and the sample is an average one of the surface-soil at 6000 to 10,000 feet. There is, I think, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... even oaks and other usually slow growing forest trees have covered the land, making shoots by three feet in a season, and throwing out roots well qualified, by their number and length, to derive from the subsoil abundant nourishment, in proportion as the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... is lost in such questions, but finds no answer to them. To discover the false seed of poesy which lies in those heads and fructifies in those lives, it is necessary to dig into them; and when we do that we soon come to a thin subsoil beneath the surface. The Parisian shopkeeper nurtures his soul on some hope or other, more or less attainable, without which he would doubtless perish. One dreams of building or managing a theatre; another longs for the honors ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... legume mainly grown as animal feed. On favorable soil it develops a deep root system, sometimes exceeding ten feet. Alfalfa draws heavily on subsoil minerals so it will be as rich or poor in nutrients as the subsoil it grew in. Its average C/N is around 12:1 making alfalfa useful to compensate for larger quantities of less potent material. Sacked alfalfa meal or pellets are usually less expensive (and being "stemmy," ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... Yorkshire folk were loth to put their money underground, and it was hard to make them believe that the real cause of the frequent epidemics and fevers in Haworth was such as could be cured by an effective system of subsoil drainage. It was cheaper and easier to lay the blame at the doors of Providence. So the parson preached in vain. Well might he preach, for his own house was in the ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... should be laid deep enough in the ground to be secure from frost; but to be most effective it should not be over fourteen to sixteen inches below the surface, hence sub-irrigation cannot be used very successfully in the Northern states. In a sandy loam soil with a clay subsoil it works best at sixteen ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... meant to make an exhaustive study of them all; but sermons and parish calls and funerals, and that little affair of Mrs. Samuel Nute, have forced him, by a process of which we all know something, to forego his projected subsoil ploughing and make such hasty preparation ...
— Saint Patrick - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... the south of Ireland—the moory bog—varies in depth from nine inches to three feet, below which there is a clayey or sandy subsoil. On the average, about L4 per statute acre is required to bring it from a state of nature to one of cultivation, and then it will fetch a rent of from 5s. to 10s. per ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... much labor put on this piece of land, as it was first reduced to a level by removing the soil and subsoil, and levelling the gravelly bottom; then returning the subsoil and soil to the top. Walks were next laid out with great care, and flower beds made. A border was also dug for the expected new greenhouse, and filled with rich soil and compost, and ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... it, and be enabled thereby to withstand droughts and cold winters. The best means of deepening the soil, as explained in Chapter IV, is by tile-draining; but it can also be accomplished to some extent by the use of the subsoil plow and by trenching. Since the lawn cannot be refitted, however, the subsoil is likely to fall back into a hard-pan in a few years if it has been subsoiled or trenched, whereas a good tile-drain affords a permanent amelioration of the under soil. Soils that are naturally loose and porous may ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... the hill for hundreds and hundreds of feet along this side had been ruthlessly rent from its place and flung broadcast everywhere, and, in the chaos he beheld, Buck calculated that hundreds of thousands of tons of the blackened rock and subsoil had been dislodged by ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... except those large areas covered by rocky mountains. The best lands lie mainly at the heads of inlets and mouths of the larger streams. There are occasional tracts of swampy lands containing a deep soft fibrous deposit resembling peat. A clayey subsoil was seen in a few places near Cape Ball on the ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... upstairs chamber. But to this subterranean room no murmur from the upper world ever penetrated. When I had entered it and closed the door, I was surrounded by the silence of the tomb. In order to prevent the dampness of the subsoil from penetrating the chamber, the walls had been laid in hydraulic cement and were very thick, and the floor was likewise protected. In order that the room might serve also as a vault equally proof against violence and flames, for the storage of valuables, I had roofed it with stone slabs hermetically ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... is evidently on the increase, for M. Duvau, at the time of our visit, was excavating extensive additional cellarage. The subsoil at Varrains being largely composed of marl, which is much softer than the tufa of the Saint-Florent coteau, necessitated the roofs of the new galleries being worked in a particular form in order to avoid ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... apple prefers a rather strong soil, neither very heavy nor very light. Subsoil is rather more important than surface soil, although the latter should be friable and easily worked. The apple follows good timber successfully. Heavy clay soils are apt to be too cold, compact, and ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... waters had dissolved in their passage, crystallising on the limestone, would corrode and undermine everything, if precautions were not taken. When the inundation was over, the subsidence of the water which impregnated the subsoil caused in course of time settlements in the most solid foundations: the walls, disturbed by the unequal sinking of the ground, got out of the perpendicular and cracked; this shifting displaced the architraves which held the columns together, and the stone slabs ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... impress them much more than do the able and correct drawing of adults. For although theirs are incomplete they add to them a thousand things of their own seeing and imagining; and they add to them also the thousand things that grow in the deep subsoil of their consciousness—the things which no brush would be ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... houses, occasional streaks of red, will drop from its track, and it will leave a wake, six or seven times as wide as a high road, from which all soil, all cultivation, all semblance to cultivated or cultivatable land will have disappeared. It will not even be a track of soil. It will be a track of subsoil laid bare. It will be a flayed strip of nature. In the course of its fighting the monster may have to turnabout. It will then halt and spin slowly round, grinding out an arena of desolation with a diameter equal to its length. If it has to retreat and advance again these streaks and holes of ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... states, had been there from time immemorial. He continues: "One of the wildest glades of the wood at Misdon, perforated by galleries and cells, out of which came and went a mysterious society, was called 'The Great City.' The gloomy Breton forests were servants and accomplices of rebellion. The subsoil of every forest was a sort of sponge, pierced and traversed in all directions by a secret highway of mines, cells and galleries. Each of these blind cells could shelter five or six men. Usually the cover, made of moss and branches, ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... be made larger than for any other tree, because its roots are wide-spreading, like its branches. The earth should be thrown out to the depth of twenty inches, and four or five feet square, for an ordinary-sized tree. This, however, will not do on a heavy clay subsoil, for it would form a basin to hold water and injure the tree. A ditch, as low as the bottom of the holes, should extend from tree to tree, and running out of the orchard, constructed in the usual method of drains, and, whatever be the subsoil, the trees will flourish. ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... little more in this direction than such a conformation of the surface as will prevent water from standing on the footway when the ground is frozen. At all other times it sinks naturally away into the earth. It is much more often the case that the character of the soil or subsoil prevents a settling away of water, or that subterranean oozing from higher ground keeps the earth throughout the spring and autumn, and after heavy rains in summer, damp, and often sloppy. Wherever ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... roads! Now it was a strip of corduroy, now a piece of well-graded elevation with clay subsoil and gravel surface, now a neglected stretch full of dangerous holes; and worst of all, running through the great forests, long pieces of road from which the stumps had been only partly extracted, and where the sunlight barely penetrated. Here ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... beyond are to be seen through the thin and gaping walls of the streets, and there, overturned and defaced by shell-bursts and the crude subsoil thrown out from dug-outs, a few ragged shrubs survive. A rustic bower is lumbered with empty bottles, meat tins, a bird-cage, and ugly litter and fragments. It is the flies which find these gardens pleasant. Theirs is now the only voice ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... real people are really doing, when one thinks of it, are Soap, Tooth-brushes, Subsoil Pipes, Wall Papers, Razors, Mattresses, Suspenders, Tiles, Shoes, Pots, and Kettles. Of course the first thing that happened to us, to Lim and to me (as any one might guess, in a little quiet job like making over the earth), was that we found we had ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... range of soils, that it is really easier to list those on which it should not be set than it is to enumerate those on which it may be planted. Of the soils not adapted to it, deep sandy lands, soils underlaid with quicksand close to the surface, soils with hardpan subsoil, wet, sour, poorly-drained lands, and stiff, pasty clays, may ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... Plain is known for it, and I hear that all the ground that troops are now occupying is to be ploughed up when we leave. As far as that goes we have ploughed it up a bit already, but a systematic ploughing will make it more regular. The subsoil is only four inches, then you come to chalky clay. The tent-pegs when they are taken from the ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... vegetable marrows: In the sunniest part of the garden—the middle of the tennis-court is as good as anywhere else—dig a trench ten feet deep and about six wide, taking care to keep the top soil separate from the subsoil. Into this trench tip about six hundredweight of a compost made up of equal parts of hyperphosphate of lime, ground bones, nitrate of soda and basic-slag. The basic-slag should be obtained direct from the iron-foundry. That kept ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... the depth of drains, it is shown, that in order that they may draw, they should never be shallower than thirty inches, and should always leave a depth of eighteen inches clear of the draining materials, in order that the subsoil and trench plough may have full freedom of action, without risk of injury to the drain; while of the use of soles ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... conductors for the protection of life and property were soon brought out. These, in their simplest form, are tapes or stranded wires of iron or copper attached to the walls of the building. The lower end of the conductor is soldered to a copper plate buried in the moist subsoil, or, if the ground is rather dry, in a pit containing coke. Sometimes it is merely soldered to the water mains of the house. The upper end rises above the highest chimney, turret, or spire of the edifice, ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... correspondingly advanced; the cherries under glass quite over. One of the latest improvements is a second flower garden to the west of the house, in the English landscape style. In rear of this garden to the north, there existed formerly a cedar swamp, which deep subsoil draining with tiles has converted into a grass meadow of great beauty; a belt of pine, spruce, tamarack, and some deciduous trees, thinned towards the south-west, let in a glimpse of the St. Lawrence and the high-wooded Point Levi shores, shutting out the view of the St. Lewis ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... glance revealed no sign of the emergency we were facing. The Lower Brule was a broad expanse of green grass and grain, rippling gently in the breeze like water on a quiet sea. Sufficient moisture from the snow and early rain had been retained in the subsoil for vegetation. But we needed water. With the hot weather the dams were going dry. There had been increased demands for water this summer, and there had not been the late torrential rains to fill the dams as there had been the ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... destructive. Malaria and miasms offer to the unpractised eye of the military officer no perceptible signs of their presence. The camp is liable to be pitched and the men required to sleep in malarious spots, or on the damp earth, or over a wet subsoil, exposed to noisome and dangerous exhalations from which disease may arise. Pringle says, that, in 1798, the regiment which had 52 per cent, sick in two months, and 94 per cent, sick in one season, "were cantoned on marshes whence noxious exhalations emanated."[51] ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... special reading for the work of each Sunday. Week by week a conscientious minister has to do an immense amount of miscellaneous reading in commentaries, dictionaries, etc., in connection with the discourses in hand; but, in addition to this, he should be enriching the subsoil of his mind by larger efforts in wider fields. It is far from easy to carry this on in a busy pastorate; and it is almost impossible unless the foundation has been laid ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... court is to be, the first question to consider is proper drainage. If the subsoil is sandy the chances are that the natural soakage will take care of the surplus water, but on the contrary, if the court is at the bottom of a hill or in a low place where clay predominates, it is necessary to provide ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... of unprecedented faith, God's faith, Thy soil, thy very subsoil, all upheav'd, The general inner earth so long so sedulously draped over, now hence for what it is boldly laid bare, Open'd by thee to heaven's ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman |
