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Arable   /ˈɛrəbəl/   Listen
Arable

adjective
1.
(of farmland) capable of being farmed productively.  Synonyms: cultivable, cultivatable, tillable.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Arable" Quotes from Famous Books



... is ignorant of the difficulties that are met with in the conversion of untilled land into arable and productive land. These difficulties are so great, that usually an isolated man would perish before he could put the soil in a condition to yield him even the most meagre living. To that end are needed the united and combined efforts ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... right, leaving a space of firm ground, varying, from three to one mile in, width, between it and the river. At the back of this swamp, again, which may be about six or eight miles across, come up the waters of Lake Pontchartrain, and thus a neck of arable land is formed, stretching for some way above the city. The whole of these morasses are covered as far as the Detour with tall reeds; a little wood now succeeds, skirting the open country, but the wood measures no more than one mile in depth, when it again gives place to reeds. Such ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig

... portion of Canada, alone quite sufficient, if pushed to its utmost, the furnish grain for the whole continent of America. We spent one night for rest and observation at a point near the mouth of the Bow River, and then proceeded to Calgary. This is the westernmost point where there is arable and grazing lands before beginning the ascent of the Rocky mountains. Here we inspected a sheep ranch owned by a gentleman from England. It is located at Cochrane, a few miles west of Calgary. It was managed by a young gentleman of most pleasing manners and great intelligence, ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... French only began yesterday. And they have a harder task before them, for in the interval the Arabs have arrived in the country. It is they, with their roving and pastoral habits, who have done the mischief, changing arable land into pasture, which grows ever poorer, and finally desert. The fertility of these regions may be said to have been annihilated by the goats of a nomad race, whose faith has made it improvident ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas

... valleys unfolding to the ocean, and of small farms fertile enough when they were sheltered from the prevailing wind; but on the southern confines of the parish the soil became shallow and stony, the arable fields degenerated into a rough open pasturage full of gorse and foxgloves and gradually widening patches of heather, until finally the level monochrome of the Rhos absorbed the last vestiges of cultivation, and the ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie

... land under cultivation is considerably larger, the arable lands consisting of about twelve per cent of the total area, and in Sweden as in Norway, the agricultural products are more than those from shipping, lumber, and ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough

... hospital was afterwards called Spittle, and some of the stones are still remaining in Spittle-field. It was left by Agnes Pudding, with eight acres of arable land adjoining it. ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips

... later nineteenth century, the utmost importance attaches to Anglo-Saxon arrangements respecting local government and administration. The smallest governmental unit was the township, comprising normally a village surrounded by arable lands, meadows, and woodland. The town-moot was a primary assembly of the freemen of the village, by which, under the presidency of a reeve, the affairs of the township were administered. A variation of the township was the burgh, ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... forest and morass, plentifully supplied with water in the form of rivers, lakes, and marshes, and broken up by numerous patches of cultivation. The southern half is, as it were, the other side of the pattern—an immense expanse of rich, arable land, broken up by occasional patches of sand or forest. The imaginary undulating line separating those two regions starts from the western frontier about the 50th parallel of latitude, and runs in a northeasterly direction till it enters the Ural ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... Brandenburg;" looking into everything with his own eyes; making, I can well fancy, innumerable crooked things straight; reducing more and more that famishing dog-kennel of a Brandenburg into a fruitful arable field. His portraits represent a square-headed, mild-looking, solid gentleman, with a certain twinkle of mirth in the serious eyes of him. Except in those Hussite wars for Kaiser Sigismund and the Reich, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... healthful living standard, that the destructive and disrupting impact of the massacre brought a period of severe famine and sickness. After the raid the surviving colonists had to abandon many of the outlying plantations with their arable fields, livestock, and supplies. And having had the routine of life interrupted, the settlers—their numbers unfortunately increased by a large supply of new immigrants, sent by ambitious planners in England—came to the winter of 1622-23 ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes

... century, Scotland was a very poor country. It consisted mostly of mountain and moorland; and the little arable land it contained was badly cultivated. Agriculture was almost a lost art. "Except in a few instances," says a writer in the 'Farmers' Magazine' of 1803, "Scotland was little better than a barren waste." Cattle ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles

... another revolution resulted in a new redistribution. Such suspicions could hardly beget the patience essential for the development of agriculture. And yet this was the very time when farming must be encouraged. Large parts of the arable land had been abandoned to grazing during the preceding century because of the importation of the provincial stipendiary grain, and Italy had lost the custom of raising the amount of food that her population required. As a result, the younger Pompey's control ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... other in Egypt, had its origin in the formation of a canal for irrigation, caused by an increased demand for arable land, in consequence of the augmentation of the population. It was, in its origin, one of the numerous canals which spread the waters of the Nile for the irrigation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... with a mountain torrent. At first, the task was too heavy, and the fitful-tempered brook, and the swamp-like region it encompassed, were left for years to their old wild instincts. At last the increasing demands of my business made it necessary to have more arable land, and I saw that, if I could keep it from being overwhelmed with water and gravel, the alluvial meadow was ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe

... passed in three hours; a rapid journey, but agreeable merely by its rapidity, for the whole neighbourhood presents only widely-extended plains, turf-bogs and moorlands, sandy places and heaths, interspersed with a little meadow or arable land. From the nature of the soil, the water in the ditches and fields looked black ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer

... villages, and not even a ring of nomad tents is visible in the distance on the wide stretches of arable land. At infrequent intervals our motor passed a train of laden mules, or a group of peasants about a well, and sometimes, far off, a fortified farm profiled its thick-set angle-towers against the sky, or a white koubba ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton

... soil, of rich minerals, of navigable rivers. The very fact that it has so long sustained such a vast population suggests the richness of its resources. There are said to be 600,000,000 acres of arable soil, and so thriftily is it cultivated that many parts of the Empire are almost continuous gardens and fields. Four hundred and nineteen thousand square miles are believed to be underlaid with coal. Baron von Richthofen thinks that 600,000,000,000 tons of it are anthracite, and that the single ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN

... there the solitary palm-tree looks down, it reached to the Mediterranean Sea, from 24 deg. 3' N. to 31 deg. 37' N. The river runs in a valley, bounded on one side by the eastern and on the other by the Libyan chain of mountains, and of which the average breadth is about seven miles, the arable land, however, not averaging more than five and a half. At the widest place it is ten and three-quarters, at the narrowest two. The entire surface of irrigated and fertile land in the Delta is 4500 square miles; the arable ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... happier he became, and plans for the land rose to his mind each better than the last; to plant all his fields with hedges along the southern borders, so that the snow should not lie under them; to divide them up into six fields of arable and three of pasture and hay; to build a cattle yard at the further end of the estate, and to dig a pond and to construct movable pens for the cattle as a means of manuring the land. And then eight hundred acres of wheat, three hundred ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... peasantry of England—and it is here that the revolution was accomplished—had been largely dispossessed and pauperized under Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, while the development of the wool-growing industry had restricted the arable land to a point where it no longer gave employment to the mass of field labourers. The first blast of factory production threw out of work the whole body of cottage weavers, smiths, craftsmen; and the result was a great mass of men, women, ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... bickering down the winding way of a stream gave life and coolness to the warm silence. Thick among the tree-trunks on one side grew cornel bushes and sloes, making a solid mass of underbrush, while on the other side there was an opening through which one might catch sight of a long meadow, and arable fields beyond, and even of blue hills along ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson

... di campagna is an obscure individual, usually very honest, very intelligent, very active, and very rich. He undertakes to farm several thousand acres of land, pasture or arable as may be, which the prince would never be able to farm himself, because he neither knows how, nor has the means to do so. Upon this princely territory the farmer lets loose, in the most disrespectful manner, droves of bullocks, and cows, and horses, and flocks of sheep. ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About

... vineyard, vinery; orangery^; farm &c (abode) 189. V. cultivate; till the soil; farm, garden; sow, plant; reap, mow, cut; manure, dress the ground, dig, delve, dibble, hoe, plough, plow, harrow, rake, weed, lop and top; backset [U.S.]. Adj. agricultural, agrarian, agrestic^. arable, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... will become the most valuable in the State, I may say, with perfect confidence, in the whole Union; unrivalled water power, magnificent pastures and arable land capable of producing crops of corn such as the world has never seen. All that is required to develop their resources is capital and labour, and labour will always follow where capital leads the ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston

... boast of in the way of architecture, except its rusty vanes and twisted chimneys. A few out-houses, for the accommodation of the negroes, were nigh; and nearer to the river, there were barns and stables, of dimensions and materials altogether superior to those that the appearance of the arable land, or the condition of the small farm, would seem to render necessary. The periagua, in which the proprietor had made his passage across the outer bay, lay at a small wooden wharf ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper

... Scots, granted to John Smith the hermitage in the forest of Kilgur, "which formerly belonged in heritage to Hugh Cominch the Hermit, and was resigned by him, with the croft and the green belonging to it, and three acres of arable land." ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley

... farm contains two hundred and two acres of arable land, good land, no better, in fact, in the country. Besides, we have twenty acres of wooded land and a tenant house. This machinery is the best that we could find. We have two men—Giles and Ephraim; they are the best hands we know of, for ...
— The Mystery of Monastery Farm • H. R. Naylor

... were captured by Narmer. These were the seats of the royal residence in various parts of the country. Behind their walls was the king's house, and no doubt also a town of nobles and retainers, while the peasants lived on the arable land without. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall

... had shown how uniformity in discontent may bring forth political readjustments. The new region of the late eighties lay west of Missouri and Iowa, where the railroads had stimulated settlement along the farther edge of the arable prairies. Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and the Dakotas had passed into a boom period about 1885, and had pushed new farms into regions that could not in ordinary years produce a crop. Only blinded enthusiasts believed that the climate ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson

... comes in the Merced, much the largest of the tributaries of the San Joaquin. The lands along and between the tributaries of the San Joaquin and the lake of Buena Vista form a fine pastoral region, with a good proportion of arable land, and a very inviting field for emigration. The whole of this region has been but imperfectly explored; enough, however, is known to make it certain that it is one of the most desirable regions ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant

... a class far commoner in Galloway sixty years ago than now. He was a "bonnet laird" of the best type, and his farm, which included all kinds of soil—arable and pasture, meadow and moor, hill pasture and wood—was of the value of about L300 a year, a sum sufficient in those days to make him a man of substance and consideration in ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett

... enabled, by its vast extent of arable land, as well as by its cheap conveyance and skilful handling of freights, to sweep into the German markets agricultural products of various sorts, especially meats, and to undersell the native German producers. This naturally vexed the landed proprietors, ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... wilderness to the mail. I rode about seventy miles without break, through the desolate forest, in order to reach here, and before me lie more than a hundred miles more before one gets to provinces of arable land. Not a city, not a village, far and wide; only single settlers in wide huts, with a little barley and potatoes, who find rods of land to till, here and there between dead trees, pieces of rock, and bushes. Picture to yourself about five hundred square miles of such ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... Where the thrifty, pig-tailed Chinese peasant once cultivated broad and level fields in such river valleys, he is now able to rescue only a few half-hearted patches by piling the rock in heaps and saving a few intervening arable ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... the great cattle-raising ranches in Colorado. This, the youngest State in the Union, a Territory until quite recently, has an area of about 68,000,000 acres, a great portion of which, though rich in mineral wealth, is worthless either for stock or arable farming, and the other or eastern part is so dry that crops can only be grown profitably where irrigation is possible. This region is watered by the South Fork of the Platte and its affluents, and, ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird

... landscape of Italy has lost so little of its original appearance in the course of history as Calabria." This may apply to the mountains; but the lowlands have suffered hideous changes.] a region of gentle undulations, the hill-tops covered with forest-growth, the valleys partly arable and partly pasture. Were it not for the absence of heather with its peculiar mauve tints, the traveller might well imagine himself in Scotland. There is the same smiling alternation of woodland and meadow, the same ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... cash; his golden hatchet into fine angels, curious ducats, substantial ridders, spankers, and rose-nobles; then with them purchases a good number of farms, barns, houses, out-houses, thatched houses, stables, meadows, orchards, fields, vineyards, woods, arable lands, pastures, ponds, mills, gardens, nurseries, oxen, cows, sheep, goats, swine, hogs, asses, horses, hens, cocks, capons, chickens, geese, ganders, ducks, drakes, and a world of all other necessaries, and ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... the Border, we should recognise little but the familiar hills and mountains. The rivers, in the plains, overflowed their present banks; dense forests of oak and pine, haunted by great red deer, elks, and boars, covered land that has long been arable. There were lakes and lagoons where for centuries there have been fields of corn. On the oldest sites of our towns were groups of huts made of clay and wattle, and dominated, perhaps, by the large stockaded house of the tribal prince. In the lochs, natural islands, or artificial islets made ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang

... people, they had little by little been left a prey to their own faults in order that their unworthy mistress might plead their disorders as an excuse for her tyranny. Agriculture languished, and the minute subdivision of arable land finally rendered its tillage ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... The arable soil of Jaffna is generally of a deep red colour, from the admixture of iron, and, being largely composed of lime from the comminuted coral, it is susceptible of the highest cultivation, and produces ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... feat the ladies had donned homespun dresses kept for such excursions, and the gentlemen were suitably provided. Winding through an arable field they descended the narrow path that led into the thicket, and were soon pushing and cutting their way against the stout lattice of vines. When far into the interior they found themselves in a natural arbor free from undergrowth ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts

... country was not depopulated, although very much of the arable land was abandoned for agricultural purposes. A farm of a hundred acres might have ten acres under cultivation, this being as much as the farmer could "keep up," as was commonly stated. This meant that all of the farm manure and other refuse that could be secured from the entire farm ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins

... that the maple sugar-boiler is also at work. But as for farming as a regular vocation, there is not much of it here. At any rate, no man by that means accumulates a fortune from this thin and rocky soil, all whose arable parts have long since ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville

... Devonshire coast; and then to Lusia's home in Somersetshire. I never saw her look better or happier. De Soyres pretty well; their little girl grown a pretty and strong child; their baby said to be very thriving. They live in a fine, fruitful, and picturesque country: green pastures, good arable, clothed with trees, bounded with hills that almost reach mountain dignity, and in sight of the Bristol Channel which is there all but Sea. I fancy the climate is moist, and I should think the trees are too many for health: but I was there too little ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald

... vast forests of Virginia have much to do with its peculiar temperature. As we travel from place to place we are strongly impressed with the vastness of the wilderness, which covers thousands of acres of as fine arable soil as can be found on the continent. How different is this from the notions we had formed of the Old Dominion, while reading of its early settlements, and of its great agricultural advantages. But when we look into ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier

... officially estimated that the arable lands of Chile comprise about twenty-five millions of acres (slightly over 39,000 sq. m.), or very nearly one-eighth of its total area. The desert regions of the north include comparatively large areas of plains and gently sloping surfaces, traversed by ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... and Cat were essential. For their fertile lands yielded the supplies of grain which Norway required; and when the Norse were driven from the arable lands of the Moray seaboard, Orkney and Cat became still more necessary to them and their folk at home. Cat the Scots could not then reach, for the Norse held the sea, while on land Pictish Moray, ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray

... opened the Governor and several others went to the new trading post and town, Mont Real. There really seemed more advantages here than at Quebec. There was a long stretch of arable land, plenty of fruit trees, if they were wild; a good port, and more ease in catching the traders as they came along. There, too, stray Indians often brought in a few choice furs, which they traded for various trifles, ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas

... long in almost every part of this wonderful land, for conditions of soil and climate are essentially everywhere the same, and capital is finding out how to store in and bring from the fastnesses of the mountains rivers of clear water taken at such elevations that the whole arable surface can be irrigated. The development of the country has only ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner

... the fishing-boat—which, as I said, in the architecture of the sea represents the cottage, more especially the pastoral or agricultural cottage, watchful over some pathless domain of moorland or arable, as the fishing-boat swims, humbly in the midst of the broad green fields and hills of ocean, out of which it has to win such fruit as they can give, and to compass with net or drag such flocks as it may find,—next to this ocean-cottage ranks in interest, it seems to me, the small, ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin

... passing in single file through the inn, their backs bending under their huge burdens. Pigs and fowls and dogs, and a stray cat, were foraging for crumbs under the table. Through the open doorways you saw the paddy-fields under water and the terraced hills, with every arable yard under cultivation. The air was hot and enervating. "The country of the clouds," as the Chinese term the province of Szechuen, does not belie its name. An elderly woman was in charge of the oven, and toddled about on her deformed feet as if she were walking on her heels. ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison

... falling fortunes. Some trees were already dropping their leaves; the greater part standing in all the varied splendour which the late frosts had given them. The road, an excellent one, sloped gently up and down across a wide arable country, in a state of high cultivation, and now showing all the rich variety of autumn. The reddish buckwheat patches, and fine wood-tints of the fields where other grain had been; the bright green of young rye or winter wheat, then soberer-coloured ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell

... home on his farm thirty slaves, besides other serving-people. He gave his slaves a certain day's work; but after it he gave them leisure, and leave that each should work in the twilight and at night for himself, and as he pleased. He gave them arable land to sow corn in, and let them apply their crops to their own use. He laid upon each a certain quantity of labour to work themselves free by doing it; and there were many who bought their freedom in this ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson

... amusingly enough, sank away into vaster remoteness. There were moments in which Bedient almost believed there was a little garden of his planting in the heart of the lustrous lady; moments, even, when he thought it was extending broader and broader upon an arable surface. Again, some bitterness from the world seemed to blast the young growths—and the delicate fragrance was far-blown. It was these reactions, and his sensitiveness to the beauty of the romance, which put off from day to ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort

... covers. Nuneham is the best natural pheasant preserve in the Thames Valley, except Wytham, Lord Abingdon's place, above Oxford. The woods lie roughly in a ring round the park, in which the pheasants sun themselves. Outside these woods are arable fields with quantities of feed, and all along the front lies the river, which the pheasants do not often cross. The most striking sport at Nuneham is the driving of the island by the lock cottage. Every ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish

... for all is to become a reality, this immense capital—cities, houses, pastures, arable lands, factories, highways, education—must cease to be regarded as private property, for the monopolist to dispose ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin

... for, but by making an enclosure about it with a hedge, which I did with a great deal of toil; and the more, because it required a great deal of speed; the creatures daily spoiling my corn. However, as my arable land was but small, suited to my crop, I got it totally well fenced in about three weeks time, and shooting some of the creatures in the day-time, I set my dog to guard it in the night, tying him up to a stake at the gate, where he would stand ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe

... sense at least, for a lovelier farm there is not on the whole of the wide surface of the Empire State. What does not always happen in this wicked, world, it was as good as it was handsome. It consisted of three hundred and seventy-two acres of first-rate land, either arable, or of rich river bottom in meadows, and of more than a hundred of rocky mountain side, that was very tolerably covered with wood. The first of our family who owned the place had built a substantial one-story stone house, ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper

... he has many; those thy pride may quell: And 'tis his fault to love those sons too well, Or, in reward of thy victorious hand, Has Troy proposed some spacious tract of land An ample forest, or a fair domain, Of hills for vines, and arable for grain? Even this, perhaps, will hardly prove thy lot. But can Achilles be so soon forgot? Once (as I think) you saw this brandish'd spear And then the great AEneas seem'd to fear: With hearty haste from Ida's mount ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... occupation of the people of the hill country; and in the summer season, when the lower districts are parched with drought, tens of thousands of sheep may be seen covering the roads leading to the Upper Cevennes, whither they are driven for pasture. There is a comparatively small breadth of arable land in the district. The mountains in many places contain only soil enough to grow juniper-bushes. There is very little verdure to relieve the eye—few turf-clad slopes or earth-covered ledges to repay the tillage of the farmer. Even the mountains ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles

... capital and common centre not only for the roads, but for steam navigation around the coasts extending in each direction about 900 miles. The coast country affords the best prospects for the agriculturist, but the arable spots therein, being of difficult access by land, his success would depend much on immediate means of communication with Sydney by water and, on the facility his position would thus afford of shipping his produce to ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... "I don't worry my 'ead about him. I've got too much to do." And he went off into technicalities concerning the abundance of charlock on the arable land of Pym. He called it "garlic." I saw that it was typical of Bates that he should have too much to do. I reflected that his was the calling which ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford

... grace was granted to the Catholics, by which they were allowed to take a lease of fifty acres of bog, and half an acre of arable land for a house; but this holding should not be within a mile of any town. In 1773 an attempt was made to tax absentees; but as they were the principal landowners, they easily defeated the measure. A pamphlet ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... of debilitating superstitions that not only retarded progress but were positively injurious to both man and material, as it had to do with the introduction of rational ideas. The rapid increase of the world's population and the very general occupancy of arable lands throughout the world, presupposes that the maximum of food production will soon be reached. A liberal and general diffusion of scientific information among agriculturists alone can augment the productive power of the soil and at the same time conserve its fertility for the support ...
— A Broader Mission for Liberal Education • John Henry Worst

... Chippenham little less, as appears by the poor's books there. Inclosures are for the private, not for the public, good. For a shepherd and his dog, or a milk-maid, can manage meadow-land, that upon arable, employed the hands ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey

... the village; between ourselves and the heath and pine wood there was one miserable shanty, worthy of the poorest potato patch in Ireland. It was inhabited by a ragged ruffian of the name of E——, whose small domain we sometimes saw undergoing arable processes by the joint labor of his son and heir, a ragged ruffian some sizes smaller than himself, and of a half-starved jackass, harnessed together to the plow he was holding; occasionally the team was composed of the quadruped and a tattered and ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... tree; the river dashes over its ledge of rock in a foaming flood, runs shallow and rapid between green woods, and all about the town there are breezy pastures where the stumps are still standing, and arable lands well cleared. The little town itself has a thriving look. Its public buildings and its villas have risen, as by the sweep of an enchanter's wand, in these backwoods to the south of the ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall

... growing out of and connected with the character of their several locations, should be regarded. Some are upon reservations most fit for grazing, but without flocks or herds; and some on arable land, have no agricultural implements. While some of the reservations are double the size necessary to maintain the number of Indians now upon them, in a few cases, perhaps, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... the use of these public lands as the urban element became more and more preponderant. It seems that while there are boroughs with common pasture only, there has been found no instance of a borough having arable and meadow allotments, and no common pasture. The inference is that, as the community grew more addicted to mercantile pursuits, they were less able to devote themselves to the cares of husbandry, and, accordingly, ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell

... demesne not falsely is Mentula deemed rich, who has everything in it of such excellence, game preserves of every kind, fish, meadows, arable land and ferals. In vain: the yield is o'ercome by the expense. Wherefore I admit the wealth, whilst everything is wanting. We may praise the demesne, but its owner is a ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... was across arable land, and was ploughed up with the rest of the field every autumn, after which it was trodden out afresh. The thaw had so loosened the soft earth, that lumps of stiff mud were lifted by his feet at every leap he took, and flung against him ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy

... actually have of weather forces can be seen from the fact that at present we do not even know exactly how rain begins.[58] Learning to predict it and to modify it, through space application, might help slow down the soil erosion of arable land—that "geological inevitability * * * which man can only hasten or postpone."[59] It is noteworthy that the two leading nations in space research, the United States and the U.S.S.R., are among the most affected by ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics

... kindly river did the work of a million men and made it possible to feed the teeming population of the first large cities of which we have any record. It is true that all the arable land was not in the valley. But a complicated system of small canals and well-sweeps carried water from the river-level to the top of the highest banks and an even more intricate system of irrigation trenches spread it throughout ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... a wood-bird; the Swedish blue-throated one lives in marshes and arable fields. I have never seen a robin in really ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin

... only glens of any size. The climate is mild and healthful, fuchsias and other plants flowering even in winter, and neither snow nor frost being of long continuance, and less rain falling than in many parts of the western coast. Some two-thirds of the area, mostly in the centre and south, are arable, yielding excellent crops of potatoes for the Glasgow market, oats and turnips; the rest consists of hill pastures and plantations. The fisheries are of considerable value. There is no lack of sandstone, slate and whinstone. Some coal exists, but it is of inferior quality ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... thus secured, both companies proceeded to procure emigrants; and they had not much difficulty, as at this time there were many unemployed people in England. The wool culture had converted great tracts of arable land in England into mere pastures for sheep,[8] and the closure of the monasteries and religious houses removed the support from thousands of English families. Since 1585 this surplus humanity had found employment in the war with Spain, but the ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler

... the inhabitants to a seafaring life. While the sea drew, the land drove in the same direction. There a hilly or mountainous interior putting obstacles in the way of landward expansion, sterile slopes, a paucity of level, arable land, an excessive or deficient rainfall withholding from agriculture the reward of tillage—some or all of these factors combined to compel the inhabitants to seek on the sea the livelihood denied by the land. Here both forces worked ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... went on, the Valleys of the James and the Appomattox, down which our way lay, broadened into an expanse of arable acres, and the faces of those streams were frequently flecked by ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... which only hastened the washing-away process so characteristic of the Southern agriculture. Very few farmers thought it worth while to rotate their crops when fresh lands were to be had at a few dollars an acre. The area of the United States seemed limitless, and hardly a tenth of its arable land had ever been brought under cultivation. The inventions of 1840-50 enabled the Western farmer to grow larger crops, and harvest time was not so burdensome; corn-shellers and grain-fans shortened the hours of labor for the men. Sewing-machines and the revolving churns ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd

... that some have taken to themselves meadows and arable land that belong to the community. Such land we would take once more into the hands of our communities wheresoever they have not been honestly purchased. But where they have been purchased, then shall the case be agreed upon in peace and brotherly love, according to the circumstances ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens

... But the arable tracts were velvet green with young grain, the verdant level broken here and there by a rustic's hut, under two or three close-standing palms. Even from the surface of the Nile the checkered appearance of the country, caused by the various kinds of products, was noticeable. Egypt ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... grant of land at Australind comprises 100,000 acres, among which there is a large quantity of excellent pasture and arable land. It is well watered, and generally well adapted for the site of a new settlement. The flats of the Brunswick and Collic rivers would supply the whole colony, if thoroughly peopled, with grain; ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor

... compound bodies, whose precise nature is little known. These bodies have received the collective names Humus and Geine. We shall employ the term humus to designate this mixture, whether occurring in peat, swamp-muck, salt-mud, in composts, or in the arable soil. Its chemical characters are much the same, whatever its appearance or mode of occurrence; and this is to be expected since it is always formed from the same materials and under ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson

... soon dissolve again into open war. Money must be raised, and it was no light matter to raise it, now that the Commons had once already voted the tenth lamb and the tenth sheaf. Besides, the Black Death had ruined the country, the arable land was all turned to pasture, the laborer, laughing at statutes, would not work under fourpence a day, and all society was chaos. In addition, the Scotch were growling over the border, there was ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... children, under the guidance of teachers, parents, and appointed guardians, began to sow flower seeds, plant shrubs, vines, and trees, or raise kitchen vegetables, each group or family according to its own desires and needs. Since the "arbors" are small they do not decrease the arable land of the allotments much, and there is still room left for swings, gymnastic apparatus, and similar contrivances, as well as bare sandy spots for little tots to play in. The various allotments are mostly uniform in size and are reached by narrow three- or four-foot lanes, on which occasionally ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall

... animals, man is forced to turn his attention to the world of vegetation and he takes over the direction of the plants and animals which woman has largely domesticated. In his career as fighter and hunter he has learned to cooperate with his fellows to a degree which aids him greatly in dividing the arable land, protecting his crops, and using grazing lands in common with the tribe. He has also learned to make stone hatchets, spears and bows and arrows. Woman has not felt the same necessity to invent in her work; such new tools ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes

... men, without communication, and almost simultaneously, in the year 1815, discovered the law of rent. Suddenly it struck them that all manufactured products of human industry must necessarily obey one law; whilst the products of land obey another and opposite law. Let us for a moment consider arable land as a natural machine for manufacturing bread. Now, in all manufactures depending upon machinery of human invention, the natural progress is from the worse machines to the better. No man lays aside a glove-making machine for a worse, but only for one that possesses ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... taking flight at those words, he went on in a voice calculated to reach the great assembly of farmers which he now saw before him with their backs turned—"and never shall we take it away till we have reduced every acre in the country to an arable condition. In the future not only must we feed ourselves, but our dogs, our horses, and our children, and restore the land to its pristine glory in the front rank of the world's premier industry. But me no buts," he went on with a winning smile, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... disputes continue Climate: arid to semiarid; cold winters and hot summers Terrain: mostly rugged mountains; plains in north and southwest Natural resources: natural gas, crude oil, coal, copper, talc, barites, sulphur, lead, zinc, iron ore, salt, precious and semiprecious stones Land use: arable land 12%; permanent crops NEGL%; meadows and pastures 46%; forest and woodland 3%; other 39%; includes irrigated NEGL% Environment: damaging earthquakes occur in Hindu Kush mountains; soil degradation, desertification, overgrazing, ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... thick at the summit. Gerard backed this wall on the valley side with a cemented slope, about twelve feet wide at its base. On the side toward the commons a similar slope, covered with several feet of arable earth, still further supported this great work, which no rush of water could possibly damage. The engineer provided in case of unusual rains an overflow at a proper height. The masonry was inserted into the flank of each mountain ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... backs of horses, but which they placed upon their own shoulders as they approached the bridge. Amongst them were fishermen from Eyemouth and Coldingham, shepherds from the hills with slaughtered sheep, millers, and the cultivators of the patches of arable ground beyond the moor. With them, also, were a few women carrying eggs, butter, cheese, and poultry; and at the head of the procession (for the narrowness of the drawbridge over the frightful chasm, beyond which the castle stood, caused the company to assume the form of a procession as they ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various

... and because it was constantly farmed out to men who made their bargains profitable by oppressing the needy with unfair exactions. Chief among the causes of the misery of the peasants was the extent to which arable land was converted into pasture. Commons were unjustly enclosed, villages were depopulated, the starving peasants were forced to flee to the mountains, and black cattle roamed at will round the ruins ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt

... rocks, crags, chasms,—the fields which nourished the family lay well from the verge, within the purlieus of the limited mountain plateau. He had sought to persuade himself that it was to save all the arable land for tillage that he had placed his house and door-yard here, but both he and Aurelia were secretly aware of the subterfuge; he would fain be always within the glamour of the prospect through ...
— The Christmas Miracle - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... Hungary for a supply of cattle at present. This gentleman did not, I believe, visit Transylvania, and I am inclined to think the supply from that part of the kingdom is greatly on the increase; there the pastures are not in process of being turned into arable land, and the rise in prices has given an impetus to the profitable employment ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse

... (abode) 189. V. cultivate; till the soil; farm, garden; sow, plant; reap, mow, cut; manure, dress the ground, dig, delve, dibble, hoe, plough, plow, harrow, rake, weed, lop and top; backset [obs3][U.S.]. Adj. agricultural, agrarian, agrestic[obs3]. arable, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... place, I claim the right to own and enclose for my own use or disuse as much of the earth's surface as I am desirous and able to procure. I and my kind have made laws confirming us in the occupancy of the entire habitable and arable area as fast as we can get it. To the objection that this must eventually here, as it has actually done elsewhere, deprive the rest of you places upon which legally to be born, and exclude you after surreptitious birth as trespassers from ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... district where it has long been used as a manure either for arable or grassing land, no comment on its superior utility is requisite; but to those parts where its presence hitherto hath been forbidden by the rugged and steep hills, and to others at too great a distance to warrant the expense of a long land ...
— Report of the Knaresbrough Rail-way Committee • Knaresbrough Rail-way Committee

... opposite bank, it will be seen that a large quantity of the earth introduced into the current by the falling of the banks, has been thrown up in large masses, forming new land, which, in a few seasons, becomes arable. That which is not thus deposited, as already stated, is transported below, dropping here and there on the way, until what is left reaches the Gulf, and is precipitated upon the 'bars' and 'delta,' at the mouth. It not unfrequently happens that planters ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... relinquish it, receiving, in exchange, a country lot of fifty acres or more. Under this system, a population of a superior order was led out into the forest. Farms quickly spread into the interior, seeking the meadows, occupying the arable land, and ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... ceased to be visible; yet, as by day, to anybody whose thoughts have been engaged with it and its barbarous grandeurs of past time the form asserts its existence behind the night gauzes as persistently as if it had a voice. Moreover, the south-west wind continues to feed the intervening arable flats with vapours ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy

... with lands by the liberality of its first founder, as appears in the deeds preserved in our great muniment chest. We have ten hides of woodland, wherein none may cut wood save for our use in the winter; five hides of arable land, and the same extent of pasturage for cattle. Now for the care of the culture thereof we have a hundred serfs attached to the glebe, who, we trust, do not ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake

... tree-trunks had been placed against the rocks to aid the climbers. Some of our party trusted themselves to these ancient ladders, and with the aid of a rope also, reached the summit." These Indians had tilled a small piece of arable land ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James

... train attend the stranger-guest; Whom Pallas with unpardoning fury fired, By lordly pride and keen reproach inspired. A Samian peer, more studious than the rest Of vice, who teem'd with many a dead-born jest; And urged, for title to a consort queen, Unnumber'd acres arable and green (Otesippus named); this lord Ulysses eyed, And thus burst out ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope

... stories in the air, where you can gratify your passion for going up and down stairs. There is the best reason in the world why a tall house in the country should look grim, gaunt, and awkward; it is thoroughly inconvenient and out of place. The area of arable land covered by human habitations does not yet interfere with agricultural products. So let us spread ourselves freely. When we have learned the beauty and the strength of co-operation for mutual helpfulness, we shall see the prevailing mode of constructing houses in cities ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner

... of curing this defect is to cause the stammerer to repeat the word, which he finds difficult to speak, eight or ten times without the initial letter, in a strong voice, or with an aspirate before it, as arable, or harable; and at length to speak it very softly with the initial letter p, parable. This should be practised for weeks or months upon every word, which the stammerer hesitates in pronouncing. To this should be added much commerce with mankind, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... choose that because we both know that sector, but I could think of a hundred other examples in other paratime areas. Those people, because of deforestation, bad agricultural methods and general mismanagement, are eroding away their arable soil at an alarming rate. At the same time, they are breeding like rabbits. In other words, each successive generation has less and less food to divide among more and more people, and, for inherited traditional and superstitious reasons, they refuse to adopt any rational ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper

... of even a few arpents required a great deal of manual drudgery. On the other hand, the land of New France was fertile, and every one could have plenty of it for the asking. Kalm thought it quite as good as the average in the English colonies and far better than most arable land in ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro

... of a huqqa (the pipe for smoking), or a utensil belonging to a Brahman or Rajpoot, were capital offences. The power obtained by the Brahmans was shown by the fact that, when the province came under British rule, one-fifteenth of its arable land belonged to the ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy

... to the flying countryside, noted that it had changed character, pine yielding to scrub-oak and second-growth—the ragged vestments of an area some years since denuded by fire. This, too, presently swung away, giving place to cleared land—arable acres golden with the stubble of garnered harvests or sentinelled with unkempt ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance

... high and broad "route royale" to Havre le Grace; but had scarcely been a league upon it, when, looking at my instructions, we struck out of the high road, to the left, and followed a private one through flat and uninteresting arable land. I cannot tell how many turns were taken, or how many pretty little villages were passed—till, after a long and gradual ascent, we came upon a height, flanked the greater part by coppice wood, through one portion of which—purposely kept open for the view—was seen at a distance a marvellously ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... this widow and her two sons consisted of between five and six acres, made up of arable land and meadow. They kept four cows, four mares for purposes of horse-breeding, and a little poultry. Milch cows here are occasionally used on the farm, an anomaly among a ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... ran through fields of good black, arable land, planted with trees of many different kinds. It crossed the outlying spurs of the Tmolus range of mountains. At their foot stretched rows of olive, citron and plane-trees, plantations of mulberries and vines; at a higher level grew firs, cypresses and nut-tree copses. Fig-trees ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... of Feather River, about five miles above Marysville. The ranch consisted of several hundred acres of high land, which, at its western terminus, fell away about one hundred feet to the river bottom. There were a couple of hundred acres of this river bottom land which was arable. It was exceedingly rich and productive. Still west of this land was a well-wooded pasture, separated from the cultivated lands by a good board fence. The river bounded this pasture ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves

... are to be found in his "Flores Paradise." Another work, entitled "Dyuers Soyles for manuring pasture & arable land," enumerates, in addition to the usual odorous galaxy, such extraordinarily new matters (in that day) as "salt, street-dirt, clay, Fullers earth, moorish earth, fern, hair, calcination of all vegetables, malt dust, soap-boilers ashes, and marle." But what I think particularly commends him ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... Larks-leers. s. pl. Arable land not in use; such is much frequented by larks; any land which is poor and bare ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings

... numbers and power of the inhabitants; then harking back again, in verse 19, to the fertility of the land, and passing again to the capacity of the cities to resist attack; and finishing up, in verse 20, with the land once more, both arable and forest. The same double thought colours the parting exhortation to 'be bold,' and to 'bring of the produce of the land.' Now the people knew already both points which the spies were despatched to find out. Over and over again, in Egypt, in the march, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... subside, we got under way and made straight for Fuga. The first half of the journey led us by well-beaten footpaths through flat cultivated fields of sugar-cane and bananas, tamarind-trees, papaws, and various jungle shrubs, filling up the non-arable surface; and then began a steep ascent by rudely-beaten zigzags, to ease the abruptness of the hill, on which the capital is situated. The whole face of this hill was clothed with large timber trees, around which, here and there, entwining their trunks, clung the delicate sarsaparilla vine; and ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke

... entry contains the percentage shares of total land area for five different types of land use: arable land - land cultivated for crops that are replanted after each harvest like wheat, maize, and rice; permanent crops - land cultivated for crops that are not replanted after each harvest like citrus, coffee, and rubber; permanent pastures - land ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... years' labours it exhibited an altogether different appearance, and in place of whins and stones there were to be seen heavy crops of barley and turnips. The barren years of 1800 and 1801, however, pressed very hardly on Andrew Fairbairn as on every other farmer of arable land. About that time, Andrew's brother Peter, who acted as secretary to Lord Seaforth, and through whose influence the former had obtained the farm, left Brahan Castle for the West Indies with his Lordship, who—notwithstanding his ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... of mountains. Roseberry Topping stands out in grim isolation, on its masses of alum rock, like a huge sea-worn crag, considerably over 1,000 feet high. But this strangely menacing peak raises his defiant head over nothing but broad meadows, arable land, and woodlands, and his only warfare is with the lower strata of storm-clouds, which is a convenient thing for the people who live in these parts; for long ago they used the peak as a sign of approaching storms, having reduced the warning to ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home

... of a little group; supported, if controlled and disciplined, by an elaborate system of spiritual authority. The Reformation was the period at which the 'masterless man' made his appearance. The conversion of pastures into arable land, the growth of commerce and of pauperism, were marks of the coming change. It proceeded quietly for some generations; but the development of the modern manufacturing system represents the operation of the same process on a far larger ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... and his wealth, Rosset backing him up and putting in the most telling parts. He had very extensive property, and the more level parts of it were certainly valuable, consisting of 200 journaux of good arable land: the forests through which we walked were his, and he possessed three montagnes and chalets higher up on the mountain. The glaciere was his own property; and two years ago he had discovered another in the neighbourhood, which he had not since visited. He was assisted in his ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne

... at the summit of the island, is my arable land, my farm, lying in a fence of wire-netting, without which I should not be able to preserve a blade of anything eatable from the hordes of rabbits which make the ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling

... entire area of Deux-Sevres, which is primarily an agricultural department, consists of arable land. Wheat and oats are the main cereals. Potatoes and mangold-wurzels are the chief root-crops. Niort is a centre for the growing Of vegetables (onions, asparagus, artichokes, &c.) and of angelica. Considerable quantities ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... comfortable buildings when you buy your farm: they are, indeed, prime requisites. I have put them last for the reason that they are so often first. I have observed, however, that the joy of the farmer is by no means in proportion to the area of his arable land. It is often a nice matter to decide between acres and contentment: men perish from too much as well as from too little. And if it be possible there should be a long table in the dining-room and little chairs around ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson

... population has increased, Hindu merchants have settled in Kylang, the route through Lahul to Central Asia is finding increasing favour with the Panjabi traders, and the Moravian missionaries, by a bolder system of irrigation and the provision of storage for water, have largely increased the quantity of arable land. The Lahulis are chiefly Tibetans, but Hinduism is largely mixed up with Buddhism in the lower villages. All the gonpos, however, have been restored and enlarged during the last twenty years. ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)

... to the day. From the knoll may be seen miles on miles of hills up and down the valley, winding in and out, sometimes branching off into smaller glens, each with its gurgling rivulet of peaty-brown water flowing down from the mosses above. Only a narrow strip of arable land is here and there visible along the bottom of the dale, all above being sheep-pasture, moors, and rocks. At Glendinning you seem to have got almost to the world's end. There the road ceases, and above it stretch trackless moors, the solitude of which is broken only by the ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... Bharatas, by giving away a shed for the shelter of kine that can keep out cold and rain and that is substantial in structure, the giver rescues seven generations of his race (from hell). By giving away a piece of arable earth the giver attains to excellent prosperity. By giving a piece of earth containing mineral wealth, the giver aggrandises his family and race. One should never give away any earth that is barren or that is burnt ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... to be compared, for comfort and beauty, to a dairy-farm. Arable lands are detestable; and the windows of the house generally look into a horrible yard, where the present agonies of the nose are made tolerable only by the hope of the rich crop to come. Here our windows looked upon a sloping green field, bounded from the road by a good thick hedge, at the distance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... plain is skirted by a country road, bordered with majestic trees, and with farm-houses standing all along its winding course. Beyond, the land rises, and the slope is checkered, to the foot of the hills, with arable fields. The view is bounded by the craggy sides of the great hills which separate this quiet vale from the broad valley of the Connecticut. Here, all is soft and tranquil beauty. But just beyond the rugged barrier of those western hills lies a grander landscape, of wide extent, through ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... the grain harvests are uncertain, while fish are almost as sure as the season; and so the surplus agricultural population either emigrates or removes to the fishing grounds on the coast. There is, undoubtedly, a considerable quantity of wild land which could be made arable, but the same means, applied to the improvement of that which is at present under cultivation, would accomplish far ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor

... petty attentions and petty reforms to occupy me just now; what I intend to do will be done in a large way; I mean not only to repair but to restore the castle, to throw the whole of my lands to the north into a sheep-walk, to plant the higher points, and to convert the south lands into arable. But my first object is the plough, and that must be attended to, before everything else; the wood-work is all complete, but a little alteration must be made in the coulter, and after all, I apprehend I must do it myself, as old Shanty is as ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]

... Chichester and Selsey has to some extent opened up the east side of the peninsula, but the west is still remote and will probably remain so. The country is, however, not interesting: a dead level of dusty road and grass or arable land, broken only by hedges, dykes, white cottages, and the many homesteads within their ramparts of wind-swept elms. Wheat and oats are the prevailing crops, still for the most part cut and bound by hand. Of the villages in the centre ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... time, began to be more frequent, whereby arable land (which could not be manured without people and families) was turned into pasture, which was easily rid by a few herdsmen; and tenancies for years, lives, and at will (whereupon much of the yeomanry lived) were turned into demesnes. This bred a decay of people and (by consequence) a decay ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher

... groupings of men—is the clearer outlook, the more panoramic view of a definite geographic region, such, for instance, as lies beneath us upon a mountain holiday. Beneath vast hunting desolations lie the pastoral hillsides, below these again scattered arable crofts and sparsely dotted hamlets lead us to the small upland village of the main glen: from this again one descends to the large and prosperous village of the foothills and its railway terminus, where lowland ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes

... by half a dozen agents and their clerks, was carried on. The land of the country in those days was subdivided to an extent that it is now almost impossible for us to realize, and the tenure under which the small patches of arable or meadow-land were held was sometimes very complex and intricate. The small patches were perpetually changing hands, being bought or sold, settled upon trustees, or let out for a term of years, and every transaction would be registered ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... disappointed in the abundance of Trees. Wood seems to be the peasants' sole reliance for fuel, and trees are planted beside the roads, the streams, the ditches, and often in rows or patches on some arable portion of the peasants' narrow domain. This planting is mainly confined to two varieties—the Lombardy Poplar and what I took to be the Pollard, a species of Willow which displays very little foliage, and is usually trimmed up so as to have but a mere armful of leaves ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... whereof Salt Lake is the lowest point, and the Valley of the Colorado, which skirts it on the east, are mainly sterile from drouth or other causes—not one acre in each hundred of their surface being arable without irrigation, and not one in ten capable of being made productive by irrigation. Arid, naked, or thinly shrub-covered mountains traverse and chequer those deep yet elevated valleys, wherein few savages or even wild animals of any size ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... of Seeland has become higher than the surface of the lakes, and consequently drains into them naturally. Already a beautiful village, Witzwyl, has sprung up, surrounded by some seven hundred and fifty thousand acres of fine arable land reclaimed from a forbidding, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various

... when potatoes are not to be procured, a pig of thirty-five stone may be fattened in ten days on something less than two hundred weight of carrots. We intend to try if this is the case, and have half an acre of our orchard (which is arable) sown with carrot-seed, and feed our "stock" in the winter with the produce. With the surplus milk of two cows we find we can always keep three pigs with very little expense. Of course, if we did not plant plenty of potatoes, ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton

... a little upon the landscape, and said certain of the pleasant fields below us be longed to him; but he preferred his hill-top, and if he could have his way those arable fields should be grown up to pines too. He smoked fitfully, and slowly, and in the hour that we spent together, his whiffs were of the desultory and unfinal character of his words. When we went down, he asked me ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... fields of pasturage, and give and incomparable horsemen form the birth to those nomad tribes, in chief defence of the empire. whose numerous and incomparable horsemen the chief defence of the empire,[39] as of all Oriental states, (15 a) is to be found. The rich arable lands in the heart The rich arable lands in the of the (54) empire produce an interior produce grain enough to (2) incalculable quantity of support four times the present grain, capable not only of ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott

... villages nestle amid the trees. But soon the scene changes: the glorious valley Father Thames has scooped out for himself is left behind; we are crossing the chalk uplands. On all sides are vast stretches of unfenced arable land, though here and there a tiny village with its square-towered Norman church peeps out from an oasis of green fields and stately elm trees. On the right the Chiltern Hills are seen in the background, ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs

... measuring some 60 m. in the former, and 20 m. in the latter direction. It is a plain varying from 600 to 800 ft. above the sea, with few eminences and a slight inclination westwards. Heaths and coppice alternate with pastures and arable land; pools and marshes are numerous, especially in the north. Its chief rivers are the Veyle, the Reyssouze and the Seille, all tributaries of the Saone. The soil is a gravelly clay but moderately fertile, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... had hired for a season, was a large comfortable mansion, snugly situated beneath a hill covered with wood, which shrouded the house upon the north and east; the front looked upon a little lawn bordered by a grove of old trees; beyond were some arable fields, extending down to the river, which was seen from the windows of the house. A tolerable, though old-fashioned garden, a well-stocked dovecot, and the possession of any quantity of ground which the convenience of the family might require, rendered the place in ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... that it could accomplish this work as rapidly as it actually did years after. During a great flood it washed a canyon not only to Kanab but for miles up the gorge, sweeping away at one master stroke hundreds of acres of arable land and leaving a mud chasm forty feet deep. Had the fall we examined been arranged then so that the water might glide down, the fearful washout would not have occurred. There are thousands of places in the West to-day that require treatment to conserve arable land, and in time the task ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... anticipation during the slow journey on the branch line from the junction. The train crawled and burrowed into the wooded heart of the Midlands, passed a village, a hamlet, a few scattered houses, puffed and panted through endless lengths of arable and pasture land, drew up exhausted at the little wayside station of Whithorn-in-Arden, and left him in that prosaic wilderness a prey ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair

... next attracted my attention was a fine one indeed, a noble subject for a painter. At the other end of the arable tract, a young man of attractive appearance was driving a superb team: four yoke of young beasts, black-coated with tawny spots that gleamed like fire, with the short, curly heads that suggest the wild bull, the great, wild eyes, the abrupt ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand

... behold Th' effects which thy original crime hath wrought In some to spring from thee, who never touch'd Th' excepted Tree, nor with the Snake conspir'd, Nor sinn'd thy sin, yet from that sin derive Corruption to bring forth more violent deeds. His eyes he op'nd, and beheld a field, Part arable and tilth, whereon were Sheaves 430 New reapt, the other part sheep-walks and foulds; Ith' midst an Altar as the Land-mark stood Rustic, of grassie sord; thither anon A sweatie Reaper from his Tillage brought First Fruits, the green ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... earland is still a living expression; and a Yorkshireman, who has more Saxon than Latin in him, will not write "arable land," but "earable land." A Yorkshire clergyman tells me that this orthography has been perpetuated in a local act of parliament of no ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various

... the eye would instinctively wander across the green and shallow valley, to the long upslope opposite, showing the Manor set in its clump of trees, and farms and haystacks pleasantly dotted, and moderately far off coal-mines with twinkling headstocks and narrow railwaylines crossing the arable fields, and heaps of burning slag. The balcony or covered terrace—James settled down at last to the word terrace—was to be one of the features of the house: the feature. It was to be fitted up as a sort of elegant lounging restaurant. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... son, filial salt, saline meal, farinaceous wood, ligneous wood, sylvan cloud, nebulous glass, vitreous milk, lacteal water, aquatic stone, lapidary gold, aureous silver, argent iron, ferric honey, mellifluous loving, amatory loving, erotic loving, amiable wedded, hymeneal plow, arable priestly, sacerdotal arrow, sagittal wholesome, salubrious warlike, bellicose timely, temporary fiery, igneous ring, annular soap, saponaceous nestling, nidulant snore, stertorous window, fenestral twilight, crepuscular ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... the fast-darkening organ, white robes could be dimly seen, and one feeble voice, rising and falling in a cracked, monotonous mutter, could at intervals be faintly heard. In the free outer air, the river, the green pastures, and the brown arable lands, the teeming hills and dales, were reddened by the sunset: while the distant little windows in windmills and farm homesteads, shone, patches of bright beaten gold. In the Cathedral, all became gray, murky, and sepulchral, ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens

... Henry,[*] that that prince, by contract with his butcher, paid near a groat a pound throughout the year for all the beef and mutton used in his family. Besides, we must consider, that the general turn of that age, which no laws could prevent, was the converting of arable land into pasture; a certain proof that the latter was found more profitable, and consequently that all butcher's meat, as well as bread, was rather higher than at present. We have a regulation ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... Salzburg Country is one of those nooks; an extensive Crypto-Protestantism lodging, under the simple slouch-hats, in the remote valleys there. Protestantism peaceably kept concealed, hurting nobody; wholesomely forwarding the wooden-clock manufacture, and arable or grazier husbandries, of those poor people. More harmless sons of Adam, probably, did not breathe the vital air, than those dissentient Salzburgers; generation after generation of them giving offence to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... no remedy for but by making an enclosure about it with a hedge; which I did with a great deal of toil, and the more, because it required speed. However, as my arable land was but small, suited to my crop, I got it totally well fenced in about three weeks' time; and shooting some of the creatures in the daytime, I set my dog to guard it in the night, tying him up to a stake at the gate, where he would stand and bark all night long; so in a little ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe

... carried on by peasants holding small amounts of land which would correspond to the small shops and slender capital of the handicraftsman. Each local unit, whether free village or a manor, was made up of different kinds of land,—arable, commons for pasturing sheep and cattle, forests for gathering firewood and for herding swine and meadows for growing hay. The arable land was divided into three so-called "fields," or sections, each field partitioned into smaller portions called ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith



Words linked to "Arable" :   cultivatable, productive, arability



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