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Marl   Listen
Marl

noun
1.
A loose and crumbling earthy deposit consisting mainly of calcite or dolomite; used as a fertilizer for soils deficient in lime.



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"Marl" Quotes from Famous Books



... be first, and the first last; it is the oldest families that are accounted the worst, while the best families mean always the newest. Now, the earliest mammals to appear on earth were creatures of distinctly marsupial type. As long ago as the time when the red marl of Devonshire and the blue lias of Lyme Regis were laid down on the bed of the muddy sea that once covered the surface of Dorset and the English Channel, a little creature like the kangaroo rats of Southern Australia lived among the plains of what is now the south of England. In the ages ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... flinging off a great wealth of tendrils from their supporting-poles (pedamenta). The figs begin to show the purple bloom of fruitage, and the villicus, who has just now come in from the atriolum, reports a good crop, and asks if it would not be well to apply a few loads of marl (tofacea) to the summer fallow, which Cato is just now breaking up with the Campanian steers, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various

... of a gravel pit at St. Acheul, on the Somme. The implements are nearly always found in the lowest strata, which is a bed of gravel from ten to fourteen feet thick. Overlying this are beds of marl, loam, and surface soil, comprising in all a depth of fourteen feet. It has been suggested that the implements are comparatively recent, and have sunk down from above by their own weight, or perhaps have been buried in artificial excavations. The beds are however too compact to admit of any ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... that he did commence on the higher land, where the timber was lighter, and the place for his house was dry. With increasing ability, he is found draining the swamps, clearing the heavy timber, turning up the marl, or burning the lime, and thus acquiring control over more fertile soils, yielding a constant increase in the return to labour. Let him then trace the course of early settlement, and he will find that while it has often followed the course of ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey

... help to form, a painter of pale anatomies. The painters of Southern Tuscany loved as a background the arid and mountainous country of their birth. Taddeo di Bartolo placed the Death of the Virgin among the curious undulations of pale clay and sandy marl that stretch to the southernmost gates of Siena; Signorelli was amused and fascinated by the odd cliffs and overhanging crags, unnatural and grotesque like some Druidic monument, of the valleys of the Paglia and the Chiana; ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... about to despoil that noble range. But the Apennines, though cultivated wherever they can be, are far more precipitous and sterile than their American counterpart, and seem to be in good degree composed of a whitish clay or marl which every rain is washing away, rendering the Arno after a storm one of the muddiest streams I ever saw. I presume, therefore, that the Apennines are, as a whole, less lofty and difficult now than ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... his reader to drop it from his thoughts. But he has, unhappily, perplexed his poetry with his philosophy. His infernal and celestial powers are sometimes pure spirit, and sometimes animated body. When Satan walks with his lance upon the "burning marl," he has a body; when, in his passage between hell and the new world, he is in danger of sinking in the vacuity, and is supported by a gust of rising vapours, he has a body; when he animates the toad, he seems to be mere spirit, that can penetrate matter at pleasure; ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... the lines of antique statues. I noticed two young contadini in one field, whom Frederick Walker might have painted with the dignity of Pheidian form. They were guiding their ploughs along a hedge of olive-trees, slanting upwards, the white-horned oxen moving slowly through the marl, and the lads bending to press the plough-shares home. It was a delicate piece of colour—the grey mist of olive branches, the warm smoking earth, the creamy flanks of the oxen, the brown limbs and dark eyes of the men, who paused awhile to gaze at us, ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... the forest without seeing the sun. The district consists of two lines of irregular ridgy hills, rising three hundred to four hundred feet above the neighboring country. These ridges are separated by a sort of valley like a Norwegian fjord, tilled with red marl. The rocks are generally volcanic products, with much slate, which is extensively quarried. Granite and sienite are also quarried, and at the chief granite-quarry—Mount Sorrel, an eminence which projects into the valley of the Soar—was ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook

... invincible energy took both himself and the great bearded man, Edwin, to a certain spot on the hollow confines of the town towards Turnhill, where there were several pits of marl and clay. They stared in silence at a vast ochre's-coloured glistening cavity in the ground, on the high edges of which grew tufts of grass amid shards and broken bottles. In the bottom of the pit were laid planks, and along the planks men with pieces of string ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... rain. Rain percolates through the chalk rapidly at all times, it being greatly fissured and cavernous, and finds vent at the bottom of the hills, in ordinary seasons, in the perennial springs which issue there, at the top of the chalk marl, or of the galt (the clay so called) which underlies the chalk. But when long-continued rains have filled the fissures and caverns, and the chinks and crannies of the ordinary vents below are unequal to the drainage, the reservoir as it were overflows, and the superfluity ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various

... to the soil in the form of quicklime made by burning lime stone or shells. Other forms are gypsum or land plaster, gas lime (a refuse from gas works) and marl. Most soils contain sufficient lime for the food requirements of most plants. Some soils, however, are deficient in lime and some crops, particularly the legumes, are benefitted by direct ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich

... small islets or shallows of clay or marl in the centre of a lake, which were probably dry in summer, but submerged in winter. These little islands, or mounds, were used as a foundation for this singular habitation. Piles of wood, or heaps of stone and bones driven into or heaped on the soil, formed the support of the crannoge. They ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... Spanish politics. Our walk was a trial of endurance. I had traversed the Pyrenees in snow, and that was fatiguing enough in all conscience; but now the sun was beating cruelly on the parched herbage, and plodding up the ascent was like treading burning marl. I had to cry halt half-a-dozen times before we reached the summit; and yet that marvellous guide, with the baggage of all three on his head, kept on with a springy step and serene smile, like the youth in ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... the British Museum by geological specimens from the far-famed palace of mortal and immortal spirits, built in the heart of The Great Desert. I picked up various pieces of stone which lay scattered at its rocky base. But I found nothing but calcareous marl, or basaltic chippings and crumblings, some of cream colour, some lavender, some purple, some red-brown, some nearly black. This done, as connoisseur of geology, I stood stock still and gaped open-mouthed like an idiot, at the huge pyramidal ribs of The Rock. Then I bethought ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... marine plants, whose special duty it is to seize and make use of the substances thus swept from the land, and reconvert them into solids. We cannot form an adequate conception of the extent of the great work carried on continually in this way; but we see part of it in the chalk cliffs, the marl beds of the sea shore, and the coral islands of the South Seas,—of which last more particular notice shall be taken in a ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne

... merely the country in which his wife's parents dwelt: it was, above all, a unique and privileged home for insects; not on account of its flora, but because of the soil, a kind of limestone mingled with sand and clay, a soft marl, in which the burrowing hymenoptera could easily establish their burrows and their nests. Certain of them, indeed, lived only there, or at least it would have been extremely difficult to find them elsewhere; such was the famous Cerceris; ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... rays of the sun, which brings the coral to such a heat that even the hardened beachcomber walks thereon with "uneasy steps," reminding him of another outcast who used that oft-quoted staff as a support over the "burning marl." Gilbert White relates that a pair of fly-catchers which inadvertently placed their nests in an intolerably hot situation hovered over it "all the hotter hours, while with wings expanded and mouths gaping for breath, they screened ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... two classes—called putrescent and fossil. The putrescent are composed of decayed, or decaying, vegetable and animal substances. The fossil are those dug from the earth, as lime, marl, and gypsum. All vegetable substances not useful for other purposes are valuable for manure. Rotten wood, leaves, straw, and all the vegetable parts of stable manure, and any spoiled vegetables or grain, are all valuable. At the South, their immense quantities of ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden

... kept straight on for five or six hundred yards, until they encountered their regimental quartermaster and camping party. Then they wheeled to the right, passed through a thin belt of shade trees, across a splendid marl drive and a vast unkempt lawn. Beyond this they skirted a typical planter's house of the better class, with its white galleries, green blinds, quarters, smoke houses, barns, and outhouses innumerable; and halted, each troop moving to a point a little in the rear of where its ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... approaches of Fezzan from the north. At first occur broken limestone hills, as previous to Mizdah; but when we approach the plateau the aspect of the hills changes, and they are composed chiefly of variegated marl mixed with gypsum, and with a covering of limestone. Fossil shells were picked up at intervals. Some huge, irregular masses, that appeared ahead during the first day, were mistaken by us for the ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson

... Versailles from Marl's height, And cried, astonished at the sight, "Whose fine estate is that there here?" "State! Je vous n'entends pas, Monsieur." "His? What the land and houses too? The fellow's richer than a Jew: ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... which they were mingled; and in some places appeared traces, as if a sack full of grain, a dead body, or something of that heavy and solid description, had been dragged along the ground. In one part of the thicket there was a small swamp, the clay of which was whitish, being probably mixed with marl. The back of Kennedy's coat appeared besmeared with stains of ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... marks Greene's regrets, also distinguish Lodge's prose work to such an extent that remarks on the two might sometimes be made simply interchangeable. But fortune was kinder to Lodge than to his friend and collaborator. Nor does he seem to have had any occasion to "tread the burning marl" in company with conny-catchers and their associates. Lodge began with critical and polemical work—an academic if not very urbane reply to Stephen Gosson's School of Abuse; but in the Alarum against Usurers, which resembles and even preceded Greene's similar work, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... dead. We watched the chase with the interest always felt for the weak; and had there been a saddled horse at hand, he would have fared better. Leaving camp, our road soon approached the hills, in which strata of a marl like that of the Chimney rock, hereafter described, made their appearance. It is probably of this rock that the hills on the right bank of the Platte, a little below the junction, are composed, and which are worked by the winds and rains ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont

... the extremity of pain. Amidst agonies which cannot be conceived without horror, he deliberates, resolves, and even exults. Against the sword of Michael, against the thunder of Jehovah, against the flaming lake, and the marl burning with solid fire, against the prospect of an eternity of unintermitted misery, his spirit bears up unbroken, resting on its own innate energies, requiring no support from anything external, nor even from ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... wide, and, without paying heed to the poets, who have instinctively assumed the humblest attitude, their divine rescuer recrosses the bog, leaving them free to enter into the iron fortress. There they find countless sinners cased in red-hot coffins sunk in burning marl. On questioning his guide, Dante learns each open sepulchre contains an arch-heretic, or leader of some religious sect, and that each tomb is heated to a degree corresponding to the extent of the harm ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... Memoirs, relates this story, without referring to any authority. His authority probably was family tradition. That reports were current in 1692 of horrible crimes committed by the Macdonalds of Glencoe, is certain from the Burnet MS. Marl. 6584. "They had indeed been guilty of many black murthers," were Burnet's words, written in 1693. He ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... poise of the mind in actual or imaginary play—nullifies the susceptibility of other excitation. In its final, imperious stage, it seems the unjoyous dissipation of demons, seeking diversion on the burning marl of perdition. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... that human imagination can conceive requisite for animal enjoyment. The soil of this border, and of the valleys, is a blackish mould; that of the hills is different, changing as you ascend them into variously coloured earth and marl. The beds of the streams and rivers, which swell into torrents during the rainy season, consist of stones and gravel, often of a flinty nature, and often also containing particles of iron. Some basaltic appearances ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... dreams chance to stray along the roads full of deep ruts, or over the heavy land which secures the place against intrusion, he will wonder how it happened that this romantic old place was set down in a savanna of corn-land, a desert of chalk, and sand, and marl, where gaiety dies away, and melancholy is a natural product of the soil. The voiceless solitude, the monotonous horizon line which weigh upon the spirits are negative beauties, which only suit with sorrow that refuses ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac

... glossy kingfisher Flutters when noon-heats are near, 105 Glad the shelving banks to shun, Red and steaming in the sun, Where the shrew-mouse with pale throat Burrows, and the speckled stoat; Where the quick sandpipers flit 110 In and out the marl and grit That seems to breed them, brown as they. Naught disturbs its quiet way, Save some lazy stork that springs, Trailing it with legs and wings, 115 Whom the shy fox from the hill Rouses, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... undulating steppe, lying on a vast bed of rock-salt, which extends over an area of two versts in length, and a mile in breadth, with a thickness of more than 100 feet. When the thin cover of red sand and marl is removed, the white salt is exposed, and is found to be so free from all stain, or admixture of other material, excepting sometimes minute filaments of gypsum, that it is pounded at once for use, without any cleansing or ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne

... where the field Long slept in pastoral green, A goblin-mountain was upheaved (Sure the scared sense was all deceived), Marl-glen ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville

... in England there are two great divisions of these New Red sandstones, "Trias," as geologists call them. An upper, called in Germany Keuper, which consists, atop, of the rich red marl, below them, of sandstones, and of those vast deposits of rock-salt, which have been long worked, and worked to such good purpose, that a vast subsidence of land has just taken place near Nantwich in Cheshire; and serious fears are entertained lest the town ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley

... soon as you strike it, it will come surging up.' 'How deep?' 'Not over 25 feet.' He cut out a turf to indicate the spot, and we commenced sinking next day. The person employed was an old well-sinker, and he came to me two or three times whilst engaged in sinking, showing specimens of the soil or marl, assuring me there never was water where such existed, and it was worse than useless to go further. I told him to go on if he had to get to New Zealand—it was my money, and he need not regard me nor my pocket. When he had gone about 22 feet, his pickaxe tapped the spring ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett

... in examining the geology of the surrounding country, which was very interesting. We here see at the bottom of the cliffs, beds containing sharks' teeth and sea-shells of extinct species, passing above into an indurated marl, and from that into the red clayey earth of the Pampas, with its calcareous concretions and the bones of terrestrial quadrupeds. This vertical section clearly tells us of a large bay of pure salt-water, gradually encroached on, and at last converted into ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... rains percolates through the crevices of the upper stratum, it dissolves the softer material beneath, and oozing through the steep inclination, carries large quantities in solution to the lower level and deposits this fertilising marl upon the plain below. In this manner the low ground of the rich but dreary Messaria has been formed through the decay and denudation of the higher levels, and the process will continue until the present table-topped hills ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... Marl is a compound of chalk and clay, or chalk and loam. Though suitable for certain fruit-trees and a few other things, few flowers ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink

... concerning Britain. He quotes the instances of Duns Scotus and Suisset in support of the view that the barbarians are equal to the Italians in intellect,[126] and he likewise notices the use of a fertilizing earth—presumably marl—in agriculture,[127] and the longevity of the people, some of whom have reached their hundred and twentieth year.[128] The first notice of us in the De Varietate is in praise of our forestry, forasmuch as he remarked that the plane tree, which is almost unknown ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... from the decomposition of the sandstone, and may be a diluvial or lacustrine deposit. Blue clay appears in the lowest parts of the basin, and forms the level parts of the plain, with concretions of marl in thin layers. This has every appearance of a mud deposit; but its depth is greater than the lowest part visible in the channel of the river. The parallel course of small tributaries joining rivers, which seem to be the middle drain of extensive plains, may have been marked ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... Thames is nearly all the same from Oxford to Hampton Court, made up of some score of very fine and striking flowers that grow from foot to crest on the wall of light marl that forms the bank. Constantly refreshed by the adjacent water, they flower and seed, seed and flower, and are haunted by bees and butterflies till the November frosts. The most decorative of all are the spikes of purple loose-strife. In autumn when most of the flowers are ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish

... of April, 1816, Byron embarked for Ostend. From the "burning marl" of the staring streets he planted his foot again on the dock with ...
— Byron • John Nichol

... afterwards. In sandy or chalky soils, pears will have a poor chance even on the free (or pear) stock, unless the ground has been previously prepared by trenching, and then digging in a good quantity of decayed stable or farmyard manure. Marl or clay from other parts, or turf (chopped up) from a field, may be added with advantage. Generous treatment subsequently in the way of liquid manure will alone make trees in such ground a success. Should, however, the soil be shallow and the subsoil gravel or chalk, trees must be lifted ...
— The Book of Pears and Plums • Edward Bartrum

... greatly from place to place. Here it's black; there it's yellow; here it's rich loam; there it's boggy mould or sandy gravel. And some soils are better adapted to growing certain plants than others. Rich lowlands and oolites suit the cereals; red marl produces wonderful grazing grass; bare uplands are best for gorse and heather. Hence everything favours for the practical man the mistaken idea that plants and trees grow mainly out of the soil. His own eyes tell him so; he sees them growing, he sees the ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... wilderness; and it hasn't quite mingled with its muddy neighbour yet, no more than we Westerns can comfortably mingle with the habitans and their old-world practices down here. You see, Wynn, the St. Lawrence has been running over a bed of marl for miles before it reaches Lake St. Louis; and the Ottawa has been purified by plenty of rocks and rapids; so they don't suit very well—no more than we and the habitans—ha! ha!' Mr. Holt was vastly amused ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... ploughed by the sword-blade for the coming years they sow; And ruth is a thing forgotten and all hopes they trample down; And whatso thing is steadfast, whatso of good renown, Whatso is fair and lovely, whatso is ancient sooth In the bloody marl shall they mingle as they laugh for lack of ruth. Lo the curse of the world cometh hither; for the men that we took in the land Said thus, that their host is gathering with many an ordered band To fall on the wild-wood passes and flood the lovely Mark, As the river over the meadows upriseth in ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris

... can't boast that I am," said the goosey-gander. It seemed to him that the leader-goose had already made up her mind to send him home, so he didn't much care how he answered. "I never swam any farther than across a marl-ditch," he continued. "Then I presume you're a crack sprinter," said the goose. "I have never seen a tame goose run, nor have I ever done it myself," said the goosey-gander; and he made things appear much worse than they ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof

... Falstaff's page, and are about as near the standard as the original. Sir Fret. Ha! Sneer. In short, that even the finest passages you steal are of no service to you; for the poverty of your own language prevents their assimilating; so that they lie on the surface like lumps of marl on a barren moor, encumbering what it is not in their power to fertilize! Sir Fret. [After great agitation.] Now, another person would be vexed at this! Sneer. Oh! but I wouldn't have told you—only to divert you. Sir Fret. I ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan



Words linked to "Marl" :   soil, dirt



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