"Sterility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... contraceptive measures damage the individual? The answer to that depends on the purpose for which they are used. If they are used to render unions childless or inadequately fruitful they are harmful. There are grounds for thinking that unrealisation of maternity favours sterility. ...
— Love—Marriage—Birth Control - Being a Speech delivered at the Church Congress at - Birmingham, October, 1921 • Bertrand Dawson
... than the ROMAN CAMPAGNA. Independent of the indelible associations with which it is connected, and the glorious deeds of which it has been the theatre, its appearance produces an extraordinary impression on the mind of the beholder. All is silent; the earth seems struck with sterility—desolation reigns in every direction. A space extending from Otricoli to Terracina, above sixty miles in length, and on an average twenty in breadth, between the Apennines and the sea, containing ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... gigantic—enterprises as are to be referred to them; for it was then that he composed his voluminous Pisgah-sight of Palestine, Church History and Worthies, not to speak of many minor writings. But the secret of his prolificness amidst surroundings which would have paralyzed most men into stark sterility admits of ready elucidation. Besides being endowed with great physical vigor and enjoying uninterrupted health. Fuller never wasted a moment, was an unweariable student at odd hours, and moreover supplemented the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... contamination of our cultures was correct, we ought to find a pure culture of the septic vibrio in the heart's blood of an animal recently dead of septicemia. This was what happened, but a new difficulty presented itself; all our cultures remained sterile. Furthermore this sterility was accompanied by loss in the culture media of (the ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... inclinations, the mountain-torrent diverted or restrained, and the means of artificial irrigation, to sustain nature during the long droughts of summer, obtained. By the incessant labour of centuries this prodigy has been completed, and the very stony sterility of nature converted into the means of heightening, by artificial means, the heat of summer.... No room is lost in these little but precious freeholds; the vine extends its tendrils along the terrace walls ... in the corners formed by their meeting, ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... coloured increase is due chiefly to propagation among the coloured people themselves then it forms a good argument against those who assert that the half-caste is relatively inclined to sterility, while if the increase is found to be due to cohabitation of white men with coloured women then it is a fair illation that the coloured section is in process of absorption by the whites. This assumed process of absorption will, no doubt, entail the presence of a certain, ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... his dream of wealth as the year declined. He had reared no crop for the supply of his household during the sterility of winter. The season was long and severe, and for the first time the family was really straitened in its comforts. By degrees a revulsion of thought took place in Wolfert's mind, common to those whose golden dreams have been disturbed ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... ofttimes quite heavy enough in the pieces given to him to render—more so than in his prose; though, even when first introduced to that, Cowper could exclaim, not a little to the chagrin of those who regarded it as perfection of writing: 'Oh, the sterility of that man's fancy! if, indeed, he has any such faculty belonging to him. Dr. Blair has such a brain as Shakespeare somewhere describes, "dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage.'" But the fancy ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... When his mother discovered this, she wept and lamented. After that the bestowal of immortality was impossible. Demeter left the house. Keleus then built a temple. The grief of Demeter for Persephone was limitless. She spread sterility over the earth. The gods had to appease her, to prevent a great catastrophe. Then Zeus induced Hades (Pluto) to release Persephone into the upper world, but before letting her go, he gave her a pomegranate to eat. This obliged her to return periodically ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... opportunity. Humor, as a characteristic element of the English novel, has been felt to be peculiarly dependent upon the fashion of life in Britain. Blankenburg, another eighteenth-century student of German literary conditions, in his treatise on the novel[7], has similar theories concerning the sterility of German life as compared with English, especially in the production of humorous characters[8]. He asserts theoretically that humor (Laune) should never be employed in a novel of German life, because "Germany's political institutions and laws, and our ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... eleven thousand feet in real altitude, yet their height from their immediate basis is not so great as might be imagined, as they swell up from elevated plains, several thousand feet above the level of the ocean. These plains are often of a desolate sterility; mere sandy wastes, formed of the detritus of the granite heights, destitute of trees and herbage, scorched by the ardent and reflected rays of the summer's sun, and in winter swept by chilling blasts from the snow-clad mountains. Such is a great ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... for immediate pleasure, afford matter of the most instructive speculation to the philosopher, who studies the wisdom of nature through the medium of things. As, on the one hand, the summit of the mountain may be supposed the point of absolute sterility, so, on the other, the sandy desert, moved by nothing but the parching winds of continents distant from the sources of abundant rains, finishes the scale of natural fertility, which thus diminishes in the two opposite ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... of my patient's problem. There remained the adjustment to domestic life. This was hard, and though in part successful, it was delayed by the sterility of the marriage. The husband and wife agreed that pending a child she might well become active again in the larger world. Though the best place would have been her old work, pride and convention stood in the ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... over the big pile of manuscript before me certain things become clearer to me, and particularly the immense inconsequences of my experiences. It is, I see now that I have it all before me, a story of activity and urgency and sterility. I have called it Tono-Bungay, but I had far better have called it Waste. I have told of childless Marion, of my childless aunt, of Beatrice wasted and wasteful and futile. What hope is there for a people whose women become fruitless? I think of all the energy I have given to ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... usually does in Egypt. The atmosphere was sad. Clouds of wild pigeons flew up to right and left of them, circling over the now diminishing crops and the little runlets of water that soon would die away where sterility's empire began. In low, yet penetrating, voices the camel men sang the songs of the sands, as they ran on, treading softly with naked feet. Hamza, who accompanied the little caravan with his donkey in case Mrs. Armine grew tired of her camel, ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... Colmenares, whom I have mentioned above, was commanded to search along those coasts where it was thought Nicuesa wandered abandoned. It was known that the latter had left Veragua, because of the sterility of the soil. The colonists instructed Colmenares to bring Nicuesa back as soon as he could find him and to assure him they would be grateful to him if, on his arrival, he succeeded in calming the dissensions ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... must seek the continent of Europe, whose human inhabitants had not only to subdue the wild beasts and teach the earth to bring forth wholesome food in place of useless plants, but also to battle with wintry climates, and overcome the adverse influences of cold, sterility of soil, and other hostile conditions ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... the fluent mind in which every thought and feeling came readily to the lips. "Loose the knots of the heart," he says. We absorb elements enough, but have not leaves and lungs for healthy perspiration and growth. An air of sterility, of incompetence to their proper aims, belongs to many who have both experience and wisdom. But a large utterance, a river that makes its own shores, quick perception and corresponding expression, a constitution to which every ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... love indeed, the cause of all good to mortal men, that reconciles all creatures, and glues them together in perpetual amity and firm league; and can no more abide bitterness, hate, malice, than fair and foul weather, light and darkness, sterility and plenty may be together; as the sun in the firmament (I say), so is love in the world; and for this cause 'tis love without an addition, love [Greek: kat' exochaen], love of God, and love of men. [4603]"The love of God begets the love of man; and by this ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... of heredity and memory and the corollaries relating to sports, the reversion to remote ancestors, the phenomena of old age, the causes of the sterility of hybrids and the principles underlying longevity—all of which follow as a matter of course. This was ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... and the Pieve, render himself master of this branch of the Apennines, and descend at pleasure into the Casentino, the Val d'Arno, the Val di Chiane, or the Val di Tavere, as well as be prepared for every movement of the enemy. But Niccolo, considering the sterility of these places, told him, "his horses could not eat stones," and went to the Borgo San Sepolcro, where he was amicably received, but found that the people of Citta di Castello, who were friendly to the Florentines, could not be induced to yield to his overtures. Wishing to have Perugia at ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... usage; on the contrary, it recognizes in the variety of local and dialectical peculiarities a source of wealth which would be impaired by any normalization, and the drying up of which would threaten literature with sterility. Cultivated Germany is not an anarchy, but a federation of many small states, with a much more democratic constitution than such a unified state as France, of which state Paris is the monarch. The influence of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... been hired bravos or wandering minstrels with whom it can share no common conviction. I never cease wondering why it cannot produce a man of its own faith. There must be something inherent in its creed that produces sterility. ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... other words, that so far as the sex factors are concerned there is a difference between the ovules and pollen grains borne by the same plant. Unfortunately further investigation of this case is rendered impossible owing to the complete sterility of the F1 ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... besieging all attempts to clothe in words the visionary scenes derived from the world of dreams, where a single false note, a single word in a wrong key, ruins the whole music; and, secondly, I desire him to consider the utter sterility of universal literature in this one department of impassioned prose; which certainly argues some singular difficulty suggesting a singular duty of indulgence in criticizing any attempt that even imperfectly succeeds. The sole Confessions, belonging to past times, that have at ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... where it is not perceived, but like the distinctions of geography—existing to-day, forgotten to-morrow—and abolished by a stroke of the pen, or a trick of diplomacy. Russia, again, a mighty empire, as respects the simple grandeur of magnitude, builds her power upon sterility. She has it in her power to seduce an invading foe into vast circles of starvation, of which the radii measure a thousand leagues. Frost and snow are confederates of her strength. She is strong by her very weakness. But Rome ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Heaven: such are the noblest employments of the mediaeval soul; how much of pity, of love, may remain for man; how much of study for the knowable? To Wastefulness like this—to misapplication of mind ending almost in palsy—must we ascribe, I think, the strange sterility of such mediaeval art as deals not merely with pattern, but with the reality of man's body and soul. And we might be thankful, if, during our wanderings among mediaeval things, we had seen the starving of only art and artistic instincts; but ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... one of those glorious afternoons that sometimes come in the African spring, although it was so intensely still. Everywhere appeared the proofs of evidences of life. The winter was over, and now, from the sadness and sterility of its withered age, sprang youth and lovely summer clad in sunshine, bediamonded with dew, and fragrant with the breath of flowers. Jess lay back and looked up into the infinite depths above. How blue they were, and ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... industry and endurance of William Burness to the utmost; and what with the sterility of the soil, which was the poorest in the parish, and the loss of cattle by accidents and disease, it was with great difficulty that he managed to support his family. They lived so sparingly that butcher's meat was for years a stranger in the house, and they labored, children and all, from ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... More hideous, when thou show'st in a child, Than the sea monster! Hear, nature, hear! Dear goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose, if Thou did'st intend to make this creature fruitful! Into her womb convey sterility! Dry up in her the organs of increase; And from her degraded body never spring A babe to honor her! If she must teem, Create her a child of spleen; that it may live And be a thwart disnatured torment to her! ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... does not die upon the broken sword; one has to live on. Would that I could dissuade you from this inky pestilence! This poetizing spirit, which gives all life so much significance to the imagination, strikes it with sterility in every thing which should beget or prosper a personal career. It opens the heart—true, but keeps it open; it closes in on nothing—shuts in nothing for itself. It is an open heart, and the sunshine enters there, and the bird alights there; but nothing retains them, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... crossing and intertwining with each other, added to the roughness below, made the passage infinitely toilsome. Scattered over this space were single cedars with their ragged spines and wreaths of moss, and copses of dwarf oaks, which were only new emblems of sterility. ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... arts; they were men who had descended from a cold northern climate, where nature did little to supply their wants, where hunger and cold could not be avoided but by industry and exertion; where, in one word, the sterility of nature was counteracted by ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... simply the eternal stream of life, working slowly upwards, onwards, to unknown goals. All that opposes itself to this Life-stream is evil. Morality, a man-made local convention, is our present blundering method of assisting this great Force, and preventing its sterility, or dissipation. In his conception of the nature of this Life-stream Goethe is more Catholic and more ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... according to a German belief, is said to attract rain, and in olden times was thought to produce sterility. Some critics have suggested that it is the plant referred to in "Macbeth" by ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... threaten their nourishing business, they have united in mutual admiration; so that in the South the Mendelssohnian school, with all that pertains to it, is now lauded and protected—whilst, in the North, the prototype of South-German sterility is welcomed [Footnote: Franz Lachner and his Orchestral Suites.] with sudden and profound respect—an honour which Lindpaintner of blessed memory [Footnote: Peter Josef von Lindpainter, 1791-1856, Capellmeister at Stuttgart] did not live to see. ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... SPARING.—Menstruation at another time is too sparing; this is a frequent cause of sterility. Medical aid, in the majority of cases, will be able to remedy the defect, and, by doing so, will probably be the means of bringing the womb into a healthy state, ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... expense of the whole; for unless there be considerable attention paid to other parts of the land, besides those appropriated to the raising of tobacco, the manure will no longer be found on the plantation, and general exhaustion and sterility ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... still wider territory, extending on the south into Cinaloa, on the east in to the Province of Taraumara. The Upper Pima are found far to the north living by the Sobahipuris to its outlet, and on both banks of the Gila to the Tomosatzi, in vales of luxuriant beauty, and in wastes of sand and sterility between those rivers and the sea,—having still other tribes beyond them using the same language in different dialects. The Lower Pima are in the west of the Province, having many towns extending to the frontier ...
— Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language - Shea's Library Of American Linguistics. Volume III. • Buckingham Smith
... genital sperm is projected, or, if there be, it is in a less quantity than nature requires, or there is no prolific faculty in it; or there is a deficiency of a due proportion of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness; or there is a resolution of the generative parts. The Stoics attribute sterility to the obliquity of the yard, by which means it is not able to ejaculate in a due manner, or to the unproportionable magnitude of the parts, the matrix being so contracted as not to have a capacity to receive. Erasistratus assigns it to the womb's being more callous or more carneous, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... general anathema. She was young and pleasure-loving, and at last her nature could no longer stand this general rejection, the absence of the simple pleasures of life. It was not their quarrels, even when they came to blows, that determined her action. It was a revolt from the radical sterility of Terry's philosophy. Katie furnished her with the necessary money, and she went away to California. There this tired creature, this civilised product of the slums, this thoughtful prostitute, this striving human being full of the desire for life and as eager for excellence as is the moth for ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... there is a tree which nobody looks at without curiosity and without wondering how it came there. For a long time it was the only one of its kind known in the state, and from its isolated position it has always been cursed with sterility. It reminds one of the warm climes of Africa or Asia, and wears the aspect of a stranger of distinction driven from his native country. Indeed with its sharp and thin foliage, sighing mournfully under the blast of one of our November ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... of sterility, blindness of babies, and all manner of surgical operations and "diseases peculiar to women," so common among innocent wives, Miss Dock shows us that European records give about seventy-five per cent of men as infected. In America things are better, a conservative estimate giving the proportion ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... in families, churches, and schools, to say nothing about sex relations, normal or abnormal; and in society at large to do nothing about the ancient evil of prostitution, to provide neither isolation nor treatment for the worst of contagious diseases, and to regard the blindness, feeble-mindedness, sterility, paralysis, and insanity which result from those diseases as afflictions which could not be prevented. The progress of medicine within twenty years, both preventive and curative, has greatly changed the ethical as well as the physical situation. The policy of silence ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... the religions of the world, not to protest but in a spirit of enquiry. Our flocks grow increasingly restive, when they are not leaving us altogether, our influence grows less. We wish to know what steps, if any, are being taken toward modification or abrogation of the sterility program. Without hope of posterity, ...
— It's All Yours • Sam Merwin
... farming as those in the interior. They are generally very rocky and uneven. In many places they are mere barrens being covered with a stunted growth of shrubs. There are however good spots intermixed, and many places that formerly appeared doomed to sterility have been brought under a good state of cultivation. Great improvements have lately been made in farming in this county. Many new settlements have been formed and are rapidly improving. Several merchants and persons of property in the city of Saint John have lately improved farms in ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... thousand different shapes of sandy, sterile, and chalky isles, many of them resembling immense antique tombs; some of them appear united by chains of reefs, others protected by immense sand-banks, and all that one could see of the continent displayed the same sterility, and the same monotony of colour and appearance. The dismayed and astonished navigator turns away his eyes, fatigued with the contemplation of these unhappy isles and hideous solitudes, surrounded, as he ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... abortion," says Dr. J. Clifton Edgar, in his book, "The Practice of Obstetrics," "are hemorrhage, retention of an adherent placenta, sepsis, tetanus, perforation of the uterus. They also cause sterility, anemia, malignant diseases, ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... germination of seeds. Their influence in this respect is most striking in those southern countries where a long dry season is followed by heavy tropical showers, which in a few days change the whole face of nature, from one of parched sterility to one of a wealth of ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... Oligarchy is an ostracism of itself,—an ostracism not occasional, but permanent,—not dubious, but certain. Her laws prevented the development of merit instead of attacking its maturity. They did not cut down the plant in its high and palmy state, but cursed the soil with eternal sterility. In spite of the law of ostracism, Athens produced, within a hundred and fifty years, the greatest public men that ever existed. Whom had Sparta to ostracise? She produced, at most, four eminent men, Brasidas, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... explain about the development and birth of the child.) If this tear is repaired immediately no inconvenience usually results but if it is neglected it may produce a series of complications, some of which are falling of the womb, inflammation and even sterility. ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... could not possibly have been in a better relation to him for the purpose. He encouraged, beguiled, excited him, manifested an unfathomable credulity, and his only interruptions were when the Colonel did not respond to it. He had his intermissions, his hours of sterility, and then Lyon felt that the picture also languished. The higher his companion soared, the more gyrations he executed, in the blue, the better he painted; he couldn't make his flights long enough. He lashed him on when he flagged; his apprehension became great at moments that the Colonel ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... the Ass is easy enough, and is constantly done, as far as I am aware, if you take two mules, a male and a female, and endeavour to breed from them, you get no offspring whatever; no generation will take place. This is what is called the sterility of the hybrids ...
— The Conditions Of Existence As Affecting The Perpetuation Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... mission of nuns and celibate priests, all together give small promise of rapid increase of population. It is rather to the fact that the French settlements, except at the seaboard, were constituted so largely of these elements, than to any alleged sterility of the French stock, that the fatal weakness of the French occupation is to be ascribed. The lack of French America was men. The population of Canada in 1759, according to census, was about eighty-two thousand;[27:2] ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... common as the result of degeneration or extensive and destructive disease of the secreting organs (testicles, ovaries) which elaborate the male and female sexual products, respectively. Such diseases are, therefore, a common cause of sterility in both sexes. The old bull, fat and lazy, becomes sluggish and unreliable in serving, and finally gets to be useless for breeding purposes. This is not attributable to his weight and clumsiness alone, but largely to the fatty degeneration of his testicles ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... are small. Indeed most of the houses we saw on the road indicated poverty, or rather that the people could just live. Towards the frontiers they grew worse and worse in their appearance, as if not willing to put sterility itself out of countenance. No gardens smiled round the habitations, not a potato or cabbage to eat with the fish drying on a stick near the door. A little grain here and there appeared, the long stalks of which you might ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... fuel, the fire is believed to promote the growth of the crops and the welfare of man and beast, either positively by stimulating them, or negatively by averting the dangers and calamities which threaten them from such causes as thunder and lightning, conflagration, blight, mildew, vermin, sterility, disease, and not ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... in all their ranks, there is seldom a man possessed of the higher intellectual qualities that flower in literature, eloquence, or statesmanship. Scarcely one of them has produced a book worth printing, a poem worth reading, or a speech worth listening to. They are struck with intellectual sterility. They go to college; they travel abroad; they hire the dearest masters; they keep libraries among their furniture; and some of them buy works of art. But, for all that, their brains wither under luxury, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... fruits are quite sterile, or produce extremely few seeds. This is notoriously the case with some of the best pears and grapes, with the pine-apples, bananas, bread-fruits, pomegranate and some members of the orange tribe. It is open to discussion as to what may be the immediate cause of this sterility, but it is quite evident, that all such sterile varieties must have originated in a cultivated condition. Otherwise they would surely ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... The sterility of the hills here is much relieved by the bunches of beautiful large yellow flowers of the Cochlospermum Gossypium, interspersed with the large balls of white cotton, just bursting from the seed-vessels. I collected a bag full ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... courts, it followed that the lethargies of pedantic dulness were uniformly deepened by the lethargies of aulic and ceremonial dulness; so that, if the reader represents to himself the very abstract of birthday odes, sycophantish dedications, and court sermons, he will have some adequate idea of the sterility and the mechanical formality which at that era spread the sleep of death over German literature. Literature, the very word literature, points the laughter of scorn to what passed under that name during the period of Gottsched. That such a man indeed as this Gottsched, equal at the best to the composition ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... capacious chair; she seemed utterly exhausted, as if she had been subjected to a prolonged brutal strain. But still her eyes sought him steady in their hurt regard. "There is so much that I can give you," he blundered, immediately conscious of the sterility of his phrase. "I mean better things—peace and attention and—and understanding. I won't attempt any of the terms usual, commonplace, at such moments, you must take them, where they are worthy, for granted. I only tell you a lamentable fact, and ask you to marry me, promise ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... And mayhap this is why they make their girls Wives prematurely, mothers over young, Hoping to please their Mother God this way. Since everywhere in Nature sex is shown For procreative uses, they contend Sterility is sinful. (Save when one Chooses a life of Saintship here on earth, And so conserves all ...
— Poems of Purpose • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... miserable who, aspiring to follow these, feels his force wane within him while he remains yet fatherless; or who has sons stillborn, or weakly, or dishonoured. I question whether sheer degradation into evil brings more pain to man than such sense of sterility or frustrate parentage. But it is no small part of human redemption that none need know the interminable misery. A man may have neither sons nor genius, but in the dark hour he can go out and give, if it be only a penny or a kind word, and on that foundation ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... tea-drinkers could supply themselves with pure water from the Vassie and the fragrant tea-pots of Gnihing. This sagacious sophist and dogmatizer also discovered that, among other evils, tea-drinking deprived its devotees of the power of expectoration, and entailed sterility; wherefore he hoped Europeans would thereafter keep to their natural beverages— wine and ale—and reject coffee, chocolate, and tea, which were ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... disease, imperfection and decay; all the mischievous and ferocious instincts and tendencies of man and beast; all the multitudinous forms of struggle, terror, anxiety and grief; all that makes life bitter to any living being, and, even as the Fathers were accustomed to say, the briars and weeds and sterility of the earth. Paradise Regained was believed to be indissolubly connected with Paradise Lost. The one was the explanation of the other. The one introduced the disease, the other provided ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... judicial faculty, directed to the beautiful, and thus to some extent distinct from the intellectual judgment. It was further bisected into active and passive; but the former ran into the definition of "ingegno," the latter described sterility. The word "gusto," or taste as judgment, was in use in Italy at a very early period; and in Spain we find Lope di Vega and his contemporaries declaring that their object is to "delight the taste" of their public. These uses of the word are not of significance as regards ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... be said, too, that putting off having children too long, is very apt to result in the sterility of the wife. Many a young wife, who has really wanted to have children sometime, and who would be greatly grieved if she thought she could not bear a child, has kept putting it off, and has done this so often, and for so long, that, when the "convenient day" does come, ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... consisting in the fact that the variation in the flower is not a useful, but a disadvantageous one, which can only be preserved by artificial selection on the part of the gardener, while the transformations that have taken place parallel with the sterility of the ants are useful, since they procure for the colony an advantage in the struggle for existence, and they are therefore preserved by natural selection. Even the sterility itself in this case is not disadvantageous, since the fertility of the true females ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... conceit must not go so far as to suppose that it was that appreciation which commended him to his own countrymen. At the time when Sydney Smith wrote the article from which we have quoted there was apparently an almost literary sterility in this country, and the professional critics of the critical journals were, as Professor Lounsbury says in his admirable Life of Cooper, undoubtedly greatly affected by English opinion. But there was an American reading public independent of the few literary ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... lost their sharpness of outline and melted into a vague and feathery mass. At the moment it was impossible to know of what he was thinking, but he was happy with the happiness which visits men of small parts and of sterile imagination. By virtue of these limitations and this sterility he had risen out of obscurity—for the spiritual law which decrees that to gain the world one must give up one's soul, was exemplified in him as in all his class. Success, the shibboleth of his kind, had controlled ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... Sacy regarding the Chinar has already been quoted by Marsden, and though it may be doubtful whether the term Arbre Sec had any relation to the idea expressed, it seems to me too interesting to be omitted: "Its sterility seems to have become proverbial among certain people of the East. For in a collection of sundry moral sentences pertaining to the Sabaeans or Christians of St. John ... we find the following: 'The vainglorious man is like a showy Plane Tree, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... We have no name for it but Post-Impressionism. Such men as Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh recognized the sterility of Impressionism and of a narrow aestheticism, while they shared the hatred of the aesthetes and the Impressionists for the current art of the salons. No more than the aesthetes or the Impressionists were they conscious of any social or universal ideals that demanded ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... obtaining from the greater assembly what he would have extracted from the less if he had held office in 1787. That is the secret of Necker's unforeseen weakness in the midst of so much power, and of his sterility when the crisis broke and it was discovered that the force which had been calculated equal to the carrying of a modest and obvious reform was as the rush of Niagara, and that France ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... lakes, which in the dry season retain a little brackish water, the traveller meets from time to time, even in the most extreme drought, groves of Mauritia, a species of palm, the leaves of which, spreading out like a fan, preserve amidst the surrounding sterility a brilliant verdure. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... wide a deviation from ordinary practice and none at all. This fact reappears in heredity as the beneficial effects of occasional crossing on the one hand, and on the other, in the generally observed sterility of hybrids. If heredity be an affair of memory, how can an embryo, say of a mule, be expected to build up a mule on the strength of but two mule-memories? Hybridism causes a fault in the chain of memory, and it is to this cause that the usual ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... always follow intercourse of the male and female. Impotency in the male and sterility in ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... briefly finish up the argument. Divorce cases are rare because they are almost exclusively based upon incompatibility of temper or persistent sterility. ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... which the sea-hawk chooses for its nest; while freedom, on the contrary, flourishes like the tannen, 'on the loftiest and least sheltered rocks,' and clothes with its refreshing verdure what, without it, would frown in naked and incurable sterility. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... negro is standing still, or "relapsing into barbarism," are the falsest of false prophets. They resolutely shut their eyes to facts all around them, and devote columns upon columns of newspaper, magazine and book argument—imaginary pictures—to the immorality, mental sterility and innate improvidence of this people; and they do this for various reasons, none of them honorable, many of them really disreputable. In dealing with this negro problem they always start off upon a false premise; their conclusions must, ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... the revolution in the woman's world, the woman in the modern American family, the career of the child, the passing of patriarchism and familiarism, the precarious hour, the trend as to marriage, race sterility and race suicide, divorce, the attitude of the church, the family, and the social revolution. The author finds that during the past half century the American family possesses unity, due to the fact that ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... the country beyond the influence of the tanks is neither rich nor interesting. The cultivation seemed scanty and the population thin, owing to the irremediable sterility of soil, from the poverty of the primitive rock from whose detritus it is chiefly formed. Raghunath Rao told me that the wish of the people in the castle to adopt a child as the successor to his nephew arose from the desire to escape the scrutiny into the past accounts of disbursements which he might ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... "Nietzsche was a rank woman-hater;" then I began my work on Mrs. Beacon's portrait, the fashionable Mrs. Beacon, and tried to forget all about the finer issues and the satisfied sterility of its ideals. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... between the sterility of first crosses and of hybrids—Sterility various in degree, not universal, affected by close interbreeding, removed by domestication—Laws governing the sterility of hybrids—Sterility not a special endowment, but incidental on other differences, not accumulated by natural selection—Causes ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... destination. The desolation of the country had become so absolute that she could not conceive of anything but still greater desolation lying beyond. She had no feeling that she was merely traversing a tract of sterility. Her sensation was that she had passed the boundary of the world God had created, and come into some other place, upon which He had never looked and of which He had ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... aside, by the Work in its PRESENT FORM. To have produced it, wholly divested of ornament, would have been as foreign to my habits as repugnant to my feelings. I have therefore, as I would willingly conclude, hit upon the happy medium—between sterility ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the rise or fall of the territory they lived in. Fathers there deposited the hopes of their posterity; and children there beheld the monuments of their fathers. Here their lot was finally cast; and it is the natural wish of all that their lot should not be cast in a bad land. Poverty, sterility, and desolation are not a recreating prospect to the eye of man; and there are very few who can bear to grow old among the curses of a whole people. If their passion or their avarice drove the Tartar lords to acts of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... faith; for, withdrawing from the tradition of the Catholic Church, they have erred from the knowledge of the truth, and as the proverb saith: "The husbandmen have gone astray in their own husbandry, and have gathered in their hands sterility," because certain priests in deed, but not priests in reality, had dared to slander the God-approved ornaments of the sacred monuments. Of whom God cries aloud through the prophet: "Many pastors have corrupted my vineyard, they have polluted my portion" ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... fair villages and villas garlanded with roses and flushing with grapes whose juice gains warmth from the breathing of its subterraneous fires, while just above them rises a region more awful than can be created by the action of any common causes of sterility. There, immense tracts sloping gradually upward show a desolation so peculiar, so utterly unlike every common solitude of Nature, that one enters upon it with the shudder we give at that which is wholly unnatural. On all sides are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... annihilated in the Roman empire. Some notion, however, may be formed of the revenue of the provinces where considerable wealth had been deposited by nature, or collected by man, if we observe the severe attention that was directed to the abodes of solitude and sterility. Augustus once received a petition from the inhabitants of Gyarus, humbly praying that they might be relieved from one third of their excessive impositions. Their whole tax amounted indeed to no more than one hundred and fifty drachms, or about five pounds: but Gyarus ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... of the injury, it will be well to first consider the question of the sterility of the bullet. Putting laboratory experiments on one side, the large experience of this campaign seems to prove to absolute demonstration that, bearing in mind the very large proportion of instances of ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... could never herself take the initiative in divorce; the husband was all-powerful. The first divorce of which we have any record took place in the year 231 B.C., when Spurius Carvilius Ruga put away his wife for sterility. Public opinion censured him severely for it "because people thought that not even the desire for children ought to have been preferred to conjugal fidelity and affection."[96] As the Empire extended and Rome became more worldly and corrupt, the reasons for divorce became more ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... moment, expectantly, rolling her eyes, then in full loathing of menkind went back to the kitchen and vowed herself to sterility. ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... of an almost extinct type. Ollivier's house is as pretty as the whole coast. It stands on a peninsula with perfect sands, one or other of which is sheltered for bathing in any wind, and instead of the usual parched sterility of Provence, springs rise all round the house, which is lost in a dense forest of young palms. The views are not from the house, but from the various shores of the peninsula, all these, however, being close at hand. I had for escort in my trips about the coast the famous ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... of the early Northern rationalism and its practical results is part of the general history of religion and politics. In some respects it may have been premature; in many cases it seems (as might be expected) to have gone along with hardness and sterility of mind, and to have left an inheritance of vacuity behind it. The curious and elaborate hardness of the Icelandic Court poetry may possibly be a sign of this same temper; in another way, the prevalent coolness of Northern piety, even before the Reformation, ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... way, and must lie principally in the Alta California; the demarcation latitude of 42 deg. probably cutting a segment from the north part of the rim. Of its interior, but little is known. It is called a desert, and, from what I saw of it, sterility may be its prominent characteristic; but where there is so much water there must be some oasis. The great river and the great lake reported may not be equal to the report; but where there is so much snow, there must be streams; ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... a horse in poor condition and in warm weather cannot go much over a day without water, and when the sterility of the country is considered, it will be readily seen what a disadvantage one labours under without camels, which can go ten days without water. Well can I sympathize with Mr. Giles when he states in his journal: ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... is to be seen on this place, but the glorious hills rising on every side, vested in foliage of living green, make ample amends for the sterility of the tiny level upon which we camp. The surrounding scenery is infinitely more charming than that of Rich Bar. The river, in hue of a vivid emerald, as if it reflected the hue of the fir-trees above, bordered with a band of dark red, caused by the streams flowing into it from the different sluices, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... are much more fitted to be types and characters of the Infinite. And thirdly (which is the main reason), the exuberant and riotous prodigality of life naturally forces the mind more powerfully upon the antagonist thought of death, and the wintry sterility of the grave. For it may be observed generally, that wherever two thoughts stand related to each other by a law of antagonism, and exist, as it were, by mutual repulsion, they are apt to suggest each other. On these accounts it is that I ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... islands twenty miles deep; while the portion of the Arctic current which splits off at the head of Newfoundland, and pushes down through the strait, presses close past Caribou Island. This explains the sterility ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... not action but contemplation—being as distinct from doing—a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some shape or other, the principle of all the higher morality. In poetry, in art, if you enter into their true spirit at all; you touch this principle, in a measure: these, by their very sterility, are a type of beholding for the mere joy of beholding. To treat life in the spirit of art, is to make life a thing in which means and ends are identified: to encourage such treatment, the true moral significance of ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... descendants of the self-fertilised plant named Hero.—Summary on the growth, vigour, and fertility of the successive crossed and self-fertilised generations.—Small amount of pollen in the anthers of the self-fertilised plants of the later generations, and the sterility of their first-produced flowers.—Uniform colour of the flowers produced by the self-fertilised plants.—The advantage from a cross between two distinct plants depends on their differing ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... daughter's verses, she had a fixed belief in the excellence of those efforts of genius. The secret of Lady Mallow's silence rests between her husband and herself; and it is just possible that some too candid avowal of Lord Mallow's may be the reason of her poetic sterility. It is one thing to call the lady of one's choice a tenth muse before marriage, and another thing to foster a self-delusion in one's wife which can hardly fail to become a discordant element in domestic life. ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... great man wishes to leave behind some monument of his labors, to bless or instruct mankind. Any man without some form of this noble ambition lives in vain, even if his monument be no more than a cultivated farm rescued from wildness and sterility. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... repeat and to which it has no other relation, are quite right in condemning that conception, only that is not, in fact, what the Christian Religion is. The content of the Christian dogmas is so full and so complex that there is never any danger of intellectual sterility in those who are called to deal with them; and their application to life is so rich and so manifold that there is not the least danger that those who set out to apply them to the problems of daily existence will become mere formalists. The attempt to live ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... edifice, and carried our thoughts back to the remote period when submarine volcanoes gave birth to new islands, or rent continents asunder. Every thing which surrounded us seemed to indicate destruction and sterility; but the back-ground of the picture, the coasts of Lancerota presented a more smiling aspect. In a narrow pass between two hills, crowned with scattered tufts of trees, marks of cultivation were ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... martial appearance. Though it is but a detachment of not over fifty men—a single troop—riding by twos, the files stretch afar in shining array, its sheen all the more brilliant from contrast with the sombre sterility of the desert. ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... Law to the Social World? Will it be charged that the splendid achievements of such thinkers are hybrids between things which Nature has meant to remain apart? Nature usually solves such problems for herself. Inappropriate hybridism is checked by the Law of Sterility. Judged by this great Law these modern developments of our knowledge stand uncondemned. Within their own sphere the results of Mr. Herbert Spencer are far from sterile—the application of Biology to Political ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... but the premises are arbitrary. Robespierre is as one who should iterate indisputable propositions of abstract geometry and mechanics, while men are craving an architect who shall bridge the gulf of waters. Exuberance of high words no longer conceals the sterility of his ideas and the shallowness of his method. We should say of his speeches, as of so much of the speaking and writing of the time, that it is transparent and smooth, but there is none of that quality which the critics ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... repetition of the scenes witnessed at the same time wherever the Irish strove to propagate the true faith. Later on it will be our pleasure to come back to this field and wonder at the growth of a blooming garden which has replaced the old sterility. ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... enters on the exit of a discontented and resentful expectant mother, a woman, very much alone in the world—perhaps a bachelor maid or a barren wife, who, as she sits in the office, bitterly weeps and wails over her state of loneliness or sterility; and so we are led to realize that discontentment is the lot of many women; and we are sometimes led to regret that ours is not the power to take from her that hath and give to her that ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... factitious one among themselves, and assumed that they could operate without the intervention of the occult original. But Nature would not be mocked; and whenever this race of idolaters have worked without her agency, she has afflicted them with the most stubborn sterility. ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... time, when a return is made to the old and correct doctrine. These innovators are serious about nothing else in the world than their own priceless person, and it is this that they wish to make its mark. They bring this quickly about by beginning a paradox; the sterility of their own heads suggests their taking the path of negation; and truths that have long been recognised are now denied—for instance, the vital power, the sympathetic nervous system, generatio equivoca, Bichat's distinction between the working of the passions and the working of intelligence, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Pantagruel. Thanks to you, my lord, said the Lord Kissbreech; but to the purpose. There passed betwixt the two tropics the sum of threepence towards the zenith and a halfpenny, forasmuch as the Riphaean mountains had been that year oppressed with a great sterility of counterfeit gudgeons and shows without substance, by means of the babbling tattle and fond fibs seditiously raised between the gibblegabblers and Accursian gibberish-mongers for the rebellion of the Switzers, who had assembled themselves to the full number of ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... believe, how much this silence, on my part at least, was awkward, stiff, and ridiculous; but, as it often happens in circumstances which demand most imperatively the resources of eloquence, I was stricken with an invincible sterility of mind. I tried in vain to find some plausible subject of conversation, and the more annoyed I felt at finding none, the less capable I ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... way even in darkness. More than once Peter had wondered why his master had so carefully explored this useless mass of upheaved rock at the end of Cragg's Ridge. They had never seen an animal or a blade of grass in all its gray, sun-blasted sterility. It was like a hostile thing, overhung with a half-dead, slow-beating something that was like the dying pulse of an evil thing. And now darkness added to its mystery and its unfriendliness as Peter nosed close at his master's ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... winter keeps up to the vivacity of its d'ebut, you will have no reason to complain of the sterility of my letters. I do not say this from the spirit of the House of Commons on the first day,(341) which was the most fatiguing and dull debate I ever heard, dull as I have heard many; and yet for the first quarter of an hour it looked as if we were met to choose a King of Poland,(342) ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... France is the same as ever. An oppressive air of solitude seems to hover over these rich and extended plains, while we are sensible that, whatever is the motive of the desolation, it cannot be sterility. The towns are small, and have a poor appearance, and more frequently exhibit signs of decayed splendour than of thriving and increasing prosperity. The chateau, the abode of the gentleman, and the villa, the retreat ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... character Society, state of, in England Soldiers, why and for what they are killed and wounded Soldier, who had lost both arms Spontaneous combustion, productive of superstition Spencer, Lord, his park Space, whether eternal Stage-coach horses, mismanagement of Standard of truth defined Sterility of ancient countries, cause of Statesmen, their mistaken policy St. James's palace, its ruined state St. Paul's Cathedral St. Lawrence, the, its probable fate Surfaces, the residence of electric power Surrey, its disgraceful wastes Supernatural ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... remembered that his theory is, that slight variations occurring in an individual advantageous to it (not to its associates), in the struggle for life, is perpetuated by inheritance, it is no wonder that the case of sterile ants gave him so much trouble. Accidental sterility is not favorable to the individual, and its being made permanent by inheritance, is out of the question, for the sterile have no descendants. Yet these sterile females are not degenerations, they are in general larger and ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... the metaphor, is the mauvais pas in the ascent of Parnassus: and here Daniel broke down. He did indeed acquire a style of his own; but the effort exhausted him. He was no longer prolific; his ardor had gone: and his innate self-distrustfulness made him quick to recognize his sterility. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... regarded as a thing apart, owing to a general instinctive repugnance to admit that a phenomenon, whose extrinsications are so extensive and penetrate every fibre of social life, derives, in fact, from the same causes as socially insignificant forms like rickets, sterility, etc. But this repugnance is really only a sensory illusion, like many others of widely ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... father and mother first met over an operating table, dressed in the white sterility that leaves only the eyes visible. She wielded the trephine that laid the patient's brain bare, he kept track of the patient's life by observing the squiggles on the roll of graph paper that emerged from his encephalograph. She knew nothing of the craft of the delicate instrument-creator, ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... be said on both sides. But if one took the larger historic view, it would certainly have to be admitted that, while the excellence of French poetry was a magnificent Renaissance after a long period of something like sterility, the excellence of the novel was something more—an achievement of things never yet achieved; an acquisition and settlement of territory which had ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... her children in affection, As an artist loves and nurses What his skillful hands have fashioned. Thus Lowyatar named her offspring, Colic, Pleurisy, and Fever, Ulcer, Plague, and dread Consumption, Gout, Sterility, and Cancer. And the worst of these nine children Blind Lowyatar quickly banished, Drove away as an enchanter, To bewitch the lowland people, To engender strife and envy. Louhi, hostess of Pohyola, Banished all the other children To the fog-point in the ocean, To the ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... settlements between the head-waters of the river and the Kluchefskoi volcano, and nearly all are situated in picturesque locations, and surrounded by gardens and fields of rye. Nowhere does the traveller see any evidences of the barrenness, sterility, and frigid desolation which have always been associated with the name ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... Virginia, and Maryland, at different times, strong movements have been made for emancipation,—movements enforced by a comparison of the progressive march of the adjoining free States with the poverty and sterility and ignorance produced by a system which in a few years wastes and exhausts all the resources of the soil without ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... responsibilities lived up to, as the life best worth living; then evil days for the commonwealth are at hand. There are regions in our land, and classes of our population, where the birth rate has sunk below the death rate. Surely it should need no demonstration to show that wilful sterility is, from the standpoint of the nation, from the standpoint of the human race, the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death; a sin for which there is no atonement; a sin which is the more dreadful exactly in proportion ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... fragments, in her isolated truths; the sense of failure which haunts his most valuable attainments; his tampering with the lower or diabolic magic, when the divine has failed; the ascetic exaltation in which he begins his career; the sudden awakening to the spiritual sterility which has been consequent on it; all these find their place, if not always their ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... God, or as forming part of God, which we cannot also think of as a Person, or as a part of a Person, as it is to produce a hybrid between two widely distinct animals. If I am not mistaken, the barrenness of inconsistent ideas, and the sterility of widely distant species or genera of plants and animals, are one in principle-sterility of hybrids being due to barrenness of ideas, and barrenness of ideas arising from inability to fuse unfamiliar thoughts into a coherent conception. I have insisted on this at some length ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... walk in the glorious forest amidst such treasures and feel they are all thrown away upon one. My collection from the Abrolhos is interesting, as I suspect it nearly contains the whole flowering vegetation—and indeed from extreme sterility the same may almost be said of Santiago. I have sent home four bottles with animals in spirits, I have three more, but would not send them till I had a fourth. I shall be anxious to hear how they fare. I made an enormous collection ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... capacity for swift and terrible action seemed to hold itself in reserve, and a breath almost appeared to come from the half-opened jaws, momentarily dimming the crystal that smoothly gushed beneath. No scrap of vegetation could the rill persuade out of the inexorable sterility around, saving for some curdled greenish mosses that waved slowly from the sides of the basin, or pointed from root-hold on brick and shard, where the small current loitered a little. I am not a taker of notes, nor, for all my vagrant ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... persons, a company of developed men, and it is difficult, very difficult to find them. In this country sterility reigns throughout the whole region of gray matter in the brain—it is sterility in the great gray ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... the alien grass and looked up at the unfamiliar constellations, smelling the frozen sterility of the ...
— The Planet with No Nightmare • Jim Harmon
... other, cheated, beaten, bullied, and hunted into the streets to disgusting overwork, without daring to utter the cry for help that brings, not rescue, but exposure and infamy, yet revenging herself terribly in the end by scattering blindness and sterility, pain and disfigurement, insanity and death among us with the certainty that we are much too pious and genteel to allow such things to be mentioned with a view to saving either her or ourselves from them. ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... done wonders there. But still you have not accounted, as you may be held to account, for divergence up to a certain extent producing increased fertility of the crosses, but carried one short almost imperceptible step more, giving rise to sterility, or reversing the tendency. Very likely you are on the right track; but you have something to do ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... I speak nine languages, and can tell you the Hebrew for an old umbrella. The Gypsy's Elixir cures colds, gout, all nervous affections, with such cutaneous disorders as are diseases of the skin, debility, sterility, hostility, and all the illities that flesh is heir to except what it can't, such as small-pox and cholera. It has cured cholera, but it don't claim to do it. Others claim to cure, but can't. I am not a charlatan, but an Ann-Eliza. That is the difference between ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... women at the roadside stopped with their pack burdens to listen. He told a thousand anecdotes. He knew all the story of the pass; how the Swiss, filing through it, had scattered the Milanese; how Suwarrow and Massena had made its sterility fertile with blood. ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... faults have a way of asserting themselves with annoying persistency. Furthermore, breeding between animals closely allied in parentage is prone to lead to degeneracy, physical weakness, and mental stupidity, while impotence and sterility are frequent concomitants, and none but experienced breeders should attempt so hazardous an experiment. Observation has proved that the union of father with daughter and mother with son is preferable to an alliance between brother and sister. Perhaps ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... his constant intercourse with Liszt and Chopin during his stay of several years in Paris to the rich passage work of the new school, appeared to him old-fashioned. Mendelssohn, who in his letters repeatedly alludes to his sterility in the matter of new pianoforte passages, allowed himself to be persuaded by Hiller to rewrite the pianoforte part, and was pleased with the result. It is clear from the above that if Mendelssohn failed to give Chopin his due, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... been done, yet can herself do nothing, and she represents, in symbol, that detestable condition of spirit which cannot create, though it sees the need of creation, and can only show the irritation which its own sterility awakens within it by destruction. All Hedda can actually do, to assert her energy, is to burn the MS. of Loevborg, and to kill herself with General Gabler's pistol. The race must be reformed or die; the Hedda Gablers which adorn its latest phase ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... converge, paralyzing in the nation the best half of the soul, and, worse still, to leading the will astray and perverting the public mind, transforming generous impulses into evil outbursts, and organizing lasting inertia, ennui, discontent, discord, feebleness, and sterility.[4102] ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... ridge, which extended upwards of fifty miles, through a succession of deep ravines, where no objects met the eye except barren sandstone rocks, and stunted trees. With the banksia and xanthorrhoea always in sight, the idea of hopeless sterility is ever present to the mind, for these productions, in sandy soils at least, grow only where nothing else can vegetate. The horizon is flat, affording no relief to the eye from the dreary and inhospitable ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... temptation to walk amid its scenes is ever present to one. In comparison, nature here is rude, raw, and forbidding; has not that maternal and beneficent look, is less mindful of man, runs to briers and weeds or to naked sterility. ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... multitudinous surnames which go back to monosyllables of the later type of name, such as John and Hugh, with the complete sterility of the names above. Therefore, when an alternative derivation for a surname is possible, it is usually ten to one that this alternative is right. Dodson is a simplified Dodgson, from Roger (Chapter VI); Benson belongs to Benedict, sometimes to Benjamin; Cobbett is a disguised ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... stiff and sterile when it had become a Moslem city. I am not so exacting as to ask any one to popularise such a word as "Constantinopolitan." But it would surely be a better word for stiffness and sterility to call it Stamboulish. But for the Moslems and other men of the Near East what counted about Byzantium was that it still inherited the huge weight of the name of Rome. Rome had come east and reared against them this Roman city, and though and priest ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... in history? It is sterility. It is incapacity to imagine, still less to shape, the yet unknown. It is an inordinate capacity for flinging oneself with feminine adaptability into anything that is historically presented and accomplished—from ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... first settlers, in which lions and tigers, and a whole menagerie of tropical animals, came in for no small share of wonder; and, as an offset to this summer luxuriance of life, most disparaging pictures were drawn of the bleak sterility of New England,—and even that which was the only compensation for this barrenness of the earth, namely, the abundance of fish in the sea, was, as respects the revenue derived from it, made an especial subject of derision. Thus, doubtless, did the ancient Peloponnesian look ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... strength. This child was born nine years before his mother committed her first and only fault. I have said it, and I repeat it. It has been objected that he was born after six years of a marriage which seemed condemned by Heaven to an eternal sterility:—fatal circumstance, which appeared proof positive to a vindictive and ulcerated heart. But again, who ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... cultivation advances. There are to-day other canals, those of Les Alpines, of Langlade, and d'Istres, besides that of Craponne that assist in fertilising the waste. Wherever the water reaches, the soil is covered with trees, with pasture-land, with fields of corn; and in another century probably the sterility of the Crau will have ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... before we go any further, that, notwithstanding the sterility of this part of the coast; it is not without importance, on account of the rich produce of the sea which bathes it. The agriculture of the waters as a celebrated naturalist has said, offers too many ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... it unnecessary. Vegetable diet is more suited to them than animal, which favours a denser population. Talent is elicited by the efforts required to overcome difficulties and hardships; and their natural birth-place is a country of frost and snow—of tempests—of sterility enough to give a spur to exertion, but not enough to extinguish hope. Where these difficulties exist, and give occasion to war and emulation, the powers of the human mind are most ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker |
