"Erosion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... river runs through a gorge in a greenstone ridge nearly one thousand feet high. The portion of the ridge east of the river is called Mount Holyoke, and the portion west of it Mount Tom. This gorge is very interesting because of showing the amount of erosion that can be performed by water in long periods of time. In all probability the bed of the Connecticut was, in remote time, much higher than it is at present, and the river itself much larger, and the rich, alluvial plains that border it ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... the mouth of the Hudson. Southern Jersey was in short an island with a sound behind it very much like the present Long Island. The shoal and island had been formed in the far distant geologic past by the erosion and washings from the lofty Pennsylvania mountains now worn down ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... strait. He had watched the gulf stream constantly flowing in a westerly direction, and he thought that he had ascertained, as the result of careful observation, that the islands in the course of the current had their lengths east and west, owing to erosion on their north and south sides. From this fact he deduced the constancy of the current. His own pilot, Juan de la Cosa, serving under Ojeda and Bastidas, had established the continuity of land from the Gulf of Paria to Darien. The Admiral ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... dear Algernon," he said, "we are cousins. There is no need for harsh words between us. All I ask is that you should forbear to make your claim until I have delivered my speech in the House of Lords on the Coast Erosion Bill, upon which I feel deeply. Once the Bill is through, I shall be prepared to retire in your favour. Meanwhile let us all enjoy together the ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... survey of the physical universe may be thought in the terms of natural science. The uniformitarian method in geology, resolving the history of the crust of the earth into known processes, such as erosion and igneous fusion;[244:13] and spectral analysis, with its discoveries concerning the chemical constituents of distant bodies through the study of their light, have powerfully reenforced this effort of thought, ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... these confusions have actually enabled Professor Tyndall to keep the scientific world in darkness as to the real nature of glacier motion for the last twenty years; and to induce a resultant quantity of aberration in the scientific mind concerning glacial erosion, of which another twenty years will scarcely undo ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... south as Nyaunglebin in the Pegu district. At Toungoo it is narrow, but below Shwegyin it widens, and at Sittang it is half a mile broad. It flows into the Gulf of Martaban, and near its mouth its course is constantly changing owing to erosion and corresponding accretions. The second river in the province in point of size is the Salween, a huge river, believed from the volume of its waters to rise in the Tibetan mountains to the north of Lhasa. It is in all probability actually longer than the Irrawaddy, but it is not to be compared ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... times of heavy rainfall, the water-flow carries with it, especially in unforested sections, great quantities of soil and sediment. Beaver-dams catch much of the material eroded from the hillsides above, and also prevent much erosion along the streams which they govern. They thus catch and deposit in place much valuable soil, the cream of the earth, that otherwise would be washed away and lost,—washed away into the rivers and harbors, impeding navigation and ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... around ought to wash away. There is something mysterious here. This island is as solid as a pancake; I don't understand it. By all the rules of the game there shouldn't be anything left here but the tree by this evening. There doesn't seem to be any process of erosion." ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... furnished with a band or sheath of comparatively soft metal larger than the bore; the gas then acting on the base of the projectile, forces the band through the grooves, sealing the escape, entering the projectile, and, to a great extent, mitigating the erosion of surface. This is, of course, universally known. It is also pretty generally known among artillerists that the effect of the resistance offered by the band or sheathing on the powder is to cause more complete combustion of the charge before the shot moves, and therefore to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... rumbled along the hoof-pocked frozen clay. Aaron analyzed the contours of the hills for watershed and signs of erosion. He studied the patterns of the barren winter fields, fall-plowed and showing here and there the stubble of a crop he didn't recognize. When the clouds scudded for a moment off the sun, he grinned up, and looked back blinded to the road. Good tilth and ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... as replications. Each spring the trees received a liberal application of a 10-6-5 fertilizer. Strips six to eight feet wide on each side of the contoured rows received frequent cultivation each growing season, while strips of orchard grass sod were left between the rows to prevent erosion. The soil is Riverdale (tentative series) sandy loam that had been in orchard grass sod for ten years before the experiment was begun. It has been necessary to spray the trees each year with DDT, parathion, or both to control Japanese beetles ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... what bilt ther Bable Tower, hed they but known ther secret, mighter from thet same material have bilt a dome higher nor St. Paul's, thet would uv shone like burnished silver 'nd would hev retained all its strength 'nd splendor, notwithstandin' ther erosion uv time 'nd ther abrashin' uv ther ages, even till now, tho' since then two hundred generations uv ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... through a canoned channel whose banks rise three hundred feet above its bed. They are twin cliffs that front one another, their facades not half so far apart. Rough with projecting points of rock, and scarred by water erosion, they look like angry giants with grim visages frowning mutual defiance. In places they approach, almost to touching; then, diverging, sweep round the opposite sides of an ellipse; again closing like the curved handles of callipers. Through the spaces thus opened the ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... almost equal whiteness, continues to the great headland of Flamborough, where the sea frets and fumes all the summer, and lacerates the cliffs during the stormy months. The masses of flinty chalk have shown themselves so capable of resisting the erosion of the sea that the seaward termination of the Wolds has for many centuries been becoming more and more a pronounced feature of the east coast of England, and if the present rate of encroachment along the low shores of Holderness is continued, this accentuation ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... upheaval. These cliffs, I may remark, are basaltic, and therefore plutonic. An area, as large perhaps as Sussex, has been lifted up en bloc with all its living contents, and cut off by perpendicular precipices of a hardness which defies erosion from all the rest of the continent. What is the result? Why, the ordinary laws of Nature are suspended. The various checks which influence the struggle for existence in the world at large are all neutralized or altered. Creatures survive which would otherwise disappear. You will observe that both ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a mound of earth or stone worn away by erosion," answered the Professor, with an assurance that forbade any one to question the ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... soil erosion from overgrazing and other poor farming practices; desertification; dumping of raw sewage, petroleum refining wastes, and other industrial effluents is leading to the pollution of rivers and coastal waters; Mediterranean Sea, in particular, becoming ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... and suburbs, so-called, cover a thousand hectares, an area a third less than that of Windsor Forest, the enterprising tourist will have some feeble notion of the waste before him. The place is indeed altogether indescribable—surely one of the most striking testimonies to the force of erosion existing on the earth's surface. The explanation of the phenomenon is found here. At a remote period of geological history the action of mighty torrents let loose sculptured these fantastic and grandiose monoliths, bored these arcades and galleries, hollowed these ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... things weather so slowly that most of the buildings might have been put up yesterday. No rainfall, no earthquakes, no vegetation is here to spread cracks with its roots—nothing. The only aging factors here are the erosion of the wind—and that's negligible in this atmosphere—and the cracks caused by changing temperature. And one other agent—meteorites. They must crash down occasionally on the city, judging from the thinness ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... (plate XCIV) is an irregular, circular depression, closely resembling a volcanic crater, but evidently, as Dr Hoffman well points out, due to erosion rather than to volcanic agencies. As one approaches it from a neighboring ranch the road ascends a low elevation, and when on top the visitor finds that the crater occupies the whole interior of the hill. The exact dimensions I did not accurately determine, but the ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... Erosion of water and wind have bared the sedimentary rocks and exposed the layers in well defined pages so I may study this great rock-paged geology book, and indeed ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... remark, that nowhere near Valparaiso above the height of twenty feet, or rarely of fifty feet, I saw any lines of erosion on the solid rocks, or any beds of pebbles; this, I believe, may be accounted for by the disintegrating tendency of most of the rocks in this neighbourhood. Nor is the land here modelled into terraces: Mr. Alison, however, informs me, that on ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... intervals of rest sufficient for lakes, stocked with fresh- water mollusca, to form on the cold surfaces of several of the lava- flows' (Holland, in I.G. (1907), i. 88). A great tract of the volcanic region appears to have remained almost undisturbed to the present day, affected by sub-aerial erosion alone. The geological horizon of the Deccan trap cannot be precisely defined, but is now vaguely stated as 'the close of the cretaceous period'. The 'steps', or conspicuous terraces, traceable on the hill-sides for great distances, are explained as being 'due to the outcrop ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... main purposes to arouse a stronger sentiment for preserving what remains of the forests as well as for extending their areas. This is because proper forestation will lessen the danger of floods and of erosion of the soil, and it will encourage the return of the wild creatures that are of so much economic importance and add so much to ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... and examine the fissure that he had studied earlier in the day. It was a cleft in the rock, the result of some subterranean upheaval which had caused the whole crag to settle into its base; a fissure, originally a mere crack which had been widened and deepened by the erosion of time. Upon closer inspection, it was larger than it had appeared from below, perhaps ten feet in width at the outside, and ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... very hard rock, which had an average thickness of nearly three hundred feet, and a breadth varying from rather less than two miles to four miles? The river, though it has so little power in transporting even inconsiderable fragments, yet in the lapse of ages might produce by its gradual erosion an effect of which it is difficult to judge the amount. But in this case, independently of the insignificance of such an agency, good reasons can be assigned for believing that this valley was formerly occupied by an arm of the sea. It is needless in ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... are much greater than in the Jura. Fig. 19 shows a section after Heim, from the Spitzen across the Brunnialp, and the Maderanerthal. It is obvious that the valleys are due mainly to erosion, that the Maderaner valley has been cut out of the crystalline rocks s, and was once covered by the Jurassic strata j, which must have formerly passed in a great arch over what is ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... familiar, it brings forth, by the natural economy of language, a name for the class or the principle; "federation," "deciduous trees," "emotion," "terminal moraine," are all names of classes; "attraction of gravity," "erosion," "degeneration," "natural selection," are names of principles which sum up acts of generalization. Almost always these names begin as figures of speech, but where they are used accurately they have a perfectly exact meaning. ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... bones were perfect in every respect, if we except a little erosion of their external table, and firmly held together by their sutures, &c., &c. Having completed our intention [i.e., of taking a plaster cast of the skull, washed from every particle of sand, &c.], the skull, securely closed in ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... operation of the twisting force just referred to, the promontory underwent various changes of level. There are sea-terraces and layers of shell-breccia along its flanks, and numerous caves which, unlike the inland ones, are the product of marine erosion. The Ape's Hill, on the African side of the strait, Mr. Busk informs me has undergone similar disturbances. [Footnote: No one can rise from the perusal of Mr. Busk's paper without a feeling of admiration for the principal discoverer ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... beginning. Chamberlin and Salisbury[1] estimate that the height of the mountains developed in the Laramide range at this time was 20,000 feet, and that, owing to the further elevation which has since taken place, from 32,000 to 35,000 feet would be their present height if erosion had not reduced them. Thus on either side of the American continent we have the same forces at work, throwing up mountain ridges where the sediments had formerly been shed into ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... exploited for private gain not only until the timber has been seriously reduced, but until streams have been ruined for navigation, power, irrigation, and common water supplies, and whole regions have been exposed to floods and disastrous soil erosion. Probably there has never occurred a more reckless destruction of property that of right should belong to ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... the afternoon we had seven islands in sight. They were higher than those we had seen before, and consisted of precipitous hills. There were also small glaciers or snow-fields, and the rock formation showed clear traces of erosion by ice or snow, this being especially the case on the largest island, where there were even small valleys, ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... two divisions of the system are sharply separated by a pronounced unconformability which is probably indicative of a prolonged interval of erosion. In the central valley between the base of the Highlands and the southern uplands lay "Lake Caledonia." Here the lower division is made up of some 20,000 ft. of shallow-water deposits, reddish-brown, yellow and grey sandstones and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... they opened up the ship, and let down the landing ramps. It was a very old world that they set foot upon. Whatever mountains or hills it had ever had, had long ago been leveled by erosion, so that now there was only a vaguely undulating plain studded with smooth and rounded boulders. The soil underfoot was packed and barren, and there was no vegetation for as far as they ...
— Shepherd of the Planets • Alan Mattox
... mining areas; we have, and will have under contour farming, little crazy-quilt blocks of land unsuitable for cultivation. All these agencies and all these needs tie in with the intelligent use of trees, particularly nut trees, because they serve a fourfold purpose; lumber, food, erosion control, and a balanced wild life. Here is where the nut specialist would enter the scene. By collecting data, by pooling the results of the individual growers, and especially by selection and breeding, he should be able to recommend the proper varieties of nut trees ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... deforestation; inadequate supplies of potable water; desertification; soil contamination and erosion; ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... oxidation, pollution, defoedation|, poisoning, venenation|, leaven, contamination, canker, corruption, adulteration, alloy. decline, declension, declination; decadence, decadency[obs3]; falling off &c. v.; caducity[obs3], decrepitude. decay, dilapidation, ravages of time, wear and tear; corrosion, erosion; moldiness, rottenness; moth and rust, dry rot, blight, marasmus[obs3], atrophy, collapse; disorganization; delabrement &c. (destruction)[Fr]. 162; aphid, Aphis, plant louse, puceron[obs3]; vinefretter[obs3], vinegrub[obs3]. wreck, mere wreck, honeycomb, magni nominis umbra[Lat]; jade, plug, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... vegetations above described; and as just stated, the fibrin may form a more or less permanent cap. If this cap is disintegrated or lost and the cells under it washed away in the blood stream, ulceration takes place, which may be more or less serious, even to the perforation of a valve or actual erosion of one of its cusps, and the parts of the valves most seriously affected are the parts which strike against each other on closure; as previously stated, the parts subjected to the greatest strain and the greatest ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... radiated much less than its present amount of heat, no water could have existed on the earth's surface except in the form of ice; there would have been scarcely any evaporation, and the geological changes due to erosion could not have taken place. Moreover, the commencement of the geological operations of which we speak is by no means the commencement of the earth's existence. The theories of both parties agree that, for untold aeons before ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... Erosion has worn it to an insignificant pillar, but it at one time was a portion of the main chain of bluffs bounding the valley of the Platte. Denudation through countless ages separated it from them. Fifty years ago it was a conical elevation, ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... lofty bluffs and sinuous ravines,—the former known as "divides," the latter as "draws." The top of these divides preserves one general level,—leading naturally to the hypothesis that all the draws are valleys of erosion in a tract of alluvial deposit originally uniform with the plateaus of the divides. Some of the larger draws still serve as the channels of unfailing streams; most of them carry more or less water during the rainy season; few of them are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... the vast antiquity of that furrowed lunar surface, by far the oldest thing that mortal eye can see, since, while observing the ceaseless political or geological changes on earth, the face of this dead satellite, on account of the absence of air and water and consequent erosion, has remained unchanged for bygone ages, as it doubtless ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... hundred thousand years. The meaning of this is that the time elapsed since the close of the Glacial Age was something less than the number just stated. On the other hand, a minimum date for this time has been obtained by estimating the amount of erosion in the valley of the River Saone, in France. From this we know that the time can not be less ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... change," she said. "And with evolution. Look at this scarred mountain-side, how confused and senseless the upheavals seem which have given it its grandeur! Nor is it static yet. It is continually wearing down. Erosion is diminishing it, that river is denuding it. Eternal change is ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... renewed, though slowly and with difficulty. Reforestation prevents erosion and thus conserves soil fertility. Systems of crop rotation designed to retain nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... comes from erosion or is the consequence of the bursting of a small abscess, which may have formed beneath the delicate layer of the conjunctiva, continued over the cornea; or, in the very substance of the cornea itself, after violent keratitis, or catarrhal conjunctivitis. At other times it ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... successively lower geological formations, until in Arizona the platform is reached which borders the real chasm and extends southward beyond, far into the central part of that territory. It is the theory of geologists that ten thousand feet of strata have been swept by erosion from the surface of this entire platform, whose present uppermost formation is the Carboniferous; the deduction being based upon the fact that the missing Permian, Mesozoic, and Tertiary formations, which belong ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... fact that the Pacific coast in California contains several of these fissures and earthquakes are more common there. The entire western part of the United States has been slowly rising for many centuries, and the shifting of soil due to erosion and transportation doubtless contributes to produce these ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... molten materials. They come from magmas—molten mixtures of minerals, often containing gases. They come from deep below the surface of the earth. If they cool off while below the surface, they form intrusive rocks, which may later be revealed by erosion. When magmas reach the surface red hot, they form extrusive rocks, such as volcanic rocks. Thus, granite is an igneous, intrusive rock; lava is an igneous, extrusive rock. (Notice how the type of rock tells its past history—if you know ...
— Let's collect rocks & shells • Shell Oil Company
... Wailuku Valley, a picturesque gorge several miles deep, and giving you a very fair example of the broken, verdure-clad, and now lonely valleys of these islands; which are in reality steep, narrow canons, worn out of the mountains by the erosion of water. The old Hawaiians seem to have cared little how difficult a piece of country was; they not only made their taro patches in the streams which roar at the bottoms of such gorges, but they fought battles among the precipices which you find at the upper ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... long as these slopes were forest-clad, the decaying leaves and humus gave a sponge-like character to the soil upon them, and it gave out the water gradually to the streams below. Now, however, the peaks are in most cases only enormous rock-piles, the erosion having laid waste the country roundabout; or else they are mixtures of rock and earth rent by gorges through which furious torrents rush down immediately after each rainfall, submerging once fruitful ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... of maintaining and strengthening it. The system of a standing army was of course not to be thought of, and the uncertain recruits who took its place were mostly undisciplined and unreliable. When the exigencies became pressing, a new method was resorted to, and then the usual erosion of life in the field, the losses by casualties and sickness, caused the numbers to dwindle. Long ago the paymaster had ceased to pretend to pay off the men regularly so that there was now a large amount of back pay due them. Largely through Washington's patriotic exhortations ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... espoused his niece, daughter of Edward IV., and in order to make the home nest perfectly free from social erosion, he caused his consort, Anne, to be poisoned. Those who believed the climate around the throne to be bracing and healthful had a chance to change their views in a land where pea-soup fog can never enter. Anne was the widow of Edward, whom Richard ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... forms between mainland and islands; by slight geological changes one is converted into the other. Great Britain was a peninsula at the end of the Tertiary period, before subsidence and the erosion of Dover Channel combined to sever it from the continent. It bears to-day in its flora and fauna the evidence of its former broad connection with the mainland.[804] In Pliocene times, Sicily and Sardinia were united by a land bridge with the Tunisian projection of North Africa; and they too, in ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... discovery at the source of that little tributary, where the erosion of the glacier had opened a rich vein, and on following the stream through graywackes and slate to the first gravelled fissure, he had found the storage plant for his placer gold. He was on his way out to have the claim recorded and get supplies and mail when he heard the baying setter and, rounding ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... swept them all away with a gesture, leaving only the stretch of shore; much as it was before Thorhaven existed, and as it would be when Thorhaven was under the sea like the other village beyond, which coast erosion ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... Testament, therefore, there is no static creed. For, like a flowing river, the Church's thought of her Lord shaped itself to the intellectual banks of the generation through which it moved, even while, by its construction and erosion, it transfigured them. Nor did this movement cease with New Testament days. From the Johannine idea of the Logos to the Nicene Creed, where our Lord is set in the framework of Greek metaphysics, the development is just as clear as from the category of Jewish Messiah to the categories of the Fourth ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... I really knew exactly where Tripoli was. About thirty years ago, when I learnt geography, one of the questions they were always asking me was, "What are the exports of Spain, and where is Tripoli?" But much may happen in twenty years; coast erosion and tidal waves and things like that. I looked at the map in order to assure myself that Tripoli had remained pretty firm. As far as I could make it out it had moved. Certainly it must have looked different thirty years ago, for I took some little time to locate ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... in another half-minute had the struggle not been at the very edge of the bank. Undermined by the erosion of the spring floods, a section of this bank suddenly gave way, and with it went Baree and half the pack. In a flash Baree thought of the water and the escaping caribou. For a bare instant the cave-in had set him free of the pack, and in that space he gave a single leap over ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... some people have trouble with wind or water erosion. We don't have that. So we can get by and do a better job and produce better trees by sowing nuts in the fall, and we sow them in the fall, just as if we were sowing black walnuts for production and ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various |
