"Arable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that time, began to be more frequent, whereby arable land (which could not be manured without people and families) was turned into pasture, which was easily rid by a few herdsmen; and tenancies for years, lives, and at will (whereupon much of the yeomanry lived) were turned into demesnes. This bred a decay of people and (by consequence) a ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... gathered this information, "it appears to us—I mean, to me— that our agricultural friends would be well advised, at this juncture, in considering the advisability, as well as the feasibility, of restoring a quantity of their pasture-land to an arable condition, and cultivating it as such. The Board of Agriculture, it is understood, will shortly issue a circular—er—on these lines. Now you cannot effect the change ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... with the children, taking them away before they had gorged themselves. Outside the shadow of the wall one had the vivid beauty of flowers, the perfume of fruit, and the lively play of the sunlight; with glimpses through the foliage of smooth meadow, sloped arable, and distant heath; the firm ground beneath them, the open sky above them, and all around them the contented atmosphere of home. All these things together confirmed Mavis in the feeling that she had reached the apotheosis ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... are to be found in his "Flores Paradise." Another work, entitled "Dyuers Soyles for manuring pasture & arable land," enumerates, in addition to the usual odorous galaxy, such extraordinarily new matters (in that day) as "salt, street-dirt, clay, Fullers earth, moorish earth, fern, hair, calcination of all vegetables, malt dust, soap-boilers ashes, and marle." But what I think particularly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... early settlers, in selecting the highest ground in this region, had a sense of this excellence of the climatic effect we do not know; but their descendants believe that such was their reason for settling the highest arable land on the Hill before the valleys or ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... "Arable land in all this territory is less than 1,200 square miles, and three-fourths of that is given over to pasturage. The richer grazing land supports Holmagor cattle, a breed said to date back to the time ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... against the glowing sky. The farms on the Karroo, and, in fact, generally throughout the more northern parts of the colony, are of surprising size. It is quite common to find a Dutchman farming some 10,000 acres. Arable land in the Karroo is of course very rare, and one would think that the "Ooms" and the "Tantas" and their young hopefuls would have their time fully occupied even in keeping their large herds and flocks within bounds. One continually sees half a dozen ostriches stalking solemnly about a huge ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... is an obscure individual, usually very honest, very intelligent, very active, and very rich. He undertakes to farm several thousand acres of land, pasture or arable as may be, which the prince would never be able to farm himself, because he neither knows how, nor has the means to do so. Upon this princely territory the farmer lets loose, in the most disrespectful manner, ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... (dominium), was yet regarded as a perfectly secure form of tenure. All occupiers of public land paid dues to the state through a state contractor (publicanus.) These dues varied in amount, and in the method of their collection. We learn from Appian that the ordinary dues paid by occupiers of arable land in Italy were 1/10 of seed crops and 1/5 of plant produce. Owners who turned cattle or sheep on pasture land belonging to the state also paid fixed dues to the treasury. The occupiers of the Roman public land in Campania paid a large rent (Cic. de leg. Agr. i. 7. 21). Appian's ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of rent. Suddenly it struck them that all manufactured products of human industry must necessarily obey one law; whilst the products of land obey another and opposite law. Let us for a moment consider arable land as a natural machine for manufacturing bread. Now, in all manufactures depending upon machinery of human invention, the natural progress is from the worse machines to the better. No man lays aside a glove-making machine for a worse, but only for one that possesses the old powers at ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... nooks, wherein to spend Maytide, than around the villages and hamlets of the Andredsweald, whither the action of our tale betakes itself again—around Chiddinglye, Hellinglye, Alfristun, Selmestun, Heathfeld, Mayfeld, and the like—not, as now, accessible by rail and surrounded by arable lands; but settlements in the forest, with the mighty oaks and beeches which had perchance seen the coming of Ella and Cissa, long ere the Norman set foot in Angleland; and with solemn glades where ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... ten per cent. of the arable area in Western Canada is under cultivation there are already 3,500 country elevators. Terminal elevators at the head of the lakes with a storage capacity of forty-four million bushels and interior Government terminals with ten and one-half million ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... and reaping, as well as all the most useful secrets connected with the harvest, which they had derived from their ancestors, and had improved by their own experience." "They rented," says the same historian, "the arable lands belonging to the kings, the priests, and the military class, for a small sum, and employed their whole time in the tillage of their farms," and the laborers who cultivated land for the rich peasant, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... not even the adverse report of an ill-humored congressional committee, can alter the fact of the tremendous service that Newell and his loyal associates in the Reclamation Service did for the nation and the people of the United States. By 1915 reclamation had added to the arable land of the country a million and a quarter acres, of which nearly eight hundred thousand acres were already "under water," and largely under tillage, producing yearly more than eighteen ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... three old women might be observed plying their aged limbs through the single street of the village at Middlemas towards the honoured door, which, fenced off from the vulgar causeway, was defended by a broken paling, enclosing two slips of ground, half arable, half overrun with an abortive attempt at shrubbery. The door itself was blazoned with the name of Gideon Gray, M. A. Surgeon, &c. &c. Some of the idle young fellows, who had been a minute or two before loitering at the other end of the street before the door of the alehouse, (for the pretended ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... tapis, and AEsop said, when his turn came to speak: One of my fields, on the wrong slope of a hill-side and surrounded by trees, scarcely ever sees the sun; and by consequence its crops are short when arable, and when in pasture its grass sour, and the ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... a wood-bird; the Swedish blue-throated one lives in marshes and arable fields. I have never seen a robin in really wild ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... of which consist of verdant meadow or arable land, is bounded on all sides excepting that which joins the Severn, by ranges of hills which have generally either been covered with woods or devoted to the feeding of cattle. The southern or Severn side presents to the view well cultivated lands, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... grim isolation, on its masses of alum rock, like a huge seaworn crag, considerably over 1,000 feet high. But this strangely menacing peak raises its defiant head over nothing but broad meadows, arable land, and woodlands, and his only warfare is with the lower strata of storm-clouds, which is a convenient thing for the people who live in these parts; for long ago they used the peak as a sign of approaching storms, having reduced the warning to ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... said Quintin, "this farm contains two hundred and two acres of arable land, good land, no better, in fact, in the country. Besides, we have twenty acres of wooded land and a tenant house. This machinery is the best that we could find. We have two men—Giles and Ephraim; they are the best hands we know of, for Mr. Rixey ...
— The Mystery of Monastery Farm • H. R. Naylor
... in one of the Henley Street houses till her death (she was buried September 9, 1608), and he derived a modest rent from the other. On May 1, 1602, he purchased for 320 pounds of the rich landowners William and John Combe of Stratford 107 acres of arable land near the town. The conveyance was delivered, in the poet's absence, to his brother Gilbert, 'to the use of the within named William Shakespere.' {204b} A third purchase quickly followed. On September ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... on that side of the village; between ourselves and the heath and pine wood there was one miserable shanty, worthy of the poorest potato patch in Ireland. It was inhabited by a ragged ruffian of the name of E——, whose small domain we sometimes saw undergoing arable processes by the joint labor of his son and heir, a ragged ruffian some sizes smaller than himself, and of a half-starved jackass, harnessed together to the plow he was holding; occasionally the team was composed of the quadruped ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... fishing-boat—which, as I said, in the architecture of the sea represents the cottage, more especially the pastoral or agricultural cottage, watchful over some pathless domain of moorland or arable, as the fishing-boat swims, humbly in the midst of the broad green fields and hills of ocean, out of which it has to win such fruit as they can give, and to compass with net or drag such flocks as it may find,—next to this ocean-cottage ranks in interest, it seems to me, the ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... of abolition. Admitting that it has succeeded there—which I will do for the sake of the argument—do you know the reason of it? The true and only causes of whatever success has attended it in Antigua are, that the population was before crowded, and all or nearly all the arable land in cultivation. The emancipated negroes could not, many of them, get away if they desired; and knew not where to go, in case they did. They had, practically, no alternative but to remain on ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... just below the Mansion House Farm and contained nine hundred twenty-eight acres of arable land and meadow. In 1793 it had, in Washington's words, "a newly erected brick barn, equal, perhaps, to any in America, and for conveniences of all sorts, particularly for sheltering and feeding horses, cattle, &c. ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... fifty acres of arable land, six of meadow, and a right of commonage. What may we assume to have been the value of its fee-simple? Malone, who allows the total fortune of Mary Arden to have been 110L 13s 4d., is sure that the value of Asbies ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... rain to subside, we got under way and made straight for Fuga. The first half of the journey led us by well-beaten footpaths through flat cultivated fields of sugar-cane and bananas, tamarind-trees, papaws, and various jungle shrubs, filling up the non-arable surface; and then began a steep ascent by rudely-beaten zigzags, to ease the abruptness of the hill, on which the capital is situated. The whole face of this hill was clothed with large timber trees, around ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... fresh, all making very fine hay land. It is overgrown with all kinds of trees, standing without order, as in other wildernesses, except that the maize lands, plains and meadows have few or no trees, and these with little pains might be made into good arable land. ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • J. F. Jameson, Editor
... revolution resulted in a new redistribution. Such suspicions could hardly beget the patience essential for the development of agriculture. And yet this was the very time when farming must be encouraged. Large parts of the arable land had been abandoned to grazing during the preceding century because of the importation of the provincial stipendiary grain, and Italy had lost the custom of raising the amount of food that her population required. As a result, the ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... was now very aged and feeble, had proposed to the Missionaries to send a Tahaitian as his successor; and fearing that the population of his island might exceed the means of subsistence which their quantity of arable land afforded, he was desirous of settling some of ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... old decay'd rake that stood next the box-keeper yonder ... they call him Sir Timothy Deuxace; that wretch has play'd off one of the best families in Europe—he has thrown away all his posterity, and reduced 20,000 acres of wood-land, arable, meadow, and pasture within the narrow circumference of an oaken table of eight foot." The Masquerade as the title of the play is a misnomer, for it does not conduce at all to the plot. We give the greater part of the Prologue to The Masquerade, ...
— Don Garcia of Navarre • Moliere
... on his farm thirty slaves, besides other serving-people. He gave his slaves a certain day's work; but after it he gave them leisure, and leave that each should work in the twilight and at night for himself, and as he pleased. He gave them arable land to sow corn in, and let them apply their crops to their own use. He laid upon each a certain quantity of labour to work themselves free by doing it; and there were many who bought their freedom in this way in one year, or in the second year, and all who had ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... example. I choose that because we both know that sector, but I could think of a hundred other examples in other paratime areas. Those people, because of deforestation, bad agricultural methods and general mismanagement, are eroding away their arable soil at an alarming rate. At the same time, they are breeding like rabbits. In other words, each successive generation has less and less food to divide among more and more people, and, for inherited traditional and superstitious reasons, they refuse to adopt any ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... dollars came from across the Pacific. Such a short-sighted, unstable dependence left the Colony resourceless when bold foreign traders stamped out monopoly and brought commerce to its natural level by competition. In the meantime the astute ecclesiastics quietly took possession of rich arable lands in many places, the most valuable being within easy reach of the Capital and the Arsenal of Cavite. Landed property was undefined. It all nominally belonged to the State, which, however, granted no titles; "squatters" ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... a mile from Liberton, Leswaid, and Drodden;[518] then came to Libberton Kirk; then came neir to Libberton burne, and turned up to Blackfurd, wheir we saw Braids merches with Libberton moore, now arable ground, bought lately by the President.[519] Also wt Grange[520] saw Sacellum Sancti Marlorati Semirogues Chappell.[521] That burne that runes throw the Brighouse goes by Blackfurd to the Calsay[522] and Powburne, then to Dudiston Loch, out of which it runes again by West Dudiston milnes and ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... Caspian Sea with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Iran will have to be negotiated International disputes: none Climate: subtropical desert Terrain: flat-to-rolling sandy desert with dunes; borders Caspian Sea in west Natural resources: petroleum, natural gas, coal, sulphur, salt Land use: arable land: 3% permanent crops: 0% meadows and pastures: 69% forest and woodland: 0% other: 28% Irrigated land: 12,450 km2 (1990) Environment: contamination of soil and groundwater with agricultural chemicals, pesticides; ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... north-east strip of Northamptonshire and Huntingdonshire—a wide, wild, thinly-populated district, with some fine woodlands; country that was almost all grass, until deep draining turned some cold clay pastures into arable. It holds a rare scent, and the woodland country can be hunted, when a hot sun does not bake the ground too hard, up to the first week in May, when, in most other countries, horns are silenced. The country is wide enough, with foxes enough, to bear hunting ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... and Delta continents, with their herds of veldbeest—all open range, and every 'beest that didn't carry a Company brand a maverick. And all the untapped mineral wealth, and the untilled arable land; it would take years of litigation even to make the Company's claim to Big Blackwater stick. And Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines would lose their monopolistic franchise and get sticky about it in the courts, and in any case, ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... years England has raised about twenty per cent of her wheat supplies. One reason was her dependence on grass instead of arable land; another was the inherent objection of the British farmer to adopt scientific methods of soil cultivation or engage in co-operative marketing. The old way was the best way; he wanted to ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... exaggerated. The pond was found, as he had described it to be, covering at least four hundred acres of low bottom-land; while near three thousand acres of higher river-flat, covered with beach and maple, spread around it for a considerable distance. The adjacent mountains too, were arable, though bold, and promised, in time, to become a fertile and manageable district. Calculating his distances with judgment, the surveyor laid out his metes and bounds in such a manner as to include the pond, all the low-land, and about ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... could have given had he been taken into council; and one of Kaiser Wilhelm's predecessors on the throne of Prussia intimating that he, in like case, would have proved conclusively that pounded quartz and silex may easily be in excess in arable soil. The creature, then, has intelligence of which the Creator has always been destitute. Yet the creature can have nothing save what, either directly or indirectly, he derives from a creator. Wherefore that, in becoming endowed with intelligence, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... Iowa's pioneers, after Indian cessions had been secured, spread well toward her western limits. Minnesota, also, was recruited by a column of pioneers. The treaty of Traverse de Sioux, in 1851, opened over twenty million acres of arable land in that State, and Minnesota increased her population 2730.7 per cent in the decade ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... the source of their living. They could spare no fertile or sheltered spot, even for the burial-ground, but economically laid it out in the sand, or on the bleak hill-side; while they threw away no fencing on the house of God, but jealously preserved that costly distinction for their arable lands and orchards. They were farmers; and it was no unmeaning thing for them to keep the harvest feast. They had prayed in drought, with all faith and fervor, for the blessing of rain; in seed-time, for the favoring sunshine and soft ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... was afterwards called Spittle, and some of the stones are still remaining in Spittle-field. It was left by Agnes Pudding, with eight acres of arable land adjoining it. ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... ear to instruction, and that prejudices have less empire over their reason. The great landed proprietors, whom terror had induced to fly their country, have, on recovering possession of their patrimony, converted their parks into arable land. Others, who are not fond of living in town, are daily repairing to their estates, in order to superintend the cultivation of them. No one disdains the simple title of farmer. Old publications relative ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... proposed adjustments should be effected, if possible, upon the same terms as the previous treaties, it was known that certain changes will be necessary owing to the peculiar topographic features of the country itself. For example, in much of it arable reserves, such as many of the tribes retained in the south, were unavailable, and special stipulations were necessary, in such case, so that there should be no inequality of treatment. But where good land could be had, a novel choice ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... comes the sweet slender voice of a linnet, the sunshine falling on his rosy breast. The gateways show the thickness of the hedge, as an embrasure shows the thickness of a wall. One gives entrance to an arable field which has been recently rolled, and along the gentle rise of a "land" a cock-pheasant walks, so near that the ring about his neck is visible. Presently, becoming conscious that he is observed, he goes down into a furrow, and ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... persistence, and their comparative changelessness from earliest times to the later nineteenth century, the utmost importance attaches to Anglo-Saxon arrangements respecting local government and administration. The smallest governmental unit was the township, comprising normally a village surrounded by arable lands, meadows, and woodland. The town-moot was a primary assembly of the freemen of the village, by which, under the presidency of a reeve, the affairs of the township were administered. A variation of the township was the burgh, or borough, ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... arable land: 0% permanent crops: 0% other: 100% (largely covered by permanent ice and snow with some sparse vegetation consisting of grass, moss, ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... the percentage shares of total land area for three different types of land use: arable land - land cultivated for crops that are replanted after each harvest like wheat, maize, and rice; permanent crops - land cultivated for crops that are not replanted after each harvest like citrus, coffee, and ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Athole plan, by way of experiment. We can plant them up if they do not thrive. On the whole, three-and-a-half feet is, I think, the right distance. I have no fear of the ground being impoverished. Trees are not like arable crops, which necessarily derive their sustenance from the superficial earth—the roots of trees go far and wide, and, if incommoded by a neighbor, they send out suckers to procure nourishment elsewhere. They never hurt each other ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... ascended a hill; from the top of this hill the view is very fine. To the east are the high lands of Cheshire, to the west the bold hills of Wales, and below, on all sides a fair variety of wood and water, green meads and arable fields. ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... gates on a plateau dominating the plain, was part of a large estate whose once vast grounds were reduced to less than two hectares in consequence of successive sales, without counting that the construction of the railroad had taken away the last arable fields. The house itself had been half destroyed by a conflagration and only one of the two buildings remained—a quadrangular wing "of four walls," as they say in Provence, with five front windows and roofed with large pink tiles. ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... single file the troop rides into the wood. On the other side there is a long stretch of open ploughed field, and about the middle of it little white dots close together, sweeping along as if the wind drove them. Horsemen are galloping on the turf at the edge of the arable, which is doubtless heavy going. The troop that has worked through the wood labours hard to overtake; the vapour follows again, and horsemen and hounds are lost in ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... consisted of several hundred acres of high land, which, at its western terminus, fell away about one hundred feet to the river bottom. There were a couple of hundred acres of this river bottom land which was arable. It was exceedingly rich and productive. Still west of this land was a well-wooded pasture, separated from the cultivated lands by a good board fence. The river bounded this pasture ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... larger scale, that when potatoes are not to be procured, a pig of thirty-five stone may be fattened in ten days on something less than two hundred weight of carrots. We intend to try if this is the case, and have half an acre of our orchard (which is arable) sown with carrot-seed, and feed our "stock" in the winter with the produce. With the surplus milk of two cows we find we can always keep three pigs with very little expense. Of course, if we did not plant plenty of potatoes, we must purchase more meal for them; but as ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... horses, but which they placed upon their own shoulders as they approached the bridge. Amongst them were fishermen from Eyemouth and Coldingham, shepherds from the hills with slaughtered sheep, millers, and the cultivators of the patches of arable ground beyond the moor. With them, also, were a few women carrying eggs, butter, cheese, and poultry; and at the head of the procession (for the narrowness of the drawbridge over the frightful chasm, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... worry my 'ead about him. I've got too much to do." And he went off into technicalities concerning the abundance of charlock on the arable land of Pym. He called it "garlic." I saw that it was typical of Bates that he should have too much to do. I reflected that his was the ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... stretch in a level sea, inset with tracts of heath and bracken, for miles around. The whole arc of the sky, the whole circle of the world's rim, lay bare to the eye, infinitely varied by clouds and cloud-shadows, by pasture and arable, dark patches of woods and pallor of pools, by the lambent burnish of the west and the soft purpling of the east, even by differing weathers—here great shafts of sunlight, there the blurred column of a distant ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... that is to say, each villager, as well as the lord of the manor, might freely gather fire-wood, or he might turn his swine loose to feed on the acorns in the forest and his cattle to graze over the entire pasture. The cultivable or arable land was divided into several—usually three—great grain fields. Ridges or "balks" of unplowed turf divided each field into long parallel strips, which were usually forty rods or a furlong (furrow-long) in length, and from one to four rods wide. Each peasant had exclusive right to one or more of ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... spirited woman who had seen the world, than to a mere farmer's daughter who had never looked beyond her cheese. Old Gardon would be an admirable adviser, and if he were taken into the menage she would add to the endowment another arable field, and grass for two more cows. If she liked the young woman on inspection, the marriage should take place in ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pig-tailed Chinese peasant once cultivated broad and level fields in such river valleys, he is now able to rescue only a few half-hearted patches by piling the rock in heaps and saving a few intervening arable remnants ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... Navaho call Tsegi, contains several small streams and numerous patches of arable land on the bottoms. The conditions here are exceptionally favorable for horticulture; indeed, the numerous remains of cliff dwellings which are found in the canyon would show this if other evidence were lacking. It has long been famous among the Navaho as the horticultural ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... country of green valleys unfolding to the ocean, and of small farms fertile enough when they were sheltered from the prevailing wind; but on the southern confines of the parish the soil became shallow and stony, the arable fields degenerated into a rough open pasturage full of gorse and foxgloves and gradually widening patches of heather, until finally the level monochrome of the Rhos absorbed the last vestiges of cultivation, and the parish came ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... the countrey is most part wood, sauing here and there pasture and arable ground, many riuers and diuers Islands vnhabited, as the most part of the countrey is, for ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt
... permission of the fairies, the understanding being that all raths were to be left undisturbed. For a long time the agreement was respected, fairies and mortals living side by side, and neither class interfering with the other. But, as the necessity for more arable land became evident, it was determined by the townspeople to level several raths and mounds that interfered with certain fields and boundary lines. The dangers of such a course were plainly pointed ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... orangery[obs3]; farm &c. (abode) 189. V. cultivate; till the soil; farm, garden; sow, plant; reap, mow, cut; manure, dress the ground, dig, delve, dibble, hoe, plough, plow, harrow, rake, weed, lop and top; backset [obs3][U.S.]. Adj. agricultural, agrarian, agrestic[obs3]. arable, predial[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... a much less interesting country. One single walk over the undulatory turf plain shows everything which is to be seen. It is not at all unlike Cambridgeshire, only that every hedge, tree and hill must be leveled, and arable land turned into pasture. All South America is in such an unsettled state that we have not entered one port without some sort of disturbance. At Buenos Ayres a shot came whistling over our heads; ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... breakfast, on the ensuing day, and, crossing the Wabash, at a ferry, he proceeded to the Big Prairie, where, to his astonishment, he beheld a fertile plain of grass and arable; and some thousand acres of land covered with corn, more luxuriant than any he had before seen. The scene reminded him of some open well-cultivated vale in Europe, surrounded by wooded uplands. But the illusion ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... disappointed in the abundance of Trees. Wood seems to be the peasants' sole reliance for fuel, and trees are planted beside the roads, the streams, the ditches, and often in rows or patches on some arable portion of the peasants' narrow domain. This planting is mainly confined to two varieties—the Lombardy Poplar and what I took to be the Pollard, a species of Willow which displays very little foliage, and is usually ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... Mexico, is that of luxuriant fertility. It would be difficult to find another portion of the world, of the same extent, which has so little useless land as the inhabited parts of the American Union. Most of the mountains are arable, and even the prairies, in this section of the republic, are of deep alluvion. The same is true between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific. Between the two lies the broad belt, of comparative desert, which is the scene of this ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... keeping close under the shore as they were, the up view could not be had till the point was turned. First they passed the rock-bound shore which fenced in the home valley; then for a space the rocks and the heights fell back and several acres of arable ground edged the river, cut in two by a small belt of woods. These acres were not used except for grazing cattle; the first field was occupied with a grove of cylindrical cedars; in the second a soft growth of young pines sloped up towards ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... inspection proved them to be unsatisfactory. Secondly there were the companies which leased sources of production that were owned by the State such as fisheries, salt-works, mines and forest land. In some particular cases even arable land had been dealt with in this way, and the confiscated territories of Capua and Corinth were let on long leases to publicani. Thirdly there were the societies, which did not themselves acquire leases but acted as true intermediaries between the State and individuals[135] ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... Gomme's guidance, we have now to trace a transition that occurred in the use of these public lands as the urban element became more and more preponderant. It seems that while there are boroughs with common pasture only, there has been found no instance of a borough having arable and meadow allotments, and no common pasture. The inference is that, as the community grew more addicted to mercantile pursuits, they were less able to devote themselves to the cares of husbandry, and, accordingly, ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... for the river, in Desolation and Gray, together of 587 feet. Desolation is full of rapids, some of them bad. Wonsits Valley, which succeeds Desolation, is the longest of the few valleys, being about 87 miles, with a width of 6 or 8 miles. There is a considerable amount of arable land, and along the river bank large groves of cottonwood trees. The river course is winding, the current sluggish, the width being 600 to 800 feet. At the head of this valley is Split-Mountain Canyon, 8 miles long, ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... when he had read thus far. The marriage was approved not for itself, it would seem, but because by means of it two stretches of earth were united into one. It was a marriage of two parks, of two estates, of two tracts of arable and forest, and that two human beings were concerned in it was apparently no ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... border of the North Sea, lie Friedrichgroden, New Augustengroden, and New Friedrichgroden. It is a tract of land gained from the sea of about ten or twelve hundred acres, banked round in three divisions, and made arable, on which are built about twenty farmhouses, which form almost a new world. This land is the property of the government; a small sum is paid on entering, and a yearly ground-rent, and then it is the property of ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... circular sweep which it makes at this place. The sun was about three hours high when we found the trail; and as our people had passed early in the day, we had the prospect of a vigorous walk before us. Immediately where we landed, the high arable plain on which we had been traveling, for several days past, terminated in extensive low flats, very generally occupied by salt marshes, or beds of shallow lakes, whence the water had in most places evaporated, leaving their hard surface incrusted with a shining white residuum; and absolutely covered ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... place in consequence. I started with a party for the new mines, early in October. A day's ride brought us to the Madison Fork, a broad, shallow stream, difficult of fording on account of its large boulders, and flowing through a narrow strip of arable land. Very different is the Gallatin, beyond. It is cut up into narrow streams of a very rapid current, and waters a valley of surprising fertility. The Snakes called it Swift River. This valley is forty miles long and from ten to fifteen wide, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... architecture, except its rusty vanes and twisted chimneys. A few out-houses, for the accommodation of the negroes, were nigh; and nearer to the river, there were barns and stables, of dimensions and materials altogether superior to those that the appearance of the arable land, or the condition of the small farm, would seem to render necessary. The periagua, in which the proprietor had made his passage across the outer bay, lay at a small wooden ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... the charcoal-burner; while in early spring added curls of vapor show that the maple sugar-boiler is also at work. But as for farming as a regular vocation, there is not much of it here. At any rate, no man by that means accumulates a fortune from this thin and rocky soil, all whose arable parts have ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... though imperceptibly, yet rapidly approaches our increasing colony, and that is the imperious necessity of a separation; for so very limited are the available portions of the island, that some families who number ten or twelve persons, have not five acres of arable ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... bread, but only boil those kinds of grain with milk or meat for their victual. Their wheat, indeed, does not render so much, but this they use only to make vermicelli, and pastes of that description. No spot of arable land is left untilled; and their cattle are infinitely prolific, so that when they take the field every man is followed by six, eight, or more horses for his own use. Thus you may clearly perceive how the population of those parts is so great, and how they have such ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... spirit as one may, little is developed to support any statement that the country may become prosperous from the products of her own soil. In truth Japan is nearly as unproductive as Greece and Norway, for only sixteen per cent. of her soil is arable. The mountain ranges and peaks and terraced hills that make the country scenically attractive to the tourist come near to prohibiting agriculture. The lowlands, separating seacoast from the foothills, and the valleys ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... has been said, it may be seen how impossible it was to detach a body of convicts to any distance, if there had been any necessity for it. The land at Rose-Hill is very good, and in every respect well calculated for arable and pasture ground, though it be loaded with timber, the removal of which requires great labour and time; but this is the case with the whole country, as far as had been seen, particular spots excepted. As the good land could not at present be ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... and parable, Are false, but may he render'd also true, By those who sow them in a land that 's arable. 'T is wonderful what fable will not do! 'T is said it makes reality more bearable: But what 's reality? Who has its clue? Philosophy? No: she too much rejects. Religion? Yes; but ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... and the fitful-tempered brook, and the swamp-like region it encompassed, were left for years to their old wild instincts. At last the increasing demands of my business made it necessary to have more arable land, and I saw that, if I could keep it from being overwhelmed with water and gravel, the alluvial meadow was ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... two years' labours it exhibited an altogether different appearance, and in place of whins and stones there were to be seen heavy crops of barley and turnips. The barren years of 1800 and 1801, however, pressed very hardly on Andrew Fairbairn as on every other farmer of arable land. About that time, Andrew's brother Peter, who acted as secretary to Lord Seaforth, and through whose influence the former had obtained the farm, left Brahan Castle for the West Indies with his Lordship, who—notwithstanding his being both deaf and dumb—had ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... two hundred millions of arable acres south of the Saskatchewan. North of this river, in the pleasant valleys of the Peace, are one hundred million acres more. If Canada were as thickly populated as the British Isles it would have a billion people. ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... will become the most valuable in the State, I may say, with perfect confidence, in the whole Union; unrivalled water power, magnificent pastures and arable land capable of producing crops of corn such as the world has never seen. All that is required to develop their resources is capital and labour, and labour will always follow where capital leads the way. When once the country is opened up, ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... Tao i chi lio: "This country [Ts'eng yao lo] is to the south-west of the Ta Shih (Arabs). There are no trees on the coast; most of the land is saline. The arable ground is poor, so there is but little grain of any kind, and they mostly raise yams to take ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... born on the 26th of February, 1786, in the commune of Estagel, an ancient province of Roussillon (department of the Eastern Pyrenees). My father, a licentiate in law, had some little property in arable land, in vineyards, and in plantations of olive-trees, the income from which supported his ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... its way among eggs. Now the hounds cry and the horn rings. Put her at timber, stream, and plowed field in pleasing rotation, and see her now: up ears; open nostril; nerves steel; heart immovable; eye of fire; foot of wind. And ho! there! What stuck in that last arable, dead stiff as the Rosinantes in Trafalgar Square, all but one limb, which goes like a water-wagtail's? Why, by Jove! if it isn't the hero of the turnpike road: the gallant, impatient, ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... diverted to the flying countryside, noted that it had changed character, pine yielding to scrub-oak and second-growth—the ragged vestments of an area some years since denuded by fire. This, too, presently swung away, giving place to cleared land—arable acres golden with the stubble of garnered harvests or sentinelled with ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... about himself and his wealth, Rosset backing him up and putting in the most telling parts. He had very extensive property, and the more level parts of it were certainly valuable, consisting of 200 journaux of good arable land: the forests through which we walked were his, and he possessed three montagnes and chalets higher up on the mountain. The glaciere was his own property; and two years ago he had discovered another in the neighbourhood, ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... eight years of age, whom before marriage the husbands have never seen, men of thirty-five and forty and forty-eight. Does Canada desire the system of the child wife embodied in her national life? Suppose one hundred thousand Hindu colonists came to the vacant arable lands of British Columbia. As the inalienable right of a British subject, the colonist must be allowed to bring in his wife. What if she is a child to whom he was married in her infancy? The colonist being a British subject is to be given a vote. How would Canada abolish the child wife system ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... Williams has gone down to finish surveying my land, and will cut up and sell for me to the negroes about as much land as they have been in the habit of using,—good, arable land, at $5 per acre, where they are not ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... the Valleys of the James and the Appomattox, down which our way lay, broadened into an expanse of arable acres, and the faces of those streams were frequently flecked by gem-like ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... the woods, like brave men, putting the best face upon falling fortunes. Some trees were already dropping their leaves; the greater part standing in all the varied splendour which the late frosts had given them. The road, an excellent one, sloped gently up and down across a wide arable country, in a state of high cultivation, and now showing all the rich variety of autumn. The reddish buckwheat patches, and fine wood-tints of the fields where other grain had been; the bright green of young rye or winter wheat, then soberer-coloured pasture or ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... that can be of national Waste and Decay, in respect of Inhabitants. What could a Foreigner, travelling among us, particularly in the western Counties, some Summers past, judge of our national Wisdom and Oeconomy? Would he not start even at our Humanity, on seeing the best arable Grounds in the Kingdom, in immense Tracts, wantonly enjoyed by the Cattle of a few petulant Individuals; and at the same Juncture, our high Ways and Streets crowded with Shoals of mendicant fellow-creatures! reduced, through Want of proper Sustenance, to the utmost Distress? Would not a Frenchman ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... were green, and so was the rising wheat which had been sown, but which neither had nor would receive any further care. Such arable fields as had not been sown, but where the last stubble had been ploughed up, were overrun with couch-grass, and where the short stubble had not been ploughed, the weeds hid it. So that there was no place which was not more or less green; the footpaths were the greenest of all, ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... arctic cold to tropic heat. It is a land of vast forests, of fertile soil, of rich minerals, of navigable rivers. The very fact that it has so long sustained such a vast population suggests the richness of its resources. There are said to be 600,000,000 acres of arable soil, and so thriftily is it cultivated that many parts of the Empire are almost continuous gardens and fields. Four hundred and nineteen thousand square miles are believed to be underlaid with coal. Baron von Richthofen thinks that ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... as follows: Meat of camels, kine, sheep, and goats; a few cat-fish from the river, plenty of a vegetable called meholakea; some limes, a few melons, cucumbers, dried barmea, a vegetable common in Egypt; beans, durra, duchan, tobacco of the country, plenty of gum arable, with which, by the way, Sennaar abounds, (the natives use it in their cookery;) drugs and spices brought from Gidda, among which I observed ginger, pepper, and cloves; and great quantities of dried ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English
... last century, Scotland was a very poor country. It consisted mostly of mountain and moorland; and the little arable land it contained was badly cultivated. Agriculture was almost a lost art. "Except in a few instances," says a writer in the 'Farmers' Magazine' of 1803, "Scotland was little better than a barren waste." Cattle could with ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... would, if I could, prevent a single one of them from returning to tell the fate of their companions. The reader will understand that the property at Everly belonging to Mr. Astley, joined my father's, without any other division than a mere furrow struck with the plough, between the arable lands; and that the division between the down lands consisted of old bound balls, which were merely small heaps of the sod thrown up together, perhaps some hundred years before; so that those who were not aware ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... yards on his lawn were swept clean, and after two or three weeks all the worm-castings on the space were collected and dried. These were found to contain 0.35 of nitrogen. This is from two to three times as much as we find in our ordinary arable surface-soil; more than in our ordinary pasture surface-soil; but less than in rich kitchen-garden mould. Supposing a quantity of castings equal to 10 tons in the dry state were annually deposited ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... journey, pleased with our reception at Slanes Castle, of which we had now leisure to recount the grandeur and the elegance; for our way afforded us few topics of conversation. The ground was neither uncultivated nor unfruitful; but it was still all arable. Of flocks or herds there was no appearance. I had now travelled two hundred miles in Scotland, and seen only one tree not ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... the peasant, and because it was constantly farmed out to men who made their bargains profitable by oppressing the needy with unfair exactions. Chief among the causes of the misery of the peasants was the extent to which arable land was converted into pasture. Commons were unjustly enclosed, villages were depopulated, the starving peasants were forced to flee to the mountains, and black cattle roamed at will round the ruins of their ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... spectacle that next attracted my attention was a fine one indeed, a noble subject for a painter. At the other end of the arable tract, a young man of attractive appearance was driving a superb team: four yoke of young beasts, black-coated with tawny spots that gleamed like fire, with the short, curly heads that suggest the wild bull, the great, wild eyes, the abrupt movements, the nervous, jerky way ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... the slow journey on the branch line from the junction. The train crawled and burrowed into the wooded heart of the Midlands, passed a village, a hamlet, a few scattered houses, puffed and panted through endless lengths of arable and pasture land, drew up exhausted at the little wayside station of Whithorn-in-Arden, and left him in that prosaic wilderness a prey to the ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... place, I claim the right to own and enclose for my own use or disuse as much of the earth's surface as I am desirous and able to procure. I and my kind have made laws confirming us in the occupancy of the entire habitable and arable area as fast as we can get it. To the objection that this must eventually here, as it has actually done elsewhere, deprive the rest of you places upon which legally to be born, and exclude you after surreptitious birth as trespassers from all chance to procure ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... lands, to the effect of placing the lands of each tenant in one or more portions, and in a different place or places from where they may have previously lain. (2.) To regulate and control the use of the town mails, grass, and arable lands, by placing restrictions on the tenants in the keeping of swine, geese, or otherwise. (3.) To enclose or otherwise withdraw from the scattalds such portions, not exceeding one-fourth of each scattald, to be judged of as at the date of each tack, as he may deem proper. (4.) To regulate ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... and, ruthless though survival was, they were at least alive. In the wastes ahead no life was possible or visible, though there seemed to be no doubt that the D'zertanoj lived there. This must mean that though it looked unlimited—as Ijale believed it to be—there were probably arable lands on the other side. Mountains as well, if they weren't just clouds, since a line of gray peaks could just be made ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... fired, By lordly pride and keen reproach inspired. A Samian peer, more studious than the rest Of vice, who teem'd with many a dead-born jest; And urged, for title to a consort queen, Unnumber'd acres arable and green (Otesippus named); this lord Ulysses eyed, And thus burst out the imposthumate ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... people, they had little by little been left a prey to their own faults in order that their unworthy mistress might plead their disorders as an excuse for her tyranny. Agriculture languished, and the minute subdivision of arable land finally rendered its tillage ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... "A house, with its stables and farm-buildings," says Mr. Hallam, "surrounded by a hedge or inclosure, was called a court, or as we find it in our law-books, a curtilage: the toft or homestead of a more genuine English dialect. One of these, with the adjacent arable fields and woods, had the name of a villa or manse. Several manses composed a march; and several marches formed a Pagus, or district." There was indeed little temptation or need to move from place to place, ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... first year of Cyrus is an illustration of the fact. It records the lease of a farm near Sippara, which belonged to the temple of the Sun-god, and was let to a private individual by the chief priest and the civil governor of the temple. The farm contained 60 gur of arable land, and the lease of it included "12 oxen, 8 peasants, 3 iron plough-shares, 4 axes, and sufficient grain for sowing and for the support of the peasants and the cattle." Here the peasants are let along ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... the former, and 20 m. in the latter direction. It is a plain varying from 600 to 800 ft. above the sea, with few eminences and a slight inclination westwards. Heaths and coppice alternate with pastures and arable land; pools and marshes are numerous, especially in the north. Its chief rivers are the Veyle, the Reyssouze and the Seille, all tributaries of the Saone. The soil is a gravelly clay but moderately fertile, and cattle-raising is largely carried on. The region is, however, more especially ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... villeinage. That is to say, it was in the hands of others, who had conditional use of it. In England these tenants were chiefly of three kinds—the villeins, the cottiers, the serfs. The first held a house and yard in the village street, and had in the great arable fields that surrounded them strips of land amounting sometimes to thirty acres. To their lord they owed work for three days each week; they also provided oxen for the plough. But more than half of their time could be devoted to the farming of their property. ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... house, the church and church-yard, Sutton's farm and the rectory, the four cottages and the Mill, the river and its bridge, lie close together in the small flat of the valley. Green pastures slope up the hill behind them to the north; pink-brown arable lands, ploughed and harrowed, are flung off to either ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... river did the work of a million men and made it possible to feed the teeming population of the first large cities of which we have any record. It is true that all the arable land was not in the valley. But a complicated system of small canals and well-sweeps carried water from the river-level to the top of the highest banks and an even more intricate system of irrigation trenches spread ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon |
