"Coral reef" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with a heap of those limy incrustations wherewith certain springs in the neighborhood cover the dead clump of rushes. It is light, full of holes and gives a faint suggestion of a coral reef. Moreover, it is covered with a short, green, velvety moss, a downy sward of infinitesimal pond weed. I count on this modest vegetation to keep the water in a reasonably wholesome state, without driving me to frequent renewals which would disturb the work of my colonies. Sanitation ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... is a low islet, covered with shrubs and trees, and surrounded by a coral reef, which extends for three-quarters of a mile from its north-east end; the island is not more than three-quarters of a mile long, and about a quarter of a mile broad; it is dangerous to approach at night, from being very low. It is situated thirty miles North 53 degrees West (magnetic) ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... a retrograde glance to the history of this period. It was only fifty years before that Columbus had dropped anchor off the coral reef of Samana Cay, and thrilled the Old World by announcing the discovery of the New. Elizabeth, the virgin Queen of England, was a proud, haughty girl just entering her teens, all unmindful of her eventful future. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... to tell ME about Henry," he protested. "I've known Henry twenty-five years. If Henry got his deserts," he exclaimed hotly, "he wouldn't be a consul on this coral reef; he'd be a minister in Europe. Look at me! We're the same age. We started together. When Lincoln sent him to Morocco as consul, he signed my commission as a midshipman. Now I'm an admiral. Henry has twice ...
— My Buried Treasure • Richard Harding Davis
... went for a row in the 'Glance' and the 'Flash' to the coral reef, now illumined by the rays of the setting sun. Who can describe these wonderful gardens of the deep, on which we now gazed through ten and twenty fathoms of crystal water? Who can enumerate or describe the strange creatures moving about and darting hither and ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... urbanization, and poor farming practices; soil salinity rising due to the use of poor quality water; desertification; clearing for agricultural purposes threatens the natural habitat of many unique animal and plant species; the Great Barrier Reef off the northeast coast, the largest coral reef in the world, is threatened by increased shipping and its popularity as a tourist site; ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... search-light of war was turned upon the island of Key West, it was, to the people of the North generally, little more than a name attached to a small, arid coral reef lying on the verge of the Gulf Stream off the southern extremity of Florida. Few people knew anything definitely about it, and to nine readers out of ten its name suggested nothing more interesting or attractive than Cuban filibusters, sponges, and cigars. In less than a month, however, ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... similar instances. Many flat fish, as for example the flounder and the skate, are exactly the colour of the gravel or sand on which they habitually rest. Among the marine flower gardens of an Eastern coral reef the fishes present every variety of gorgeous colour, while the river fish even of the tropics rarely if ever have gay or conspicuous markings. A very curious case of this kind of adaptation occurs in the sea-horses ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... and died on the sea-bottom, successive generations piling higher on the skeletons and lifework—or the life-loafing, for they were lazy atoms—of those that went before. At last the coral reef crawled upward until in uncharted waters it was tall enough to smash a ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... hardy navigator," continued Kurz Pacha, "who sails for the boreal pole. It is glittering enough, but shipwreck by daylight upon a coral reef, is no pleasanter than by night ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... he places before them is in part what has been arranged already—to run along coast till they discover a gap in the line of coral reef; for it is this which causes the breakers. Further, they are told that, when such gap be found, they will lower a boat; and having first scuttled the barque, abandon her; ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... business. He would rather face the "ever angry bears" than breathe the subject of matrimony to any woman that he could ever imagine himself marrying. He was therefore steadily drifting toward the necessity of selling everything and going away. This event, however, was like a coral reef to a sailor, with no land in view beyond it. The only thing which seemed certain was the general breaking up of all that had hitherto ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... his talk with his father, Roddy, ignorant of Mr. Caldwell's intentions, was in Venezuela, sitting on the edge of a construction-raft, dangling his rubber boots in the ocean, and watching a steel skeleton creep up from a coral reef into a blazing, burning sky. At intervals he would wake to remove his cigarette, and shout fiercely: "O-i-i-ga, you Moso! Get a move on! Pronto! If you don't I'll do ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... attempt to describe the wondrous beauties of a South Sea coral reef at low tide—they have been fully and ably written about by many distinguished travellers—but the barrier reef of Strong's Island is so different in its formation from those of most other islands in the Pacific, that I must, as relative illustration to this account of the fishing by oap mention ...
— "Five-Head" Creek; and Fish Drugging In The Pacific - 1901 • Louis Becke
... gone to his stateroom and the first mate was in charge. It was three o'clock, the wind still blowing and the darkness pitchy, when the forward lookout shrieked a warning, "Breakers under the lee!" Almost the next instant the ship was on a coral reef, full of water, and the seas breaking over ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... danger.] Pitfall — N. rocks, reefs, coral reef, sunken rocks, snags; sands, quicksands; syrt^, syrtis^; Goodwin sands, sandy foundation; slippery ground; breakers, shoals, shallows, bank, shelf, flat, lee shore, ironbound coast; rock ahead, breakers ahead. precipice; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... on the plain grew only a short scrubby vegetation, a foot or two in height. Some vegetable soil was found, a few inches in thickness, the result of the decomposition of vegetable matter and birds' dung. On the weather side of the island was a coral reef of two miles in diameter, enclosing a shallow lagoon. In this lagoon were both sharks and turtles swimming about. The island was stocked with sea-fowl, and the trees ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... shudders with the knowledge of what the speck is, and hears in imagination the yells, and sees the knives, of the Lascar pirates just starting in pursuit. As I took in the import of those innocent words, falling from Winifred's bright lips, falling as unconsciously as water-drops over a coral reef in tropical seas alive with the eyes of a thousand sharks, my skin seemed to roughen with dread, and my ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... of it all, the indescribable thing about this picture of mirrored palm trees, blue lagoon, coral reef and sky, was ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... stick to my kingdom," answered Victor I., alias Peleg Timrod. "You'd better sheer off; you'll hit a coral reef or get ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... work of mine was begun in so deductive a spirit as this, for the whole theory was thought out on the west coast of South America, before I had seen a true coral reef. I had therefore only to verify and extend my views by a careful examination of living reefs. But it should be observed that I had during the two previous years been incessantly attending to the effects on the shores of South America of the intermittent elevation of the land, together ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... and even beyond, the limits of the tropics. The eastern coast of New Holland is almost wholly girt with reefs and islands of coral rock, rising perpendicularly from the bottom of the abyss. Captain Kent, of the Buffalo, speaking of a coral reef of many miles in extent, on the south-west coast of New Caledonia, observes, that "it is level with the water's edge, and towards the sea, as steep to as a wall of a house; that he sounded frequently within twice the ship's length of it with a line of one hundred and fifty fathoms, or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 268, August 11, 1827 • Various
... so small that it can be seen only under the higher powers of the microscope. It multiplies by means of buds like those of a tree, the individuals all combining to form a composite stony mass, which is called a polypidom. A number of such polypidoms growing close together form a coral reef. See woodcuts. ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... agreed that the first Florida Coral Reef is at least 30,000 years old; but Agassiz asserts, uncontradicted, that the insect which built it has not altered in the least in that period, and he says regarding it: "These facts furnish evidence, as direct as we can ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... when he looked over the magazine, he was appalled at the slaughter. In some cases the titles had been altered: "Finis," for instance, being changed to "The Finish," and "The Song of the Outer Reef" to "The Song of the Coral Reef." In one case, an absolutely different title, a misappropriate title, was substituted. In place of his own, "Medusa Lights," the editor had printed, "The Backward Track." But the slaughter in the body of the poems was terrifying. Martin groaned ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... the orchid glows, And you rave to your grave with the fever, and they rob the corpse for its clothes. And sometimes it leads to the Northland, and the scurvy softens your bones, And your flesh dints in like putty, and you spit out your teeth like stones. And sometimes it leads to a coral reef in the wash of a weedy sea, And you sit and stare at the empty glare where the gulls wait greedily. And sometimes it leads to an Arctic trail, and the snows where your torn feet freeze, And you whittle ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... and municipal town of Wellington county, Western Australia, 112 m. by rail S. by W. of Perth. Pop. (1901) 2455. The harbour, known as Koombanah Bay, is protected by a breakwater built on a coral reef. Coal is worked on the Collie river, 30 m. distant, and is shipped from this port, together with tin, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... explained that because the people of that section were "tight" (stingy) they were called Kaweleau alapaa. This ready imitativeness, often converted into caricature, enters into the minutest detail of life and is the clew to many a familiar proverb like that of the canoe on the coral reef quoted in the text.[3] The chants abound in such symbols. Man is "a long-legged fish" offered to the gods. Ignorance is the "night of the mind." The cloud hanging over Kaula is a bird which ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... the matter came to be investigated, it was discovered that the Cora had run on to a coral reef unmarked in the charts. Coral reefs form with extraordinary rapidity, and are infinitely dangerous, because they are so sharp as to cut like razors. The loss of the Cora was no one's fault; but that fact was of but little comfort to those whose ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... side of the house the ground sloped away down to a beach seen between the Pandanus and cocoanut trees, of fine white sand fringing a calm lagoon of the deepest blue, beyond which appeared a long line of foaming breakers, ever dashing against a coral reef, which extended parallel with the coast as far as the eye could reach. On the other side rose the steep sides of a range of rocky and picturesque mountains, clothed to their summits with the richest and densest foliage, numberless creepers climbing up the trees, and hanging ...
— Mary Liddiard - The Missionary's Daughter • W.H.G. Kingston |
