"Fecundity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... petitioners can never afford the marriage payments.[3] He will then probably recount the purchase price of this own wife, always with exaggerations; descant on the qualities of his daughter, her strength, her beauty, her diligence, her probable fecundity; and deplore the grievous loss to be sustained by her departure from her parents' side. Whereupon the visitors respond that they are willing to substitute a number of slaves to make up for the loss of the daughter, but that in any case she will not leave the paternal home and that the bridegroom ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... and exciting action from the first page to the last. A fecundity of invention that never lags, and a judiciously used vein ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... book-stall by the side of the octavos, quartos, and duodecimos he has pyramidized on our book-shelves. Look through any catalogue you will, and you will find that a large proportion of the works in it have been contributed by Anon. The only author who can in the least compete with him in fecundity is Ibid." ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... fates, from whose movements in flight omens were drawn, but also spirits of fertility. When the childless Indian sage Mandapala of the Mahabharata was refused admittance to heaven until a son was born to him, he "pondered deeply" and "came to know that of all creatures birds alone were blest with fecundity"; so he became ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... which this holy war was prosecuted against the whole race of unbelievers, we do not find that the population of this new colony was in anywise hindered thereby; on the contrary, they multiplied to a degree which would be incredible to any man unacquainted with the marvelous fecundity ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... gentlemen of the Chapter who gave him his house rent free, on account of his wife being the daughter of a former old servant of the church. The smell of the paste and of the damp floor infected his house with the rank atmosphere of poverty. A hopeless fecundity aggravated this poverty; his sad, placid wife with her big yellow eyes appeared every year with a new baby tugging at her flabby breast, and several children crept along the cloister walls, dull and inert with hunger, with enormous heads and thin necks, always sickly, ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Black Plague, a greater fecundity in women was everywhere remarkable—a grand phenomenon, which, from its occurrence after every destructive pestilence, proves to conviction, if any occurrence can do so, the prevalence of a higher power in the direction ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... gilt coronet all Jewish brides wore. The crowning of the bride is still observed by the Russians, and the Calvinists of Holland and Switzerland. The wearing of orange blossoms is said to have started with the Saracens, who regarded them as emblems of fecundity. It was introduced into Europe by the Crusaders. The bride's veil is the modern form of the flammeum or large yellow veil which completely enveloped the Greek and Roman brides during the ceremony. Such a covering is still in use among the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... prescribed the dance as a remedy for the hysteric affections which are common among the women of their country; and the Arabs use a somewhat similar recipe for the highbred mares, whose too lively temperament hinders their fecundity. 'Dull as a dancer' is a familiar proverb at the theatre. In fact, the best brains of Europe are convinced that dancing brings with it a ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... ducks, geese, flamingoes, and teal. To the left, the grassy valley extended to the desert its fields and orchards in joyful abundance; the sun shone on the yellow wheat, and the earth exhaled forth its fecundity in odorous wafts. At this sight, Paphnutius fell ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... are not individually large rats. Occasionally very large ones are found among them, but these are exceptional cases. They are in general less distinguished for size, than for a fierce and spiteful disposition, combined with a great fecundity, which of course renders them exceedingly numerous and troublesome. It has been observed that wherever they make their appearance, in a few years the rats of all other species disappear; and it is therefore conjectured that the Norway ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... woods beyond, gilt-tipped in the setting sun. There were fields of ripening yellow grain, of lusty young corn that grew almost as we watched it: the warm winds of evening were heavy with the acrid odours of fecundity. Fecundity! In that lay the elusive yet insistent charm of that country; and Nancy's, of course, was the transforming touch that made it paradise. It was thus, in the country, I suggested that we should spend the rest of our existence. What was the use of amassing money, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... transmissibility of the modifications so induced, and it is difficult to gather from his inconsistent writings what extent of transformation he really believed in. Prof. Osborn says of Buffon: "The struggle for existence, the elimination of the least-perfected species, the contest between the fecundity of certain species and their constant destruction, are all clearly expressed in various passages." He quotes two of these (op. cit. ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... leaves thrown out, waving a thousand hands of cheerful welcome and assurance—these blades of the corn, so much mightier than any blades of steel. He saw the broad beckoning banners of the pale tassels bursting out atop of the stalk, token of fecundity and of the future. He caught the wide-driven pollen as it whitened upon the earth, borne by the parent West Wind, mother of increase. He saw the thickening of the green leaf at the base, its swelling, its growth ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... is not a Jovian virtue. Jupiter grew restless, and then, shaking off all restraint, plunged into inconstancy of the most scandalous and flagrant kind. It is doubtful if the history of royal amours, with all its fecundity, can furnish a parallel. Within a few months, Madame de Soubise, Mademoiselle de Rochefort-Theobon, Madame de Louvigny, Madame de Ludres, and some lesser ones passed in rapid succession through the ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... their workmen? Do the economists mean to point to the increase of population as one of the benefits of machinery? Let them renounce, then, the theory of Malthus, and stop declaiming against the excessive fecundity of marriage. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... sun;" and that in such important stocks as the Iroquois, Athapascas, Cherokees, and Tupis, the sun is said to be a feminine noun; while the myths represent them more frequently as brother and sister than as man and wife; nor did at least the northern tribes regard the sun as the cause of fecundity in nature at all, but solely ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... past; what of the present? In spite of the dehumanizing and other efforts to destroy the fecundity of the race, the twenty Africans of 1620, by the close of the Revolution, had increased to 650,000, and these 650,000, at the close of the Civil War, had reached the alarming number of four and one-half millions; and these four and ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... is wont to piss whole clouds of rain Into the earth, vast gaping urinal, Which that one-ey'd subsizer of the sky, Dan Phoebus, empties by calidity; He and his townsmen planets brings to thee Most fatty lumps of earth's fecundity.[112] ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... the fecundity of her loins, and it was in 1970 that the first cry of alarm was raised. For some time all territories adjacent to China had been grumbling at Chinese immigration; but now it suddenly came home to the world that China's population was 500,000,000. She had increased by a hundred ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... possible to imagine the unmeasured and unsparing license of attack assumed by these comedies upon the gods, the institutions, the politicians, philosophers, poets, private citizens, and women of Athens. With this universal liberty of subject there is combined a poignancy of derision and satire, a fecundity of imagination, and a richness of poetical expression such as cannot be surpassed. Towards the end of the career of Aristophanes, however, this unrestricted license of the comedy began ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... four peasant women bearing trays of vegetables and fruits, symbols of fecundity, I assumed. Behind them, sitting cross-legged in glass cages swung from poles, each borne by a score of sweating coolies in scarlet liveries, were the four chief messengers of the royal harem—former concubines ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... wrong; and the writer who has given such delight, has influenced so many writers, and has taught so much to so many persons, can hardly have been a shallow mannerist, or an ungovernable partisan. No one denies that Macaulay had a prodigious knowledge of books; that in literary fecundity and in varied improvisation he has rarely been surpassed; that his good sense is unfailing, his spirit manly, just, and generous; and lastly, that his command over language had unequalled qualities of precision, energy, and brilliance. These are all very great and ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... executed, Dickens, like the real artist that he was, had put into them his best work. There was no scamping. The critics of the time judged superficially, not making allowance for the ample fund of observations he had amassed, for the genuine fecundity of his genius, and for the admirable industry of an extremely industrious man. "The World's Workers"—there exists under that general designation a series of short biographies, for which Miss Dickens has written a sketch of her father's life. To no one could the description more ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... devised them, she leaves their operation to the blindness of chance. Steps in man and controls and directs them. For the first time in the history of life conscious intelligence forms and transforms life. These yearnings and desires, promptings of the "abysmal fecundity," have in man evolved into what is called "love." They arise in instinct and sensation and culminate in sentiment and emotion. They master man, and the intellect of man, as they master the beast and all the acts of the beast. And they operate in the development of ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... Jack listened, the fragrance of flowers was in his nostrils and in intervals between Jasper Ewold's sentences he seemed to hear the rustle of borning leaf-fronds breaking the silence. But the narrative was not an idyll. Toil and patience had been the handmaidens of the fecundity of the soil. Prosperity had brought an entail of problems. Jasper Ewold mentioned them briefly, as if he would not ask a guest to share the shadows which they brought to ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... his cunning, in the struggle for existence, it is not necessary for us to know exactly how this has come about; yet it is well to hear the opinions as to such subjects of men who have evidently thought much about them. Therefore we ask for your opinions on the question of the power of adaptation in fecundity. ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... energetic fecundity do we find in him! As a boy he began to fight for bread, has been hungry (twice a day we trust) ever since, and has been obliged to sell his wit for his bread week by week. And his wit, sterling gold as it is, will find no such purchasers as the fashionable painter's thin pinchbeck, ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... prodigal in those days! I told a thousand "stories" to the good people of Quincy, and every story was "good"; but since I have come to write for the magazines I have often regretted the wealth of story, the fecundity of fiction, I lavished ...
— The Road • Jack London
... whites for fifty years.[1677] The chiefs of the Niam Niam take their daughters to wife.[1678] The Sakalava, on Madagascar, allow brother and sister to marry, but before such a marriage the bride is sprinkled with consecrated water and prayers are recited for her happiness and fecundity, as if there were fears that the union was not pleasing to the higher powers, and as if there was especial fear that there might be no offspring. Such marriages are contracted by chiefs who cannot find other brides of ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... sends articles to La France; his nom-deplume in L'Illustration is "Perdican"; he also contributes to the Figaro, 'L'Independence Belge, Opinion Nationale' (1867-1872); he signs articles in the 'Rappel; as "Candide"; in short, his fecundity in this field of literature is very great. He is today a most popular journalist and writes for the 'Presse, Petit Journal, Temps', and others. He has not succeeded as a politician. Under the second Empire he was often in collision with the Government; in 1857 he was sentenced to pay a fine of ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... corresponds with the Jupiter Tonans of the Romans,—"the prince of the power of the air," destroyer of crops, the scatterer of the harvest, represented with a flaming sword; but as god of the atmosphere, the giver of rain, of abundance, "the lord of fecundity," he was beneficent as well ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... withdrew much of what he had at first put forward, and re-introduced a large portion of the medieval religiosity which he had once so successfully and fiercely attacked. The year 1520 saw him at the most advanced point he ever attained. It was then that he produced, with marvellous fecundity, a series of pamphlets unequalled by him and unexcelled anywhere, both in the incisive power of their attack on existing institutions and in the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... two of the prime qualities of genius, a faculty of vigorous yet minute analysis, and a wonderful fecundity of imagination. The first of these faculties is as needful to the artist in words, as a knowledge of anatomy is to the artist in colors or in stone. This enables him to conceive truly, to maintain a proper relation of parts, and to draw a correct outline, while the second ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of plant carotinoids to growth, fecundity and reproduction of fowls. J. Biol. Chem., ...
— The Vitamine Manual • Walter H. Eddy
... this fecundity was a very potent factor in the development of the Dutch School of painting. Had Hals confined his talent to painting the portraits of the highest in the land, which would never have been seen by the public at large, it is improbable ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... interminable fecundity, pours forth millions of human beings for whom there is no place on earth, and no means of subsistence, what affair is that of ours, my brethren? We did not make them; we did not ask Nature to make them. And it ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... painting arose another branch of art, which was peculiar to Holland—the painting of animals. Cattle are the riches of the country, and the splendid breed of Holland is unequalled in Europe for its beauty and fecundity. The Dutch, who owe so much to their cattle, treat them, so to speak, as a part of the population; they love them, wash them, comb them, dress them. They are to be seen everywhere; they are reflected in the canals, and the country is beautified with their innumerable black and white ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... there is greater power of fecundity than in us. But in us there is not only one procession of the word, but there are many: for in us from one word proceeds another; and also from one love proceeds another. Therefore in God there are more ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... lawful or expedient for state and church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church—But she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and patronage ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... custom of putting the ashes of the bonfires in the fowls' nests to make the hens lay eggs,[839] and from the German practice of mixing the ashes of the bonfires with the drink of cattle in order to make the animals thrive.[840] Further, there are clear indications that even human fecundity is supposed to be promoted by the genial heat of the fires. In Morocco the people think that childless couples can obtain offspring by leaping over the midsummer bonfire.[841] It is an Irish belief that a girl who jumps thrice over the midsummer bonfire will soon ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... Nevertheless, Nathan maintains his ground by the quickness of his mind, by those lucky hits which billiard-players call a "good stroke." He is the cleverest shot at ideas on the fly in all Paris. His fecundity is not his own, but that of his epoch; he lives on chance events, and to control them he distorts their meaning. In short, he is not true; his presentation is false; in him, as Comte Felix said, is the born ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... which with these two completes the treatise, appeared in 1917 when it was reviewed in this publication. The second volume covers the period from our independence through the Civil War. Carrying forward this treatment the author considers marriage and fecundity in the new nation, the unsettling of foundations, the emancipation of childhood, the social subordination of woman, the emergence of woman, the family and the home, sex morals in the opening continent, the struggle for the west, the new industrial order, the reign of self indulgence, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... not render the Scotchman less great, I saw both the system that was favourable to the execution of my work, and the possibility of carrying it out. Although, so to speak, dazzled by the surprising fecundity of Walter Scott, always equal to himself and always original, I did not despair, for I found the reason of such talent in the variety of human nature. Chance is the greatest novelist in the world. To be fertile, one has only to study it. French ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... be a dainty feast. In consequence of the mother's heedlessness, the number of those who escape all these voracious hunters and the inclemencies of the weather must be curiously small. This perhaps explains why she is compelled to make up by her fecundity for ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... truth, like love, like all realities viewed from the angle of human vision, the desert is a paradox. Its vast emptiness is more than full; its unashamed sterility is but the simile for unmeasured fecundity. ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... which used to be, and the coloured eggs which still are, given away at Easter throughout Europe, are not of Christian origin, but belong to the Roman celebration (at the same season, viz., April 12th to 15th) of the goddess of Plenty—Ceres. Eggs are the symbols of fecundity and the renewal of life in the spring. They were decorated and given in baskets by rich Romans to their friends and dependents at this season. "Hot-cross buns" are peculiar to England, and no doubt have a Christian significance. They have not survived in ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... woman asleep, just from the hand of Destiny; while the succeeding figures symbolize the Awakening, the Joy of Being, finally, the Kiss of Life, with the human pair offering their children, representing the beginnings of fecundity. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... procession of friendly names which accompany my books mingles pleasure with the pain their great number causes me, for they are not written without anxiety, to say nothing of the reproach cast upon me for my alarming fecundity,—as if the world which poses before me were not more fecund still. Would it not be a fine thing, George, if some antiquary of long past literatures should find in that procession none but great ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... introduction such as this to discuss at any length the characteristics of Hugo as a literary artist, but a few remarks may be made on some of the features of his art which are most conspicuous in the poems selected for this volume. It is scarcely necessary to dwell upon the poet's extraordinary fecundity of words and images. Occasionally, especially in his later works, this degenerates into diffuseness, and he exhibits a tendency to repetition and a fondness for long enumeration of names and details. On the other hand, he constantly ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... talks about 'the sacred duty of his august ministry,' and for the purpose, I suppose, of showing how strictly he fulfils the precepts of his mild Master and Redeemer, he styles the Society in question 'an infernal Society,' and speaks of 'its accursed fecundity.' Goodly words! Charitable words! May I be permitted to enquire in what part of the sacred writings he found them recommended? Perhaps in the following text ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... gives such vigour and greatness to single lines and sentiments of Wordsworth, and to poems developing a single thought or sentiment. It was this that made him so fond of the sonnet. That sequestered nook forced upon him the limits which his fecundity (if I may not say his garrulity) was never self-denying enough to impose on itself. It suits his solitary and meditative temper, and it was there that Lamb (an admirable judge of what was permanent in literature) liked him best. Its narrow bounds, but fourteen paces from end to end, turn ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... fatting-pen. She proved, when fat, good bacon, juicy, and tender; the rind, or sward, was remarkably thin. At a moderate computation she was allowed to have been the fruitful parent of three hundred pigs: a prodigious instance of fecundity in so large a quadruped! She was killed ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... divinity of the ancient Persians, confounded by the Greeks and Romans with the sun. He is the personification of Ormuzd, representing fecundity and perpetual renovation. Mithra is represented as a young man with a Phrygian cap, a tunic, a mantle on his left shoulder, and plunging a sword into the neck of a bull. Scaliger says the word means "greatest" ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... the arms of the two empires; and behind this group came magistrates, warriors, and the people presenting crowns. At the two extremities of the transparencies were represented the Seine and the Danube, surrounded by children-image of fecundity. The twelve columns of the peristyle and the staircase were illuminated; and the columns were united by garlands of colored lights, the statues on the peristyle and the steps also bearing lights. The bridge Louis XV., by which this Temple of Hymen was reached, formed in itself ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... should be nourished with body, it would carry itself better there, where the fecundity of the material is, (as Jamblichus argues); so that when a large fat body presents itself, we should imagine that it were the habitation of a strong soul, firm, ready and heroic, and we should say: Oh, fat soul, oh, fecund spirit, oh, fine nature, oh, divine intelligence, oh, clear mind, oh, blessed ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... numbers of other dead who were so hurriedly and carelessly buried that their limbs in places protruded through the soil, poisoning the air with hideous smells and giving abundant promise of the pestilence which must surely follow. I saw districts noted for their fecundity on the raw edge of famine, and a people proverbial for their light-heartedness who ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... consequent thereon. Messrs. Darwin and Wallace have each thrown invaluable light upon these last two points, but Buffon, as early as 1756, had made them the keystone of his system. "The movement of nature," he then wrote, "turns on two immovable pivots: one, the illimitable fecundity which she has given to all species: the other, the innumerable difficulties which reduce the results of that fecundity." Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck followed in the same sense. They thus admit the survival of the fittest as fully as Mr. Darwin himself, though they do not make use of this particular ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... interest center in fecundity, since the desires and happiness of mankind are consummated in marriage and procreation. How dreary would life be without love, companionship, and the family! How precious are the ties that bind our hearts to father, mother, daughter, and son! The love of children is innate ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... turn to the left instead of right, a wrong counting of doors along the passage, the jiggling of bed-curtains, screams and consternation. It is one of the seven original plots. Except for clothes-closets, screens and bed-curtains, Sterne must have gone out of the novel business, Sheridan have lost fecundity and Dryden starved in a garret. But the moths got into their red brocade at last and ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... another to fit it to feed on plants; if one has webbed feet and another not; then, in all such cases, difference of structure proves difference of kind. (2.) Physiological; that is, the internal nature, indicated by habits and instincts, furnishes another safe criterion. (3.) Permanent fecundity. The progenitors of the same species reproduce their kind from generation to generation; the progeny of different species, although nearly allied, do not. It is a fixed law of nature that species never can be annihilated, ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... mental, is owing to the isolation in which each small tribe has lived, and to the narrow round of life and thought, and close intermarriages for countless generations which are the necessary results. Their fecundity is of a low degree, for it is very rare to find an Indian family having so many as four children, and we have seen how great is their liability to sickness and death on removal from ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... quickening, and powerful. I will not dress my verse up in fine words and pretty fancies, but I will breathe into it the grit and force and adhesiveness of real things." Beauty is the flowering of life and fecundity, and it must have deep root ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... truly astonishing. During the height of the breeding season, she will often, under favorable circumstances, lay from two to three thousand eggs, a day! In my observing hives, I have seen her lay, at the rate of six eggs a minute! The fecundity of the female of the white ant, is much greater than this, as she will lay as many as sixty eggs a minute! but then her eggs are simply extruded from her body, to be carried by the workers into suitable nurseries, while the queen bee herself deposits ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... herself to any especial manner in her literary work. Her spontaneity of feeling and the actual fecundity, as it were, of her imaginative gift, could not be restrained, concentrated, and formally arranged as it was in the case of the two first masters of modern French novel-writing. Her work in this respect may be compared to a gold mine, while theirs is rather the goldsmith's craft. ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... besides human foes, numberless enemies among the foxes, wolves, hawks, and other birds. The fecundity of the survivors, however, keeps pace with the many fatalities to ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... so wisely attached to the reproduction of our species. We reverently admire the wisdom and the goodness of Faraki, who, desiring to secure to the world a continued population, has implanted in the sexes an invincible mutual attraction, which constantly draws them towards each other. Fecundity is the end he proposes, and he rewards with intoxicating delights those who contribute to the fulfilment of his designs. What should we say to the favourite of a King from whom he had received a beautiful house, and fine estates, and who chose to spoil the house, to let it ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 1 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... common intent, than the expression of the individual activity, energy, and wonderful mobility of M. Girardin himself. The Presse is Emile de Girardin, with his boldness, his audacity, his rampant agility, his Jim Crowism, his inexhaustible cleverness, wonderful fecundity, and indisputable talent. The Presse is bold and daring; but no man can tell the color of its politics to-day, much less three days, or three months hence. On the 25th of July, 1848, it was as audacious, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... hedges. At this time there is a general bustle among the feathered tribes; an incessant fluttering about, and a cheerful chirping; indicative, like the germination of the vegetable world, of the reviving life and fecundity ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... go directly on to the southward," replied Swinton; "the migration of these animals is one of the most remarkable proofs of the fecundity of animal life. Like the ants, they devour everything before them; and if we journey in the direction they have come from, we shall find no food for the cattle until after the rains. After the rains fall, these animals will ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... marvel of the formation of animals, I made use of a Pre-established Harmony, that is to say, of the same means I had used to explain another marvel, namely the correspondence of soul with body, [65] wherein I proved the uniformity and the fecundity of the principles I had employed. It seems that this reminded M. Bayle of my system of accounting for this correspondence, which he had examined formerly. He declared (in chapter 180 of his Reply to the Questions of a Provincial, vol. III, p. 1253) ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... the doctor had said; each one of these middle-class ladies considered herself a special case, but their stories all seemed to fit together. Nature's boundless and irrational fecundity was an exceedingly trying feature of the life of middle-class ladies. In the first place, the having of babies was a tedious and painful matter. One became grotesquely disfigured, and had to hide away and sever all social relationships. One lost one's grace and attractiveness, and hence ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... from a many-coloured furnace of flower-beds, scarcely parted by lush paddocks from the intense green wall of the coppiced hill, the Wakes has always retained for my memory an impression of rural fecundity and summer glow absolutely unequalled. The garden seemed to burn like a green sun, with crimson stars and orange meteors to relieve it. All, I believe, has since then been altered. Selborne, they tell me, has ceased to bear any resemblance to that rich nest in ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... meetings; for there can be nothing new among us," said he; "we have traveled over each other's minds." Johnson was piqued at the suggestion. "Sir," said he, "you have not traveled over my mind, I promise you." Sir Joshua, less confident in the exhaustless fecundity of his mind, felt and acknowledged the force of Goldsmith's suggestion. Several new members, therefore, had been added; the first, to his great joy, was David Garrick. Goldsmith, who was now on cordial terms with him, had zealously promoted his election, and Johnson had given it ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... the supreme lord of words. In sheer facility, in sheer abundance of language, Shakespeare alone of all the writers of the world can be reckoned his superior. The bulk of his work is very great, and the nature of it is very various; but every page bears the mark of the same tireless fecundity, the same absolute dominion over the resources of speech. Words flowed from Victor Hugo like light from the sun. Nor was his volubility a mere disordered mass of verbiage: it was controlled, adorned, and inspired by ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... proportion to the avenue—far too high and far too irregular. There is no regular design, no continuous outline; immense, costly, new, they sprout upwards—sprout as if under the drawing-up power of a tropical sun, sprout as if fed with the superabundant fecundity of virgin soil. Unless they were as high, there would not be room for the people down at this crowded end of the wedge-shaped town. The want of finality about them is no less apparent in their irregularity of size than ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... crossed with its pollen the blossoms of his own soul, that Babylonian garden is his marvellous and best apology. For astounding figurative opulence he yields only to Shakespeare, and even to Shakespeare not in absolute fecundity but in images. The sources of his figurative wealth are specialised, sources of Shakespeare's are universal. It would have been as conscious an effort for him to speak without figure as it is for most men to speak with figure. Suspended in the dripping well of his imagination the ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... flower of the species. "Children" too?—very happy, beautiful, heart-gladdening creations—God bless them all, and scatter those who love them not!—but still for a proof of more than average humanity, somewhat common, somewhat overwhelming: rabbits beat us here, with all our fecundity, so offensive to Martineau and Malthus. But as to "books"—common enough, too, smirks gentle reader: pardon, courteous sir, most rare—at least in my sense; I speak not of flat current shillings, but the bold medallions of ancient Syracuse; I heed not the dull thousands of minted gold ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... wherever it made its appearance. In England it was introduced by shipping about the middle of the last century, and has since then increased to such an extent as to swarm over the whole country, and render the old English black rat a comparatively rare animal. From its ferocity and fecundity the brown rat is a veritable pest; if it cannot beat a retreat from an enemy it will show most determined fight, and in large numbers will attack and kill even men. A story is related by Robert Stephenson, the great engineer, that in a coal-pit in which many horses were employed, the rats, allured ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... as I have already observed, this disproportion increases daily, since the negroes are transferred to one part of the Union as soon as slavery is abolished in the other. Thus the black population augments in the South, not only by its natural fecundity, but by the compulsory emigration of the negroes from the North; and the African race has causes of increase in the South very analogous to those which so powerfully accelerate the growth of the European race ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... these men were united in Voltaire, who in nearly two hundred volumes, and with a fecundity of genius perfectly amazing and unparalleled, in poetry, in history, in criticism,—yet without striking originality or profound speculations,—astonished and delighted his generation. This great and popular writer clothed his attacks on ecclesiastical power, and upon Christianity ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... matter. But in this case what nature does not obtain in any volume or in quantity from any one individual, she simply receives by the number of animals in question, through the enormous multiplicity of these animals, and their astonishing fecundity—namely, by the wonderful faculty they have of promptly regenerating, of multiplying in a short time their generations successively, and rapidly accumulating; finally, by the total amount of reunion of the products of ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... render them healthy can be accomplished. The sickly appearance of the inhabitants establishes but too well the facts related to me; and yet, strange to say, it would appear to be a provision of Providence, that a remarkable fecundity on the part of the women in the more healthy portions of their Western States, should meet the annual expenditure of life. Three children at a birth are more common here than twins are in England; and they, generally speaking, are all reared ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... enormous wonderful green locks, sprinkled on the damp earth, on the defaced statues, on the crumbling steps of the pavilion, and even on the pavement of the deserted street, flowers like stars, dew like pearls, fecundity, beauty, life, joy, perfumes. At midday, a thousand white butterflies took refuge there, and it was a divine spectacle to see that living summer snow whirling about there in flakes amid the shade. There, in those gay shadows of verdure, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... there are not much above a dozen who know how to interest with the ordinary events of life, and by the portrayal of characters truly human. If the former is a talent, it must be owned that it is much commoner than the latter . . . . If we are to rate novelists according to their fecundity, or the riches of their invention, we must put Alexander Dumas above Cervantes. Cervantes wrote a novel with the simplest plot, without belying much or little the natural and logical course of events. This novel which was called 'Don Quixote,' is perhaps the greatest work of human wit. Very ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... great efforts to reduce the number of Coyotes because of their destructiveness to the young game, but an animal that is endowed with extraordinary wits, phenomenal speed, unexcelled hardihood, and marvellous fecundity, is not easily downed. I must confess that if by any means they should succeed in exterminating the Coyote in the West, I should feel that I had lost something of very great value. I never fail to get that joyful thrill when ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... for the Bible were enlarged into immense canvases, some of which were twenty feet long and twelve feet high. All who looked upon these pictures were amazed by the fecundity in invention and the skill shown in drawing; but the most telling criticism against them was their defect in coloring. Dore could draw, but could not color, and the report was abroad that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... silver-throated And stern, where the tables Are spread, and the work Of the Lord is in hand! Driving the darkness, Even as the banners And spears of the Morning; Sifting the nations, The slag from the metal, The waste and the weak From the fit and the strong; Fighting the brute, The abysmal Fecundity; Checking the gross, Multitudinous blunders, The groping, the purblind Excesses in service, Of the Womb universal, The absolute Drudge; Changing the charactry Carved on the World, The miraculous gem In the seal-ring that burns On the hand of ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... society of either white or black and an alleged relative sterility of his kind is advanced as proof of this assertion. On the other side it is said, with equal vehemence, that the coloured people are mongrels, unfit to mingle with the pure parental breeds, and that this is proved by their excessive fecundity. The coloured people are also accused of being inferior in physical constitution when compared with either of the ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... Gazette (afterwards the Gazette de France) in 1631, followed by the issue of the first daily newspaper, the London Daily Courant, in 1702, and the Boston Weekly News-letter in 1704, (the first American journal)—to the wonderful fecundity of the modern periodical press, which scatters the leaves of more than thirty thousand different journals broadcast over the world, there is a long and interesting history of the trials and triumphs of a free press. In ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... chain of lymphatics, periodical ovulation, timed pubescence, and perfected, co-ordinate functions) a study, that they stand abuse and excess so well; that the fierce blasts of lust and passion that sear and scorch them and well-nigh dry up their fountain springs of vitality and fecundity, do not wholly destroy or hopelessly disarrange their delicate tissues ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... being 31,592,429. When it is borne in mind that this is equal to 7,272 passengers every hour, and that the length of line worked by the company's engines, including that of the "foreign" line worked, is slightly less than 25 miles, the fecundity in traffic of the metropolitan district must be said to be marvelous. It is to be regretted that the official account from which these figures are given does not give any idea of the number of passengers in the different classes, for such a return would be of value. It is a marvelous ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... that the greatest number of children are born to parents whose earnings are the lowest,(3) that the direst poverty is associated with uncontrolled fecundity emphasize the character of the parenthood we are depending upon to create the ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... help from others than is usual with inventors, we must allow that Bain was a mechanical genius of the first order—a born inventor. Considering the early date of his achievements, and his lack of education or pecuniary resource, we cannot but wonder at the strength, fecundity, and prescience of his creative faculty. It has been said that he came before his time; but had he been more fortunate in other respects, there is little doubt that he would have worked out and introduced all or nearly ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... plants that at a distance looked like jade or malachite. Now, all of a sudden, as it were, there was this forest of rank verdure, sprung with a kind of hideous rapidity, stifling, overpowering, productive with a teeming, incredible fecundity. Low down near the earth the full-grown fruit, green with the faintest tip of gold, hung heavy, indolent, luscious, derisively cool to touch and taste in this semi-tropical heat. The gherkin a few inches above it defied ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... and diversified, one may ask what was the dominant feature, what was the supreme quality, the one characteristic which marked the nature of the man. Was it his incomparable genius for finance? Was it his splendid oratorical powers? Was it his marvellous fecundity of mind? In my estimation it was not any one of these qualities. Great as they were, there was one still more marked, and if I have to give my own impression, I would say that the one trait which was dominant in his nature, ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... Darwin, which had the merit of convincing on one point the philosopher himself, had indeed been written before this, in London lodgings; but his pen was not idle at Claygate; and it was here he wrote (among other things) that review of "Fecundity, Fertility, Sterility, and Allied Topics," which Dr. Matthews Duncan prefixed by way of introduction to the second edition of the work. The mere act of writing seems to cheer the vanity of the most incompetent; but a correction accepted by Darwin, and a whole review borrowed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... abilities in other more desirable directions.[20] Again, "it is the perpetual effort, generation after generation, through long ages, to repair the mischief inflicted by enemies," that accounts for "the fecundity of the codfish and other creatures. The more prolific it becomes, the more enemies it can feed; and the more they multiply, the more prolific it grows." A vicious circle indeed! Even "earthquakes, storms, droughts, deluges," are explained as due to a ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... is called the Blue Grass Region, and boasts itself as of peculiar fecundity in the matter of pasturage. Why the grass is called blue, or in what way or at what period it becomes blue, I did not learn; but the country is very lovely and very fertile. Between Lexington and Frankfort a large stock farm, extending over three thousand acres, is kept by a gentleman ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... luxury, our ears with the tales of orgies; to aid in the manoeuvres of public robbers, or to applaud them; to laugh at morality, and only believe in success; to love nothing but pleasure, adore nothing but force; to replace work with a fecundity of fancies; to speak without thinking; to prefer noise to glory; to erect sneering into a system, and lying into an institution—is this the spectacle that we have seen?—is this the society that ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... a few pages in Life's Handicap describing the City of Lahore by night. There is great heat in these pages; there is distance also, and the breathless air of streets where the formic swarming of India, her callous fecundity, the tyranny of her skies, and her old faith, prepare us for the House of Suddhu ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... that he did not tax the fertility of his active brain to wheedle Collins Shackelford, the cashier, into breaking into his envelope for five or ten dollars in advance. These appeals came in every form that Field's fecundity could invent. When all other methods failed the presence of "Pinny" or "Melvin" in the office would afford a messenger and plan of action that was always crowned with success. "Pinny" especially seemed to enter ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... literary sinner;" but the extent of his sins never struck me so forcibly as when I observed his delinquencies counted up in chronological order in Niceron's "Hommes Illustres." It is extremely amusing to detect the swarming fecundity of his pen; from year to year, with author after author, was this translator wearying others, but remained himself unwearied. Sometimes two or three classical victims in a season were dragged into his slaughter-house. Of about seventy works, fifty were versions of the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Scott's literary life have been made a part of this brief sketch, both because his phenomenal fecundity and popularity offer a convenient measure of his power, and because the fiscal misfortune of his later life revealed a simple grandeur of character even more admirable than his mental force. "Scott ruined!" exclaimed the Earl of Dudley when he heard of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... Dagantakala, a name which proves the presence of the god among the Canaanites long before the Philistine invasion, and we find two Beth-Dagons—one in the plain of Judah, the other in the tribe of Asher; Philo of Byblos makes Dagon a Phoenician deity, and declares him to be the genius of fecundity, master of grain and of labour. The representation of his statue which appears on the Graeco- Roman coins of Abydos, reminds us ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... satisfied with this fecundity,—which would have exhausted many another man of letters,—Honore de Balzac, in 1830, founded a critical organ, in company with Emile de Girardin, H. Auger, and Victor Varaigne, under the title of Feuilleton ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... authors of the great romances. But it produced some of the greatest matter, and some of not the least delightful handlings of matter, in book-history. And it is everywhere distinguished, first, by the adventurous fecundity of its experiments in form and kind, secondly, by the presence of that spirit which has been adumbrated in the last paragraph. In this last, we must own, the pupil countries far outdid their master or mistress. France was stronger relatively ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... having been burnt on the wedding evening to insure prosperity to the newly-married couple, and both in Greece and Rome young married couples were crowned with marjoram. At Roman weddings, too, oaken boughs were carried during the ceremony as symbols of fecundity; and the bridal wreath was of verbena, plucked by the bride herself. Holly wreaths were sent as tokens of congratulation, and wreaths of parsley and rue were given under a belief that they were effectual preservatives against evil spirits. In Germany, nowadays, a wreath of vervain is presented ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... enamored swains is at once so trite and obvious, that both the invention and vocabulary of the lover who abides by it so perpetually must have been poor and narrow beyond anything we can conceive of Spenser's fecundity of language and imagery, if we sit down content to imagine that no more is meant by its recurrence than meets the eye. We are satisfied that this title or simile—call it what you will—is the key-word of the mystery; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... scientific visitors to a coral islet found almost innumerable sea birds and eggs. The multitude of birds and their prodigious fecundity inspired the thought that the "rookery" for the whole breadth of the Indian Ocean had been discovered. Investigations showed that the islet was also the abiding-place of a certain species of lizard which subsisted entirely on eggs. It was calculated that not one egg in several hundred was hatched ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... argument against this theory may be got from the general biological fact that sexual promiscuity tends to pathological conditions unfavorable to fecundity, that is, fertility, or the birth of offspring. Physicians have long ago ascertained this fact, and the modern prostitute gives illustration of it by the fact that she has few or no children. Among ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... Nash's wit, and tried their hand either at the picaresque novel or at the reproduction of scenes taken from ordinary life, of which Greene also had left some examples. The comic school was far from equalling the fecundity of its romantic rival; it existed however, and though absolutely forgotten now, it helped to keep up and improve the natural gift of observation which ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand |
