"Viscid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sufficiently vivid, and spurred to an unnatural effect by the exciting scenes of the previous night—painted each patch of shadow, clinging bat-like to the humid wall, as some globular sea-spider ready to drop upon him with its viscid and clay-cold body, and drain out his chilled blood, enfolding him in rough and hairy arms. Each splash in the water beneath him, each sigh of the multitudinous and melancholy sea, seemed to prelude the laborious advent of some mis-shapen and ungainly abortion of the ooze. All the sensations ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... to all the muscles of deglutition and respiration, so that the patient not only has the greatest difficulty in swallowing, but has a constant sense of impending suffocation. To add to his distress, a copious secretion of viscid saliva fills his mouth. Any voluntary effort, as well as all forms of external stimuli, only serve to aggravate the spasms which are always induced by the attempt to swallow fluid, or even by the sound of ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... concealed, it is capable of protrusion till it exceeds in length the whole body of the creature. No sooner does an incautious fly venture within reach than the extremity of this treacherous weapon is disclosed, broad and cuneiform, and covered with a viscid fluid; and this, extended to its full length, is darted at its prey with an unerring aim, and redrawn within the jaws with a rapidity that ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... where a bucket, with an aperture serving as a spout, is formed in an orchid. Bees visit the flower: in eager search of material for their combs, they push each other into the bucket, the drenched ones escaping from their involuntary bath by the spout. Here they rub their backs against the viscid stigma of the flower and obtain glue; then against the pollen masses, which are thus stuck to the back of the bee and carried away. 'When the bee, so provided, flies to another flower, or to the same flower ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... and gelignite, both of which substances consist of a mixture of gun-cotton dissolved in nitro-glycerine, with the addition of varying proportions of wood-pulp and saltpetre, the latter substances acting as absorbing materials for the viscid gelatine. Nitro-glycerine is also largely used in the manufacture of smokeless powders, such as ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... about four miles from me, which ultimately proved to be a creek, and the most southern point of the N'yanza, which, as I have said before, the Arabs described to us as the Ukerewe Sea.[57] We soon afterwards descended into a grassy and jungly depression, and arrived at a deep, dirty, viscid nullah (a watercourse that only runs in wet weather), draining the eastern country into the southern end of the creek. To cross this (which I shall name Jordan) was a matter of no small difficulty, especially for the ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... the methods of manufacture are very simple. In the simplest form, the sugar cane is crushed in a mortar. The juice thus extracted is boiled in common open pans. After boiling a certain length of time, it becomes a dark colored, soft, viscid mass. The uncrystallized sirup is expressed by putting the whole into cloth bags and subjecting them to pressure. This is molasses in a crude state. It is further purified by reboiling it with an addition of an alkaline solution and a quantity ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... F.M. Somewhat viscid, almost glabrous; leaves with 1 to 2 pairs of small obovate-cuneate leaflets; in front rounded, or truncate, or retuse, or sometimes 3-toothed, flat at the margin; rachis dilated; fruit-bearing pedicels ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... selected and cut into junks of the same length as the sack required. The outer bark is then removed and the inner bark loosened by pounding, so that it can be separated by turning it inside out. Sometimes a small piece of the wood is left to form the bottom of the sack. The fruit exudes a milky, viscid juice, which hardens into the consistency of beeswax, ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... are coarse, often dirty, and nearly always have something bristling about them which is entirely absent in the sculptures of the wind. The under side of the roof in the cavity looked very much as a very stiff or viscid treacle would look when spread over a meshy surface, as, for instance, over a closely woven netting of wire. The stems and the branches of the brush took the place of the wire, and in their meshes the snow had been pressed through by its own weight, ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... Moseley "On the Structure and Development of Peripatus capensis" ("Phil. Trans. R. Soc." Volume 164, page 757, 1874). "When suddenly handled or irritated, they (i.e. Peripatus) shoot out fine threads of a remarkably viscid and tenacious milky fluid... projected from the tips of the oral papillae" (page 759).) is so stupid as to spit out the viscid matter at the wrong end of its body; it would have been beautiful thus to have explained the origin of ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... the hooks were converted into whitish, irregular balls, rather above the 0.05th of an inch (1.27 mm.) in diameter, formed of coarse cellular tissue, which sometimes wholly enveloped and concealed the hooks themselves. The surfaces of these balls secrete some viscid resinous matter, to which the fibres of the flax, &c., adhere. When a fibre has become fastened to the surface, the cellular tissue does not grow directly beneath it, but continues to grow closely on each side; so that when several ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... is a viscid liquid of about the consistence of honey, but varying to a soft solid, known as gum, thus, according to the amount of exposure which it has undergone, it contains about 10 to 25 per cent. of "spirits," to which the name of turpentine is commonly given, the rest being resin, or as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... of edentate mammals, have a tubular mouth with a small aperture, and a long tongue covered with a viscid secretion, which they thrust into the ant-hills and then withdraw ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... to a foot high. It was in flower although covered with ice.* Also a variety of Leucopogon villosus, with rather less hair than usual, and another species of the same genus, probably new. Near the highest parts of the plateau I found a new species of eucalyptus with short broad viscid ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... compound was probably the material procured from wine lees (dregs), deposited after fermentation has commenced, and which after considerable application of heat yields not only most of the tannin contained in the stones and fruit stalks, but a viscid compound characteristic of gelatine and of a red-purple color which in course of time changes ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... line and half across; they form the whole inner face of each woody zone. When boiling water is poured over shavings of this wood a clear jelly, resembling tragacanth, is formed and becomes a thick viscid mass; iodine stains it brown, but not a trace of starch is indicated in it. No doubt the nutritious quality of the tree is owing to the mucilage, which is apparently of the same nature as that of the nearly allied Tragacanth tree of Sierra Leone ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... and inhales this noxious air,[6] there is ever after a manifest irritation in the lining membrane of the respiratory passages, which is apparent before carbon in any quantity can be supposed to be lodged in the lungs. The mucous membrane of the air passages, by its continually pouring out a viscid fluid, has the power of removing any foreign matter that may be lodged in them. Now, should this membrane, owing to previous irritation, lose to a certain degree this secretory power, then the foreign body adheres to it, and is retained, and this, I think, constitutes ...
— An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis • Archibald Makellar
... said she, in the heart of the woods The sweet south-winds assert their power, And blow apart the snowy snoods Of trilliums in their thrice-green bower. Now all the swamps are flushed with dower Of viscid pink, where, hour by hour, The bees swim amorous, and a shower Reddens the stream where cardinals tower. Far lost in fern of fragrant stir Her fancies roam, for unto her All Nature came ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... of the Tana River was from the top of a bluff. It flowed below us a hundred feet, bending at a sharp elbow against the cliff on which we stood. Out of the jungle it crept sluggishly and into the jungle it crept again, brown, slow, viscid, suggestive of the fevers and the lurking beasts by which, indeed, it was haunted. From our elevation we could follow its course by the jungle that grew along its banks. At first this was intermittent, leaving thin or even open spaces ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... than the level of the oil, and pass it into the neck of a bottle and let it stand and thus all the oil will separate from this milky liquid; it will enter the bottle and be as clear as crystal; and grind your colours with this, and every coarse or viscid part will remain in the liquid. You must know that all the oils that have been created in seads or fruits are quite clear by nature, and the yellow colour you see in them only comes of your not knowing how to draw it out. Fire or heat by its nature ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... brink of the bottomless caldron of viscid muck and gazed out across the deadly plain. Bill stood still beside her, watching her face ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... lean, reproving forefinger at a shapeless, melting mass that lay at the bottom of a second jar, exuding an ooze of viscid strings. ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... were cultivating their yams and tanias, or else preparing their farina for cassava from the root of the manioc plant. The process consisted in first squeezing out, by means of an old sack and a heavy stone for a press, the viscid juice, which is a strong poison—the same, indeed, with which the Caribs used to tip their arrows in the old days of the aborigines—and then baking the flour on a griddle over a ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... caesia are quite similar to those of our American forms, with the following interesting exception: The doorway of the cavity constituting the bird's domicile is plastered up with clay, made viscid by the nuthatch's glutinous saliva, leaving in the center a circular hole just large enough to afford entrance and exit for the little owner. Says the author quoted above: "When the sitting bird is ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... unintelligible mass, conveying somehow an idea that it was the fruit of vast labor and erudition, emanating from a mind very full of books, and grinding and pressing down the great accumulation of grapes that it had gathered from so many vineyards, and squeezing out rich viscid juices,—potent wine,—with which the reader might get drunk. Some of it, moreover, seemed, for the further mystification of the officer, to be written in cipher; a needless precaution, it might seem, when the writer's natural ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sometimes termed the 'birdcatching plant' by settlers and bushmen . . . It will always be a plant of special interest, as small birds are often found captured by its viscid fruits, to which their feathers become attached as effectively as ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... in bundles as a salad. (Some writers give the name of Lady Fern, not to the Bracken, but to the Asplenium filix foemina, because of its delicate and graceful foliage.) The Bracken has branched riblets, and is more viscid, mucilaginous, and diuretic, than the ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... foliis polos-viscid is pontiffs aequalibus pianissimos, Roach inferno angsts, calycibus hurts. Ait. Kew. v. ...
— The Botanical Magazine Vol. 7 - or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... been positively pretty had the mildness looked a little more alert, and the pensiveness somewhat less lackadaisical. In fact, though Miss Jemima was constitutionally mild, she was not de natura pensive; she had too much of the Hazeldean blood in her veins for that sullen and viscid humor called melancholy, and therefore this assumption of pensiveness really spoilt her character of features, which only wanted to be lighted up by a cheerful smile to be extremely prepossessing. The ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... He held the blade out for our inspection. The point was covered with some viscid-looking matter. ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... the spout or overflow. Dr. Cruger saw a "continual procession" of bees thus crawling out of their involuntary bath. The passage is narrow, and is roofed over by the column, so that a bee, in forcing its way out, first rubs its back against the viscid stigma and then against the viscid glands of the pollen-masses. The pollen-masses are thus glued to the back of the bee which first happens to crawl out through the passage of a lately expanded flower, and are thus carried away. Dr. Cruger sent me a flower in spirits ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... After a few days expectoration begins to come with the cough, at first scanty and viscid or frothy, but soon becoming copious and of purulent character. In general, after free expectoration has been established the more urgent and painful symptoms abate; and while the cough may persist for a length of time, often extending to three or ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various |
