"Stagnant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... why had she come to torture him? To him she now appeared as the incarnation of his tragedy. In her the Past, from which he had fled to the far corners of the earth, hiding his trail in seas and deserts and in stagnant backwaters of humanity, had tracked him down at last. And all the grief and bitterness and hatred that he had beaten down, or thought he had beaten down, had returned to rend and ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... humiliations abroad came to swell the dull murmur of public discontent. Disturbance was arising everywhere. "From stagnant chaos France has passed to tumultuous chaos," wrote Mirabeau, already an influential publicist, despite the irregularity of his morals and the small esteem excited by his life; "there may, there should come ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... devil. The day's experience convinced me that the English colony had some excuse forits existence, since its periodical visits gave the good people of Tolosa a little wholesome excitement during the stagnant ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... disappointing, but exerted a most depressing influence. There was no draught, such as he had believed would issue from the winze. In vain did he hold up a wetted finger, in vain watch for the slightest flicker in the flame of his candle. The air was as stagnant as that of a dungeon. And yet there certainly had been a decided current at that very place only a few hours before. Puzzled and disheartened, he was still determined to press forward, and, stooping low, ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... continent, raised it to prosperity. One sign of vigor, the roll of capital, was wanting; speculation was fast asleep. The government of the day seems to have observed this with regret. A writer of authority on the subject says that, to stir stagnant enterprise, they directed "the Bank of England to issue about four millions in advances to the state and in enlarged discounts." I give you the man's words; they doubtless carry a signification to you, ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... depended upon as a means of softening the material so that the fibres can be disassociated. The process is called "retting," as in the linen manufacture. The details of the process are somewhat different. The jute is commonly fermented in tanks of stagnant water, although sometimes it is allowed to soak in river water for a sufficient length of time to produce the softening. After the fermentation is thus started the jute fibre is separated from the wood, and is of a sufficient flexibility and toughness to be woven into sacking, ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... floods, let alone from neglect and age. Handrails were broken down, planks rotted and wrenched away leaving gaps through which the cloudy greenish blue water could be seen as it purred and chuckled beneath. Here, at the river level, it was hot to the point of sultriness, the air heavy, even stagnant, since the Bar shut off ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... risked in that which is fresh. On the other hand, M. Lucullus was reputed to be so careless and neglectful of his fish ponds that he did not provide any suitable quarters for his fishes in hot weather, but permitted them to remain in ponds which were unhealthy with stagnant water: a practice very different from that of his brother L. Lucullus, who yielded nothing to Neptune himself in his care of his fishes, for he pierced a mountain at Naples, and so contrived that the sea water in his ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... Breed that has always existed in England, and will always exist till the world's end. You may meet its members in London and in Fiji; in the lands that lie beyond the mountains and at Henley; in the swamps where the stagnant vegetation rots and stinks; in the great deserts where the night air strikes cold. They are always the same, and they are branded with the stamp of the breed. They shake your hand as a man shakes it; ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... midst of this uniform progress we find a stagnant spot. Surrounded by legends that are patent and easy to read and understand, we find the stone-cutter and the architect still putting up tablets and cornerstones, monuments and cornices, with dates disguised in Roman numerals. It is as ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... Improvement Sodality," which Miss Gale has made famous in her delightful stories of village life,[71] well illustrates the influences which have been started by many a cemetery association. Not infrequently the one thing which evinces some civic pride in an otherwise stagnant community is its well-kept cemetery. The condition of the cemetery is a good index of community spirit. When people neglect the resting place of their dead they are not apt to do much for the living. But once arouse a feeling of shame for such neglect and the effort to clean up and beautify the ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... fundamental teachings of Judaism first gained headway at the beginning of the eleventh century with the Karaites, whose entire conception of Judaism was such as to render their sect hopelessly stagnant and doomed to dwindle. Still, even they would never have thought of emphasizing certain dogmas as indispensable, had they not discerned in the teachings of Mohammedanism a dangerous challenge to Judaism. Thus the dogma-making tendency in Judaism arose during the Middle Ages ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... sober pleasures of housekeeping and cooking beside the rough, deep-living exhilaration of gypsy life on the plains! She looked back pityingly at those days of stagnant peace, compared the entertainment to be extracted from embroidering a petticoat frill to the exultant joy of a ride in the morning over the green swells. Who would sip tea in the close curtained primness ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... wouldn't have it. I plodded on, the water up to the saddle- girths. The mosquitos swarmed in millions, and the poor little grey could hardly get one leg before the other. I, too, was so feverish that, ignorant of bacteria, I filled my round hat with the filthy stagnant water, and drank it ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... the banishment of the non-christian Chinese in 1755, trade became stagnant. The Philippines now experienced what Spain had felt since the reign of Phillip III., when the expulsion of 900,000 Moorish agriculturists and artisans crippled her home industries, which needed a century and a half to revive. The Acapulco trade was fast on the wane, and the Manila Spanish ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... her from her place, and a keener pain passed through him than he had felt of late; for he knew that the Plague was abroad, feeding in the low stagnant places of human abode; and he had but too much reason to dread that she might be now struggling in its grasp. He seized the first opportunity of slipping out and hurrying home. He sprang upstairs to her room. He ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... outward, while the footpaths were black with the hurrying swarm of pedestrians. It was difficult to realize, as we looked at the line of fine shops and stately business premises, that they really abutted on the other side upon the faded and stagnant square which we ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... shoal of imprisoned wenches, twice more detestable than they. Some had been changed into toads, some into dragons, some into serpents who were swimming and hissing, glavering and butting in a fetid, stagnant pool, much larger than Llyn Tegid. {84} "In the name of wonder," said I, "what sort of creatures may these be?" "There are here," said he, "four sorts of wenches, all notoriously bad. First, there are procuresses, with some of the principal lasses of their respective bevies about them. Second, gossiping ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... the red and smoky light of his little bamboo house, glanced upwards, drew in a long breath of the warm and stagnant air, and stood for a moment with his good eye closed tightly, as if intimidated by the unwonted and deep silence of Lakamba's courtyard. When he opened his eye he had recovered his sight so far, that he could distinguish the various degrees of formless blackness which ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... Grebes are to be found in the temperate zones of both hemispheres, beyond which they do not extend very far either to the north or south. They are usually found on ponds or large sheets of stagnant water, sometimes on deep, slow-moving streams; but always where sedges and rushes are abundant. Probably there are no birds better entitled to the name of water fowl than the Grebes—at least, observers state that they know of no others ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [April, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... Chatelain and I, our guns resting on the already cooling earth, beside the pool that forms the center of the meager oasis, hidden behind a kind of hedge of alfa. The setting sun was reddening the stagnant ditches which irrigate the poor garden ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... pleaded for sinners in a glorious human imitation of the Divine pleading. And the exuberant vitality poured by the Conqueror of death into the human race, flowing strongly through that tiny chapel, had carried the little, thin, stagnant stream of Molly's soul into the great flood of grace that purifies ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... sun, instead of crystallising slowly here into ice, amid countenances rigid with respectability, sharpened by the lust of gain; without taste, without emotion, without even sorrow! Let who will be the stagnant mill-head, crawling in its ugly spade-cut ditch to turn the mill. Let me be the wild mountain brook, which foams and flashes over the rocks—what if they tear it?—it leaps them nevertheless, and goes laughing on its way. Let me go thus, for weal or woe! And if I sleep awhile, let it be like ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... of men turned at last into a long deep-cut communication trench leading out into a village. The air in the trench was heavy and close and stagnant, and the men toiled wearily up it, sweating and breathing hard. At a branching fork one path was labelled with a neatly printed board 'To Battn. H.Q. and the Mole Heap,' and the other path 'To the Duck Pond'—this last, the name of a trench, being a reminder of ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... carrion! One may as well see upon whom our friend here has put his mark." So saying he stooped and turned over the man, the first of the two who had fallen. He lay half in a stagnant pool of water, and was quite dead, as we could see, for the moon fell clearly on his evil and distorted ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... place, the ground is interspersed with rocky fragments, the creek is small, and good water is rather scarce. In summer it almost amounts to a drought, and what there is then is generally brackish or stagnatic. It is necessary never to drink stagnant water, or that found in holes, without boiling, unless there are frogs in it, then the water is good; but the diggers usually boil the water, and a drop of brandy, if they can get it. In passing through the plains you are sure of finding water near the surface ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... respected as a man. His conduct is invariably resolute but there is a kind of statesmanlike formality about his actions. He is respectful towards ritual, formal observances and Brahmans while in comparison with his encounters with the cowgirls his relations with women have an air of slightly stagnant luxury. His wives and consorts lavish on him their devotion but the very fact that they are married removes the ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... cumbersome distribution system have resulted in chronic food shortages. The collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1989-91 has disrupted important technological links. North Korea remains far behind South Korea in economic development and living standards. GDP is stagnant. ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... that the accumulation of wealth and the acquisition of power were what the old man says they are, the world would very soon be stagnant. If he believed that his chances of obtaining either were as poor as the majority of men find them to be, ambition would die within him. It is because he rejects the experience of those who have preceded him, that the world is kept in the topsy-turvy ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... entered her mind. She was only too glad if she could escape from the harshness of her father and the cruelty of her first husband. Then came her development into a beautiful woman, content for the time to be languorously stagnant and to enjoy the rest and peace which had come ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... which it would be hard to find a parallel in modern fiction. Here at last was an answer to the blind impulses agrope in Odo's breast—the loosening of those springs of emotion that gushed forth in such fresh contrast to the stagnant rills of the sentimental pleasure-garden. To renounce a Julie ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... down on the horizon, to the westward of where I and my poor friend, Captain Alphonse, were drifting on the desert sea. The sight of the ship again, even in the distance, and the warmth of the sun's bright beams, which made the stagnant blood circulate in my veins once more, gave me hope and renewed courage, for I recollected and thought that after all, there were eight white men still left on board the ill-fated vessel to keep possession of her and defend my little one—eight good men ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... bows and sides anointed, Smeared them well with oil, that swiftly 100 He might pass the black pitch-water. All night long he sailed upon it, Sailed upon that sluggish water, Covered with its mould of ages, Black with rotting water-rushes, 105 Rank with flags and leaves of lilies, Stagnant, lifeless, dreary, dismal, Lighted by the shimmering moonlight, And by will-o'-the-wisps illumined, Fires by ghosts of dead men kindled, ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... is common enough in stagnant pools, and on our spongy bogs, is the most serviceable of all known herbal tonics. It may be easily recognised growing in water by its large leaves overtopping the surface, each being composed of three leaflets, ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... maintained a lively and sanguine cheerfulness. But seldom was it that she lost patience with the dreamer. Then her rare, indignant outbursts of commonplace and common sense, like a thunderstorm, sweetened the stagnant air of Clement's thoughts and awoke new, wholesome ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... another flight of steps made of gigantic blocks of stone older than history, and groping our way up those we followed the Gray Mahatma to a gallery at the top, on the other side of which was a sheer drop and the smell of stagnant water. I could hear something sluggish that moved in the water, and somewhere in the distance was a turning around which light found its way so dimly that it hardly looked like light at all, but more like filmy mist. A heavy monster splashed somewhere beneath us and the Mahatma raised the ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... had got back his self-assertiveness. Raven could guess his jealous anger, the tide of fury coming, flooding the stagnant marshes of his soul. "I want to hear one more testimony. Thyatira Tenney, get up and tell what ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... greater social efficiency or of increased production or rigid uniformity of doctrine. With the sacrifice of individual initiative will go the loss of all "soul," and the result will be degeneration to a mechanical type of existence, a merely stagnant institution expressing nothing of man's spirit. This personal power of initiative Bergson appeals to each one to maintain. In an important passage of his little work on Laughter he ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... "How well a stagnant life seems to suit some people! Now you—you are immensely improved—unspeakably improved. You have grown into a pretty woman—more than a pretty woman. I shouldn't have thought a few months could make such an alteration in ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... as old Norris, rest his soul! was after fifty. To him and his scanty literature (what there is of it, sound) have we flown from the metropolis and its cursed annualists, reviewers, authors, and the whole muddy ink press of that stagnant pool. ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... Oblivion was not far off. Even then the sound of falling waters was mingling with the roar of the pines above him; and ere long he came to a river, moving in solemn majesty through the forest, and falling with a dull, leaden sound into a motionless stagnant lake, above which the branches of the forest met and mingled, forming perpetual night. This was the Fountain of Oblivion. Upon its brink the Student paused, and gazed into the dark waters with a steadfast look. They were limpid waters dark with shadows only. And as he gazed, he beheld, far ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... Then he laughed at himself, heartily yet a little self-consciously. A fool's errand might yet be a pleasant one, even though his immediate surroundings seemed to mock the sound of his mirth. Woolhanger Moor in November was a drear enough sight. There were many patches of black mud and stagnant water, carpets of treacherous-looking green moss, bare clumps of bushes bent all one way by the northwest wind, masses of rock, gaunter and sterner now that their summer covering of creeping shrubs and bracken had lost their foliage. It was indeed the month of desolation. ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... from all eyes and glowing out upon the world in verse, turns to exaggeration, with the trifles of a narrow existence for its object. Far away from the centres of light shed by great minds, where the air is quick with thought, knowledge stands still, taste is corrupted like stagnant water, and passion dwindles, frittered away upon the infinitely small objects which it strives to exalt. Herein lies the secret of the avarice and tittle-tattle that poison provincial life. The contagion of narrow-mindedness and meanness affects the noblest natures; and in such ways as these, men ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... sphered symmetry; burdened and strained under increase of pressure, they pass into a nascent marble; scorched by fervent heat, they brighten and blanch into the snowy rock of Paros and Carrara. The dark drift of the inland river, or stagnant slime of inland pool and lake, divides, or resolves itself as it dries, into layers of its several elements; slowly purifying each by the patient withdrawal of it from the anarchy of the mass in ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... Rockets being perched on a seat behind. We arrived at about eight o'clock at the village of Lemonade—an attractive name on a hot day—and near there found a boat in readiness to carry us to Cape Francois. How delicious the sea-breeze smelt!—how refreshing to our parched skins and stagnant blood! It appeared to me to drive away at once all the remains of the fever. I felt like a new being, strong and hearty, in a moment. I found, however, when I attempted to exert my strength, that I had very little of that left. Once more we found ourselves in the far-from-delectable ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... upon him. Life had become stagnant, a tasteless thing. He was keen for the open stretches, honing to be gone down the wind. He fretted and ate out his heart for the freedom of the range. Old Anita, passing at some work or other, stopped and gazed at him ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... like the pillow for an oracle. There is no voice like that which breaks the silence—of the stagnant hours of the night with its sudden suggestions and luminous counsels. When Euthymia awoke in the morning, her course of action was as clear before her as if it bad been dictated by her guardian angel. She went ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... old palaces and new, inhabited and abandoned, and over all lay the same fine dust of oblivion, like the silvery mould on an overripe fruit. Overripeness is indeed the characteristic of this rich and stagnant civilization. Buildings, people, customs, seem all about to crumble and fall of their own weight: the present is a perpetually prolonged past. To touch the past with one's hands is realized only in dreams, and in Morocco the dream-feeling envelopes one at every step. One ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... this rural retreat, or academic bower, Atticus spends a due portion of the autumnal season of the year; now that the busy scenes of book-auctions in the metropolis have changed their character—and dreary silence, and stagnant dirt, have succeeded to noise and flying ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... what might prove an arid desert. I had, unfortunately, nothing in which I could carry water, so that I had to depend on the supply which I might find in my path. I pushed on as fast as I could. It was almost night, however, before I reached a pool of water. It was stagnant, and so bad tasted that I could only moisten my lips with it, after I had cooked and eaten one of my fish. A number of birch trees were growing near. I quickly built a shanty with their bark, and with the same material formed myself a mattress and ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... lock came the smell of stagnant water, of old decay. The mold that proliferated over the ramp did not extend into the wreck. But other things grew inside, pale and oily tendrils festooning the walls. Dasinger removed his night glasses, brought out a pencil light, ...
— The Star Hyacinths • James H. Schmitz
... found water in stagnant pools, but none running. The wide, dry channel, however, continued on as before; and the "bush" extended on both sides without interruption, so thick that they could only make way by ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... with an air of humiliation, as if half ashamed of having given way to such excitement. From his hiding-place the pirate saw him pass, and watched him out of sight. Then, clambering quickly out of the stagnant pool, he pushed deeper and deeper into the recesses of the morass, regardless of every danger, except that of falling ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... about the mosquito as the cause of the spread of malaria. From the fact that the eggs hatch on stagnant water, deduce a benefit arising ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... stagnant life, a gust of wind will blow. Those beautiful trees, that you water with the stream of oblivion, Providence will destroy; despair will overtake you, heedless ones, and tears will dim your eyes. I will not say that your mistresses will deceive you—that would not grieve you so much ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... excited against them all the commercial aristocracy of Lyons, an honest right-minded city, but one of money, where all becomes a calculation, and where ideas have the weight and immobility of interests. Ideas have an irresistible current, which attract even the most stagnant populations; Lyons was led on and overwhelmed by the opinions of the epoch. M. Roland was raised to the municipality at the first election, and spoke out with all the earnestness of his principles, and the energy inspired by his wife. Feared ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... He who maketh right, what those most interested in know to be wrong, cherishes a bad motive. When a philosopher teaches doctrines that become doubtful in their ultraness, the weakness carries the insincerity,—the effort becomes stagnant. Never sell yourself to any class of evils for popularity's sake. If you attempt it you mistake the end, and sell yourself to the obscurity of a political trickster, flatttered by a ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... superiority or inferiority. It may be unhesitatingly asserted that all animals live, move, and have their being, in every essential respect, in the same way. Whether one considers those creatures of microscopic size living in stagnant ponds, or man himself, it is found that certain qualities characterize them all. That minute mass of jelly-like substance known as protoplasm, constituting the one-celled animal amoeba, may be described as ingestive, digestive, secretory, excretory, assimilative, respiratory, ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... the ideals. Men bring together a few generosities and integrities. Soul-misers, men gloat over these, as money-misers over their shining treasure, content with the little virtue they have. But no man has a right to fulfill a stagnant career; life is not to be a puddle, but a sweet and running stream. No man has a right to rust; he is bound to keep his tools bright by usage. No man has a right to be paralyzed; he is bound to enlarge and grow. So ideals come in to compel men to go forward. It is easier to lie ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... civilization. These people, known as Hellenes, were the pioneers of western civilization. Their position in the ancient world is well shown on the map reproduced opposite. To the East lay the older political despotisms, with their caste-type and intellectually stagnant organization of society, and to the North and West a little-known region inhabited by barbarian tribes. It was in such a world that our western civilization had its birth. These Greeks, and especially the Athenian Greeks, represented an entirely new spirit ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... great friend; it will help you to fight disease better than anything else. Open all your windows as often as you can, so that the air may get into every nook and corner. Never keep an unused room shut up. You know what a stagnant pool is like—no fresh water runs through it, it is green and slimy, and full of insects and dead things; you would not care to bathe in it. Well, still and stuffy air in a house is very much worse, only, unluckily, ...
— How Girls Can Help Their Country • Juliette Low
... Dictionary, circa 1730, I find the following: 'Natron; or, a Natron, from Gr. Natron (?), a kind of black greyish salt, taken out of a lake of stagnant water in the ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... clothes, soaked through with perspiration, stuck to his body; his left boot full of water weighed heavily on his leg and squeaked at every step; the sweat ran in drops down his powder-grimed face, his mouth was full of the bitter taste, his nose of the smell of powder and stagnant water, his ears were ringing with the incessant whir of the snipe; he could not touch the stock of his gun, it was so hot; his heart beat with short, rapid throbs; his hands shook with excitement, and his weary legs stumbled ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... traceable. Now it would lie straight between the dense thicket of marsh-plants; again it would follow the winding shores of vast pools, some of which, several versts in length and breadth, deserve the name of lakes. In other localities the stagnant waters through which the road lay had been avoided, not by bridges, but by tottering platforms ballasted with thick layers of clay, whose joists shook like a too weak plank thrown across an abyss. Some of these platforms ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... call, Obedient to the unwelcome note That stays them from the quarry's bursting throat?— Famine and Pestilence and Earthquake dire, Torrent and Tempest, Lightning, Frost and Fire, The soulless Tiger and the mindless Snake, The noxious Insect from the stagnant lake (Automaton malevolences wrought Out of the substance of Creative Thought)— These from their immemorial prey restrained, Their fury ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... Pearse, breaking in on the frowning silence. "How much longer are we to drift around these stagnant ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... spores or cysts can be carried long distances by the wind and develop into active forms when they reach an environment which is favorable. Their distribution in water depends upon the amount of organic material this contains. In pure drinking water there may be very few, but in stagnant water they are very numerous, living not on the organic material in solution in this, but on the bacteria which find in such fluid favorable conditions for existence. The food of protozoa consists chiefly of other organisms, particularly bacteria, and they are classed with ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... of all these observations, scattered through the town was, naturally, to excite curiosity. All those who had the right to visit the Hochons resolved to call that very night and examine the Parisians. The arrival of these two persons in the stagnant town was like the falling of a beam ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... second class are white. Civilization finds it well nigh impossible to advance under such iron bound conditions and against such a fatal obstruction to progress, while civic righteousness must certainly share the same fate. Such social injustice is as sure to provoke crime as stagnant water is to produce disease. Yet, in spite of this iniquitous caste system the leaven of democracy, of equality has found lodgment in the black man's mind, and he craves the chance to become all that the white man ...
— The Ultimate Criminal - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 17 • Archibald H. Grimke
... springs, trenches filled with water, out of which peats and turf had been dug, and here and there by some straggling thickets of alders which loved the moistness so well, that they continued to live as bushes, although too much dwarfed by the sour soil and the stagnant bog-water to ascend into trees. Beyond this ditch, or gully, the ground arose into a second heathy swell, or rather hill, near to the foot of which, and' as if with the object of defending the broken ground and ditch that covered their front, the body of insurgents ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... erected in the thirteenth century for Philip the Bold, and is still interesting as an example of the ancient feudal fortress. The fosse has since been filled up, on account of the malaria produced by the stagnant ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... food, frozen food, soft food, unwholesome food, stagnant water, or drinking large quantities of water at one time, purgative medicines, or it may be associated with blood diseases, lung and intestinal affections, or produced by micro-organisms. Many horses, particularly ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... into the prince's cabinet down to this autumn evening, not a step of real progress could be recorded as the result of the intolerable quantity of speech-making and quill-driving. There were boat-loads of documents, protocols, and notes, drowsy and stagnant as the canals on which they were floated off towards their tombs in the various archives. Peace to the dust which we have not wantonly disturbed, believing it to be wholesome for the cause of human progress that the art of ruling the world by doing nothing, as practised some centuries since, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sink down with thee;—my lily crown Shall bloom in Erebus, portentous loss [26] To Earth, which by degrees will fade & fall In envy of our happier lot in Hell;— And the bright sun and the fresh winds of heaven Shall light its depths and fan its stagnant air. ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... therefore, was suffering from mental growing pains. She struggled with new ideas which she had swallowed whole, without any previous elementary knowledge of the subject. Her brain was hungry, her life was stagnant, and she seized upon these sociological problems which Holman Sommers had placed before her, and worried over them, and wondered where Holman Sommers had learned so much about things she had never heard of. Save his vocabulary, which wearied ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... farms and pasture lands the traces which may even now be seen of the toil of these great preachers of labour. The whole water supply of a countryside for miles round was gathered up by vast drainage works; stagnant pools were transformed into running waters closed in by embankments, which still serve as ditches for the modern farmer; swamps were reclaimed that are only now preserved for cultivation by maintaining the dykes and channels first cut by medieval monks; mills rose on the banks of the ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... apartments the upper portions of the windows were fixed. Lower casements alone could be opened, so that by far the largest amount of air-spaces in the rooms contained vitiated air, comparatively stagnant." When this was the condition of royal abodes, no wonder that the typhoid-germ, like Solomon's spider, "took hold with her hands, and was in kings' palaces." And well might Sir George Trevelyan, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... past. The unemployed energy of the nation, like an unemployed human muscle, is losing its vitality. Unable to go backward, unwilling to go forward, the nation is at standstill, and its civilization is stagnant with vices of the worst sort, the growth of which is checked by no iron ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... four or five times a year at one another's houses to discuss questions mainly theological, from more liberal points of view than was at that time common, 'the air then in America getting a little too close and stagnant.' The Club was first formed in 1836. The Dial appeared in 1840, and went on for four years at quarterly intervals. Emerson was a constant contributor, and for the last half of its existence he acted as editor. 'I submitted,' he told Carlyle, 'to what seemed a necessity of petty literary patriotism—I ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... say that people want these things, or they would not buy. A people that gets what it wants is a stagnant people. We are stuffed and sated with inferior objects. The whole art of life is identified with our appreciations, not with our possessions. We look about our houses and find that which we bought ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... promised. A revival in THE MOST UNLIKELY PLACE IN THE CIRCUIT, where even the raciest of preachers seems to be dull, and where there is a monotony which would shame a prison. Yes, there, right there, look out for the water, not stagnant, but water that "breaks out." "Then shall the lame man leap as the hart" that finds the stream it needs, and the "dumb shall sing," for this living water shall quench his thirst, and loosen his dried-up tongue. When ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... the new awakening of the East. The world has seen its marvellously rapid development and fruitage in Japan. It is witnessing the same process in China and Korea. The people of India, likewise, have been touched by its power and are no longer willing to rest contentedly as a subject people or a stagnant race. ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... and where five handsome bridges connect the banks, we seem almost to be on a lake. The Elizabeth Bridge has a span of 950 feet. Farther down, on the frontier of Wallachia, the river is nearly two-thirds of a mile wide; but here the current is slow; creeks of stagnant water are formed, and marshes extend far along the banks. And at the point where the Rumanian railway crosses the Danube, we find at Chernovodsk a bridge over the river which is nearly 2-1/2 miles long and is the longest in all the world. Not far ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... world by the lovely pictures that have been made of it. It has lately fallen into disrepute by the destruction of some of its beautiful trees, but more specially by the leakage of the pond which left it stagnant, dirty, and partly dry. This has now to a large extent been remedied, and the pond once more assumes its former aspect, giving reflection in its surface to the lovely forms of beautiful foliage with which it is overhung. The village ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various
... from Hell where bloodily locked with him in fight I woke. Where we fall down caverns ruddily Spilt with glazing gore and muddily Dashed with stagnant night and smoke. Yet I do not care, ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... conscience—perhaps a task as trying as you could well imagine to the faith and patience of any honest clergyman. For, on the very first bench, these were the faces on which his eye had to rest, watching whether there was any stirring under the stagnant surface. ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... parched road led up the hill to this languishing, decayed little place. It had its forlorn omnibus, and altogether suggested the general desolation of, say, Peterborough. Had it remained in Flemish hands, it would now have been flourishing. I doubt if any English visitor ever troubles its stagnant repose. Yet it boasts its 'grand' place, imposing enough as a memorial of departed greatness, and, as usual, a Flemish relic, in the shape of a charming belfry and town-hall combined. It was really truly ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... of a single budget, but a question of the future destiny of our race. These gentlemen seemed to prefer to live in a small country. For his part, he hoped he should all his life live in a great one. No country could be stationary without becoming stagnant, or restrict its natural progress without inviting its decay. It was so in all human affairs; it was so even in ordinary business. Every man of business knew that if his enterprise ceased to grow bigger, it soon began to dwindle down; and so a country must grow greater ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... are you satisfied with these consequences of the agitation you have gotten up? I am. I thank God that the great deep of the American mind has been blown upon by the wind of abolitionism. I rejoice that the stagnant water of that American mind has been so greatly purified. I rejoice that the infidelity and the semi-infidelity so long latent have been set free. I rejoice that the sober sense North and South, so strangely asleep and silent, has risen up to hear the word of God and to speak it to the ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... was evidence that the Nationalist movement in Ireland was rooted in crime and public panic. The "Otherhalf-London" would be the utterance of an ordinary educated and sensible Home Ruler, who thought that in the main Nationalism was one distinct symptom, and crime another, of the same poisonous and stagnant problem. The "Tertium Quid" would be some detached intellectual, committed neither to Nationalism nor to Unionism, possibly Mr. Bernard Shaw, who would make a very entertaining Browning monologue. Then of ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... residence in the island may be contemplated, without the slightest apprehension of prejudicial results. These pestilential localities are chiefly at the foot of mountains, and, strange to say, in the vicinity of some active rivers, whilst the vast level plains, whose stagnant waters are made available for the cultivation of rice, are seldom or never productive of disease. It is even believed that the deadly air is deprived of its poison in passing over an expanse of still water; and one of the most remarkable circumstances is, that the points ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... houses. Sometimes it scraped against their sides and lapped their balconies; sometimes it was held in check by walls and narrow terraces. For Billy the water between the dark houses, the mirrored stars, the unexpected flare of some oil lamp and its still reflection, the long windings and the stagnant smells held their suggestions of Venice for his senses, and he thought the business he was going about was very similar to the business which had brought so many of the gentry of Venice to ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... which we have seen dangling disjointed from the roofs and walls of dwelling-houses in the country. At the first shock, good-bye to you! if you are anywhere around. Or, rather, he may be compared to the miasma from ditches and stagnant ponds, inhaled at all times by our rustic fellow citizens, with the trustfulness (if not relish) of the most extreme simplicity. And yet, it kills them, all the same. No one out West would have cared a pin about WILLIAM'S "disobedience" and ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... wearily I knew not where; Up windy downs far-stretching, bleak and bare; Through swamps that soddened under stagnant air; In blackest woods and brambled mesh, ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... conclude. Can means impure Omnipotence befit, And clog the range of its solicitude? Can finite bonds confine the Infinite? Though man, by choice of ill, must needs offend, Need God do ill that good may come of it? Must havoc's mad typhoon perforce descend? May naught else serve to fan the stagnant air? Must captive flame earth's quaking surface rend, Or seek escape in lava flood? and ere Effete society new structure raise, Must dearth or pestilence the ground prepare? Thus is it that a parent's care purveys His bounty, and, exacting rigorously The ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... gaze on Anne. He saw into the queen as one sees into a stagnant pool. The marsh has its transparency. In dirty water we see vices, in muddy water we see ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... it must be understood, had happened in a very much shorter time than it has taken to tell of it, and the squall had not reached as far as the boats when the brig disappeared; while, as for us, we were lying motionless in a still stagnant atmosphere, with our starboard broadside presented fair to the approaching squall. But as the last words left Mendouca's lips the squall swooped down upon the boats, and in an instant they were lost sight of in a smother ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... Joking apart, I advise you in the most friendly spirit, that if you hold a position for yourself worthy of my introduction, you should put up with the loss of my society and farther your own career and wealth: but if things are stagnant with you there, come back to us. In spite of everything you will get all you want, by your own good qualities certainly, but also by ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... making adequate arrangements to prevent it. We each received a tin basin, but the washing was all done at three pumps outside. All the drinking water was derived from this source, and had a strong and disagreeable taste. A few feet away from each pump was a stagnant pool into which the waste water flowed. I think it is reasonable to suppose that a good proportion of it, after filtering through the sand, was pumped up again. In spite of these trifles we were told that the water had been analysed ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... and then, light shone upon the path—the light that indicates an opening in the forest; but it was not that of a friendly clearing. Only the break caused by some dismal lagoon, amidst whose dank stagnant waters even the cypress cannot grow—the habitat of black water-snakes and mud-turtles—of cranes, herons, and Qua-birds. Hundreds of these I saw perched upon the rotting half-submerged trunks—upon ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... the multitude of people who exist in buildings and houses, where men and women huddle together and have, as they had, a certain amount of comfort, but lose their identity, and are finally swept away into that great stagnant pool of obscurity where existence in great cities goes on and on without ...
— A Few Short Sketches • Douglass Sherley
... not long ago, the farmers standing ready to drive their teams afield as usual, the water gave no signs of falling; without new attraction in the heavens, without freshet or visible cause, still standing stagnant at an unprecedented height. All hydrometers were at fault; some trembled for their English even. But speedy emissaries revealed the unnatural secret, in the new float-board, wholly a foot in width, added to their already too high privileges by ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... new exponent of morals and healer of ills is at his best an exotic tree which, when rooted in its native orient, throve and flourished and was abundant in balm but, transplanted to a clime more temperate, its roots have lost their quondam vigour while the stuff that comes away from it is stagnant, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce |
