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More "Fecundity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of angles for half a degree up to 60 degrees, Specimen of which are placed in every Elementary School throughout the land. Owing to occasional retrogressions, to still more frequent moral and intellectual stagnation, and to the extraordinary fecundity of the Criminal and Vagabond classes, there is always a vast superfluity of individuals of the half degree and single degree class, and a fair abundance of Specimens up to 10 degrees. These are absolutely destitute of civil rights; and a great number ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... have much to recommend them: but they are very unequal; and are devoid of the sweet and pensive morality which pervade almost every page of the Farmers Boy; nor can they establish any pretensions to that fecundity in painting the oeconomy of rural life, which this Poem, drawn from actual experience, so ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... philosophised over pleasure, and told me she would never have known it if I had not chanced to meet her uncle. Helen did not speak; she was more voluptuous than her cousin, and swelled out like a dove, and came to life only to expire a moment afterwards. I wondered at her astonishing fecundity; while I was engaged in one operation she passed from death to life fourteen times. It is true that it was the sixth time with me, so I made my progress rather slower to enjoy the pleasure ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... even those which seem the most easy. Commonly the song came to him through the refrain;—he caught the butterfly by the wings;—when he had seized the refrain, he finished at intervals, and put in the nicer shadings at leisure. He wrote hardly ten songs a year at the time of his greatest fecundity. It has since been remarked that they smell of the lamp here and there; but at first no one had eyes except for the rose, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... assertion which Mr Hume has spent no small labour in maintaining: But, on the other hand, it is clear, that violence is more easily guarded against, in almost any state of society, than the artifices of dishonesty and the pollution of licentiousness; and, besides, it never will be found that any fecundity of nature can keep pace, with the accelerating increase of vicious desires and propensities, consequent on indulgence. Restraint from the operation of fear, and better still when practicable, the implantation and growth ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... the 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 in the spirit of poetry ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... stopped at some islands where there were numerous roosts of passenger pigeons; and, in about fifteen minutes, they knocked on the head, and brought on board the boat, about three hundred. Mr. Pike, though he had frequently heard of the fecundity of these birds, had never given credit to it; but, he says, that the most fervid imagination cannot conceive their numbers. The noise, which they made in the woods, was like the continued roaring of the wind. The young ones were still in their nests: these consisted only of small bunches ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... an ecclesiastic and 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 ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... him. He again thinks of starting from Brundisium, and promises, when he has arrived there, instantly to begin a new work. He has sent his De Gloria to Atticus; a treatise which we have lost. We should be glad to know how he treated this most difficult subject. We are astonished at his fecundity and readiness. He was now nearly sixty-three, and, as he travels about the country, he takes with him all the adjuncts necessary for the writing of treatises such as he composed at this period of ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... superficial only, he had an astonishing perception of the relative bearings of facts which seemed at first sight to be quite beyond the range of one another, and of the relations between the sciences generally; it was this which gave him his felicity and fecundity of illustration—a gift which he never abused. He delighted in its use for the purpose of carrying a clear impression of his meaning to the mind of another, but I never remember to have heard him mistake illustration for argument, nor endeavour to mislead an adversary ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... country, which supplied the whole nation, and were the property of one individual. So unrivalled was his agricultural science that the vulgar only accounted for his admirable produce by a miraculous fecundity! The proprietor of these hundred golden acres was a rather mysterious sort of personage. He was an aboriginal inhabitant, and, though the only one of the aborigines in existence, had lived many centuries, and, to the consternation of some of the Vraibleusians and the exultation of others, ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... early in this century, when Lowell Mason in Boston and Thomas Hastings in New York began their multitudinous publications of psalmody. Between them not less than seventy volumes of music were published in a period of half as many years. Their immense and successful fecundity was imitated with less success by others, until the land was swamped with an annual flood of church-music books. A thin diluvial stratum remains to us from that time in tunes, chiefly from the pen of Dr. Mason, that have taken permanent place as ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... In a character so complex 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, which ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... larvae about to emerge from them, must 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
... with her 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 is Nature's business to feed them, not ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... printing; and Brant lived to see the time when Joh. Caesarius was able to write to a friend of his: "At this moment, Germany, if she does not surpass Italy, at least need not, and will not, yield to her, not so much on account of her empire, as for her wonderful fecundity in learned men, and the almost incredible ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... people of the Court and of the city, the best and most distinguished went. Scarron was not in a state to leave his house, but the charm of his genius, of his knowledge, of his imagination, of that incomparable and ever fresh gaiety which he showed in the midst of his afflictions, that rare fecundity, and that humour, tempered by so much good taste that is still admired in ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... was born another kind of painting, especially peculiar to Holland—animal painting. Animals are the wealth of the country; and that magnificent race of cattle which has no rival in Europe for fecundity and beauty. The Hollanders, who owe so much to them, treat them, one may say, as part of the population; they wash them, comb them, dress them, and love them dearly. They are to be seen everywhere; they are reflected in all the canals, and dot with ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... peculiar to the jungle, it may be said that there are no more secrets of beauty for it to penetrate, because nowhere else has Nature been so profuse in bestowing her multifarious tints or has manifested Life with such triumphal glory of fecundity; nowhere else can be found such a prodigious variety of forms and attitudes or such ineffable ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... and climbing plant. A day might be passed here as in a forest, in the presence of grandeurs as solemn as those of nature, before caprices as fascinating, amid the same intermingling of sublime monotony and inexhaustible fecundity, before contrasts and metamorphoses of light as rich and as unexpected. A mystic reverie, combined with a fresh sentiment of northern nature, such is the source of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... are often under ten. To what is this disproportion owing? to the difference of grain, as rice may be in its nature extremely prolific? to the more genial influence of a warmer climate? or to the earth's losing by degrees her fecundity from an excessive cultivation? Rather than to any of these causes I am inclined to attribute it to the different process followed in sowing. In England the saving of labour and promoting of expedition are the chief objects, and in order to effect these ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... the book. This episode of the war, treated with cynicism, tenderness, humor and pathos mingled in quite a new manner, revealed a fresh genius for the art of narrative. There was an instant demand for more short stories from the same pen, and it was soon discovered that the fecundity and resource of the new writer were as extraordinary as the charm of his style and the ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... a minute quantity of calcareous 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 these ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... 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 parent ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... 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 Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... unreasonable than to sow without land, without rain, without ploughs? All those who give themselves up to this damnable culture shall reap only tares. Let us cut off these monstrous births of gold and silver; let us stop this execrable fecundity." ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... truly a power as generalization) is what 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 ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... come to the third and most curious day of the nuptials, which is still strictly observed. As the ceremony of the livrees is the symbol of taking possession of the heart and home of the bride, that of the chou is the type of the fecundity of marriage. After breakfast the next morning, this performance commenced—a custom of ancient Gallic origin, which became gradually a sort of Mystery or Morality of the middle ages. Two lads disappear during the breakfast, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... read—deep and long, until you feel the metal of his thought tinkling on your brain, and striking out from your flinty lethargy flashes of ideas that give the mind light and heat. And away you go in the chase of what the soul within is creating on the instant, and you wonder at the fecundity of what seemed so barren, and at the ripeness of what seemed so crude. The glow of toil wakes you to the consciousness of your real capacities: you feel sure that they have taken a new step toward final development. In such mood it is that one feels ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... reproduction and comprehension of such a multiplicity of views. It would be impossible to follow the varied transformations occurring in these compositions, with their pervading melancholy, without admiring the fecundity of his creative force, even when not fully sustained by the higher powers of his inspiration. He did not always confine himself to the consideration of the pictures presented to him by his imagination and memory, taken en masse, ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... of the year, being more favorable to fecundity, exerts an influence over the increase of population. Nursing mothers are as a rule sterile until after weaning time. This is not always so however, and the possibility of pregnancy taking place while nursing a baby, and before menstruation is reestablished must be reckoned ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... breeds may be due to their descent from distinct parent-species; but as the early maturity of the Southdowns has long been carefully attended to by breeders, the difference is more probably the result of such attention. Lastly, the fecundity of the several breeds differs much; some generally producing twins or even triplets at a birth, of which fact the curious Shangai sheep (with their truncated and rudimentary {98} ears, and ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... 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 ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... will settle down as stalked polypes, and in their turn practise some mystery of Owenian parthenogenesis, or Steenstruppian alternation of generations, in which all traditional distinctions of plant and animal, male and female, are laughed to scorn by the magnificent fecundity of the Divine imaginations. ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... the demand of the delta lands, to which the sugar crop was confined, was almost wholly for negro slaves. The only notable increase in the rural white population of the district came through the fecundity of the small-farming Acadians who had little to ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... hard head between her breasts, and pressed her breasts against him with his hands. And she with quivering hands pressed his head against her, as he lay suffused out, and she lay fully conscious. The lovely creative warmth flooded through him like a sleep of fecundity within the womb. Ah, if only she would grant him the flow of this living effluence, he would be restored, he would be complete again. He was afraid she would deny him before it was finished. Like a child at the breast, he cleaved intensely to her, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... not in such a style that Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Gassendi, Bayle, and Newton wrote." D'Alembert replied that the king would judge more favourably of the philosopher's person than of his works; that he would find in Diderot, along with much fecundity, imagination, and knowledge, a gentle heat and a great deal of amenity.[88] Frederick, however, did not send the invitation, and Diderot willingly enough went homeward by the northern route by which he had come. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... 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 Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... before we arrive. The Sedlor are a form of life, something like your..." he paused, searching through his scanty store of Earthly knowledge, then went on, doubtfully, "perhaps some thing like your insects. They developed a sort of intelligence, and because of their fecundity, adapted themselves to their environment as readily as did man; and for ages they threatened man's supremacy upon Titan. They devoured vegetation, crops, animals, and mankind. After a world-wide campaign, however, they were finally exterminated, save in ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... and often solar erections called Hermae, undoubtedly more or less cross-shaped owing to the transverse rail, were worshipped as conducive to fecundity. ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... thunderbolts, He that 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
... hostilities of all 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 ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... Indian organisation, both bodily and 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 ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... 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 ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... general and of fertility in particular. We need not wonder, therefore, that in her sanctuary on the Aventine she was represented by an image copied from the many-breasted idol of the Ephesian Artemis, with all its crowded emblems of exuberant fecundity. Hence too we can understand why an ancient Roman law, attributed to King Tullus Hostilius, prescribed that, when incest had been committed, an expiatory sacrifice should be offered by the pontiffs in the grove of Diana. For we know that the crime of incest is commonly ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... The same phenomenon was witnessed to a certain extent also in Galicia, where for a while Haskalah flourished in great splendor. There, too, the charm and fecundity of German literature, the similarity of Yiddish to German, and the privileges the Austrian Government accorded them, proved too strong a temptation for the Jews, and many of those who became enlightened were rapidly ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... seemed most stable—religion, the basis of property, the ownership of land, as well as forms of government and the hierarchy of classes—may owe more to the deep influences of expanding numbers than to Lenin or to Nicholas; and the disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... and in consequence it was my grandmother who entered from the dairy, still wiping her hands from the good, warm buttermilk which had just rendered up its tale of butter. There was a kind of capable and joyous fecundity about my grandmother, in spite of her sharp tongue, her masterful ways, the strictness of her theology and her old-fashioned theories, which seemed to produce an effect even on inanimate things. So light ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... reported an instance of delivery in a girl a little over ten years of age. There are instances of fecundity at nine years recorded by Ephemerides, Wolffius, Savonarola, and others. Gleaves reports from Wytheville, Va., the history of what he calls the case of the youngest mother in Virginia—Annie H.—who was born in Bland County, July 15, 1885, and, on September 10, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... found, so rich that the whole of Rome is now overrun with terra-cottas. Every part of the human body is represented,—heads, hands, feet, fingers, eyes, noses, mouths, tongues, entrails, lungs, symbols of fecundity, whole figures of men and women, horses, oxen, sheep, pigs,—in such quantities as to make several hundred cartloads. There were also bronze statuettes, sacred utensils, and mirror-cases, which were all stolen or destroyed. I have known of one workman breaking marvellous objects (cose insigni) ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... ploughman, and I was walking in the fields, musing upon country-life and the destiny of the husbandman. Doubtless it is a depressing thing to consume one's strength and one's life driving the plough through the bosom of the jealous earth, which yields the treasures of its fecundity only under duress, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread at the end of the day is the only reward and the only profit of such laborious toil. The wealth that covers the ground, the crops, the fruit, the proud cattle fattening on the long grass, are the property of a few, and the instruments ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... thunder, gradually gave place to the white Egyptian crown, so that as Reshpu he was represented as a royal warrior; and Qadesh, another form of Astarte, becoming popular with Egyptian women as a patroness of love and fecundity, was also ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... 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 ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... of black pupils upon yellowish eyeballs, sparkled with nervous activity. He flung himself into the air above her head, uttering sounds of such mellow richness and such infinite fecundity of modulation, that the old hovel almost burst with intoxicated song, combining gladness, welcome, fear, defiance, superstition, horror, and epithalamium all together, like Orpheus gone mad, and losing the ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... warmly welcomed and continuously employed, with such brilliant results to itself and to the black-and-white art in England. I was one day conversing with a distinguished foreign artist on the comparative merits of Gilbert and Dore, whose fecundity in their art was equal, and I ventured to assert the great artistic superiority of Gilbert. "You are right!" cried my enthusiastic friend, with more judgment of art than accuracy of English idiom; "Gilbert cocks Dore ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... honour, and another unto dishonour? (Rom. ix. 21.) And can that earth-artificer have a freer power over his brother potsherd (both being made of the same metal), than God hath over him, who, by the strange fecundity of His omnipotent power, first made the clay out of nothing, and then him ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... which the legislator has to work; he must, therefore, be able to gauge their relative values. These depend primarily and simply on four things—intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness. Secondarily, on fecundity, the consequent probable multiplication of the like sensations; and purity, the improbability of consequent contrary sensations. Finally, on extent—the number of persons pleasurably or painfully affected. All these being weighed together, if the pleasurable ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... impatient of unravelling them; his third acts are apt either to evaporate in talk or to find some unreal and unsatisfactory solution for the complexity he has created. But constructive weakness apart, his amazing brilliance and fecundity of dialogue ought to have given him an immediate and lasting grip of the stage. There has probably never been a dramatist who could invest conversation with the same vivacity and point, the same combination ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... disengaged to strike, its head clothing the human head within, as Alexander, on some of his coins, looks out from the elephant's scalp, and Hercules out of the jaws of a lion, on the coins of Camarina. Those diminutive golden horns attached to the forehead, represent not fecundity merely, nor merely the crisp tossing of the waves of streams, but horns of offence. And our fingers must beware of the thyrsus, tossed about so wantonly by himself and his chorus. The pine-cone at its top does but cover a spear-point; ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... been bitten out of its side; and what seemed more extraordinary, the shell had closed, and the place was healed up. Were it not for the immense destruction made of these animals in the different stages of their existence, and that food must in the end fail, their fecundity is such, that all the tropical seas and shores would scarcely afford room for them in a few years. The number of eggs found in the females, and there were few, if any males amongst the forty-six taken here, usually ran from four to seven hundred; and in one weighing 459 ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... 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. ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... the morning. No one could have suspected that the shame-faced little man harboured such resources. If he has not always the subtlest perception of the harmonics of flavours, what a mastery he shows of strong effects and striking contrasts, what fecundity of invention, what a play of fancy in decoration, what manual dexterity, what rapidity and certainty in all his operations! And the marvel increases when we consider the simplicity of his implements and materials. ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... 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 of the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... "an agreeable variety to their 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 ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... marvelous example of Mr. De Morgan's inexhaustible fecundity of invention.... Shines as a romance quite as much as 'Joseph Vance' does among realistic ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... cessation of the black plague, a greater fecundity in women was everywhere remarkable; marriages were prolific; and double and treble births were more frequent than at other times. After the "great mortality" the children were said to have got fewer teeth than before; at which contemporaries were mightily shocked, and even ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and conventional purposes of the romantic novelist. Nor is this the only instance of such psychological obtuseness in his work. That, in spite of this initial and damning defect, he does succeed in producing a fine novel, is but one more proof of the amazing fecundity of his genius. None the less does the fact remain that it is a novel, so to speak, without a soul—that, so far from being of the essence of the Covenant, the Burleys, Mucklewraths, Mauses and Macbrairs are but so many of its accidents, and that thus the main issues of the ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... been observed, by long experience, that late springs produce the greatest plenty. The delay of blooms and fragrance, of verdure and breezes, is for the most part liberally recompensed by the exuberance and fecundity of the ensuing seasons; the blossoms which lie concealed till the year is advanced, and the sun is high, escape those chilling blasts, and nocturnal frosts, which are often fatal to early luxuriance, prey upon the first smiles of vernal beauty, destroy the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... this 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 ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... of the fecundity of nature; it consisted of a representation, generally grotesquely exaggerated, of the male genital organs; the phallophori crowned with violets and ivy and their faces shaded with green foliage, sang improvised airs, called 'Phallics,' ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... This strange anomaly becomes intelligible when I recall that a friend told me that the pores of her nose were enlarged, and I said mine were also; we had been talking of a quotation from Emerson relating to nature's fecundity; my friend was soon to be married; and a line from Emerson often in my thought is that in regard to pines "throwing out pollen for the benefit of ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... fecundity and death, But mine are beauty and immortal love. Therefore I will be tyrant of myself— Mine own law will I be! And I will make Creatures of mind and melody, whose forms Are wrought of loveliness without decay, And wild desire without satiety, And ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... to feel any spontaneous enthusiasm for fecundity such as that which Zola sings. Moreover, I regard the whole pose as a superstition. I may be a member of an exhausted race,—that is quite possible,—but between the devotion to our species which ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... adorable Eve, that Eve with the sturdy flanks fit for the bearing of humanity, that Eve with the proud, tender grace of a woman bent on being loved even to perdition, that Eve embodying the whole of woman with her fecundity, her seductiveness, her empire! Moreover, even the decorative figures of the pilasters at the corners of the frescoes celebrate the triumph of the flesh: there are the twenty young men radiant in their nakedness, with incomparable ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... led by 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 of the Sultan ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... the numbers, are always idiotic. I have few convictions, but I have that one strongly. But the masses must be respected, however inept they may be, because they contain the germs of an incalculable fecundity. Give ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... reform as Judaism had done. [FN319] An exaggerated Trinitarianism or rather Tritheism, a "Fourth Person" and Saint-worship had virtually dethroned the Deity; whilst Mariolatry had made the faith a religio muliebris, and superstition had drawn from its horrid fecundity an incredible number of heresies and monstrous absurdities. Even ecclesiastic writers draw the gloomiest pictures of the Christian Church in the fourth and seventh centuries, and one declares that the "Kingdom of Heaven had become ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... persuasion, and too powerful for constraint; that they will laugh at argument, and defeat violence; that the continent of North America contains three millions, not of men merely, but of whigs, of whigs fierce for liberty, and disdainful of dominion; that they multiply with the fecundity of their own rattlesnakes, so that every quarter of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... that it would be universally 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
... Nature's a dial whose shade no hand puts back, Trick as we may! My friend, you are forty-three This very year in the world— [JOSEPHINE breaks out sobbing again.] And in vain it is To think of waiting longer; pitiful To dream of coaxing shy fecundity To an unlikely freak by physicking With superstitious drugs and quackeries That work you harm, not good. The fact being so, I have looked it squarely down—against my heart! Solicitations voiced repeatedly At length have shown the soundness of their shape, And left me no ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... bears fruit in four years after it has been planted, the following year still more, and increases in fecundity until the ninth or tenth year, when it is ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... 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
... counterpart, was Ashtoreth or Astarte. As Baal was the embodiment of the generative principle in nature, so was Ashtoreth of the receptive and productive principle. She was the great nature-goddess, the Magna Mater, regent of the stars, queen of heaven, giver of life, and source of woman's fecundity.[1127] Just as Baal had a solar, so she had a lunar aspect, being pictured with horns upon her head representative of the lunar crescent.[1128] Hence, as early as the time of Moses, there was a city on the eastern side of Jordan, named after her, Ashtoreth-Karnaim,[1129] ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... gave the island of Porto Santo, to colonize it. Perestrelo, however, did not make much of his captaincy; and spent his life in endeavouring to make head against the rabbits, which were as destructive as a plague of locusts, and which by their fecundity resisted all his efforts to exterminate them. This captain has a place in history, as being the father-in-law of Columbus, who, indeed, lived at Porto Santo for some time, and here, on new found land, studied the cosmographical works ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... poets, private citizens, specially named—and even the women, whose life was entirely domestic—of Athens. With this universal liberty in respect of subject there is combined a poignancy of derision and satire, a fecundity of imagination and variety of turns, and a richness of poetical expression such as cannot be surpassed, and such as fully explains the admiration expressed for him by the philosopher Plato, who in other respects must have regarded ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... productiveness &c. adj.; fecundity, fertility, luxuriance, uberty|. pregnancy, pullulation, fructification, multiplication, propagation, procreation; superfetation. milch cow, rabbit, hydra, warren, seed plot, land flowing with milk and honey; second crop, aftermath; aftercrop, aftergrowth[obs3]; arrish[obs3], eddish[obs3], rowen[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Dave in the old days. Now he was doing a profitable business himself in other men's calves. He had started with a branding-iron and a flexible conscience. He still had both of them, together with a nice little bunch of cows that beat the world's records for fecundity. ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... the Parent of the Universe, the Mediator. In Zoroaster's cave of initiation, the Sun and Planets were represented over-head, in gems and gold, as also was the Zodiac. The Sun appeared emerging from the back of Taurus. Three great pillars, Eternity, Fecundity, and Authority, supported the roof; and the whole was an ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... followed full of pimps; then a lot of debauched companions; and then his mother, utterly neglected, followed the mistress of her profligate son, as if she had been her daughter-in-law. O the disastrous fecundity of that miserable woman! With the marks of such wickedness as this did that fellow stamp every municipality, and prefecture, and colony, and, in short, the ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... necessary to 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, ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... certainly have seen the absurdity of his aims. Ho doubt he was at that time in a period of inward abundance in which there was no gap, no chink, through which boredom or emptiness could creep. Everything served as an excuse to his inexhaustible fecundity: everything that his eyes saw or his ears heard, everything with which he came in contact in his daily life: every look, every word, brought forth a crop of dreams. In the boundless heaven of his thoughts he ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... position in the French School. He is the most original painter of the second half of the nineteenth century, the one who has really created a great movement. His work, the fecundity of which is astonishing, is unequal. One has to remember that, besides the incessant strife which he kept up—a strife which would have killed many artists—he had to find strength for two grave crises in himself. He joined one movement, then freed ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... to admit that she had given me an inspiration. That girl, under a rough and unpromising exterior, has fecundity of ideas which astonishes me. Had she been in a higher class in life—or even able to spell—she might have been a regular contributor to the ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... and unsociable; a hunter wants no neighbour, he rather hates them, because he dreads the competition. In a little time their success in the woods makes them neglect their tillage. They trust to the natural fecundity of the earth, and therefore do little; carelessness in fencing often exposes what little they sow to destruction; they are not at home to watch; in order therefore to make up the deficiency, they go oftener to ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... desire to be considered brave and manly, desire for exaltation in the minds of descendants, to increase wealth, to secure abundance of wild game and fish, to secure general health and activity of the people, general favor at the hands of the women, fecundity of women, and slaves ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... of which Nature has been more bountiful than poets. They swarm like the spawn of cod-fish, with a vicious fecundity, that invites and requires destruction. To publish verses is become a sort of evidence that a man wants sense; which is repelled not by writing good verses, but ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... the land unrolled itself to infinity. But now it was no longer parched with heat, cracked and warped by a merciless sun, powdered with dust. The rain had done its work; not a clod that was not swollen with fertility, not a fissure that did not exhale the sense of fecundity. One could not take a dozen steps upon the ranches without the brusque sensation that underfoot the land was alive; roused at last from its sleep, palpitating with the desire of reproduction. Deep down there in the recesses of the soil, the great ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... proof of his immense vitality, both physical and mental, that so tremendous an emotional strain could be endured by him for years without exhausting his fecundity ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... of proofs, demonstrated the fecundity of the Godhead, in that all spiritualities, of whatever gradation, have originated essentially and substantially from it, like streams from their fountain; I avail myself of this as another sound argument, that in the sameness of ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... rats 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 rats destroy the other kinds! Weazels are no match for them—for ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... Far greater fecundity and a more directly successful appeal to the public, were, somewhat later, the characteristics of Perez y Galdos, whose vigorous novels, spoiled a little for a foreign reader by their didactic diffuseness, are well-known in this country. In the ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... is conscientiously done. When a great French writer, Emil Zola, alarmed at the sterilization of his nation, wrote an eloquent and powerful book to restore the prestige of parentage, it was at once assumed in England that a work of this character, with such a title as Fecundity, was too abominable to be translated, and that any attempt to deal with the relations of the sexes from any other than the voluptuary or romantic point of view must be sternly put down. Now if this assumption were really founded on public opinion, ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... which still retain it, explode if they be wetted, like an eolopile suddenly exposed to a strong heat. These observations have been verified by Spallanzani and others. Hence rainy seasons make a scarcity of grain, or hinder its fecundity, by bursting the pollen before it arrives at the moist stigma of the flower. Spallanzani's Dissertations, v. II. p. 321. Thus the flowers of the male Vallisneria are produced under water, and when ripe detach themselves from the plant, ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... before it 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 ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... in which the name of Luther was not familiar as a word of hope and promise. Then rose a common cry for guidance. Books were called for—above all things, the great book of all, the Bible. Luther's inexhaustible fecundity flowed with a steady stream, and the printing presses in Germany and in the Free Towns of the Netherlands, multiplied Testaments and tracts in hundreds of thousands. Printers published at their own expense as Luther wrote.[483] The continent ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... rebellious members of this growing creature Man. And if the imagination of a Plato, permitted to work its will, would thus have sterilized the germs of progress, what shall we say of such men as ourselves imposing on the fecundity of nature the limits and rules of our imperfect mensuration! Rather should we, in humility, submit ourselves to her guidance, and so adapt our institutions that they shall hamper as little as may be the movements and forces operating ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... by a rational and disposing principle, in accordance with certain fundamental ideas. 3. There exists, therefore, a sublime and wise cause (or several), which is not merely a blind, all-powerful nature, producing the beings and events which fill the world in unconscious fecundity, but a free and intelligent cause of the world. 4. The unity of this cause may be inferred from the unity of the reciprocal relation existing between the parts of the world, as portions of an artistic edifice—an ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... they should have been conceived, combined, nourished, connected, and developed in the brain of a poet; where circumstances make them fructify, mature them, and bring them forth in perfection, by reason of the fecundity, generated by the genial warmth and the peculiar energy of the matrix, in which these intellectual seeds shall have been placed. Ideas in combining, expanding, connecting, and associating themselves, form ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... invitation to succeed the venerable Thomas Cawton (the younger) as independent minister in Westminster. He accepted the call and drew great multitudes to his chapel. He published other books which showed a fecundity of wit, a playful strength of reasoning, and a provoking indomitableness of raillery. Even with Dr Goodman and Dr Stillingfleet for antagonists, he more than held his own. His Mischief of Impositions (1680) in answer to Stillingfleet's ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... understood chapter of Isaiah,[1] which was thought to foretell that the Messiah should be born of a virgin; or, lastly, it may be in consequence of the idea that the "breath of God," already regarded as a divine hypostasis, was a principle of fecundity.[2] Already, perhaps, there was current more than one anecdote about his infancy, conceived with the intention of showing in his biography the accomplishment of the Messianic ideal;[3] or, rather, of the prophecies which the allegorical exegesis of the time referred to the Messiah. ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... venture—a too assured demand, an insufficient gratitude for past benefits, Alice never quite knew what—brought about a second breach in the Twemlow family. The paternal purse was closed, and perhaps not too early, for the improvidence of the tea-blender and Alice's fecundity were a gulf whose depth no munificence could have plumbed. Again John Stanway sympathised with the now enfeebled old man. John advised him to retire, and Twemlow decided to do so, receiving one-third ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... of acknowledged reputation, newly discovered pigments are to be used with caution. Good colours have ever been prized with so true an estimation of their value, that to produce such, after so many ages of research is no ordinary accomplishment. But too many resplendent pigments, fruits of the fecundity of modern chemistry, have been found deficient. The yellow and orange chromates of lead, for instance, withstanding as they do the action of the sunbeam, become by time, foul air, and the influence of other ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... "Fecundity! Fecundity!"—he chanted in greeting, as he reined in to a halt, if halt it might be called, with his tan-golden sorrel mare a-fret and a-froth, wickedly reaching with her teeth now for his leg and next for Graham's, one moment pawing the roadway, the next moment, in sheer impotence ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... 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 and expansion, till the indefinite ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... and transferred to the divinity. As those like by similarity, so those unlike, were identified by contiguity, as traits of the unknown power. This is the active element in the degeneracy of religious idealism. The cow or the bull, chosen first as a symbol of creation or fecundity, led to a worship of the animal itself, and a transfer of its traits, even to its horns, to the god. In a less repulsive form, the same tendency shows itself in the pietistic ingenuity of such poets as Adam de Sancto Victore and George Herbert, who delight ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... that 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 that such a business-like community would have produced many ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... things were derived.[46-*] Both among them and the Mayas, as I have pointed out in a previous work, he was supposed to govern the generative proclivities and the sexual relations.[46-[]] Another of his names was Xiuhtecutli, which can be translated "God of the Green Leaf," that is, of vegetable fecundity and productiveness.[46-[]] ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... to achieve their anti-Russian object. This object was to attract some twenty thousand Germans to the province, provide them with farms on easy terms, and look to time, the industry of the men, the fecundity of the women and the teachings of the schools to create a new German State in that part of the Russian Empire. It was part of the functions of these colonists, we are frankly told by their historiographer,[35] "to serve, even as armed defenders" ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the spiritual deflowering, of which the bodily is but a symbol? If the first fine bloom of the soul has gone, if the dream that is only dreamed once has grown up in the imagination and been once given, the mere chastity of the body is a lie, and whatever its fecundity, the soul has nought but sterility to give to another. It is not those kisses of the lips—kisses that one forgets as one forgets the roses we smelt last year—which profane; they but soil the vessel of the sacrament, and it is the sacrament itself which those consuming spirit-kisses, which burn ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... British assumption. No part of the Old World, he says, has reason to rejoice that Columbus discovered the New. Its inhabitants—the countrymen of Washington and Franklin, of Adams and Jefferson—multiply, as he tells us, "with the fecundity of their own rattlesnakes." Of the fathers of our Revolution he speaks in no more flattering terms:—"Probably in America, as in other places, the chiefs are incendiaries, that hope to rob in the tumults of a conflagration, and toss brands among ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... 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 up. ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... emblem of the fecundity of nature; it consisted of a representation, generally grotesquely exaggerated, of the male genital organs; the phallophori crowned with violets and ivy and their faces shaded with green foliage, sang improvised airs, ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... 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 ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... difference in these two breeds may be due to their descent from distinct parent-species; but as the early maturity of the Southdowns has long been carefully attended to by breeders, the difference is more probably the result of such attention. Lastly, the fecundity of the several breeds differs much; some generally producing twins or even triplets at a birth, of which fact the curious Shangai sheep (with their truncated and rudimentary {98} ears, and great Roman noses), lately exhibited in the Zoological Gardens, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... soft straw, or hay orts, for that purpose. Hens love secrecy in their domestic economy, and are wonderfully pleased with the opportunity to hide away, and conceal themselves while laying. Indeed, such concealment, or the supposition of it, we have no doubt promotes fecundity, as it is well known that a hen can stop laying, almost at pleasure, when disturbed in her regular habits and settled plans of ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... life possessed by many insects, their prodigious fecundity, the length of time they often remain in the different phases of their existence, [Footnote: In many insects, some of the stages of life regularly continue for several years, and they may, under peculiar circumstances, be almost indefinitely prolonged. Dr. Dwight mentions ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... laboring to a 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, as unabashed, and as little disconcerted as two days before. When ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... need we go up to knowledge, when knowledge comes down to us? The Sibyl wrote her prophecies upon the leaves of the forest, and wasted them; but here such careless profusion might be prudently indulged, for it can be afforded without loss, in consequence of the almost fabulous fecundity of the instrument which these latter ages have invented. We have sermons in stones, and books in the running brooks; works larger and more comprehensive than those which have gained for ancients an immortality, issue forth every morning, and are ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... for existence 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 ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... tying knots and impatient of unravelling them; his third acts are apt either to evaporate in talk or to find some unreal and unsatisfactory solution for the complexity he has created. But constructive weakness apart, his amazing brilliance and fecundity of dialogue ought to have given him an immediate and lasting grip of the stage. There has probably never been a dramatist who could invest conversation with the same vivacity and point, the same combination of surprise ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... judgment. I am induced to take this course after a somewhat amused survey of a series of criticisms which have been passed upon the two poets who are our immediate subject. One writer, for instance, speaks of Mr. Davidson's works as "marked from end to end by the careless fecundity of power," while the next tells us of the self-same verses that they have "the severe restraint and very deliberately willed simplicity of M. Guy de Maupassant." Careless fecundity and deliberate restraint are sufficiently irreconcilable ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... of Reshef, a god of war and thunder, gradually gave place to the white Egyptian crown, so that as Reshpu he was represented as a royal warrior; and Qadesh, another form of Astarte, becoming popular with Egyptian women as a patroness of love and fecundity, was also sometimes modelled ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... best and most distinguished went. Scarron was not in a state to leave his house, but the charm of his genius, of his knowledge, of his imagination, of that incomparable and ever fresh gaiety which he showed in the midst of his afflictions, that rare fecundity, and that humour, tempered by so much good taste that is still admired in ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... raft to which the limpets stuck for life in the surge of a supersensual chaos; she conceived herself and her family as the centre and flower of an ordered universe which she knew to be unity because she had made it after the image of her own fecundity; and this creation of hers was surrounded by beauties and perfections which she knew to be real because she herself had ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... honours almost as great, if less vociferous, than those which had hailed him after the momentous Convention of 1788. Banquets were given in his honour, the bar extolled him, and the large body of his personal friends were triumphant at this new proof of his fecundity and his power over the minds of men. They were deeply disturbed on another point, however, and several days after his arrival, Troup rode out to The ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... said that there are no more secrets of beauty for it to penetrate, because nowhere else has Nature been so profuse in bestowing her multifarious tints or has manifested Life with such triumphal glory of fecundity; nowhere else can be found such a prodigious variety of forms and attitudes or such ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... from the gardens to the grove where the temple of Mylitta stood. At the steps of the shrine, she declared, were white-winged lions, and immense bulls with human heads. Within were dovecotes and cisterns, the emblems of fecundity, and a block of stone which she did not describe. Without, among the terebinths and evergreens, were little cabins and an avenue bordered by cypress trees, in which men with pointed hats and long embroidered gowns ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... born at the home of a parson in Catshire, near the little town of Miaulbury. My mother's fecundity condemned nearly all her infants to a cruel fate, because, as you know, the cause of the maternal intemperance of English cats, who threaten to populate the whole world, has not yet been decided. Toms and females each insist it is due to their own amiability and respective ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... brown soil fantastically, black stumps, shrivelled and gnarled, tortured into uncouth shapes; they remind you of the creeping things in a naturalist's museum, of giant spiders and great dried centipedes and scorpions. But imagine the vineyards later, when the spring has stirred the earth with fecundity! The green shoots tenderly forth; at first it is all too delicate for a colour, it is but a mist of indescribable tenuity; and gradually the leaves burst out and trail along the ground with ever-increasing ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... Volumnia.[16] A car followed full of pimps; then a lot of debauched companions; and then his mother, utterly neglected, followed the mistress of her profligate son, as if she had been her daughter-in-law. O the disastrous fecundity of that miserable woman! With the marks of such wickedness as this did that fellow stamp every municipality, and prefecture, and colony, and, in ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... an artificial inundation. The valor of the Batavi disclosed the impotency of the world's ruler, as the noble courage of their descendants revealed to the whole of Europe the decay of Spanish greatness. The same fecundity of genius in the generals of both times gave to the war a similarly obstinate continuance, and nearly as doubtful an issue; one difference, nevertheless, distinguishes them: the Romans and Batavians fought humanely, for they did ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... points the botanists and zoologists differ widely already, many making likeness among individuals a secondary consideration, and genealogical succession the absolute test of species. Others, on the contrary, make resemblance the fundamental rule, and look upon habitual fecundity within hereditary limits as provisional, or answering to temporary needs only. These differences of opinion would seem to be the more tenaciously held as the question of new varieties presses for solution at the hands of nature, rather than by the agency of man. All these varieties tend less ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... point of view of the eugenists, who demand more fecundity on the higher and less on the lower levels of life, one of the most sinister of all influences inimical to family life is this large and increasing band of superior and happy single women who are not even ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... a poor one has often been found an easy undertaking. The apparent facility of fictitious composition has deceived great numbers of literary aspirants, and has filled the circulating libraries with a vast collection of thoroughly worthless productions. This unfortunate fecundity, to which the department of fiction is subject, began to be conspicuous at the end of the eighteenth century,[200] and excited much opposition to novels of all kinds. Hannah More, in her essays on female education, ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... 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
... 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 every thing 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 ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... slaw," though perhaps the result—parallel to but more cheerful than that recorded in the old rhyme—may be that Till has the power not of drowning but of intoxicating two men, where Tweed can only manage one. But this engrained fecundity and facundity of hers inevitably make her work novel-journalism rather than novel-literature in all points but in that of style, which ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... and boiling in its veins, and shakes to the wind its 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, a throng of innocent voices spoke sweetly to ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... pleasures, and a prudent use of the means to happiness, is the first condition of virtue; in this the easily attainable minor joys, whose summation amounts to a considerable quantum, must not be neglected. The value of a pleasure is measured by its intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity in the production of further pleasure, purity or freedom from admixture of consequent pain, and extent to the greatest possible number of persons. Every virtuous action results in a balance of pleasure. Inflict no ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... South Panel; Vanity in center with handglass; man and woman with children, representing Fecundity, ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... velvety of lawns 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 which Thomas ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... Nile and all kinds of moisture are called the "efflux of Osiris." Therefore a water-pitcher[FN336] is always carried first in his processions, and the leaf of a fir-tree represents both Osiris and Egypt.[FN337] Osiris is the great principle of fecundity, which is proved by the Pamylia festivals, in which a statue of the god with a triple phallus is carried about.[FN338] The three-fold phallus merely signifies any great and ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... a 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
... are making 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 ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... 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 furnace of ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... must be confessed that between the two elements of goodness there is a kind of opposition, needful though both are for each other. Order has in it much that is repressive; and wealth—in the sense of fecundity of powers—is, especially at its beginning, apt to be disorderly. When a new power springs into being, it is usually chaotic or rebellious. It has something else to attend to besides bringing itself into accord with what already exists. There is violence in it, a lack of sobriety, and only by degrees ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... 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 of the ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... by variety of proofs, demonstrated the fecundity of the Godhead, in that all spiritualities, of whatever gradation, have originated essentially and substantially from it, like streams from their fountain; I avail myself of this as another sound argument, that ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... forth in weather which appalled the stoutest of the stout hearts that occasionally exchanged a word with him, in passing to and fro in their mutual employment. Of his name, birth, or descent, nothing was known; but the fecundity of conjecture had supplied an unfailing stock of materiel on these points. Some said he was the devil incarnate; others said he was a Dutchman, or some other "far-away foreigner," who had fled to these comparative solitudes for shelter, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various
... describes and discusses the dances, bonfires and festivals of spring and summer, of Halloween (October 31), and Christmas. He also explains the sexual character of these festivals. "There are clear indications," he observes (p. 305), "that even human fecundity is supposed to be promoted by the genial heat of the fires. It is an Irish belief that a girl who jumps thrice over the midsummer bonfire will soon marry and become the mother of many children; and in various parts of France they think that if a girl ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... In this state of natural against the intemperance of frigid liberty, society will be our first and torrid zones, against the sterility thought. A thousand motives will of the earth which, refuses him aliment, excite them thereto. The strength of or its baneful fecundity, which one man is so unequal to his wants, makes poison spring up beneath his and his mind so unfitted for perpetual feet; in short against the claws and solitude, that he is soon obliged to teeth of savage ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... was compelled to admit that she had given me an inspiration. That girl, under a rough and unpromising exterior, has fecundity of ideas which astonishes me. Had she been in a higher class in life—or even able to spell—she might have been a regular contributor ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... blind bathybus lies. Fecundity flings her seeds and spores into the glazed abysses, and they teem. There is a heaving in the broken, sunless bottoms; the continents and islands are upcast, rugged and black, shaking the roaring ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... saying, many of us: "We have done enough for the poor, whom we have with us always." But not always do we have with us a land famous for its fecundity that is now at grips with famine; a land that once was light-hearted, but where now you never hear anyone laugh aloud; a land that is half a waste and half a captive province; a land that cannot find bread to feed ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... Both among them and the Mayas, as I have pointed out in a previous work, he was supposed to govern the generative proclivities and the sexual relations.[46-[]] Another of his names was Xiuhtecutli, which can be translated "God of the Green Leaf," that is, of vegetable fecundity and productiveness.[46-[]] ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... 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 these ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... 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 and expansion, ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... never be so plentiful as pigeons and antelopes; and the wild asses of the Tartarian deserts cannot equal in numbers the horses of the more luxuriant prairies and pampas of America. The greater or less fecundity of an animal is often considered to be one of the chief causes of its abundance or scarcity; but a consideration of the facts will show us that it really has little or nothing to do with the matter. Even the least prolific ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... 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,' ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... dauphiness. From 1543 she had a child every year for ten years, and was occupied with maternal cares during the period covered by the last three years of the reign of Francois I. and nearly the whole of the reign of Henri II. We may see in this recurring fecundity the influence of a rival, who was able thus to rid herself of the legitimate wife,—a barbarity of feminine policy which must have been one of Catherine's grievances ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... a superb large sheep fetich of purplish-pink fluorspar, the eyes being inlaid with small turkoises. Such are either carried about by the shepherds or kept in their huts, and, together with certain ceremonials, are supposed not only to secure fecundity of the flocks, but also to guard them against disease, the animals of prey, or death ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... confined 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 ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... French 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 marry and become ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... culling Nature, 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 ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... and its duties while exalting the place of celibacy. In the United States, also, Engelmann, who, as a gynaecologist, was able to see this process from behind the scenes, urged his fellow-countrymen "to stay the dangerous and criminal practices which are the main determining factors of decreasing fecundity, and which deprive women of health, the family of its highest blessings, and the nation of its ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... 2. Its duration. 3. Its certainty or uncertainty. 4. Its propinquity or remoteness. 5. Its fecundity. 6. Its ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... North. And, 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 ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... one fourfold set of rhymes, one threefold, and one double, all cunningly interlaced, is as complicated a piece of rhyme-harmony as the ear of the average lover of poetry can carry. It is needless to say that there are born rhymers, who think in rhyme and whose fecundity of imagery is multiplied by the excitement of matching sound with sound. They are often careless in their prodigality, inexact in their swift catching at any rhyme-word that will serve. At the other extreme are the self-conscious artists in verse who ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... 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
... 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
... 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 and the ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... of the sources of power of the Emperor Napoleon, and perhaps the rarest among them, that the marvellous fecundity of his mind, and the inexhaustible variety of the projects and conceptions which he was constantly turning over, reciprocally sustained and complemented each other. This characteristic of his genius has been ignored; and little honor has been done to his foresight ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... refers to the premature awakening among the rustic population of this island of the procreative instincts, and the consequent increase in their numbers notwithstanding the high rate of mortality. The fecundity of the women is notable; from six to ten children in a family seems ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... healthy. Octave Mouret had come near losing his daughter, who had always been very frail, while his little boy continued to enjoy superb health. But the chosen abode of vigorous health and of extraordinary fecundity was still the house of Jean, at Valqueyras, whose wife had had two children in three years and was about to have a third. The nestlings throve in the sunshine, in the heart of a fertile country, while the father sang as he guided his plow, and the mother at home ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... 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 ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... she draws all her fecundity from the other! Do you not see her hovering about him like an amorous woman running after a man in a field?" And he exalted the ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... Supercalia, which consisted of very rude games and ceremonies, in which men sacrificed goats, and then dressed themselves partially in the skins, and ran about whipping every one whom they met, with thongs made likewise of the skins of goats, or of rabbits, or other animals remarkable for their fecundity. The meaning of the ceremonies, so far as such uncouth and absurd ceremonies could have any meaning, was to honor the God of fertility and fruitfulness, and to promote the fruitfulness of their flocks and herds, during the year ensuing at the time ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... mouth of his yet again, and speak even more to the purpose. To these mothers who did not wish to be mothers, who threw the gift of Heaven back in the face of Heaven, preferring artificial barrenness to natural fecundity, and who made of their bodies, that should have brought forth healthy, wholesome sons and daughters of their race, tombs and sepulchres—to these he told the truth, in swift, sharp, trenchant sentences, that, like the keen sterilised blade of the surgical knife, cut to heal. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... of race. Whites and blacks may multiply together, but their offspring is never either white or black; it is always mulatto. It is a half-breed, and shares all the peculiarities of half-breeds, among whose most important characteristics is their sterility, or at least their reduced fecundity. This shows the connection to be contrary to the normal state of the races, as it is contrary to the preservation of species in the animal kingdom. . .Far from presenting to me a natural solution of our difficulties, the ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... conscientiously done. When a great French writer, Emil Zola, alarmed at the sterilization of his nation, wrote an eloquent and powerful book to restore the prestige of parentage, it was at once assumed in England that a work of this character, with such a title as Fecundity, was too abominable to be translated, and that any attempt to deal with the relations of the sexes from any other than the voluptuary or romantic point of view must be sternly put down. Now if this assumption were really founded ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 shows how well he understood the power of brevity ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... character of "a 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, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... sturdy barbarians [the Connecticut colonists], to keep up a harmony of interests, and promote population. * * * * They multiplied to a degree which would be incredible to any man unacquainted with the marvellous fecundity of this growing country. This amazing increase may, indeed, be partly ascribed to a singular custom prevalent among them, commonly known by the name of bundling—a superstitious rite observed by the young people of ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles
... 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 millions ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... unable to feel any spontaneous enthusiasm for fecundity such as that which Zola sings. Moreover, I regard the whole pose as a superstition. I may be a member of an exhausted race,—that is quite possible,—but between the devotion to our species which is professed by these would-be re-peoplers of countries, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... in Ireland, caught at his friend's notion, poured in paper after paper, and contributed the stores of his mind, the sweet fruits of his reading, the delightful gleanings of his daily observation, with a wonderful profusion, and as it seemed an almost endless fecundity. He was six-and-thirty years old: full and ripe. He had not worked crop after crop from his brain, manuring hastily, subsoiling indifferently, cutting and sowing and cutting again, like other luckless cultivators of letters. He had not done much ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... breasts against him with his hands. And she with quivering hands pressed his head against her, as he lay suffused out, and she lay fully conscious. The lovely creative warmth flooded through him like a sleep of fecundity within the womb. Ah, if only she would grant him the flow of this living effluence, he would be restored, he would be complete again. He was afraid she would deny him before it was finished. Like a child at the breast, he cleaved intensely ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... with, speak the same language I here write; but whether they think the same thoughts I cannot say. The Athenians, says Plato, study fulness and elegancy of speaking; the Lacedaemonians affect brevity, and those of Crete to aim more at the fecundity of conception than the fertility of speech; and these are the best. Zeno used to say that he had two sorts of disciples, one that he called cy——-ous, curious to learn things, and these were his favourites; the other, aoy—-ous, that cared for nothing but words. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... of the generative principle in nature, so was Ashtoreth of the receptive and productive principle. She was the great nature-goddess, the Magna Mater, regent of the stars, queen of heaven, giver of life, and source of woman's fecundity.[1127] Just as Baal had a solar, so she had a lunar aspect, being pictured with horns upon her head representative of the lunar crescent.[1128] Hence, as early as the time of Moses, there was a city on the eastern side of Jordan, named ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... hoisted over every house in which a boy has been born during the preceding twelve months, and is emblematical of his future career. As the 'koi,' or 'carp,' which is very plentiful in Japan, finds its way up streams and rivers, surmounting all obstacles in its way, and rendering itself by its fecundity and edible qualities useful to the whole country, so the child is to make his way through life, boldly fulfilling his destiny, and proving himself a useful and beneficial member of the community. In the same way, the scarlet streamer indicates the birth of a female child, ...
— Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs • J. M. W. Silver
... disposition of organised life may, in part, be traced to the extreme fecundity of nature, who, as before stated, has in all the varieties of her offspring a prolific power much beyond (in many cases a thousandfold) what is necessary to fill up the vacancies caused by senile decay. As the field of existence is limited and preoccupied, it is ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... horny covering is the natural protection of his species, he does not possess it; if it is strength of muscle, he is weak; if it is tusks, he is without them; if it is agility, he cannot yet move; if it is fecundity, he is not yet mature. Therefore, all species should have become extinct, for there is none so strong but that he once was weak; and there is no infancy which is not more feeble than any adult life. It is love which protects all this weakness, and explains "survival." Maternal love, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... expiation consisted in "marrying to a worthy man a young girl who has never known a man" (Vendidad, 14, Sec. 15). Herodotus of old remarked that one of the chief merits in an Iranian was to have many children: the King of Persia encouraged fecundity in his realm, and awarded a prize each year to that one of his subjects who could boast the most ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... career—not yet very remote—an average of only three or four volumes per year. This rate, in days when French scribes carry on five romances at a time, in the daily feuilletons of five newspapers, and when certain English authors, emulous of Gallic fecundity, annually conceive and elaborate their dozen or two of octavos—says little for his industry, or much for his judicious forbearance. Latterly, however, we regret to observe in him a disposition to increase the length of his books, and abandon the pleasant one, two, and three volume tales ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... fundamental ideas. 3. There exists, therefore, a sublime and wise cause (or several), which is not merely a blind, all-powerful nature, producing the beings and events which fill the world in unconscious fecundity, but a free and intelligent cause of the world. 4. The unity of this cause may be inferred from the unity of the reciprocal relation existing between the parts of the world, as portions of an artistic edifice—an inference ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... grateful to those 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, though none of them ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... 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 ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... there wrapped up in the core of these articulations that we so heedlessly utter, would we but make use of the wizard's wand wherewith to evoke them! What an exhaustless wealth does there lie in even the humblest fruitage and flowerage of language, and what a fecundity have ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the most remarkable events in modern history. The energy and passion which convulsed society during his youth and early manhood undoubtedly had much to do in stimulating that robust and virile quality in his mind which gave such character to his compositions. The fecundity of his intellect is shown in the fact that he produced four hundred and thirty works, out of which only eighty have been published. In this catalogue there are ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... where Cervantes lived and died, the great Lope de Vega passed his edifying old age. This phenomenon of incredible fecundity is one of the mysteries of that time. Few men of letters have ever won so marvellous a success in their own lives, few have been so little read after death. The inscription on Lope's house records that he is the author of two thousand comedies and ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... KEMPSTER: The relation of plant carotinoids to growth, fecundity and reproduction of fowls. J. ...
— The Vitamine Manual • Walter H. Eddy
... sense of our author's brilliant diversity and ingenuity, we bring our restrictions to a close. To the broadly generous side of his imagination it is impossible to pay exaggerated homage, or, indeed, for that matter, to its simple intensity and fecundity. No romancer has created a greater number of the figures that breathe and move and speak, in their habits as they might have lived; none, on the whole, seems to us to have had such a masterly touch in portraiture, none has mingled so much ideal beauty with so much unsparing reality. His ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... torrent, but it runs so noisily over pebbles and rocks that it seems to be conversing with them and with the trees of the neighboring forest. In proportion as they had felt themselves alone on the road from Rome to Otricoli, they now felt themselves compassed about with the life, the fecundity, ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... facts occur. When geese were first introduced into Bogota they laid few eggs at long intervals, and few of the young survived. By degrees the fecundity improved, and in about twenty years became equal to what it is in Europe. The same author tells us that, according to Garcilaso, when fowls were first introduced into Peru they were not fertile, whereas now ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... loveliest in the female form. His plastic ideal of the woman is masculine. He builds a colossal frame of muscle, bone, and flesh, studied with supreme anatomical science. He gives to Eve the full pelvis and enormous haunches of an adult matron. It might here be urged that he chose to symbolise the fecundity of her who was destined to be the mother of the human race. But if this was his meaning, why did he not make Adam a corresponding symbol of fatherhood? Adam is an adolescent man, colossal in proportions, but beardless, hairless; ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... vision of a pine tree growing from my nose. This strange anomaly becomes intelligible when I recall that a friend told me that the pores of her nose were enlarged, and I said mine were also; we had been talking of a quotation from Emerson relating to nature's fecundity; my friend was soon to be married; and a line from Emerson often in my thought is that in regard to pines "throwing out pollen for the benefit of the ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... self-satisfaction. For this reason his criticisms or strictures upon persons and conditions are to be received with much discount. But he was an intelligent man, and a keen-eyed and assiduous note-taker; and the variety and fecundity of his material is not a little due to the trivial and relatively unimportant details which are embodied ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... Alliance Italy built up all her industries, she consolidated her national unity and prepared her economic transformation, which was fraught with considerable difficulties. Suddenly her sons spread all over the world, stimulated by the fecundity of their race and by ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... to the third and most curious day of the nuptials, which is still strictly observed. As the ceremony of the livrees is the symbol of taking possession of the heart and home of the bride, that of the chou is the type of the fecundity of marriage. After breakfast the next morning, this performance commenced—a custom of ancient Gallic origin, which became gradually a sort of Mystery or Morality of the middle ages. Two lads disappear during the breakfast, go and dress themselves up, and then return, accompanied by music, dogs, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... England, do not thrive, while those which have been bred in the intermediate climate of the Cape of Good Hope do much better. When geese were first introduced into Bogota, they laid few eggs at long intervals, and few of the young survived. By degrees, however, the fecundity improved, and in about twenty years became equal to what it is in Europe. According to Garcilaso, when fowls were first introduced into Peru they were not fertile, whereas now they are as much so ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... in New York began their multitudinous publications of psalmody. Between them not less than seventy volumes of music were published in a period of half as many years. Their immense and successful fecundity was imitated with less success by others, until the land was swamped with an annual flood of church-music books. A thin diluvial stratum remains to us from that time in tunes, chiefly from the pen of Dr. Mason, ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... queens, twenty, twenty-five, and thirty days old. All became fertile after a single impregnation; however, we have remarked some essential peculiarities in the fecundity of those unimpregnated until the twentieth day of their existence; but we shall defer speaking of the fact until we can present naturalists with observations sufficiently secure and numerous to merit their attention: Yet let me add a few words more. Though neither my assistant nor myself have ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... primrose peep from under the 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 of the year. ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... 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
... Alexander, on some of his coins, looks out from the elephant's scalp, and Hercules out of the jaws of a lion, on the coins of Camarina. Those diminutive golden horns attached to the forehead, represent not fecundity merely, nor merely the crisp tossing of the waves of streams, but horns of offence. And our fingers must beware of the thyrsus, tossed about so wantonly by himself and his chorus. The pine-cone at its top does but cover a spear-point; and the thing ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Weekly News, in 1622, and Renaudot's 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 whatever respect American libraries may fall behind those ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... or Alphabet of angles for half a degree up to 60 degrees, Specimen of which are placed in every Elementary School throughout the land. Owing to occasional retrogressions, to still more frequent moral and intellectual stagnation, and to the extraordinary fecundity of the Criminal and Vagabond classes, there is always a vast superfluity of individuals of the half degree and single degree class, and a fair abundance of Specimens up to 10 degrees. These are absolutely destitute ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... cottage, but they drift to a lodging, and usually it isn't the best sort of lodging, for landladies hate wives and the other lodgers detest babies. Often the young couple doesn't have babies. You see, they are more intelligent than peasants, and intelligence and fecundity vary reciprocally," ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... from first to last the products of his needle were appreciated by his contemporaries, even if he himself did not set great store by them. He began to etch early in life: he ceased only when his eyesight failed. He found in etching a congenial and natural means of self-expression. His artistic fecundity threw them off in regal profusion. The mood seized him: he would take a prepared plate, and sometimes, having swiftly spent his emotion, he did not trouble to do more than indicate the secondary ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... ravagers disappear; more often than not none knows how or why; deliverance is at hand. What indeed would become of the world were nothing to moderate such fecundity? ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... and happiness there is everything to be said for early marriage, but better late than never.[A] The chief obstacles to early and happy marriage are financial, and these would largely disappear if women were able to control fecundity. The chief obstacles to healthy marriage are the venereal diseases, and these could be extirpated in two or three generations if sexual cleanliness was properly taught to all adults, and if promiscuous ...
— Safe Marriage - A Return to Sanity • Ettie A. Rout
... demand, an insufficient gratitude for past benefits, Alice never quite knew what—brought about a second breach in the Twemlow family. The paternal purse was closed, and perhaps not too early, for the improvidence of the tea-blender and Alice's fecundity were a gulf whose depth no munificence could have plumbed. Again John Stanway sympathised with the now enfeebled old man. John advised him to retire, and Twemlow decided to do so, receiving one-third of the net profits of the partnership ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... powerful inhabitants of heaven; and this association became stronger every day by the mechanism of language and the constitution of the human mind. Men would say by a natural metaphor: The bull spreads over the earth the germs of fecundity (in spring) he restores vegetation and plenty: the lamb (or ram) delivers the skies from the maleficent powers of winter; he saves the world from the serpent (emblem of the humid season) and restores the empire of goodness (summer, joyful season): the scorpion pours out ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... The fecundity of this plant is marvellous. Linnaeus has calculated that a single plant of tobacco contains 40,320 grains, and says that if each seed came to perfection, the plants of tobacco in vegetation in the ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... metal of his thought tinkling on your brain, and striking out from your flinty lethargy flashes of ideas that give the mind light and heat. And away you go in the chase of what the soul within is creating on the instant, and you wonder at the fecundity of what seemed so barren, and at the ripeness of what seemed so crude. The glow of toil wakes you to the consciousness of your real capacities: you feel sure that they have taken a new step toward final development. ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... rhetorical feature of these many dispatches is the absence of iteration, notwithstanding they were written upon substantially one text. It is characteristic of them, as of his speeches, that no one interlaces the other; each is complete of itself. Mr. Seward has always possessed that varied fecundity of expression for which Mr. Webster was admired. A gentleman who accompanied him upon his Lincoln-election tour from Auburn to Kansas, remarked, that listening to and recalling all the bye-play, depot speeches, and more elaborate addresses uttered by Mr. Seward during the campaign, he never heard ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... rapidity, and flourishes with the luxuriance, of tropical climates. Tall reeds, in which the buffaloes are hid, in which a rhinoceros might lie concealed, spring up in the numerous pools or deep ditches with which the dreary flat surface is sprinkled. Wild grapes of extraordinary fecundity grow in the woods, and ascend in luxuriant clusters to the tops of the tallest trees. Nearer the sea, a band of noble chestnuts and evergreen oaks attests the riches of the soil, which is capable of producing such magnificent specimens of vegetable life; and over the whole plain the ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... respond to an imperfectly understood chapter of Isaiah,[1] which was thought to foretell that the Messiah should be born of a virgin; or, lastly, it may be in consequence of the idea that the "breath of God," already regarded as a divine hypostasis, was a principle of fecundity.[2] Already, perhaps, there was current more than one anecdote about his infancy, conceived with the intention of showing in his biography the accomplishment of the Messianic ideal;[3] or, rather, of the prophecies which the allegorical exegesis ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... cultivated products, the desire to be considered brave and manly, desire for exaltation in the minds of descendants, to increase wealth, to secure abundance of wild game and fish, to secure general health and activity of the people, general favor at the hands of the women, fecundity of women, and slaves in ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... Speaking of a fertile writer of tales who was not then dead, he declared that —— (naming the author in question) had spawned upon them (the publishers) three novels a year! Such language is perhaps justifiable in regard to a man who shows so much of the fecundity of the herring; but I did not know how fruitful might be my own muse, and I thought that I had better ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... completed in three volumes. The purpose of it is to develop an understanding of the forces that have been operative in the evolution of the family institution in the United States. The author will endeavor to set forth the influences that have shaped marriage, controlled fecundity, determined the respective status of father, mother, child, attracted relative and servant, influenced sexual morality and governed the function of the family as an educational, economic, moral, and spiritual institution as also its relation ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... giving an order, receiving obedience but not recognition. For the destiny once imposed by the seasons he has substituted his will. He repairs the injustice of the year, unites hostile republics, and equalises wealth. He restricts or augments the births, regulates the fecundity of the queen, dethrones her and instals another in her place, after dexterously obtaining the reluctant consent of a people who would be maddened at the mere suspicion of an inconceivable intervention. ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of St. Victor.] A Saxon of the monastery of Saint Victor at Paris, who fed ill 1142 at the age of forty-four. "A man distinguished by the fecundity of his genius, who treated in his writings of all the branches of sacred and profane erudition that were known in his time, and who composed several dissertations that are not destitute of merit." Maclaine's ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... to a large extent, the result of all the ages that had multiplied since the heated tropics held the early fecundity of human life. A Haitian lunged by with out-turned palms hanging at his knees, a loose jaw dropped on a livid gullet flecked with white, and a sultry inner consciousness no more than a germinal superstition visible in fixed blood—suffused eyes. He had an odor, Lee fantastically ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... them into a white cloth prepared for the occasion. The bulls are then sacrificed and a prayer offered that "God would render his own gift prosperous to those on whom he has bestowed it." They believed that administered in a potion it would impart fecundity to any barren animal, and that it was a remedy against all kinds of poison. The branches of the mistletoe were then distributed among the faithful, each cherishing the token as the most sacred emblem of his faith. It is thought that ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... 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 of this growing country. ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... journal "the Jenneh" of Beirut, contained a letter in June, 1872, from its Damascus correspondent, praising the fecundity of Syria, and stating that a young woman who was married at nine and a half, became a grandmother at twenty! Such instances are not uncommon in Damascus and Hums, where the chief and almost the only concern of parents is to marry off their daughters as early as nature will allow, ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... and extraordinary gifts of expression. He had none of that ambition which inflames some hardy men, to make new beliefs and new passions enter the minds of their neighbours; his ascendency is due to literary pomp, not to fecundity of spirit. No one has ever surpassed him in the art of combining resolute and ostentatious common sense of a slightly coarse sort in choosing his point of view, with so considerable an appearance of dignity and elevation in setting it forth and ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... originally consisted of not more than seventy Bengal sheep, had increased in number to 4,000 head, although the wethers had been killed as they became fit for slaughter. It appears, however, that as the sheep approached to greater purity of blood, their extreme fecundity diminished. ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... vengeance of the Almighty. St. Chrysostom says: "What can be more unreasonable than to sow without land, without rain, without ploughs? All those who give themselves up to this damnable culture shall reap only tares. Let us cut off these monstrous births of gold and silver; let us stop this execrable fecundity." ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... in the form of the skull, which have been made known to us in recent times by the rapid progress of geographical knowledge — the analogies presented by the varieties in the species of many wild and domesticated animals — and the more correct observations collected regarding the limits of fecundity in hybrids.** ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... skunks" might have turned their undoubted 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," ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... 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 of the Sultan who had once been noted ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... 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 ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... Lexington 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, ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... sentimental exaggerations of sympathy, which do some injustice to the great Artificer whom we are for the moment assuming to be responsible for sentient life. Many of us are much concerned about "nature, red in tooth and claw." It is a sort of nightmare to us to think of the tremendous fecundity of swamp and jungle, warren and pond, and of the ruthless struggle for existence which has made earth, air, and sea one mighty battle-ground. In this we are again letting the fallacy of number take hold of us. There can be no aggregate of suffering among lower, any ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... Fir-Cone. What does the "fir-cone" in the Ninevite sculptures mean? Layard does not explain it. Is it there as the emblem of fecundity, as the pomegranate of Persia and Syria? Has it altogether the same character as the latter fruit? Then—was it carried into Hindostan via Cashmir? When? By the first wave of population which broke through the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... a Wolfram and a Walther, with shadowy creatures of speculation like the 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 in the spirit of poetry during the Middle Ages than ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... generalization) is what 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 ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... solemnities around, that it will assume a rarer and finer tincture, even more grateful to the understanding, if not to the senses, than that form of the emotion which arises from such companionship in spots where all is life, and growth, and fecundity. ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... manufacturers will reemploy 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
... surprised at this flood in a hot, dry summer, but afterwards I discovered that it was caused by the tropical exuberance of the red weed. Directly this extraordinary growth encountered water it straightway became gigantic and of unparalleled fecundity. Its seeds were simply poured down into the water of the Wey and Thames, and its swiftly growing and Titanic water fronds speedily ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... and "A Flock of Four," are all published by Gardner, Darton & Co., and "Effie," by Griffith & Farran. When one realises that not a few of these books contain a hundred illustrations, and that the list is almost entirely from two publishers' catalogues, some idea of the fecundity of Mr. Gordon Browne's output is gained. But only a vague idea, as his "Shakespeare," with hundreds of drawings and a whole host of other books, cannot be even mentioned. It is sufficient to name but one—say the example from "Robinson Crusoe" ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... News," on which his services were warmly welcomed and continuously employed, with such brilliant results to itself and to the black-and-white art in England. I was one day conversing with a distinguished foreign artist on the comparative merits of Gilbert and Dore, whose fecundity in their art was equal, and I ventured to assert the great artistic superiority of Gilbert. "You are right!" cried my enthusiastic friend, with more judgment of art than accuracy of English idiom; "Gilbert cocks ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... 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 names, noble hearts, pure and sacred friendships,—the glories of this century? May I not show myself ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... strange inflexibility of the Indian organisation, both bodily and 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 place ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
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