"Subsoil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... faith, God's faith, Thy soil, thy very subsoil, all upheav'd, The general inner earth so long so sedulously draped over, now hence for what it is boldly laid bare, Open'd by thee to heaven's light for ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... able and correct drawing of adults. For although theirs are incomplete they add to them a thousand things of their own seeing and imagining; and they add to them also the thousand things that grow in the deep subsoil of their consciousness—the things which no brush ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... destructive on the summits of isolated hills and ridges and on the steep slopes of mountains. The influence of the form of the ground was, however, subordinate to that exerted by the nature of the subsoil. Thus, at Mentone, as we have seen, and also at Nice and Genoa, houses built on rock in elevated positions suffered much less than those situated on the plains below that are composed of sand and ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of subsoil in it.—The explanation is, of course, that in a great many thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest our attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the enormous number of impressions which pass through our ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... put on this piece of land, as it was first reduced to a level by removing the soil and subsoil, and levelling the gravelly bottom; then returning the subsoil and soil to the top. Walks were next laid out with great care, and flower beds made. A border was also dug for the expected new greenhouse, and ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... soil, but this difference is more often the result of circumstances than of formation. The surface soil from having been long cultivated has been more opened to the influences of the air than is the case with the subsoil, which has never been disturbed so as to allow the same action. Again the growth of plants has supplied the surface soil with roots, which by decaying have given it organic matter, thus darkening its color, rendering it warmer, and giving greater ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... may be, the grandest renovating and enriching crop commonly grown on our farms. It owes its great value, not to any power it may or may not possess of getting nitrogen from the atmosphere, or phosphoric acid and potash from the subsoil, but principally, if not entirely, to the fact that the roots can drink up such a large amount of water, and live and thrive on very ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... whom his fifty-five years weighed no more heavily than if they had been forty. He belonged to an old Edinburgh family, and was one of its most distinguished members. His labors did credit to the body of engineers who are gradually devouring the carboniferous subsoil of the United Kingdom, as much at Cardiff and Newcastle, as in the southern counties of Scotland. However, it was more particularly in the depths of the mysterious mines of Aberfoyle, which border on the Alloa mines and ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... the rounded heap was about 4 feet high. This justified the hope that something might be discovered beneath them. But although the entire space within, up to the fairly defined inner faces of the walls, was thoroughly cleaned out down into the untouched gravelly subsoil, no trace of a bone or other indication of a burial was found. The only artificial object was a section 31/4 inches long of a columella perforated lengthwise, apparently lost by the wearer, as it lay on the natural surface. This is shown in ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... probe is an instrument which I first saw slung over my friend Baddely's shoulders, and of his invention. It is a sort of huge screw gimblet, or auger, which readily penetrates the ground by being worked with a long cross-handle, and brings up the subsoil in a groove to a considerable depth. Specimens of the soil and of rocks and minerals were collected, and a plan was adopted which is a useful lesson to future explorers. A small piece of linen or cotton, about four inches square, had two pieces of twine ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... a fence across the entrance, which Milton removed without dismounting, for it consisted of only two rails, within his reach. Life rode through the opening, and started his horse into a gallop again. The subsoil was of gravel, with a thin coating of loam on it, not more than three inches deep, so that the animals ...
— A Lieutenant at Eighteen • Oliver Optic
... mountains of Terglou and Manhardt in thundering cataracts amongst cliffs and woods into the pure and deep cerulean lakes of Wochain and Wurzen, and pursuing its course amidst pastoral meadows so ornamented with plants and trees as to look the garden of Nature. The subsoil or strata of this part of Illyria are entirely calcareous and full of subterranean caverns, so that in every declivity large funnel- shaped cavities, like the craters of volcanoes, may be seen, in which the waters that fall from the atmosphere are lost: ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... December had its refinements of cruelty; it required in addition petty victims. Its appetite for extermination extended to the poor and to the obscure, its anger and animosity penetrated as far as the lowest class; it created fissures in the social subsoil in order to diffuse the proscription there; the local triumvirates, nicknamed "mixed mixtures," served it for that. Not one head escaped, however humble and puny. They found means to impoverish the indigent, to ruin those dying of hunger, to spoil the disinherited; the ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... the nature of the sub-soil on which the house stands—for example, a gravel or chalk subsoil is better than a subsoil of clay, because the former admits of a speedy escape of the surplus water in time of heavy and continuous rain, while the latter does not. Avoid the neighbourhood of graveyards, and of factories ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... they come? where do they go?" He is lost in such questions, but finds no answer to them. To discover the false seed of poesy which lies in those heads and fructifies in those lives, it is necessary to dig into them; and when we do that we soon come to a thin subsoil beneath the surface. The Parisian shopkeeper nurtures his soul on some hope or other, more or less attainable, without which he would doubtless perish. One dreams of building or managing a theatre; another longs for the honors of mayoralty; this one ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... deep enough in the ground to be secure from frost; but to be most effective it should not be over fourteen to sixteen inches below the surface, hence sub-irrigation cannot be used very successfully in the Northern states. In a sandy loam soil with a clay subsoil it works best at sixteen ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... in the misty distance, the whale came near us. It was almost calm and we could see him without glasses. He rose and disappeared at intervals of a minute, and as he moved along he rippled the surface like a subsoil plough on a gigantic scale. After ten or twelve small dives, he threw his tail in air and went down for ten minutes or more. When he reappeared he was two or three hundred ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... waggons much better during the winter season than the thin and loose soil on the sides of hills; apparently because this lay on rock, or a substratum so tenacious as to support the water in or just under the surface. The wheels and also the feet of the cattle sunk at once to this rocky subsoil whatever its depth, and up came the water, so that on level parts our track resembled a ditch of mud and water, and on slopes it formed a current of water and a drain from the sides of hills. I had observed the plains during my reconnaissance of the interior from the side of Mount William, ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... said in a voice which broke in spite of her self-control: "If this were an assembled mob opposing the rights of women I should know what to say. I never made a speech except to rouse people to action. My work is that of subsoil plowing.... I ask you tonight, as your best testimony to my services, on this, the twentieth anniversary of my public work, to join me in making a demand on Congress for a Sixteenth Amendment giving women ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... elsewhere, prospect for and work the bank-reefs after the subtending gutter-bed has proved auriferous. There is, however, no connection between the two, and the precious metal in the subsoil is either swept down by the floods or washed out of the sides, as we shall ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... the US has claimed a 12-mile contiguous zone in addition to its 12-mile territorial sea) continental shelf - the LOS Convention (Article 76) defines the continental shelf of a coastal State as comprising the seabed and subsoil of the submarine areas that extend beyond its territorial sea throughout the natural prolongation of its land territory to the outer edge of the continental margin, or to a distance of 200 nautical miles from the baselines from which the breadth of ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... exhaustive study of them all; but sermons and parish calls and funerals, and that little affair of Mrs. Samuel Nute, have forced him, by a process of which we all know something, to forego his projected subsoil ploughing and make such ...
— Saint Patrick - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... streams, the situation of each tract characterized by peculiar vegetation, not only within the area he has himself traversed, but perhaps for a hundred miles around it. His acute observation enables him to detect the slightest undulations of the surface, the various changes of subsoil and alterations in the character of the vegetation that would be quite imperceptible to a stranger. His eye is always open to the direction in which he is going; the mossy side of trees, the presence of certain plants under the shade of rocks, the morning and evening flight ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... are harder to unravel. As a rule, Roman town-gates had large super-structures and needed stronger foundations than the town-walls. At Newgate, where the superstructure must have been comparatively slender, the published plans show that under a part, at least, of the gate-towers the undisturbed subsoil rises higher than beneath the adjacent town-walls. According to the elevation published by Dr. Norman and Mr. F. W. Reader in Archaeologia lxiii, plate lvii, the wall-builders at this point stopped their deep foundation trenches for the full width of the gateway ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield
... wide range of soils, that it is really easier to list those on which it should not be set than it is to enumerate those on which it may be planted. Of the soils not adapted to it, deep sandy lands, soils underlaid with quicksand close to the surface, soils with hardpan subsoil, wet, sour, poorly-drained lands, and stiff, pasty ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... soil should be deep and porous, so that the roots will strike far into it, and be enabled thereby to withstand droughts and cold winters. The best means of deepening the soil, as explained in Chapter IV, is by tile-draining; but it can also be accomplished to some extent by the use of the subsoil plow and by trenching. Since the lawn cannot be refitted, however, the subsoil is likely to fall back into a hard-pan in a few years if it has been subsoiled or trenched, whereas a good tile-drain affords a permanent amelioration of the under soil. ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... first place, the facility of cleansing will be greatly increased. A smooth surface, between which and the subsoil is interposed a thick concrete—which grows as hard and impermeable as iron—will not generate mud and filth to one-fiftieth of the extent of either granite roads or Macadam. It is probable that if there were no importations of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... to extend from Pennsylvania to Venezuela embraces a considerable portion of the Dominican Republic. Near Puerto Plata, during rains, one of the streams flowing down from the mountains in the Mameyes section, is covered with greasy spots thought to be petroleum that has oozed from the subsoil. Traces of petroleum have also been discovered near Neiba, and in the provinces of Pacificador ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... are many good makes. The swivel type has the advantage of turning all the furrows one way, and is the best for small plots and sloping ground. It should turn a clean, deep furrow. In deep soil that has long been cultivated, plowing should, with few exceptions, be down at least to the subsoil; and if the soil is shallow it will be advisable to turn up a little of the subsoil, at each plowing—not more than an inch—in order that the soil may gradually be deepened. In plowing sod it will be well to have the plow fitted with a coulter, which turns a miniature furrow ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... the soil in the holes dug for the root lessons, noticing the difference between the upper or surface soil and the under or subsoil. Examine as many kinds of surface soils and subsoils as possible, also decayed leaf mould, the black soil of the woods, etc. If there are in the neighborhood any exposed embankments where a road has ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... except those large areas covered by rocky mountains. The best lands lie mainly at the heads of inlets and mouths of the larger streams. There are occasional tracts of swampy lands containing a deep soft fibrous deposit resembling peat. A clayey subsoil was seen in a few places near Cape Ball on the east ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... with, or attributable to, the kennel. According to the early opinion of Mr. Asheton Smith, who is a good authority, it was referable to some peculiarity in the breed or management of the hounds; but, agreeably to a later opinion, it is dependent on situation and subsoil, and may be aggravated or increased by circumstances over which we have no control. Some kennels are in low and damp situations, yet the hounds are free from all complaint: and others, with the stanchest dogs and under the best management, are ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of subsoil in it. The explanation is, of course, that in a great many thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest our attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the enormous number ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... true rounded life. And note sharply that this gives the true perspective of service. The service life grows up out of the other two. Its roots lie down in prayer and purity. This explains why so much service is fruitless. It isn't rooted. There is no rich subsoil. ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... waters to an adjacent belt of sea, described as the territorial sea in the UNCLOS (Part II); this sovereignty extends to the air space over the territorial sea as well as its underlying seabed and subsoil; every state has the right to establish the breadth of its territorial sea up to a limit not exceeding 12 nautical miles; the normal baseline for measuring the breadth of the territorial sea is the low-water line along the coast as marked on large-scale charts officially recognized by ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... spot we stood awhile to note the peculiarities of the place and its position. The soil is a loose clay, deep-red or brown, impregnated with iron and, where unclothed with humus, cold and infertile, as the spontaneous aloe shows. The subsoil is laterite, also highly ferruginous. Soft and working well with the axe while it retains the quarry-water, it soon hardens by exposure; and, thus weathered, it forms the best and ugliest of the local building materials. Embedded in the earth's surface are blocks and boulders ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... I shall draw no conclusions from this check, which my scruples may attribute to some unknown cause. Perhaps the atmosphere of my cabinet and the dryness of the sand serving them for a bed have been too much for my nurslings, whose tender skins are used to the warm moisture of the subsoil. ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... to furnish drainage, let in the air and to hold heat. Contrary to general belief, the grape seldom thrives in very sandy soils unless there is a fair admixture of clay, considerable decomposing vegetable matter and a clay subsoil. The latter, however, must not come too close to the surface. Some of the best vineyard lands in the country are very stony, the stones hindering only in making the land difficult to till. Nearly all grapes require a friable ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... are imperfect valleys which have no outlet. As a consequence of this, the water cannot escape by an overground bed, so it forces itself through the porous surface to reappear in a lower valley, undermining the subsoil, which in time collapses, and forms the oases of this otherwise barren land. The rain washes down the little earth that there is on the hillside, the chemical action of the limestone oxidises the same, and the so-called "terra rossa" is formed ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... to dig a tank in the garden, but the subsoil water proving too low, it had been abandoned, unfinished, with the excavated earth left piled up into a hillock. On the top of this height my father used to sit for his morning prayer, and as he sat the sun would rise at the edge of the undulating expanse which ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... what roads! Now it was a strip of corduroy, now a piece of well-graded elevation with clay subsoil and gravel surface, now a neglected stretch full of dangerous holes; and worst of all, running through the great forests, long pieces of road from which the stumps had been only partly extracted, and where ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... immediately beyond the ranch itself. The plains were broad. Here and there the flatness broke in a long, low line of cottonwoods marking the winding course of a slough or trace of subsoil water. Mesquite lay in dark patches; sagebrush; the green of pasture-land periodically overflowed by the irrigation water. Nearer at home were occasional great white oaks, or haystacks bigger than a house, and ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... and cover perhaps half an acre of ground. When the mine exploded at 5.45 p. m. on March 2, 1916, a thing like a great black mushroom rose from the earth. Beneath it appeared, with the ponderous momentum of these big upheavals, a white growth like the mushroom's gills. It was the chalk subsoil following in the wake of the black loam. With this black and white upheaval went up, Heaven knows, how many bodies and limbs of Germans, scattered everywhere with the rest of the debris. And the explosion sent up many graves as well as the bodies ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... cultivated our present from our past, homage to it might be as much to the purpose at least as the Gheber's worship of the sun. The past is an atmosphere weighing over each man's life. The skilful farmer with his subsoil-plough lets down the wealthy air of the actual atmosphere into his furrows, deeper than it ever went before; the greedy loam sucks in the nitrogen there, and one day he finds his mould stored with ammonia, the great fertilizer, worth many a harvest. Are they numerous who thus enrich the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... subsoil.—In countries of abundant rainfall, a great distinction exists between the soil and the subsoil. The soil is represented by the upper few inches which are filled with the remnants of decayed vegetable matter and modified by plowing, harrowing, and other cultural operations. ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... direct action of the air, are deprived of moisture during the hot season. This system of drainage is not a modern invention; the Italian monks understood it as well as, and even better than, we do. In deep and loose soils they used sometimes, just as we do now, porous clay pipes; but when the subsoil was formed of compact and nearly impermeable matters, they employed a system of drainage, the extent and grandeur of which astonishes us. It is that of drainage by cavities, applied by the Etruscans, Latins, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... tract of rough uncultivated land which is in many places covered with woods. On its southern boundary the ground rises steeply on the east, and more gently on the west, to the Franco-Belgian frontier, over a rocky subsoil in which the affluents of the river have ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... the south of Ireland—the moory bog—varies in depth from nine inches to three feet, below which there is a clayey or sandy subsoil. On the average, about L4 per statute acre is required to bring it from a state of nature to one of cultivation, and then it will fetch a rent of from 5s. to ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... cropped once or twice. One of two horses went first, and, with a common English plough, turned an ordinary furrow. Then the other followed, of twice the force of the first, in the same furrow, with a subsoil plough held to the work beam-deep. The iron-stones and ferruginous clods turned up by this "deep tillage" would make a prairie farmer of Illinois wonder, if not shudder, at the plucky and ingenious industry which competes with his easy toil ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... for any other tree, because its roots are wide-spreading, like its branches. The earth should be thrown out to the depth of twenty inches, and four or five feet square, for an ordinary-sized tree. This, however, will not do on a heavy clay subsoil, for it would form a basin to hold water and injure the tree. A ditch, as low as the bottom of the holes, should extend from tree to tree, and running out of the orchard, constructed in the usual method of drains, and, whatever be the subsoil, the trees will flourish. ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... a rather strong soil, neither very heavy nor very light. Subsoil is rather more important than surface soil, although the latter should be friable and easily worked. The apple follows good timber successfully. Heavy clay soils are apt to be too cold, compact, and wet; light ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... Soil.—The soil on which one lives is a matter of primary importance; it may be a matter of life or death for a weakly person, but it is important for every one. First, as regards the subsoil on which a house is built. If this be clay, or impervious rock, then no possible system of drainage can make the site a dry one; this condition of affairs will be very bad indeed for health. No house should be built on such a soil if at ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... thing as the sudden giving way of the inward subsoil. A despairing certainty does not make its way into a man without thrusting aside and breaking certain profound elements which, in some cases, are the very man himself. Grief, when it attains this shape, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... follow him?" Having delivered himself of these sage remarks he stepped to the brink of the mire and put his foot heavily upon its surface. His top-boot sank quickly through the yielding crust, and the black subsoil rose with oily, sucking action, 'and his foot was immediately buried out of sight. He drew it out sharply, a shudder of horror quickening his action. Strong man and hardy as he was, the muskeg inspired him with a superstitious terror. "Guess there ain't ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... outlines of these miniature mountain ranges change often in a single night. At one time, centuries ago, this part of Flanders, which is now so bare, was, it is pretty clear, covered by forests, the remains of which are still sometimes found beneath the subsoil inland and under the sea. When the great change came is unknown, but the process was probably gradual. At an early period, here, as in Holland, the fight against the invasions of the sea began, and the first dykes are ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... it is one thing to design, and another to accomplish. The grandest design for a palace may fail to stand because some peculiarity of the stone has been forgotten, or some character of foundation and subsoil has been misunderstood. The noblest form of turret-ship may prove useless because the strength of some material will not correspond to the ideal, or some curve of stability has been miscalculated. Not only this: man may create, as a sculptor, the ideal form for his to-be statue, ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... of the Nitrifying Organism in the Soil.—Three series of experiments have been made on the distribution of the nitrifying organism in the clay soil and subsoil at Rothamsted. Advantage was taken of the fact that deep pits had been dug in one of the experimental fields for the purpose of obtaining samples of the soil and subsoil. Small quantities of soil were taken from ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... originally called Parva Kinghorn and later Wester Kinghorn. The origin and meaning of the present name of the town have always been a matter of conjecture. There seems reason to believe that it refers to the time when the site, or a portion of it, formed an island, as sea-sand is the subsoil even of the oldest quarters. Another derivation is from Gaelic words meaning "the island beyond the bend." With Dysart, Kinghorn and Kirkcaldy, it unites in returning one member ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... people are really doing, when one thinks of it, are Soap, Tooth-brushes, Subsoil Pipes, Wall Papers, Razors, Mattresses, Suspenders, Tiles, Shoes, Pots, and Kettles. Of course the first thing that happened to us, to Lim and to me (as any one might guess, in a little quiet job like making over the earth), was that we found we had to begin ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... notable examples in mind, we are not prepared to assert that, though man has as a rule neither the gills of a fish nor the nose of a mole, he may not enjoy a drive at the bottom of the sea, or a morning ramble under the subsoil. But with the exception of Peter Wilkins' Flying Islanders-whose existence we vehemently dispute-and some similar creatures whom it suits our purpose to ignore, there is no record of any person to whom the name of The-Man-Who-Flies-Over-the-Hills may be justly applied. We ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... angles to the first line so that the rows will be straight both ways. The pegging being completed, the holes should be dug not less than 18 inches wide and 18 inches deep. The top soil should be carefully placed on one side of the hole and the subsoil on the other, the holes should remain open as long as possible and should only be filled in a week or so before planting the trees. The bottoms of the holes should be explored with a light crowbar ...
— The Hawaiian Islands • The Department of Foreign Affairs |
