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More "Fecundity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 his ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... 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 Sun-King's affection—which ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... 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
... Well, the Life Force is stupid; but it is not so stupid as the forces of Death and Degeneration. Besides, these are in its pay all the time. And so Life wins, after a fashion. What mere copiousness of fecundity can supply and mere greed preserve, we possess. The survival of whatever form of civilization can produce the best rifle and the best ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... the medieval religiosity which he had once so successfully and fiercely attacked. The year 1520 saw him at the most advanced point he ever attained. It was then that he produced, with marvellous fecundity, a series of pamphlets unequalled by him and unexcelled anywhere, both in the incisive power of their attack on existing institutions and in the popular force of ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... was visibly impressed by this fecundity and riotous extravagance of genius. 'I do hope you ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... 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
... on the fecundity of the literature of the Victorian Age in its middle period, and especially on the publications which adorned the decade from 1850 to 1859. He calls those years, very justly, "marvellous and almost unexampled" in their rich profusion. I may suggest that the only ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... and most 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, ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... possesses space with eternal energy, producing millions of solar systems, each one of which has a different organisation and a separate individuality. Man, the creature of our small planet, the Earth, is but a single result of the resistless output of Divine fecundity,—nevertheless Man is the 'image of God' in that he is endowed with reason, will and intelligence beyond that of the purely animal creation, and that he is given an immortal Soul, formed for love and for the eternal things which love creates. He can himself be Divine, in the ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... 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
... race continue to play the leading part in continental Europe. One of the shrewdest observers in contemporary Germany—himself a distinguished Semite—commented on this decisive fact as follows:[305] "Within ten years Germany will contain seventy million inhabitants, and in the torrent of her fecundity will drown anemic and exhausted France.... The French nation is dying of exhaustion. There is no reason, however, for the world to get alarmed ... for before the French will have vanished from the earth, other races, virile and healthy, will have come to their country to take their place." That ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... terrific property. No such property in the world, unless it were New York! There was a lot of hysteria in the papers nowadays; but any one who, like himself, could remember London sixty years ago, and see it now, realised the fecundity and elasticity of wealth. They had only to keep their heads, and go at it steadily. Why! he remembered cobblestones, and stinking straw on the floor of your cab. And old Timothy—what could he not have told them, if he had kept his memory! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... past; what of the present? In spite of the dehumanizing and other efforts to destroy the fecundity of the race, the twenty Africans of 1620, by the close of the Revolution, had increased to 650,000, and these 650,000, at the close of the Civil War, had reached the alarming number of four and one-half millions; and these four and a half millions, had, according ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... a Platonic soul just fallen from the Empyrean; and the child may be dazed, credulous, and fanciful; but he is not mad. On the contrary, his earnest playfulness, the constant distraction of his attention from observation to daydreams, is the sign of an inward order and fecundity appropriate to his age. If children did not see visions, good men would have nothing to work for. It is the soul of observant persons, like Matthew Arnold, that is apt not to be quite sane and whole inwardly, but somewhat warped by familiarity with the perversities of real things, and ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... France; his nom-deplume in L'Illustration is "Perdican"; he also contributes to the Figaro, 'L'Independence Belge, Opinion Nationale' (1867-1872); he signs articles in the 'Rappel; as "Candide"; in short, his fecundity in this field of literature is very great. He is today a most popular journalist and writes for the 'Presse, Petit Journal, Temps', and others. He has not succeeded as a politician. Under the second Empire ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... before the drainage 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 ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the instruments with 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... 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 luxuriance; and then it is a rippling sea ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... with any of the great interests of life, and consequently they represent nothing. Nevertheless, Nathan maintains his ground by the quickness of his mind, by those lucky hits which billiard-players call a "good stroke." He is the cleverest shot at ideas on the fly in all Paris. His fecundity is not his own, but that of his epoch; he lives on chance events, and to control them he distorts their meaning. In short, he is not true; his presentation is false; in him, as Comte Felix said, is the born juggler. Moreover, ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... are in the middle of the picture. The fauns stagger under the dark trees, carrying great sumptuous vases of agate and gold. Silenus is asleep on a sunny hill at a distance, and the white sails of the ship with Theseus gleam on the deep-blue sea. There is another called an Offering to Fecundity. It is a crowd of most lovely baby boys, wonderfully painted, frolicking on the green among flowers and fruits. A figure full of action and passion holds up a glass to the statue of the goddess in one corner. The children ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... tried. In all the things that go to make up an understanding of a fellow mortal's real nature they still were to him as completely strangers as they had been on the day he landed in this place. Set down in the midst of a teeming fecundity he nevertheless remained as truly a castaway as though he had floated ashore on a bit of wreckage. He could have been no more and no less a maroon had the island which received him been a desert island ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... he gave was in regard to the sex—it was a girl, he said, and she seemed to be 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 ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... of representations, we may say, comprehensively, that they are capable, one and all, of no light in which they do not even offend some right moral sentiment of our being. Indeed, they raise up moral objections with such marvellous fecundity, that we can hardly state them as fast ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... — he began to see that his must be a literary career. In a letter of March 20, 1876, he says to Judge Bleckley that he has had a year of frightful overwork. "I have been working at such a rate as, if I could keep it up, would soon make me the proverb of fecundity that Lope de Vega now is." He refers to the India papers written for "Lippincott's". "The collection of the multitudinous particulars involved in them cost me such a world of labor among the libraries ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... Leyden—through 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 not fight ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... mind that this is equal to 7,272 passengers every hour, and that the length of line worked by the company's engines, including that of the "foreign" line worked, is slightly less than 25 miles, the fecundity in traffic of the metropolitan district must be said to be marvelous. It is to be regretted that the official account from which these figures are given does not give any idea of the number of passengers in the different classes, for such a return would be of value. It is a marvelous ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... Christian substitute for the gilt coronet all Jewish brides wore. The crowning of the bride is still observed by the Russians, and the Calvinists of Holland and Switzerland. The wearing of orange blossoms is said to have started with the Saracens, who regarded them as emblems of fecundity. It was introduced into Europe by the Crusaders. The bride's veil is the modern form of the flammeum or large yellow veil which completely enveloped the Greek and Roman brides during the ceremony. Such a covering is still in use among the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... the European, enabling him to accommodate himself to diverse conditions. Among the Andean tribes there are seldom over five children, generally but one, in a family; and Bates, speaking of Brazilian Indians, says "their fecundity is of a low degree, and it is very rare to find a family having ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... ascending scale 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 of civil rights; and a ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... landscape art was born another kind of painting, especially peculiar to Holland,—animal painting. Animals are the riches of the country; 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, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... may well imagine that Nature's fecundity can have engendered beings there of an organization different from our own, adapted to an existence in the proximity of fire. What magnificent landscapes may there be adorned with the luxuriant vegetation that develops rapidly under an ardent ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... the original, were lumped, 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 in taking some ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... one has webbed feet and another not; then, in all such cases, difference of structure proves difference of kind. (2.) Physiological; that is, the internal nature, indicated by habits and instincts, furnishes another safe criterion. (3.) Permanent fecundity. The progenitors of the same species reproduce their kind from generation to generation; the progeny of different species, although nearly allied, do not. It is a fixed law of nature that species never can be annihilated, except by all the individuals included in them dying out; and ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... common notion that the politician and his machine are of comparatively recent origin. But the American politician arose contemporaneously with the party, and with such singular fecundity of ways and means that it is doubtful if his modern successors could teach him anything. McMaster declares: "A very little study of long-forgotten politics will suffice to show that in filibustering and gerrymandering, in stealing governorships and legislatures, in using force at the polls, ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... the authorities of that day. After the lapse of several years, during which he no doubt improved his time and opportunities by laying the foundation of that series of text books which he produced with remarkable fecundity in a marvellously short space of time, Mr. Rankine was appointed in 1855 to the Chair of Civil Engineering and Mechanics in Glasgow University. This Chair, we may explain, was instituted by Queen Victoria in 1840, and is in ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... story than any of the others, so far as sustained interest is concerned.... The rich, suggestive, highly metaphorical the M. I. style.... A marvelous example of Mr. De Morgan's inexhaustible fecundity of invention.... Shines as a romance quite as much as 'Joseph Vance' does ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... 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 in ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... four or five, and such a litter she exhibited when in her fatting-pen. She proved, when fat, good bacon, juicy, and tender; the rind, or sward, was remarkably thin. At a moderate computation she was allowed to have been the fruitful parent of three hundred pigs: a prodigious instance of fecundity in so large a quadruped! She was ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... leaves, and the daisy and the 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
... 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 ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... fifth argument against this theory may be got from the general biological fact that sexual promiscuity tends to pathological conditions unfavorable to fecundity, that is, fertility, or the birth of offspring. Physicians have long ago ascertained this fact, and the modern prostitute gives illustration of it by the fact that she has few or no children. Among the lower animal species, in which some degree of promiscuity obtains, moreover, ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... to have had no perceptible influence. The mountain-situated Geneva and the lowland Paris produced alike prolifically talented men. The valley of the Seine and that of the Loire competed for hegemony in fecundity. The facts contradicted the highland theory, the lowland theory, the coast theory, and every other theory of the dominance of ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... 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 ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... eyes of a fanatical 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
... cell; spawn. Associated Words: ooelogy, ooelogist, ovology, oviferous, yolk, glair, albumen, embryo, oviparous, oviposit, oviposition, vitellus, fecundate, impregnate, impregnation, fecundity, clutch, vitelline, oviduct, Ovipara, ovulation, ovulist, tread, treadle, chalaza, addle, ooemeter, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... great. His fecundity was prodigious, and he wrote at will in seven languages. 'This polyglot facility was not in itself a very remarkable circumstance, for it grew out of his necessary education and geographical position. Few men in that age and region were limited ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... there was still a respectable heap that was turned over to Company L. Alas, I was young and prodigal in those days! I told a thousand "stories" to the good people of Quincy, and every story was "good"; but since I have come to write for the magazines I have often regretted the wealth of story, the fecundity of fiction, I lavished that day in ...
— The Road • Jack London
... back and forth through the light. The trees have put on a thin green pretense. Even the soil pretends to fecundity. Toothless jaws widen in a smile of real mirth. Bones lightened of flesh ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... of her community. Indeed, so difficult and expensive has become in the modern world the rearing and training of even one individual, in a manner suited to fit it for coping with the complexities and difficulties of civilised life, that, to the family as well as to the state, unlimited fecundity on the part of the female has already, in most cases, become irremediable evil; whether it be in the case of the artisan, who at the cost of immense self-sacrifice must support and train his children till ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... by the name by which she was well known on the stage, but by that of 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 short, the ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... To put the statistical figures in another way, Mr. Boner,[8] writing in 1865, calculates that the Roumains, naturalised in Southern Hungary, number 596 out of every 1000 souls in Transylvania. The fecundity of the race is remarkable, they threaten to overwhelm the Saxons, whose numbers, on the other hand, are seriously on the decrease. They are also supplanting ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... very little. There is still an anomaly. There is but one perfect female in a nest to germinate eggs, and the myriads produced (being over 80,000 in twenty-four hours, according to some historians) shows that the fecundity of our queen-bee is not a parallel case by any means. And yet they are similar, by having their offspring provided for without an effort ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... "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 ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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 a ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... 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 ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... 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 ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... 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 which Perestrelo had been ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... 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 ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... brilliant. The Emperor may have instituted those prizes, as his apologists declared he himself said that he did, to keep active minds from occupying themselves with politics; but the exhibition of how the Empire had crushed out originality and fecundity in the French brain must have appalled him, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the inquisitor, "this is a bad look-out. If you had been born a Dumas—I am speaking of fecundity, if you please, and of nothing else—if you had been born a Dumas, and could rattle off a romance in a fortnight, you might be excused for not keeping tally of your productions. Pitiful, dilatory worker that you are, if you cannot remember them, how can you expect the world ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... has gone there is everything to indicate that pig raising, while an extremely profitable occupation, has not yet attained the results which may be expected to follow as more attention is given to the choice of breeds, the selection of the hogs, and fecundity on the part of the sow. These are all matters which from the ordinary farming standpoint have never been gone into thoroughly. That pig raising will pay and does yield handsome returns is admitted, yet when so many avenues of improvement are open, it ...
— Australia The Dairy Country • Australia Department of External Affairs
... 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, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... products of nature and of human industry vie with each other in extent and variety. A bare enumeration would read like a page of a gazetteer and possibly make no more impression than a column of figures. To form an estimate of the marvellous fecundity of the country and to realise its picturesqueness, one ought to visit the provinces in succession and spend a year in the exploration of each. If one is precluded from such leisurely observation, undoubtedly the next best thing is to see them through the eyes of those who have travelled ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... clothe a dry ideal skeleton. So those tremendous positivists, the Hebrew prophets, had the most prosaic notions about the goods and evils of life. So Lucretius praised, I will not say the atoms merely, but even fecundity and wisdom. The motives, to take another example, which Racine attributed to his personages, were prosaically conceived; a physiologist could not be more exact in his calculations, for even love may be made the mainspring in a clock-work of emotions. Yet that Racine was a born poet appears ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... 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
... impertinent, the embodiment of all that is odious in 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... astonishing. During the height of the breeding season, she will often, under favorable circumstances, lay from two to three thousand eggs, a day! In my observing hives, I have seen her lay, at the rate of six eggs a minute! The fecundity of the female of the white ant, is much greater than this, as she will lay as many as sixty eggs a minute! but then her eggs are simply extruded from her body, to be carried by the workers into suitable nurseries, ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... facetious, factitious, fallacious, fallible, fastidious, fatuous, feasible, feculence, fecundity, felicitous, felonious, fetid, feudal, fiducial, filament, filtrate, finesse, flaccid, flagitious, floriculture, florid, fluctuate, foible, forfeiture, fortuitous, fractious, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... same street 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 ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... golden-bristled boar, scattering, with lavish hands, fruits and flowers to gladden the hearts of mankind. She had a chariot of her own, however, in which she generally travelled. This was drawn by cats, her favourite animals, the emblems of caressing fondness and sensuality, or the personifications of fecundity. ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... than that of the lake of Albano, a cup rimmed with trees of wondrous vigour and density! Pines, elms, and willows descend to the very margin, with a green mass of tangled branches which weigh each other down. This formidable fecundity springs from the vapour which constantly arises from the water under the parching action of the sun, whose rays accumulate in this hollow till it becomes like a furnace. There is a warm, heavy dampness, the paths of the adjacent gardens grow green with moss, and in the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... have been responsible for suggesting the experiments out of which this empirical knowledge emerged. The use of a girdle (a) as a protection against danger to life, and (b) as a means of conferring fecundity on girls[266] provided the circumstances which enabled men to discover that the sexual attractiveness of maidens, which in a state of nature was originally associated with modesty and coyness, was profoundly intensified by the ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... nothing here but the smooth green pavement of cheerful little plants that at a distance looked like jade or malachite. Now, all of a sudden, as it were, there was this forest of rank verdure, sprung with a kind of hideous rapidity, stifling, overpowering, productive with a teeming, incredible fecundity. Low down near the earth the full-grown fruit, green with the faintest tip of gold, hung heavy, indolent, luscious, derisively cool to touch and taste in this semi-tropical heat. The gherkin a few inches above it defied the eye to detect the swelling and lengthening that were taking place ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... that after the Glacial Epoch they migrated northward, leaving the ants behind them. However this may be, their peculiar form has served them well, since they have maintained themselves as fairly abundant species with a lower fecundity than is found in any other group ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... more numerous in the south than in the 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 ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... shilling by 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 his life! His Topica, ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... 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 projected onwards to the ends of the earth at ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... always one 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 ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... of Mr Sadler's work on the law of. His attack of Mr Malthus. His statement of the law of population. Extremes of population and fecundity in well-known countries. Population of England. Of the United States of America. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... bright-eyed one, so steep and mellow your ecstasy in the 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
... in process of formation? If a hard and 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 ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... held on the Brocken or other high mountain. Upon the spot where they met, nothing would ever grow afterwards, as their hot feet burnt all the fecundity out of the soil. In France, England, and the American Colonies, it was supposed that witches made their trips on broomsticks; in Spain and Italy it was believed that they twirled on the back of the Devil himself, who, for the occasion, transformed himself into male goat. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... 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. ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... 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, ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... are not much above a dozen who know how to interest with the ordinary events of life, and by the portrayal of characters truly human. If the former is a talent, it must be owned that it is much commoner than the latter . . . . If we are to rate novelists according to their fecundity, or the riches of their invention, we must put Alexander Dumas above Cervantes. Cervantes wrote a novel with the simplest plot, without belying much or little the natural and logical course of events. This novel which was called 'Don Quixote,' is ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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 intercourse was properly regulated during ...
— Safe Marriage - A Return to Sanity • Ettie A. Rout
... Immanis enim natio, jam inde ab incunabulis primis varietate casuum imminuta; ita saepius adolescit, ut fuisse longis saeculis aestimetur intacta. Ammianus, xxviii. 5. The Count de Buat (Hist. des Peuples de l'Europe, tom. vi. p. 370) ascribes the fecundity of the Alemanni to their easy adoption of strangers. ——Note: "This explanation," says Mr. Malthus, "only removes the difficulty a little farther off. It makes the earth rest upon the tortoise, but does not tell us on what the tortoise rests. We ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... became associated with the superior and 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 his ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... 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 the woods. That new mode of life ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... quartos, and duodecimos he has pyramidized on our book-shelves. Look through any catalogue you will, and you will find that a large proportion of the works in it have been contributed by Anon. The only author who can in the least compete with him in fecundity is Ibid." ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... of enamored swains is at once so trite and obvious, that both the invention and vocabulary of the lover who abides by it so perpetually must have been poor and narrow beyond anything we can conceive of Spenser's fecundity of language and imagery, if we sit down content to imagine that no more is meant by its recurrence than meets the eye. We are satisfied that this title or simile—call it what you will—is the key-word of the mystery; and we must now look around the neighborhood of the Mulla ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... co-ordinate functions) a study, that they stand abuse and excess so well; that the fierce blasts of lust and passion that sear and scorch them and well-nigh dry up their fountain springs of vitality and fecundity, do not wholly destroy or hopelessly disarrange their delicate ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... herbivora; eagles and lions can never be so plentiful as pigeons and antelopes; 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 of animals would increase rapidly if unchecked, whereas ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... Haven't I already! 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 ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... 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 ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... which show that the greatest number of children are born to parents whose earnings are the lowest,(3) that the direst poverty is associated with uncontrolled fecundity emphasize the character of the parenthood we are depending upon to create the race of ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... for the most part intellectual, and something like it can be found in others, though the happy fecundity and lightsome gaiety of it belonged to the individual temperament and perished with him. I remember once trying to give an idea of the different sides of his humour, just to see how far it could ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... of convincing on one point the philosopher himself, had indeed been written before this in London lodgings; but his pen was not idle at Claygate; and it was here he wrote (among other things) that review of 'FECUNDITY, FERTILITY, STERILITY, AND ALLIED TOPICS,' which Dr. Matthews Duncan prefixed by way of introduction to the second edition of the work. The mere act of writing seems to cheer the vanity of the most incompetent; but a correction ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to single lines and sentiments of Wordsworth, and to poems developing a single thought or sentiment. It was this that made him so fond of the sonnet. That sequestered nook forced upon him the limits which his fecundity (if I may not say his garrulity) was never self-denying enough to impose on itself. It suits his solitary and meditative temper, and it was there that Lamb (an admirable judge of what was permanent in literature) liked him best. Its narrow bounds, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... 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 ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... 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
... epoch. Perceiving this want of connection, which, indeed does not render the Scotchman less great, I saw both the system that was favourable to the execution of my work, and the possibility of carrying it out. Although, so to speak, dazzled by the surprising fecundity of Walter Scott, always equal to himself and always original, I did not despair, for I found the reason of such talent in the variety of human nature. Chance is the greatest novelist in the world. To be fertile, one has ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... characteristic modern decorations employed by the Hopi, especially as a symbol of fecundity, is the butterfly or moth. It is a constant device on the beautiful white or cotton blankets woven by the men as wedding gifts, where it is embroidered on the margin in the forms of triangles or even in more realistic patterns. This symbol is a simple triangle, which ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... follow, however, from these remarks that we expect war in its crudest form to continue for ever. There will come a term to this phase of evolution. Probably the impact and collision between nations—if required for their impregnation and fecundity—will come about ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... danger to the mother 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, it would indicate an attitude of disgust ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... 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, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... whites for fifty years.[1677] The chiefs of the Niam Niam take their daughters to wife.[1678] The Sakalava, on Madagascar, allow brother and sister to marry, but before such a marriage the bride is sprinkled with consecrated water and prayers are recited for her happiness and fecundity, as if there were fears that the union was not pleasing to the higher powers, and as if there was especial fear that there might be no offspring. Such marriages are contracted by chiefs who cannot find ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... 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 she ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... concert; so the carnal mind, being in its own nature enmity against God, produces, wherever it operates, substantially the same fruits. In an alienated heart there is an intense unwillingness to be or to abide near to God; and there is, consequently, great fecundity in the conception and production of partition walls to shield the conscience from the ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... Calabrian doctors prescribed the dance as a remedy for the hysteric affections which are common among the women of their country; and the Arabs use a somewhat similar recipe for the highbred mares, whose too lively temperament hinders their fecundity. 'Dull as a dancer' is a familiar proverb at the theatre. In fact, the best brains of Europe are convinced that dancing brings with it a ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... numberless inventions for the improvement of all the arts, and for rendering life more commodious, and trade more easy. I once could not believe that Diodorus was in earnest, in what he relates concerning the Egyptian industry,(377) viz. that this people had found out a way, by an artificial fecundity, to hatch eggs without the sitting of the hen; but all modern travellers declare it to be a fact, which certainly is worthy our investigation, and is said to be practised also in Europe. Their relations inform us, that the Egyptians stow eggs in ovens, which are heated to such a temperament, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... exactly analogous 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, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... was 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 ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... merit of convincing on one point the philosopher himself, had indeed been written before this, in London lodgings; but his pen was not idle at Claygate; and it was here he wrote (among other things) that review of "Fecundity, Fertility, Sterility, and Allied Topics," which Dr. Matthews Duncan prefixed by way of introduction to the second edition of the work. The mere act of writing seems to cheer the vanity of the most incompetent; but a correction accepted by Darwin, and a whole review borrowed and reprinted by Matthews ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Vinci "the great Italian Yankee," because of his multifarious and ingenious suggestions in the world of material things, so our own Edison may be called "the Yankee Leonardo," for, with a curiosity ranging over the whole world of nature, equal to that of the Italian, and with a fecundity of invention no less bewildering, he unites, like Leonardo, an imaginative and poetical vein that lifts his devices into the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... ensured the success of 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 objective force of ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... is certain that the idea of chance did not enter into the concept of her until long after Servius's day. Instead the early Fortuna was a goddess of plenty and fertility, among mankind as a protectress of women and of childbirth, among the crops and the herds as a goddess of fertility and fecundity. Her full name was probably Fors Fortuna, a name which survived in two old temples across the river from Rome proper, in Trastevere, where she was worshipped in the country by the farmers in behalf of the crops. ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... like truth, like love, like all realities viewed from the angle of human vision, the desert is a paradox. Its vast emptiness is more than full; its unashamed sterility is but the simile for unmeasured fecundity. ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... was "unique." ([Greek: Heis Zeus Sarapis]) In him all energies were centered, although the functions of Zeus, of Pluto or of Helios were especially ascribed to him. For many centuries Osiris had been worshiped at Abydos both as author of fecundity and lord of the underworld,[45] and this double character early caused him to be identified with the sun, which fertilizes the earth during its diurnal course and travels through the subterranean ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... woman issued the little life. Thus the symbol of the "virgin with the child" became the symbol of worship; the word "virgin" then having a somewhat different meaning from that which we give it today, although we may trace the analogy in our use of the term "virgin soil," signifying fecundity. The virgin and child then, popularly supposed by those whose prejudices prevail over their desire for Truth, to have originated with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, antedates history, as ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... but benumbs and disintegrates the whole vital apparatus of such an organisation as Rousseau's. If he had been devoid of this feeling about women, his character might very possibly have remained sterile. That feeling was the complementary contribution, without which could be no fecundity. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... scientific visitors to a coral islet found almost innumerable sea birds and eggs. The multitude of birds and their prodigious fecundity inspired the thought that the "rookery" for the whole breadth of the Indian Ocean had been discovered. Investigations showed that the islet was also the abiding-place of a certain species of lizard which subsisted entirely on eggs. It was calculated that not one ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... 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 Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... become mendacious, phantasmal; but they have, to an immense degree, lost that organ since, and are now living comfortably cheek-by-jowl with lies. Lies of that sad "conservative" kind,—and indeed of all kinds whatsoever: for that kind is a general mother; and BREEDS, with a fecundity that is appalling, did you ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... hazel held a significant position, torches having been burnt on the wedding evening to insure prosperity to the newly-married couple, and both in Greece and Rome young married couples were crowned with marjoram. At Roman weddings, too, oaken boughs were carried during the ceremony as symbols of fecundity; and the bridal wreath was of verbena, plucked by the bride herself. Holly wreaths were sent as tokens of congratulation, and wreaths of parsley and rue were given under a belief that they were effectual preservatives against evil spirits. In Germany, nowadays, ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... 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 marked the man more distinctly than any other, ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... side-fins ever outspread like the pinions of a bat,—the terror of luggermen, the uprooter of anchors? From all these, perhaps, and from other monsters likewise—goblin shapes evolved by Nature as destroyers, as equilibrists, as counterchecks to that prodigious fecundity, which, unhindered, would thicken the deep into one measureless and waveless ferment of being... But when there are many bathers these perils are forgotten,—numbers give courage,—one can abandon one's self, without fear of the invisible, to the long, quivering, electrical ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... Thanks to modern fecundity, critics rarely molest authors with demands for the raison d'etre of a new book. The reviewer's question used to be, "Why did the man publish? What need was there? What is he trying to show?" One pontiff is said ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... Paris, was known as the "furious madman"; Puvis, as the "tranquil lunatic." Nine of his pictures were refused at the Salon, though in 1859 he exhibited there his Return from Hunting, and, in 1861, even received a second-class medal. His fecundity was enormous. His principal work comprises the Life of Ste. Genevieve (the saint is a portrait of his princess), at the Pantheon; Summer and Winter at the Hotel de Ville, the decorations for the amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, the decorations ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... abstract Principle-of-All-Things, reposing aloof and impersonal in the stillness of an eternal calm. He is rather the boundless energy of an eternal Life—"no motionless eternity of perfection, but an overflowing vitality, an inexhaustible fecundity, the everlasting well-spring of all existence." He is the eternal Creator of all things; not indeed in any sense which commits us to a literal acceptance of the mythology of Genesis, but in the sense that the created universe has its origin in His holy and righteous ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... fire of volcanoes, of the world. 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 ...
— 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
... of 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 ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... occupied his vacant acres, have shown both a marvellous tenacity for their own customs and also a fecundity that has enabled people, numbering 60,000 at the time of the British conquest, to multiply now to some 2,500,000, scattered over the United States and Canada. To govern them has never been an easy problem. Nairne says that the French officer, Bougainville, who had ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... 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 ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... April, 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 ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... imperturbable good humour. 'It is very convenient to travel with him,' writes his companion from Auchinleck to Mrs Thrale, 'for there is no house where he is not received with kindness and respect. He has better faculties than I had imagined; more justness of discernment and more fecundity of images.' They had hoped to go sailing from island to island, and had not reckoned with what Scott, who wonders they were not drowned, calls the proverbial carelessness of Hebridean boatmen. They really had come two months too late. But Boswell's ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... 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 ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... conditions, 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 ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... reading of Sainte-Beuve gives me the same impression. Indeed his literary fecundity, the necessity of having the Causerie ready for each Monday's issue of the Constitutionnel or the Moniteur, precluded a study of words while composing, and his rapid and correct writing was undoubtedly due to the training obtained ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... 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 a rabble passively combustible." All these atrocities ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... the struggle for existence, it is not necessary for us to know exactly how this has come about; yet it is well to hear the opinions as to such subjects of men who have evidently thought much about them. Therefore we ask for your opinions on the question of the power of adaptation in fecundity. ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... 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 ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... 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
... disproportion increases daily, since the negroes are transferred to one part of the Union as soon as slavery is abolished in the other. Thus the black population augments in the South, not only by its natural fecundity, but by the compulsory emigration of the negroes from the North; and the African race has causes of increase in the South very analogous to those which so powerfully accelerate the growth of the European race in ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... duodecimos he has pyramidized on our book-shelves. Look through any catalogue you will, and you will find that a large proportion of the works in it have been contributed by Anon. The only author who can in the least compete with him in fecundity is Ibid." ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... on one point the philosopher himself, had indeed been written before this, in London lodgings; but his pen was not idle at Claygate; and it was here he wrote (among other things) that review of "Fecundity, Fertility, Sterility, and Allied Topics," which Dr. Matthews Duncan prefixed by way of introduction to the second edition of the work. The mere act of writing seems to cheer the vanity of the most incompetent; but a correction accepted ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all the things that go to make up an understanding of a fellow mortal's real nature they still were to him as completely strangers as they had been on the day he landed in this place. Set down in the midst of a teeming fecundity he nevertheless remained as truly a castaway as though he had floated ashore on a bit of wreckage. He could have been no more and no less a maroon had the island which received him been a desert island ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... 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 may be compared to a gold mine, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... and all the force that man is able to exert is necessary to accomplish such unions, even between species that have the nearest resemblances. And when the mule breeds that are thus produced by these forced conjunctions happen to be fruitful, which is seldom the case, this fecundity never continues beyond a few generations, and would not probably proceed so far without a continuance of the same cares which excited it at first. Thus we never see in a wild state intermediate productions between the hare and the rabbit, between the stag and the doe, or between the marten ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... 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 ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... 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; and the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... the symbol of worship; the word "virgin" then having a somewhat different meaning from that which we give it today, although we may trace the analogy in our use of the term "virgin soil," signifying fecundity. The virgin and child then, popularly supposed by those whose prejudices prevail over their desire for Truth, to have originated with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, antedates history, ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... to their yield of talent, the physical environment was found to have had no perceptible influence. The mountain-situated Geneva and the lowland Paris produced alike prolifically talented men. The valley of the Seine and that of the Loire competed for hegemony in fecundity. The facts contradicted the highland theory, the lowland theory, the coast theory, and every other theory of the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... status of the church, or 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 of ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... profounds the 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
... ecstasy in the 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
... of his august ministry,' and for the purpose, I suppose, of showing how strictly he fulfils the precepts of his mild Master and Redeemer, he styles the Society in question 'an infernal Society,' and speaks of 'its accursed fecundity.' Goodly words! Charitable words! May I be permitted to enquire in what part of the sacred writings he found them recommended? Perhaps in the following text of ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... which 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
... power over the increase of population. The spring of the year, as has already been stated, is the most favourable to fecundity. It is not known whether day and night have ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... 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 hands of Galdos, a further ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... in God there is greater power of fecundity than in us. But in us there is not only one procession of the word, but there are many: for in us from one word proceeds another; and also from one love proceeds another. Therefore in God there are more ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... 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 ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... without deliberation or concert; so the carnal mind, being in its own nature enmity against God, produces, wherever it operates, substantially the same fruits. In an alienated heart there is an intense unwillingness to be or to abide near to God; and there is, consequently, great fecundity in the conception and production of partition walls to shield the conscience from ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... their operation to the blindness of chance. Steps in man and controls and directs them. For the first time in the history of life conscious intelligence forms and transforms life. These yearnings and desires, promptings of the "abysmal fecundity," have in man evolved into what is called "love." They arise in instinct and sensation and culminate in sentiment and emotion. They master man, and the intellect of man, as they master the beast and all the acts of ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... some other circumstances must have been responsible for suggesting the experiments out of which this empirical knowledge emerged. The use of a girdle (a) as a protection against danger to life, and (b) as a means of conferring fecundity on girls[266] provided the circumstances which enabled men to discover that the sexual attractiveness of maidens, which in a state of nature was originally associated with modesty and coyness, was profoundly intensified by the artifices ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... of 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
... animals, the uterus is often divided into two long segments which afford room for the development of a number of young at once. Some ancient writers make most absurd statements with regard to the fecundity of females. One declares that the simultaneous birth of seven or eight infants by the same mother was an ordinary occurrence with Egyptian women! Other statements still more extravagant are made by writers. For example: A traveler in the seventeenth century wrote ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... 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 ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... extraordinary Journey; for Dr. Johnson thus writes to Mrs. Thrale, Nov. 3, 1773:—'Boswell will praise my resolution and perseverance, and I shall in return celebrate his good humour and perpetual cheerfulness. He has better faculties than I had imagined; more justness of discernment, and more fecundity of images. It is very convenient to travel with him; for there is no house where he is not received with kindness and respect.' Let. 90, to Mrs. Thrale. [Piozzi Letters, i. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... 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 with ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... difficult and expensive has become in the modern world the rearing and training of even one individual, in a manner suited to fit it for coping with the complexities and difficulties of civilised life, that, to the family as well as to the state, unlimited fecundity on the part of the female has already, in most cases, become irremediable evil; whether it be in the case of the artisan, who at the cost of immense self-sacrifice must support and train his children till their twelfth or ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... as to the elbow, and the feet, summarily indicated, emerge from a long sheath-form robe. As for the arms and hands, they project slightly and are rather outlined than sculptured. The left hand grasps a fruit, the emblem of fecundity, while the right held a painted crown, the traces of which have now entirely disappeared. It suffices to look at this sarcophagus to recognize the exclusively Phenician character of it, and the complete analogy with the monuments of the same species met with in Phenicia, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... 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
... 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
... very great. His fecundity was prodigious, and he wrote at will in seven languages. 'This polyglot facility was not in itself a very remarkable circumstance, for it grew out of his necessary education and geographical position. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... list of authors to be more brilliant. The Emperor may have instituted those prizes, as his apologists declared he himself said that he did, to keep active minds from occupying themselves with politics; but the exhibition of how the Empire had crushed out originality and fecundity in the French brain must have appalled him, whatever ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... "the great Italian Yankee," because of his multifarious and ingenious suggestions in the world of material things, so our own Edison may be called "the Yankee Leonardo," for, with a curiosity ranging over the whole world of nature, equal to that of the Italian, and with a fecundity of invention no less bewildering, he unites, like Leonardo, an imaginative and poetical vein that lifts his devices into the domain ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... 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 of his imagination ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... 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 ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... 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 ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... flourished, as he said, the only corn-fields in the 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, exhibited ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... comb-building and filling; the care and feeding of the young, the guardian-service of the queen; and far beyond that it would spread to the blue glory of the summer sky, the fresh winds, the endless beauty and sweetness of a thousand thousand flowers. It would treat of the vast fecundity of motherhood, the educative and selective processes of the group-mothers; and the passion of loyalty, of social service, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... green in the level evening light, to the darkening woods beyond, gilt-tipped in the setting sun. There were fields of ripening yellow grain, of lusty young corn that grew almost as we watched it: the warm winds of evening were heavy with the acrid odours of fecundity. Fecundity! In that lay the elusive yet insistent charm of that country; and Nancy's, of course, was the transforming touch that made it paradise. It was thus, in the country, I suggested that we should spend the rest of our existence. What was the use of amassing ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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, and she could ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... unfortunate exiles, must excite the contempt of a philosophic emperor; but they deserved the friendship of Julian, by their implacable hatred of the Christian name. The barren synagogue abhorred and envied the fecundity of the rebellious church; the power of the Jews was not equal to their malice; but their gravest rabbis approved the private murder of an apostate; and their seditious clamors had often awakened the indolence ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... position, torches having been burnt on the wedding evening to insure prosperity to the newly-married couple, and both in Greece and Rome young married couples were crowned with marjoram. At Roman weddings, too, oaken boughs were carried during the ceremony as symbols of fecundity; and the bridal wreath was of verbena, plucked by the bride herself. Holly wreaths were sent as tokens of congratulation, and wreaths of parsley and rue were given under a belief that they were effectual preservatives against evil spirits. In Germany, nowadays, a wreath of ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... 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
... "The fecundity of the people of reason is extreme. It is very rare to find a married couple with less than five or six children, while there are hundreds who have from twelve to fifteen. Very few of them die in their ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... birth, with a fiery fecundity of invention, to book after book of the long list of Novels that make up his story of life, there took shape in his mind a definite intention: to become the Secretary of an Age of which he declared society to be the historian. He wished to ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... his recital, his verses pleased the Overseer and he wondered at his words and savoured their grace and fecundity and said to them, "By Allah, ye possess both beauty and eloquence. But now listen to me, you twain!" And he began chanting, and recited in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... foes, numberless enemies among the foxes, wolves, hawks, and other birds. The fecundity of the survivors, however, keeps pace with the many fatalities to which ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... credulous, and fanciful; but he is not mad. On the contrary, his earnest playfulness, the constant distraction of his attention from observation to daydreams, is the sign of an inward order and fecundity appropriate to his age. If children did not see visions, good men would have nothing to work for. It is the soul of observant persons, like Matthew Arnold, that is apt not to be quite sane and whole inwardly, but somewhat warped by familiarity with the perversities of real ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... to the southward," replied Swinton; "the migration of these animals is one of the most remarkable proofs of the fecundity of animal life. Like the ants, they devour everything before them; and if we journey in the direction they have come from, we shall find no food for the cattle until after the rains. After the rains fall, these animals will return ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... sake of health 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 intercourse was properly regulated during the same ...
— Safe Marriage - A Return to Sanity • Ettie A. Rout
... 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 ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... 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 ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... 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
... shields, on which were represented the arms of the two empires; and behind this group came magistrates, warriors, and the people presenting crowns. At the two extremities of the transparencies were represented the Seine and the Danube, surrounded by children-image of fecundity. The twelve columns of the peristyle and the staircase were illuminated; and the columns were united by garlands of colored lights, the statues on the peristyle and the steps also bearing lights. The bridge Louis XV., by which this Temple of Hymen was reached, formed in itself an avenue, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... beardless, resembling in many respects the aborigines of North America, and as Columbus described them in his first communication to his royal patrons, were "loving, tractable, and peaceable; though entirely naked, their manners were decorous and praiseworthy." The wonderful fecundity of the soil, its range of noble mountains, its widespread and well-watered plains, with its extended coast line and excellent harbors, all challenged the admiration of the discoverers, so that Columbus recorded in his journal these words: "It is the most beautiful island that eyes ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... certain 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 ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... described as a goddess of nature in 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 supposed to cause a ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... often to deal with, the whole of his vast view of the truth is recalled in his treatment of every one of them, as the whole sky is mirrored in a single drop of dew. What could be a more impressive proof of the fecundity of his mind than the fact that, amid the innumerable distractions of a second visit to his Greek converts, he should have written in half a year three such books as Romans, ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... after introducing himself as a plain and unlettered man, launched out into a wonderfully vigorous and picturesque description of those Islands of Paradise which bloom like gardens amid the blue waters of the Pacific Ocean. He described the fecundity and luxuriance of Nature, drew word-portraits of the mild, brown-skinned Polynesians, wept over their enthralment by a debased system of idolatry, and painted the blessings which would befall them when converted to the gentle religion of Christ. Baltic ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... from it is, that we can, as it were, extend the range of our experience to an immense duration. For, to continue the simile which I have borrowed from the vegetable kingdom, is it not almost the same thing whether we live successively to witness the germination, blooming, foliage, fecundity, fading, withering, and corruption of a plant, or whether a vast number of specimens, selected from every stage through which the plant passes in the course of its existence, be brought at ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... supported by the 'Trois Rats' and its frequenters. One series in particular, representing a robin overcome by the seduction of a glass of absinthe and passing through all the stages of delirium tremens, had a grim inventiveness, a fecundity of half humorous, half pathetic fancy, which held ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the civilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and demoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity. The confident and optimistic Radicalism of the earlier nineteenth century, and the humanitarian philanthropic type of Liberalism, have bogged themselves beyond hope in these realizations. The Socialist has shirked them as he has shirked the older crux of Malthus. Liberalism is a thing of ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... (for it is as 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 best. Its narrow bounds, but fourteen paces from end to end, turn into ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... 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 ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... 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 of them, not having even intelligence ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... prize-man, the flower of the species. "Children" too?—very happy, beautiful, heart-gladdening creations—God bless them all, and scatter those who love them not!—but still for a proof of more than average humanity, somewhat common, somewhat overwhelming: rabbits beat us here, with all our fecundity, so offensive to Martineau and Malthus. But as to "books"—common enough, too, smirks gentle reader: pardon, courteous sir, most rare—at least in my sense; I speak not of flat current shillings, but the bold medallions of ancient Syracuse; I heed not the dull thousands of minted gold and ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... to him as possible of proof as of confutation and the nomenclature employed in its selenographical charts as attributable to verifiable intuition as to fallacious analogy: the lake of dreams, the sea of rains, the gulf of dews, the ocean of fecundity. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... of the early wars for democracy. The seeds of universal freedom once sown, finally ripened not alone to the unshackling of a race, but to the fecundity and birth of a spirit that moved all nations and peoples to seek an enlarged liberty. The finger of disintegration and change is never still; is always on the move; always the old order is passing; always the new, although ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... 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 Mosheim, Eccl. Hist. v. iii . cent. xii. p. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... one 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 ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... how to interest with the ordinary events of life, and by the portrayal of characters truly human. If the former is a talent, it must be owned that it is much commoner than the latter . . . . If we are to rate novelists according to their fecundity, or the riches of their invention, we must put Alexander Dumas above Cervantes. Cervantes wrote a novel with the simplest plot, without belying much or little the natural and logical course of events. This novel which was called 'Don Quixote,' is perhaps ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... from the Irish Channel to the Danube 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.[35] The continent was covered ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... have a more convenient hypothesis? Do you not perceive its fecundity? And, the task being so very difficult, will it not be benevolent in me to lend her my assistance? What think you? Is it not possible to prove that ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... New York to receive 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
... The relation of plant carotinoids to growth, fecundity and reproduction of fowls. J. Biol. Chem., 1916, ...
— The Vitamine Manual • Walter H. Eddy
... are, given away at Easter throughout Europe, are not of Christian origin, but belong to the Roman celebration (at the same season, viz., April 12th to 15th) of the goddess of Plenty—Ceres. Eggs are the symbols of fecundity and the renewal of life in the spring. They were decorated and given in baskets by rich Romans to their friends and dependents at this season. "Hot-cross buns" are peculiar to England, and no doubt have a Christian significance. They have ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... and senses which are utterly dulled. The Calabrian doctors prescribed the dance as a remedy for the hysteric affections which are common among the women of their country; and the Arabs use a somewhat similar recipe for the highbred mares, whose too lively temperament hinders their fecundity. 'Dull as a dancer' is a familiar proverb at the theatre. In fact, the best brains of Europe are convinced that dancing brings with ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... 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 incidents in ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... 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 ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... coffee at my own meals, so that the chief, or some one of the principal men, might partake along with me. They all soon become very fond of coffee; and, indeed, some of the tribes attribute greater fecundity to the daily use of this beverage. They were all well acquainted with the sugar-cane, as they cultivate it in the Barotse country, but knew nothing of the method of extracting the sugar from it. They use the cane only for chewing. Sekeletu, relishing the sweet coffee and biscuits, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... grim 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 Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... ingenious and impecunious Eugene had not managed to forestall. Not a week went by that he did not tax the fertility of his active brain to wheedle Collins Shackelford, the cashier, into breaking into his envelope for five or ten dollars in advance. These appeals came in every form that Field's fecundity could invent. When all other methods failed the presence of "Pinny" or "Melvin" in the office would afford a messenger and plan of action that was always crowned with success. "Pinny" especially seemed to enter into his father's schemes to move Shackelford's sympathy ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... visitors to a coral islet found almost innumerable sea birds and eggs. The multitude of birds and their prodigious fecundity inspired the thought that the "rookery" for the whole breadth of the Indian Ocean had been discovered. Investigations showed that the islet was also the abiding-place of a certain species of lizard which subsisted entirely on eggs. It was calculated that ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... "Presents of beautiful baby clothes are arriving from friends and relatives." Same old gush, gush, gush! slop, slop, slop! that has set the nation retching three times already. Good Lord! will it never end? The fecundity of that family is becoming an American nightmare. Will the time ever come when a married woman of social prominence can get into "a delicate condition" without having the fact heralded over the country as brazenly as though she had ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... evidently the original of the woolly "baa-lamb" of the nursery, with long, fleecy wool. The Oxford Downs are a short-woolled sheep. One of the flocks of this breed has been improved by selection, mainly in regard to fecundity, to such an extent that I believe twins are the normal proportion among the lambs. The shepherds, as elsewhere on the large down farms, form a race apart. They are not always on the best of terms with the ordinary farm labourers, I notice. "The shepherd be a working ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... about the middle of the last century, and has since then increased to such an extent as to swarm over the whole country, and render the old English black rat a comparatively rare animal. From its ferocity and fecundity the brown rat is a veritable pest; if it cannot beat a retreat from an enemy it will show most determined fight, and in large numbers will attack and kill even men. A story is related by Robert Stephenson, the great engineer, that in a coal-pit in which many horses were employed, the rats, allured ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... images, and similes, we shall find the invention still predominant. To what else can we ascribe that vast comprehension of images of every sort, where we see each circumstance of art, and individual of nature, summoned together by the extent and fecundity of his imagination to which all things, in their various views presented themselves in an instant, and had their impressions taken off to perfection at a heat? Nay, he not only gives us the full prospects of things, but several unexpected peculiarities and side views, unobserved ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... if the soul should be nourished with body, it would carry itself better there, where the fecundity of the material is, (as Jamblichus argues); so that when a large fat body presents itself, we should imagine that it were the habitation of a strong soul, firm, ready and heroic, and we should say: Oh, fat soul, oh, fecund spirit, oh, fine ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... borne in mind that this is equal to 7,272 passengers every hour, and that the length of line worked by the company's engines, including that of the "foreign" line worked, is slightly less than 25 miles, the fecundity in traffic of the metropolitan district must be said to be marvelous. It is to be regretted that the official account from which these figures are given does not give any idea of the number of passengers in the different classes, for such a return would be of value. It is a marvelous ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... 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! ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... cessation of the Black Plague, a greater fecundity in women was everywhere remarkable—a grand phenomenon, which, from its occurrence after every destructive pestilence, proves to conviction, if any occurrence can do so, the prevalence of a higher power in ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... said: 'Nay, pluck not,—let the first fruit be: Even as thou sayest, it is sweet and red, But let it ripen still. The tree's bent head Sees in the stream its own fecundity And bides the day of fulness. Shall not we At the sun's hour that day possess the shade, And claim our fruit before its ripeness fade, And eat it from the branch and ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... 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. The greater number of the contrasts which were formerly supposed to exist have disappeared before the laborious researches of Tiedemann on the brain of negroes and of Europeans, and the anatomical investigations of Vrolik and Weber ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... maliciousness of the world. This feeling will doubtless never change. The 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? ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... 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 of animals would increase rapidly if unchecked, ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... and breadth of thought, by his profound understanding of life, by the intensity of his dreams, Alfred de Vigny is superior to Victor Hugo, whose genius was quite different, in his power to portray picturesque scenes, in his remarkable fecundity of imagination, and in his sovereign ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... 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 ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... 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 twenty-five ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... which he was himself subject, aided him in the 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 ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... parsimony. If a man is killed in a duel, he is killed as many a one has been killed; but it is a sad thing for a man to lie down and die; to bleed to death, because he has not fortitude enough to sear the wound, or even to stitch it up.' I cannot but pause a moment to admire the fecundity of fancy, and choice of language, which in this instance, and, indeed, on almost all occasions, he displayed. It was well observed by Dr. Percy, now Bishop of Dromore, 'The conversation of Johnson is strong and clear, and may be compared to an antique statue, where every vein and muscle is distinct ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... the 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 ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... 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 a century doubles ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... become a terrific property. No such property in the world, unless it were New York! There was a lot of hysteria in the papers nowadays; but any one who, like himself, could remember London sixty years ago, and see it now, realised the fecundity and elasticity of wealth. They had only to keep their heads, and go at it steadily. Why! he remembered cobblestones, and stinking straw on the floor of your cab. And old Timothy—what could he not have told them, if he had kept his memory! Things ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... nothing. Nevertheless, Nathan maintains his ground by the quickness of his mind, by those lucky hits which billiard-players call a "good stroke." He is the cleverest shot at ideas on the fly in all Paris. His fecundity is not his own, but that of his epoch; he lives on chance events, and to control them he distorts their meaning. In short, he is not true; his presentation is false; in him, as Comte Felix said, is the born ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... fondness. As Jack listened, the fragrance of flowers was in his nostrils and in intervals between Jasper Ewold's sentences he seemed to hear the rustle of borning leaf-fronds breaking the silence. But the narrative was not an idyll. Toil and patience had been the handmaidens of the fecundity of the soil. Prosperity had brought an entail of problems. Jasper Ewold mentioned them briefly, as if he would not ask a guest to share the shadows which they brought ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... de Marolles in the 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 ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... above value to the student in the development of his mechanism and the formation of his style. A strong characteristic of the composer is his almost redundant profusion of ideas;[89] but his rich fecundity of invention is greatly counterbalanced by diffuseness of design, resulting from the want of that power of condensation by means of which greater interest is often ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... entire, or partial secessions from the agricultural body, was not so extensively beneficial as might at first be imagined. All this time the population was in a state of rapid progression, both from the daily influx of people from without, and from the amazing fecundity of the colonists within. The distress, therefore, of the colony continued increasing in proportion to its increasing population. And although it may appear strange, that while it was a subject of such notoriety, that the settlers were ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... South Panel; Vanity in center with handglass; man and woman with children, representing Fecundity, ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... another not; then, in all such cases, difference of structure proves difference of kind. (2.) Physiological; that is, the internal nature, indicated by habits and instincts, furnishes another safe criterion. (3.) Permanent fecundity. The progenitors of the same species reproduce their kind from generation to generation; the progeny of different species, although nearly allied, do not. It is a fixed law of nature that species never can be annihilated, except by all ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... 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 ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... comedy upon the gods, the institutions, the politicians, philosophers, 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 ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... movements in flight omens were drawn, but also spirits of fertility. When the childless Indian sage Mandapala of the Mahabharata was refused admittance to heaven until a son was born to him, he "pondered deeply" and "came to know that of all creatures birds alone were blest with fecundity"; so he ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... already! 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 ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... was therefore viewed as free, but at the same time responsible. Immediately, as if fecundity were the reward of correctness, the German theatre became filled with true and living characters. The stage widens under their steps that they may have room to move. History with its great proportions and its terrible ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... 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, ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... previously requisite that 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 a whole, like all the other bodies ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... finds in her wonderful fecundity wherewith to supply the new wants which arise in ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... 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 ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... 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, called 'Phallics,' full ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... eggs, it helps the matter but very little. There is still an anomaly. There is but one perfect female in a nest to germinate eggs, and the myriads produced (being over 80,000 in twenty-four hours, according to some historians) shows that the fecundity of our queen-bee is not a parallel case by any means. And yet they are similar, by having their offspring provided for without an ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... the mother 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 ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... Sleep, is the crouched form of a woman, while successively come the Awakening, the Ecstatic Joy of Being - or it may be the Realization of Living; the Kiss of Life, with the human pair offering up their children, representative of the beginnings of fecundity; a female, strong of limb and superb of physique, enfolds in her arms two infants, while her mate, of no less powerful build and rude force, kneeling beside her, gives her an embrace typical of the overpowering parental instinct. Here is the suggestion of ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... in heaven, reflected how best he could obtain the largest number of offspring within the shortest period of time. The Rishi, after reflection, understood that of all creatures birds alone were blest with fecundity. Assuming the form of a Sarngaka the Rishi had connection with a female bird of the same species called by the name of Jarita. And he begat upon her four sons who were all reciters of the Vedas. Leaving all those sons of his with ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... The conical Syrian helmet 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 ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... He is an adept at 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 and inevitableness ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... occur when the circumferences of the circles of each are completed, which in short-lived existences pass over a short space, and in long-lived ones over a long space. But to the knowledge of human fecundity and sterility all the wisdom and education of your rulers will not attain; the laws which regulate them will not be discovered by an intelligence which is alloyed with sense, but will escape them, and they will bring children into the world when they ought ...
— The Republic • Plato
... Dissenters"; and we are told that from "June 1687 to almost the very week of his death in 1731 a stream of controversial books and pamphlets poured from his pen commenting upon and marking every important passing event." The fecundity of Defoe as a journalist alone surpasses that of any great journalist we can name, William Cobbett not excepted, and we may add that the style of "Captain Singleton," like that of "Robinson Crusoe," is so perfect that there is not a single ineffective passage, or indeed a weak sentence, ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... the scene of one of those terrible puerperal epidemics which breathe death upon human fecundity, of one of those cases of atmospheric poisoning which empty, in a twinkling and by whole rows, the beds of women lately delivered, and which once caused the closing of La Clinique. They believed that it was a visitation of the plague, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... lambs compared with man as a destroyer, we must conclude that nature has been able to find in man alone a sufficient barrier against the too great multiplication of other animals and of man himself, an equilibrating power against the fecundity of generation. While, in making these observations, my situation points my attention to the warfare of man in the physical world, yours may perhaps present him as equally ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Rousseau's. If he had been devoid of this feeling about women, his character might very possibly have remained sterile. That feeling was the complementary contribution, without which could be no fecundity. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... 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 continuity ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... the unmeasured and unsparing license of attack assumed by these comedies upon the gods, the institutions, the politicians, philosophers, poets, private citizens, and women of Athens. With this universal liberty of subject there is combined a poignancy of derision and satire, a fecundity of imagination, and a richness of poetical expression such as cannot be surpassed. Towards the end of the career of Aristophanes, however, this unrestricted license of the comedy began ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... 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
... melodiousness, which is one of Spenser's signal characteristics, may be perceived in his Eclogues, as also a native gracefulness of style, which is another distinguishing mark of him. Perceivable, too, are his great, perilous fluency of language and his immense fecundity of mind. The work at once secured him a front place in the poetical ranks of the day. Sidney mentions it in his Apologie for Poetrie;{5} Abraham Fraunce draws illustrations from it in his Lawyers Logicke, which appeared in 1588; Meres praises it; 'Maister Edmund Spenser,' says Drayton, ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... the fecundity of the literature of the Victorian Age in its middle period, and especially on the publications which adorned the decade from 1850 to 1859. He calls those years, very justly, "marvellous and almost unexampled" in their rich ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... most characteristic modern decorations employed by the Hopi, especially as a symbol of fecundity, is the butterfly or moth. It is a constant device on the beautiful white or cotton blankets woven by the men as wedding gifts, where it is embroidered on the margin in the forms of triangles or even in more realistic patterns. This symbol is a simple triangle, which becomes quite realistic ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... ranked in Assyria next to the Triad consisting of Anu, Bel, and Hoa. She is generally mentioned in close connection with Bel, her husband, in the Assyrian records. She appears to have been regarded in Assyria as especially "the queen of fertility," or "fecundity," and so as "the queen of the lands," thus resembling the Greek Demeter, who, like Beltis, was known as: "the Great Mother." Sargon placed one of his gates under the protection of Beltis in conjunction with her husband, Bel: and Asshur-bani-pal, his ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... marvelous example of Mr. De Morgan's inexhaustible fecundity of invention.... Shines as a romance quite as much as 'Joseph Vance' does among ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... 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 ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... darkness, Even as the banners And spear of the Morning; Sifting the nations, The Slag from the metal, The waste and the weak From the fit and the strong; Fighting the brute, The abysmal Fecundity; Checking the gross Multitudinous blunders, The groping, the purblind Excesses in service Of the Womb ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... 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 ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... 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 vine, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
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