"Silt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... popularly judged upon the principle of opposing most strongly anything that was supposed to find favour with the Government. Last session a strong wish to do SOMETHING caused the Legislature to advocate a scheme which many persons think would cause the mouth of the River Swan to silt up, and expose the town of Fremantle to danger, lest the river in flood should burst out (as no doubt it did formerly) into the South Bay over the town site. The question, however, is referred to the Victorian Government engineer, and the Melbourne ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... the ship to completely unrecognizable debris might have to be accomplished eventually, but it certainly was not immediately possible. However, perception told him that the heavy vessel was already hidden beneath silt and stagnant water. It would be safe for a while from accidental discovery. The Challonari was self-sustaining and could survive untended for years, if necessary, serving to keep the area clear of wild life that might draw hunters of the dominant species ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... coast of Florida and through her keys, until it joins the other branch. Inside the Gulf stream, along the coast of Texas, is the counter-current before referred to, making down the coast at the rate of two to three miles per hour, and bringing down the silt and mud of the Mississippi, Sabine, etc. I have seen the water off the Island of Galveston the color of chocolate, after a ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... had shunted him, the alien strayed away from the sea, which he hated, as far as the district covered by Engine Company No. 99. Light as a cork, he was kept bobbing along by the human tide, the cruelest atom in all the silt of the stream that emptied into the reservoir ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... zealous antiquary, writing in 1855, informs us that in the course of the eight years preceding that date, no less than seventeen canoes had been dug out of this estuarine silt [of the valley of the Clyde], and that he had personally inspected a large number of them before they were exhumed. Five of them lay buried in silt under the streets of Glasgow, one in a vertical position with the prow ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... tropical vegetation which makes a green and tangled girdle around D'Urban for a dozen miles inland: yonder is the white and foaming line of breakers which marks where the strong current, sweeping down the east coast, brings along with it all the sand and silt it can collect, especially from the mouth of the Umgeni River close by, and so forms the dreaded bar, which divides the outer from the inner harbor. Beyond this crisp and sparkling line of heaving, tossing snow stretches the deep indigo-blue of the Indian Ocean, whilst over all wonderful sunset ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... the Wady 'Afr takes the name of "El-Bad." Sweeping from west to east, it is deflected to a north-south line, roughly speaking, by the gate of the Shigdawayn, twin-hills standing nearly east and west of one another. Now become a broad, well-defined, tree-dotted bed, with stiff silt banks, here and there twenty to twenty-five feet high, it runs on a meridian for about a mile, including the palm-orchard and the camping-ground. It then turns the west end of the Jebel el-Safr, a mass ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... you look at me as though I had used a strange word. Silt is the deposit of mud, sand, or earth of any kind carried up and down streams by the tide or other current. But the river engineers here are constantly removing it; the course is kept open, and the Hoogly pilots are very skilful. The ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... experiment is made very carefully in a proper way this material can be separated from the pure clay. It is called silt, but really there are a number of silts, some almost like clay and some almost like sand; they shade one ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... not Medeland with its wealth of woods, Fair Ganges, Hermus thick with golden silt, Can match the praise of Italy.... Here blooms perpetual spring, and summer here In months that are not summer's; twice teem the flocks: Twice does the tree yield service of her fruit. Mark too, her cities, so many and so proud, Of mighty toil ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... the boys betook themselves, treading the way gingerly over the tenacious but slippery surface. Will pointed to a half barrel sunk level in the ooze. It was full to the brim with fine silt. ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... roads. For more than 1600 miles the Nile flows without an affluent; in the spring it falls so low that its channel becomes almost unnavigable; but in the late summer, its waters, swollen by the rains and melted snows of Central Africa, and laden with the fertilising silt of the Abyssinian mountains, spread over the cultivated country, and ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... groan, Rustum bewail'd:— "Oh, that its waves were flowing over me! Oh, that I saw its grains of yellow silt Roll tumbling in the ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... tall graceful plant, named by the Jesuits 'folle avoine,' and by the English 'wild rice.' The long drooping ears filled with very large grains, black outside and white within, shook down their contents into the silt at bottom with every movement which waved their seven-feet stems. Arthur knew it as a noted haunt of wild duck, a cloud of which arose when ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... has been employed by Mr Chantrey. A small strip of a fir-tree, a branch of holly, a curled leaf of broccoli, or any other vegetable production, is suspended by one end in a small cylinder of paper which is placed for support within a similarly formed tin case. The finest river silt, carefully separated from all the coarser particles, and mixed with water, so as to have the consistency of cream, is poured into the paper cylinder by small portions at a time, carefully shaking the plant a little after each addition, in order that its leaves ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... that your room will some day again be shrouded under a forest growth. The mechanical city will be neglected, tumbled into ruins, buried beneath the silt of the passing centuries. The sun will slowly rise—a giant dull red ball, burning out, cooling. And the Earth will cool. Humans, perhaps, will have passed decadence and reverted to savagery. Perhaps the polar ice-caps ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... The jaw would thus be deposited immediately, while the rest of the body would float and drift away altogether, ultimately reaching the sea, and perhaps becoming destroyed. The jaw becomes covered up and preserved in the river silt, and thus it comes that we have such a curious circumstance as that of the lower jaws in the Stonesfield slates. So that, you see, faulty as these layers of stone in the earth's crust are, defective ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... the two Rockley girls really liked it better, or whether they only imagined they did, is a question. Certainly their lives were much more grey and dreary now that the grey clay had ceased to spatter its mud and silt its dust over the premises. They did not quite realize how they missed the shrieking, shouting lasses, whom they had known all their lives and disliked ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... lonely and magnificent in guilt, Splendid in scorn, rapt in a cloudy dream, He paused at last upon the Stygian silt, And raised calm eyes above the angry stream.... Hand in his breast, he stood till Charon came, While Hades hummed with ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... deep ravine numerous fossil bones, belonging chiefly to the mastodon, and extinct species of the horse, deer, and llama. They were imbedded in the middle of an unstratified cliff, four hundred feet high, of very compact silt or trachytic clay, free from stones, and resting on a hard quartzoze sandstone. In the bed of the stream which runs through the ravine (charged with nitrate of soda) are some igneous rocks. The bones were drifted to this ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... parts of the valley of the Nile threatened, by hordes of sand hills marching in from the desert; cities have been buried and harbors filled up. Many of the harbors of the ancient civilizations are mere miasmatic marshes now. This is partly in consequence of the silt brought in by the rivers; but where the rivers do not flow in it is because the sand blows in along the shore. Harbors are especially endangered when their protection from the waves consists of a bank of sand, as on Cape Cod and the Sandy Hook below the ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... you will actually find along some English shores—under the sand hills, perhaps a bed of earth with shells and bones; under that a bed of peat; under that one of blue silt; under that a buried forest, with the trees upright and rooted; under that another layer of blue silt full of roots and vegetable fibre; perhaps under that again another old land surface with trees again growing in it; and under all the main ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... of Mexico formerly reached to where Cairo, Ill., now is. Washings from the land, during the slow-moving centuries, pushed the shoreline ever outward; the humus of decaying vegetation raised the ground surface still higher. This section of Louisiana, built by the silt of the Mississippi, was of course the ...
— The Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor of New Orleans • Thomas Ewing Dabney
... concealed by sage, not ten minutes' walk from the Ferry inn, unknown to the map-maker and innocent of all use, lay a perfect floor for evening pacing with one's eyes upon the stars. It was the death mask of an ancient lake, done in purest alkali silt, and needing only the shadows cast by a low moon to make the illusion almost unbelievable. Slow precipitation, season after season, as the water dried, had left the lake bed smooth as a cast in plaster. Subsequent warpings had lifted the ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... were thick and the silt and sand Were gathered day by day, Till not a furlong out from land A ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... Mesopotamian rivers contains five times as much sediment as the Nile. In fact, one of the most pressing of the problems the Sumerian and early Babylonian engineers had to solve was the keeping of the canals free from silt.(1) What the floods, if left unchecked, may do in Mesopotamia, is well illustrated by the decay of the ancient canal-system, which has been the immediate cause of the country's present state of sordid desolation. That the decay ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... the initial examination, attention should be given to the removal of dirt, silt, grease and other foreign matter from the fingers. Soap and water are good cleansing agents. So is xylene, a chemical which will readily clean grease and fatty matter from the fingers. Good results ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... to the geologist, from the nuts of a similar plant abounding in the tertiary formations at the mouth of the Thames, and having floated about there in as great profusion as here, till buried deep in the silt and mud that now forms the island of Sheppey.* [Bowerbank "On the Fossil Fruits and Seeds of the Isle of Sheppey," and Lyell's "Elements of Geology," ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... Colorado River. The main stream of the district is the Virgin, with a drainage area of 11,000 square miles, Muddy River and Santa Clara Creek being its main tributaries. It is a torrential stream, subject to sudden floods and carrying much silt. A section of its valley in the northwestern corner of the present Arizona, near Littlefield, is to be dammed in the near future for the benefit of small farms that have been cultivated for many years and for carrying out irrigation ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... miles from Ponce, in a hollow among limestone hills, now environed by a coffee plantation. Here are found three basins—results of erosion, most likely—that are described as natural bath-tubs. The middle and largest of these pools is partly filled with silt, probably occluding the entrance to a cavern which formerly opened into it, a fathom or so below the water-surface. This cave was the hiding-place of a native woman whose father had discovered her love for one of Ponce de Leon's soldiers. ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... the river trail, and come constantly nearer and nearer. All the streams that are confluent with the Tanana on its left bank are glacial streams draining the high ice of these mountains. They come down laden thick with silt, at times foaming torrents, at times merely trickling watercourses that seam with numerous small runnels the wide deltas at their mouths. The tributaries of the right bank flow for the most part through heavily wooded country, and come out cleanly into the river. So the glacial waters ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... some of these mounds, exposing brick vaults, some so low as to be under water part of the time, and we wonder if the fact does not also record a slow subsidence of the delta plain under the ever increasing load of river silt. ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... been removed, and now the light lay, yellow and vivid, on a red clinker of coal and a charred piece of stick. A piece of glossy white paper had been flung in the untidy grate, and in the hollow curve of it a thin silt of black dust had gathered—the light showed it plainly. All these things the boy marked and was subtly aware of their unpleasantness. He was forced to read to escape the sense of them. But it was words, words, words, that he read; the subject ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... the empire of India and the second city in the British Empire. Although situated on an arm of the delta of the Ganges, eighty miles inland, Calcutta is an immense seaport, but its sea-going privileges can be maintained only by great engineering works, because of the silt which the Ganges is constantly bringing down and depositing in its seaward channels. Calcutta enjoys almost a monopoly of the whole trade of the Ganges and Brahmapootra valleys, and until the building ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... an exact chronological statement throwing light on the length of the various prehistoric periods, the most notable have been those by M. Morlot, on the accumulated strata of the Lake of Geneva; by Gillieron, on the silt of Lake Neufchatel; by Horner, in the delta deposits of Egypt; and by Riddle, in the delta of the Mississippi. But while these have failed to give anything like an exact result, all these investigations ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... and called his family together and said that they would first improve the tank and then find wives for all his sons. The sons agreed and they collected coolies and drained off the water and began to dig out the silt. When they had drained off the water they found in the bed of the tank a number of big fish of unknown age: which they caught and two of them they sent to the Raja as a present. When the fish were carried into the presence of the Raja they both began to ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... rattle of loosened gravel and earth sliding into the gully. The wash widened and opened out into a sandy flat. Link crossed this and turned up on the opposite side. Rocks impeded the progress of the car, and these had to be rolled out of the way. The shelves of silt, apparently ready to slide with the slightest weight, the little tributary washes, the boulder-strewn stretches of slope, the narrow spaces allowing no more than a foot for the outside wheels, the spear-pointed cactus that had to be avoided—all these obstacles were as nothing to the cowboy ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... individual, the slow but sure disintegrator of the body politic, the dry-rot of nations, before which the mightiest empires have crumbled into dust. The lagoons of Venice mirror it in the departed grandeur of her palaces, overthrown by the licentiousness of her merchant princes. The mute sands that silt up the ruins of old empires are eloquent of it. The most brilliant civilization the world has even seen through it became the most transitory. Even the vast and massive structure of the Roman Empire, undermined by moral corruption, vanished before barbarian ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... river in the Punjab is no small matter,' said her husband. 'For me, a stream that leaves good silt on my land suffices, and I thank Bhumia, the God of the Home-stead.' He shrugged one knotted, ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... among the alders lie their derelict foundations, The beams wherein they trusted and the plinths whereon they built— My rulers and their treasure and their unborn populations, Dead, destroyed, aborted, and defiled with mud and silt! ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... its commerce to Venice precisely the same questions are in course of debate which again and again, ever since Venice was a city, have put her senate at pause—namely, how to hold in check the continually advancing morass formed by the silt brought down by the Alpine rivers. Is it not strange that for at least six hundred years the Venetians have been contending with those rivers at their mouths—that is to say, where their strength ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and Wyoming the "high plains," the last of the four great divisions of the plains, extend as far as western Texas. These, like the prairies, have been built up by deposits brought from other regions. In this case, however, the deposits consist of gravel, sand, and silt which the rivers have gradually washed out from the Rocky Mountains. As the rivers have changed their courses from one bed to another, layer after layer has been laid down to form a vast plain like a gently sloping beach hundreds of miles wide. In most places the streams are no longer building this ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... canal between the Nile and the Red Sea, which had been originally constructed by Seti I. and Ramesses II., but had been allowed to fall into disrepair. The Nile mud and the desert sand had combined to silt it up. Neco commenced excavations on a large scale, following the line of the old cutting, but greatly widening it, so that triremes might meet in it and pass each other, without shipping their oars. After a time, however, he felt compelled to desist, without effecting ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... developed, in order to keep the deep channel of the Skookum from filling, he had the pipes from the dredger run out to the Sawdust Pile and covered the unsightly spot with six feet of rich river-silt up to ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... doubt and misgivings, uncertain whether he had crossed the Divide at all, Mackenzie ordered the canoe down this river. Snowy peaks were on every side. Glaciers lay along the mountain tarns, icy green from the silt of the glacier grinding over rock; and the river was hemmed in by shadowy canons with roaring cascades that compelled frequent portage. Mackenzie wanted to walk ahead, in order to lighten the canoe and look out for danger; but fear had got in the ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... dark and drear. Clouds hung heavily in the sky and the moorland was wrapt in a fine mist so peculiar to that district. The roads were heavy, and one could hear the silt crush beneath ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... then, with hands and knife, working cautiously and noiselessly he began to enlarge the basin, drawing out stones, scooping out silt ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... By restraining the streams in flood and replenishing them in drought they make possible the use of waters otherwise wasted. They prevent the soil from washing, and so protect the storage reservoirs from filling up with silt. Forest conservation is therefore an ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt
... came rolling through the cave. We know this to be so, because in places it broke up this layer of stalagmite and washed it away, as well as large portions of the breccia below, and after the floods had ceased, occasionally inundations still threw down layers of mud and silt. This accumulation is known as cave earth, and is the layer containing the numerous remains of the Cave-men. Here the explorers were not only struck with the large number of implements, but at once noticed that they were of a higher form and better made. Instead of the rude ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... altered the course and ran along parallel with the coast. Charmian was at the wheel. Martin was at the engine, ready to throw on the propeller. A narrow silt of an opening showed up suddenly. Through the glasses I could see the seas breaking clear across. Henry, the Rapa man, looked with troubled eyes; so did ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... trench should not be carried nearer than within six inches of the surface of the ground, and should be covered with fine and well-packed earth to prevent the entrance of surface-water which would soon carry in silt enough to stop its action. Whatever covering is adopted for the walk itself, it must be of such a character as to prevent any thing like a free admission of surface-water. Concrete will do this perfectly; and either ashes, or gravel dressed at the top with ashes, if well raked and rolled at ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... in flight, And swans be swifter than hawks of the tower, And wrens set gos-hawks by force and might, And muskets make verjuice of crabbes sour, And ships sail on dry land, silt give flower, And apes in Westminster give judgment and sentence, Then put ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... largest channel was a swift broad stream called the Dhaus. The river is very capricious, seldom flowing for any length of time in one channel. This is owing in great measure to the amount of silt it carries with it from the hills, in its impetuous progress to ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... all seasons. In autumn, the swollen waters pour down as from a cornucopia; in winter, folk from the town come driving over the frozen flood, racing one against another; in spring, the river overflows its banks, spreading silt on the meadows as in the land of the Nile; and in summer, the haymakers are lulled by the song of the grasshoppers and the scent of the hay to dream of paradise, where the children of men even now may enter in for some few days in ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... Bowery. I have lived in it nearly thirty years, and I am just beginning to understand its heartbeats. It is like a great river fed by a hundred alien streams. Each influx brings strange seeds on its flood, strange silt and weeds, and now and then a flower of rare promise. To construe this river requires a man who can build dykes against the overflow, who is a naturalist, a geologist, a humanitarian, a diver and a strong swimmer. I love my Bowery. It was my cradle and is my inspiration. I have ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... of men, fragments of the shattered right, caught her in its rush, and she was borne back to the open fields lying along the pike. There, as when a turbulent river empties into a bay, the force of the current subsided, and she was dropped like silt. The cowardly ones, hatless and weaponless, ran off toward the pike, but the greater portion halted, formed in line, called for their comrades to join them, and sent for ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... when water channels and reservoirs become clotted with silt and mud, a side effect of deforestation ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... body of the monster, but with no other effect than the sudden snapping of the inch line like thread. It was subsequent to this that, as the diver stayed his steps in the unsteady current, his staff was seized below. The water was murky with the river-silt above the salt brine, and he could see nothing, but after an effort the staff was rescued or released. Curious to know what it was, he probed again, and the stick was wrenched from his hand. With a thrill he recognized in such power the monster of the sea, the devil-fish. He returned ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... coast—an impossible position for a pioneer of Italian dominion. Italy looks west, not east; almost all her natural harbours are on her western side; and though that at Ostia, owing to the amount of silt carried down by the Tiber, has never been a good one, it is the only port which can be said to command an entrance into the centre ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... but we should be just; we give to the poor of the land, but we are eminently the friends of our servants; duty to mankind diverts us not from the love we bear to our dog; and with a pathetic sorrow for silt, we discard it from sight and hearing. We hate dirt. Having said so much, having shown it, by sealing the mouth of Mr. Stuart Rem and iceing the veins of Mr. Abram Posterley, in relation to a dreadful public ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... A few stars glinted above them, winking through the drifting silt that blew across ...
— The Gun • Philip K. Dick
... always up along the wet gully, deep with silt and frost-splintered rock, she toiled, the heavy grasping of men behind her. Twice she was jerked to a halt while ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... influences, we find them delicately preserved, though after a fashion that renders difficult their safe removal. Originally the bed must have existed as a brown argillaceous mud, somewhat resembling that which forms in the course of years, under a scalp of muscles; and it has hardened into a more silt-like clay, in which the fossils occur, not as petrifactions, but as shells in a state of decay, except in some rare cases, in which a calcareous nodule has formed within or around them. Viewed in the group, they seem of an intermediate character, between the shells of the Lias and ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... cellars of old houses and unearthed old water pipes; excavated through a depth of tipped rubbish on which these houses had evidently been built; and then came upon the former strand of the river, beneath which was the blue silt usually found; then a stratum of bowlder clay; and finally the red sandstone rock. Once begun, the works were pushed forward night and day, Sundays excepted, until January, 1884, when the last few feet of rock were cleared away by the boring machine, and the mayors of Liverpool and Birkenhead ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... story began to piece itself together. He conjured up a vision of this strange forgotten kink in the world's littoral, of the long meandering channels that spread and divaricate and spend their burden of mud and silt within the thunderbelt of Atlantic surf, of the dense tangled vegetation that creeps into the shimmering water with root and sucker. He gave a sense of heat and a perpetual reek of vegetable decay, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... shrouding mesa and dome, appeared the vainest of all human endeavors. It seemed a veritable rainbow realm of the sun. At first only the beauty stirred Hare—he saw the copper belt close under the cliffs, the white beds of alkali and washes of silt farther out, the wind-ploughed canyons and dust-encumbered ridges ranging west and east, the scalloped slopes of the flat tableland rising low, the tips of volcanic peaks leading the eye beyond to veils and vapors hovering over blue clefts and dim line of level lanes, and so on, ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... Ebibi, "there are many banks hereabout, large sands, which silt up in a night, therefore we must make a passage for the puc-a-puc, by going ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... summer, when the river is at its highest level and overflows the banks for miles, it is no pleasure excursion to steer ungainly boats between banks of sand and silt without pilots. On the second day a strong southerly storm arose, and the dangerous waves in the whirlpools of the current capsized many vessels and damaged others. Alexander made for the bank to look for fishermen ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... to a dredger, which, gathers up all the silt of a harbour, and carries it out to sea, leaves it there and then returns to repeat the operation. If such an operation is necessary in a harbour, and if without it the best anchorages in the world would often get choked with rubbish and become useless, how doubly ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... soil classification is the soil type, which is a soil having agricultural unity, as determined by texture, chemical character, topography, and climate. The types commonly named are clay, clay loam, silt loam, loam, fine sandy loam, sandy loam, fine sand, and sand. In general the soil materials are so heterogeneous and so remote from specific rock origin, that in such classification the geologic factor of origin is not taken into account. ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... Surging, silt-laden water rushed upwards past the sides of the heavy cab and swirled around Troy and Alec. Both were clamped into the seat by a steel mesh belt and the waters tore and whipped at them. Despite the six-ton mass of the tractor, both men could feel it quiver against the thrust of the ...
— The Thirst Quenchers • Rick Raphael
... the community reaction is especially well shown in the case of leaf mold and duff. The leaf litter is again only the total of the fallen leaves of all the individuals but its formation is completely dependent upon the community. The reaction of plants upon wind-borne sand and silt-laden waters illustrates ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... for the steam, as it rushed up, rasped away the sides of the hole, and hurled it up into the sea in a shower of mud and gravel and ashes; and then it spread all around, and sank again, and covered in the dead fish so fast, that before Tom had stood there five minutes he was buried in silt up to his ankles, and began to be afraid that he should have ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... valley at Meidoom; Aur-Aa was at flood stage, then nearly fifty feet above the normal level, Now, after centuries, the valley has been filled by river silt and the ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... prosperous, were shown abandoned because the mountains near by had become deforested. Man could not live there because food could not grow without soil, and all the soil had been washed away from the slopes. The streams, once navigable, were choked up with the silt that had washed down. When rains came they acted as torrents, since there was no vegetation to hold the water and ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... in my little life." Indian rivers are nearly always moving about in their beds, and will shift, sometimes, as much as two or three miles in a season, drowning the fields on one bank, and spreading good silt on the other. ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... northern coast of South America as the Guiana Current, enters through the Caribbean Sea into the Gulf of Mexico, where it circles around to the northward; then, colored a deep blue from the fine river silt of the Mississippi, and heated from its long surface exposure under a tropical sun to an average temperature of eighty degrees, it emerges into the Florida Channel as ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... working speedily, but still studying what he could see of the strange erection under the lake. He thought it was curiously free of silt, and its color, as far as he could distinguish, allowing for the dark hue of the water, was light gray—perhaps even white. He ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... distance looked like fields of waving corn, and immense flocks of wild-fowl haunted them. Into this dismal swamp the rivers brought down their freshets, the waters mingling and winding by devious channels before they reached the sea. The silt with which they were laden became deposited in the basin of the Fens, and thus the river-beds were choked up, compelling the intercepted waters to force new channels through the ooze; hence there are numerous ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... traveller to see in a line for eight miles. The river is a continual succession of half-circles, hills to the right, with the stream curving into a shadowy lake, or swerving out again in a bend to the low left; or high-walled sandstone bluffs to the left sending the water wandering out to the low silt shore on the right. Not river of the Thousand Islands, like the St Lawrence, but river of Countless Islands, the Saskatchewan ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... of the processes above described Is a rock powder containing a great variety of sizes of soil grains intermingled with clay. The larger soil grains are called sand; the smaller, silt, and those that are so small that they do not settle from quiet water after 24 hours are ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... lowlands which are apt to be flooded when the river overflows its banks. The mud and dirt consequently settle on the grass and make it unfit for hay, but the rainfall does good, causes the grass to grow and it is not injured by the silt. ...
— Weather and Folk Lore of Peterborough and District • Charles Dack
... it an act, or a gradual process, this "putting off the old man?" It is both. It is a resolve taken once for all, but carried out in detail day by day. The first hour that the sap begins to withdraw, and the leaf-stalk begins to silt up, the leaf's fate is sealed: there is never a moment's reversal of the decision. Each day that follows is a steady carrying out of the plant's purpose: "this old leaf shall die, and the new leaf shall live." So with your soul. ...
— Parables of the Cross • I. Lilias Trotter
... blue-green glacier-ice glances down into the valley, many knobs and depressions are laid bare which one otherwise sees only covered with white, the muddy edge of the ice comes to view with its deposit of rocks, silt, and slime, and far greater volumes of water than usual rush into the valley. This continues until it gradually becomes autumn again, the waters grow less, and one day a gray continuous gentle rain ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... a half dozen trails of large parties, and he felt sure that, according to arrangement, they were converging on the Ohio, at the point where the Licking emptied the waters and silt of the Kentucky woods into the larger stream. Timmendiquas, no doubt, would be there, and Henry's heart throbbed a little faster at the thought that he would ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... escape was a matter of wriggling on down the drain. And wriggling was not impossible, though excessively difficult and exhausting. The drain was nowhere choked with silt, but all along was furred with ooze and there was more than an inch of ooze along its bottom. In this, hitching myself forward on my elbows by violent contortions, I slipped back almost as much as ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... spikes with the tints of the rainbow, like Indian arrows dipped in blood, knee-deep, multi-colored, fiery, dyed in the very essence of sunglow, humming with bees and alive with butterflies, lives of a summer in the aeon of ages that the snow flakes had taken manufacturing soil out of granite, silt out of snow. ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... it, irrigation by underflow from ditches on higher elevations is being successfully used on small areas in the foothills. For gardens the most promising arrangement seems to be a laying of drain tiles rather near the surface, which shall be taken up each year, cleaned of silt and plant roots, and relaid along the rows before planting; but this calls for too much labor, except perhaps for amateur gardeners. The kind of soil best suited to such a system is a medium loam which will distribute water sufficiently to avoid saturation and air-exclusion. Both ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... highest adaptation for deposit soils, such as are made by the settling of silt held in solution by waters that overflow. In these it will grow with vigor, though they rest upon coarse sand or even upon gravel not too near the surface. Irrigating waters to some extent are necessary to grow the plants in best form, although, as previously intimated, the ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... vegetable life in a single day. Southern streams are not perennial. On the Riviera, they are fed from nearby mountains, and are intermittent even in their season. When the water ceases, the sun quickly bakes a crust of silt and dries the stones ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... especially in the dry interior of Australia, to a slight depression of the ground varying in size from a few yards to a mile in length, where the deposit of fine silt prevents the water from sinking into the ground as rapidly as it ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... is victorious, and is bent on deeds equal to the gods. For I think that neither his strength will defend him, nor his beauty at all, nor those beautiful arms, which shall lie everywhere in the very bottom of my gulf, covered with mud. Himself also will I involve in sand, pouring vast abundant silt around him; nor shall the Greeks know where to gather his bones, so much slime will I spread over him. And there forthwith shall be[683] his tomb, nor shall there be any want to him of entombing, when the Greeks perform ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... the interior," he continued, "is formed by a vast alluvial deposit carried down as silt by the Mississippi. East of this the range of the Alleghanies, nowhere more than eight thousand feet in height, forms a secondary or subordinate axis from which the watershed ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... think when the antiquary, grubbing in the dust and silt of five thousand years ago to discover some traces of infant effort—some rude specimens of the ages of Magog and Mizraim, in which we may admire the germ that has since developed into a wonderful art—breaks his shins against an article so perfect ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... clean by taking at least one hot bath per week; per day if possible. Much filth is excreted by your sweat-pores; why let it cake on skin and underlinen, and silently silt up your thirty miles of skin canals, thus overworking the other excretory organs, and gradually ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... higher, leaving a damp hollow behind it where ice-plants grew green and rank; and as he crept along the thunder of his exhaust started tons of sliding silt. His wheels raced and burrowed as he struck a soft spot, and then abruptly they sank. He dug them out carefully and backed away, but a mound of drifted sand barred his way. Twist and turn as he would he could not get around it and at last he climbed to its summit. The sun was setting ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... northern Luzon is made up of four distinct types. First is the coastal plain — a consistently narrow strip of land, generally not over 3 or 4 miles wide. The soil is sandy silt with a considerable admixture of vegetable matter. In some places it is loose, and shifts readily before the winds; here and there are stretches of alluvial clay loam. The sandy areas are often covered with coconut trees, and the alluvial deposits along the rivers frequently ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... the octopus swelled to a frenzy, and in his contortions the locked fighters bumped heavily against the glass, making the faces shrink back. The small stones on the bottom were scattered this way and that, and the fine silt rose in a cloud ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... unquestionably lay before them. Between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea the Jordan is fordable at thirty points during certain parts of the year. The first of the two main fords in the lower Jordan is just below the point where the Wady Kelt enters the Jordan from the west and deposits its mass of mud and silt. The other ford is six miles further north below the point where the Wady Nimrin comes down from the highlands of Gilead. Here to-day the main highway connecting the east and the west-Jordan country crosses the river. This spot was probably the scene of the historic crossing ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... LOAD OF STREAMS. This consists of the silt which the stream carries in suspension, and the sand and gravel and larger stones which it pushes along its bed. Especially in times of flood one may note the muddy water, its silt being kept from settling by the rolling, eddying currents; and often by placing his ear close to the bottom of a ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... desert that he made He must treble bless with shade, In primal wastes set precious seed of rapture and of pain; All the strongholds that he built For the powers of greed and guilt— He must strew their bastions down the sea and choke their towers with silt; He must make the temples clean for the gods to come again, And lift the lordly cities under ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... expansion trap by Mr. Hyde, and made by Mr. S. Farron, Ashton-under-Lyne. The general appearance of this arrangement is as in Fig. 1 or Fig. 3, the center view, Fig. 2, showing what is the cardinal feature of the trap, viz., that it contains a collector for silt, sand, or sediment which is not, as in most other traps, carried out through the valve with the efflux of water. The escape valve also is made very large, so that while the trap may be made short, or, in other ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various
... appearance or properties. There is, however, with us, an inclination to apply this word particularly to those purer and more compact sorts which are adapted for fuel, while to the lighter, less decomposed or more weathered kinds, and to those which are considerably intermixed with soil or silt, the term muck or swamp muck is given. These distinctions are not, indeed, always observed, and, in fact, so great is the range of variation in the quality of the substance, that it would be impossible ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... when Roger the Dane laid here the first stone of his pirates' stronghold, to protect his port of Harfleur, the salt water must have dashed right up against the chalky cliff; but the centuries during which the silt of the Vosges had been carried down the river and piled up against the rocks at its mouth, had driven the castle inland for an eighth of a mile. Melcourt-le-Danois which had once looked down into the very waves now dominated in the first place a ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... the earth Was seen before mankind had birth; Strange monsters basked them in the sun, Behemoth, armored glyptodon, And in the dawn's unpractised ray The transient dodo winged its way; Then, by degrees, through silt and slough, We reached Berlin—I don't know how. The good Professor's monotone Had turned me into senseless stone Instanter, but that near me sat Hypatia in her new spring hat, Blue-eyed, intent, with lips whose bloom Lighted the heavy-curtained room. Hypatia—ah, what lovely things Are fashioned ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... not despise the gem because it has been broken to fragments, obscured by silt and mud. Still less let us fancy that one least fragment of it is not more precious than the most brilliant paste jewel of our own compounding, though it be polished and faceted never so completely. For what are all these myths but fragments ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... meet at their extreme points, and passing by one another with but a small space left between. If then the stream of the Nile should turn aside into this Arabian gulf, what would hinder that gulf from being filled up with silt as the river continued to flow, at all events within a period of twenty thousand years? indeed for my part I am of opinion that it would be filled up even within ten thousand years. How, then, in 18 all the time that has elapsed before I came into being should ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... England, France, Germany, and other parts of Europe, are the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, horse, great Irish deer, bear, tiger, and hyaena. In the peat, No. 1 (Figure 87), and in the more modern gravel and silt (No. 2), works of art of the ages of iron and bronze, and of the later or Neolithic stone period, already described, are met with. In the more ancient or Paleolithic gravels, 3 and 4, there have been found of late years in several valleys in France and England— as, for example, ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... ancient port, which sea and river have both deserted, is now a city of the dead, a Pompeii above ground, whose avenues of tombs lead to streets of human dwellings more desolate still. It is no longer by Ostia, nor even by the Tiber, that one can reach the sea: the way was choked by sand and silt seventeen centuries ago, and Trajan caused the canal to be made which bears his name; and this is still the outlet from Rome to the Mediterranean, while the river expires among ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... Banerjea's tales has been won from the sea by alluvial action. Its soil, enriched by yearly deposits of silt, yields abundantly without the aid of manure. A hothouse climate and regular rainfall made Bengal the predestined breeding-ground of mankind; the seat of an ancient and complex civilisation. But subsistence is too easily secured in those fertile ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... have already been built upon. The marsh is about half a mile wide, and something like a mile and a half long, extending southward into Jersey City. The surface is a network of matted vegetation and roots perhaps five feet deep, and under that lies a mass of blue clay or river silt 100 feet or more in depth. The original tidal flow over these marsh lands has been obstructed by viaducts for railroads and streets, leaving only two natural outlets, a sluice way at Fifteenth street on the north, and on the south a basin constructed by ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... Cardiff. They came; they saw; and they narrowly escaped being conquered. Luckily they did not give their sanction to the idea that the statue was a petrifaction, but Professor Hall was induced to say: "To all appearance, the statue lay upon the gravel when the deposition of the fine silt or soil began, upon the surface of which the forests have grown for succeeding generations. Altogether it is the most remarkable object brought to light in this country, and, although not dating back to the stone age, is, nevertheless, deserving of ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... harbour is therefore of importance. A party of convicts were employed in building a breakwater, connecting a cliffy island at the entrance with the south point of the river, for the purpose of deepening the mouth, but I much question whether it will answer, as the silt that is washed down by the stream not finding its former exit may by meeting the sea form ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... amount of wearing and knocking about when being transported by the agency of currents and rivers, than will a softer substance, such as clay. An equal amount of this wearing action upon clay will reduce it to a fine impalpable silt. The grains of sand, however, will still remain of an appreciable average size, and where both sand and clay are being transported to the sea in one and the same stream, the clay will be transported to long distances, ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... Fine silt, brought down in suspension by a muddy river and deposited to form the Delta when the river reaches the sea, accumulates ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... to water our horses, as they had travelled forty miles under a hot sun without drawing bit. The honourable judge flatly refused, although he had a good well, besides a pond, under fence, covering several acres; his wife, however, reflecting, perhaps, that her stores were rather short of coffee or silt, entered into a rapid discussion with her worse half, and by-and-by that respectable couple of honourables agreed to sell water to us at ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... loamy material usually found in the front chambers of large caverns. It is made up of roof dust, sand, and silt washed from the interior, outside dust and vegetable matter blown in by the wind, with minute amounts of clay or soil ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... construction and lining, amounting to an average of 0.34 ft. between the bulkhead lines. This settlement has been constantly decreasing since construction, and appears to have been due almost entirely to the disturbances of the surrounding materials during construction. The silt weighs about 100 lb. per cu. ft. * * * and contains about 38% of water. It was found that whenever this material was disturbed outside the tunnels a displacement of the ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... husband's family, and from that moment her father-in-law had had nothing but bad luck. He had been robbed, his best stallion died, there had been a flood in his tea which not only spoiled the crop but filled the ground with silt—it was impossible to relate his calamities. He consulted a necromancer at last and learned that it was all caused by the ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... hammer pile-driving machine with me. I submitted them to Mr. Baker, and he saw its importance in a moment. "That," he 'said, "is the very thing that I want to enable me to complete my contract satisfactorily." Thousands of enormous piles had to be driven down into the deep silt of the Shore; and to have driven them down by the old system of pile-driving would have occupied a long time, and would also have ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... untouched. Now, knowledge has penetrated to the central fire, and of the sea it can be no longer said that man's "control stops with its shores." The pathway of his messenger from continent to continent he has laid deep in its chalky ooze, while over it silt silently, flake by flake, as they have been falling since aeons before his creation, the induviae of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... Peary, as is generally thought, is trapped beneath the ice floes or embedded in the deep silt of the polar sea-floor, her margin of safety has passed the deadline, it was pointed out to-day by her designers. Through special rectifiers aboard, her store of air can be kept capable of sustaining life for a ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... enormous rafts are made on the shore and then floated to the works, where they are weighted by stones and sunk in the required position. Within a few weeks large quantities of silt and mud accumulate, and the whole forms an exceedingly tough and strong elevation under the water; the currents grow weaker, and deposits are lodged also outside the dam, the base of which is of course of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... is a cliff or steep slope varying in height from a few feet to that of a good-sized tree. Between the silt plain and the general level of its bed rises a terrace. In front of it Prince stopped and distributed the men he had reserved to search the lava bed. He gave ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... humdrum folk intent on digging a living from the soil; but the other is an army of peaks, a region of storms, a spread of dark and tangled forests. In the one, shallow rivers trickle on their sandy way to the Gulf of Mexico; from the other, the waters rush, uniting to make the mighty stream whose silt-laden floods are slowly filling ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... During the average year it brings down 7,500,000,000 cubic yards of sediment, discharging it along the lower course, or pushing it into the Gulf. As one thinks of the small amount of sediment held in a gallon or two of river water, a comprehension of this vast amount of silt is impossible. It is enough to cover a square mile in area to a depth of 268 feet. In five hundred years it would build above the sea level a State as large and as high as Rhode Island. Thus, by means of this sediment, the river has pushed its mouths fifty ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... rivers whose current, running red with the silt and mud of their soft alluvial shores, carry far into the ocean the record of their muddy progress; but this glorious river system, through its many lakes and various names, is ever the same crystal current, flowing pure from the fountain-head of Lake Superior. Great ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... as nearly as it can be fixed, was about two hundred yards below where the public road-bridge at present spans the Wabash. The bluff was then far different from what it is now, steeper and higher, with less silt and sand between it and the water's edge. Indeed, swollen as the current was, a man could stand on the top of the bank and easily leap into the deep water. At a point near the middle of the river a great mass of drift-logs and sand had long ago ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... wider than the trench so that, when in place, the paper arches and fits tightly to the sides. The purpose of the stone or gravel is to facilitate water seepage from tile to ground while the roofing paper cover prevents silt from reducing the seepage. ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... perforce to grow corn for themselves, whether nature would or nature wouldn't; and, in order to grow it under such very unfavourable circumstances of soil and climate, they terraced off the entire hillside, by catching the silt as it washed slowly down, and keeping it in ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... force water into the tank, and the rotating paddles were operated by a 7 h.p. engine. This apparatus washed a batch of 14 cu. yds. in from 1 to 2 hours at a cost of 7 cts. per cubic yard. The sand contained much fine coal and silt. The above data are given ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... before the latter could take up the slack. I deemed it advisable to use stout cord instead of wire in the future and made a protective slot for the weight. I had blocked up the seaward side of the pipe with rocks, but found that these caused a deposit of silt so I had to get into the water at low tide and shift them all out again to clean away ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... the ore is From the cupola spurting, Tossing the flaming petals Over the silt and furnace ash— Blown leaves, devastating, Falling about ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... materials which are found above the solid rocks, in the form of gravel, silt, rolled pebbles, etc., should be carefully distinguished from the solid strata upon which they repose. And the more ancient of these loose materials, found on the sides or summits of hills, etc., should be distinguished from the recent mud, sand, and gravel, brought down by land-floods, or ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... covering of yellow silt away and adjusted the instrument's controls as best he could, centering it on where Judd's craft had last been. Then he peered through—and saw that which ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... building, at a cost of more than $4,000,000, the great Roosevelt Dam which will furnish water to irrigate 250,000 acres of the richest of soils around the city of Phoenix in the Salt River valley. One of the most serious problems in the construction of the great dams in the West is the question of silt, which is washed down in the streams and will eventually fill up and render useless these expensive ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... with this matter, and by it has so silted up the Lake of Constance as to abolish it for a large fraction of its length. The Rhone is charged with it, and tens of thousands of acres of cultivable land are formed by the silt ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the work of getting the city's ancient reservoirs cleared of silt before the next spring thaw brought more water down the underground aqueducts everybody called canals in mistranslation of Schiaparelli's Italian word, though this was proving considerably easier than anticipated. The ancient Canal-Builders must ...
— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper
... For example, Kalamata, the economic outlet for the richest part of Peloponnesos, and the fifth largest port in the kingdom,[1] was and still remains a mere open roadstead, where all ships that call are kept at a distance by the silt from a mountain torrent, and so placed in imminent danger of being driven, by the first storm, upon the ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... laden boats go by, he found fresh enjoyment in every stop, and in blouse and knickerbockers, with bare feet, paddled about on the moist banks, making friends with the half-clothed camel-drivers, whose patient beasts knelt so obediently to be loaded with the silt deposits taken from the bed of the canal, and collecting items of interest in regard to this artery of commerce which might have made even its founder open his eyes. The girls profited by his researches, and it was, indeed, a common thing for ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... Japanese to wear double kimonos. During the middle of the day, however, I was glad to walk with my jacket over my arm, and many little boys and girls were running about naked. The region visited had a naturally well-drained dark soil, composed of river silt, of volcanic dust and of humus from buried vegetation, and it went down to a depth beyond the need of the longest daikon (giant radish). Sweet potatoes and taro were still on the ground, and large areas, worked to a perfect tilth, ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... Lat. barra, origin unknown), in physical geography, a ridge of sand or silt crossing an estuary under water or raised by wave action above sea-level, forming an impediment to navigation. When a river enters a tidal sea its rate of flow is checked and the material it carries in suspension is deposited in a shifting bar crossing the channel ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... light northwesterly breeze through the channels which connect the island of San Francesco with the more easterly stretches of the Venetian lagoon. The boat presently neared the shore of one of the cultivated lidi—islands formed out of the silt of many rivers by the travail of centuries, some of them still mere sand or mud banks, others covered by vineyards and fruit orchards—which, with the murazzi or sea-walls of Venice, stand sentinel between the city and the sea. On the lido along which the boat was coasting, the vintage ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the force of the emission jet can be applied as a factor in giving motive power, the fact that no close-fitting parts are required for the places upon which the line of force impinges will alter the conditions of the whole problem. In the centrifugal sand pump, as now largely used for raising silt from rivers and harbours, the serious corrosive action of the jet of sand and water upon the inside of the pump has been successfully overcome by facing the metal with indiarubber; but nothing of the kind could have been done if the working of the apparatus ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... ocean fathoms deep in what is now The King's Basin and extending a hundred and seventy miles north of the shore that takes their wash to-day. Slowly, through the centuries of that age of all beginnings, the river, cutting canyons and valleys in the north and carrying southward its load of silt, built from the east across the gulf to Lone Mountain a mighty ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... will be separated and scattered as readily as though it had fallen upon hard ground where it would be torn to pieces by carnivorous animals. The dead body must then be covered up by a blanket of silt or sand like that which would be deposited as the result of a freshet. If a skeleton is too greatly broken up or scattered, it may be difficult or even impossible for its discoverer to piece together the various ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... and watched the great clouds melt away and settle on our clothes and silt into our eyes; and then finally, when it was clearer, a man inside struck a match, lit a candle and handed it down into a great hole which had been dug through the very centre of these decade-old bullion coverings. How deep the hole was ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... Bit-Yakin. The continual deposit of alluvial soil at the mouths of the rivers had greatly altered the coastline from the earliest historic times downwards. The ancient estuary was partly filled up, especially on the western side, where the Euphrates enters the Persian Gulf: a narrow barrier of sand and silt extended between the marshes of Arabia and Susiana, at the spot where the streams of fresh water met the tidal waters of the sea, and all that was left of the ancient gulf was a vast lagoon, or, as the dwellers on the banks called ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... point of junction of these rivers with the Wash, and still more to seaward, was South Holland Sluice, through which the waters of the South Holland Drain entered the estuary. At that point a great mass of silt had accumulated, which tended to choke up the mouths of the rivers further inland, rendering their navigation difficult and precarious, and seriously interrupting the drainage of the whole lowland district traversed by both the Old and New Nene. Indeed the sands were accumulating ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... of the Nile a turbid convection was taking place, as if the river silt had been stirred up, but the fuming current was assuming a dull red tinge. The action had been rapid. Already the stain had predominated, streaks of clear water, only here and there, clarifying the opaque coloring. The boat rode half its depth in red, the ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... caissons, the pulsometer pumps were sucking up streams of water that flowed without ceasing into the settling tank and off into the city sewers, the men in the caissons were sending up buckets full of silt-like gruel. The lawyer watched operations for a few minutes, then he asked for the owners' boring plan. When he had examined this he grunted twice, twitched his lower lip humorously, and said: 'I'll put you out of this. If the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... marine microscopic plants known as Diatoms, which likewise secrete a siliceous skeleton, often of great beauty. The skeletons of Diatoms are found abundantly at the present day in lake-deposits, guano, the silt of estuaries, and in the mud which covers many parts of the sea-bottom; they have been detected in strata of great age; and in spite of their microscopic dimensions, they have not uncommonly accumulated to form deposits of great thickness, and of considerable superficial extent. Thus the ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... of these watercourses may in former times have been larger and even navigable up to a point. Their flow is now obstructed, their volume diminished. I daresay they have driven the sea further out, with silt swept down from the uplands. The same thing has struck me in England—at Lyme Regis, for instance, whose river was also once navigable to small craft and at Seaton, about a mile up whose stream stands ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... last fifteen years, of those who stedfastly set themselves to the task of proving and of asserting at all risks, that the Maker of the coal seam and the diluvial cave could not be a "Deus quidam deceptor," and that the facts which the rock and the silt revealed were sacred, not to be warped or trifled with for the sake of any cowardly and hasty notion that they contradicted His other messages. When a few more years are past, Buckland and Sedgwick, Murchison ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... North Frisian islands of Silt and Fohr the following ABC rhymes have been recorded, consisting mostly of personal names ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain |
