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Migratory   /mˈaɪgrətˌɔri/   Listen
Migratory

adjective
1.
Used of animals that move seasonally.
2.
Habitually moving from place to place especially in search of seasonal work.  Synonym: migrant.  "Migratory workers"



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"Migratory" Quotes from Famous Books



... of observation, that Providence, which strongly appears to have intended the continual intermixture of mankind, never leaves the human mind destitute of a principle to effect it. This purpose is sometimes carried on by a sort of migratory instinct, sometimes by the spirit of conquest; at one time avarice drives men from their homes, at another they are actuated by a thirst of knowledge; where none of these causes can operate, the sanctity of particular ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... the obstacles are generally much more difficult to negotiate than on tilled ground. Also, the nature of grazing stock demands variation in the stiffness and height of the fences, which, in the Midlands, have to restrain the migratory propensities of frisky young bullocks; but in dairy-farming counties like Cheshire, much smaller and weaker ones amply serve their purpose in acting as barriers to ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes

... plains, but they have been driven into the mountains by the Pawkees, or the roving Indians of the Sascatchawain, and are now obliged to visit occasionally, and by stealth, the country of their ancestors. Their lives are indeed migratory. From the middle of May to the beginning of September, they reside on the waters of the Columbia, where they consider themselves perfectly secure from the Pawkees who have never yet found their way to that retreat. ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark

... glimpse of the methods of the Free-masons, of their organization, almost military in its order and dispatch, and of their migratory life; although they had a more settled life than this ungainly sentence allows, for long time was required for the building of a great cathedral. Sometimes, it would seem, they made special contracts with the inhabitants of a town where they were ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... in the southern part of ——, there lived a squirrel. One day, as it was viewing the departure of some migratory birds from its neighborhood, it could not prevent the escape of a deep sigh, accompanied with the exclamation, "O dear! I wish some land fairy would make me a bird. I could then soar to a great height, or dart swiftly through the ...
— Our Gift • Teachers of the School Street Universalist Sunday School, Boston

... been driven from the mountains, though there may be a few in southern Alpine County, but the evidence is not conclusive. The panther is migratory, preying on young colts and calves. They are not at all common, though some are heard of every year. The "ermine" is pure white in winter, except the tip of the tail, which is black. It is yellowish brown ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... remarkably free from one peculiarity of modern writers on such matters. Several considerate gentlemen are extremely anxious for the "rights of woman"; they think that women will benefit by removing the bulwarks which the misguided experience of ages has erected for their protection. A migratory system of domestic existence might suit Madame Dudevant, and a few cases of singular exception; but we cannot fancy that it would be, after all, so much to the taste of most ladies as the present more permanent system. We have some reminiscence of the stories of the wolf and ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... Southern states—from Virginia and the Carolinas as well as from Kentucky and Tennessee. When the great compromise of 1820-21 admitted her to the union, wearing "every jewel of sovereignty," as a florid orator announced, migratory slave owners were assured that their property would be safe in Missouri. Along the western shore of the Mississippi and on both banks of the Missouri to the uttermost limits of the state, plantations tilled by bondmen spread out in broad expanses. In the neighborhood of ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... antelope feed on their rich grasses. Hither also the puma follows its prey, and there are several other creatures of the feline tribe. Bears, wolves, and foxes likewise range across them. In some of them herds of buffalo pass their lives; for, unlike their brethren of the plain, they are not migratory. It is doubtful whether or not they are of the same species, but they are said to be larger ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... one side, and with small orifices in the three remaining walls. These could be closed, and yet they were not windows. Their purpose was much more like that of loopholes in a mediaeval barbican. They were to enable the man inside to watch the movements of migratory birds, and to send his shot into the thick of them when, unsuspecting danger, they chanced to come within range. The little building was an affut. Near to it was a sort of fixed cage, intended for decoy birds, but it had long been without tenants when I took possession ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... Oriole in America only. According to Mr. Nuttall, it is migratory, appearing in considerable numbers in West Florida about the middle of March. It is a good songster, and in a state of captivity imitates ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [January, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various

... on the forest litter leave a wondrously plain track in the snow. We used to look and look at the beginning of winter for the birds to come down from the pine lands; looked in the orchard and stubble; looked north and south on the mesa for their migratory passing, and wondered that they never came. Busy little grosbeaks picked about the kitchen doors, and woodpeckers tapped the eaves of the farm buildings, but we saw hardly any other of the frequenters of the summer canons. After a while when we grew bold to tempt the snow ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin

... this tribe are, to a certain extent, migratory, moving their villages from one location to another according to the demands of their mode of agriculture. Their rice fields are made in mountain-side clearings, and as the ever present cogon grass[1] begins to invade the open land they substitute sweet potatoes ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole

... still and silent with Sunday, men at no other time to be run to earth were entrapped in their bunks, under their dwelling-places in the shade, shaving, exchanging hair-cuts, washing workaday clothes, reminiscing over far-off homes and pre-migratory days, or merely loafing. The same cheery, friendly, quick-witted fellows they were as in their native land, even the few Italians and rare Portuguese scattered among them inoculated ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck

... much in the parish. I think the places in which we have suffered become distasteful to us, and the instinct to wander takes us. A migratory bird goes, or dies of home-sickness; home is not always where we are born—it is among ideas that are dear to us: and it is exile to live among people who do not share our ideas. Something must ...
— The Lake • George Moore

... the origin of this singular superstition I can find no account whatsoever; it is conceived, however, in a mild, sweet, and hospitable spirit. The visits of these migratory little creatures, which may be termed domestic grasshoppers, are very capricious and uncertain, as are their departures; and it is, I should think, for this reason, that they are believed to be cognizant of the ongoings of human life. We ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton

... the families of the nobles dependent on them, who had received so-called sub-fiefs. Some of the landless nobles perished; some offered their services to the remaining feudal lords as soldiers or advisers. Thus in this period we meet with a large number of migratory politicians who became competitors of the wandering scholars. Both these groups recommended to their lord ways and means of gaining victory over the other feudal lords, so as to become sole ruler. In order to carry out their plans ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard

... two days later that he first beheld that prelate, heading the ducal pilgrimage to the shrine of the mountain Virgin. The day had opened with a confused flight of chimes from every bell-tower in Pianura, as though a migratory flock of notes had settled for a moment on the roofs and steeples of the city. The ducal party set forth early from the palace, but the streets were already spanned with arches and garlands of foliage, tapestries and religious ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... far capital forgot, Its splendour and its blandishments, In poor Moldavia cast her lot, She visited the humble tents Of migratory ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

... could lay their hands on—and were beating the remaining spark of life out of the helpless birds, then seizing and quarrelling over the bodies, without one word of pity or regret for the dreadful catastrophe, so long as they could secure the coveted specimens of this rare migratory bird. Then Jimmy noticed that some few had actually escaped injury, but, before he could reach them, older and stronger people had rushed upon the terrified and weakened creatures, and were clubbing ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson

... shall embrace all the phenomena. Obviously any satisfactory solution of the problem must be preceded by a thorough examination of all particular myths, all social characteristics, and all geographical and migratory relations affecting the early communities; and on these points there is yet ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... spring up; one only knows that they do spring up, suddenly, like street crowds. There comes, it would seem, a moment when the whole English-speaking race is unconsciously bursting to have its say about some one thing—the split infinitive, or the habits of migratory birds, or faith and reason, or what-not. Whatever weekly review happens at such a moment to contain a reference, however remote, to the theme in question reaps the storm. Gusts of letters come in from all corners of the British Isles. These are presently reinforced by Canada in full ...
— A. V. Laider • Max Beerbohm

... fellow-citizens, whether your interest in Washington will be best protected by his continued presence or his occasional absence." This hit brought down the house. Mr. Toombs's addresses to the Supreme Court were models of solid argument. During the early days of the Supreme Court of Georgia, it was a migratory body; the law creating it tended to popularize it by providing that it should hold its sessions in the different towns in the State convenient to the lawyers. The court once met in the little schoolroom of the Lumpkin Law School in ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall

... and orchids hang from the trees. Outside on the breezy downs one may drink in pure ozone from the Atlantic, and revel in an atmosphere untainted by microbes or bacilli. Wild duck, woodcock, and plover, resting in their migratory flight, crowd the marshes, ponds, and lagoons, and the sea is alive with fish." Such was the Tresco that Mr. Augustus Smith made his home; such it is still in the hands of Mr. Dorrien-Smith. It is certain that when Mr. Smith died in 1872, and was buried at St. ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... changed its location, till its ancient sites extend for thirty miles along the river, and its ruins, more extensive than even those of Rome, cover this range of territory. But I shall not go into the details of those migratory periods, but speak only of the city as we ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic

... weather, the crops, the migratory wild fowl now peopling the Haven, the Royal Family—invariably a favourite topic this, in genteel circles furthest removed from the throne—in anecdotes of servants and of pets interspersed with protests against the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... this be laid to the charge of the artificial superstitions of a philosophical class of poets? Or is it due to the true evolution of such beliefs, that as long as our search touches upon the unsettled periods of semi-migratory life, the tombs of individual members of a family being scattered here or there wherever they meet their deaths, the offering to the dead takes a special form, inasmuch as the solidarity of the tribe eclipses the importance of the family ...
— On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay • Hugh E. Seebohm

... that the prowler might be some tramp who had wandered far off the beaten path of migratory humans, and who, stumbling upon the coulee and its empty dwellings, was searching at random for whatever might be worth carrying off. A horseman did not fit that theory anywhere. That particular horseman had come there deliberately, had given the house a deliberate ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower

... of time and in the same odd, migratory manner, the beautiful school came around four times more in succession; and every time I swung out a handsome one. Kate then took the pole and caught one. Then Ellen caught one; and afterwards Theodora took her turn and succeeded in ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... dwelling houses, were covered with these ants; and when all sustenance was destroyed in one quarter, they took up their line of march in immense armies and proceeded elsewhere in search of food. In these migratory excursions, if they came to a brook or small river, their progress was not stayed. Those in front were impelled into the stream by the pressure from behind; and, although myriads were swept away and drowned in the rushing waters, many were borne to the other ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper

... been so, from the time of the first pre-human anthropoid crossing a mountain-divide in quest of better berry-bushes beyond, down to the latest Slovak, arriving on our shores to-day, to go to work in the coal-mines of Pennsylvania. These migratory movements of peoples have been called drifts, and the word is apposite. Unplanned, blind, automatic, spurred on by the pain of hunger, man has literally drifted his way around the planet. There have been drifts ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London

... of sin and horror which has afforded a theme to the pens of several distinguished writers, and the details of which are as well known on the spot at present, as if years had not elapsed since its occurrence. And this, too, in a country prone above all others, from the migratory habits of its population, to cast aside all tradition, and to lose within a very few years the memory of the greatest and most illustrious events upon the very stage ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various

... the wagon train during the first lap of the desert trip. Hiram rode with his employer, and their migratory institution of learning was in full swing. Then when they reached the beginning of the mountain pass they found a ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins

... she means to do. Protean divinity that no image could completely describe, here she leaps suddenly forth, like a fountain in the midst of a desert, to disappear after having given birth to an ephemeral oasis; there she returns at regular intervals, collecting and scattering, like migratory birds that obey the rhythm of the seasons. On our right she fells a man and concerns herself with him no further; on our left she bears down another, and furiously worries her victim. But, though she bring ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck

... economic and political developments set a class free to travel, that class at once begins to travel; in England, for example, above the five or six hundred pounds a year level, it is hard to find anyone who is not habitually migratory, who has not been frequently, as people say, "abroad." In the Modern Utopia travel must be in the common texture of life. To go into fresh climates and fresh scenery, to meet a different complexion of humanity and a different type of home ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... the lower degrees of rank, the possession of land and share in public office, feudalism and freedom, interpenetrated each other, and made a common-weal which yet harmonised with all the inclinations that lend charm and colouring to individual life. The old migratory impulse and spirit of warlike enterprise set before itself religious aims also, which lent it a higher sanction; war for the Church, and conquest (which meant for each man a personal occupation of land) were combined in one. Starting from Normandy, where great warlike ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... desire as it is a situation forced upon mental defectives through those natural intellectual and social deficiencies which restrict them to environments economically and otherwise less desirable to normal people. This phenomenon is most conspicuous in rural communities where such migratory movements as the modern city-drift have exercised a certain natural selection, but it is also plainly evident in the slums and poorer sections of the cities, both large and small, as any field worker will testify. Closely related to this factor ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... which, after flourishing awhile slightly further up Broadway under the charmlessly commercial name of Brougham's Lyceum (we had almost only Lyceums and Museums and Lecture Rooms and Academies of Music for playhouse and opera then,) entered upon a long career and a migratory life as Wallack's Theatre. I fail doubtless to keep all my associations clear, but what is important, or what I desire at least to make pass for such, is that when we most admired Mr. Blake we also again admired Miss Mary Taylor; and it was at Brougham's, not at Burton's, that we rendered ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... In the great migratory movement beginning at the dawn of the Christian era, which scattered the Jews to the four corners of the globe, and which was accentuated and precipitated by the misfortunes that broke over the population of Palestine, France, ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber

... through the dry season in one of these two alternative fashions and some in the other. In flat countries where small ponds and tanks alone exist, the burying plan is almost universal; in plains traversed by large rivers or containing considerable scattered lakes, the migratory system finds greater ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... careful in his inquiries, for he wished no one to find out that the little boy he was looking for was the third cousin of the late Autocrat on the mother's side. He therefore disguised himself as a migratory medical man, and determined to use all possible caution. When he reached the camp of the young horseman, Alberdin, and found that personage gone, his ...
— The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales • Frank R. Stockton

... progressed, and the jumps between towns became longer, the young salesman had time to see a good deal. In the far Southwest he became aware that the increasingly numerous Mexican population was no longer a matter of box-car dwellers, more or less migratory. It was a settled people. Its little adobe villages, queer and quaint as they seemed to Middle-Western eyes, were centers of established life. And he discovered that in these villages always one ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt

... lacerate her heart at Eeny's. She hears of her husband occasionally, as he wanders through the Continent, and the chain that binds her to him galls her day and night. Little Reginald, able to trot about on his own sturdy legs now, accompanies her in her migratory flights, and is petted to death wherever he goes. He has come to grief quite recently, and takes it very hard that grandpa should have something else to nurse besides himself. This something else is a little atom of humanity named Gracie, and is ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming

... Junior, exhibiting the antithetical 'suaviter in modo;' a Senior, whose 'otium cum dignitate' at once distinguishes him from the vulgar herd of common mortals. Then succeed hearty greetings of meeting friends, great purchase of text-books, and much changing of rooms; students being migratory by nature, and stimulated thereto by the prospect of choice of better rooms conceded to advanced academical standing. In which state of things the various employes of college, including the trusty colored Aquarius, facetiously denominated ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... twenty-one and sixty. This tax, and all other taxes due for the two previous years, must be paid before the 1st of February of the election year. All these provisions, though applying equally to all the population, greatly lessened the negro vote. Negroes are notoriously migratory, and a large proportion never remain two years in the same place. The poll tax could not be collected by legal process, and to pay the tax for two years, four dollars or more, eight months in advance of an election, seemed to the average negro to be rank extravagance. Moreover, few politicians ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson

... them for the strictly economic reason that they destroy harmful insects. The only time I ever used the Ford organization to influence legislation was on behalf of the birds, and I think the end justified the means. The Weeks-McLean Bird Bill, providing for bird sanctuaries for our migratory birds, had been hanging in Congress with every likelihood of dying a natural death. Its immediate sponsors could not arouse much interest among the Congressmen. Birds do not vote. We got behind that bill and we asked each of our six thousand dealers to wire to his representative in ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford

... sparrow was once probably quite as migratory as any of the rest of these, but a great change has come over his habits. With his newly acquired fondness for the haunts of men he has suffered a change in this respect also. Whatever may have been ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker

... of Dorothea, is a vague and shadowy memory. He seems to have had little of his father's energy or good sense. Unstable in many of his ways, he lived a migratory life, "at various spots in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, as well as in Worcester and Boston, Mass." When Dorothea was born, he was living at Hampden, Maine, adjoining his father's Dixmont properties, presumably as his father's land agent. He probably tired of this occupation because it ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach

... earned by the depredations which he annually makes upon the rice crops, though his food "is by no means restricted to that seed, but consists in a large degree of insects, grubs, and various wild grasses." A migratory bird, residing during the winter in the southern parts of America, he returns in vast multitudes northward in the early Spring. According to Wilson, their course of migration is as follows: "In April, or very early in May, the Rice Buntings, male and female, ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [March 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various

... place, has grown into a town out of an ancient monastery founded at the close of the fifth century by St. Tudwal (or Tual), one of the religious leaders of those great migratory movements which introduced into the Armorican peninsula the name, the race, and the religious institutions of the island of Britain. The predominating characteristic of early British Christianity was its monastic tendency, and there were no bishops, at all events among the immigrants, ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan

... present discharged in India by the system of caste. But the township in the old sense of the word, with its settled population and the common eye upon all its members, has to a large extent disappeared. The influence of the family is at the same time being constantly weakened by the migratory habits modern industrialism entails on the population; in a word, the old constraining force, which used to hold society together, are almost gone, and nothing effective has sprung ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison

... than a reconstruction of rural civilisation is called for, our inquiries will be more profitably directed to those sections where agricultural society is permanently established, or where the rural population might abandon the migratory habit if the conditions were more favorable to an advanced civilisation. At the present stage I feel that the whole subject can be most profitably discussed in its application to the Middle Western and the Southern sections. Here the intimate ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett

... when thawed. I may add that there is an Indian toad which can resist salt water and haunts the seaside. Nothing ever astonished me more than the case of the Galaxias; but it does not seem known whether it may not be a migratory fish like the salmon. It seems to me that you complicate rather too much the successive colonisations with New Zealand. I should prefer believing that the Galaxias was a species, like the Emys of the Sewalik Hills, which has long retained the same form. Your remarks on the insects ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... worth while settling, and as long as they can put on a bit of finery, display themselves out of doors with something of a meteor flash, a semblance of style and appearance of luxury, honour is saved! Encampment does not in any way distress this migratory tribe. Through the half-opened doors, their poverty is betrayed by the four bare walls of an unfurnished chamber, or the litter of an overcrowded room. It is bohemianism in the domestic circle, a life full of ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet

... the assistance of graduates of the university, acquainted with the art of writing and skilled in law. These were appointed by the king to the office of counsellors.[32] In 1302, parliament, hitherto migratory, following the king in his journeys, was made stationary at Paris. Its sessions were fixed at two in each year, held at Easter and All Saints respectively. The judicial body was subdivided into several "chambers," according to the nature ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... ample reservoirs hidden away in a grove of beeches. The water flowing thence became brooks or was diverted to enliven fountains. One pipe carried it in generous flow to the summit of the promontory. In this leafy Eden the birds of the climate made their home the year round. There the migratory nightingale came earliest and lingered longest, singing in the day as well as in the night. There one went regaled with the breath of roses commingled with that of the jasmine. There the bloom of the pomegranate flashed ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... Tlascalans made reply, "Neither our ancestors nor ourselves ever have or will pay tribute to any one. Invade us if you can. We beat you once and may do it again!" or words to that effect, as recorded by the historians. For in the past history of the Tlascalans—who were of the same original migratory family as the Aztecs—a great conflict had been recorded, in which they had ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... fantastic figure, straining to see who came behind her; but the little procession was at an end, for all the lesser members of the family had taken their seats, and the eight tall ushers, gathering themselves together like birds or insects preparing for some migratory manoeuvre, were already slipping through the side ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton

... and Mosambique, knew more of us than Katosa did. Their muskets were carefully polished, and never out of these slaver's hands for a moment, though in the chiefs presence. We naturally felt apprehensive that we should never see Katosa again. A migratory afflatus seems to have come over the Ajawa tribes. Wars among themselves, for the supply of the Coast slave-trade, are said to have first set them in motion. The usual way in which they have advanced among the Manganja has been by slave-trading in a friendly way. Then, ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone

... on the road, Deerfoot met those of his own race. Sometimes they were warriors riding their ponies, and again they were on foot. The Indian seems to be migratory by nature, and many of these families were shifting their homes, apparently in obedience to the yearning for change which is not confined to uncivilized people alone. It is worthy of note that the Shawanoe not once ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis

... that an increase in the general rate of interest prevailing in any particular country will increase the total supply of capital available for the businesses of that country, since capital has in modern times acquired a considerable migratory power. In the case of labor, we cannot go so far as this; but here, too, there is no doubt that an increase in the remuneration offered in any particular occupation will attract an increased labor supply (always supposing, of course, that "other ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson

... characteristic of Ohio people which has marked them from the beginning of their history, and marks them now. We are a migratory race. We are the Innocents Abroad. No Arab in his tent, restless and uneasy, feels more uncertain and movable than a man from Ohio, who can better his condition anywhere else. We are a migratory race, and why should we not be? Do we not deserve the best ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... world; were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows. On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory charts of the sperm whale. Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct — say, rather, secret intelligence from the Deity —mostly swim in .. veins, as they are called; ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... geographer of wide reknown, Native of Abu-Keber's ancient town, In passing thence along the river Zam To the adjacent village of Xelam, Bewildered by the multitude of roads, Got lost, lived long on migratory toads, Then from exposure miserably died, And grateful travelers bewailed ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... the immigrations of the Slavonians and other barbarous races, in the sixth and eighth centuries. The population of Greece had dwindled rapidly, and its revenues were so small that the Eastern emperors cared little to defend it. Hence these northern migratory hordes rapidly acquired possession of its soil. Finally this great body of settlers broke up into a number of tribes and disappeared as a people, leaving behind them, however, still existing evidences of their influence upon the ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... of the birds, especially of our migratory song-birds, is a series of adventures and of hair-breadth escapes by flood and field. Very few of them probably die a natural death, or even live out half their appointed days. The home instinct is strong in birds as it is in most creatures; and I am convinced that every spring a large number of ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs

... home with us. The old birds rose like grouse, and would afford splendid shooting if found in such a situation at any other period than that of incubation; at other times however, as I shall have to inform the reader, they congregate in vast flocks, and are migratory. ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt

... effects of intercrossing in eliminating variations of all kinds, I shall have to recur; but it may be here remarked that most animals and plants keep to their proper homes, and do not needlessly wander about; we see this even with migratory birds, which almost always return to the same spot. Consequently each newly-formed variety would generally be at first local, as seems to be the common rule with varieties in a state of nature; so that similarly modified individuals would soon exist in a small ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... blanket tents fastened to a kind of wattle. In the plain of Rhoeh is a small mud fort in a dilapidated state, and uninhabited; the village itself was not of any importance, the habits of the people being evidently migratory. ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem

... Frank, if it was want of food which prompted the flight of migratory animals from one place to another. In some cases it is so, undoubtedly; as for instance, in that which I am now going to tell you about, the American passenger pigeon; it is from the work of the great ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley

... the rapidity and cheapness of intercourse, and the migratory habits both have induced, leave little of rusticity and local character in any particular sections of the country. Distinctions, that an acute observer may detect, do certainly exist between the ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... us; we can only say in our ignorance that this type, like innumerable others that have ceased to exist, has probably run its course and is dying out. Or it might be imagined that its system is undergoing some slow change, which tells on the migratory instinct, that it is becoming more a resident species in its winter home in Africa. But all conjectures are idle in such a case. It is melancholy, at all events for the ornithologist, to think of an England without a wryneck; but before that still distant day ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson

... reckoning of them, Herr Johannes had adopted the right method for ensuring the devotion of the maidens of Tyrol. She responded with an amazed gulp of her mouth and a grimace of acquiescence. Ten florins in silver shortened the migratory term of the mountain girl by full three months. Herr Johannes asked her the hour when the officers in command had supper, and deferred his own meal till that time. Katchen set about earning her money. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Professor Huxley was strongly opposed to unnecessary interference with the labours of sea fishermen, he was well aware of the necessity of protecting migratory fish like salmon, against over-fishing: and his reports for 1882 and 1883—in which he gave elaborate accounts of the results of legislation on the Tyne and on the Severn—show that he keenly appreciated the necessity of regulating ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... credit them; yet this information may reach them through known laws. Breed knew of it from the elk movements, and it is probable that the elk in turn were warned from some similarly natural source,—perhaps from atmospheric changes, more likely from the flight of migratory birds. ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts

... is migratory only to the extent of moving to and from the shore, and is, therefore, practically a sedentary animal. Its movements are governed chiefly by the abundance of food and the temperature of ...
— The Lobster Fishery of Maine - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, Vol. 19, Pages 241-265, 1899 • John N. Cobb

... range of our inquiry was intended to include the whole migratory range for seals.... Our movements were kept most secret."—Sir George Baden-Powell on the Work of ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Volume 101, October 31, 1891 • Various

... in the water, and no finches in the bushes. They had evidently all passed. Those in the van of the migratory army were no doubt scattered and thinly distributed, so that he had been meeting the flocks a long while before he suspected it. The nearer he approached their centre the thicker they became, and on getting through that he found a solitude. The weeds were ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies

... of the race rather than of the individual, possessed the American frontiers-man. He moved from one locality to another, but always westward, like some new migratory species that had willingly discarded the instinct for returning. He never took the back trail. A traveler, writing in 1791 from the Ohio Valley, rather superficially observed that "the Americans are lazy and bored, often moving from place to place for the sake of change; in the thirty ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth

... a coping of worn brick on which she had set her feet, but she did not see it now. She saw migratory birds traveling steadily through a vast expanse of gray sky; birds that were going, at the appointed time, to some far-distant place, in search of a golden climate, in search of the sun. Inevitably they would come into the golden climate, inevitably they would find ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... few stags of the old descent left; and burrow-ducks and partridges love to live there, and it offers a resting place, in the spring and late summer, for thousands of migratory birds. Above all, it is the swampy eastern shore below the sheep meadow, where the migratory birds alight, to rest ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof

... Labrador. There are three British governments concerned—Newfoundland, the Dominion and the province of Quebec. There are French and American fishermen along the shore. The proper protection of some migratory species will require co-operation with the United States, perhaps with Mexico and South America for certain birds, and even with Denmark for the Greenland seal. Then, there are the Indians, the whole trade in animal products, the necessity of not interfering with any legitimate development, and ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood

... chanced that later in the season, when the migratory inhabitants had flown to their hot-air registers in Boston and Providence, I breakfasted with one who had lingered. It was a certain Boston lawyer,—replete with principle, honesty, self-discipline, statistics, aesthetics, and a perfect consciousness ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte

... nature, familiarly met with in the neighbourhood, "the pot-boy, the muffin youth, and the baked potato man," had about them a perennial freshness. Whenever we were reminded, again, in regard to the principal characteristics of the population that it was migratory, "usually disappearing on the verge of quarter-day, and generally by night," her Majesty's revenues being seldom collected in that happy valley, its rents being pronounced dubious, and its water communication described as "frequently cut off," we found in respect to the whole ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... fame of being the woman market for half the world. The innate German migratory disposition seems to animate also a portion of the women. In larger numbers than those of any other people, the Austrian excepted, do they furnish their contingent to the supply of international prostitution. ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... little in these migratory times," returned the young lady. "You have but to imagine a von before it, and it would pass at Dresden, or at Berlin. Von Blunt, der Edelgeborne Graf Von Blunt, Hofrath—or if you like it better, Geheimer Rath mit Excellenz ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... forms of the coral atolls are very few in number. So far as vegetation is concerned, the cocoa-palm and breadfruit are about the only kinds of plant life of importance. A few species of fish and migratory birds are the only animals that may be ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson

... birds migrate for food or warmth is not overthrown by modern observations. That appears to be the primary impulse, though others may be traced or reasonably imagined. To suppose, as has been put forward, that birds are endowed with a migratory instinct for the express purpose of keeping down their numbers, in order, that is, that they may perish in crossing the sea, is really too absurd for serious consideration. If that were the end in view, it would be most easily obtained by keeping them at home, where snow would speedily starve ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... from one house to the other. "Were you to go into most of the sets of this town, and mention Mrs. Hawker's name, not one person in ten would know there is such a being in their vicinity; the pele mele of a migratory population keeping persons of her character and condition in life, quite out of view. The very persons who will prattle by the hour, of the establishments of Mrs. Peleg Pond, and Mrs. Jonah Twist, and Mrs. Abiram Wattles, people who first appeared on this island ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper

... migratory and ephemeral species of moth, black and pink (of the same pink as the amourettes) had hatched out, and they slept poised on the long stalks of the grass, or flew away as lightly as the flowers shed their petals when we walked through ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti

... their basis: First, the variable quantity of the modulus of elasticity, which, in the concrete, varies inversely as the stress; and, second, the fact that the neutral axis in a reinforced concrete beam under changing stress is migratory. There are also many other elements of evaluation, which, though of ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey

... cities in the Low Countries, and to some extent even London, have since the beginning of the Jewish movement towards the United States, become the refuge of a considerable number who straggled behind the migratory columns and were unable to reach their final destination. Free from any official molestations and rather welcomed by the native Jews, the foreign Jewish community in Paris has flourished in its own way. It numbers by this time about twenty-five thousand souls, ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... Instances of migratory menstruation, the flow moving periodically from the ordinary passage to the breasts and mammae, are found in the older writers. Salmuth speaks of a woman on whose hands appeared spots immediately before the establishment of the menses. Cases ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... settlement in respect to individualistic speculation in public lands; how it would open a career to the land jobbers, as well as to the natural leaders in the competitive movement for acquiring the best lands, for laying out town sites and building up new communities under "boom" conditions. The migratory tendency of New Englanders was increased by this gradual change in its land policy; the attachment to a locality was diminished. The later years showed increasing emphasis by New England upon individual success, greater respect for the self-made man who, in the ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... Perchance, after a few thousands of years, if the fishes will be patient, and pass their summers elsewhere, meanwhile, nature will have levelled the Billerica dam, and the Lowell factories, and the Grass-ground River run clear again, to be explored by new migratory shoals, even as far as the Hopkinton pond ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... necessary consequences of it. Man, as a reasoning animal, must always have doubted of his immortality and plan of conduct; in all the results of faith, there is immediate submission to a divine will, which we are sure is good. We may compare the destiny of man in this respect to that of a migratory bird; if a slow flying bird, as a landrail in the Orkneys in autumn, had reason and could use it as to the probability of his finding his way over deserts, across seas, and of securing his food in passing to a warm climate 3,000 miles off, he would undoubtedly starve in Europe; under the direction ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy

... that Negroes have been taught to place a higher and a proper valuation upon their citizenship, and the importance of the ballot when it is wielded for the maintenance and perpetuation of good government. As a class of citizens Negroes are peaceable and law-abiding, and must not be reckoned with the migratory hordes of anarchists, nihilists, and the wreckers of law and order that infest our Eastern and Western shores. In our schools, too, Negroes have learned that it is theirs to petition respectfully for the enjoyment ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... same description, more or less numerously peopled. At Seloufeeat and Tintaghoda, however, we saw more houses built of stone and mud. This may be accounted for by the fact that the inhabitants are not nearly so migratory as those of Tintalous, who often follow in a body the motions of their master, so that he is ever surrounded by ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson

... have a surgeon and the equipment for immediate facial operations; and there are migratory pedicures, masseurs, and barbers. So heavy has been the subscription, so persistent and intelligent the work of all connected with this great oeuvre, so increasingly fertile the amazing brain of Mlle. Javal, that practically nothing is now wanted to ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... to have," she agreed, thoughtfully. "Because you and I are here. But it goes a long way back—to Genesis—yes. Following the initial placing, other and higher organisms, finding in their migratory travels this evidence of life, accepted the encouragement to remain, and did remain, feeding upon the life found here in the shape of toads and lizards—to carry the theory forward a step—even as the ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton

... wound up, and a new tenant took the farm. It became necessary, therefore, for the shepherd to seek a new situation, and this brought about the first "flitting" in the family history. The Berwickshire hinds are somewhat notorious for their migratory habits, in which some observers have found a survival of the restlessness which characterised their ancestors in former times, and was alike the result and the cause of the old Border Forays. Be that as it may, every Whitsunday ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns

... above them. But the reason no longer exists. Doubtless the business of a city should be as compact as possible; but for its dwellings, every consideration of comfort and happiness, of physical and moral well-being, demands that the inhabitants shall make the most of their migratory resources and—scatter; find room to build, not tenements or residences, but homes for themselves and their children. In the old time safety was found by crowding together within mural walls. Now the case is reversed. Where the population is densest, temptations and ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner

... spring which they called the corn-medicine festival of the women. They thought that a certain Old Woman who Never Dies made the crops to grow, and that, living somewhere in the south, she sent the migratory waterfowl in spring as her tokens and representatives. Each sort of bird represented a special kind of crop cultivated by the Indians: the wild goose stood for the maize, the wild swan for the gourds, and the wild duck for the beans. So when the feathered messengers of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... latter of Ionic blood. And, indeed, these two nations had held from very early times the most distinguished place in Greece, the one being Pelasgic, the other a Hellenic people, and the one having never quitted its original seas, while the other had been excessively migratory." "The Hellenes," wrote Professor Boughton in the Arena some years ago, "were the Aryans first to be brought into contact with these sunburnt Hamites, who, let it be remembered, though classed as whites, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... Darwin's conclusions, and these have not escaped objection. The advocatus diaboli has a useful function in science. But in attacking Darwin his brief is generally found to be founded on a slender basis of facts. Thus Winge and Knud Andersen have examined many thousands of migratory birds and found "that their crops and stomachs were always empty. They never observed any seeds adhering to the feathers, beaks or feet of the birds." (R.F. Scharff, "European Animals", page 64, London, 1907.) The most considerable investigation of the problem of Plant Dispersal since ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... of a nation's or a people's civilization, is found in the correspondence, written and printed, conducted by the citizens. Barbarians have and need no correspondence. Civilization needs it, and can not exist without it. A migratory people like ours have more correspondence than older and less migratory nations. A citizen emigrating from Vermont to Illinois must correspond with the friends of his old home. The old friend in Vermont must know how the absent one 'gets along in the world.' To conduct ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... Mall, and topside Litchfield was littered in a dozen places with forsaken equipment and half-completed paving. There was no one in Kurt Fawzi's office in the Airlines Building, and the employment office was jammed with migratory workers ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper

... Like most flat countries nowadays, it was heavily guarded against invasion of privacy by forced timber—fifty-foot spruce and tamarack, grown in five years. The population was close on two millions, largely migratory between Florida and California, with a backbone of small farms (they call a thousand acres a farm in Illinois) whose owners come into Chicago for amusements and society during the winter. They were, he said, noticeably kind, ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling

... the night, and though it sometimes warns them off, it always holds them by a spell. The night migrating birds perish in scores against the plate-glass of coast lighthouses, swerving from the control of the all-powerful migratory instinct toward the fascinating glare that is their destruction. It is not sportsmanlike to hang a lantern in the marsh and shoot the duck that gather under it. But the night, the silent marsh, and the lantern have charms that the sportsman, with his legal and mechanical paraphernalia, ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various

... on a hot day will bring the smell of that Sac camp to me even now. The Sacs were a migratory, brutish people, who snatched at life red-handed and growling, and as I squatted in their dirty hovels, I lost, like a dropped garment, all sense of the wonder and freedom of my wilderness life. Suddenly all the forest seemed squalid, and a longing for the soft ease and ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith

... met below, They, too, have long roam'd to and fro; They ramble, leaving, where they pass, Their fragments on the cumber'd grass. And often to some kindly place Chance guides the migratory race, Where, though long wanderings intervene, They recognise a former scene. The dingy tents are pitch'd; the fires Give to the wind their wavering spires; In dark knots crouch round the wild flame Their children, as when first they came; They see their shackled beasts again Move, browsing, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... of a natural instinct the bee invariably builds its cell in the same form for the next brood and the storage of honey for it; the butterfly prepares the cradle and food for offspring it never sees, and the migratory birds follow the sun northward in the spring and southward on the approach of winter. All ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger

... trade, buying or building premises, in the belief that, however business may alter from other causes, his geographical position must, at all events, continue unchanged, must be as much astonished as was Macbeth at the migratory propensities of Birnam forest, when he perceives that towns a hundred miles down the road have actually walked between him and London; get their town parcels much earlier, and have digested and nearly forgotten their newspaper, while he is waiting in a fever of expectation to know ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... old hermit. On his arrival at Ophir he ordered a carriage and drove directly to The Pines, for he was impatient to see John Britton at as early a date as possible, and was fearful lest the latter, with his migratory ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour

... couple of hundred years or so more before I saw a third bullfinch—which didn't surprise me, for bullfinches are very woodland birds, and non-migratory into the bargain—so that they didn't often get blown seaward over the broad Atlantic. At the end of that time, however, I observed one morning a pair of finches, after a heavy storm, drying their poor battered wings upon a shrub in one of the islands. From this ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... my first flush, reflected in other pages, to fail of justice to so much proud domestic architecture—in the very teeth moreover of the fact that I was for ever paying my compliments, in a wistful, wondering way, to the fine Palazzo Lanfranchi, occupied in 1822 by the migratory Byron, and whither Leigh Hunt, as commemorated in the latter's Autobiography, came out to join him ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... was fearful of forming new ties with men. It was something for this reason that he liked to dwell in a country where it was easy to live apart, a stranger amid a throng of strangers. For the rest he rarely stayed long in any one place; often he changed his lair: he was like an old migratory bird which needs space, and has its country in the air ... "Mein Reich ist in ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... as dull and colourless as the inland waters of any other country. The reform seems likely to come about in this way. There are at least 30,000 children resident on the canal-boats. How are they to be properly educated and brought up as useful citizens if they are to continue to lead a migratory existence which never leaves them for a fortnight in a single place? Formerly, nobody cared whether they were educated or not. They were left undisturbed to live their lives in their own simple and primitive way. As De Amicis wrote: 'The children ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough

... fecundity, for example, of the heiring would, according to this view, be both cause and effect of its habits of life, which exposed it in its migrations to enormous destruction. Whether the herring and other migratory fishes adopted their present habits because of their exceptional fecundity—the origin of which would then have to be sought in some other natural cause—or whether those habits were originally due to some other cause, and ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... all the migratory instincts of his well-known family, and flits from East St. Pancras to British Columbia and back again with engaging irregularity. On his rare visits to Westminster he is always ready to impart in a somewhat strident voice (another family characteristic) the political ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various

... referring to the James river, the best waters for sturgeon in Virginia to this day. The "small rivers" were the fresh-water tributaries of the large salty ones. The small fish to be found there which would take the hook in winter were probably the non-migratory species like perch, catfish and suckers. If some of the names Smith gives seem puzzling today, it should be remembered that often the same fish name has applied throughout history to different fish at different times or in different ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton

... appease the susceptibility of the Tartar tribes. The Lamas are divided into three classes: those that remain under the tent, and whose mode of life differs little from that of the other members of their family; the travelling Lamas—a migratory kind of animals—who, with staff in hand, and wallet at their backs, wander from place to place, trusting to Tartar hospitality for their maintenance; and lastly, the Lamas who live in communities, or convents, and devote ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... from the mother every member of the family should be a material producer; and then there will be means sufficient for the producer in the kitchen to get such remuneration for her skill as will eliminate the incompetent, shirking, migratory ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... land, are so frequent and unexpected, and the habits of the people are so migratory, that there are very many in every part of the Country, who, having seen all their temporal plans and hopes crushed, are now pining among strangers, bereft of wonted comforts, without friends, and without the sympathy and society, ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher

... existed in the city of Nephosis a fraternity of priests, reverenced by the appellation of Gasteres. It is reported that they were not always of their present form, but were birds aquatic and migratory, a species of cormorant. The poet Linus, who lived nearer the transformation (if there indeed was any), sings thus, ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... and build, and educate. He claims to occupy so much territory as will furnish him with subsistence, but his "home," if he really has one, is in the forest, like the game he hunts. It is a fact beyond dispute, that all migratory people are low down in the scale of ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.

... thirty-six years old, and all of the years had been comfortable, carefree ones. In the natural order of her pleasantly migratory, luxurious life, she had rarely come into close contact with careworn or strained faces; this contact through the small, clear lenses seemed startlingly close. Stefana's lean and anxious face, the child's baby-bent little back, like ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell



Words linked to "Migratory" :   migrate, nonmigratory, unsettled, migratory locust



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