"Rarefied" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the north-east, but clearly visible in the rarefied mountain air, towered the mighty gates through which the Olifant River roared down to meet the Letaba. On their left the great ranges rolled away to the infinite north-west. What direction first to explore in? That was ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... explained the aurora as due to the accumulation of electricity on clouds or on spicules of ice in the upper air. Yet others think it due merely to the passage of electricity through rarefied air itself. Humboldt considered the matter settled in yet another way when Faraday showed, in 1831, that magnetism may produce luminous effects. But perhaps the prevailing theory of to-day assumes that the aurora is due to a current of electricity generated at ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... when the moving mass of air reaches its greatest elevation, it is then on the verge of the great valley, or, as in the case of the Kalahari, the great heated inland plains; there, meeting with the rarefied air of that hot, dry surface, the ascending heat gives it greater capacity for retaining all its remaining humidity, and few showers can be given to the middle and western lands in consequence ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... lofty plateaux of Peru; and Alcide d'Orbigny states (33. Quoted by Prichard, 'Researches into the Physical History of Mankind,' vol. v. p. 463.) that, from continually breathing a highly rarefied atmosphere, they have acquired chests and lungs of extraordinary dimensions. The cells, also, of the lungs are larger and more numerous than in Europeans. These observations have been doubted, but Mr. D. Forbes carefully measured many Aymaras, an allied race, living at the height ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... upon her as she crossed the threshold, and Jessy recognized unwillingly that she looked surprisingly handsome. Handsome, however, was not the word Vane would have used. He thought Evelyn looked exotic: highly cultivated, strangely refined, as though she had grown up in a rarefied atmosphere in which nothing rank could thrive. Exactly what suggested this it was difficult to define; but the man felt that she had brought along with her the clean, chill air of the heights where the cloud-berries bloom. She was a flower of the dim and misty North, which has ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... incapable of comment—so great was the demand upon his lungs—was not too tired to admire the power and resolution of the girl, who seemed not to suffer any special inconvenience from the rarefied air. The dryness of his open mouth, the throbbing of his troubled pulse, the roaring of his breath, brought to him with increasing dismay the fact that he had overlooked another phase of the ranger's job. "I couldn't chop ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... in that nervous state when the brain seems rarefied and empowered to wrest secrets from the very elements in his path. He pursued several chains of thought at once, with lightning rapidity, and, with curious mental inconsistency, dropped them, and lapsed into others. Now ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... the air it is necessary that it should blend with a quantity of air, and if it were united with the air, two difficulties arise: that is, that it will rarefy that portion of air with which it is mingled, and this rarefied air will fly upwards and will not remain in the air which is heavier than itself; and besides this the ethereal spiritual essence is disunited, and its nature is changed, for which reason that nature loses some of its first virtue. There is in addition to these a third difficulty, ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... of the cone. We continued our zigzag climb. The fifteen hundred remaining feet took us five hours to clear; the circuitous route, the diagonal and the counter marches, must have measured at least three leagues. I could stand it no longer. I was yielding to the effects of hunger and cold. The rarefied air scarcely gave play to the action ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... only one; that her husband's absence should continue long enough to amount to positive desertion. But she never allowed her mind to dwell much upon the thought; still less did she deliberately hope for such a result. Her regard for Winterborne had been rarefied by the shock which followed its avowal into an ethereal emotion that had little to ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... never been higher than 7,000 feet and was unaccustomed to reading country from a great altitude. It was also bitterly cold, and even in my fur-lined combination I was shivering. I noticed, too, that I had to take long, deep breaths in the rarefied atmosphere. Looking downward at a certain angle, I saw what at first I took to be a round, shimmering pool of water. It was simply the effect of the sunlight on the congealing mist. We had been keeping an eye out for German ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... anciently been reported," observes Lord Bacon, "and is still received, that extreme applauses and shouting of people assembled in multitudes, have so rarefied and broken the air, that birds flying over have fallen down, the air not being able to support them; and it is believed by some that great ringing of bells in populous cities hath chased away thunder, and also dissipated pestilent air. All which may ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... why the same Body seems greater (without adding to it) one time, than another; they say, when it seems lesse, it is Condensed; when greater, Rarefied. What is that Condensed, and Rarefied? Condensed, is when there is in the very same Matter, lesse Quantity than before; and Rarefied, when more. As if there could be Matter, that had not some determined Quantity; when ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... of dogs fast dying out, and the same breed of jolly young monks whom I mourn to know as humbugs, and the same convent parlour with its piano and the sitting round the fire, and the same supper, and the same lone night in a cell, and the same bright fresh morning when going out into the highly rarefied air was like a plunge into an icy bath. Now, see here what comes along; and why does this thing stalk into my mind on the top ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... magnified thus by the mirage. Sometimes they thought that they saw lakes of water in the distance, and hastened on to them; and then they fancied they were close to rivers and islands, covered with luxuriant foliage, but still were doomed to disappointment; as all was the result of the highly-rarefied air, and the refraction of the sun's rays on the sultry plain. What would they have given for a bush even to afford them any shelter from the noonday sun, for the crowns of their heads appeared as if covered with live coal, ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... movement of the monoplane as it drove up the faint south-west breeze was very little in excess of the pitching of a boat head on to broad rollers in a moderate gale, and he was constitutionally a good sailor. And the keenness of the more rarefied air into which they ascended produced a sense of lightness and exhilaration. He looked up and saw the blue sky above fretted with cirrus clouds. His eye came cautiously down through the ribs and bars to a shining flight of white birds that hung in the lower sky. For a space he watched these. ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... shallow niche, his hold an icicle ready to snap in an instant, an abyss below him waiting for his foot to slip or the icicle to break. How thin the air seemed, how desperately hard to breathe! He was thinking of Mont Blanc, it may be, and the fearfully rarefied atmosphere which he remembered well as one of the great trials in his mountain ascents. No, it was not Mont Blanc,—it was not any one of the frozen Alpine summits; it was Hecla ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... dies More quickly far, more quickly is dissolved Back to its primal bodies, when withdrawn From out man's members it has gone away. For, sure, if body (container of the same Like as a jar), when shivered from some cause, And rarefied by loss of blood from veins, Cannot for longer hold the soul, how then Thinkst thou it can be held by any air— A stuff much ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... of a rose-leaf upon its mates already fallen,—can we conceive of her treading anything so sordid? No; it is only on some unsubstantial floor of dream that she walks securely, herself a dream. And it is only when Spenser has escaped thither, only when this glamour of fancy has rarefied his wife till she is grown almost as purely a creature of the imagination as the other ideal images with which he converses, that his feeling becomes as nearly passionate—as nearly human, I was on the point of saying—as with him is possible. ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... I regret to say, was not a good Oriental. He lacked the Semite's pliability. He was graceful, but not gracious. A consequence, doubtless, of having inhaled for some time past the rarefied atmosphere of the Chief, and swallowed a few pokers during the process, his manner towards me was freezingly non-committal—worthy of the best Anglo-Saxon ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... heat between the freezing-point and the boiling-point, 32 deg. and 212 deg., the expansion of air is about 1/490th part, so that any invention which seeks to use rarefied air as a motive power must employ a very intense degree of heat, enough to ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... strikingly, gowned, somewhat conspicuously; a large pattern in the figure of the cloth. She carried a little dog. There was about her something, difficult to denote, brilliant and hard in effect, like a polished stone. And we felt the rarefied atmosphere of a wealthy, highly cultivated, rather haughty society. "Charge to Edward Wharton," she said, very nicely, bending over us as we wrote "Lenox, Mass." She pronounced it not Massachusetts, but Mass, as is not infrequent in the East. "Thank you," ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... the nipping air of Galesburg, Illinois, that turns the young sciolists of Knox College toward the rarefied ethers of literature? S.S. McClure, John Phillips, Ralph Waldo Trine, Don Marquis—are there other Knox men in the game, too? Marquis was studying at Galesburg about the time of the Spanish War. He has worked on half a dozen newspapers, and assisted Joel Chandler Harris in ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... was open and in the middle of the opening was fixed a kind of basket grate, in which faggots and sheaves of straw were burnt. The air, rarefied in passing through this flame, rose in the balloon, swelled out its sides, and filled it. The persons, who were placed in the gallery made of wicker and attached to the outside near the bottom, had each ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... he went to Les Bains that next evening that the world had somehow changed into another dimension, so much clearer the air was, so much brighter the stars.... He had discovered a higher, more rarefied stratum of life, in the dim, keen atmosphere of which things took on incomparable beauty and mystery, so that the water on his left hand, unseen, yet so blue, was not the Gulf of Lyons, but the whole Mediterranean, which washed ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... social register. We mixed around a lot more now. We went to the million-candle-power restaurants every now and then, and ate a good deal more than sixty-five cents' worth apiece without batting an eye; and we went to see a play occasionally and didn't climb up into the rarefied atmosphere to find our seats, either. And whenever we broke in with the limousine crowd we kept a bright lookout for Jarvis. We wanted to see him and show him that we were coming along. We wanted him to be proud ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... flowed out like a rocket tail behind us. The Planetara caught their impetus. In the rarefied air, our bow lifted slightly, like a ship riding a gentle ground swell. At a hundred thousand feet we sailed gently forward, hull down to the asteroid's surface, cruising to ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... remember always. They lingered over the second bottle. Either of them had only to mention the word "mortifying" to send them both into riotous gasps. The dining-room was whirring and shifting now; a curious lightness permeated and rarefied ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the tiny, fluttering things at this terrible height, it takes our breath away. What a panorama of dark earth and glistening river and ocean must be spread out beneath them! How the big moon must glow in that rarefied air! How diminutive and puerile must seem the houses and cities ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... more imbued with a sense of their own omniscience. Even the men with district experience, and those who had groaned in provincial secretariats under the heavy hand of the Government of India, were quick to adopt more orthodox views as soon as they were privileged to breathe the more rarefied atmosphere of the Olympian secretariats, that prided themselves on being the repositories of all the arcana of "good government." Of what constituted good government efficiency came to be regarded as the one test that mattered, ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... wanted was not the applause of the public, but the faith of a coterie, to be a martyr, misunderstood by the many, worshipped by the few. A Bloomsbury hero, a Chelsea King! "We confess that as a writer Mr. Delancey Woburn is altogether too rarefied for our taste. His work is far too impregnated by the stamp of a tiny clique of rather self-conscious superintellectuals. Reading his books, we feel as if we had suddenly entered a room full of people who know one another very well. In other words, ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... wind created by the ship as she rushes through the atmosphere. And if perchance you were fortunate enough to escape being blown overboard, you would be made seriously ill by the sudden change, from the dense air which you are now breathing, to the highly rarefied air outside. For this same reason it is also necessary that, while the ship is in flight, all ports and doors communicating with the exterior atmosphere should be kept tightly closed. But come, the sun is rising," he said, as a flash of golden light darted in through the scuttles; "you ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... instead of jogging along with it, hand in hand. The modern psychology has shown us how powerfully symbolism is at work in the unconscious mind. It is therefore easier to understand at the present time than it would have been twenty years ago that the most rarefied thought may be but the conscious counterpart of ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... entirely in the brain, how was it that all the cerebral functions were not vitiated? In fine, the source of the disease lay, not in the weakness of the brain, but in an access of heat, caused possibly by exposure to the sun, by which the matter of the brain had become so rarefied that it showed unhealthy activity in absorbing moisture from the other parts. This heat, therefore, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... fine; little wind. Objects at fifty miles' distance seem close upon you, so clear and rarefied is the air. Berka came this morning ostensibly for eye-powders, but really for a bit more sugar for his little grandson, the well-beloved son ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... resolved itself into a kind of rarefied picnic, and, as Sara crossed the cool green lawns in the wake of a smart parlourmaid, she found that quite a considerable number of Audrey's friends—and enemies—were gathered together under the shade of the trees, partaking of tea and strawberries and cream. The elite of the neighbourhood ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... of Russian secret police in that country. The Falcon was now speeding along at a considerable height, and after running for a number of miles, sufficient to preclude the possibility that they could be picked up by the pursuing aeroplane, Tom sent his craft down, as the rarefied ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Glider - or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure • Victor Appleton
... quality of the charge?—that is to say, is the positive or the negative more prone to break disruptively through the insulating medium? Investigations with Geissler's and other tubes containing highly rarefied gases have made it tolerably clear that there is a greater "tearing away" influence at the negative than at the positive pole, and if two equal balls, containing one a positive and the other a negative charge, be equally heated, the negative is more readily dissipated than the positive. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... dilatation, inflation, subtilization[obs3]. vaporization, evaporation, diffusion, gassification[obs3]. ether &c. (gas) 334. V. rarefy, expand, dilate, subtilize[obs3]. Adj. rare, subtile, thin, fine, tenuous, compressible, flimsy, slight; light &c. 320; cavernous, spongy &c. (hollow) 252. rarefied &c. v.; unsubstantial; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... over the car and perceived a small blackish mass. It was Spires. The Rhine, which is so large, seemed an unrolled ribbon. The sky was a deep blue over our heads. The birds had long abandoned us, for in that rarefied air they could not have flown. We were alone in space, and I in presence of ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... Lindsay, describing his elephant-catching in Silhet, says: "At night each man lights a fire at his post, and furnishes himself with a dozen joints of the large bamboo, one of which he occasionally throws into the fire, and the air it contains being rarefied by the heat, it explodes with a report as loud as a musket." (Lives of the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... can subscribe and say amen to every plank in that platform. He believes it, he has proclaimed it in public, and he embodies it. Mr. Burrows indulges in slight but effective sarcasm of sham reformers and so-called business men who perform the arduous task of cutting coupons and live in rarefied regions where they can only be seen by the common people when the light is turned on. (Cheers from two partisan bodies and groans and hisses from another. General Doby, with a pained face, pounding with the gavel. This isn't a circumstance to what's ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... all he enjoyed the quiet, starlit nights before the moon was up; for the moon dazzled the eyes in the rarefied air where they flew, whereas the stars gave just enough light to steer by without making ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... chance he had carried the weapon in an outer pocket where the frost had stiffened the grease. Had it been warmed next his body, the fatal check would not have occurred. Even so, he pulled again and it exploded sharp and deafening in the rarefied morning air. In that instant's pause, however, Captain had whirled so that the bullet tore through the loose fur beneath his arm. He struck, simultaneously with the report, and the gun flew outward, ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... tradesmen, clerks, and hall-boys knew of her. Almost invariably, when called upon to state her name in such quarters, she was greeted by a slight start of recognition, a swift glance of examination, whispers, even open comment. That was something. Yet how much more, and how different were those rarefied reaches of social supremacy to which popular repute bears scarcely any relationship at all. How different, indeed? From what Cowperwood had said in Chicago she had fancied that when they took up their formal abode in New York ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... for this something he suggests "ethereal air" or "liquid fire," neither of which, we contend, were empty terms. With Bacon's knowledge of experimental chemistry it is a question, and a most interesting one, whether he had not in his mind those two actual principles respectively of gas and air rarefied by heat on which we launch our ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... eight hundred and forty-seven cubic feet of gas of which we speak, all introduced into the balloon, it would be entirely filled; but that would not do, because, as the balloon continued to mount into the more rarefied layers of the atmosphere, the gas within would dilate, and soon burst the cover containing it. Balloons, then, are usually only ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... speaking, there can not be assigned a truer than your own mild and free and humane government. It is the liberty, Lords and Commons, which your own valorous and happy counsels have purchased us, liberty which is the nurse of all great wits; this is that which hath rarefied and enlightened our spirits like the influence of heaven; this is that which hath enfranchised, enlarged and lifted up ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... is used—(1.) For passing currents through glass tubes almost exhausted of air or containing highly rarefied gases. The luminous effects of these "Geissler" tubes are very beautiful. (2.) For producing the now famous X or Roentgen rays. These rays accompany the light rays given off at the negative terminal (cathode) of a vacuum ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... not one worth mentioning; and the heavy tropical rains and the melted snow from the mountains, poured vast quantities of water into it. Had the valley been at the level of the sea, it would simply have become a great lake, surrounded by hills; but at three thousand feet higher, the atmosphere is rarefied, and evaporation goes on with such rapidity as to keep the accumulation of water in check. So the affair had adjusted itself in this wise, that the land and the five lakes should divide the valley about equally between them. It became necessary ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... (at the meter) could only be driven through the ordinary small burner holes at a velocity destructive of good results. Herr Frederick Siemens perceived this in his early experiments, and not only increased the orifices of his burners, but provided for the closer contact of the more rarefied gas and air by the use of notched deflectors, which are now an essential part of his apparatus. Mr. Grimston also uses separate tubes of large area for his hot gas, but dispenses with deflectors, save in so far as the same duty may be performed by the plain lower edge of the inner cylinder ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... my legs on either side of the manhole and prepared to unscrew it, but Cavor stopped me. "There is first a little precaution," he said. He pointed out that although it was certainly an oxygenated atmosphere outside, it might still be so rarefied as to cause us grave injury. He reminded me of mountain sickness, and of the bleeding that often afflicts aeronauts who have ascended too swiftly, and he spent some time in the preparation of a sickly-tasting drink which he insisted on my ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... work is too impalpable and moves in an air too rarefied. It sometimes lacks strength. It fails to take grip enough of life. Had he lived he might have given it these things; there are signs in his last poems that he would have given it. But he could hardly have bettered the sheer and triumphant lyricism ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... There by the incumbent atmosphere compressed, The panting chase grows warmer as he flies, 350 And through the net-work of the skin perspires; Leaves a long-streaming trail behind, which by The cooler air condensed, remains, unless By some rude storm dispersed, or rarefied By the meridian sun's intenser heat. To every shrub the warm effluvia cling, Hang on the grass, impregnate earth and skies. With nostrils opening wide, o'er hill, o'er dale, The vigorous hounds pursue, with every breath Inhale the grateful steam, quick pleasures sting 360 Their ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... dropping of the fluid contained in them, they would sometimes, says he, appear at a distance to be sucked up from the sea. The theory of waterspouts in the present day does in fact admit the supposition here referred to; that the air, being rarefied by particular causes, has its equilibrium restored by the elevation of the water, on the same principle that mercury rises in the barometer, or the contents of a well in a common pump. The opinions of the learned traveller on this subject are extremely loose and unscientific, and are only ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... amount of power has been proved to be experimentally possible. In the rarefied atmosphere at a height of five or ten miles from the earth's surface, electric discharges of very high voltage are conveyed without any other conducting medium than that of the air. By sending up balloons, carrying suspended wires, ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... everywhere, and everywhere that he went he met the Langleys. In the high political and social life in which the Dictator, to his entertainment, found himself, the hostilities of warring parties had little or no effect. In that rarefied air it was hard to draw the breath of party passion, and the Dictator came across the Langleys as often in the houses of the Opposition as in Ministerial mansions. So it came to pass that something almost approaching to an intimacy ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... I began to feel the effects of the rarefied air very sensibly. It made me dizzy and sick, bringing on a most acute headache—a sharp, knife-like pain. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... The air was so rarefied, the drive so exciting, that I shouted with all my might, "Go on, reindeer, go on. This is fine, I never had such a drive ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... They imagined themselves walking through its unknown countries, climbing its highest peaks, descending into its lowest depths. Here and there they fancied they saw vast seas, scarcely kept together under so rarefied an atmosphere, and water-courses emptying the mountain tributaries. Leaning over the abyss, they hoped to catch some sounds from that orb forever mute in the solitude of space. That last day ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... far less than exists on the top of the highest terrestrial mountain. A mountain here must have an altitude of about ten miles to possess so low a pressure on its summit. Drops of water big enough to form rain can hardly collect in such a rarefied atmosphere. Moisture will fall as dew or frost upon the ground. The days will be hot owing to the unimpeded solar radiation; the nights bitterly cold owing to the ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... For example, water in freezing exerts an expansive, thrusting force of thirty thousand pounds to the square inch, over two thousand tons to the square foot; an incomprehensible force, but applicable in nature to little besides splitting rocks. On the other hand, when water is rarefied into steam its power is vastly more versatile, tractable, and serviceable in a thousand ways. Take a bit of metal called zinc. It is heavy, subject to gravitation, solid, subject to cohesion. But cause it to be burned, to pass away, and be changed. To do this we use ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... mass which constitutes the entire mountain top. The rock is full of minute particles of mica, which glitter and flash in the sun like "gems of purest ray serene." A brisk wind was blowing and the rarefied air infused us with new strength ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... a joyous cast, which was noticeable because he was habitually of grave demeanor, and his associates, observing the change, taxed him with the fact and demanded an explanation, Hobart in particular wishing to know. Harley lightly ascribed it to the rarefied air, as they were ascending a plateau, and the others, though calling it the baldest and poorest of replies, were forced ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... a great central hall, into which a current of fresh, temperately warmed air is continually pouring. Each chamber opening upon this hall has a chimney up whose flue the rarefied air is constantly passing, drawing up with it all the foul and poisonous gases. That house is well ventilated, and in a way that need bring no dangerous draughts upon the most delicate invalid. For the ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... sooner or later temptation is sure to beset. The desire comes to see close up those monsters of mystery. Many, including most women, ignorant of rewards, refuse to venture because they fear hardship. "I can never climb mountains in this rarefied air," pleads one, and in most cases this is true; it is important that persons unused to the higher altitudes be temperate and discreet. But the lungs and muscles of a well-trained mountain horse are always obtainable, and the least ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... fleecy beings the clouds," went on Mr. Lavender, without taking on the interruption, "seemed to await our coming in the morning glory of their piled-up snows; and we, with the rarefied air in our lungs, felt that we must shout to them." And so carried away was Mr. Lavender by his own style that he really did begin to address the clouds: "Ghosts of the sky, who creep cold about this wide blue air, we small adventuring mortals great-hearted salute ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... any move to descend to the lower and less rarefied altitudes the horse began executing a few fancy steps, and he started traveling sidewise with a kind of a slanting bias movement that was extremely disconcerting, not to say alarming, instead of proceeding straight ahead ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... necessarily of such enormous and constantly increasing importance. One half of our people are engaged in the manufacture of ingenious mechanical implements, moved by steam, electricity, water, compressed or rarefied air, by means of which the other half multiply their powers of production a hundredfold; and it follows as a natural consequence that among us the employment of machinery has developed a many-sidedness and a perfectness of which those who are outside ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... rotting leaves, but a clean, aromatic odour. It seemed to give them a substance without which they had been but a mirage, a scene painted on a cloth, so motionless and apparently lifeless they stood, with the long vines hanging from their boughs, and the hot, rarefied air ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... electricity in power-production, and its similarity to light in the wireless communication of thought, a new field of research, with entirely new practical possibilities, was suddenly opened up in the last third of the nineteenth century through the discovery of how electricity behaves in rarefied air. This brings us to the discovery of cathode rays and the phenomena accompanying them, from which the latest stage in the history of electricity originated. And here once more, as in the history of ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... though it was so rarefied that the boys, at first, found a little difficulty in breathing, made objects seem strangely near. Several times Jack and his companions saw a distant landmark, and wondered why they were so long in reaching it. Mr. ...
— Jack Ranger's Western Trip - From Boarding School to Ranch and Range • Clarence Young
... rambled, and even up into the octagonal turret chambers in the tower. Here he seemed to be rid of the aura of the dining-room portrait and in a rarefied atmosphere of Tudor turbulence. In one of the turret chambers, that overlooking the orchard, he found himself surveying the distant parkland with the eyes of a captive and longing for the coming of one who ever tarried yet was ever expected. The long narrow gallery ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... autumnal evening, just when you smell the first indication of winter in a rarefied atmosphere, and see it in the clear curling of the smoke, as its woolly flakes rise from the cottage chimney and gradually are lost in the clear blue sky. Although not a cold evening, a log fire was extremely welcome. My father, Heaven rest him! had ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... that he moved more swiftly when farthest from the earth's surface, because the air was more rarefied and offered less resistance, Rob mounted upwards until the islands of Japan were mere specks visible ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... appearances that are observed. Sir Humphry Davy, in a paper which contains his researches on flame, strongly expresses an opinion that the meteorites are solid bodies moving in space, and that the heat produced by the compression of the most rarefied air from the velocity of their motion must be sufficient to ignite their mass so that they are fused on entering the atmosphere. It is estimated that a body moving through our atmosphere with the velocity of one mile in a second, would extricate heat equal to 30,000 ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... do not learn it till our eyes and ears have become accustomed. And there are others who do not stand conspicuously in the main stream of mental progress, who, nevertheless, remote and perhaps secluded as they are, have a vision rarefied, subtle, strange not only in their own times, but for all times. Those men have their own communication to make to those anxious to add to the fineness of their perception, or merely perhaps to the oddness of experience. If some sting ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... peace in the grateful shadow of the little church on the cliff, but, above all, in the release from mental tension, and the ease of feeling after the strain of thought, she found the highest form of pleasure she had tasted, the most rarefied, the most intense. The St. Valentine's Day of her development was approaching, and her heart had begun already to practise the notes of the song-significant into which she would burst when ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... fraternity on scientific principles advocate the extension to the whole of humanity of the love men feel for themselves, their families, and the state. They forget that the love which they are discussing is a personal love, which might expand in a rarefied form to embrace a man's native country, but which disappears before it can embrace an artificial state such as Austria, England, or Turkey, and which we cannot even conceive of in relation to all ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... north coast of Australia, the winds are periodical, and are called the east and west monsoons, for such is their direction in the mid-sea. Near the Coast of New Holland the regularity of these winds is partly suspended by the rarefied state of the atmosphere; this produces land and sea-breezes, but the former are principally from the quarter from which the winds are blowing in the mid sea. The usual course of the winds near the coast in the months of April, May, and June, is as follows: after a calm night, ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... the breath that men draw into their lungs of life to supply eternal combustion," was what he said when I asked him point-blank what he thought of the League. "Only let us breathe slowly as we ascend to still greater elevations with their consequent rarefied air," he added, with the most heavenly thoughtfulness in his fine face. "Did it ever occur to you, Evelina, that your Cousin James is really a radiantly beautiful man? How could you be so mistaken, as to both him and his personal appearance, as to apply such a name ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... salary that would have accompanied those other titles, possessed in an indirect sort of way the authority, and yet managed to remain disentangled from the responsibilities. Had he suddenly vanished the elder Foote would have been left suspended in rarefied heights between heaven and his business, lacking direct contact with the mills and machine shops and foundries; yet, doubtless, would have been unable to realize that the loss of Rangar had left him so. Rangar was a competent, efficient man, if ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... the glamour, the uniform, the guard-mount, the military music, the rarefied air, the new conditions, the new interests of my life. Heine's songs, Goethe's plays, history and romance were floating through my mind. Is it to be wondered at that I and Adams together prepared the most atrocious meals that ever a new husband had to eat? I related my difficulties ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... appeared very thirsty, and with exserted maxillae drank eagerly of drops of water, this same circumstance has been observed by Strack: may it not be in consequence of the little insect having passed through a dry and rarefied atmosphere? Its stock of web seemed inexhaustible. While watching some that were suspended by a single thread, I several times observed that the slightest breath of air bore them away out of sight, ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... affirmed in his short squeak that he had always admired Mrs. Stewart very much. She was now frequently to be found in the place of honor at those dinners of his, where distinguished visitors from London brought the stir and color of the great world into the austere groves, the rarefied atmosphere of Academe. ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... those very words that you have uttered he could hale you to a court and emerge with your year's pension as a solatium for his wounded character. Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it? Is this a man to traduce? Foul-mouthed doctor and slandered professor—such would be your respective roles! That's genius, Watson. But if I am spared ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... done," he shouted to Malvoise, "if we keep on going higher the air will soon be so rarefied that we shall be ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... No one ever met Lord Bowen without wishing to meet him again; no one ever made his acquaintance without desiring his friendship. Sir Henry Cunningham's memoir of him only illustrated afresh the impossibility of transplanting to the printed page the rarefied humour of so delicate a spirit. Let me make just one attempt. Of a brother judge he said: "To go to the Court of Appeal with a judgment of ——'s in your favour, is like going to sea on a Friday. It is not necessarily fatal; but ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... be renewed in the interior of the Nautilus. And this day would make it worse. An intolerable weight oppressed me. Towards three o'clock in the evening this feeling rose to a violent degree. Yawns dislocated my jaws. My lungs panted as they inhaled this burning fluid, which became rarefied more and more. A moral torpor took hold of me. I was powerless, almost unconscious. My brave Conseil, though exhibiting the same symptoms and suffering in the same manner, never left me. He took my hand and encouraged me, and I heard him murmur, "Oh! if I could only not ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... for Mr. Belloc's most copious revelation of his personality. But this is true—that the most personal expression of all for any man is in verse: even though it be small in quantity and uneven in quality. It is as though, here, in a more rarefied and more complex form of composition—we will not say "more difficult"—some kind of effort or struggle called out all of a man's characteristics in their intensest shape. Such emotions as a man has to express will be, perhaps not more perfectly, but at any ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... peculiarities of what I felt to be a very striking personality, but it was borne in upon me that he was a man apart from his fellows, a mind that followed a line leading away from ordinary human intercourse and human interests, and into regions that left in his atmosphere something remote, rarefied, chilling. ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... the clouds!" said the professor. "Be careful not to exert yourselves, as it is hard to breathe in this rarefied or ...
— Through the Air to the North Pole - or The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch • Roy Rockwood
... smoke. What do you see? Sometimes the impression is strong upon your ocular belief that the window is driving the smoke in. You can hardly be convinced of the contrary—scarcely when five or seven minutes has absolutely rarefied the smoke so much that a book-lettering previously invisible has become even legible. And at last, when the fact, the result, the experience, has corrected the contradictory theory of the eye, you begin to suspect, without any aid ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... been water (as it seemed so, to the eye), with what a plunge of reverberating thunder would it have rolled upon its course, disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines And yet water it was and sea-water at that—true Pacific billows, only somewhat rarefied, rolling in mid-air among ...
— The Sea Fogs • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Rarefied Air, effects of.—On high plateaux or mountains new-comers must expect to suffer. The symptoms are described by many South American travellers; the attack of them is there, among other names, called the puna. The disorder is sometimes fatal to stout ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... music. I wanted to open my eyes and see where I was going; but I could not. I was passive in action, active in thought only. Then, the music growing fainter and fainter as the atmosphere became more celestially rarefied, I felt the supporting Hand going away from me. One after another the fingers loosened their hold, and yet I did not feel that I was falling. It was gone, and I floated on. With its absence came the wish for action. My eyes were unloosed, and I looked up. Far above me I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... aliment, which is constantly going on between the animal and vegetable worlds. This interchange of kindly offices is constantly going on all over the earth, even in the highest latitudes, and in the very depths of winter; for air which has been respired is rarefied, and, when thrown from the lungs, ascends, and is thus not only out of our reach, whereby we are protected from respiring it a second time, but this (to us) deadly poison falls into the great aerial current which is constantly flowing from the polar to the tropical ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... simple enough affair, but, under Mrs. Hading's treatment, it became rarefied. A chef for the supper had been commanded from Johannesburg, a string orchestra for the dance from Salisbury, and exquisite bridge prizes were being sent from a jeweller's at the Cape. The hotel dining-room was to be transformed into a salon for the ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... of the fatal malady that was lurking under his apparently stout frame and strong constitution. The splendid scenery of those vast forests and snow-clad mountains inspired him with the liveliest pleasure; but the highly rarefied atmosphere, which to most residents in India is as life from the dead, seemed in him to have ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... shadow, the double of a god, was in no way essentially different from the soul, shadow, or double of a man; his body, indeed, was moulded out of a more rarefied substance, and generally invisible, but endowed with the same qualities, and subject to the same imperfections as ours. The gods, therefore, on the whole, were more ethereal, stronger, more powerful, better fitted to command, to enjoy, and to suffer ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... period until the baffle drains get the water away no air can get in, so the engine has a good suck at the air in the boat, the result of all this being a slight vacuum in the boat. It is a very unpleasant sensation, and made me very sick. This is really a form of sickness due to the rarefied air. ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... down, watching him with angry eyes, uncomfortable, unhappy, humiliated. She seemed to have dropped in a few hours from the realms of rarefied and splendid thought to a world of petty deeds. Not one of her companion's actions was lost upon her. She watched him study with ill-concealed reverence a ducal invitation, saw him read through without hesitation ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... evenings that occur only in the Caucasus. The sun had sunk behind the mountains but it was still light. The evening glow had spread over a third of the sky, and against its brilliancy the dull white immensity of the mountains was sharply defined. The air was rarefied, motionless, and full of sound. The shadow of the mountains reached for several miles over the steppe. The steppe, the opposite side of the river, and the roads, were all deserted. If very occasionally mounted men appeared, the Cossacks in the cordon and the Chechens in ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... journey. It was highly interesting to see here at this season of the year, as we well could do, so near the equator, the regular systematic procession of the wind and rain following up the sun in its northward passage. The atmosphere, at this time and place, was heated and rarefied by the vertical rays of the sun; that produced a vacuum, which the cold airs of the south taking advantage of, rush up to fill, and with their coldness condense the heated vapours drawn up daily from the ocean and precipitate them back again on the earth below. This ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... mighty circles. Upon them played the eternal sunshine. He uttered a wild cry. He bowed himself on to the earth, and when he rose his face was white. In absolute silence he walked on. He was very silent now. In those high regions the rarefied air is hard to breathe by those born in the valleys; every breath he drew hurt him, and the blood oozed out from the tips of his fingers. Before the next wall of rock he began to work. The height of this seemed infinite, and he said nothing. The sound of his tool rang ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... the partner never replied in suitable terms, and Diva became honey-mouthed again. It was, indeed, if Mr. Wyse had appeared at two or three parties, rather a relief not to find him at the next, and breathe freely in less rarefied air. But whether he came or not he always returned the invitation by one to a Thursday luncheon-party, and thus the high circles of Tilling met every week ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... Chrysippus, following Heraclitus, taught that the elements passed into one another by a process of condensation and rarefaction. Fire first became solidified into air, then air into water and lastly water into earth. The process of dissolution took place in the reverse order, earth being rarefied into water, water into air, and air into fire. It is allowable to see in this old world doctrine an anticipation of the modern idea of different states of matter—the solid, the liquid, and the gaseous, ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... while in our front stretched the valley tributary to the Yellowstone, in extent, itself, an inland empire. The month was August, and, with the exception of cool nights, no complaint could be made, for that rarefied atmosphere was a tonic to man and beast, and there was pleasure in the primitive freshness of the country which rolled away on every hand. On leaving the Rosebud, two days' travel brought us to the ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... the highly rarefied air, the traveller at first experiences great difficulty in breathing, accompanied by a sharp, piercing pain at each inspiration. This increases until he becomes what the natives call "emparamento,"—when his extremities are benumbed, and he can no longer continue in motion. ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... be either compressed or rarefied. The physiological effects of compressed air were first studied in diving-bells, and more recently in caissons. Caisson workers at first enjoy increased strength, vigour and appetite; later, however, the opposite effect is produced and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and following his every daring movement with almost excited interest. To be the wife of such a man, she thought—to even command his interest, let alone his affection—must be wonderful. After the dull world she had known—it seemed dull compared to the upper, rarefied realms which she was beginning to glimpse through him—and after the average men in the real-estate office over the way where she had first worked, Cowperwood, in his good clothes, his remote mood, his easy, commanding ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... air, when rarefied by heat, becomes lighter and rises, cold air immediately rushing in to supply its place; and it is evident, therefore, that if two neighbouring regions of the atmosphere are unequally heated, this inequality of temperature will give rise to two currents ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart, the life ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... becoming as heavy as that without. Of course," continued the philosopher, "you are aware that heated air is much lighter than the ordinary atmosphere; and that is why a balloon filled with the former, rises, and will continue rising, till it has reached that elevation, where the rarefied atmosphere is as light as the heated air. Then it can go no further, and the weight of the balloon itself will bring it down again. A bladder of ordinary air sunk in water, or a corked bottle, will illustrate this point ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... nearest snow to supply the rarefied air in the valley heated by the sun, even now tolerably powerful; it blows for some days so long as a vacuum is formed, and discontinues when clouds again appear; hardly so, as it before only blew for three or four days, although several more elapsed before ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... his Columbiad," resumed the major, "Rodman used a powder in grains as large as chestnuts, made of willow charcoal, simply rarefied in cast-iron pans. This powder was hard and shining, left no stain on the hands, contained a great proportion of hydrogen and oxygen, deflagrated instantaneously, and, though very brittle, did not ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... repletion. But Norway is little frequented, because it is not fashionable, although it would be difficult to point out a more appropriate occasional residence for the numerous class of invalids just mentioned, than Christiania, with its picturesque environs, sublime scenery, and clear and rarefied atmosphere.' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... began to study chimneys, and after much experiment found that those that smoked need not be taken down, but that only a draught was needed to cause the smoke to rise in rarefied air. The name of the Franklin stove added very greatly to Poor Richard's wisdom, in making for Franklin an American reputation, which also extended to Europe. His fame arose along original ways. Surely no one ever walked ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... or the apocryphal book known under that name? He is the first of the Mystics, and perhaps has gone the furthest in his theological definitions. He lives in the rarefied air of the mountain tops, above the gulfs, on the threshold of the other world which he sees in part by flashes of grace, and he remains lucid, undazzled in the blaze of light ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... huckster trip to Craigswold he pinned a similar sign to the bulletin board of that rarefied resort's post-office. And ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... seemed something overpoweringly insistent; she couldn't get away from it. It gave her, apparently, neither pleasure nor pain; it called forth no conscious excitement as had been the case with Lawson—unless this strange, rarefied sense was a higher excitement. This consciousness of his presence was, tiresomely enough, something not to be escaped from; it pulsed in every vein, keeping her awake. She tried to lose it in the thought of Lois' ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... a year ago, all but a day, that Clare had married Tess, and only a few days less than a year that he had been absent from her. Still, to start on a brisk walk, and on such an errand as hers, on a dry clear wintry morning, through the rarefied air of these chalky hogs'-backs, was not depressing; and there is no doubt that her dream at starting was to win the heart of her mother-in-law, tell her whole history to that lady, enlist her on her side, and ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... name I would like to have applied to me sometimes," I said. "You see I'm tremendously fond of this world exactly as it is now. Mr. Vedder, it's a wonderful and beautiful place! I've never seen a better one. I confess I could not possibly live in the rarefied atmosphere of a final solution. I want to live right here and now for all I'm worth. The other day a man asked me what I thought was the best time of life. 'Why,' I answered without a thought, 'Now.' It has always seemed to me that if a man can't make a go of it, yes, and be happy ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... with the heat, while the lungs remain of the same capacity, they must take in a smaller quantity by weight, though the same by measure, of oxygen, the supporter of life; but if, in addition to the air being rarefied, it be also still further distended by the vapour of water being mixed with it, it is evident that a certain number of cubic inches by measure, or the lungs full, will contain a less weight of oxygen than ever; so little, indeed, that life can barely be supported; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... bustling frontier city. You wonder to see glistening dome and spire far out there under the very shadow of the Rockies. At least you would have wondered a decade ago in the Centennial year. You note the transparency of the atmosphere. Science has told you that at such an altitude the air is rarefied. There is no light haze to soften outlines and to lend enchantment to a distant view. Roof, spire, chimney, all stand out clear and hard, and the coal-smoke from the railway blots the landscape where it rises, yet is quickly scattered by the mountain breeze. Between ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... they were able to discard the old doctrine of what were afterwards known as the 'elements'—Fire, Air, Earth, and Water—and to regard all these as states of a single substance, which presented different appearances according as it was more or less rarefied or condensed. Moreover, Anaximander at least (c. 546 B. C.), the successor of Thales, shook himself free of the idea that the earth required support of some kind to keep in its place. He held that it swung free in space and that it remained where it was because ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... continuous and full; and now the face could not accord by a suitable motion; but it was felt that the influx was into the brain, and that this was acted upon in like manner. Lastly, they spoke in such a manner that the speech fell only into the interior understanding; its fluency was like that of rarefied air. I was sensible of the influx itself, but not distinctly of the particulars. These several kinds of speech were circumstanced like different fluids—the first kind was like flowing water; the second like water of less density; the third like ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... the drifting air, the illusion of a new season carried relief from the stiff and breathed-over atmosphere they had left, and for a hushed moment the traffic sounds and the murmur of water flowing in the gutters seemed an illusive and rarefied prolongation of that music to which they had lately danced. When Anthony spoke it was with surety that his words came from something breathless and desirous that the night had conceived in ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... some writers alluded to by Augustine (Gen. ad lit. ii, 4), that waters resolved into vapor may be lifted above the starry heaven, is a mere absurdity. The solid nature of the firmament, the intervening region of fire, wherein all vapor must be consumed, the tendency in light and rarefied bodies to drift to one spot beneath the vault of the moon, as well as the fact that vapors are perceived not to rise even to the tops of the higher mountains, all to go to show the impossibility of this. Nor is it less absurd to say, in support ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... provision, as well as of a plant called LLARETTA, the root of which burns tolerably well. This precious combustible was carried back to the CASUCHA and heaped up on the hearth. It was a difficult matter to kindle it, though, and still more to keep it alight. The air was so rarefied that there was scarcely oxygen enough in it to support combustion. At least, this was the reason assigned by ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... the temperate climate and rarefied air of this spot are singularly favourable to the cultivation of the coffee-tree, which is well known to flourish on heights. The prefect of the capuchins, an active and enlightened man, has introduced into the province this new branch of agricultural industry. Indigo ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt |
