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Silt   Listen
noun
Silt  n.  Mud or fine earth deposited from running or standing water.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Silt" Quotes from Famous Books



... than a half dozen trails of large parties, and he felt sure that, according to arrangement, they were converging on the Ohio, at the point where the Licking emptied the waters and silt of the Kentucky woods into the larger stream. Timmendiquas, no doubt, would be there, and Henry's heart throbbed a little faster at the thought that he would ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler

... treatment by the storms and seas, the newly born earth masses began to crumble and "weather." The detached fragments slipped back, or were washed back, into the deeper or shallower parts of the ocean, and were there tossed back and forth, pounded and ground into sand and silt, into pebbles and boulders, while more land was slowly being thrust out for the angry sea to work upon. Layer by layer, the ground-up masses were deposited in the inner ocean bed, parts of which were now practically shut off from the vast ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James

... won first place were grown by Mr. Duke Hughes, of Coal Run, Noble County, O. He states the tree is about 50 years old and stands in well-limed permanent pasture near the crest of a ridge, in Muskingum silt loam. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various

... if the soil is too soft, its several parts will be separated and scattered as readily as though it had fallen upon hard ground where it would be torn to pieces by carnivorous animals. The dead body must then be covered up by a blanket of silt or sand like that which would be deposited as the result of a freshet. If a skeleton is too greatly broken up or scattered, it may be difficult or even impossible for its discoverer to piece together the various fragments ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... too near the east coast—an impossible position for a pioneer of Italian dominion. Italy looks west, not east; almost all her natural harbours are on her western side; and though that at Ostia, owing to the amount of silt carried down by the Tiber, has never been a good one, it is the only port which can be said to command an entrance into the ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler

... the Cecil silt loam consists of 12 inches of a light gray or white silt loam. This material is underlain by a subsoil of yellow silt loam slightly heavier than the soil. The type is locally termed "white land," and is closely related to the Penn loam and the Iredell clay loam, ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head

... duplicate the dastardly deed of the first wingless wizard of the plains, and the hapless voyager is left gasping. Almost immediately there are to be seen the regular "desert devils," as they are called, bringing a dozen or more whirling columns of yellow silt rapidly through the air, each pirouetting on one foot, assuming meanwhile ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan

... the steady June rains and the weeks of fall rains, the great Mississippi of North Russia moves down to the sea, sweeping with deep wide current great volumes of reddish sediment and secretions which give it the name Dvina. And the arm of the Arctic Ocean into which it carries its loads of silt and leachings, and upon which it floats the fishermen's bottoms or the merchantmen's steamers, is called the White Sea. Rightly named is that sea, the Michigan or Wisconsin soldier will tell you, for it is white more than half the year with ice and snow, ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore

... made very carefully in a proper way this material can be separated from the pure clay. It is called silt, but really there are a number of silts, some almost like clay and some almost like sand; they shade one ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell

... see them," Peggotty adds, "for what with the mud and sand the water is pretty thick down there. But they could feel them well enough—an arm sticking out there, and a knee sticking out here, and sometimes half a body clear of the silt, owing to lying one over another. They could have got them all up easy enough, and would, too, if they had been paid for it. They were told that they were to have a pound apiece for all they brought ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy

... now made it necessary for Japanese to wear double kimonos. During the middle of the day, however, I was glad to walk with my jacket over my arm, and many little boys and girls were running about naked. The region visited had a naturally well-drained dark soil, composed of river silt, of volcanic dust and of humus from buried vegetation, and it went down to a depth beyond the need of the longest daikon (giant radish). Sweet potatoes and taro were still on the ground, and large areas, worked to a ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott

... free from the lighter silt which now finds its way to the sea; slowly filling up the river-mouth harbor, and finally destroying the commerce of the city which depends upon it. In this way, every individual, child or adult, who plants ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... higher elevations is being successfully used on small areas in the foothills. For gardens the most promising arrangement seems to be a laying of drain tiles rather near the surface, which shall be taken up each year, cleaned of silt and plant roots, and relaid along the rows before planting; but this calls for too much labor, except perhaps for amateur gardeners. The kind of soil best suited to such a system is a medium loam which will distribute water sufficiently to avoid ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson

... the other branch. Inside the Gulf stream, along the coast of Texas, is the counter-current before referred to, making down the coast at the rate of two to three miles per hour, and bringing down the silt and mud of the Mississippi, Sabine, etc. I have seen the water off the Island of Galveston the color of chocolate, after ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... heavy groan, Rustum replied:— "Oh that its waves were flowing over me! 765 Oh that I saw its grains of yellow silt[46] Roll tumbling in the current o'er ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson

... steersman, one Ebibi, "there are many banks hereabout, large sands, which silt up in a night, therefore we must make a passage for the puc-a-puc, by going from shore ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace

... body clean by taking at least one hot bath per week; per day if possible. Much filth is excreted by your sweat-pores; why let it cake on skin and underlinen, and silently silt up your thirty miles of skin canals, thus overworking the other excretory organs, and gradually ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... this river, were noted for their fertility. The annual inundations always left a rich deposit of silt. This silt produced excellent maize, potatoes, beans, pumpkins, squashes, cucumbers and melons. These, according to Heckewelder, were important items of ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce

... lie their derelict foundations, The beams wherein they trusted and the plinths whereon they built— My rulers and their treasure and their unborn populations, Dead, destroyed, aborted, and defiled with mud and silt! ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling

... and from that moment her father-in-law had had nothing but bad luck. He had been robbed, his best stallion died, there had been a flood in his tea which not only spoiled the crop but filled the ground with silt—it was impossible to relate his calamities. He consulted a necromancer at last and learned that it was all caused by ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer

... point of junction of these rivers with the Wash, and still more to seaward, was South Holland Sluice, through which the waters of the South Holland Drain entered the estuary. At that point a great mass of silt had accumulated, which tended to choke up the mouths of the rivers further inland, rendering their navigation difficult and precarious, and seriously interrupting the drainage of the whole lowland district traversed by both the Old and New Nene. Indeed ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... fissures water was ejected, carrying with it large quantities of sand and silt, and so abundantly that every stream-bed, even though generally dry in summer, was flooded. By the passage of the water, some part of the fissures was often enlarged into a round hole of considerable size, ending in a craterlet at the surface. Certain belts within the fissured area contained ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison

... foliage that were packed upon the surface, Paul, as usual, following closely. Now and then he dived under a big log, and came up on the other side, his head well hidden among upthrust boughs and among the weeds and grass that had grown in the soil formed by the silt of the river. And Paul always ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler

... an exact chronological statement throwing light on the length of the various prehistoric periods, the most notable have been those by M. Morlot, on the accumulated strata of the Lake of Geneva; by Gillieron, on the silt of Lake Neufchatel; by Horner, in the delta deposits of Egypt; and by Riddle, in the delta of the Mississippi. But while these have failed to give anything like an exact result, all these investigations together point to the central truth, so amply established, of the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... water channels and reservoirs become clotted with silt and mud, a side effect of deforestation ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... that some of you look at me as though I had used a strange word. Silt is the deposit of mud, sand, or earth of any kind carried up and down streams by the tide or other current. But the river engineers here are constantly removing it; the course is kept open, and the Hoogly pilots are very skilful. ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic

... humdrum folk intent on digging a living from the soil; but the other is an army of peaks, a region of storms, a spread of dark and tangled forests. In the one, shallow rivers trickle on their sandy way to the Gulf of Mexico; from the other, the waters rush, uniting to make the mighty stream whose silt-laden floods are slowly ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland

... By restraining the streams in flood and replenishing them in drought they make possible the use of waters otherwise wasted. They prevent the soil from washing, and so protect the storage reservoirs from filling up with silt. Forest conservation is therefore an essential ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... their sheep, The northern Sir; and this great Oxus stream, The yellow Oxus, by whose brink I die." Then, with a heavy groan, Rustum bewail'd:— "Oh, that its waves were flowing over me! Oh, that I saw its grains of yellow silt Roll tumbling in the current o'er my head!" But, with a grave mild voice, Sohrab replied:— "Desire not that, my father! thou must live. For some are born to do great deeds, and live, As some are born to be obscured, and die. Do thou the deeds I die too young to do, And reap a second glory ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester

... opportunities for fishing and trading; for this river, which in the North divides the two states of Vermont and New Hampshire, flows through Massachusetts and Connecticut, where it pours rich deposits of silt ...
— Three Young Pioneers - A Story of the Early Settlement of Our Country • John Theodore Mueller

... decided that Vizcaino's description must have been too highly colored, or else that the Bay of Monterey must, since his time, have been filled up with silt or destroyed by some earthquake. At any rate, the bay between Santa Cruz and the Point of Pines was the only Monterey they could find. According to Washburn, Vizcaino's account was far from a correct one. It was ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan

... central plain of the interior," he continued, "is formed by a vast alluvial deposit carried down as silt by the Mississippi. East of this the range of the Alleghanies, nowhere more than eight thousand feet in height, forms a secondary or subordinate axis from which the watershed falls to ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock

... pile-driving machine with me. I submitted them to Mr. Baker, and he saw its importance in a moment. "That," he 'said, "is the very thing that I want to enable me to complete my contract satisfactorily." Thousands of enormous piles had to be driven down into the deep silt of the Shore; and to have driven them down by the old system of pile-driving would have occupied a long time, and would also have ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... their touch and silt rose into the water around them. But Rick persisted and felt fabric under his hands. He pulled it out and recognized a seaman's jacket, brass buttons corroded and fabric nearly rotted through. Apparently they had ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin

... their final struggle against Caesar. Indeed they may possibly have drawn allies from a yet wider area, if, as Mr. Elton conjectures, the prehistoric boats which have at various times been found in the silt at Glasgow may be ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare

... dumping on the Sawdust Pile. When the necessity for more dredger-work developed, in order to keep the deep channel of the Skookum from filling, he had the pipes from the dredger run out to the Sawdust Pile and covered the unsightly spot with six feet of rich river-silt up to ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne

... night. A few stars glinted above them, winking through the drifting silt that blew across the ...
— The Gun • Philip K. Dick

... reduction of the ship to completely unrecognizable debris might have to be accomplished eventually, but it certainly was not immediately possible. However, perception told him that the heavy vessel was already hidden beneath silt and stagnant water. It would be safe for a while from accidental discovery. The Challonari was self-sustaining and could survive untended for years, if necessary, serving to keep the area clear of wild life that might draw hunters of the ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan

... you will actually find along some English shores—under the sand hills, perhaps a bed of earth with shells and bones; under that a bed of peat; under that one of blue silt; under that a buried forest, with the trees upright and rooted; under that another layer of blue silt full of roots and vegetable fibre; perhaps under that again another old land surface with trees again growing in it; and under all the main ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley

... day I was digging with Dick in a ditch that is to run down through the orchard and connect finally with the land drain we put in four years ago. We laid the tile just in the gravel below the silt, about two feet deep, covering the openings with tar paper and then throwing in gravel. It was a bright, cool afternoon. In the field below a ploughman was at work: I could see the furrows of the dark earth glisten as he turned it over. The grass in the meadow was a full ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson

... still left for investigation. Given a line of weakness in the rocks, though, and a susceptibility to fresh fracture is afforded. Professor McGee suggests that the overloading of the ocean bed by silt from the Mississippi river or other sources may have been the immediately exciting cause of the recent outbreaks. Other geologists have found a similar explanation acceptable in the case of eruptions elsewhere. The theory has much to ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... Indian arrows dipped in blood, knee-deep, multi-colored, fiery, dyed in the very essence of sunglow, humming with bees and alive with butterflies, lives of a summer in the aeon of ages that the snow flakes had taken manufacturing soil out of granite, silt ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... good deal of disconnected information—silt bands, crevasses were mentioned. Finally he put the problems of ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott

... him, that you yourself do not suffer it to drop should you find that it commits you to the other side of the argument. Be at least as fair and honest as you say the infidels ought to have been. The six and a half metres of silt and slime,—representative, let us hold, of from five to six thousand years,—rest, you say, on "a foundation of sand like that of the adjacent desert." But have you ascertained on what the sand rests? I know nothing of that, replies ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... STREAMS. This consists of the silt which the stream carries in suspension, and the sand and gravel and larger stones which it pushes along its bed. Especially in times of flood one may note the muddy water, its silt being kept from settling by the rolling, eddying currents; and often by placing his ear close to the bottom ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... at Meidoom; Aur-Aa was at flood stage, then nearly fifty feet above the normal level, Now, after centuries, the valley has been filled by river silt and the tide ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt

... are in private grounds belonging to Mrs Law. They have probably been created by the action of water, and when discovered were filled with the bones of wild animals (many of them now extinct) embedded in silt, which had been washed into them. In one of them there is now stacked a quantity of these bones, whilst a selection of them is deposited in Taunton Museum. The caves are shown by some of the outdoor ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade

... removed, and now the light lay, yellow and vivid, on a red clinker of coal and a charred piece of stick. A piece of glossy white paper had been flung in the untidy grate, and in the hollow curve of it a thin silt of black dust had gathered—the light showed it plainly. All these things the boy marked and was subtly aware of their unpleasantness. He was forced to read to escape the sense of them. But it was words, words, words, that he read; the subject ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown

... roofing paper cut slightly wider than the trench so that, when in place, the paper arches and fits tightly to the sides. The purpose of the stone or gravel is to facilitate water seepage from tile to ground while the roofing paper cover prevents silt ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley

... Sea-captain loved, the River built, Wealth sought and Kings adventured life to hold. Hail, England! I am Asia—Power on silt, Death in my hands, ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling

... tackle. When the pile was ready to be sunk, a 2 in iron pipe was let down the centre, and coupled to a force-pump by means of a hose; a jet of water was then forced down this pipe, driving the sand and silt away from below the pile. The pile was then rotated backwards and forwards about a quarter of a turn, by men pulling on the arms; the pile, of course, sank by its own weight, the water-jet driving the sand up through the hollow centre and into the trench, and it was ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams

... stream" its advocates do not mean splashing and lifting the feet above the surface, sending the water hither and yon on to the banks, into the pools, with the soil of silt or mud or fine gravel from the bottom, polluting the stream many yards ahead, and causing every fish to scurry to the shelter of a hole in the bank or under a shelving rock. They intend that the rodster shall enter the water quietly, and, after a few preliminary casts to ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks

... refers to the valley of the Nene and the lowlands which are apt to be flooded when the river overflows its banks. The mud and dirt consequently settle on the grass and make it unfit for hay, but the rainfall does good, causes the grass to grow and it is not injured by the silt. ...
— Weather and Folk Lore of Peterborough and District • Charles Dack

... that blue wilderness, with no other shore in sight, yet not over three miles northeast of a "pass" between two long tide-covered sand- reefs, a ferment of delta silt—if science guesses right—had lifted higher than most of the islands behind it in the sunken west one mere islet in the shape of a broad crescent, with its outward curve to seaward and a deep, slender lagoon ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable

... the soil in which the McKinster tree is growing, taken at a depth of 6 inches, was tested in July 1950. The results specify that the soil is mostly silt with an average amount of organic matter and that evidence indicates it to contain ashes. The acidity is specified as "neutral", potash "high", and phosphate "low". No mention is made of available nitrogen; however, the dark green color of the leaves and vigorousness of growth would indicate ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various

... Ganges divides on approaching the sea, breaks away from the main channel near Santipur, and flowing in a southerly direction past Calcutta, reaches the Bay of Bengal after a course of 145 m.; navigation is rendered hazardous by the accumulating and shifting silt; the "bore" rushes up with great rapidity, and attains a height of 7 ft. 2, A city (33) on the western bank of the river, 25 m. N. of Calcutta; is capital of a district, and has a college for English ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... the ore is From the cupola spurting, Tossing the flaming petals Over the silt and furnace ash— Blown leaves, devastating, Falling about ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge

... highest adaptation for deposit soils, such as are made by the settling of silt held in solution by waters that overflow. In these it will grow with vigor, though they rest upon coarse sand or even upon gravel not too near the surface. Irrigating waters to some extent are necessary to grow the plants in best form, ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw

... construction employed were novel in subaqueous tunneling and are partly shown on photographs on pages 62 and 63. The bed of the Harlem River at the point of tunneling consists of mud, silt, and sand, much of which was so nearly in a fluid condition that it was removed by means of a jet. The maximum depth of excavation was about 50 feet. Instead of employing the usual method of a shield and compressed air at high pressure, a ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous

... tank if he paid forty rupees. The merchant paid the money and then went home and called his family together and said that they would first improve the tank and then find wives for all his sons. The sons agreed and they collected coolies and drained off the water and began to dig out the silt. When they had drained off the water they found in the bed of the tank a number of big fish of unknown age: which they caught and two of them they sent to the Raja as a present. When the fish were carried into ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas

... as they had travelled forty miles under a hot sun without drawing bit. The honourable judge flatly refused, although he had a good well, besides a pond, under fence, covering several acres; his wife, however, reflecting, perhaps, that her stores were rather short of coffee or silt, entered into a rapid discussion with her worse half, and by-and-by that respectable couple of honourables agreed to sell water to us ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat

... comfortably. The deck assumed an easier angle. Now it was possible to walk. There were no rocks here, at any rate. Courtenay at once jumped to the conclusion that the powerful current whose existence he suspected had cut out for itself a deep-water channel towards the land, and the ship had struck on the silt of its back-wash. Anyhow, the Kansas was still living. The lights were all burning steadily. He could detect the rhythmic throb of the donkey-engine. He felt it like the faint beat of a pulse. In her new position the ship presented less of a solid wall to the onslaught of ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy

... sniffing the air and pawing the ground. Boyton raised his revolver and fired. The great head swayed from side to side and the noble animal dropped to his knees. Thinking the shot was fatal, Paul seized the hunting knife and sprang forward to silt its throat, having first flung a lot of brush on the smoldering fire. As the flames shot up, the elk rose to his feet and commenced to retreat slowly across the bar. Fully expecting to see him fall at every step, Paul followed as fast as the cumbersome rubber pants would permit. Instead of weakening, ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton

... Medeland with its wealth of woods, Fair Ganges, Hermus thick with golden silt, Can match the praise of Italy.... Here blooms perpetual spring, and summer here In months that are not summer's; twice teem the flocks: Twice does the tree yield service of her fruit. Mark too, ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... always up along the wet gully, deep with silt and frost-splintered rock, she toiled, the heavy grasping of men behind her. Twice she was jerked to a halt while her ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers

... and magnificent in guilt, Splendid in scorn, rapt in a cloudy dream, He paused at last upon the Stygian silt, And raised calm eyes above the angry stream.... Hand in his breast, he stood till Charon came, While Hades hummed with ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton

... be compared to a dredger, which, gathers up all the silt of a harbour, and carries it out to sea, leaves it there and then returns to repeat the operation. If such an operation is necessary in a harbour, and if without it the best anchorages in the world would often get choked with rubbish and become useless, how doubly important must it be in the ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker

... must be clean, free from organic matter and sand, must contain no appreciable amount of mica, feldspar, alkali, shale or similar deleterious substances and not exceed two and one-half per cent of clay and silt. The sand is of such a range of sizes that all will pass the one-fourth-inch sieve and that not exceeding about five per cent will ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg

... trench should not be carried nearer than within six inches of the surface of the ground, and should be covered with fine and well-packed earth to prevent the entrance of surface-water which would soon carry in silt enough to stop its action. Whatever covering is adopted for the walk itself, it must be of such a character as to prevent any thing like a free admission of surface-water. Concrete will do this perfectly; and either ashes, or gravel dressed at the top with ashes, if well raked and rolled at the ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring

... I now lay was of soft, oozy silt; about me were rocks, slippery and covered with a coating of grey-green slime. Spots in the slime moved. I could hear it, or rather feel it—a sort of bubbling quake, mere beginnings of the life impulse. ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... leathery, pulpy body of the monster, but with no other effect than the sudden snapping of the inch line like thread. It was subsequent to this that, as the diver stayed his steps in the unsteady current, his staff was seized below. The water was murky with the river-silt above the salt brine, and he could see nothing, but after an effort the staff was rescued or released. Curious to know what it was, he probed again, and the stick was wrenched from his hand. With a thrill he recognized in such power the monster ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various

... double-mouthed river. The distance from Baghdad to Basra is about 300 miles, and the area traversed by the Shatt-el-Arab is slowly extending at the rate of a mile every thirty years or so, as a result of the steady accumulation of silt and mud carried down by the Tigris and Euphrates. When Sumeria was beginning to flourish, these two rivers had separate outlets, and Eridu, the seat of the cult of the sea god Ea, which now lies 125 miles inland, ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie

... are found above the solid rocks, in the form of gravel, silt, rolled pebbles, etc., should be carefully distinguished from the solid strata upon which they repose. And the more ancient of these loose materials, found on the sides or summits of hills, etc., should be distinguished from the recent mud, sand, and gravel, brought down by land-floods, ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King

... ocean; landslides were filling up channels between the islands; tides and rivers were opening new passages and closing old ones; and, more than all, those mightiest tools of the great Engineer, the glaciers, were furrowing valleys, dumping millions of tons of silt into the sea, forming islands, promontories and isthmuses, and by their recession letting the sea into deep and long fiords, forming great bays, inlets and passages, many of which did not exist in ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young

... places where, by the shifting of the channel, the river had cut into some of these mounds, exposing brick vaults, some so low as to be under water part of the time, and we wonder if the fact does not also record a slow subsidence of the delta plain under the ever increasing load of river silt. ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King

... and the banks were slimy. Fingal's Creek was almost at its usual level and the silt was crusting along its bedraggled borders. Just above where it empties into the Neosho we noted a freshly broken embankment as though some weight had crushed over the side and carried a portion of the bank with it. Puddles of water and black mud ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter

... two Rockley girls really liked it better, or whether they only imagined they did, is a question. Certainly their lives were much more grey and dreary now that the grey clay had ceased to spatter its mud and silt its dust over the premises. They did not quite realize how they missed the shrieking, shouting lasses, whom they had known all their lives and ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence

... fragmentary for a time, fending off my questions; then his story began to piece itself together. He conjured up a vision of this strange forgotten kink in the world's littoral, of the long meandering channels that spread and divaricate and spend their burden of mud and silt within the thunderbelt of Atlantic surf, of the dense tangled vegetation that creeps into the shimmering water with root and sucker. He gave a sense of heat and a perpetual reek of vegetable decay, and told how ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... was carried on by the gravity system, by which canals were built from intakes from the river and extended throughout the cultivated district. In Egypt for a long time the periodical overflow of the Nile brought in the silt for fertilizer and water for moisture. When the flood subsided, seed was planted and the crop raised and harvested. As the population spread, the use of water for irrigation became more general, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... junior, I'm right down ashamed on you for a son o' mine!" he said, digging away at his oar savagely, as if trying to dredge up some of the silt from the bottom of the harbour. "You, turned fifteen year old, and been back'ard and forrud 'twixt Hardway and the Gosport shore for a matter of five years or more, and not for to know and read a common signal like that, which you ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson

... into the sea in a shower of mud and gravel and ashes; and then it spread all around, and sank again, and covered in the dead fish so fast, that before Tom had stood there five minutes he was buried in silt up to his ankles, and began to be afraid that he ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley

... wide, and something like a mile and a half long, extending southward into Jersey City. The surface is a network of matted vegetation and roots perhaps five feet deep, and under that lies a mass of blue clay or river silt 100 feet or more in depth. The original tidal flow over these marsh lands has been obstructed by viaducts for railroads and streets, leaving only two natural outlets, a sluice way at Fifteenth street on the north, and on the south a basin constructed ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various

... could not do. He was bound for Christmas to the Silts—"as a REAL guest," Mrs. Silt had written, underlining the word "real" twice. And after Christmas he must ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster

... France, Germany, and other parts of Europe, are the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, horse, great Irish deer, bear, tiger, and hyaena. In the peat, No. 1 (Figure 87), and in the more modern gravel and silt (No. 2), works of art of the ages of iron and bronze, and of the later or Neolithic stone period, already described, are met with. In the more ancient or Paleolithic gravels, 3 and 4, there have been found of late years in several valleys in France and England— ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... has its problems to solve; there are shades in salt. We must be charitable, but we should be just; we give to the poor of the land, but we are eminently the friends of our servants; duty to mankind diverts us not from the love we bear to our dog; and with a pathetic sorrow for silt, we discard it from sight and hearing. We hate dirt. Having said so much, having shown it, by sealing the mouth of Mr. Stuart Rem and iceing the veins of Mr. Abram Posterley, in relation to a dreadful public case and a melancholy private, we have a pleased sense of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... group of fresh-water and marine microscopic plants known as Diatoms, which likewise secrete a siliceous skeleton, often of great beauty. The skeletons of Diatoms are found abundantly at the present day in lake-deposits, guano, the silt of estuaries, and in the mud which covers many parts of the sea-bottom; they have been detected in strata of great age; and in spite of their microscopic dimensions, they have not uncommonly accumulated to form deposits of great thickness, and of considerable superficial ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... gallery, piercing the lower part of the dam, was closed by iron doors on the down stream face and blocked with timber at the upper end. When required to be flushed out, laborers passed through the gallery and broke down the timber barrier, the silt forming a wall sufficiently thick to resist the pressure of the water for the time being, and allow of the retreat of the Forlorn Hope—if the latter had luck—before ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various

... that no close-fitting parts are required for the places upon which the line of force impinges will alter the conditions of the whole problem. In the centrifugal sand pump, as now largely used for raising silt from rivers and harbours, the serious corrosive action of the jet of sand and water upon the inside of the pump has been successfully overcome by facing the metal with indiarubber; but nothing of the kind could have been done if the working of the apparatus had depended ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland

... empire of India and the second city in the British Empire. Although situated on an arm of the delta of the Ganges, eighty miles inland, Calcutta is an immense seaport, but its sea-going privileges can be maintained only by great engineering works, because of the silt which the Ganges is constantly bringing down and depositing in its seaward channels. Calcutta enjoys almost a monopoly of the whole trade of the Ganges and Brahmapootra valleys, and until the building of the Suez Canal it had almost a monopoly ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various

... glittering snow peak suggests a white-crested roller, higher than the rest. The drenching rains which fall each year have washed the soil from the sides of the hills until they have become strangely grooved by numberless water-courses, and the black primeval rock is everywhere exposed. The silt and sediment have filled the valleys which lie between, and made their surface sandy, level and broad. Again the rain has cut wide, deep and constantly-changing channels through this soft deposit; great gutters, ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill

... another as one pursues the river trail, and come constantly nearer and nearer. All the streams that are confluent with the Tanana on its left bank are glacial streams draining the high ice of these mountains. They come down laden thick with silt, at times foaming torrents, at times merely trickling watercourses that seam with numerous small runnels the wide deltas at their mouths. The tributaries of the right bank flow for the most part through heavily wooded country, and come out cleanly into ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... much greater amount of blue-green glacier-ice glances down into the valley, many knobs and depressions are laid bare which one otherwise sees only covered with white, the muddy edge of the ice comes to view with its deposit of rocks, silt, and slime, and far greater volumes of water than usual rush into the valley. This continues until it gradually becomes autumn again, the waters grow less, and one day a gray continuous gentle rain spreads over all the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various

... valley. During countless ages it has stripped from the plateau and carried into the Gulf of California a deposit of rock waste from the land surface of its basin many feet deep, and abraded billions of tons of material from its channel. All this silt and detritus have served to fill up the northern part of the gulf, the result of the deposit being an immense land area. At length a great bar was formed across the northern part of the gulf, making a sort of inland sea. Then the ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson

... occasion should require, made an attempt to re-open the canal between the Nile and the Red Sea, which had been originally constructed by Seti I. and Ramesses II., but had been allowed to fall into disrepair. The Nile mud and the desert sand had combined to silt it up. Neco commenced excavations on a large scale, following the line of the old cutting, but greatly widening it, so that triremes might meet in it and pass each other, without shipping their oars. After a time, however, he felt compelled to desist, without ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson

... hygienic principles in a stagnant pool; I look with a delighted eye upon the inexhaustible spray of spreading bubbles; I see in imagination the prehistoric times when seaweed, the first-born of plants, produced the first atmosphere for living things to breathe at the time when the silt of the continents was beginning to emerge. What I see before my eyes, between the glass panes of my trough, tells me the story of the planet surrounding ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... which the mightiest empires have crumbled into dust. The lagoons of Venice mirror it in the departed grandeur of her palaces, overthrown by the licentiousness of her merchant princes. The mute sands that silt up the ruins of old empires are eloquent of it. The most brilliant civilization the world has even seen through it became the most transitory. Even the vast and massive structure of the Roman Empire, undermined by moral corruption, vanished ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... braves, looked not a little anxious. But their leader kept steadily on. The sand was hard enough and offered sufficient resistance to the broad hoof of a horse, but if one stood still for a minute or so, it began gradually to silt up and bury it. It was a horrible place. When at noon that devil's slough resolved itself into a comparatively narrow strip, and Dorothy saw that they could easily have left it, she began to understand their reason ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie

... and that an ample supply of pure water could be counted on. It was known that water was met all through this valley at depths of from six to twelve feet and then that there would be found a layer of finely powdered silt to a depth of about one hundred feet, when another layer of water would be found, and that all the private wells reached this layer. When tested by the city, however, it was found that this water-bearing stratum was of too fine material to yield its ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden

... the falls were sheer, they had to disembark and walk along little portages through the green raspberry bushes. The prints of great hooves in the black silt betrayed where wild animals had paused to drink. They stopped for lunch on a warm rock beside a singing waterfall, and at last they turned an elbow in the stream and with suddenly widened vision ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... was a swift broad stream called the Dhaus. The river is very capricious, seldom flowing for any length of time in one channel. This is owing in great measure to the amount of silt it carries with it from the hills, in its impetuous ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... or more. For I have a project to bring down a leat of fair water from the hill-tops right into Plymouth town, cutting off the heads of Tavy, Meavy, Wallcomb, and West Dart, and thereby purging Plymouth harbor from the silt of the mines whereby it has been choked of late years, and giving pure drink not only to the townsmen, but to the fleets of the queen's majesty; which if I do, I shall both make some poor return to God for all His unspeakable mercies, and erect unto myself a monument better than of brass or marble, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... flooding returns to the soil the needed fertility. This may be true if the flooding-water deposits much silt, but if the water be clear it is untrue, and fertilizers or leguminous crops are needed to keep up fertility. Cowpeas replace the lost soil-elements and keep down ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett

... heavily laden with earthy matter that it sinks to the bottom. This precipitation of drift has taken place to such an extent, that the bed of the Missouri is in many places completely covered to a great depth by immense fields of logs. Of all the silt thrown into the Mississippi, the Missouri furnishes ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... and is bent on deeds equal to the gods. For I think that neither his strength will defend him, nor his beauty at all, nor those beautiful arms, which shall lie everywhere in the very bottom of my gulf, covered with mud. Himself also will I involve in sand, pouring vast abundant silt around him; nor shall the Greeks know where to gather his bones, so much slime will I spread over him. And there forthwith shall be[683] his tomb, nor shall there be any want to him of entombing, when ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer

... absorb the momentum of the water are figured mathematically and in practice become polished like mirrors. So great is the eroding action of water, under great heads—especially when it contains sand or silt—that it is occasionally necessary to replace these buckets. For this reason the larger wheels consist merely of a spider of iron or steel, with each bucket bolted separately to its circumference, so that it can be removed and replaced easily. Usually ...
— Electricity for the farm - Light, heat and power by inexpensive methods from the water - wheel or farm engine • Frederick Irving Anderson

... fast they grow fast. A little water brings forth vegetable life in a single day. Southern streams are not perennial. On the Riviera, they are fed from nearby mountains, and are intermittent even in their season. When the water ceases, the sun quickly bakes a crust of silt and dries the stones of the ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... productions in bronze has been employed by Mr Chantrey. A small strip of a fir-tree, a branch of holly, a curled leaf of broccoli, or any other vegetable production, is suspended by one end in a small cylinder of paper which is placed for support within a similarly formed tin case. The finest river silt, carefully separated from all the coarser particles, and mixed with water, so as to have the consistency of cream, is poured into the paper cylinder by small portions at a time, carefully shaking the plant a little after each addition, ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage

... mussels and snails and the crayfish burrow deep into the mud and silt at the bottom of ponds and streams where they lie motionless during the winter. The land snails, in late autumn, crawl beneath logs, and, burrowing deep into the soft mould, they withdraw far into their shells. Then each one forms with a mucous secretion two thin transparent membranes, ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various

... preserve my perspective, for I am studying the Bowery. I have lived in it nearly thirty years, and I am just beginning to understand its heartbeats. It is like a great river fed by a hundred alien streams. Each influx brings strange seeds on its flood, strange silt and weeds, and now and then a flower of rare promise. To construe this river requires a man who can build dykes against the overflow, who is a naturalist, a geologist, a humanitarian, a diver and a strong swimmer. I love my Bowery. It was my cradle and is my inspiration. I have published ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... is, however, with us, an inclination to apply this word particularly to those purer and more compact sorts which are adapted for fuel, while to the lighter, less decomposed or more weathered kinds, and to those which are considerably intermixed with soil or silt, the term muck or swamp muck is given. These distinctions are not, indeed, always observed, and, in fact, so great is the range of variation in the quality of the substance, that it would be impossible to draw a line where muck leaves off and peat begins. Notwithstanding, ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson

... streets the water was coming under the doors into the houses. Women and children were taking refuge in the garrets while the men, with their trousers rolled up to their knees, were splashing about in the liquid silt, carrying their farming tools to places of safety, or tugging at some donkey who would be balking at going ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... restore some of its commerce to Venice precisely the same questions are in course of debate which again and again, ever since Venice was a city, have put her senate at pause—namely, how to hold in check the continually advancing morass formed by the silt brought down by the Alpine rivers. Is it not strange that for at least six hundred years the Venetians have been contending with those rivers at their mouths—that is to say, where their strength has become wholly irresistible—and ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... Late Lat. barra, origin unknown), in physical geography, a ridge of sand or silt crossing an estuary under water or raised by wave action above sea-level, forming an impediment to navigation. When a river enters a tidal sea its rate of flow is checked and the material it carries in suspension is deposited in a shifting ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... than five feet of water over her conning-tower, so that even a torpedo-boat, let alone a destroyer, would hit it if she came over. But nothing hit anything. The search was conducted on scientific principles while they sat on the silt and suffered. Then the commander heard the rasp of a wire trawl sweeping over his hull. It was not a nice sound, but there happened to be a couple of gramophones aboard, and he turned them both on to drown it. And in due time that boat ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling

... feet in diameter; at their bottoms there is a roofed chamber, into which the air is pumped, and in which the men work when excavating, this roof being supported by ample main and cross lattice girders. Shafts with air-locks and pipes for admitting water and ejecting silt are provided. The air-locks are fitted with sliding doors, worked by hydraulic rams, or by hand, the doors being interlocked in a manner similar to that in which railway points and signals are interlocked, so that one ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various

... cleavage is parallel to the basal plane. Its lustre is sometimes resinous, sometimes vitreous, and it crystallises in the 2nd (hexagonal) system. It occurs in somewhat long, hexagonal prisms, with smooth, truncated planes, and is often found in granite and the silt brought down by rivers from granite, gneiss, and similar rocks. It is found in Great Britain and in many parts of Europe, Asia, and America, in crystals of all sizes, from small to the weight of several tons. The common kinds are ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin

... were thick and the silt and sand Were gathered day by day, Till not a furlong out from land A shoal had barred ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke

... was hard at work forcing the water back in the caissons, the pulsometer pumps were sucking up streams of water that flowed without ceasing into the settling tank and off into the city sewers, the men in the caissons were sending up buckets full of silt-like gruel. The lawyer watched operations for a few minutes, then he asked for the owners' boring plan. When he had examined this he grunted twice, twitched his lower lip humorously, and said: 'I'll put you out of this. If the owners ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... a light northwesterly breeze through the channels which connect the island of San Francesco with the more easterly stretches of the Venetian lagoon. The boat presently neared the shore of one of the cultivated lidi—islands formed out of the silt of many rivers by the travail of centuries, some of them still mere sand or mud banks, others covered by vineyards and fruit orchards—which, with the murazzi or sea-walls of Venice, stand sentinel between the city and the sea. On the lido along which ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... out of the tortuous canon on its turbulent journey to the sea. But Fairchild failed to notice either that or the fact that ancient, age-whitened water wheels had begun to appear here and there, where gulch miners, seekers after gold in the silt of the creek's bed, had abandoned them years before; that now and then upon the hills showed the gaunt scars of mine openings,—reminders of dreams of a day long past; or even the more important fact ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper

... have been entirely dependent upon the mud of the great rivers. Thebes and Memphis, Rameses and Amenhotep, based their civilisation absolutely upon the mud of Nile. The bricks of Babylon were moulded of Euphrates mud; the greatness of Nineveh reposed on the silt of the Tigris. Upper India is the Indus; Agra and Delhi are Ganges and Jumna mud; China is the Hoang Ho and the Yang-tse-Kiang; Burmah is the paddy field of the Irrawaddy delta. And so many great plains in either hemisphere consist ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... broad steps of the bathing ghats are assembled crowds of pious worshippers in clothes of every brilliant hue. The river has an aspect of kindliness and geniality and life-givingness. Its waters and rich silt have brought plenty to many a barren acre, and the dwellers on its banks know well that it issues from ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband

... has elsewhere fixed between land and water. For the Station which, if I can allow myself an apparent Irishism, is a moveable one, has to be pushed forward almost day by day as the sands of the Volga silt up far beyond the choked-up lands of the Delta, encroaching with a steady inroad on the depths of the waves; the Steppe everywhere widening as the sea dwindles, and suggesting the thought that the whole region that is now Steppe must in remote ages have ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various

... because the mountains near by had become deforested. Man could not live there because food could not grow without soil, and all the soil had been washed away from the slopes. The streams, once navigable, were choked up with the silt that had washed down. When rains came they acted as torrents, since there was no vegetation to hold the water and ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... classes, three of which are active acoustics, lidar and magnetic anomaly detectors. Broadband underwater active acoustics could address pressing needs such as shallow-water anti-submarine warfare and mine detection (both buried and silt covered). The practical application of lidar is a relatively recent development enabled by advances in laser, power management, and data processing technologies. Lidar can be used for fire control, weapon guidance, foliage penetration ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade

... of getting the city's ancient reservoirs cleared of silt before the next spring thaw brought more water down the underground aqueducts everybody called canals in mistranslation of Schiaparelli's Italian word, though this was proving considerably easier than anticipated. The ancient Canal-Builders must have anticipated a time when their ...
— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper

... seen before mankind had birth; Strange monsters basked them in the sun, Behemoth, armored glyptodon, And in the dawn's unpractised ray The transient dodo winged its way; Then, by degrees, through silt and slough, We reached Berlin—I don't know how. The good Professor's monotone Had turned me into senseless stone Instanter, but that near me sat Hypatia in her new spring hat, Blue-eyed, intent, with lips whose bloom Lighted ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... was blasted from the side of the canyon on which they were, and far below, between them and the hoisting house and the mill, ran a clear little mountain stream, undefiled for years by the silt of industry. The peak of the cross, lifting a needle point high above them, as if keeping watch over the Blue Mountains, the far-distant Idaho hills, the near-by forests of Oregon, and the puny, man-made structures at its feet, appeared to have a lofty disdain of them and the burrowings ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton

... grown conscious, now the Country's King That, at his beck, the blood for Freedom spilt Shall be accursed, and I, then, for the guilt Of dropping not with thud, as he with ring At Darkness' feet, be shut in mud and silt Forever and with stars, ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle

... Fine silt, brought down in suspension by a muddy river and deposited to form the Delta when the river reaches the sea, ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman

... Sea the Jordan is fordable at thirty points during certain parts of the year. The first of the two main fords in the lower Jordan is just below the point where the Wady Kelt enters the Jordan from the west and deposits its mass of mud and silt. The other ford is six miles further north below the point where the Wady Nimrin comes down from the highlands of Gilead. Here to-day the main highway connecting the east and the west-Jordan country crosses the river. This spot was probably the ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks

... then, with hands and knife, working cautiously and noiselessly he began to enlarge the basin, drawing out stones, scooping out silt and fibre. ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers

... zealous antiquary, writing in 1855, informs us that in the course of the eight years preceding that date, no less than seventeen canoes had been dug out of this estuarine silt [of the valley of the Clyde], and that he had personally inspected a large number of them before they were exhumed. Five of them lay buried in silt under the streets of Glasgow, one in a vertical position with the prow uppermost, as ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... may be seen not far away, peeping from amongst the trees which surround it. Seaton Sluice owes its name to the Delaval who placed the large sluice gates upon the burn, in order to have a strong current which, in rushing down to the sea, would be able to wash the mouth of the stream clear from the silt and mud brought in by the incoming tide. A later baronet, Sir John Hussey Delaval, made the cutting through the solid rock which is so striking a feature of the harbour. It was ready for the entrance ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry

... Sea-captain loved, the River built, Wealth sought and Kings adventured life to hold. Hail, England! I am Asia — Power on silt, Death in my ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling

... Marmora considers it analogous to the upper tertiary formations found in the south of France, central and southern Italy, Sicily, Malta, the Balearic Islands, and Africa. The plains generally consist of a deep alluvial silt, interspersed with shingly patches, containing boulder stones. Such is the valley of the Liscia, occupying nearly the whole surface from sea to sea towards the northern extremity of the island. This, it may be recollected, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... the boys betook themselves, treading the way gingerly over the tenacious but slippery surface. Will pointed to a half barrel sunk level in the ooze. It was full to the brim with fine silt. ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts

... islands of Silt and Fohr the following ABC rhymes have been recorded, consisting mostly of personal ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... judged upon the principle of opposing most strongly anything that was supposed to find favour with the Government. Last session a strong wish to do SOMETHING caused the Legislature to advocate a scheme which many persons think would cause the mouth of the River Swan to silt up, and expose the town of Fremantle to danger, lest the river in flood should burst out (as no doubt it did formerly) into the South Bay over the town site. The question, however, is referred to the Victorian Government engineer, ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest

... concealed by sage, not ten minutes' walk from the Ferry inn, unknown to the map-maker and innocent of all use, lay a perfect floor for evening pacing with one's eyes upon the stars. It was the death mask of an ancient lake, done in purest alkali silt, and needing only the shadows cast by a low moon to make the illusion almost unbelievable. Slow precipitation, season after season, as the water dried, had left the lake bed smooth as a cast in plaster. Subsequent warpings ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote

... and Nature had been pouring into his sick senses her healing balm; while the medicaments of peace and sleep and quiet labour had been having their way with him, he had been reorganised, renewed, flushed of the turgid silt of dissipation. For his sins and weaknesses there had been no gall ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... as the water and are continually changing. Here a low alluvial bank is being washed away, there a broad flat is forming. With the exception of the Rio Grande in New Mexico, and the Gila, which joins the Colorado at Yuma, no other river is known to be so laden with silt. No other river is so rapidly removing the ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks

... from the mountains, discharge themselves into the sea. Many of these watercourses may in former times have been larger and even navigable up to a point. Their flow is now obstructed, their volume diminished. I daresay they have driven the sea further out, with silt swept down from the uplands. The same thing has struck me in England—at Lyme Regis, for instance, whose river was also once navigable to small craft and at Seaton, about a mile up whose stream stands that village—I forget its name—which ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... minutes. The terrain changed from the green, fertile, Nile Valley to the bleak Sahara as though cut by a giant knife. For the first time, Rick understood the phrase "Egypt, gift of the Nile." Where the yearly Nile overflow brought fertile silt and moisture, there was lush green land. Where the overflow stopped, the desert began. No intermediate ground lay between. Egypt consisted of the Nile Valley and the desert, with ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin

... as is generally thought, is trapped beneath the ice floes or embedded in the deep silt of the polar sea-floor, her margin of safety has passed the deadline, it was pointed out to-day by her designers. Through special rectifiers aboard, her store of air can be kept capable of sustaining life for a theoretical period of ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter

... fertility that skill, science, and economy could win from the reluctant German field was secured. The German farmer had to woo his land like a lover. And so the unyielding fields of Germany returned richer harvests thirty years ago than a like area of the prodigally vital silt ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

... limestone walls. From miles away the approaching caravans were overlooked by legionaries brought from Gaul and Britain, quartered in the capitol on Mount Silpius at the city's southern limit. The riches of the East, and of Egypt, flowed through, leaving their deposit as a river drops its silt; were ever- increasing. One quarter, walled off, hummed with foreign traders from as far away as India, who lodged at the travelers' inns or haunted the temples, the wine-shops and the lupanars. In that quarter, too, there were barracks, with compounds and open-fronted ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy

... soon driven by the waves up the shore, and beyond the reach of further wear;[2] and "the rivers carry only silt ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... the stuff an', if they's time, we'll flume the silt tailin's for the fine dust. Providin' we can git a fall of water. There'll be plenty for all hands to do. An' the shares go as first fixed. I ain't expectin' you to do the diggin' an' not git a pinch or two of ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn

... would thus be deposited immediately, while the rest of the body would float and drift away altogether, ultimately reaching the sea, and perhaps becoming destroyed. The jaw becomes covered up and preserved in the river silt, and thus it comes that we have such a curious circumstance as that of the lower jaws in the Stonesfield slates. So that, you see, faulty as these layers of stone in the earth's crust are, defective as they necessarily are as a record, the account of contemporaneous vital phenomena presented ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... where some of the dirt or silt that is brought down by the creek goes," said Uncle Robert. "And all this must have been left here since the flood in the spring. Frank is right. The creek is really ...
— Uncle Robert's Geography (Uncle Robert's Visit, V.3) • Francis W. Parker and Nellie Lathrop Helm

... escaped being conquered. Luckily they did not give their sanction to the idea that the statue was a petrifaction, but Professor Hall was induced to say: "To all appearance, the statue lay upon the gravel when the deposition of the fine silt or soil began, upon the surface of which the forests have grown for succeeding generations. Altogether it is the most remarkable object brought to light in this country, and, although not dating back to ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... large bodies in the shallow water near the shores, and is driven by the wind into the mouths of the rivers. A barrier being thus formed to the force of the lake-waves, the sudden check of velocity causes them to deposit a portion of the silt they hold in suspension upon the upper surface of this stratum of ice. By repeated accumulations in this way, the weight becomes sufficient to sink the whole mass to the bottom. There it rests, together with other strata, which are sunk in the same way, until the channel is obstructed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various

... which the remains, if found in England or the Low country, would have been regarded by the antiquary as belonging to very remote periods. During the previous winter I had read a little work descriptive of an ancient ship, supposed to be Danish, which had been dug out of the silt of an English river, and which, among other marks of antiquity, exhibited seams caulked with moss—a peculiarity which had set at fault, it was said, the modern ship-carpenter, in the chronology of his art, as he was unaware that there had ever been a time when ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... have we, Without the useless silt and dross; And like our cousins, all are free, Yet we have no election boss. No union here of Church and State, Yet Church and State full well agree That nations never can be great If they refuse ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant



Words linked to "Silt" :   silty, dirt, clog up, clog, silt up, foul, congest



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