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Fissure   /fˈɪʃər/   Listen
Fissure

verb
1.
Break into fissures or fine cracks.



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"Fissure" Quotes from Famous Books



... at every leap of his horse. The bluff towards which they rode was probably a hundred feet high, and was washed at its base by a deep but sluggish creek, on the other side of which lay a densely wooded swamp. Through the top of the bluff, however, was a sort of fissure or ravine washed by the flow of water during the rainy season, and where it terminated the height of its mouth above the stream was not more than forty or fifty feet. Down this gully Sam rode furiously, so that ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston

... to himself, and he followed Mather into the fort. In the corners of the mud walls, in any fissure, in the very floor, young trees were sprouting. Rearward a steep glacis and a deep fosse defended the works. Durrance sat himself down upon the parapet of the wall above the glacis, while the pigeons ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason

... fissure, breach, rent, split, rift, crack, slit, incision. dissection anatomy; decomposition &c. 49; cutting instrument &c (sharpness) 253; buzzsaw, circular saw, rip saw. separatist. V. be disjoined &c.; come off, fall off, come to pieces, fall to pieces; peel off; get loose. disjoin, disconnect, disengage, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... name—has made nothing in vain," he whispered; "I must go foremost, but do as I do." He then raised up the long heath, and entered a low, narrow fissure in the rocks, Reilly following him closely. The entrance was indeed so narrow that it was capable of admitting but one man at a time, and even that by his working himself in upon his knees and elbows. In this manner they advanced in utter darkness for about thirty yards, when they ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... five miles above the foot of the lake, and extending across it from shore to shore, a large fissure in the ice usually appears during the winter. This fissure is sometimes so wide that a team cannot cross it, and many years ago a span of horses was accidentally driven into it. The crevice in the ice has caused much speculation. The lake is narrow at the place where the ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall

... deliberate and conscious effort to keep my brain quite cool. I have not the reputation of being of an excitable temperament, but the contrary; yet I could at that moment see my way to a condition in which one might become insane in an instant. It was as if a fissure opened somewhere, and I saw my way into a mad-house; then it closed, and everything went on as before. Once in my life I had obtained a slight glimpse of the same sensation, and then, too, strangely enough, while swimming,—in the mightiest ocean-surge into which I had ever dared plunge ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... he took the tears of balsam, Took the resin of the Fir-Tree, Smeared therewith each seam and fissure, Made ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck

... its ascensional force, approached the ground; the anchors ran along until, at last, one of them caught in the fissure of a rock, and the balloon ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne

... pretty little village of Evanton, and pursued the course of the river Auldgrande, first through intermingled fields and patches of copsewood, and then through a thick fir wood, to where the bed of the stream contracts from a boulder-strewed bottom of ample breadth, to a gloomy fissure, so deep and dark, that in many places the water cannot be seen, and so narrow, that the trees which shoot out from the opposite sides interlace their branches atop. Large banks of the gray boulder-clay, laid open by the river, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... diabolical host with lead, they believed their last hour had come, when the ground on which they were making their last stand shook, there was a rending of rocks and a rush of imprisoned steam that drowned even the dragons' roar, and they were separated from them by a long fissure and a wall of smoke and vapour. Struggling back from the edge of the chasm, they fell upon the ground, and then for the first time fully realized that the earthquake had saved them, for the dragons could not come across the opening, and ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor

... consequence of the wind and the thaw, and there was a sort of icy wave cast up near the land, over which it was indispensable to pass, in order to get fairly on the river. As the top of this ridge, or wave, was broken, it exposed a fissure that enabled us to see the thickness of the ice, and this Guert pointed out in proof of its strength. There was nothing unusual in a small movement of the covering of the river, which the current often produces; but, ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper

... half-way through a stone fell through a fissure of the cave, and Luliban, who watched for the signal, dived outwards with the line of cinnet, and came behind Red-Hair and put the noose over his left foot, and Harry, who followed close, cast the stone he carried away and raised his hand and stabbed him in the belly as he turned, and then, ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke

... at length the travellers found themselves at the mouth of a narrow rocky boulder- strewn gorge bounded on either side by titanic masses of volcanic rock, rugged and moss-grown, with little patches of herbage here and there, or an occasional stunted pine growing out of an almost imperceptible fissure. The only signs of life in this wild spot consisted of a diminutive musk-ox here and there cropping the scanty herbage half-way up the apparently inaccessible height in spots from which it appeared equally impossible for the creature to advance or ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... thrust against the bar. It bent so suddenly that I almost slipped. I clambered about and bent the adjacent bar in the opposite direction, and then took the luminous fungus from my pocket and dropped it down the fissure. ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... with calcareous tufa. One enormous fresh-water lake, in which probably sported the Dyconodon, was let off when the remarkable rent was made in the basalt which now constitutes the Victoria Falls. Another seems to have gone to the sea when a similar fissure was made at the falls of the Orange River. It is in this calcareous tufa alone that fossil animal remains have yet been found. There are no marine limestones except in friths which the elevation of the west and east coasts have ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... valley that it waters is a gorge 500 or 600 feet deep through the greater part of its distance. The traveller at the bottom supposes, or is ready to suppose, that he is in some ravine of the high mountains; in reality, it is simply a fissure of the plateau that was once the bed of the sea. There is no igneous, no metamorphic rock here; nothing but limestone of the Jurassic formation. The convexities on one side of the fissure correspond with marked regularity to the concavities on ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... this way and that, on their laborious exploration, the silence fell profound; and this silence was the ruin of the islanders. A sound of stones rattling caught the ear of Teina. He looked, thinking to perceive a crab, and saw instead the brown hand of a human being issue from a fissure in the ground. A shout recalled the search parties and announced their doom to the buried caitiffs. In the cave below, sixteen were found crouching among human bones and singular and horrid curiosities. One was a head of ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a fissure through the rock down into the cave. That's where the Germans that put in the radio plant made their hook-up. We can listen there, and maybe hear ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge

... be brought into approximation and held in place by drilling a small hole from one side into and through the other, commencing half an inch back of the fissure on each side; then drive a light horseshoe nail through the hole and clinch it. Pare the injured claw as short as ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... perceived in merely passing over the bridge: to appreciate its character, and comprehend its awfully impressive effects, it is necessary to see the bridge, the chasm, and the roaring water, from different projecting crags which impend over the river. At a little distance below the bridge, "the fissure gradually spreads its rocky jaws; the bottom opens; and, instead of the dark precipices which have hitherto overhung and obscured the struggling river, it now emerges into day, and rolls its murmuring current through a winding valley, confined within ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various

... recruit our own exhausted strength with food and rest, was our first necessary resource. In tracing the rocky course of the current for a convenient watering place, Antonio discovered that it issued from a cavern, which, though a mere fissure exteriorly, was, within, of cathedral dimensions and solemnity; we all entered it and drank eagerly from a foaming basin, which it immediately presented to our fevered lips. Our first sensations were those of freedom and independence, and of that perfect security which is the ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez

... the disposition of the limb of the ray is such that the incomplete part or the fissure is outside. This is exactly opposite to the disposition of the same part in ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith

... and a certain Teutonic stamp of civilization which these districts have received, would greatly facilitate the eastward extension of the German Empire; while their common religions, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, would help obliterate the old political fissure. Thus the borderland of a country, so markedly differentiated from its interior, performs a certain historical function, and becomes, as it were, an organ of the living, growing race ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... Ford; "mount on my shoulders, my lad! I am still strong enough to bear you!" The young man understood in an instant. His father propped himself up against the rock. Harry got upon his shoulders, so that with his pick he could reach the line of the fissure. Then with quick sharp blows he attacked it. Almost directly afterwards a slight sound was heard, like champagne escaping from a bottle—a sound commonly expressed by the ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne

... on both sides, I am sure I should not have known it was built up unless I had examined it. It is much narrower on this side than on the other—not more than twenty-five feet, I should say. There seem to be some irregularly-shaped holes in what looks like a fissure in the middle. I suppose they are to light the rooms on this side of the house, but they are certainly too small to ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty

... remained untouched, but the influence of sudden fear had so violent an effect on Mr. Cranium, that he lost his balance, and alighted in an ivy bush, which, giving way beneath him, transferred him to a tuft of hazel at its base, which consigned him to the boughs of an ash that had rooted itself in a fissure about halfway down the rock, which finally transmitted him to the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various

... descended to within three feet of the ground; in a corner at the right, a kind of box, full of dried heather; a few logs of oak, an axe, a massive bench, and other implements of toil, were lost in the shade. A resinous odour of pine-wood impregnated the air, and the ruddy smoke eddied through a fissure in the rock. ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian

... changing of kingdoms and empires, of battles and world-wide fame which grew and died and passed away; and temples crumbled, and kings' tombs were forgotten, and cities were buried and others built over them after hundreds of years—and perhaps a few stones fell from a mountain side, or a fissure was worn, which the people below could not even see. And that was all. There they stood, and perhaps their secret was that they had been there for ever and ever. That was what the mountains said to Marco, which ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... which was cut into the shape here exactly copied (Fig. 55). The short end of the stick beyond the hole was purposely split, but not the opposite [page 75] end. As the wood was highly elastic, the split or fissure closed immediately after being made. After six days the stick and bean were dug out of the damp sand, and the radicle was found to be much enlarged above and beneath the hole. The fissure which was ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin

... and steeper, and pressing more and more upon our path. We entered at length a defile which I never had seen rivaled. The mountain was cracked from top to bottom, and we were creeping along the bottom of the fissure, in dampness and gloom, with the clink of hoofs on the loose shingly rocks, and the hoarse murmuring of a petulant brook which kept us company. Sometimes the water, foaming among the stones, overspread the whole narrow passage; sometimes, withdrawing to one side, it gave us room to pass ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... of the rain, the incisive blasts of the wind, coming again and again, though the centuries went, were registered here in mystic runes. The surface had weathered to a whitish-gray, but still in tiny depressions its pristine dark color showed in rugose characters. A splintered fissure held delicate fucoid impressions in fine script full of meaning. A series of worm-holes traced erratic hieroglyphics across a scaling corner; all the varied texts were illuminated by quartzose particles glittering in the sun, and here and there fine green grains of glauconite. ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... at the same time to a small stream which trickled down a fissure in the rock, and formed a little well of clear water beneath. I bowed deeply, and murmuring something, I know not what, took the pitcher from her hand, and scaling the rocky cliff, mounted to the clear source ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... the fissure, lean over the brink of the precipice, and look downward, a little to the left, on the belt of woods which covers the strand between the water and the base of the cliffs. Here a gang of axe-men are at work, and Point Levi and Orleans echo the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... Peter, Sogrange and Dory, whose nerves were of iron, faced one another, doubting and amazed. The floor beneath them rocked and billowed like the waves of a canvas sea. The windows were filled with flashes of red light, a great fissure parted the wall, the pictures and book-cases came crashing down beneath a shower of masonry. It was the affair of a second. Above them shone the stars and around them a noise like thunder. Bernadine, who alone understood, was the first to recover himself. He stood in ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... the Dane word to do the best he could and followed leisurely. The big fellow worked with painful care for more than an hour before he became sure of himself; then his speed quickened, following a dry nullah at last, for several miles. The dark was creeping in before they came to a deep fissure among the rocks where the empty waterway sunk into a pool which was not yet dry. Skag and the Dane drank deep; then the man filled his canteen, ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost

... Landless caught at the stem of a cedar projecting from a fissure in the rock, and swung himself up to the cleft. The Indian followed, and with silence and caution they commenced their dangerous journey. Landless was no novice at such work. When a boy, he had often rounded the face of frowning white cliffs with the sea breaking in ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston

... high-perched on a crag that overlooked a glittering expanse of desert. More precious than its bulk in diamonds, a spring of clear, cold water from the rock-lined depths of mother earth gushed out through a fissure near the Summit, and round that spring had been built, in bygone centuries, a battlemented nest to breed and turn out warriors. Alwa's grandfather had come by it through complicated bargaining and dowry-contracts, ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... of the spinal column and the brain. The brain consists of three parts: The cerebrum, or great brain, consisting of two hemispheres, which, though connected, are divided in great part by a longitudinal fissure; the cerebellum, or little brain; and the medulla oblongata, or bulb. The spinal nerves consist of thirty-one pairs, which branch out from the spinal cord. Each pair of nerves contains a right ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education

... Beltane awoke, and sitting up, looked about him. He was in a chamber roughly square, a hollow within the rock part natural and part hewn by hand, a commodious chamber lighted by a jagged hole in the rock above, a fissure all o'er-grown with vines and creeping plants whose luxuriant foliage tempered the sun's rays to a tender green twilight very grateful ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol

... an hour's search, they found a point where the descent seemed practicable. A little stream had worn a deep fissure in the face of the rock. Shrubs and bushes had grown up in the crevices and afforded a hold for the hands, and there appeared no great difficulty in getting down. Before starting they cut three stiff slender rods twelve feet in length. They then set to work to ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty

... thrilling farewell which is never erased from the tablet of memory. In the farewell of the emigrant, torn by cruel fate from country and friends, hope smiles in his tears; the fortune that drives away can bring back; but the farewell of death leaves no fissure in its cloud for the gleam of hope—it is final, terrible, and, on ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly

... transverse poles. Then he endeavoured to throw the lead-weight beyond one of the poles. He succeeded only after the seventh or eighth attempt, and was well pleased when the weight running over it swung down to our feet, as the position of the poles and the slope of the floor of the fissure did not allow it to rest in the cavern. 'Pull the cord,' shouted Armand. 'What for?' 'You will soon see. Pull'—and speedily the string drew after it one of our stout ropes. 'Now do you understand?' ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... maddened by hunger, took advantage of the receding tide to go in search of crayfish. Half naked, and with his open knife between his teeth, he sprang from rock to rock. In hunting a crab he found himself once more in the mysterious grotto that glittered with jewel-like flowers. He noticed a fissure above the level of the water. The crab was probably there. He thrust in his hand as far as he was able, and groped ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... at the edge of the fissure at length, and leaned over to peer down through the bracken and heather which grew on the sides of ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn

... received from Dr. A. J McDonald, physician to the Los Pinos Indian Agency, Colorado, a description is given of crevice or rock-fissure burial, which follows. ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow

... dead when they rolled him over. The gun, an old-fashioned, heavy-weighted muzzle-loader, lay near him. Steel and wood had parted company. Near the butt of the right-hand barrel, with lips pressed outward, gaped a fissure several inches in length. The sailor picked it up, curiously. A glittering stream of yellow dust ran out through the crack. The facts of the case dawned ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London

... twenty feet above the girl's head, was as thick as many a tall tree hereabouts, and was like a giant's arm, bent at the elbow, thrusting the rocks back. She could make her way up this far, working along a ragged fissure in the cliff; thence she could edge out upon the broad limb until she came to the trunk itself. And once there, to Wanda in her hunting costume and with her knowledge of tree climbing, the rest of the way, from limb to limb, might be difficult but would ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory

... which the Black Spectre had stood, but our readers may judge of his surprise when he found that the spectre, or whatever it was, had disappeared, and was nowhere, or any longer, visible. Place of concealment there was none. He examined the ground about him. It was firm and compact, and without a fissure in which ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... show that they are much more violent and occur oftener where the crust of the earth is being disturbed by folding. We have seen that there are two main causes of earthquakes: the slipping of portions of the earth past each other along a fissure, and the contact of water with very hot rocks far below the surface. It is probable that the earthquakes which occur so often in the western portion of the United States are due to the first of these causes. The numerous ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks

... and placing strong iron wedges at equal distances along this line; these wedges are struck in succession with heavy hammers, till the mass splits down. Another method of detaching masses of rock, is by driving wooden wedges into a deep artificial or natural crack, or fissure; the wedges are then wet, and, in consequence of swelling, burst the ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers

... Christian fold the marks of division have pronounced themselves in the most unmistakable manner. As an example we may take the lines of cleavage which have shown themselves in the two great churches, the Congregational and the Presbyterian, and the very distinct fissure which is manifest in the transplanted Anglican church of this country. Recent circumstances have brought out the fact of the great change in the dogmatic communities which has been going on silently but surely. The licensing of a missionary, the transfer of a Professor from one ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... knelt, the general slope was broken by a narrow ledge or platform, bowlder-strewn—from which, almost vertically, rose the rocky scarp again. Among the sturdy, stunted fir trees, bearding the rugged face, frowned a deep fissure, dark as a wolf den, and, just in front of it, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, crouched Lola—Natzie's shadow. Rarely in reservation days, until after Blakely came as agent, were they ever seen apart, and now, in these days of exile and alarm, they were ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King

... around, they beard for the first time a peculiar subterranean rumbling, and going back a few feet, saw the river disappear in a smooth, green slide down into a wide fissure. They stood looking down, fascinated at this mysterious, silent, and stealthy disappearance of the waters that come with such a sparkle out of the bright valley; then dropped stones down, and stooped their heads in vain to catch even the slightest ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville

... throat he raised his little arm straight up, like a flag. And Clotilde kept her unconscious smile, seeing him so healthy, so rosy, and so plump, thriving so well on the nourishment he drew from her. During the first few weeks she had suffered from a fissure, and even now her breast was sensitive; but she smiled, notwithstanding, with that peaceful look which mothers wear, happy in giving their milk as they ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola

... you here, yonder cleft i' the rock should serve for to-night. Howbeit I'll go look." So I limped across the beach to where showed a great fissure in the cliff hard beside a lofty tree; being come within this cleft I found it narrow suddenly, and at the end a small cave very dry and excellent suited to our purpose. Moreover, close at hand was a little rill ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... go adrift, the sun sets down the valley between the hills; when snow comes, it goes down behind the Cumberland and streams through a great fissure that people call the Gap. Then the last light drenches the parson's cottage under Imboden Hill, and leaves an after-glow of glory on a majestic heap that lies against the east. Sometimes it spans the Gap ...
— 'Hell fer Sartain' and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.

... Rock was a most famous case of that. It had a large cavern inside and a very small hole through the rock at the ceiling of the cavern. Then there was a cleft or fissure through the rock right down to this little hole. You can see for yourself that when the tide started to come in, it closed the sea entrance to the cavern, imprisoning a lot of air. Then, as the ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... husband and wife would leave the crowded beach, and mount by some tortuous dusty way on to the high plateau through which was cleft far below the wooded fissure of the village. Here they seemed to have climbed the beanstalk into a new world. The rich Normandy country lay all round them—the cornfields, the hedgeless tracts of white-flowered lucerne or crimson clover, dotted by the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... things and their specific types, but he also, by an exercise of memory, animates the psychical image of these special perceptions. If, for example, the primitive man personifies a stream of water which he has seen to issue from a fissure of the rocks, and ascribes to it voluntary and intentional motion, he also animates the image which reappears in his sphere of thought, and conceives it to have a real existence. He does not merely believe it to be a psychical and what may be called a photographic repetition ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli

... destructive earthquake of April 2, the ground south of Hilo burst open with a crash and roar which at once answered all questions concerning the volcano. The molten river, after travelling underground for twenty miles, emerged through a fissure two miles in length with a tremendous force and volume. It was in a pleasant pastoral region, supposed to be at rest for ever, at the top of a grass-covered plateau sprinkled with native and foreign houses, and rich in herds of cattle. Four ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... stream, blue as the heaven it mirrored, between banks now green and gently shelving away, crowned with a growth of oak, hickory, pine, hemlock and savin, now rising into irregular masses of grey rocks, overgrown with moss, with here and there a stunted bush struggling out of a fissure, and seeming to derive a starved existence from the rock itself; and now, in strong contrast, presenting almost perpendicular elevations of barren sand. Occasionally the sharp cry of a king-fisher, from a withered ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... impression remains on my mind of the moment when the men, with their faces lighted by the small flame of the flickering fire, all looked up towards my eyrie. The culminating point of their treachery had come, and their countenances seemed ghastly and distorted, as seen from the fissure in the wall behind which I knelt. They listened to hear if we were asleep. Then all but one rolled themselves in their blankets, completely covering their heads and bodies. The one figure I could now see sat up by the fire for some time, as if absorbed in ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... pitchers, formed by the complete union of the margins, and falling off by a transverse fissure (as in the ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters

... the Leucopsis' weapon. In the dying insect, beheaded, stripped of legs and wings, with a pin stuck through its body, the sides of the fissure containing the inoculating-thread quiver violently, as if the belly were going to open, divide in two along the median line and then reunite its two halves. The thread itself gives convulsive tremblings; it comes out of its scabbard, goes back and slips out again. It is ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre

... the frontal lobes were surprisingly small, and that there was a partial deficiency of the median longitudinal fissure. The fissure did not begin till beyond the crown of the head, in the region of the occiput. The anterior half of the cerebrum consequently lacked the division into lateral hemispheres. It had few convolutions also, and ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... aside and rode to the edge of the fosse, that they suspected that he was a foe. Running to the walls they opened fire with arrows upon him, but by this time Archie had seen all that he required. Across the promontory ran a sort of fissure, some ten yards wide and as many deep. From the opposite edge of this the wall rose abruptly. Here assault would be difficult, and it was upon the gateway that an attack must be made. Several arrows had struck his armour and ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty

... portion. It is divided into two lateral lobes or hemispheres by a deep longitudinal fissure. The surface of the cerebral hemispheres is gray and roughened by pleats or folds separated by grooves or fissures. The gray or cortical layer is distinct from the white or connecting structure. The cortical layer is made up of nerve cells or areas which control the voluntary ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.

... little hamlet two miles south of Skaill Bay. On passing the place where the vessel struck, now calm and peaceful after the storm, he shortened sail and rowed inshore. A little distance up the face of the red cliff, above the high-water mark, and hidden by a projecting rock, there was a "scurro," or fissure, which opened into a large cavern. He had discovered this cavern when he was a boy, on some bird-nesting expedition; and now, scarcely knowing why he did so—except, perhaps, for the passing thought that some of the wreckage ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton

... than in Southey's verses, though it is worthy of better poetry than that. After all, I do not know that the cascade is anything more than a beautiful fringe to the grandeur of the scene; for it is very grand,—this fissure through the cliff,—with a steep, lofty precipice on the right hand, sheer up and down, and on the other hand, too, another lofty precipice, with a slope of its own ruin on which trees and shrubbery have grown. The right-hand precipice, however, has shelves affording sufficient ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... known as the Narrows. Here the great rock walls, nearly two thousand feet high, came so close together as to leave barely room for a footpath beside the creek which boiled down over great bowlders. Unexpectedly, there opened in the wall a rock fissure, and through this Arlie guided ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine

... son stepped into their fighting place, and fierce was the combat that arose between them, as when two roaring surges of the sea dash against each other in a fissure of the rocks, and the spray-cloud bursts from them high into the air. Long they fought, and many red wounds did each of them give and receive, till at last Oscar beat the Greek prince to the earth and smote off his head. Then one host groaned for woe and discouragement, while the other ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston

... chest, embracing the heart, (fig. 88,) and separated from each other by a membranous partition. The color of the lungs is a pinkish gray, mottled, and variously marked with black. Each lung is divided into lobes, by a long and deep fissure, which extends from the posterior surface of the upper part of the organ, downward and forward, nearly to the anterior angle of the base. In the right lung, the upper lobe is subdivided by a second fissure. This lung is larger and shorter than the left. It ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter

... a fissure in the side of the hill, a place of rough beams, and bare of verdure. It seemed singularly deserted, for it wanted nearly half an hour to working time. We looked into the shaft with a shudder. It led in a slanting direction into ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various

... it was sometimes, by a curious perversion, called, the "rock-in-spring," was a spring running out of a cave-like fissure in a high limestone cliff. Here the old man sheltered himself on that dreary Christmas evening, until Bud brought his roan colt to the top of the cliff above, and he and Ralph helped the old man up the cliff ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston

... he noticed that the tangled underbrush had given way to a smooth carpet of leaves. Night was near, so he halted when he came to an open spot, a place where volcanic rock precluded vegetable growth. Water, steaming hot, poured from a fissure. ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson

... in form, or plasmodiocarpous and irregular, venulose, sessile upon a common, strongly developed hypothallus, sometimes isolated and irregularly globose, dehiscing irregularly or by longitudinal fissure, yellowish or greyish white; columella none; capillitium delicate, the nodules elongate, variable in size; spores pale violaceous, minutely spinulose, ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride

... instant, the frightened woman's strength suddenly gave way; her knees received the fall of the limp body. For a second she seemed huddled in a posture of prayer, then toppled over, slipped easily forward through a fissure in the wall and plunged headforemost into the chugging ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon

... ink-stained desk a man and a woman faced each other. Threads of gray lightened the hair of each. Faint lines, delicate as pencillings, marked the forehead of the woman and radiated from the angles of her eyes. A deep fissure unequally separated the brows of the man, and on his shaven face another furrow added firmness to the mouth. Their eyes met squarely, without a motion from faces imperturbable in middle age and ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... rectovaginal fistula in the sixth month of pregnancy without any interruption of pregnancy, which is far from the general result. Cazin and Rey both produced abortion by forcible dilatation of the anus for fissure, but Gayet used both the fingers and a speculum in a case at five months and the woman went to term. By cystotomy Reamy removed a double hair-pin from a woman pregnant six and a half months, without interruption, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... found that she had turned towards me then, and, as I laid one hand across her arm, I felt her relax to a relieved trembling. Before us the night crowded down over the countryside, masking its ugliness like a film, through which our lights cut a white fissure towards town. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... to the men to leave their horses and "take cover," and he himself sought the only cover near him—a wide fissure in the wall of the long slope below the point ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer

... false modesty in the presence of others. It can never be immodest to attend to the calls of Nature, and such hypersensitiveness is dangerous, for rupture, piles, fissure, prolapse, fistula, are ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... some fifty feet high and broad; this chamber was entered by a small orifice of no great length, through which he had passed on the preceding night; it was warm, and dry except where the stream of which Hilda had spoken trickled through to the sea. It was the fissure now known as the Creux Mahie, and to which an easy access has been arranged for the benefit of the curious. Here Jean passed three months. Hilda frequently visited him, and always kept him supplied with food; she warned him also when he might safely roam on the cliffs above. There was no obstacle ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous

... waters from which Bath gets its fame are believed to owe their origin to the surface drainage of the E. Mendips, which percolates through some vertical fissure, perhaps at Downhead, to the heart of the hills, and are conducted by some natural culvert beneath the intervening coal measures, washing out as they go the soluble mineral salts, and whilst still retaining their heat emerge again at the first opportunity at Bath. ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade

... pond that had supplied them with water the first day they were thrown upon the island. Refreshed by the draught the stranger tried to thank them, but speech and strength failed him, and tottering a few paces toward the land, he fell down insensible beside a fissure in one of the rocks. The ladies ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul

... within this village is a cave or underground fissure in the rocks, which evidently had been used by the inhabitants. The mouth or entrance to this cavern, partly obstructed and concealed at the time of our visit, occurs at the point A on the plan. On clearing away the rubbish at the mouth and entering it was found so ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff

... a forest pine to split, Into each fissure sundry wedges fit, To keep the void and render work more light. Out groaned the pine, "Why should I vent my spite Against the axe which never touched my root, So much as these cursed wedges, mine own fruit; Which rend me through, inserted ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... The fissure down the front of the Pink Lady's Slipper is not so wide but that a bee must use some force to push against its elastic sloping sides and enter the large banquet chamber where he finds generous entertainment secreted among the fine white hairs in the upper part. Presently he has feasted enough. ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... light suddenly disappeared and they found themselves descending a rough downward way. Presently there were rock walls on either side hemming them in a narrow crevice in the ledges. Then the rain ceased and Vic knew they had slidden down into a rock-covered fissure, that they were getting underground. They tried to turn back, but the up-climb was impossible, and in the darkness they could reach nothing but the sharp ledge of the cliff sheer above the raging river. Entrapped and bewildered, ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter

... with vague, ghost-like images of dread and horror. I cast one glance behind, and saw a gleam of heaven's sunny blue, one bright dazzling gleam flashing between the rugged rock and the rushing waters. It was as if the veil of the temple of nature were rent, and the glory of God shone through the fissure. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz

... of abuse for Ditman Olansen was choked in Mr. Pike's throat. All he was capable of for the moment was to stare, petrified, at that enormous fissure flanked at either end with a thatch of grizzled hair. He was in a dream, a trance, his great hands knotting and clenching unconsciously as he stared at the mark unmistakable by which he had said that he would some day identify the murderer of Captain Somers. And in that ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... impossibility for any human being to travel more than a few hundred yards in any direction. The character of the place may best be illustrated by stating that Steward, who had gone up by a different route, was unable to reach us, though we could talk to him across a fissure. Many of these breaks could be jumped, but some of them were too wide for safety. The surface was largely barren sandstone, only a patch of sand here and there sustaining sometimes a bush or stunted cedar. It is the Land of Standing Rocks, as ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... seen on several occasions the spray driven over to Le Palais, nearly five miles distant. Continuing our walk along the cliffs, we came to an enormous mass of rock, standing far out detached from the cliff, and covered with screaming sea-gulls. We again descended by another fissure into a pretty sandy cove, surrounded by the same wild granite rocks; but in most places there is no beach at all. It was now high water, so it was useless to attempt the Grotte des Apothecaires,—the finest, they say, of them all, and we returned to Le Palais well ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser

... Giants' Causeway in appearance. But the noblest cliff of all on this western promontory is that of Tolpedn-Penwith, to reach which we have to pass Nanjisal Cove. Its name, the "holed headland of Penwith," refers to a deep cleft or fissure, which can be explored from the sea when tide and weather permit. Part of this fine bluff is known as the Chair Ladder, and has traditions of a witch, Madge Figgy, who used to take flight with her comrades from this magnificent point, and here would shriek ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... white plume of steam, woven by the wind into soft, fantastic shapes, no longer capped the crater; its place had been usurped by thick, dark fumes of smoke swirling sullenly about. In the fading light I marked the red, malignant glow of a fissure newly broken out in the side of the ragged cone, from which came a thin, white ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... The fissure and leaning in the upper part of the wall, which Procopius observed, (Goth. l. i. c. 13,) is visible to the present hour, (Douat. Roma Vetus, l. i. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... (compare Section 44), forcing out of its body, the water, carbon dioxide, urea, and other katastases, which are formed concomitantly with its activity. The amoeba reproduces itself in the simplest way; the nucleus occasionally divides into two portions and a widening fissure in the protoplasm of the animal's body separates one from the other. It is impossible to say that one is the parent cell, and the other the offspring; the amoeba we merely perceive, was one and is now two. It is curious to note, therefore, that ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells

... these were apt to come on each evening about 6 P.M. The pulse was 100 when the erect position was maintained, and 84 to 88 in the sitting posture. The right pupil was still dilated, reacting for accommodation but little to light. The palpebral fissure was normal in size and there was little, if any, diminution in strength of ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins

... to the bathroom run through the office. In the last blizzard they burst. The fire in the fireplace was a conflagration; the steam radiator was singing a credible song; and as the water trickled down the pipe from the little fissure, it froze solid before it was ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding

... patience and caution deserted her; reckless of danger, she placed the child upon the ledge on which she had been standing; and, though trembling in every limb, succeeded in mounting so much higher on the crag as to gain a fissure near the top of the rock, which commanded an uninterrupted view of the vast tracts of uneven ground leading in an easterly direction to the next range of ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... broken stumps of branches, made this comparatively easy, and in a few moments he reached its top, and stood upon a little ledge in the wall. A swift glance around him revealed the whole waterway or fissure slanting upward along the mountain face. Then he turned quickly to look down the dizzy height. At first he could distinguish nothing but the top of the buckeyes and their white clustering blossoms. Then something fluttered,—the ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte

... above, it is smooth water, and away ahead we see the foam of another rapid. The rock on which we stand has been worn smooth by the washing of the water during countless ages, and from a cleft or fissure there springs a pine-tree or a rustling aspen. We have crossed the Petit Roches, and our course is ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler

... reached the point of disappearance they looked for a fissure in the rocky floor, but found none. Instead, they saw a round, smooth opening into what seemed to be another tunnel. The light, when held into the dark break in the rock, revealed a landing about six ...
— Boy Scouts in Mexico; or On Guard with Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson

... many hiding-places. Once I stole some twenty-eight pounds of butter. I stuffed it down into a fissure in ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson

... imbedded, in the top of the bottom sash, the head portion of the nail. I now carefully replaced this head portion in the indentation whence I had taken it, and the resemblance to a perfect nail was complete—the fissure was invisible. Pressing the spring, I gently raised the sash for a few inches; the head went up with it, remaining firm in its bed. I closed the window, and the semblance of the whole ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... the dull scarlet light that filtered through the lowered blinds; and through the fissure between the last blind and the sash a shaft of wan light entered like a spear and touched the embossed brasses of the candlesticks upon the altar that gleamed like the ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce

... what I noticed was but a phase of the general movement, part social, part religious, part political, now carrying us along with a perceptible glide toward the crisis of revolution. But here in the Valley, more than elsewhere, this broadening fissure of division ran through farms, through houses, ay, even through the group gathered in front of the family fire-place—separating servants from employers, sons from fathers, husbands from wives. And, alas! when I realized now for the first time the existence of ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic

... the receptacle, is not long in increasing, preserving its rounded form up to the development of the asci. At this period, under the influence of the rapid growth of these organs, it soon produces at its summit a fissure of the external membrane, which becomes a more marked depression in the marginate species. The receptacle thus formed increases rapidly, becomes plane, more convex, or more or less undulated at the margin, if at all of large ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke



Words linked to "Fissure" :   volcano, fault, fracture, rift, faulting, crevice, groove, fatigue crack, vallecula, shift, slit, split, impression, depression, anatomy, crevasse, hilus, sulcus, break, Sylvian fissure, vent, general anatomy, geological fault, cranny, imprint, gap, opening, hilum, fissure of Sylvius, chink



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