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Tropics   /trˈɑpɪks/   Listen
Tropics

noun
1.
The part of the Earth's surface between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn; characterized by a hot climate.  Synonyms: Torrid Zone, tropical zone.






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"Tropics" Quotes from Famous Books



... accompaniments of flying fish, dolphins, physaliae and velellae, was our finding, in the neighbourhood of the equator, considerable numbers of a rare British bird, Thalassidroma leachii, a species of storm-petrel, not before known to extend its range to the tropics; it was distributed between the tropic of Cancer ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray

... speak Of deed of mine, my Lord. I did but think That in the sunlit tropics I had known The wantonness of cruelty; and seen Aged men grown grey in crime, whose hair thus blanch'd Show'd white, like sugar by hot ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards

... week, or more, we ran steadily toward the tropics, and in all that time we passed—and that distantly—but two steam vessels and only one sailing craft. There was no chance for me to get home. I had to possess my soul with such patience as I could, while the old Scarboro bore me swiftly away ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster

... half an hour, and then it ceased with that abruptness which seems so characteristic of the tropics. But it had scarcely come to an end when there arose a loud rustling of leaves among the trees in the garden and round about the house, a blast of hot wind poured in through the open doors and windows, violently slamming the former and causing the latter to rattle furiously; and I had barely ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood

... of the back of the tiled bench and throne in the Sala do Conselho, once an open veranda. Most of this bench is covered with tiles of Moorish design, but on the front each is stamped with an armillary sphere in which the axis is yellow, the lines of the equator and tropics green, and the rest blue. These one would certainly take to be of Dom Manoel's time, for the armillary sphere was his emblem, but they are ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson

... the sound of the waterfall increased, and grew rough and loud, and the undefinable rushing noise that precedes a heavy fall of rain in the tropics, the voice of the wilderness, moaned through the high woods, until at length the clouds sank upon the valley in boiling mists, rolling halfway down the surrounding hills; and the water of the stream, whose ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various

... hiding-places about its waters, and the laxity of its newly organized government, about the year 1695, made it a great rendezvous of pirates, where they might dispose of their booty and concert new depredations. As they brought home with them wealthy lading of all kinds, the luxuries of the tropics, and the sumptuous spoils of the Spanish provinces, and disposed of them with the proverbial carelessness of freebooters, they were welcome visitors to the thrifty traders of New-York. Crews of these desperadoes, therefore, the runagates of every country and every clime, might be seen swaggering ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms

... both long and flanked with benches; over the centre of each hung a lamp; beneath this lamp, on either side the table, sat a teacher; the girls were arranged to the right hand and the left; the eldest and most studious nearest the lamps or tropics; the idlers and little ones towards the north and south poles. Monsieur's habit was politely to hand a chair to some teacher, generally Zelie St. Pierre, the senior mistress; then to take her vacated seat; and thus avail himself of the full beam of Cancer ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... all fire has need of nourishment, without which it cannot possibly subsist; that the sun, moon, and all the stars are fed either with fresh or salt waters; and the reason that Cleanthes gives why the sun is retrograde, and does not go beyond the tropics in the summer or winter, is that he may not be too far from his sustenance. This I shall fully examine hereafter; but at present we may conclude that whatever may cease to be cannot of its own nature be eternal; that if fire wants sustenance, it will cease to ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... despised the Admiralty, he was in turn despised by his crew. It could not be concealed that he was inferior in Seamanship to every foremast man on board. It was idle to expect that old sailors, familiar with the hurricanes of the tropics and with the icebergs of the Arctic Circle, would pay prompt and respectful obedience to a chief who knew no more of winds and waves than could be learned in a gilded barge between Whitehall Stairs and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... uncommon, but cold fogs are exceedingly prevalent. The climate, however, is uncommonly diversified, and consequently so are the productions, exhibiting in some places the vegetation of the frigid zone, and in others that of the tropics. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various

... art my tropics and mine Italy; To look at thee unlocks a warmer clime; The eyes thou givest me Are in the heart, and heed not space or time: Not in mid June the golden-cuirassed bee Feels a more summer-like warm ravishment In the white Lily's breezy tent, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... those of Osiris; and that cross whose mystery you extol without comprehending it, is the cross of Serapis, traced by the hands of Egyptian priests on the plan of the figurative world; which, passing through the equinoxes and the tropics, became the emblem of the future life and of the resurrection, because it touched the gates of ivory and of horn, through which the ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... their lives, plunged into the very heart of jungle life in equatorial Africa! Those who have never wandered far from the comparatively tame regions of our temperate zone, can form but a faint conception of what it is to ramble in the tropics, and therefore can scarcely be expected to sympathise fully with the mental condition of our heroes as they ascended the Zambesi. Everything was so thoroughly strange; sights and sounds so vastly different from what ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne

... masses, the waning of faith, the growth of despair, the triumph of brute force, the reign of the liar and huckster—all these are more real and threatening here, as beasts and reptiles increase in size as we near the tropics. We are nearing the tropics of civilisation. We must not forget that the flowers will be richer, wilder, more beautiful, and life capable ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... existing, by a sudden contemporaneous mass of waters, and that the evaporation of these waters was aided by a steady wind, especially adapted to this purpose in a peculiarly dry atmosphere, and was (as it must of necessity have been) most rapid and intense at the equator and within the tropics proportionally. For—as it has been demonstrated by Dr. Wollaston's experiment, in which the evaporation, occasioned by boiling water at the mid point of a line of water, froze the fluid at the two ends, that is, at a given distance from the greatest ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... destiny." (Mac was beginning to enjoy himself. The Boy was beginning to be bored and to drum softly with his fingers.) "Now, gentlemen, Buffon says that the poles were the first portions of the earth's crust to cool. While the equator, and even the tropics of Cancer and of Capricorn, were still too boiling hot to support life, up here in the Arctic regions there was a carboniferous ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)

... of this implement, Eratosthenes carefully noted the longest and the shortest shadows cast by the gnomon—that is to say, the shadows cast on the days of the solstices. He found that the distance between the tropics thus measured represented 47 degrees 42' 39" of arc. One-half of this, or 23 degrees 5,' 19.5", represented the obliquity of the ecliptic—that is to say, the angle by which the earth's axis dipped from the perpendicular with reference to its orbit. This ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... dewdrops sparkled upon every leaf and blade of grass; touches of mist clung about the hollows, and the sweet breath of the awakened earth was full of the perfect scent of an English June, which is in its way even more delicious than the spicy odours of the tropics. It was a morning to make sick men well, and men happy, and atheists believers in a creative hand. How much more than did it fire Arthur's pulses, already bounding with youth and health, with an ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... might cross his path. Violence of temper approaching to mania has been hereditary in the men of the family, and in my stepfather's case it had, I believe, been intensified by his long residence in the tropics. A series of disgraceful brawls took place, two of which ended in the police-court, until at last he became the terror of the village, and the folks would fly at his approach, for he is a man of immense strength, and absolutely ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... danced, we walked together; Talked—no doubt on trivial topics; Such as Blondin, or the weather, Which "recalled us to the tropics." ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.

... disregard the wistful pleading eye, the hands that tugged at the mosquito curtains to show they were awake, when, late at night, I made my evening round. But it had to be done, and I fear the work and the sun and the tropics made one's temper very short, particularly when it was only possible by losing one's temper to preserve the indifference to these influences that was necessary to complete the cure. It was very hard on them at the time, ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey

... which Bonpland had begun to illustrate, but of which his desire of seeing the tropics again has prevented the completion he intrusts to Kunth. He has also brought home animals of different classes, and distributes them among the most eminent ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... 170 deg. l'. As the old running ropes were constantly breaking in the late gales, we reeved what new ones we had left, and made such other preparations as were necessary for the very different climate with which we were now shortly to encounter. The fine weather we met with between the tropics had not been idly spent. The carpenters found sufficient employment in repairing the boats. The best bower-cable had been so much damaged by the foul ground in Karakakooa Bay, and whilst we were at anchor off Oneeheow, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr

... is satisfied with one life does not exist. The suicide does not commit suicide because he is tired of life, but because he wants so many more lives that he cannot have. The native of the tropics buys a book to the North Pole. If we are poor, we grow rich on paper. We roll in carriages through the highway of letters. If we are rich, we revel in a printed poverty. We cry our hearts out over our starving paper-children and hold our shivering, ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... fable any sense which was adapted to their favorite system of religion and philosophy. The lascivious form of a naked Venus was tortured into the discovery of some moral precept, or some physical truth; and the castration of Atys explained the revolution of the sun between the tropics, or the separation of the human ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... was a large bland woman, inclined to stoutness and to making confidences, with an intense dislike of the tropics and physical discomforts of any sort. How her niece prevailed upon her to make that surreptitious trip to Muloa, which we set out upon two days later, I have never been able to imagine. The accommodations ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... the plains of Manchuria, the Pampas of Argentine, the moors of Northern Japan, all these regions in our own temperate zone offer a welcome to the Anglo-Saxon farmer. The great tropics are less hopeful, but they have never had a fair trial. The northern nations have tried to exploit them in haste, and then to get away, never to stay with them and work patiently to find out their best. Some day the possibilities of ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan

... masses, heaped up at different parts, separated from one another by deep sulci, which are especially marked at the flexures of the joints. Although elephantiasis is met with in all climates, it is more common in the tropics, and its occurrence has been repeatedly demonstrated in these localities to be dependent on the presence in the lymphatics of the filaria sanguinis hominis. The accompanying illustration shows the condition of the limb of a girl of twenty-one, the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... detail of the actions achieved in the European seas by the naval force of Great Britain, within the compass of the present year, we shall now proceed to record the exploits of the British arms within the tropics, and particularly the expedition to Martinique and Guadaloupe, which is said to have succeeded even beyond the expectation of the ministry. A plan had been formed for improving the success of the preceding year in North America, by carrying the British arms up the river St. Laurence, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... British built privateer, and the very mildest of the terms he applied to a "John Bull" will not bear repetition in respectable society. He would not forgive Ardelia. She and her "Cockney husband" might sail together to the most tropical of tropics, ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln

... metals, crucibles, retorts, mortars, and the names of a great variety of chemical combinations: In the domain of geography, globes, hemispheres, continents, islands, oceans, gulfs, bays, and straits; equator, tropics, circles, longitude, latitude, etc. These examples, will furnish an approximate idea of the wide scope in scientific names, covered by these key-words, when applied to all of ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... about double the speed of an express train, by way of the tropics of Cancer and of Capricorn. Carried by westerly-going winds, in three days it had crossed the Indian Ocean and was rapidly moving over Central Africa; two days later it was flying over the Atlantic; then, for two more days over Brazil, and then across ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... of inheritance of acquired traits has gone by the board; biologists no longer accept it. Such traits as an individual's tanned skin acquired by living in the tropics, horny hands acquired by hard labor, immunity to measles acquired by having measles, big muscular development acquired by gymnastics, are not transmitted by heredity to the children of the individual who ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... them with pearls from Ceylon and diamonds from Golconda. Here and there are fountains tossing in the sunlight, and ponds that ripple under the paddling of the swans. I gather me lilies from the Amazon, and orange groves from the tropics, and tamarinds from Goyaz. There are woodbine and honey-suckle climbing over the wall, and starred spaniels sprawling themselves on the grass. I invite amid these trees the larks, and the brown thrushes, and the robins, and all the brightest birds ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... followed the track of beasts to a pool of water, and determined to wait there until he should hear some sound of them. The fuel about was scanty, but he collected what he could until the short twilight of the tropics darkened into night, and then, with the idea of saving firewood, climbed a tree. But now the cold became intense. The heat of the day had been followed by sharp frost, and the unfortunate sportsman, with no extra covering, became so numb that he decided to descend from ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... ocean that laved the shores of Northern Europe was then intensely cold; and the result was the Glacial Period. When the barriers of Atlantis sunk sufficiently to permit the natural expansion of the heated water of the tropics to the north, the ice and snow which covered Europe gradually disappeared; the Gulf Stream flowed around Atlantis, and it still retains the circular motion first imparted to it by ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... Admiral Mahu and a large proportion of the crew had meantime perished of fevers contracted by following the course marked out for them by their employers, and thus diminished in numbers, half-stripped of provisions, and enfeebled by the exhausting atmosphere of the tropics, the survivors were ill prepared to confront the antarctic ordeal which they were approaching. Five months longer the fleet, under command of Admiral de Cordes, who had succeeded to the command, struggled in those straits, where, as if in the home of Eolus, all the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... was lacking for me to congratulate you on the fact that your daughter came through her terrible experience so well. She has assured me that she feels all the better for it. Only one, like myself, accustomed to knocking about the tropics, can fully realize the extraordinary resourcefulness and courage of the man who had the good fortune to bring her through it all safely and, as ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet

... In Darwin, eight months before we had tasted our last butter on ship-board, for tinned butter, out-bush, in the tropics, is as palatable as castor oil. The tea had been made in the Maluka's quart-pot, our cups having been carried dangling from our saddles, in the approved ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn

... an all-day appetite by no means brought to light the tiniest. The way lay across a level land bathed in sunshine, of extreme fertility, and watered by harnessed streams flowing down from the distant hills. All the day one had a sense of the richness of nature, not the prodigality of the tropics to make man indolent, but just sufficient to give full reward for reasonable exertion. The rich, black, fenceless plains were burnished here and there with little shallow lakes of the rainy season, and musical with wild ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... everywhere dead, since there can be found one Englishman who, when he stands for the first time on New England soil, feels that one more desire of his life has been satisfied. To see the East; to see India and far Cathay; to see the tropics and to live for a while in a tropical island; to be carried along the Grand Canal of Venice in a gondola; to see the gardens of Boccaccio and the cell of Savonarola; to camp and hunt in the backwoods of Canada, and to walk the streets of New York, ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant

... strength failed visibly, although artificial nourishment was given him, by Dr. Maerz's orders. He was fading away as fast as twilight in the tropics. His brown face and hands had taken on a dull gray hue, like dry garden earth, and his broad and powerful chest rose and sank rapidly and silently under the bedclothes. His eyelids, which were paler than his face, drooped so as to half cover his eyes, ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various

... whiskers set off his features, hardened and tanned by the inclemency of the weather, the sea winds and the heat of the tropics. ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau

... was needed in approaching her. If she guessed the Pelican's character, she would run in upon the land and they would lose her. It was afternoon. The sun was still above the horizon, and Drake meant to wait till night, when the breeze would be off the shore, as in the tropics it always is. ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude

... tropics, and equator, and equinoctial line; we'll take 'em turn and turn about; we'll do writing and ciphering one ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell

... was in the semi-tropics or thereabout, but the common car in which the three children were passing the night was not. This thought came to Mr. Holiday without invitation, and, like all unwelcome guests, made a long stay. So persistent, indeed, was the thought, meeting his mind at every turn and dogging its footsteps, that ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... spake the language of spirits, where the thoughts are as incense to the mind, and the words winged music to the ear, and the heart is dissolved into streams of joy, as hail that hath wandered to the tropics: in sweetness I communed with them all, and paid my ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... strum on the violin strings—"this Imperial Valley seems to me like a magic spot of the tropics, some land of fable. Richer than the valley of the Nile it has lain here beneath the sea level for thousands of years, dead under the breath of the desert, until a little trickle of water was turned in from the Colorado River, and then it swiftly put forth such ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby

... woods around were the haunts of innumerable birds. Rose-coloured flamingoes and gorgeous ducks, birds arrayed in all the jewellery of the tropics, birds not much bigger than dragon-flies, and birds that ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... when perplexed he slowly raised his hand to his moustache; and his pleasant gray eyes, still slightly blood-shot from the glare of the tropics, narrowed as ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers

... Kangaroo—Old Man Kangaroo. He ran through the ti-trees; he ran through the mulga; he ran through the long grass; he ran through the short grass; he ran through the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer; he ran till his hind ...
— Just So Stories • Rudyard Kipling

... mountains, and he in his heart Was half a Shepherd on the stormy seas. Oft in the piping shrouds had Leonard heard The tones of waterfalls, and inland sounds Of caves and trees; and when the regular wind Between the tropics fill'd the steady sail And blew with the same breath through days and weeks, Lengthening invisibly its weary line Along the cloudless main, he, in those hours Of tiresome indolence would often hang Over the vessel's aide, and gaze and gaze, And, while ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth

... fine ideal, bringing harmony out of discord,—coloring, warming, and lighting up everything within the circle of its horizon. A loving heart carries with it, under every parallel of latitude, the warmth and light of the tropics. It plants its Eden in the wilderness and solitary place, and sows with flowers the gray desolation of rocks and mosses. Wherever love goes, there springs the true heart's-ease, rooting itself even in the polar ices. To the young invalid of the Skipper's story, the dreary waste of what Moore ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... bush of curls, little aquiline profile true to her father's, tilted upward, as if sniffing the aerial scent, her slender figure Parisienne to outlandishness, the stream of Millie's ancestry flowed through the tropics of her very exotic personality. She was the magnolia on the family tree, the bloom on a century plant that was heavy with its first bud. Even at this time, slightly before her internationalism as a song bird was to carry her name to the remote places of the earth, a little patina ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... instance of the hankering after them inherent in the civilised and educated mind. To the superficial, the hot suns of Juan Fernandez may sufficiently account for his quaint choice of a luxury; but surely one who had borne the hard labour of a seaman under the tropics for all these years could have supported an excursion after goats or a peaceful constitutional arm in arm with the nude Friday. No, it was not this: the memory of a vanished respectability called for some ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... me about this climate, for ——-. For one who, like her, is in perfect health, I should think it excellent; and even an invalid has only to travel a few hours, and he arrives at tierra caliente. This climate is that of the tropics, raised some thousand feet above the level of the sea; consequently there is an extreme purity and thinness of the atmosphere, which generally affects the breathing at first. In some it causes an oppression on the chest. On me, it had little effect, if any; ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... is no ice," he said, "but you know the rule of the tropics; as soon as a ship enters port, the ...
— My Buried Treasure • Richard Harding Davis

... O ye winds across the oceans, blow! Go to the hills and prairies of the West! Haste to the tropics, search the fields of snow, Let the world's gift to her become ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... now successfully cultivated both in Bengal and in the Madras Presidency. It has found a home in the Dutch East Indies and in China; and its tastes and habits are affectionately studied in Australia. But as in the tropics it has to be grown at an altitude of three thousand feet, or more, above sea-level, it can never become so common in ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor

... April, we observed the clouds to gather more than usual in the horizon, which is a sure indication of land, as it is common between the tropics to be foggy over the land, though perfectly clear at sea; wherefore we kept an anxious look-out all this night, and early in the morning of the 11th, we saw the island of Magon W. ten leagues distant. This ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr

... gave him a rather predatory air, belied rather by his pleasant blue eyes. The sun wrinkles round their corners and his sallow complexion gave Mr. Manley the impression that he had spent some years in the tropics and suffered ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson

... But besides the improbability of a bird having long ago become extinct in these large and luxuriant islands, it appears (as we shall presently see) that the turkey degenerates in India, and this fact indicates that it was not aboriginally an inhabitant of the lowlands of the tropics. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... cannot here enter on the copious details which I have collected on {9} this curious subject; but to show how singular the laws are which determine the reproduction of animals under confinement, I may just mention that carnivorous animals, even from the tropics, breed in this country pretty freely under confinement, with the exception of the plantigrades or bear family; whereas carnivorous birds, with the rarest exceptions, hardly ever lay fertile eggs. Many exotic plants have pollen utterly ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin

... night Lowered o'er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil, Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost Basked in the moonlight's ineffectual glow, Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night; 410 Nor where the tropics bound the realms of day With a broad belt of mingling cloud and flame, Where blue mists through the unmoving atmosphere Scattered the seeds of pestilence, and fed Unnatural vegetation, where the land 415 Teemed with all earthquake, tempest and disease, Was man a nobler ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... wolves, etc., have turned white in winter, and then assumed a different color in the spring. If you start at the north and move south, you will find, at first, that the flowers are very white and delicate; but, as you move toward the tropics, they begin to take on deeper and richer hues until they run into almost endless varieties. Guyot argues on the other side of the question to account for the intellectual diversity of the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... to Mr. Hare (date not given): "The landscapes around me here are noble and lovely as any that can be conceived on Earth. How indeed could it be otherwise, in a small Island of volcanic mountains, far within the Tropics, and perpetually covered with the richest vegetation?" The moral aspect of things is by no means so good; but neither is that without its fair features. "So far as I see, the Slaves here are cunning, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... Dapitan speaks almost enthusiastically of the place, describing the climate as exceptional for the tropics, his situation as agreeable, and saying that he could be quite content if his family and his books ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig

... stratagem, and flurried the sentries to such an extent that I got clear away. I rather fancy one or two others got off, too, but I don't know. I got into a rather disagreeable tramp steamer, and volunteered as stoker. It's so difficult to get stokers in the tropics that the captain took his risks and kept me. I must say I was sorry afterwards that I hadn't ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham

... except in the minds of those utterly unfamiliar with the tropics and Southern conditions generally, of the difficulty of this labor problem throughout the world. It has appeared not only in our Southern States but in the West Indies and South Africa—in any country where colored labor is employed. The writer knows of at least one large plantation in the South ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... to Port Said, and after a short delay we pushed on through the canal and into the Red Sea. It was August, and when one talks of the Red Sea in August there is no further need for comment. The Saxon had not been built for the tropics. She had no fans, nor ventilating system such as we have on the United Fruit boats. Some unusually intelligent stokers had deserted at Port Said, and as we were in consequence short-handed, it was suggested that any volunteers would be given a try. Finch Hatton ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt

... weeks or more since leaving home, and during that five weeks they had been for twelve days steaming along one of the hottest coasts (Brazil) in all the world—the tropics—and it was summer-time once they were south of the line; and in all that time no chance for an enlisted man to get a drink of any kind of liquor—no beer or light wine even—no matter what the intensity of the thirst which may ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly

... attaps, and diversified by the pyramids and spires and fantastic turrets of the more important buildings. The valley of the Meinam, not over six hundred miles in length, is as a long deep dent or fissure in the alluvial soil. At its southern extremity we have the climate and vegetation of the tropics, while its northern end, on the brow of the Yunan, is a region of perpetual snow. The surrounding country is remarkable for the bountiful productiveness of its unctuous loam. The scenery, though not wild nor grand, is ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... turned to gossiping waves that rippled and pattered against her sides as she rolled among them, delighted with their story. Rapid changes went on, those days, in things all about while she headed for the tropics. New species of birds came around; albatrosses fell back and became scarcer and scarcer; lighter gulls came in their stead, and pecked for ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum

... look quiet for you," said Trask, as he wrote his name in the register and took off his helmet. It was plain that the tropics had put their mark upon him, for in contrast to the deep tan of burnt umber over cheeks and chin, the upper part of his forehead showed a white band of skin, the helmet line of the veteran traveller in low latitudes. His black eyes were embedded in nests of tiny wrinkles, the "tropical squint," ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore

... East the sun itself is so regular and so rapid in rising and setting that the sleeping hours of insects and birds are far more regular than in temperate lands, with their shifting periods of light and darkness. Our twilight, that season that the tropics know not, has produced a curious race of moths, or rather, a curious habit confined to certain kinds. They are the creatures neither of day nor of night, but of twilight. They awake as twilight begins, go about their ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish

... evolution might not be revealed by an analysis of the present workings of nature. As naturalist of the "Beagle" during its four years' cruise around the world, Darwin saw many new lands and observed varied circumstances under which the organisms of the tropics and other regions lived their lives. The fierce struggle for existence waged by the denizens of the jungle recalled to him the views of Malthus regarding overpopulation and its results. These and other influences led him to begin ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... vigorous and powerful, for all its organs are at the best. It gives the possibility of later, on land, becoming warm-blooded, i.e., of maintaining a constant high temperature. It is thus resistant to climate and hardship. In time its descendants will face the arctic winter as well as the heat of the tropics. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... every star was hidden in its turn, save only Jupiter near the zenith, Capella, Aldebaran, Sirius, and the pointers of the Bear. It was very white and beautiful. In many parts of the world that night a pallid halo encircled it about. It was perceptibly larger; in the clear refractive sky of the tropics it seemed as if it were nearly a quarter the size of the moon. The frost was still on the ground in England, but the world was as brightly lit as if it were midsummer moonlight. One could see to read quite ordinary print by that cold, clear light, and ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... anything like the size and beauty of proportions that it attains in California, few trees here being more than ten or twelve inches in diameter and thirty feet high. It is, however, a very remarkable-looking object, standing there like some lost or runaway native of the tropics, naked and painted, beside that dark mossy ocean of northland conifers. Not even a palm tree would seem ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir

... suppose it to be in the glorious month of October, when the myriads of travellers by land and ocean are wending their way from the chilly north towards the sunny south, when the invalid seeks the tropics in pursuit of his health, and the speculative man of business returns with his "invoices," to his shop, or factory, where ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley

... in the warm shallows before his breathless words were ended. The calm baby-waves were easy to go through. It is warm work running for your life in the tropics, and the coolness of the water was delicious. They were up to their arm-pits now, and Jane was up to ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit

... skipper, aghast, looking in dismay from one to another of the men, "the man is insane! There is no land within five hundred miles. We are in the tropics, and a man couldn't live four days without food or water, and the sea is alive with sharks. Why, this ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow

... was now comfortably settled, he had of late years acquired a great dread of cold weather. As soon as winter set in his mind turned to the tropics, and whenever it was possible he went to Cuba or some other land where he was sure of plenty of heat and sunshine. The early part of 1906 found him at Havana, this time on a visit to the Hon. E. V. Morgan, who was then our minister to Cuba. From Havana he went to ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis

... have declined to move any such colony to any state without first obtaining the consent of its government, with an agreement on its part to receive and protect such emigrants in all the rights of freemen; and I have at the same time offered to the several states situated within the Tropics, or having colonies there, to negotiate with them, subject to the advice and consent of the Senate, to favor the voluntary emigration of persons of that class to their respective territories, upon ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... his discipline, the more highly an officer was regarded by his superiors, and if he occasionally hanged a few men, it rather advanced than retarded his promotion. A good many died on the voyage from England to Australia, partly in consequence of their scanty fare and the great heat of the tropics; but, according to tradition, a very large proportion of the mortality was the result of brutal treatment ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox

... Amsterdam we sailed south, touching at some islands to obtain vegetable food and replenish our water-casks. Worn out with hardship, our crew more than once showed signs of mutiny. Sometimes for weeks together we lay becalmed in the tropics, when the air hung like a pall of vapour from the sky, and the pitch boiled and blistered in the seams of the deck-planks. In other seasons we were driven by storm and stress. But at length, in spite of every obstacle, an unbroken coast stretched before us far as the eye could reach. For three days ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes

... would not listen to any of these plans. Leaving Alexandria and spending the winter on a lonely island in the tropics was an utterly incomprehensible idea. So she let the King have his way, and no doubt was glad to be relieved from the care of the children; for, even after her royal husband's exile from the city, she never visited her daughters. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... things. I only stop here for letters and shall go on at once to Wady Halfeh, as the weather is very cold still, and I shall be better able to enjoy the ruins when I return about a month hence, and shall certainly prefer the tropics now. I can't describe the kindness of the Copts. The men I met at a party in Cairo wrote to all their friends and relations to be civil to me. Wassef's attentions consisted first in lending me his superb donkey and accompanying me about all day. Next morning arrived a procession ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... Indians had all the varieties that are now known, such as dent, flint, sweet, early, late, pop, and other special sorts which are no longer grown. They had developed varieties that matured all the way from the tropics to the St. Lawrence River ...
— Agriculture in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Lyman Carrier

... climbing over mountains, they are sailing over seas, From the artics, from the tropics, from the dim antipodes; In the steamship, in the warship, under banners loved the best, They are laughing up the waters from the east and from the west: From the courts of Andalusia, from the castles of the Rhone, To the meeting of the brotherhood of nations they are blown; From ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')

... day of their departure from this temporary halting-place, however, a piece of surprising and wholly unexpected good fortune befell them. It was one of those especially glorious mornings which are never encountered anywhere but in the tropics. A very heavy dew had fallen during the night, revivifying the vegetation parched by the fervid heat of the previous day, and causing the foliage and flowers to glow for a brief period in their brightest and freshest tints, ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... or a steamer, but the rest in a light canoe. Tropical shrubbery and forests line the banks of the stream. New forms and modes of life impress the traveller from the temperate zone. The scenery of the tropics, so long the wonder of the imagination, now expands in wild luxuriance before the sight. When you have gone as far as you can along the winding river, waiting, perhaps, for hours, here and there upon ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... do such things; but, between ourselves, I fear the Doctor is just a sort of chap to escape fielding. There are others also I must keep an eye upon. Being captain of a scratch cricket team in the Tropics is no light task, I ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... derived the opinion from the Egyptian philosophers. The discovery rested upon the readily observed fact that on a given day the shadow of objects of a certain height was longer in high latitude than in low. Within the tropics, when the sun was vertical, there would be no shadow, while as far north as Athens it would be of considerable length. The conclusion that the earth was a sphere appears to have been the first large discovery made by our race. It was, indeed, one of the most important ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... be restrained to prevent violence to himself and others. Frequently suspicious when food and drink are offered him. At times noisy when he desires food and it is not given to him at once. Probable cause unknown. There is a vague history of head injury aboard ship in the tropics. Homicidal tendencies were present when ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... on the pates of one thousand transport camels as an experiment to prevent sickness and sunstroke. Although the brutes have the smallest modicum of brains, they are very liable to attacks of illness from heat-exhaustion. That they are born in the tropics confers no immunity. Strange to say, on the march south from Assouan, of a thousand and odd only one animal succumbed to sunstroke, and that was a camel that had no sun-bonnet. If anything could have added to the naturally lugubrious ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... Dear Me. "We always are the first. Mrs. Phoebe and I don't go as far south in winter as the other members of the family do. They go clear down into the Tropics, but we manage to pick up a pretty good living without going as far as that. So we get back here before the rest of them, and usually have begun housekeeping by the time they arrive. My cousin, Chebec the Least Flycatcher, should be here by this time. Haven't ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess

... and farther. For them, life enlarges until it embraces all lands, the arts, the sciences, the languages, and all history. Whether they pursue the sea into the mountains; to the steppes, plateaus, or pampas; to the palace or the hovel; to the tropics or the poles,—they find it evermore ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson

... by the climate. The moist air of the towns on the coast made the wood swell; the dry air of Central India, on the other hand, made it shrink, which was very injurious to pianos, but especially to violins and cellos. Pianos, with metal instead of wood inside, were made for the tropics; but they had a shrill tone and were equally affected by abrupt changes ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann

... to grease carriage-wheels with. It could be done, and I feel sure it would pay, as good butter would fetch almost any price in many places. Some Devonshire butter, which we brought with us from England, is as good now, after ten thousand miles in the tropics, as it was when first put on board; but a considerable proportion is very bad, and was evidently not in proper condition in ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey

... our English woods, but these, lovely though they are, convey no idea whatever of the luxuriant and bewildering beauty of a forest in the tropics. ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly

... complain if I remind you of the tropics this dreary winter night; so I'll bear out your fanciful conceit. Your face, a moment since, was like a burst ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... he will undoubtedly enjoy as our planet becomes more and more humanized, and man asserts his proper lordship over Nature. This matter of vegetable and animal food is dictated by climate. In the temperate zone they go well mixed. In the tropics man is naturally a Pythagorean, but he is not so strong, or so healthy, or moral, or intellectual, as the flesh-eating nations ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... Thwing[20] informs us that in ancient Germany woman was considered the moral equal of man, and that woman might traverse the vast stretches of country unprotected and unharmed. Woman never held such a position in the Oriental countries; neither has man, under the sub-tropics, a like self-command as shown by those ancient Gauls. So that, with the advent of Christianity and the moral revolution that followed, primitive methods, either inflicted on others or self-inflicted, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... but having developed in different geographical areas they each present certain peculiar racial traits adapting each to the environment in which it was developed. Now, the negro race is that part of mankind which was developed in the tropics. In all the negro's physical and mental make-up he shows complete adaptation to a tropical environment. The dark color of his skin, for example, was developed by natural selection to exclude the injurious actinic rays ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... dazzling Arctic hills participated in this play of colors, which did not fade, as in the South, but stayed, and stayed, as if God wished to compensate by this twilight glory for the loss of the day. Nothing in Italy, nothing in the Tropics, equals the magnificence of the Polar skies. The twilight gave place to a moonlight scarcely less brilliant. Our road was hardly broken, leading through deep snow, sometimes on the river, sometimes through close ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor

... dissections. Finally, the dean of the medical school confronted him, and their argument drove Stacpoole to St. Mary's Hospital, where he completed his medical training and qualified L. S. A. in 1891. At some point after this date, Stacpoole made several sea voyages into the tropics (at least once as a doctor aboard a cable-mending ship), collecting ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... mesembryanthemum, of which they must obtain an abundant harvest. The weather, a little before this time, had been very cold, but was now getting warmer every day. As we had been advancing northwards towards the Tropics, I was not surprised at this. The sky also was clear, generally speaking, but we had observed for the last two or three months that it was invariably more cloudy at the full of the moon than at any ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt

... ascendancy which he owed to his single-minded faith, to create legends and to work miracles in Asia and in Africa; for Richard Burton to gain an intimate knowledge of Islam in its holiest shrines; for Livingstone, Hannington, and other martyrs to the Faith to breathe their last in the tropics; for Franklin, dying, as Scott died nearly seventy years later, in the cause of Science, to hallow the polar regions for the Anglo-Saxon race. Darkest Africa was to remain impenetrable yet awhile. Only towards the end of the century, when Stanley's work was finished, could Rhodes ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... air is always charged with moisture; the consequence being a most equable temperature all the year round, and an extreme luxuriance of all vegetation. The climate is mild and comparatively healthy for a country situated within the tropics, and bathed by the waters of the Mexican Gulf. This mildness and healthiness may be attributed to the sea breezes that constantly pass over the peninsula, carrying the malaria and noxious gases that have not been absorbed by the forests, which cover the main ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon

... William the Conqueror. From that time to this, the varieties of this precious fruit have gone on increasing, and are now said to number upwards of 1,500. It is peculiar to the temperate zone, being found neither in Lapland, nor within the tropics. The best baking apples for early use are the Colvilles; the best for autumn are the rennets and pearmains; and the best for winter and spring are russets. The best table, or eating apples, are the Margarets for early use; the Kentish codlin and summer ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... away from the tropics to escape the intolerable heat, and yet it was quite warm. In fact the weather was not at all unpleasant, and, once they were started, all enjoyed the novelty of ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton

... who carried these numerals from their original habitat to various commercial centers, it is evident that we shall never know when they first made their inconspicuous entrance into Europe. Curious customs from the East and from the tropics,—concerning games, social peculiarities, oddities of dress, and the like,—are continually being related by sailors and traders in their resorts in New York, London, Hamburg, and Rotterdam to-day, customs that no scholar has yet described ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith

... that the range of Psychotria, which has not been observed beyond the tropics in other countries, extends in New South Wales as far south as the latitude of 35 degrees; at the western extremity of which it does ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King

... tropics vanish, and meseems that I, From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir, Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again. Far set in fields and woods, the town I see Spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke, Cragged, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort Beflagged. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the glory faded, leaving a transparent lilac sky over which the darkness closed with all the swiftness of the tropics. ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross

... as he soon discovered, was no more pretentious in appearance than the San Gorgonio. It also was a long, low frame building with some great cottonwood trees before it and a few palms with their infinite and haunting suggestions of the tropics. ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... said nothing about the magnificence of the scenery for a part of the way, where the road goes through a grand mountain pass, where all the vegetable glories of the tropics seem assembled, and one gets a new idea of what scenery can be; while beneath superb tree-ferns and untattered bananas, and palms, and bright-flowered lianas, and graceful trailers, and vermilion-colored orchids, and under sun-birds and humming birds and the most ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... to the events of the voyage—where we went and what we did—as I have given a sufficiently full account in my published Journal. The glories of the vegetation of the Tropics rise before my mind at the present time more vividly than anything else; though the sense of sublimity, which the great deserts of Patagonia and the forest-clad mountains of Tierra del Fuego excited ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin

... that plain and chide Like infants for themselves, less deep to thrill Than those rich mother-notes for them breathed round. Those voices are not magic of the will To strike love's wound, but of love's wound give sound, Conveying it; the yearnings, pains and dreams. They waft to the moist tropics after storm, When out of passion spent thick incense steams, And jewel-belted ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Nature, has a beauty as real. Our own region, be it arid with parching suns, or wet with frequent rains; be it always winter there, or always summer, is full of beauty. There is sunset on the desert, moonrise on mid-ocean, gorgeous coloring and crowding life in the tropics, dazzling starlight over ice-bound lands. Neither is one day so much better than another for beholding Nature. Yesterday we let the mild sunshine redden the blood beneath the skin; to-day we are drawn from our study of the perfect harmony of grays in the clouds and trees to watch, within ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder

... away from exchanges with Quebec, months from exchanges with any part of France or Switzerland. And what other foreign station could have been more thoroughly uncongenial, except, perhaps, a convict station in the tropics? Bad quarters were endurable in Paris or even in the provinces, where five minutes' walk would take one into something pleasanter. Bad fortifications would inspire less apprehension anywhere in ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood

... have come to regard as the most important products of the imperialist movement, must in their origin and early settlement be mainly attributed to other than commercial motives. But Europe has always depended for most of her luxuries upon the tropics: gold and ivory and gems, spices and sugar and fine woven stuffs, from a very early age found their way into Europe from India and the East, coming by slow and devious caravan routes to the shores of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Until the end of the ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir

... in North America, extend from the isthmus of Darien, along the coast of the Pacific Ocean, to the distance of more than two thousand two hundred miles. One half of them is situated under the burning sky of the tropics, and the other belongs to the temperate zone. Their whole interior forms an immense plain, elevated from six to eight thousand feet above the level of the adjacent seas. The chain of mountains which constitutes this vast plain, is a continuation of that which, under ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley

... until you are almost within the harbor that you get a fair view of the city, which lies embowered in palms and fine tamarind-trees, with the tall fronds of the banana peering above the low-roofed houses; and thus the tropics come after all somewhat suddenly upon you; for the land which you have skirted all the morning is by no means tropical in appearance, and the cocoa-nut groves of Waikiki will disappoint you on their first and too distant view, which gives them the insignificant appearance ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff

... "are at work here. They say that this queer look of the sea is occasioned by thousands of little insects that float on the surface and which are like the fireflies of the tropics. Don't you ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson

... regiments of colored troops, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, and no one will bear readier testimony than he to the splendid record they made. Of their patience under the manifold hardships of roughing it in the tropics, their helpfulness in the camp and their prowess in battle, their uncomplaining suffering when lying wounded and helpless. Stories enough are told to win for them fairly the real brotherhood with their white-skinned fellows which they crave. The most touching of ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson

... gigantic vegetation that thickly clothes the valleys and mountains even to the sea-shore. A breeze from the land wafted to us the most delicious perfumes; and crowds of beautiful insects, butterflies, and birds, such as only the tropics produce, hovered about us. Nature seems to have destined these lovely regions for the unmixed enjoyment of her creatures; but, alas! hard labour and a tyrant's whip have, to the unhappy Negro, transformed this Paradise into ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue

... summer, the naked trees which he left are exchanged for the most luxuriant and varied foliage, snow and frost for warmth and splendour; the scenery of the temperate zone for the profusion and magnificence of the tropics; fruit which he had never before seen, supplies for the table unknown to him; a bright sky, a glowing sun, hills covered with vines, a deep-blue sea, a picturesque and novel costume; all meet and delight the eye, just at the precise moment when to have been landed, even upon a barren ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat

... salt, that at the time when Phoebus gave the government of his resplendent chariot to his son Phaeton, the said Phaeton, unskilful in the art, and not knowing how to keep the ecliptic line betwixt the two tropics of the latitude of the sun's course, strayed out of his way, and came so near the earth that he dried up all the countries that were under it, burning a great part of the heavens which the philosophers call ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... as elsewhere in the tropics, is to be had very cheaply, but is uncertain, sluggish, and dishonest. A man for plantation work can be hired for almost nothing a day, but he will not earn even that unless he is driven at the point ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman

... injects a poison into the body which causes itching, swelling, and, in some susceptible persons, considerable inflammation of the skin. The bites of the mosquitoes living on the shores of the Arctic Ocean and in the tropics are the most virulent. The most important relation of mosquitoes to man was only recently discovered. They are probably the sole cause of malaria and yellow fever in the human being. The malarial parasite which lives in the blood of man, when he is ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various

... Seventh went down the Avenue, twelve hundred strong, to entrain for Texas. The bullets of the foe were not the only dangers. It was midsummer and these men were bound for the tropics and the cursed fields of sand where the tarantula, the rattlesnake, and the scorpion lurked under ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... would struggle to enter into their feelings in folding their wings properly on their backs. He would calculate, on chemical and arithmetical grounds, whether one might not hear the nocturnal growth of plants in the tropics. He was quite elated by the discovery, as ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald

... Within the tropics, lime juice and sugar were made to suffice as antiscorbutics; on reaching a higher latitude, sour krout and vinegar were substituted; the essence of malt was reserved for the passage to New Holland, and for future occasions. On consulting with the surgeon, ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders

... How awfully nice! Yes, thanks, I shall love it. Can I have it with soda? Thanks! Do you know, I think that's the very best drink in the tropics: sweet white wine, with soda? Yes—well!— Well—now, why are ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

... view, the most beautiful. Not, of course, the most luxuriant: for lush richness of foliage and 'breadth of tropic shade' (to quote a noble lord) one must go, as everyone knows, to the equatorial regions. But, contrary to the common opinion, the tropics, hoary shams, are not remarkable for the abundance or beauty of their flowers. Quite otherwise, indeed: an unrelieved green strikes the keynote of equatorial forests. This is my own experience, and ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... for everyday life, so that when he had got rid of everything which appertained to him as a policeman he was still fit to go into Indian society. The ordinary garments of an Indian are scanty, but the double set of clothing might be thought rather oppressive in the tropics. But the Indian likes to be warmly clad at any time of the year. Boys of the Mission will wear comforters and warm coats well into the hot season ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin

... highways. Nor does their significance stop here. Nature laid out the St Lawrence basin so that it not only {3} led into the heart of the continent, but connected with every other system from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Tropics to the Polar sea. Little by little the pioneers found out that they could paddle and portage the same canoe, by inland routes, many thousands of miles to all four points of the compass: eastward to ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood

... go off round the world, you will see the Tropics, you will see India, you will go into Chinese cities all hung with vermilion, you will climb mountains. Oh! men can do all the splendid things. Why do you come here to remind me of it? I have never been anywhere, anywhere at all. I never shall go anywhere. Never in my life have ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... no means necessary to visit the tropics or the conservatory for examples of these wonders. Our own Asa Gray, one of Darwin's instant proselytes, was prompt to demonstrate that the commonest of our native American species might afford revelations quite as astonishing as those ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson

... man very different from Sir Marmaduke. Sir Marmaduke, blessed and at the same time burdened as he was with a wife and eight daughters, and condemned as he had been to pass a large portion of his life within the tropics, had become at fifty what many people call quite a middle-aged man. That is to say, he was one from whom the effervescence and elasticity and salt of youth had altogether passed away. He was fat and slow, thinking much of his ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... phrase, for example, as this: Apa nama ini? ("What is the name of this?") will serve to supply the place of many vocabularies. The language, which from its soft sounding has been called "the Italian of the Tropics," is very simple, and seems to consist almost exclusively of nouns (i.e. substantives, adjectives, and pronouns). The verb "to be" and prepositions are often omitted, e.g. Pighi bawa ini Tuan X— "Go [and] take ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold

... parts of the world. Let us guess San Francisco at ten inches, I doubt if it is so much. Here in England put it down at thirty-two inches, though the west coast of Ireland is, I expect, nearer fifty inches. In the tropics, say, 130 inches, though I have been in one place where 300 fell. But there is a spot in Bengal which has the largest rainfall in the world, viz. 600 inches. Fancy, fifty feet of rain! The place is a hill-station, by name "Cherra Poonjee," and the country is so steep none ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money

... among them, and on that day, as from some distant sky, and telling them of the other family, the other nation which had sprung from them, and which was swarming yonder with increase of fruitfulness amid the fiery glow of the tropics. ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... or when burning grass over scores of square miles sends up smoke sufficiently high to be caught by the upper or north-west wind. These winds probably meet during the heavy rains: now in August they overlap each other. The probability arises from all continued rains within the tropics coming in the opposite direction from the prevailing wind of the year. Partial rains are usually from ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone

... the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and flagrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway. My hopes were all dead—struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... dog had been inoculated with the virus, and that the rat could inoculate other rats. We buried the man, and from that time on slept in our boots, with mittens on, and our heads covered, even in the hot weather of the tropics. It was no use. Mad rats appeared on deck, frenzied with pain, frothing at the mouth, fearless of all living things, a few at first and after dark, then in larger numbers night and day. We killed them as we could, ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson

... gravity, the temptation of the tropics, the indifference of the east, the freedom from eastern and puritanical restraints, were all on the side of a "republic of the western waters" and against that larger, continent-wide nationalism which now has its ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... her close and kissed the crown of her dark head gently. His strong, keen-featured face was very tender, for this small woman of the old tropics was all but all the world to him. "You're a little rip," he said, as he released her. "Make me a cigarette, 'Carnacion. I've ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various

... Australia. Some maps include New Guinea in the Malay group, though it is situated far to the eastward, and forms so independent a region, being larger than Great Britain. Lying in the very lap of the tropics, the climate is more uniformly hot and moist than in any other part of the globe, and teems with productions in the animal and vegetable kingdoms elsewhere unknown. The most precious spices, the richest fruits, the gaudiest feathered birds, are here seen at home; while ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... comfortably tired when he sat down by the beck at the head of the dale. He had been at Ashness for a week, and finding much to be done had occupied himself with characteristic energy. It was a relief to feel that the heat of the tropics had not relaxed his muscles as much as he had thought, and that the languidness he had sometimes fought against was vanishing before the bracing winds that swept his native hills. The ache in his arms ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss

... is misunderstood, so long as one seeks a "morbidness" in the constitution of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths, or even an innate "hell" in them—as almost all moralists have done hitherto. Does it not seem that there is a hatred of the virgin forest and of the tropics among moralists? And that the "tropical man" must be discredited at all costs, whether as disease and deterioration of mankind, or as his own hell and self-torture? And why? In favour of the "temperate zones"? In favour of the temperate men? The "moral"? The ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche



Words linked to "Tropics" :   tropic, climatic zone



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