Popular cyclopaedia of natural science (by W.B. Carpenter).

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Página 451 - ... a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.
Página 490 - ... nourishment, once or twice a year, by digging round the roots. A spot of a little more than a thousand square feet will contain from thirty to forty banana plants. A cluster of bananas, produced on a single plant, often contains from one hundred and sixty to one hundred and eighty fruits, and weighs from seventy to eighty pounds. But reckoning the weight of a cluster only at forty pounds, such a plantation would produce more than four thousand pounds of nutritive...
Página 491 - ... fertility. Necessity awakens industry, and industry calls forth the intellectual powers of the human race. When these are developed, man does not sit in a cabin, gathering the fruits of his little patch of bananas, asking no greater luxuries, and proposing no higher ends of life than to eat and to sleep. He subdues to his use all the treasures of the earth by his labour and his skill ; — and he carries his industry forward to its utmost limits, by the consideration that he has active duties...
Página 366 - THE history of commerce does not, perhaps, present a parallel to the circumstances which have attended the introduction of tea into Great Britain.
Página 376 - In Greece too, as well as Italy, the shoots of the vines are either trained upon trees, or supported, so as to display all their luxuriance upon a series of props. This was the custom of the ancient vine-growers ; and their descendants have preserved it in all its picturesque originality.
Página 491 - The facility with which the banana can be cultivated has doubtless contributed to arrest the progress of improvement in tropical regions. In the new continent civilization first commenced on the mountains, in a soil of inferior fertility. Necessity awakens industry, and industry calls forth the intellectual powers of the human race. When these are developed, man does not sit in a cabin, gathering the fruits of his little patch of bananas...
Página 494 - A few only are found within the tropics, and the order is generally far from abundant in South America, if compared with the numbers that exist at the Cape.
Página 451 - Surely smoke becomes a kitchen, far better than a " dining chamber, and yet it makes a kitchen oftentimes in " the inward parts of men ; soiling and infecting them with an " unctuous and oily kind of soot, as hath been found in some " great tobacco-takers, that after their death were opened.
Página 367 - In 1664 the East India Company bought two pounds two ounces of tea as a present to his Majesty. In 1667 they issued the first order to import tea, directed to their agent at Bantam, to the effect that he would send home one hundred pounds of the best tea he could get.
Página 486 - It often happens that those productions of nature which charm the eye with their beauty, and delight the senses with their perfume, have the least relation to the wants of mankind, while the most powerful virtues, or most deadly poisons, are hidden beneath a mean and insignificant exterior; thus orchids, beyond their beauty, can scarcely be said to be of known utility, with a few exceptions.

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