To the culture of the world, an Archimedes, a Newton is indispensable; so she guards them by a certain aridity.

The puritan reaction of the Roman Atticists in the direction of the simplicity of Lysias defeated itself in over emphasis and ended in establishing coldness and aridity as literary ideals.

Extreme aridity and extreme altitude have the same dwarfing effect, so that we find in the high Sierras and in Death Valley related species in miniature that reach a comely growth in mean temperatures.

Now and then one gets a hint of some small, brown creature, rat or mouse kind, that slips secretly among the rocks; no others adapt themselves to desertness of aridity or altitude so readily as these ground inhabiting, graminivorous species.

Oushda is a species of oasis of the Desert of Angad, and the aridity of the surrounding country makes these gardens appear delicious, melons, olives, and figs being produced in abundance.

The extreme aridity of the countrythe absence of water in consequence of the sandy nature of the soil, which renders it impossible that watercourses should existthe dense and almost impassable nature of the thickets of acacia and melaleuca of small growth, and the heat of the climateall tend to prove the fallacy of attempting to explore this part of the colony, excepting during the wettest of the winter months.

The author of the Orlando Innamorato could hardly write, even upon the driest matters of government, with the aridity of a common clerk.

Dryness N. dryness &c adj.; siccity^, aridity, drought, ebb tide, low water.

The protracted drought of the summer, acting upon the aridity of the forests, had rendered them more than naturally combustible; and this, facilitating both the dispersion and the progress of the fires that appeared in the early part of the season, produced an unusual warmth.

Though the degree of aridity was much less than that afterwards experienced in Australia by the explorers of its interior, nevertheless conditions were sufficiently dry to compel the leader to exercise great forethought, and Cunningham determined to pursue a more easterly course, keeping nearer the crest of the range, where he was more likely to find grass and water.

The exploration of the centre of the continent was long retarded by the difficult nature of the country by its aridity, its few continuously-watered rivers, and the supposed horse-shoe shape of Lake Torrens, which thrust its vast shallow morass across the path of the daring explorers making north.

He tried to find an avenue of escape in every direction, until convinced of the futility of the attempt; sometimes encouraged and lured on by the shallow pools in some fragmentary creek, at others, seeing nothing before him but hopeless aridity.

Gregory at once seized the opportunity thus afforded of examining the upper reaches of this river, from which former explorers had been driven back by the aridity of the country.

By this time the gold rush to the southern portion of Western Australia had set in strong, and the country that had so long repelled the pastoral pioneer by its aridity was now overrun with prospectors, their camps supplied with water by condensers at the salt lakes and pools.

After Settat the road runs on for miles across the waste to the gorge of the Oued Ouem, and beyond the river it climbs to another plain so desperate in its calcined aridity that the prickly scrub of the wilderness we had left seemed like the vegetation of an oasis.

This abstraction and aridity, this ascetic devotion of his genius to pure ideal form, this almost mathematical conception of beauty, may be ascribed, I think, to the same psychological qualities which determined the dreary conditions of his home-life.

Nevertheless, with all its aridity, rigidity, and almost repulsive hardness of colour, the Doni Madonna ranks among the great pictures of the world.

Marcantonio seems to have felt and resented the aridity of composition, the isolation of plastic form, the tyranny of anatomical science, which even the most sympathetic of us feel in Michelangelo.

Dry, chaffy, or prickly plants, corresponding in their nature to the aridity and asperity of the land, were peculiarly at home upon the undulating stoniness.

It was classic without being formal, but no description can give an idea of the charm of it in contrast with the general aridity of the Cretan landscape.

Thus some explanations are unavoidably reciprocal or circular, as hind, the female of the stag; stag, the male of the hind: sometimes easier words are changed into harder, as burial into sepulture, or interment, drier into desiccative, dryness into siccity or aridity, fit into paroxysm; for the easiest word, whatever it be, can never be translated into one more easy.

There is something so unnatural in the conjunction of a scanty vegetation with a soil cursed with hopeless aridity, that the gardens and few green spots, occurring in the neighbourhood of Alexandria, detract from, instead of embellishing, the scene.

A short green-looking grass was thinly sprinkled over the country, imparting a freshness to it, which, in contrast with the aridity that had of late surrounded us, was quite delightful.

ORANGE RIVER or GARIEP, chief river of South Africa, rises in the eastern highlands of Basutoland, and flows 100 m. westward to the Atlantic, receiving the Vaal and the Caledon as tributaries, and having Cape Colony on the S. bank and the Orange Free State, Griqualand West, Bechuanaland, and German Namaqualand on the N.; a bar at the mouth and the aridity of its lower course make it unfit for navigation.

They were overcome by an impression of bleak truth, of aridity, of growing nothingness, at the thought that they had so many times grasped, rejected, and vainly grasped again their frail carnal ideal.