Gradations from Sterile to Fertile Fronds]

I guess that the comments of the latter on the Prophets will be found almost sterile in these tiger-lilies and brimstone flowers of polemic rhetoric, compared with the controversy of the former with our Henry VIII., his replies to the Pope's Bulls, and the like.

Such were the men who fought the battles of civil liberty under Cromwell and colonized the most sterile of all American lands, making the dreary wilderness to blossom with roses, and sending out the shoots of their civilization to conserve more fruitful and favored sections of the great continent which God gave them, to try new experiments in liberty and education.

Seed should be examined to ascertain that it is not sterile by age, that it is clean, particularly that it is not adulterated with other varieties of similar appearances: for age has such effect upon seed as in some respects to change its very nature, thus it is said that rape will grow from old cabbage seed, and vice versa.[90]

Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me the instinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund.

There are usually more sterile than fertile blades, especially in dense shade.

So in a nursery it is the custom to cut it back at first so that the vine may grow with a stronger stem and may have greater strength to produce fruitful tendrils: for a stem which grows slender like a rush is sterile through weakness and cannot throw out tendrils.

I saw the forty years of probable existence in front of me flat and sterile as the sea itself.

Why did he not clear and fertilize those far-spreading lands, those woods, those heaths, those stretches of stony ground which were left sterile around him?

"Those plough lands which are cultivated when they are miry are rendered useless for an entire yearthey can be neither seeded nor harrowed nor hoedbut those which are worked when they are in the state which has been described as varia, remain sterile for three years on end.