Word: graze
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Having established snails in cultural perspective, Cadart goes into more detail about their anatomy and their slippery lives. As mollusks risen from the sea and hardly adapted to the land, they are dependent on humidity. They prefer to travel and graze only when light rain is falling or when the ground is wet with dew. The rest of the time they sleep safely shut in their shells, sometimes sealed into them with a membrane of dried mucus. Their senses of touch and smell are acute, but the little eyes on the ends of their tentacles are not efficient; they must...
...than harmful to man's operations. He foresees a great industry built on the fermentation of hydrocarbons by specially trained bacteria. Some of them will turn petroleum or natural gas into valuable organic compounds too complicated to be produced by man's simple chemical processes. Others will graze on hydrocarbons like microscopic cattle. Their harvested bodies, fat and nutritious, will serve as food for man and his larger cattle...
...country of majestic mountain scenery and miserable human squalor, of tremendous natural resources and examples of their wretched neglect and abuse. To the west, condors soar over abandoned Spanish silver mines near icy, blue Titicaca, highest navigable lake in the world; in the remote east, ranchers graze their gaunt herds in a jungle reputed to be floating on oil. The Bolivian land itself is split in two-the barren, windswept uplands, fenced about by the snowy Andes; and the vast, green east, an unpopulated, trackless region of plains and jungle whose rich soil could easily feed all Bolivia...
...they had a life of their own. But lice have been bird parasites as long as birds have been birds. They probably sucked the blood of reptiles from which birds developed. When reptiles' scales turned into birds' feathers, the lice learned to graze and flourish on the new crop...
...appears," he would say, "that furze is the best type of pasture to grow on artificial meadows. Everyone says that it is better to put sheep out to graze than to keep them in sheepfolds." Focused on such a matter, he would consider nothing else "for ten or twelve hours," studying it in encyclopedias, questioning visitors about it. turning it over & over in his mind. Most of his chosen topics are not likely to interest the general reader very much, but they provide one superb demonstration after another of the Napoleonic method at work...