Hoplite

“ Humboldt mentions that he mistook a green augitic mineral, occurring in the volcanic rocks of the Cordillera of Quito, for olivine.
[9] The irregular and angular form of the vesicles is probably caused by the unequal yielding of a mass composed, in almost equal proportion, of solid crystals and of a viscid base. It certainly seems a general circumstance, as might have been expected, that in lava, which has possessed a high degree of fluidity, as well as an even-sized grain, the vesicles are internally smooth and spherical. ”

“ The southern counties of England, particularly Surrey and Kent, now yield their valuable produce of hops in this month. The common hop, humulus lupulus, is propagated either by nursery plants or by cuttings. These are set in hills, formed by digging holes in the spring, which are filled with fine mould, and the number of which varies from 800 to 1,000, or 1,200 per acre. One, two, or three plants are put in each hill; but, if hops are designed to be raised from cuttings, four or five of these, from three to four inches in length, are planted and covered one inch deep with fine mould. ”

“ At each step the stone under him sank as in a jelly and his foot whisked out in a spatter of mud; at each step her heart followed the stone in its sinking movement. He disappeared into the great ruined building. She waited, it seemed a long time. The padron of the launch began a muttered discourse upon the sin of delay with an ebbing tide. The sun rose higher, poured its accusing glare upon the squalor of the scene. The hombre in the banca pulled his wide-brimmed straw hat over his eyes, curled in the bow, and went to sleep. The mud began to crawl with little black crabs. "Cheer up!" ”

“ At the end of the first year it becomes necessary to put poles into the hills, round which the bines reared from plants are wound; at the expiration of the second year, full-sized poles, from 15 to 20 feet, are set, (though the hop-bines will run to the height of 50 feet,) in the proportion of two poles to each hill, and a similar number of hop-plants are fastened loosely round each pole, by means of withered rushes. Hops begin to flower about the latter end of June or the beginning of July. ”

“ One of them is seen at Hopton, [35] where along the side of the road a good section is exposed of coarse tumultuous agglomerate, having a dull green matrix, composed of green, brown, and black, minutely cellular, basic, devitrified, glassy lapilli, showing under the microscope abundant microlites and crystals or calcareous pseudomorphs of olivine, augite, and felspar, and much magnetite dust. Through this matrix are distributed blocks of slaggy basalt and dolerite. ”

“ HOPS are the dried flower-buds of a climbing British plant (Humulus lupulus, Fig. 81) , with a rough and angular stem, and leaves generally in three or five lobes or divisions, and serrated. Although hops grow wild, in great abundance, on hedges in several parts of the south of England, there is reason to suppose that their use was first made known from the Continent in the reign of Henry the Eighth.
A hop plantation requires the growth of some years before it is in perfection. The plants begin to push up their young stems about the month of April. ”

“ Here are several hop-plantations in and about this village; but for this once the prayers of the over-production men will be granted, and the devil of any hops there will be. The bines are scarcely got up the poles; the bines and the leaves are black, nearly, as soot; full as black as a sooty bag or dingy coal-sack, and covered with lice. It is a pity that these hop-planters could not have a parcel of Spaniards and Portuguese to louse their hops for them. Pretty devils to have liberty, when a favourite recreation of the Donna is to crack the lice in the head of the Don! ”

“ And what is stranger still, this same bone-earth bed crops out on the south side of the chalk at Farnham, and stretches along the foot of those downs, right into Kent, making the richest hop lands in England, through Surrey, and away to Tunbridge. So that it seems as if the bed lay under the chalk everywhere, if once we could get down to it.
But how does it make the hop lands so rich?
Because hops, like tobacco and vines, take more phosphorus out of the soil than any other plants which we grow in England ”

“ It is a convenient name for use in the field when doubt occurs as to the real nature of an igneous rock. Melaphyre is a name given to the very dark varieties of altered augitic lavas, rich in magnetite and chlorite.
5. Porphyrite (or quartzless porphyry) .—A basic variety of felstone-porphyry, consisting of a felspathic base with distinct crystals of felspar, with which there may be others of hornblende, mica, or augite. The colour is generally red or purple, and it weathers into red clay, in contrast to the highly acid or silicated felsites which weather into whitish sand. ”

“ Fred Scott, tenant of the farm, of which Lord Hothfield is owner, is kind enough to go over the hop-garden with us, and describe all the details. When the hops are ripe (i. e. when the seeds are hard) and ready to be gathered, the pickers swarm on the ground, and a man divides the "bine" at the bottom of the "pole" by means of a bill-hook—not cutting it too close for fear of bleeding—leaving the root to sprout next year, and then draws out the pole, to which is attached the long, creeping bine, trailing over at top. ”

“ It is remarkable that when a destructive blight is proceeding—generally in a wet and cold time—and a sudden change occurs to really hot dry weather, the hop plant often recovers its tone automatically, shakes off the disease, and the blight dies away, a fact which strengthens the assumption that in normal weather the plant can protect itself. Again, the blight is always most persistent under the shade of trees or tall hedges, or where the bine is over luxuriant, when owing to the exclusion of light and air the plant is unable to elaborate its natural safeguard. ”

“ The Hop is what botanists term a diœcious plant, because staminate flowers only are produced by one individual, and pistillate only by another, making cross-fertilization imperative. It is not the insects, however, that effect this crossing in the Hop, but the wind. The flowers are all small; the staminate produced from the axils of the leaves in long drooping panicles. They have no petals, but there are five sepals and five anthers attached to their bases. Each pistillate flower has a membranous sepal, an ovary, and two long tapering purple stigmas. ”

“ Only land “just so” will serve. A little too heavy, a little too light, or not being drained to perfection, will spell failure, and a hop-garden must be drained, with pipes or tiles, at least as well as a house.
The hop-grower’s year begins in March, when the “hills,” or stools, are uncovered and dressed by pruning. ”

“ The skeletons were not all of cattle, for at rare intervals lay the sand-worn frames of men.
On the morning of the second day the oppression increased with the wind and Red heaved a sigh of restlessness. The sand began to skip across the plain, in grains at first and hardly noticeable. Hopalong turned in his saddle and regarded the desert with apprehension. As he looked he saw that where grains had shifted handfuls were now moving. His mount evinced signs of uneasiness and was hard to control. A gust of wind, stronger than the others, pricked his face and grains of sand rolled down his neck. ”

“ Another well-known adage reminds us that:—
"The higher the hill the lower the grass."
And equally familiar is the following:—
"While the grass groweth the seely horse starveth."
In connection with hops, the proverb runs that "hops make or break;" and no hop-grower, writes,
Mr. Hazlitt, [3] "will have much difficulty in appreciating this proverbial dictum. An estate has been lost or won in the course of a single season; but the hop is an expensive plant to rear, and a bad year may spoil the entire crop." ”

“ For this reason the bark is shaved off the hop-poles, as it ought to be off all our timber trees, as soon as cut, especially the ash.—Little boys and girls shave hop-poles and assist in other coppice work very nicely. And it is pleasant work when the weather is dry overhead. The woods, bedded with leaves as they are, are clean and dry underfoot. They are warm too, even in the coldest weather. When the ground is frozen several inches deep in the open fields, it is scarcely frozen at all in a coppice where the underwood is a good plant, and where it is nearly high enough to cut. ”

“ The reason why so few specimens of the Pholades exhibit a worn shell may be thus explained: As the animal only bores the rock in sufficient degree to admit of its increased bulk of body, it only requires to bore occasionally, and there may be often an interval of many months, during which time nature [257] may have renewed the serrated edge and rough surface of the valves, and thus enabled the creature to renew its wondrous operations. ”

“ The latter plan is the best, because the animal, side-hoppled, is able to go but little faster than a walk, while the front hopple permits him, after a little practice, to gallop off at considerable speed. If the hopples are made of iron connected with chains, like handcuffs, with locks and keys, it will be impossible for the Indians, without files, to cut them; but the parts that come in contact with the legs should be covered with soft leather. ”

“ The Comma, so called from the C-mark on the under side of the hind wings, is fairly plentiful in Worcestershire and Herefordshire in the hop-districts, for the hop is its food plant; but it is curious that, with the abundance of hops in Kent, Sussex, and Hants, it is quite a rare insect in the south of England. The ragged edge of its hind wings is probably an arrangement to baffle birds in pursuit, offering more difficulty to securing a sure hold than is afforded by the even margin of the hind wings of most butterflies. ”

“ The recently named subspecies Proechimys cayennensis hoplomyoides Tate, 1939, shows an extraordinary development of the [Pg 325] aristiforms on the back and sides such as occurs in the genus Hoplomys. Actually the small bulla, wide basisphenoid and tooth structure add to the possibility of hoplomyoides being a true Hoplomys, and worn teeth might have been responsible for the difficulty which Tate had in allocating the form to the proper genus. However, the narrow braincase is more nearly like that of Proechimys than that of Hoplomys. ”

“ All the hoppers live on plant juice. The little ones are very greedy. The mother lays her tiny eggs in the plant. When the larvæ come out they fasten their mouths on the skin of the plant, and begin to suck sap.
[Pg 131]
This bite of the hopper often makes ugly brown holes, or ridges, come on plants. Often the plants become sickly, and die, from loss of sap. The hoppers are not good friends of the plants, as the bees, ants, wasps, and birds are. ”

“ But it is wise policy to use phosphates in some form or other every year in every hop garden. They are inexpensive, and without them neither dung, nitrate of soda, ammonia salts, nor organic manures can be expected to produce both a full vigorous growth of bine and well-matured, full-weighted hops. ”

“ His fortunes had fallen off sadly in the last few years of his life, but he worked away as steadily at his trade as in the old days, when, looking from his door, his eyes were met by the mast-like masses of a Kentish hop orchard. He had planted hopvines all about the fence of his little house in Jamestown. They clambered up the sides of the house, twined insinuatingly about the disdainful sunflowers, and throwing their tendrils abroad from the roots wound round and round the tall stalks of grass, weighing them down with the burden of their unsought embrace. ”

“ Still on to the north-east, and a step lower, is a kind of white land, neither chalk nor clay, neither fit for pasture nor for the plough, yet kindly for hops, which root deep in the freestone, and have their poles and wood for charcoal growing just at hand. The white soil produces the brightest hops. ”

“ It however appears certain that hops belong to our indigenous plants, as they grow everywhere wild in Germany, Switzerland, England, and Sweden, and even in countries387 into which the cultivation of them has never yet been introduced, and where it cannot be supposed that they accidentally became wild by being conveyed from hop-fields and gardens. ”

“ There were, too, very many gates, repairs to fences, hurdle-making, and odd jobs, to keep a man employed for months at a time. The building of three hop-kilns, with the necessary storerooms for green and dried hops, as the hop acreage increased, the preparation of hop-poles, and the erection of wire-work on larger poles, which gradually superseded the ordinary pole system, all demanded a great deal of regular work. ”

“ He fitted them close together, like the teeth of a comb; they were hard; they made a diminutive saw; and they bit steel. With these needles he began to saw his bars.
He sawed for a year, and had three bars nearly through; and then his cell was changed.
His patience, now, had become something fundamental within him, as granite is fundamental of the earth. He sat down and waited. They changed him again to another cell. And then to another. He spent nearly three years in different cells, and then, one morning, he found himself again in the cell where he had sawed. That night he tested the bars. ”