Rot

“ In a dry state they are very hollow, and when cut I have found them conductors of rain into the midst of the younger roots and dormant crowns, causing them to rot, and when the remaining part of the stalk has come away from rottenness too, it has been seen that a cavity of corruption had formed where it joined. ”

“ This course will not, however, suit every case, for when the rot has spread in many directions, the best and cheapest course is to consult some professional man, well versed in the peculiarities of dry rot, before determining upon any remedy, for we have shown in the course of this work that the disease may arise from various causes; and it is not a difficult matter to select the wrong remedy, and thus increase the disease. ”

“ ON THE PRESERVATION OF WOODEN BRIDGES, JETTIES, PILES, HARBOUR WORKS, ETC., FROM THE RAVAGES OF THE TEREDO NAVALIS AND OTHER SEA-WORMS.
“Perforated sore
And drilled in holes, the solid oak is found
By worms voracious, eaten through and through.”
Sir John Barrow.
As the destruction of timber by fungi has been called the vegetable rot, it may not be inappropriate to term the destruction of wood by various worms and insects, the animal rot.
We have four natural enemies to deal with: 1st, the dry rot, that attacks our houses, &c. ”

“ Cause, Cure, and Prevention.—Dry rot is a special form of decay in timber, caused by the growth of a fungus, Merulius ladhrymans, which spreads over the surface as a close network of threads, white, yellow, or brown, and causes the inside to perish and crumble. ”

“ A faintness seizes all animals; both in the woods, in the fields, and in the roads, loathsome carcases lie strewed. The air is corrupted with the smell of them. I am relating strange events. The dogs, and the ravenous birds, and the hoary wolves, touch them not; falling away, they rot, and, by their exhalations, produce baneful effects, and spread the contagion far and wide. With more dreadful destruction the pestilence reaches the wretched husbandmen, and riots within the walls of the extensive city. ”

“ And you admit that every thing has a good and also an evil; as ophthalmia is the evil of the eyes and disease of the whole body; as mildew is of corn, and rot of timber, or rust of copper and iron: in everything, or in almost everything, there is an inherent evil and disease? ”

“ A peculiar odour of decay, the odour of sour [88] soil in early spring when the grip of the ice is relaxed and the buried abominations of winter steal up into the sun, rose from the town and pursued us—a smell like rotten fungi in old crypts. Sounds like the flapping of garments on a clothesline stole through the steady bass roar of the motor, and to my heavy eyes, tortured with staring into the yellow blur ahead, a vague shape seemed to float beside the car, a shape which was strangely human; erect, but rigid, flying along like a dry leaf upright in a gale. ”

“ The cause of which is that the rocks there are pure, not gnawed away and corrupted like ours by rot and brine, through the moistures which drain together here, bringing disease and deformity to rocks and earth as well as to living things. ”

“ DRY ROT, a disease in timber, apparently infectious, which occasions the destruction of its fibres, and reduces it eventually to a mass of dry dust. It is produced most readily in a warm, moist, stagnant atmosphere, while common or wet rot is the result of the exposure of wood to repeated changes of climatic conditions. ”

“ Now, contemplate the picture civilized man presents, and see him in direct antagonism with nature! The plants of nature’s sowing are rudely torn up with the plough and destroyed, the fields are forced to yield crops by which he lives, and what he takes from the soil must, to use the language of chemists, “be restored to it:” the excreta of man and animals, the refuse of dwellings, the deteriorated and poisoned liquids, the products of manufactories, are collected into heaps, to rot on the surface of the soil, before being dug into it ”

“ When they have exhausted their period in such situations as have been assigned them, they pass into a state of decay, and become changed into a very fine mould, which, in the active spontaneity of nature, immediately begins to produce other species, which in their turn become food for various mosses, and also rot. ”

“ Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell. ”

“ Here are dust-heaps in which pigs with long snouts are ever routing—here are lean curs, wrangling with each other for leaner bones—here are ditches and puddles, and heaps of oyster-shells, and broken crockery, and cabbage-stalks, and fragments of hats and shoes. Here are torn notices on the walls offering rewards for the apprehension of thieves and murderers, painfully suggestive of dark deeds. A little further are lumber-yards and wharfs, and mud and sawdust, and dealers in old nails and rags and bones, and rotten posts and rails, and attempts at grass. ”

“ A ruined man fell from her hands like a ripe fruit, to rot on the ground by himself. ”

“ Necrosis of the tissues is likely to set in: the flesh corrupts, falls from the bone sometimes in tatters; and the colors of its putrefaction simulate the hues of vegetable decay,—the ghastly grays and pinks and yellows of trunks rotting down into the dark soil which gave them birth. The human victim moulders as the trees moulder,—crumbles and dissolves as crumbles the substance of the dead palms and balatas: the Death-of-the-Woods is upon him. ”

“ We climbed over a dust-heap, where vegetables and dead bodies of dogs and cats were rotting, where flies and fleas were regaling themselves, and half-naked, wretched-looking children were playing and munching melon parings. ”

“ But when the juices of trees have no means of escape, they clot and rot in them, making the trees hollow and good for nothing. ”

“ Wheresoever it lie, under earth or over earth, his body will always rot. ”

“ Even old wood has a smell different from new wood; you may have to have a keen nose to detect these things on the earth plane.
Old rags, he says (sotto voce.—Yes, all right, Feda will go back) , cloth decaying and going rotten. Different kinds of cloth give off different smells—rotting linen smells different to rotting wool. You can understand how all this interests me. Apparently, as far as I can gather, the rotting wool appears to be used for making things like tweeds on our side. But I know I am jumping, I'm guessing at it. ”

“ They are forced by necessity to herd with loathsome wretches to procure a little morbid warmth, tainted perhaps with noxious effluvia, on a miserable uncovered pallet, where they lie crowded together, ghastly with hunger, stupified with poisonous spirits, rotting with loathsome disease, and nauseous with accumulated filth. ”

“ Rottenness of all kinds is soon carried from the face of the land by the wise arrangements of Nature for preserving the world from plagues and diseases, which the decaying and unconsumed bodies of animals and vegetables would otherwise engender. ”

“ It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the ground it most polluted, were a rotten red. It was taken to pieces, like a toy-puzzle for a young Devil, and was put together again when the occasion wanted it. ”

“ We may consider all putrefaction and decay of suitable substances, the refuse of our households, the waste water with which we irrigate and manure the soil, as affording food-fluids for the lower organisms. Then we might think—and the like has been thought and said—that dirt is not dangerous to health if it is only properly concentrated. It has been asserted that there is much more dirt in the country and in the villages where citizens go—as they say—to get the air, than in the city. ”

“ When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us. ”

“ In the meantime the groans changed into the protracted, thunderous roar by which all living creatures are struck with terror, and the nerves of people, who do not know what fear is, shake, just as the window-panes rattle from distant cannonading. ”

“ In the quiet and secluded angles and nooks gather the lint and dust of the whole apartment. In the corners and recesses of a hospital-ward gather the miasm and the pestilence. In the unused portions of machinery do we find the rust and tarnish, and the mildew blasts the quiet and the still parts of all Nature. ”

“ This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. ”

“ The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave to thee until he have consumed thee from off the land.—The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the drought, and with blasting, and with mildew, and they shall pursue thee until thou perish.—The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee until thou be destroyed. ”

“ And over and above all else there was bestial fever, a lust for death which made this multitude delirious, an eagerness to see life flow forth fresh and ruddy beneath the knife, so that as it coursed over the soil they might dip their feet in it. ”

“ Ever mindful what it cost;
Ever grateful for the prize,
Let its altar reach the skies.
Firm, united, let us be,
Rallying round our Liberty;
As a band of brothers joined,
Peace and safety we shall find.
Immortal patriots! rise once more:
Defend your rights, defend your shore:
Let no rude foe, with impious hand,
Let no rude foe, with impious hand,
Invade the shrine where sacred lies
Of toil and blood the well-earned prize.
While offering peace sincere and just,
In Heaven we place a manly trust,
That truth and justice will prevail,
And every scheme of bondage fail. ”

“ Which soon the wasting scythe shall sweep away;
As smiles the flow'ret in the verdant field,
Which soon before the passing blast shall yield;
So flourish we upon our beds of clay,
So grow a while, so droop, and so decay.
Dust turns to dust, with ashes, ashes blend,
But upward, upward let the soul ascend ”

“ Did no wood-forester apprise you that a dead bough with its dead root left sticking there is extraneous, poisonous; is as a dead iron spike, some horrid rusty ploughshare driven into the living substance;—nay is far worse ”

“ The din grows greater from the universe:
There rises up the smell of fire and iron,—
Not dreary like the smell of burnt-out things,
But like the smell of some gigantic forge—
Cheerful, of good intent, and full of life.
Now all the joyous cries of sea and earth,
The universal harmonies of birth,
Rise up to haunt the slumber of their God.
THE END
Round the great ruins crawl those things of slime
Green ruins lichenous and scarred by moss—
An evil lichen that proclaims world doom,
Like blood dried brown upon a dead man's face. ”

“ He may poison the sweet, pure rivers of his native soil, till their crystal freshness is corrupted into deathful and putrescent slime. He may herd together, as we suffer our poor to do, in filthy tenements which shall breed every species of disease and vice. ”

“ There must be something radically wrong where fresh meat becomes tainted in a single night. [110]
What shall we say of the poisoning of our wells [62] and water-supplies by too adjacent burial-grounds? Professor Brande has instanced a case of a well near a churchyard, the water of which had derived not only odour, but colour, from the soil, and gave it as his opinion that the water in all superficial springs near burial-grounds is simply filtered through accumulated decomposition. ”

“ To this I answer, that filth and dirt are two distinct things. The streets of a city may be very dirty, that is, covered with mud composed of inoffensive clay, sand, or lime, and, at the same time, be perfectly free from those filthy vegetable and animal matters which, by putrefaction, contaminate the air. ”

“ The hot blood of man, the earth itself was infected by a kind of epidemic, so that weeds never seen before sprang up and ruined the richest crops, and the strongest oaks of the forest withered beneath the assault of grey blight and funguses, and the good black soil of the fruitful arable land was covered with a hideous green mould. ”

“ The trouble was nothing in the world but dirt and rats. The rats lived in the dirt; and the minute, living plant that makes the plague, lived in the blood of the rats. From them it got into the blood of human beings. But so long as a city kept clean and free from rats, it never had the plague. ”

“ Doubtless it is to this earthward kinship and compliance with Nature in the savage that we are to ascribe his utter unconsciousness of and indifference to what we call offensive and revolting to the senses, — foul odors, uncleanliness, filth, vermin, parasites, etc. Regarding himself as akin to the elements, the soil, and the creatures around him, the savage did not recognize what we call dirt. Dirt has been well defined as valuable matter out of place. ”