What is "porous"

Usage examples of "porous".

This decomposing vegetable matter within and upon the porous alluvial material produces large quantities of carbonic acid, a gas which readily enters the rain water, and gives it a peculiar power of breaking up rock matter.

It has been the experience in many instances that when the humus soils of the prairie, porous and spongy in character, were first tilled, clover grew on them so shyly that it was difficult to get a good stand of the same until it had been sown for several seasons successively or at intervals.

Ojo Caliente was constantly being reshaped and rebuilt, in places spongy, in other places cracked and hard and brittle, the stuff of geyserite: a hydrous form of silica, a variety of opal deposited in gray and white concretelike masses, porous, filamentous, and scaly.

Its lithology is represented in our collection by porous, gray, granular trachyte, fine-grained, compact trachyte, and dark porphyroid trachyte.

A two-foot-long, bulky piece of maguey stalk had been carved so that the porous tissue served as a pillow, or a neckrest.

Whether Shangri-la, or Utopia, Paradisaical Eden or the Elysian Fields, whether The Red-path of Nominative Hyperbole or The Last and Most Porous Membrane of Cathexian Belief, there was a valley, a greensward, a hill or summit, a body of water or a field of grain whence it all came.

There may be instances, as on light, porous and leechy soils, when it might be proper to grow crimson clover as an aid in securing a stand of the medium red variety, or in growing a crop of peas for the summer market.

Beneath their feet was a porous matrix that seemed at least half-alive, that absorbed anything organic and dead and moved rubbish to collector outlets with a disturbing peristaltic motion.

It can be so woven as to be almost as porous as wool, and to retain that porousness even when saturated with perspiration.

Highest in general suitability, probably, are clay loams underlaid with a moderately porous clay subsoil.

It passed easily through porous stones or openings, until it hit a cap of unporous rock that prevented it from moving upward.

It was pump-fed through antihydrogen mass converters to make steam, each converter a porous bed of very high temperature refractory alloys that surrounded an annihilation chamber.

From a distance of a few feet he fired his revolver at the invisible door-lock, and the detonation nearly deafened him, while his bullet caromed harmlessly from a steel plate beneath that porous white substance.

If this opinion as to the cause of this greater imperviousness is correct, it will be readily seen how water, descending to the drains, by carrying these soluble and finer parts downward and distributing them more equally through the whole, should render the soil more porous.

Despite the punishing changes in temperature and the lack of rain, porous rock served as a fertile home for endolithic fungi and algae.