The sunflower is very abundant near the watercourses the seeds of this plant are now rip and the natives collect them in considerable quantities and reduce them to meal by pounding and rubing them between smooth stones.
— from The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 by William Clark

We didn't search in vain, and near noontime we had an ample supply of bananas.
— from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World by Jules Verne

Virginia—a state now under fierce assault for this alleged crime—cast in 1888 seventy-five per cent of her vote; Massachusetts, the State in which I speak, sixty per cent of her vote. Was it suppression in Virginia and natural causes in Massachusetts?
— from The Art of Public Speaking by J. Berg (Joseph Berg) Esenwein

For it might easily be thought that, in spite of all the uniformity of natural things according to the universal laws, without which we should not have the form of an empirical cognition in general, the specific variety of the empirical laws of nature including their effects might yet be so great, that it would be impossible for our Understanding, to detect in nature a comprehensible order; to divide its products into genera and species, so as to use the principles which explain and make intelligible one for the explanation and comprehension of another; or out of such confused material (strictly we should say, so infinitely various and not to be measured by our faculty of comprehension) to make a connected experience.
— from Kant's Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant

" CHAPTER 17 A FOUR WINDS WINTER Winter set in vigorously after New Year's.
— from Anne's House of Dreams by L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery

The church door was only about twenty paces from the stairs, but the churches were no longer sanctuaries in Venice; and no one ever took refuge in them.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

When a long time was spent in vain, And no one could the will explain, She left the counsellors unfeed, And thus of her own self decreed: The minstrels, trinkets, plate, and dress, She gave the Lady to possess.
— from The Fables of Phædrus Literally translated into English prose with notes by Phaedrus

As the troops advanced north from Savannah, the destruction of the railroads in South Carolina and the southern part of North Carolina, further cut off their resources and left the armies still in Virginia and North Carolina dependent for supplies upon a very small area of country, already very much exhausted of food and forage.
— from Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete by Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson) Grant

He sought her through the world, but sought in vain; And no where finding, rather feared her slain.
— from The Works of John Dryden, Now First Collected in Eighteen Volumes; Vol. 12 (of 18) by John Dryden

If a man who steals a horse, and is condemned to three years' imprisonment, be compelled to undergo the whole sentence, without reference to his conduct under confinement, this surely is vengeance, and not, what it assumes to be, a punishment proportioned to the necessity of the case.
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 60, No. 374, December, 1846 by Various

He was by birth a native of Ireland, but his whole life, except his early boyhood, had been spent in Virginia, and no son "to the manner born" was more enthusiastic in pushing forward all interests that enured to its welfare.
— from History of Randolph-Macon College, Virginia The Oldest Incorporated Methodist College in America by Richard Irby

We don't kill our mother, anyway as long as she is vigorous and not too old, for it is very economical to have a few carefully selected, tested mothers produce all the children.
— from The Unpopular Review Vol. I January-June 1914 by Various