these are water and fire . may be called male, while the passive elements . earth and air . represent the female principle.... Only two elements, water and earth, are visible, and earth is called the hiding-place of fire, water the abode of air. In these two elements we have the broad law of limitation which divides the male from the female. The first matter of minerals is a kind of viscous water, mingled with pure and impure earth. Of this viscous water and fusible earth, or sulphur, is composed that which is called quicksilver, the first matter of the metals.英文原著 · 《Bygone Beliefs》
And far down by the water-fronts are the slum wastes where the sewers of politics and business and social life pour forth their fetid filth. Here the journals of yellow shade grub and fatten. In this ooze and slime puddle the hordes of sewer rats, scavengers of the world's garbage, from whose collected stores the editor selects his daily mess for the delectation of the great unwashed, whether of the classes or of the masses, and from which he grabs in large handfuls that viscous mud that sticks and stings where it sticks.英文原著 · 《The Doctor》
There were many caverns and winding passages leading to a kind of chamber, neatly smoothed and rounded, and about the size of a moderate snuff-box. Within this secret nursery were deposited near an hundred eggs of a dirty yellow colour, and enveloped in a tough skin, but too lately excluded to contain any rudiments of young, being full of a viscous substance. The eggs lay but shallow, and within the influence of the sun, just under a little heap of fresh- moved mould, like that which is raised by ants.英文原著 · 《The Natural History of Selborne》
By now the rain has ceased, and such air as filters through the window seems increasedly stifling. Momentarily the hush grows deeper, until the breast feels filled with a sense of oppression, and the face and eyes as though they were glued over with a web. Even when I step into the yard I find the place to be like a cellar on a summer's day, when the very ice has melted in the dark retreat, and the latter's black cavity is charged with hot, viscous humidity.英文原著 · 《Through Russia》