Desert
2 of the 7 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Desert. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an arid waste. This definition excludes the icy wastes of Greenland and the Antarctic country, as well as the frozen, lifeless tundras of the Arctic coast. A desert is not a rainless region, for there is no part of the earth's surface without rainfall; but it is a region deficient in rainfall. The Mojave Desert in Arizona has but two inches a year. The coast of Chile near the Pacific has been seven years without rain. The desert zones of the world are two, one in the southern and one in the northern hemisphere . They lie approximately twenty-five degrees north and south of the equator, in the two belts of wind that blow from the east. In the northern hemisphere the Pacific winds are robbed of their moisture by the mountains of eastern Asia. This, the greatest desert region in the world, begins with the desert of Gobi on the border of China. It stretches westward through Turkestan, Persia, Arabia, and the Sahara of North Africa--a vast arid waste. Part of this desert is the highest plateau land on the face of the globe, and part lies below the level of the sea. It is interrupted by fertile valleys, by local showers from local sources, and especially by the valley of the Nile; but all in all its extreme length is a third of the distance around the globe. It includes an area of between six and seven million square miles. Were it not for the Mediterranean, Southern Europe would be a desert. In the western continent the arid belt begins west of the Mississippi and culminates, if we may so speak of a depression, in the Death Valley of California. In the southern hemisphere , the desert belt is less marked. It includes the interior of Australia, the Kalahari region of South Africa, and the rainless coast of northern Chile. A large part of the world, formerly regarded as desert, has been reclaimed by irrigation and is now productive. There is no reason why deserts are deserts, save the want of water. They contain stupendous mountain walls and rocky ledges, as well as level plains. The rock elements are present that by disintegration and the decay of vegetable matter have produced the fertile soil of other regions. Possibly the winds that now blow may one day turn windmills that will raise water from the sea to convert millions of barren acres into rich fields and pastures. Leaving out of account semi-arid steppes and plains that produce at least scant pasturage, it is estimated that the deserts of the world cover 4,180,000 square miles of territory. Among the phenomena of the deserts are vast shifting drifts of sand, often deep enough to bury the highest steeple or the tallest forest. The whirlwinds and the changes of temperature from freezing at night to 150 deg. at noon are to be dreaded. See Sahara ; Gobi ; Oasis ; Camel ; Sirocco ; Irrigation ; Dune ; Palm ; Cactus
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a term generally used to designate an uninhabited place or solitude. In this sense it is equally applicable to the fertile plains watered by the Marañon, and to the wastes of Libya; but it is applied more particularly to the vast sandy and stony plains of Africa and Asia. The most striking feature of north Africa consists of its immense deserts. Of these the chief is the Sahara, or the Desert, so called by way of preeminence. In many parts the dreary waste of loose and hardened sand is broken by low hills of naked sandstone, or by tracts of arid clay, and occasionally it is enlivened by verdant isles, or oases, which serve as resting-places for the caravans that traverse these dismal regions. But for these oases, indeed, the Sahara would be wholly impassable. The great deserts of Africa are separated from those of Asia only by the valley of the River Nile and the Red Sea. Soon after quitting the Nile, the traveler by the route of Suez encounters sand, which is continued into the center of Arabia, where it forms the desert of Nejd, extending to the valley of the Euphrates. The sandy zone then inclines N., enters Persia, and forms the saline deserts of Adjemi, Kerman, and Mekran: it is turned N. E. by the valley of the Indus, passes through Cabul and Little Bokhara, till it joins the vast deserts of Gobi and Shamo, which occupy so large a portion of central Asia between the Altaian and Mustai chains, and reach to the confines of China. The sandy zone, thus traced throughout the breadth of the ancient continent from western Africa to 120° E. longitude, has been computed to cover an area of 6,500,000 square miles; miles; but the Asiatic portion of this tract includes many chains of mountains, and fertile valleys. Except the Nile, the Euphrates, the Indus, and the Oxus, there are no large rivers in a region which embraces almost a fourth part of both Africa and Asia. This portion of central Asia forms a series of elevated plains 6,000 miles in length from E. to W. In the Old Testament the term desert bears a wholly different interpretation from that usually attached to it in other writings.