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More "Focus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... To offer the help and happiness of club life at a low rate by establishing clubs in many centres throughout the country as the focus of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... grown from a casual, though bloody, event in California labor history into such a focus for discussion and analysis of the State's great migratory labor-problem that the incident can well be said to begin, for the commonwealth, a new ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... and veins with blood in them, and yet the head lost nothing by that. There was then a France, Monsieur. The province had an existence, subordinate doubtless, but real, active, and independent. Each government, each office, each parliamentary centre was a living intellectual focus. The great provincial institutions and local liberties exercised the intellect on all sides, tempered the character, and developed men. And now note well, Durocher! If France had been centralized formerly as to-day, your dear Revolution ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... paid from local funds. None of these can be said to be matters of local, as distinguished from national importance. It would not be a matter personally indifferent to the rest of the country if any part of it became a nest of robbers or a focus of demoralization, owing to the maladministration of its police; or if, through the bad regulations of its jail, the punishment which the courts of justice intended to inflict on the criminals confined therein (who might have come from, or committed their offenses in, any other district) ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... literature is unifying; it joins the candle and the star, and by the magic of an image shows that the beauty of the greater is in the less. And, not content with the disclosure of beauty and the bringing together of all things whatever within its focus, it enforces a moral wisdom by the tracing everywhere of cause and effect. It consoles doubly—by the revelation of unsuspected loveliness, and by the proof that our lot is the common lot. It is the supreme cry of the discoverer, ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... closed. Jim crouched over the unconscious old man. He was in a state of utter perplexity. He could not quite gather what Parrish had been trying to tell him, and it was with difficulty that he could focus his mind upon the situation, so great had been the shock of finding his ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... of the new railroad line. "What you are looking at has been called a part of the Great American Desert—the most forbidding part, in the stories of the early explorers. Notwithstanding, there will come a time when you can focus your glass here on this mountain and look out over what the promoters will then be advertising as a 'peopled paradise,' and these 'logs of wood in a row, with two strands of iron to fasten them together' will bring it ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... the person he had seen. Jane suggested dragging the canal, but was silenced by an indignant "sh-sh-sh," accompanied by apprehensive and sympathetic glances at the bereaved parents. She was displaced from the focus of attention by the appearance of the two policemen who had been sent to the chalet. Smilash was between them, apparently a prisoner. At a distance, he seemed to have suffered some frightful injury to his head, but when he was ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... Universe.—Passing through the Tower of Jewels into the great court where themes become universal under the circle of stars above the surrounding colonnade, we come to the Fountains of the Rising and the Setting Sun, by A. A. Weinmann, one at either focus of the elliptical sunken garden. In the East, the Sun, in the strength of the morning, his wings spread for flight, is springing upward from the top of the tall column rising out of the fountain. Walk toward him from the west and you get the effect ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... I'll look.—Thanks. Your eyes require a different focus from mine. Yes. What I expected," said the professor, handing back the glass. "Have another look at your sand heap; it will repay observation; it is one of the milestones of the caravan roads, only ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... glass in focus more scales had fallen from my eyes; and now I knew why I had seen so much of Raffles these last few weeks, and why he had always come between seven and eight o'clock in the evening, and waited at ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... was composed of fresh leaves of the Moreton Bay ash, with the petioles towards the centre, forming a complex green star. No doubt the arrangement of the leaves was accidental, but the white dumpy egg as a pearl-like focus completed a quaint device. Another egg reposed carelessly at the base of a vigorous plant of DENDOBRIUM UNDULATUM, the old-gold plumes of ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... tell now," he said, as he raised the objective glass and pointed it at the cloud of dust, while he squinted through the eye-piece. A moment later, after he had made a better adjustment of the focus, he cried: "It's sheep all right! A big ...
— The Boy Ranchers at Spur Creek - or Fighting the Sheep Herders • Willard F. Baker
... who was taken a prisoner there by Big Bear. He brought it with him for one of his brother Indians who was blind in one eye, imagining with untutored wisdom that if it gave light to a white man, it should also to a red, and they worked at it for a time, but they could not get the focus, finally they threw it away, saying it was no good, ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney
... Bergson the facts which we actually know directly in the ordinary course are discriminated out of a very much wider field which we must also be said in a sense to know directly though most of it lies outside the clear focus of attention. This whole field of virtual knowledge is regarded as standing to the actual facts to which we usually devote our attention, much as, for instance, the whole situation of stumbling upon something in a dark room stood to the single quality of roughness: ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... incubation, to infuse with warmth, to fortify, the nascent germs of spiritual life. In it lives and breaks forth what, in the evolving soul, tends feebly and furtively toward the flowering. In short, the voice, speech, the tongue, condenses in a single focus incalculable quantities ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... I have found it impossible to use up, in what I have written upon places and their genius, these notes about Rome. I cannot focus Rome into any definite perspective, or see it in the colour of one mood. And whatever may have happened there to my small person has left no trace in what I have written. What I meet in Rome is Rome itself. Rome is alive (only ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... holy forgiveness occupy our souls. There let the clash of interests and the war of jealousies be forgotten; and let us endeavor to persuade ourselves that, as all the conflicting pursuits of life must terminate at this point at last, so should our feelings converge to the one focus of amenity and Christian love. And, after all, how many who have considered themselves to be antagonists must, during a moment of solemn reflection, become convinced that, when toiling in the great workshop of the world, they have been engaged, in unconscious fraternity, in building ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... squarely in the eye, I said to him, "Well, why don't you move?" as though we were playing checkers instead of the game of life. He made no reply, but the spell was broken. I believe that both sides had been bluffing. In attempting to use my kodak while continuing the bluff, I brought matters to a focus. "What a picture you fellows will make," I said aloud, as my right hand slowly worked the kodak out of the case which hung under my left arm. Still keeping up a steady fire of looks, I brought the kodak in front of me ready to focus, and then touched ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... however, a horrific blaze, emitted from a huge focus of intolerable light, set the whole heavens aflame. As from a fresh-created baleful sun, blue and livid and golden-colored lightnings were shivered from it on all sides; dull, however, in comparison to the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... with paper of two colours, one black, say, and the other gold. You can work your eye and adjust the focus of vision so that you may see either a black background or a gold one. In the one case the prevailing tone is gloomy, relieved by an occasional touch of brightness; and in the other it is brightness, heightened by a background of darkness. And so you can ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... two squadrons were in little less danger in the opposite direction. Attempting to intercept with dismounted fire parties of the enemy, who were retiring towards Halifax, the little force became the focus of every wandering party of the enemy, not only of those evacuating the positions of Talana and Lennox Hill, but also of many riding in from the Buffalo. For the hills and plain were full of Boers who had taken no part in the battle. But Knox was not to be trapped. Moving ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... right. Is that so surprising? Take a telephone—you can't talk over it unless the connections are right, can you? Take a telescope or a microscope—you can see nothing through them unless the instruments are in focus, can you? Take an automobile—it will not move an inch unless all the parts are properly adjusted, will it? You may have the finest photographic camera in the world, yet you will get no picture unless you expose the sensitive ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... laid out to dry, the thatched cottage of the miller, his fishing-nets, and the tank where the fish are kept,—not to speak of the miller's boy, who was already watching me. No matter where you are in the country, however solitary you may think yourself, you are certain to be the focus of the two eyes of a country bumpkin; a laborer rests on his hoe, a vine-dresser straightens his bent back, a little goat-girl, or shepherdess, or milkmaid climbs a ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... a metropolis even in the modern sense; not merely an emporium of commerce, but a focus where the intellectual and religious treasures of various countries were concentrated and worked up, and transmitted to all the nations that desired them. I have resisted the temptation to lay the scene of my story there, because in Alexandria the Egyptian element was too much overlaid by the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Getting my camera into position, ready to swing in any direction, I waited. With deafening explosions the shells exploded in a small street behind me. The Germans were evidently trying to smash up the old Flemish town hall, which was in the corner of the market-place, so I decided to fix my focus in its direction. But though I waited for over an hour, nothing else happened. The Germans had ceased firing for that morning at least. Not till I had gone to my cafe did I realise the danger I had exposed myself to, but somehow ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... his wildebeeste over in much the same way, and thought it was dead; and as he was very keen on obtaining photographs of game, he took his stand-camera from the Indian who carried it and proceeded to focus it on the animal's head. When he was just about to take the picture, he was thunderstruck to see the wildebeeste jump up and come charging down upon him. He sprang quickly aside, and in an instant up went the camera into the ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... are moving past me, over me, and round and round me their fixed center—for the horizon to bend about, for the sky to arch over, for the highways to start from, for every influence and interest between Hingham and Heaven to focus on. ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... years gardeners and farmers had few fertilizers other than animal manure and compost. These were always considered very valuable substances and a great deal of lore existed about using them. During the early part of this century, our focus changed to using chemicals; organic wastes were often considered nuisances with little value. These days we are rediscovering compost as an agent of soil improvement and also finding out that we must compost organic ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... to be in the foreground of any social event which they may both grace with their presence. The common human interest of the unengaged, and the reminiscent interest of the married, tend to focus all eyes upon them. For this reason they will try and be as little conspicuous ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... and untainted, the ancient, inbred integrity, piety, good-nature, and good-humor of the people of England, from the dreadful pestilence which, beginning in France, threatens to lay waste the whole moral and in a great degree the whole physical world, having done both in the focus of its ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... of telegraph wires, called the Telegraph Bureau, of which James Crowley was superintendent and Eldred Polhamus deputy. There were three operators— Chapin, Duvall, and Lucas. A telegraph station was in each precinct—thus making thirty-two, all coming to a focus at head-quarters. These are also divided into five sections—north, south, east, west, and central. The Commissioners, therefore, sitting in the central office, can send messages almost instantaneously to every precinct of the city, and receive immediate answers. ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... shadows, the gradations of its colouring, and all its carefully subordinated wealth of art, pointed to, were concentrated round, one sacred spot, as a curve, however vast its sweep though space, tends at every moment toward a single focus? And that spot, that focus, was, and is still, in every Romish church, the body of God, present upon the altar in the form of bread? Without Him, what is all your building? Your church is empty: your altar ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... received a check. A blood-stained revolution at Belgrade ousted the pro-Austrian Obrenovitch, and put in its place the rival family of the Karageorgevitch. Under the new dynasty Servia escaped from Austrian tutelage, and became an independent focus of Slav life in close touch with Russia. The change was illustrated in 1908, when Austria took advantage of the revolution in Turkey, led by the Young Turks, to annex formally the occupied territories of Bosnia and the Herzegovina. Servia, which had hoped ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... was the established perception and those its earliest images. The perception remained, deepening, changing only in hue, as a viscid liquid solidifies and darkens in a vessel over the fire. It remained, persisted. Time but steadied the focus as the wise oculist, seeking for his patient the perfect image, drops lenses in the frame through which the vision chart is viewed. In a little the perfect image is found. There was that Rosalie, come to maidenhood, come to ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... shaving." In 1745 barbers and surgeons were separated into distinct corporations by 18 George II. c. 15. The barber's shop was a favourite resort of idle persons; and in addition to its attraction as a focus of news, a lute, viol, or some such musical instrument, was always kept for the entertainment of waiting customers. The barber's sign consisted of a striped pole, from which was suspended a basin, symbols the use of which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... the era had come for the expedition, planned, administered, equipped and carried out with a definite objective. It is characteristic of the race of men that the first design should have centred on the Pole—the top of the earth, the focus of longitude, the magic goal, to reach which no physical sacrifice was too great. The heroism of Parry is a type of that adamant persistence which has made the history of the conquest of the Poles a volume in which disaster and death have played a large part. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... any of us could have kept the direction except by such an obvious and continuous landmark as the sea to our left. It hardly seemed worth while to focus my mind, but I did it occasionally just by way of testing myself. Schwartz still threw away his gold coins, and once, in one of my rare intervals of looking about me, I saw Denton picking them up. This surprised me mildly, but I was too ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... passage to a second corridor. There was a chance that he might meet Clementina, but he reached his room without encountering any one. It was a large vaulted apartment with a single window, a deep embrasure in the thick wall that seemed to focus like a telescope some forgotten, sequestered part of the leafy garden. While washing his hands, gazing absently at the green vignette framed by the dark opening, his attention was drawn to a movement of the foliage, stirred apparently by the rapid passage of two half-hidden ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... brown girl and the little brown horse blurred and faded. He tried to look, but could not see. He brought his eyes to nearer vision to fix their focus for another look, and straight before him whirled a shackly old saloon, rough and tumble, its character apparent from the men who were grouped about its doorway and from the barrels and kegs in profusion outside. From the doorway issued four men, wiping their mouths and shouting hilariously. ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... phenomenon. The first method for this purpose is due to Dr Priestley, who exposes the metal to be calcined in a porcelain cup N, Pl. IV. Fig. 11. placed upon the stand IK, under a jar A, in the bason BCDE, full of water; the water is made to rise up to GH, by sucking out the air with a syphon, and the focus of a burning glass is made to fall upon the metal. In a few minutes the oxydation takes place, a part of the oxygen contained in the air combines with the metal, and a proportional diminution of the volume of air is produced; what ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... creation of a "Gold Room" in Wall Street, where the precious metal could be dealt in; while for dealings in stocks there also existed the "Regular Board," the "Open Board," and the "Long Room." Devoted to one, but the leading object of speculation, the "Gold Room" was the very focus of all the financial and gambling activity of the time, and its quotations governed trade and commerce. At first notations in chalk on a blackboard sufficed, but seeing their inadequacy, Dr. S. S. Laws, vice-president and actual presiding officer of the Gold Exchange, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... that felt communion with a Person which is the clou of the devotional life, we get as it were the link between the extreme apprehensions of transcendence and of immanence, and their expression in the lives of contemplation and of action; and also a focus for that religious-emotion which is the most powerful stimulus to spiritual growth. It is needless to emphasize the splendid use which Christianity has made of this type of experience; nor unfortunately, the exaggerations ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... platform system, however, still remained. In front of the curtain, the stage projected into a wide "apron," as it was called, lined on either side by boxes filled with spectators; and the house was so inadequately lighted that almost all the acting had to be done within the focus of the footlights. After the curtain rose, the actors advanced into this projecting "apron" and performed the main business of the act beyond the ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... speaking very deliberately. He even paused at this point and lighted a cigarette, while we all listened breathlessly. We felt that we had got the thing to a focus at last. ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... diffuse in the strict sense of the term; the omentum often protects the upper abdominal cavity from infection, as was proven in this case at the autopsy. It is possible that this diffuse peritonitis, which did not in the early period of the affection extend beyond the limited local focus, was not due to the intestinal contents and to bacteria, but chiefly to bacterial toxins which arose from the circumscribed original focus. This fact is pointed out by the prompt retrogression of the diffuse peritoneal symptoms ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... can build eternal realities. "Are we to beg and cringe and hang on the outer edge of life,—we who should walk grandly? Is it for man to tremble and quake—man who in his spiritual capacity becomes the interpreter of God's message,—the focus of ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... exist this minute with you, and then you focus your attention on Mart there, the next minute, and he exists, what becomes of me when you turn your head ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... lay the low sand-hills of Cape Cod, over our larboard quarter, and before us, the wide waters of Massachusetts Bay, with here and there a sail gliding over its smooth surface. As we drew in toward the mouth of the harbor, as toward a focus, the vessels began to multiply until the bay seemed actually alive with sails gliding about in every direction; some on the wind, and others before it, as they were bound to or from the emporium of trade and centre of the bay. It was a stirring sight ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... pair of photographs, they are placed at the same distance from the eyes as the length of the focus of the lens used in producing them, then without doubt the distance between the eyes, viz. about two and a quarter {228} inches, is the best difference between the two points of view to produce a perfectly natural result; and if the points of operation be more distant from one another, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... But the focus of the assembly was the little space before Hartrath's painting. It was called "A Study of the Contra Costa Foothills," and was set in a frame of natural redwood, the bark still adhering. It was conspicuously displayed on an easel at the right of the entrance to the main room of ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... tread, through the opalescent light, they appeared like specters flying from hateful shadows. Suddenly, in the air before them, not farther up than a low hill-top flared a lambent flame; as they looked at it, the apparition contracted into a focus of dazzling lustre. Their hearts beat fast; their souls thrilled; and they shouted as with one voice, "The Star! the ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... with these religious requirements and on what grounds. If men were deeply concerned about the taboo food that went into their bodies, they would not be concerned about the evil thoughts that arose in their souls. If they were taught to focus on petty duties, such as tithing, the great ethical principles and obligations moved to the outer field of vision and became blurred. The Sabbath, which had originated in merciful purpose toward the poor, had been turned into ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... of sense,—out of focus, distorted. Some of it was opium. Didn't you coax a little of his favorite ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... went on. It was an expensive thing to buy, but an oyster supper would do it and leave something over for the organ. Which brings us to the very core and centre of these activities, their pivot, their focus and, in a human sense, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... astronomy, all measurements being applied to the heavenly bodies. Their main service was found in accurate records of data. Kepler maintained "that every planet moved in an ellipse of which the sun occupied one focus." He also held "that the square of the periodic time of any planet is proportional to the cube of its mean distance from the sun," and "that the area swept by the radius vector from the planet to the sun is proportional to the time."[4] ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... "super" could be expected of Beason. His very blank face recalled her to the absurdity of getting out of focus with one's audience. ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... say what a day might bring forth. The young doctor looked back over the past; he bowed beneath the burden that he felt upon him. However, due credit must be given to his friend Samuel O'Neill for assisting him to bring his sober meditations to a focus. ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... softly. "Dynamite! That will bring things to a focus beautifully, won't it? When they have blown us up, I wonder how they will account to Uncle Sidney for the ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... introduction, while Miss Wild blushed and nodded an embarrassed greeting, then immediately turned her face away from the focus of the professor's observation and made a comical grimace which came very near proving ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... commanding crowded audiences, and that a passage was formed from the house where they lodged into a gallery of this church; and that the pulpit of St. Antholin's seems, for many years, to have been the focus of schism, faction, and sedition, and he may be able to bring forward from these happily preserved registers much ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 26. Saturday, April 27, 1850 • Various
... capable of the darkest designs; the sudden and evidently concealed appearance of the latter on the day my uncle died; the agitation and paleness of the attorney; the enormous advantages accruing to Gerald, and to no one else, from the terms of the devise: when these were all united into one focus of evidence, they appeared to me to leave no doubt of the forgery of the testament and the crime of Gerald. Nor was there anything in my brother's bearing and manner calculated to abate my suspicions. ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... films, I now stood up. The Caribou dashed away and by a slight limp showed that he was in sanctuary. The 20-yard estimate proved too long; it was only 16 yards, which put my picture a little out of focus. ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... men for the most part considerably his seniors, among whom, in spite of the presence of Whately, High Church principles probably predominated already, and were destined soon to predominate in the most extreme sense, for the college presently became the focus of the Ritualistic and Romanizing movement. Thus, up to twenty-three, Keble's life had been that of a sort of acolyte, and though not ascetic (for his nature appears to have been always genial and mirthful), entirely ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... college Dick Livingstone had found, like other men, that the two paths of ambition and duty were parallel and did not meet. Along one lay his desire to focus all his energy in one direction, to follow disease into the laboratory instead of the sick room, and there to fight its unsung battles. And win. He felt ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... recollected observation. Or again a quality might be propounded, such as generosity or spitefulness, and the boys required to construct an imaginary anecdote of the simplest kind to illustrate it. This would have the effect of training the mind at all events to focus itself, and this is just what drudgery pure and simple will not do. The aim is not to train mere memory or logical accuracy, but to strengthen that great faculty which we loosely call imagination, which is the power of evoking mental images, and of migrating from the present into ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... the sun were rising out of the sea. "Hai-yah!" He yawned. "Another bloomin' day. . . . I was dreaming . . . about . . . blowed if I can remember what I was dreaming about." He adjusted the focus of his glasses and stared out across the North Sea. "I wonder if they're ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... into the noble garden, with its regal trees. Groups were there of well dressed persons. Vance heard himself called by name. He had forgotten the London world,—forgotten, amidst his midsummer ramblings, that the London season was still ablaze; and there, stragglers from the great focus, fine people, with languid tones and artificial jaded smiles, caught him in his wanderer's dress, and walking side by side with the infant wonder of Mr. Rugge's show, exquisitely neat indeed, but still in a coloured print, of a pattern familiar ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... him, enveloped in a heartening whirl of new popularity. To the candidate it seemed that his star had changed with stunning swiftness. His advance to the door had been a Roman progress; and when he finally reached the lobby he was still the focus of a coterie of enthusiasts who would not be shaken off. Here a new halt was made: new people surrounded him; more hand-shakings and back-slappings took place; and everything ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... mountain? The atmosphere was deceptive, but surely it was some animal approaching in his direction. He had up till then forgotten his binoculars, but he was now wide awake and, looking first to his rifle, he got out his glasses and twisted them into focus upon the moving object in the distance. A startled exclamation rose to his lips as the field-glasses covered the moving spot; it was a man. Yes running, stumbling, crouching and at times almost crawling the object which he saw was a white man, naked except for a few rags. His desperate haste ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... tendency to give immediate expression to ideas of action. Moreover, the social instincts of the child, his sympathy, etc., give him a special interest in human beings and in their acts. These tendencies, therefore, focus his attention upon human action, and cause his ideas of such acts to become more vivid and interesting. For this reason, observation of human acts is more likely to lead to motor expression. That the social instincts of the child reinforce the tendency to imitate is indicated ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... boasted right of instruction by the constituent body is "mere sound," signifying nothing. Sir, the inhabitants of this district are subject to state legislation and state policy; they cannot complain of this, for their condition is voluntary; and as this city is the focus of power, of influence, and considered also as that of fashion, if not of folly, and as the streams which flow from here irradiate the whole country, it is right, it is proper, that it should be subject to state policy and state power, and not used as a leaven to ferment and ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... alumni; androgynus, androgyni; calculus, calculi; dracunculus, dracunculi; echinus, echini; magus, magi. But such as have properly become English words, may form the plural regularly in es; as, chorus, choruses: so, apparatus, bolus, callus, circus, fetus, focus, fucus, fungus, hiatus, ignoramus, impetus, incubus, isthmus, nautilus, nucleus, prospectus, rebus, sinus, surplus. Five of these make the Latin plural like the singular; but the mere English scholar has no occasion to be told which ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the term eccentric retreat he did not understand a retreat made on several diverging roads, but one which, instead of being directed toward the center of the base of operations or the center of the country, should be eccentric to that focus of operations, and along the line of the frontier of ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... Parson Jones who first spoke. "But what do all these figures mean?" And Tom observed how the paper shook and rustled in the tremor of excitement that shook his hand. He raised the paper to the focus of his spectacles and began to read again. "'Mark ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... adopted is still, in a sense, the result of suggestion, but of one particular suggestion which the fancy of the moment determines. Or, to put it another way, the caprice of the moment causes the attention to focus itself in a particular manner, to direct itself specially to certain aspects ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... thermo-electric pyrometers in that a thermo-couple is employed. The heat rays given out by the hot body fall on a concave mirror and are brought to a focus at a point at which is placed the junction of a thermo-couple. The temperature readings are obtained from an indicator similar to that ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... and lay gnawing my bones!—I am not mad, most noble Festus! but in sober sadness I have suffered this day more bodily pain than I had before a conception of. My right cheek has certainly been placed with admirable exactness under the focus of some invisible burning-glass, which concentrated all the rays of a Tartarean sun. My medical attendant decides it to be altogether nervous, and that it originates either in severe ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... dividing-line cut me off from all others: their appointment was to trade, navigate, eat and drink, marry and give in marriage, and the rest; mine was to discover the Source of the Nile. Hither had all the threads of my life been converging for many years; they had now reached their focus, and henceforth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... the focus of the reflector of the lantern, and not more than a hundred feet distant, stood a prodigious black creature, on eight legs, rolling something in its mandibles, which were held close to what seemed to ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... Sainte-Beuve, thinks he can trace a marked rise even in Bossuet's style from the moment he became a courtier of Louis XIV. The King brought men together, placed them in a position where they were induced and urged to bring their talents to a focus. His court was alternately a high-bred gala and a stately university. If we contrast his life with those of his predecessor and successor, with the dreary existence of Louis XIII and the crapulous lifelong debauch of Louis XV, we become sensible that Louis XIV was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... made the motion, as though he desired to take the glass. The savage took the loop from his neck, and handed the instrument to George. The latter put it to his eyes and pointed them to the east, carefully adjusting them to get the proper focus. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... path into the fine cotton-field in the North. You will see that the discoveries of Burton and Speke confirm mine respecting the form of the continent and its fertility. It is an immense field. I crave the honor of establishing a focus of Christianity in it, but should it not be granted, I will submit as most unworthy. I have written Mr. Venn twice, and from yours I see something is contemplated in Cambridge.... If young men come to this country, they must lay their account with doing everything for themselves. ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... irresponsible conduct is almost inevitable. But this opens up, of course, a whole series of different questions, which, for the reasons I have just set forth, I do not try to answer, rather purposely neglecting the second illegitimate parent, the father, so as better to focus attention on the evils arising from the existing unprotected relations between ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... whip in; gather; hold a meeting; convene, convoke, convocate[obs3]; rake up, dredge; heap, mass, pile; pack, put up, truss, cram; acervate[obs3]; agglomerate, aggregate; compile; group, aggroup[obs3], concentrate, unite; collect into a focus, bring into a focus; amass, accumulate &c. (store) 636; collect in a dragnet; heap Ossa upon Pelion. Adj. assembled &c. v.; closely packed, dense, serried, crowded to suffocation, teeming, swarming, populous; as thick as hops; all of a heap, fasciculated cumulative. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... money, and the University can depend upon it for handsome subsidies. It may well depend upon it for much more. As the Bank of England—to which in its system of government it may be likened—is the focus of all the other banks, private or joint-stock, in the kingdom, and the treasure-house, not only of the nation's gold, but of its commercial honor, so the Clarendon Press—traditionally careful in its selections and munificent in its rewards—might become the academy or central ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... less in making lint. For me, I was about amongst the wounded half the day, the British, s'entend! The rising in France for the honour of the nation now, and for its safety in independence hereafter, was brilliant and delightful, spreading in some directions from La Manche to La Mditerrane: the focus of loyalty was Bordeaux. The king left Gand the 22nd. All Alost, etc., surrounded followed, or preceded him. The noble Blcher entered France ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... country in the finest world. The streets, all grave and mellow in the sunset, seemed to applaud this after-dinner stroll; the entrance quad of his old college—spaciously majestic, monastically modern, for years the heart of his universe, the focus of what had gone before it in his life, casting the shadow of its grey walls over all that had come after-brought him a sense of rest from conflict, and trust in his own important safety. The garden-gate, whose ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the particular care and attention of the operator is the proper focus. It is not unfrequently the complaint of sitters that their hands are represented as being magnified and greatly out of proportion with the general figure. This is the case also with the nose and eyes, but in a less degree. As this cannot be wholly remedied, it is desirous to come as near as ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... for nocturnal (terrestrial) radiation were made by freely suspending thermometers with naked bulbs, or by laying them on white cotton, wool, or flannel; also by means of a thermometer placed in the focus of a silvered parabolic reflector. I did not find that the reflector possessed any decided advantage over the white cotton: the means of a number of observations taken by each approximated closely, but the difference ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... was the ashes of such a fire as burned over Ellen's brows, and she had Ellen's short upper lip, though of course she had never been fierce nor a swift runner, and no present eye could guess if she had ever been a focus of romantic love. The aged are terrible—mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... processing of such applications from recurring, in accordance with section 204(a) of the Immigration Services and Infrastructure Improvements Act of 2000 (8 U.S.C. 1573(a)). Such initiatives may include measures such as increasing personnel, transferring personnel to focus on areas with the largest potential for backlog, and streamlining paperwork. (b) Transfer of Functions From Commissioner.—In accordance with title XV (relating to transition provisions), there are transferred from the Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization ...
— Homeland Security Act of 2002 - Updated Through October 14, 2008 • Committee on Homeland Security, U.S. House of Representatives
... inexperience at handling such men, and the anomalous character of my position to some extent consoled me. In the filaments brushed across the face of my understanding I could discover none so strong as to support an overt act on my part. I cannot doubt, that had the affair come to a focus, I should have warned the scientists even at the risk of my life. In fact, as I shall have occasion to show you, I did my best. But at the moment, in all policy I could see my way to ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... a glance at his wrist watch as he talked, but in that glance, without pause or fumble of focus, with swift certainty of correlation, he ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... Georgia thus the geographical focus of our Negro population, but in many other respects, both now and yesterday, the Negro problems have seemed to be centered in this State. No other State in the Union can count a million Negroes among its citizens,—a population as large as the slave population of the whole Union ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... gentleman had often met before. Finding that his look was not returned, or indeed observed by the person to whom it was addressed, John gradually concentrated the whole power of his eyes into one focus, and brought it to bear upon the man in the flapped hat, at whom he came to stare in course of time with an intensity so remarkable, that it affected his fireside cronies, who all, as with one accord, took their pipes from their lips, and stared with open ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... he took the glass and began to focus it on a distant object. "Now, own up; you did rub that ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... who has obtained some idea of social progress. We are still childishly pleased when we see the further subdivision of labor going on, because the quantity of the output is increased thereby, and we apparently are unable to take our attention away from the product long enough to really focus it upon the producer. Theoretically, "the division of labor" makes men more interdependent and human by drawing them together into a unity of purpose. "If a number of people decide to build a road, and one digs, and one brings ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... theatre was crowded for my final performance and several Tri-D video cameras stared down at me. Pupils, lights and lenses, all came to a glittering focus on me. I slowly closed my eyes to ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... glass lens," Lana said. "When I take the picture a lens forms just long enough to focus the elements of your body into a Mantram fix." She touched my shoulder. "Would you sit down ...
— The Gallery • Roger Phillips Graham
... before the select committee raised by the English House of Commons, that the use of the locomotive-whistle as a fog-signal was first suggested by Mr. A. Gordon, C.E., who proposed to use air or steam for sounding it, and to place it in the focus of a reflector, or a group of reflectors, to concentrate its sounds into a powerful phonic beam. It was his idea that the sharpness or shrillness of the whistle constituted its chief value. And it is conceded that Mr. C.L. Daboll, under the direction of Prof. Henry, and at the instance of the United ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... subject credit for the former, but denies his claim to the latter of these attributes. As if any manifestation of mind were more deserving of that title than the power of intellectual concentration, to which nothing that came within its focus ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... above question is the badge of admission. To be clever is the badge of promotion. I am the center of this intensely interesting circle. I am the focus, the magnet around which they all revolve. The bulk of the social burden rests on me. The minute but highly important details are carefully watched and skillfully righted by the good mother. I am the General Entertainer, but she ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... a large and beautiful town—the capital of the Eastern Province—situated on the slopes of the Zuurberg range, near the head waters of the Kowie River, 1760 feet above the sea, and thirty-six miles distant therefrom. She is also the focus where all the roads from the interior converge to enter the only available ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... hands touched me. Once I felt the clutch as of cold, soft fingers at my throat. I was still equally conscious that if I gave way to fear I should be in bodily peril; and I concentered all my faculties in the single focus of resisting stubborn will. And I turned my sight from the Shadow; above all, from those strange serpent eyes,—eyes that had now become distinctly visible. For there, though in naught else around me, I was aware that ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... know whether they need to certify compliance with CIPA by July 1, 2002, to receive subsidies for the upcoming year, the Court conducted an eight-day trial at which we heard 20 witnesses, and received numerous depositions, stipulations and documents. The principal focus of the trial was on the capacity of currently available filtering software. The plaintiffs adduced substantial evidence not only that filtering programs bar access to a substantial amount of speech on the Internet that is clearly constitutionally ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... dynamic consciousness between mother and child suffers no interruption at birth. It continues almost the same. The child has no conception whatsoever of the mother. It cannot see her, for its eye has no focus. It can hear her, because hearing needs no transmission into concept, but it has no oral notion of sounds. It knows her. But only by a form of vital dynamic correspondence, a sort of magnetic interchange. The idea ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... tradition permeated him with the expectation that such powers would be propitiated by his worship of the images set up in their names. There was therefore no reasoned creed, such as those of the Catholic and Reformed Churches, but only a vague sentiment brought to a focus by the associations of the shrine. From such a view of polytheism it is easy to understand how most, if not all, of the old speculative philosophers could allow the existence of the traditional gods, even while in reasoned contemplation ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... show seven centuries of development, and, moreover, development along the broad and national lines of common or vulgar speech. Euphuism was after all only part of the general tendency of the age to focus everything that was good in politics, religion, and art, on the person and immediate surroundings of the sovereign; and the history of the eighteenth century, which saw the last issue of the series ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... spy, and that he loved to converse with foreigners and conform his behaviour to them. For his personal safety, therefore, it was perhaps unfortunate that a portion of his youth had been passed in a visit to Italy, then the focus of literature and fount of inspiration; but for his surviving fame, and for the progress of English poetry, the circumstance was eminently propitious; since it is from the return of this noble traveller that we are to date not only the introduction into our language of the Petrarchan sonnet, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... when the exercises had been duly gone through, then arose the original and powerful minds, to take full advantage of what had been gained by all the practising, and to concentrate and bring to a focus all the hints and lessons of art which had been gradually accumulating. Then the sustained strength and richness of the Faery Queen became possible; contemporary with it, the grandeur and force of English prose began in Hooker's Ecclesiastical ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... every one of those wildcats would spin up to a tremendous premium before you could turn a handspring—profit on the speculation not a dollar less than forty millions!" [An eloquent pause, while the marvelous vision settled into W.'s focus.] "Where's your hogs now? Why my dear innocent boy, we would just sit down on the front door-steps and peddle banks like ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... single battle, which was to decide its fearful issue. With divided sympathies, Europe looked with anxiety to this scene, where the whole strength of the two contending parties was fearfully drawn, as it were, to a focus. ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... events of life is a constant theme of speculation among the pragmatics; no petty detail is overlooked in the possibility of its portentous consequences. Walter Shandy's hyperbolic philosophy turned about such a focus, the exaltation of insignificant trifles into mainsprings of action. ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... scale for each of the two lenses that we principally use. For great magnification or reduction a lens of comparatively short focus must be used, but, as a long-focus lens gives a more perfect image, we use one of very long focus—thirty-six inches—for copying the same size or for slight ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... least, for there is usually a runt, stayed near the mother and climbed on her back or pulled at her tail. They made a lovely picture as they played, and the wrestling group in the middle seemed the focus of it all at first; but a keener, later look would have rested on the mother, quiet, watchful, not without anxiety, but, above all, with a face full of motherly tenderness. Oh, she was so proud and happy, and she would sit there and ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... may therefore be regarded as War concentrated, as the centre of effort of the whole War or campaign. As the sun's rays unite in the focus of the concave mirror in a perfect image, and in the fulness of their heat; to the forces and circumstances of War, unite in a focus in the great battle for ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... artists, though this is partly due to his persistence in knocking at the doors of the Paris salons, and gaining the universal prestige of admission there. There is, unfortunately, no such place to focus the attention of the world on a musician. Yet, through the success of American musical students among their rivals abroad; through the concerts they are giving more and more frequently in foreign countries; ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... ills are principally caused by bad physical habits, so are mental ills and inefficiency chiefly due to various bad mental habits, which are allowed to fasten themselves upon us. These will be briefly discussed so as to focus attention upon them, for the first thing necessary for the correction of a bad habit is to recognize its presence. It is as important to think right as it is to give the body proper care. A good body with a mind working in the wrong direction is of no use. If we allow our minds to be disturbed ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... it," reviewing it at different angles; noting the hour at which it is at its best and happiest, seizing upon its most telling presentment—and all this before he begins even mentally to compose its salient features on the square of his canvas. You can turn, if you choose, your camera skyward and focus the top of a steeple and only that. It is true, but it is uninteresting, or rather unintelligible, until you focus also the church door, and the gathering groups, and the overgrown pathway that winds through the quiet graveyard. So a picture can be true and yet very much like a slip ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... direction in which they were going; but this circumstance favored them, for those who wish to be unobserved, when they cannot be absolutely alone, have only to mix with the crowd. As they were borne towards the focus and centre of the festive doings, they clung closely together, she to him, and he to her, so that they might not be torn apart by any of the rushing and tumultuous processions of excited Thracian women ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... hurl them like an avalanche upon the critical point, crowding volley upon volley, charge upon charge, till he made a breach. What a lesson of the power of concentration there is in this man's life! He was able to focus all his faculties upon the smallest detail, as well as upon an empire. But, alas! Napoleon was himself defeated by violation of his own tactics,—the constantly repeated crushing force of heavy ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... the glass from Byfield, and brought it to focus upon one of these peepshow rifts: and lo! at the foot of the shaft, imaged, as it were, far down in a luminous well, a green hillside and three figures standing. A white speck fluttered; and fluttered until the rift closed again. Flora's handkerchief! Blessings ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... nature that led him astray in his judgment of the individual; it was merely that he was too much occupied with what he counted his work—with his theories first, then his writing of them, then the endless defending of them, to care to see beyond the focus of his short-sighted eyes. Vavasor was a gentlemanly fellow, and that went a long way with him. He did not oppose him, and that went another long way: of all things he could not bear to be opposed in what he so plainly saw to be true, nor could think why every other ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... forget, or even the occasional grossness or harshness of sentiment which contrasts so strongly with the superficial polish. A genuine report of even the best conversation would be intolerably prosy and unimaginative. But imagine the very pith and essence of such talk brought to a focus, concentrated into the smallest possible space with the infinite dexterity of a thoroughly trained hand, and you have the kind of writing in which Pope is unrivalled; polished prose with occasional gleams of genuine poetry—the epistle to Arbuthnot ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... bell began to ring in front of Roger. Without hesitation he adjusted a dial that brought the radar scanner into focus. When the screen remained blank, he made a second adjustment, and then a third and fourth, until the bright white flash of a meteor was seen on the scanner. He quickly grabbed two knobs, one in each hand, and twisted them to move two thin, plotting lines, one horizontal ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... respect to composition, he is likewise liable to censure. At one time he wearies, and at another tantalises the reader, with the prolixity or ambiguity of his preambles. His prelusive sentiments are sometimes far-fetched, and converge not with a natural declination into the focus of epigram. In dispensing praise and censure, he often seems to be governed more by prejudice or policy, than by justice and truth; and he is more constantly attentive to the production of wit, than to the ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... we have often said before, we think that a good lens requires no "actinic" focus to find. In a properly constructed lens the chemical and visual foci are identical; and we would ourselves not be troubled with the use of one in which they differed. Our advertising columns will point out ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... ye see? They've nat'rally got a focus, an' w'en I 'appen to be standin' on a sunny day in front of 'em, contemplatin' the face o' natur', as it wor, through the lantern panes, if I gits into the focus by haccident, d'ye see, it just acts ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... and set sail for St. Croix. He started under a fair breeze, but a mile out the wind dropped, and he was until midnight making the harbour of Christianstadt When they were utterly becalmed the sun seemed to focus his hell upon the little sloop. It rolled sickeningly in the oily wrinkled waters, and Alexander put his Pope in his pocket. The sea had a curious swell, and he wondered if an earthquake were imminent. The sea was not quite herself when her foundations ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... a time, thinking, or rather trying to think, for he felt like one vainly endeavouring to get the focus of a stereoscopic picture. His mind kept going away from him. He knew himself able to think, yet he could not think. It was a revelation to him of our helplessness with our own being, of our absolute ignorance of the modes in which our nature works—of what it is, and what we can ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... the effects of the blast. The machine turned back to its lustrous silver color and there was a low hum as it righted itself gracefully then swung around, into the center of the clearing to get a better focus on them. ...
— The Happy Man • Gerald Wilburn Page
... well-lighted lobby within, the fear aura no longer touched Paul Harley. Out from the doorway came hominess and that air of security and peace which had seemed to characterize the house when viewed from outside. The focus of menace, therefore, lay not inside the house of Sir Charles but without. It was very curious. In the next instant ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... history of Wassaf thus exalts Kublai: "Although from the frontiers of this country ('Irak) to the Centre of Empire, the Focus of the Universe, the genial abode of the ever-Fortunate Emperor and Just Kaan, is a whole year's journey, yet the stories that have been spread abroad, even in these parts, of his glorious deeds, his institutes, his decisions, his justice, the largeness and acuteness of his intellect, his correctness ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... uninterested in women's clothes, was noting the long, firm folds of her skirt. Vernon had turned from the window to approve the loving closeness of those violets against her hair. Lady St. Craye in her graceful attitude of conscious unconsciousness was the focus of their eyes. ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... he said. "To begin with, you cannot focus properly. You have a crooked eye. I have told you ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... rifle and machine gun fire, utilised on a large scale by the Germans and garrisoned with machine guns) held an advantageous position bearing on the lines of communication leading up from Masnieres, thereby playing pretty havoc upon ration parties and all movement within focus ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... on paper, there is no difficulty in keeping it up. That it presents an odd, unsubstantial, whimsical, new thing: a sort of previously unthought-of Power going about. That it will concentrate into one focus all that is done in the paper. That it sets up a creature which isn't the Spectator, and isn't Isaac Bickerstaff, and isn't anything of that kind: but in which people will be perfectly willing to believe, and which is just mysterious ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... preparation of the ground in which the seed is to be sown; it looks primarily to the growth of the seed and not to the elimination of the weeds. Our nature is a field in which the Word of God is sown; its preparation and care is what we need to focus ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... from the first epochs of the formation of the globe. The basalt pillars, fitted one into the other, measured from forty to fifty feet in height, and the water, calm in spite of the tumult outside, washing their base. The brilliant focus of light, pointed out by the engineer, touched every point of rock, and flooded the walls with light. By reflection the water reproduced the brilliant sparkles, so that the boat appeared to be ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... most marvelous of all is that of the Greyhounds, which evolves in gigantic spirals round a dazzling focus, and then loses itself far off in the recesses of space. Fig. 24 gives a ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... to Mr. Cave that this was not in accordance with the laws of optics as he had known them in his younger days. He could understand the rays being refracted by the crystal and coming to a focus in its interior, but this diffusion jarred with his physical conceptions. He approached the crystal nearly, peering into it and round it, with a transient revival of the scientific curiosity that in his youth had determined ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... the Last Judgment. To the west of the palace stands the Pope's gardens and park, and to the south the Church of St. Peter, the largest temple in Christendom. The whole forms a small town of itself; and this town is one of the greatest in the world, a seat of art and learning, and, above all, the focus of a great religion. For from here the Pope sends forth his bulls of excommunication against heretics and sinners, and here he watches over his flock, the Catholics, in accordance with the Saviour's thrice repeated injunction to Peter: ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... shape being exactly that of the printing frame. The other end of the bamboos are tied with stout string to a piece of cardboard tube, postal tube, which slips over the lens. The length of the bamboos depends upon the focus of the lens and the amount of reduction. It will sometimes be found convenient to have the bamboo in two lengths; thus, supposing we want as a general rule 36 inches, two pieces, 24 inches each, should be obtained, and by fastening these together in the middle by two loose rings of copper wire ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... down the row of television machines. Some of them were dead, their switches closed, but on the screens of many of the others was the same effect as on this machine. Their operators were working frustratedly at the controls, trying to focus the image, bring it ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... and stairway to distract the loftier inspirations that possessed him, no intermittent soprano noises emitted by fluttering feminine fashion, no calflike barytones from masculine adolescence to drive him to the woods, where it was always rather difficult for him to focus his attention on printed pages. The balm of heavenly silence pervaded the house, and in its beneficent atmosphere he worked in his undershirt, inhaling inspiration and the aroma of whale-oil, soap, and ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... inexplicable;" and Sir David Brewster, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in December last, assured me it was not less a puzzle to him than to Sir John. An eastern traveller, who attributes its production to "a reduplication of impulse setting air in vibration in a focus of echo," means, I suppose, saying nearly the same thing as the two philosophers, and merely conveys his meaning in ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... work. I swept the south shore of Eastern Island[3] with my finder, and picked up the image of the inter-planetary landing stage, at which the Venus mail was due to arrive. I could see the blaze of lights plainly; and with another, closer focus I caught the huge landing ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... that she distrusted; it was only that she could not focus her mind down to so small ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... happened to take would have had its prior place in the realm of essence, and its essential and logical relations there. That particular part of the realm of essence which nature chances to exemplify or to suggest is the part that may be revealed to me, and that is the predestined focus of all my admirations. Essence as such has no power to reveal itself, or to take on existence; and the human mind has no power or interest to trace all essence. Even the few essences which it has come to know, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... their proper and unbiased action, we shall be forced to acknowledge that it was the Puritan idea which predominated; that it is, in fact, the saving clause in the gospel of our national salvation. And New England was the first home of the Puritans—the focus from which have radiated the myriad beams of the light of which they were the repositories to the remotest corners of the land. Let no one be alarmed at the mention of the word Puritan. There are some people ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... from Byfield, and brought it to focus upon one of these peepshow rifts: and lo! at the foot of the shaft, imaged, as it were, far down in a luminous well, a green hillside and three figures standing. A white speck fluttered; and fluttered until the rift closed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... up a suitable place, where he thought the light would be most serviceable, and then started to focus his camera on a spot which he selected; when the drifting piece of wreckage reached that position it would be at the proper distance for effective work, and he could press the button with the belief that he had obtained ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... the same time resented, the tribute he paid Braceway through his hesitancy. The man was a clever detective and, if left to dominate Greenleaf unopposed, might easily focus attention on a new theory of the crime. Not that this could result in the acquittal of the negro; but it might deprive him, Bristow, of the credit he was ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... me in one of the two enormous rooms that were allotted to me, I threw myself into an arm-chair and tried to focus the extraordinary imaginative impression which ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... rift or opening in the foliage of a large tree that over-topped its fellows in the distance. In the centre of this rift I perceived a white spot, but could not, at first, distinguish what it was. Adjusting the focus of the telescope, I again looked, and now made it out to ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... along the North-west coast of New Holland at the season we have mentioned, should be prepared for bad weather. The hurricane experienced by Captain Grey began at South-east and ended at North-west. The lull in the centre of it showed that the focus of the storm must have passed over that locality. Captain Grey does not enter sufficiently into detail to enable us to trace the ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... too terrible to be faced. Mrs. Pendleton saw her own comfortable life affected by it; saw her position in her small social circle shaken and overwhelmed by the clamour of notoriety. She saw herself the focus of the malicious tea-table gossip of all her friends. Decidedly, ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... arrived to look upon the scene of the mysterious tragedy. London is a city of onlookers. The most trivial street accident never lacks its interested audience, and a house in which a murder is reputed to have taken place becomes a center upon which the idly curious focus from the four ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... with them, then? Seven million church member voters in this country! Why do not they focus their religion and do something? I divine a reason. While they live all the rest of the year with prayers and resolutions, they go out on a moral debauch on election day with a disreputable individual known ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... and flies, fixing this, altering that, and arranging the other; and cursing his assistants—usually lads of sixteen—who have to work the colours from wings, roof, circle, and side of the house. Lights are of three kinds: spot, focus, and flood. The spot is used on a dark stage, and lights only the singer's head and shoulders. The focus lights the complete figure. The flood covers the stage. Each of these is worked in conjunction with eight or nine shaded films placed before the arc light. ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... again to see this Professor of Indifference doing the honours of his new purchase, when he has fairly housed it. You must view it in every light, till he has found the best—placing it at this distance, and at that, but always suiting the focus of your sight to his own. You must spy at it through your fingers, to catch the aerial perspective—though you assure him that to you the landscape shows much more agreeable without that artifice. Wo be to the luckless wight, who does not only not respond to his rapture, but who should ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... a species of maternal idolatry; centered in her child Louis Marie as rays gathered up into a focus, were all her hopes, her aspirations, her ideas of the future. If she could be assured she would live to see her son leading the armies of the empire, ruling in the cabinets of state or worshipped in the circles of the great and learned, Heaven itself could ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... was down at the steps long before breakfast, that I might try my new present. Bill Freeman was there, and he showed me how to adjust the focus. I amused myself looking at the vessels which were working up and down the Reach, and so much was I delighted that I quite forgot how time passed, and lost my breakfast. Every one asked to have a peep through the telescope, and every one declared that it was an excellent glass; at last ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... a mental picture of how the sights and the bull's-eye look when properly aligned. You should acquire this mental picture during your aiming exercises and by the time you go on the range you should have the eye so trained that you will focus it properly on your sights and target ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... chair and a patched-up, sea-stained folio on his knee, 'I honestly detest the mere give and take of what we are fools enough to call life. I don't deny Life's there,' he swept his hand towards the open window—'in that frantic Tophet we call London; but there's no focus, no point of vantage. Even a scribbler only gets it piecemeal and through a dulled medium. We learn to read before we know how to see; we swallow our tastes, convictions, and emotions whole; so that nine-tenths of the world's nectar is merely honeydew.' He ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... place, the action of the sun on terrestrial bodies, teaching them to regard his substance as a pure and elementary fire, they made it the focus and reservoir of an ocean of igneous and luminous fluid, which, under the name of ether, filled the universe and nourished all beings. Afterwards, having discovered, by a physical and attentive analysis, this same fire, or another ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... observation, not in the philosophic or psychological presentment of nature. For their fine powers to have full play, it was necessary that they should deal with things seen: in other words, that feeling should take a concrete shape. Once this condition is fulfilled, they can focus their own impressions and render them with unsurpassable skill. We shall find in them nothing epic, nothing inventive on a grand scale: the transfiguring, ennobling vision of the greatest creators ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... on an axis is simply that of a body turning entirely round upon its own centre. The only centre around which the moon performs a revolution is very far from its own proper axis, being situated at the centre of the earth, the focus of its orbit, and as it has no other rotating motion around the earth, it cannot revolve on ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... he aroused himself and looked. To his eyesight, twisted and fixed to a shorter focus by the drug he had taken, the steamship was little more than a blotch on the moon-whitened fog; yet he thought he could see men clambering and working on the upper davits, and the nearest boat—No. 24—seemed ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... lava and ash ejected from this focus, the whole soils of the island have been formed; soils of still unexhausted fertility, save when—as must needs be in a volcanic region—patches of mere rapilli and scoriae occur. The mountain has ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... cut away the anchor, the doomed ship entered the narrow water-way and passed the outer line of mines in safety. Then the Spaniards discovered her, and from the way they let loose they must have thought the whole American fleet was trying to force the passage. In an instant she was the focus for a perfect cyclone of shot and shell from every gun that could be brought to bear, on ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... Department) and I have to make an important measurement in connexion with the Apothegm of the Bilateral which runs to-night precisely through this spot. My fingers now mark exactly the concentric of the secondary focus whence the Radius Vector should be drawn, but I find that (like a fool) I have left my Double Refractor in the cafe hard by. I dare not go for fear of losing the place I have marked; yet I can get no further ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the prosecution, putting aside his papers and endeavoring to focus his mind again on the case, "you have spent some years with the Alaska ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... be catholic. Let us try to shift anew the focus of criticism when a fresh personality swims into our ken. Let us study each man according to his temperament and not insist that he should chime with other men's music. The Beckmesser style of awarding good and bad marks is obsolete. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... admirable taste and a princely fortune, Count d'Orsay spared neither trouble nor expense to render his house the focus of all that was rich and rare; and, with a spirit that does not always animate the possessor of rare works of art, he opened it to the young artists of the day, who were permitted to study in ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... gone again. And something in the way she stood there a few feet beyond, and stared down into his eyes so steadfastly in silence, made him shiver. The moonlight was behind her, but in some odd way he could not focus sight upon her face, although so close. The gleam of eyes he caught, but all the rest seemed white and snowy as though he ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... a bold face and broke the news to us on our arrival; but, contrary to his fears, Mrs. Moulton and I were enchanted. Mademoiselle Wissembourg was not so enthusiastic. A live Communard at such near focus ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... stopped, gazed hard, rubbed his eyes, gazed again, and then said to Jose, "Jose, your eyes are better than mine: what is that in the village?" Jose's eyes were already starting from his head, as if to get a better focus on what he saw. "Padre," he said, almost in a whisper, "I think it is the yellow thing that Pio stole. The sergeant made it open when we went for the package, and it was like that." "Holy Saints!" cried the Father; "it looks like that to me, too, but it cannot ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... when I saw the line rise, and then the wonderful, long, shiny body, instinct with fury, shoot into the air, I yelled the number of the leap, and this was the signal for the camera-workers. They held the cameras close, without trying to focus, facing the fish, and they snapped when I yelled. It was all gloriously exciting. I could never describe that exhibition. I only know that he leaped clear forty-six times, and after a swift, hard hour ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... men, nor did they impose the women's tasks upon them. The view that the women are forced to work by the laziness of the men, and that their heavy and incessant labour is a proof of their degraded position is entirely out of focus. Quite the reverse is the truth. Evidence is not wanting of the great advantage arising to women from their close connection with labour. It was largely their control over the food supply and their position as actual producers which gave them so much influence, and even authority in the mother-age. ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... how sad is the reception which this merciful invitation receives from so many of us! Some of you never hear it at all. Standing in the very focus where the sounds converge, you are deaf, as if a man behind the veil of the falling water of Niagara, on that rocky shelf there, should hear nothing. From every corner of the universe that voice comes; from all the providences and events of our lives ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... diverting natural energy from nutritive processes to hurried growth of the overstimulated brain. The result is a type of child with a puny body and an excitable brain,—the neurotic. The young eye, for example, is too flat (hypermetropic)—made to focus only on objects at a distance. Close application to print, or even to weaving mats or folding bits of paper accurately, causes an overstrain on the eye, which not only results in the chronic condition known as myopia,—short-sightedness,—so common to school children, but which acts unfavorably ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... In a few minutes the cloud passed, and with trembling hands I presented the little disk to the face of the glowing luminary. Quivering with excitement lest a sudden cloud should interpose, a moment passed before I could hold the lens steadily enough to concentrate a burning focus. At length it came. The little thread of smoke curled gracefully upwards from the Heaven-lighted spark, which, a few moments afterwards, diffused with warmth and ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts
... and the axis of the revolving drum carrying the film. The photographing apparatus consists of a shutter, a quartz lens, and a stenopaic slit, 76 by 1.7 mm., between the lens and the sensitized film on the rotary drum. The quartz lens is used because it will focus the ultra-violet rays, which are those ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... object where I told you," Quest replied, "I can see it. I promise you that. There, that's right. Hold it steady. I've got the focus of it now. Say, French, where did you say ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... no longer remain as she had been. Here, below her was the face, the mountain face, of her rival. Unless she became one with his plans and lived in the same blazing light with them, she would be a separate landscape, a strain upon his focus. ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... would focus the attention of the country upon the action and would give undue weight to what has been done by the active ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... The conception of unchanging spatial relations in the fundamental lines of perspective vision receives constant reinforcement from the facts of daily experience. The influence of the above-described changes in experimental conditions is mediated through their effect upon the location of the focus of the limiting and perspective lines of vision. As the plane of the upper boundaries of the enclosing walls was elevated and depressed the intersection of the two systems of lines was correspondingly raised and lowered, and in dependence upon the location of this imaginary ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... derived a new importance from the ruin of the other Calvinist cities, was, then, the focus of dissensions and ambition. Moreover, its port was the last in the kingdom of France open to the English, and by closing it against England, our eternal enemy, the cardinal completed the work of Joan of Arc and ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... principles which are here treated have not been put into one book. They may be found in several. These essentials I have repeated many times with the hope that they will be fixed by this frequent repetition. The purpose has been to focus the attention upon these, to apply them in the construction of the different forms of discourse, paragraphs, and sentences, and to repeat them until it is impossible for a student to forget them. If the book fulfils this purpose, ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... questions were the great political topic of this administration. When California applied for admission to the Union as a free State, all these subjects were brought to a focus. A hot debate ensued, and for awhile it seemed as if the Union would be rent asunder. At this terrible crisis Henry Clay, the "Great Pacificator," came forward, and, with his wonderful eloquence, urged the necessity of mutual compromise and forbearance. Daniel Webster warmly ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... its precipitous north face on the Haarlem and Spuyten Duyvil to high-water mark at the foot of Whitehall Street. Its natural system of drainage might be roughly illustrated by radii drawn to the circumference of a very eccentric ellipse from its northern focus. Wherever the waste of the entire island may descend, it is met by a seaward tide twice in the twenty-four hours. On the East River side the velocity of this tide in the narrow passages is rather that of a mill-stream than of the entrance to a sound. Though less apparent, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... immunity which is due to long-continued environment or to protracted heredity. The negroes in the South have, by a lifelong proximity and struggle with the disease, acquired a practical freedom from typhoid fever, although it remains with the negro sufficiently to form a focus for the spread of the disease among others not equally immune. Creoles in yellow-fever districts have a natural immunity from the hookworm disease, although probably the class are responsible for its generous transmission to the poor whites with whom they associate. Racial immunity ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... entertainment is the one to grasp. There will be an effect of these two people going to and fro in front of the circle of a rather defective lantern, which sometimes jams and sometimes gets out of focus, but which does occasionally succeed in displaying on a screen a momentary moving picture of Utopian conditions. Occasionally the picture goes out altogether, the Voice argues and argues, and the footlights return, and then you ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... I, I discussed the task of the hero in general, here I propose to focus attention upon his host, and while in a measure traversing the same ground, to do so with a view to determining the true character ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... structure is sufficiently described in all standard physiologies, consists of a visual apparatus designed to bring the images of objects to a clear focus on the retina at the fovea, or area of clearest vision, near the point of ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... irruption succeeded an interval of peace—the calm before the storm. From every part of Spain, the most chivalric and resolute of the Moors, taking advantage of the pause in the contest, flocked to Granada; and that city became the focus of all that paganism in Europe possessed of brave ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... forth to sow or the Samaritan who went down to Jericho. Even, if no member of the despised Samaritan race ever followed in the footsteps of an hypocritical Levite along the rocky road to Jericho and succored a needy human being, the vital truth abides. Not until we cease to focus our gaze on the comparatively unimportant, can we discern the great spiritual messages of ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... her that this girl was married—there seemed nothing of the wife about her. And that she should be the neighbor whom Anne had pictured as a commonplace Four Winds housewife! Anne could not quickly adjust her mental focus to this astonishing change. ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... is the very focus of care and anxiety, so that a funereal dulness often overhangs it; and there, where there is the greatest amount of money, time, and contrivance expended on pleasure—there is least animation of spirits. For one who is pleased, a dozen are chewing the cud of some petty annoyance, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... disputes (see littoral states); Svalbard is the focus of a maritime boundary dispute between ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... that if the size of an object be ascertained, the distance of a lens from that object, and the size of the image depicted in a camera by that lens, a very simple calculation will give the focus of the lens. In compound lenses the matter is complicated by the relative foci of its constituents and their distance apart; but these items, in an ordinary photographic objective, would so slightly affect the result that for all practical purposes ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... grandeur, beauty, or truth according as the quality abides in the seer. In this view Balder or Don Quixote was no more insane than other people. Their eyes bore true witness to what was in their minds, and the sanest eyes can do no more. Their minds were, perhaps, out of focus; but who ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... James Crowley was superintendent and Eldred Polhamus deputy. There were three operators— Chapin, Duvall, and Lucas. A telegraph station was in each precinct—thus making thirty-two, all coming to a focus at head-quarters. These are also divided into five sections—north, south, east, west, and central. The Commissioners, therefore, sitting in the central office, can send messages almost instantaneously to every precinct of the city, and receive immediate ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... Desire became the focus of all eyes and a watchful dumbness settled down upon them like a pall. Frantically she tried to remember her instructions. But never had a light conversational manner seemed more difficult ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... appeal to him. He could criticise the figures of beautiful women and remain ignorant of the impassable abyss between their sphere and his own. Sometimes, he would try to study the faces thus revealed to him, as in the focus of a vision, and to say, "That woman is utterly vain," or again, "There is a doll who has not the sense of an East End flower girl." In a way he despised their ignorance of life and its terrible comedies and tragedies. Little ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... array to receive the august Emperor. From the spectacular standpoint Dresden is the climax of the Napoleonic drama. Surrounded by men who at least bore the style of sovereigns, the Corsican victor stood alone in the focus of monarchical splendor. At his side, and resplendent, not in her own but in his glory, was the daughter of the Caesars, the child of a royal house second to none in antiquity or majesty, his wife, his consort, his defiance to a passing system. Maria Louisa was ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... nautical ephemeris for this day. The morning was cloudy, with rain; but towards noon the weather cleared up, and I had the satisfaction to observe the eclipse with a refracting telescope of forty-six inches focus, and a power of about two hundred. The beginning took place at 1h 12' 37.8" of apparent time, and the end at 3h 36' 11.8". So soon as the observation was concluded, the tents and astronomical instruments were carried on board, the launch was hoisted in, and everything ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... effort of attention, fix my thought on what I am reading, and easily take in its meaning. The act of will, the effort of attention, the intending of the mind on each word and line of the page, just as the eyes are focussed on each word and line, is the power here contemplated. It is the power to focus the consciousness on a given spot, and hold it there Attention is the first and indispensable step in all knowledge. Atten. tion to spiritual things is the first step to ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... thought of the pre-existence and rebirth of the soul will disappear if we do not lose sight of the fact that the soul is a center of consciousness, which is always consciousness somewhere, but which very gradually shifts its focus from plane to plane. Its permanent home is in that body of filmy matter drawn about the ego in the higher levels of the heaven world. From that point it sends energies outward and draws about itself in the lower levels of the ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... observe their costumes and expressions. Some birds have a good deal of expression and a very charming manner while singing—a manner much more to my taste than that of many a prima donna whom I have heard, although my taste may be uncultivated. Focus your glass on that indigo-bird in yonder tree-top. Don't you see him?—the one that is favoring us with such a lively strain, beginning with a repetition of short, sprightly notes. The glass may enable you ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... due to her that Holland House became the focus of all that was brilliant in Europe. In the memoirs of her father - Sydney Smith - Mrs. Austin writes: 'The world has rarely seen, and will rarely, if ever, see again all that was to be found within the walls of Holland House. Genius and merit, in whatever rank of life, became a passport there; ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... bombardment or of what we imagine remains—Reims is or was a typical thirteenth-century building; and, like most thirteenth-century buildings, is or was, to my feeling, of no great artistic significance. That it is a venerable focus of sentiment no one denies; so, I suppose, is the monstrosity of Cologne and the Albert Memorial. I am not concerned with sentiment, but with art. Therefore, I must note that of such artistic value as the ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... cases, the eye focuses the light before it reaches the retina. Such cases are known as nearsightedness and are corrected by having placed in front of the eyes concave lenses of the proper strength. These lenses diverge the rays and make them focus on the retina. In other cases, the eye is not able to focus the rays by the time they reach the retina. In these cases, the eyes need the help of convex lenses of the proper strength to make the focus ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... simply follow the line of least resistance. They want something interesting to read and they know from experience where to go for it. Of course this brings on abuses. Writers use illegitimate methods to arouse interest—appeals perhaps, to unworthy instincts. We need not discuss that here, but simply focus our attention on the fact that writers of fiction always try to be interesting because they must; while writers of history, travel, biography and philosophy do not usually try, because they think it unnecessary. ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... Myrtle Forge from New York with a mingled sense of pleasure and the feeling that his place was unsupportably empty. The loneliness of which he had been increasingly conscious seemed to have its focus in his house. The following morning he walked restlessly down the short, steep descent to the Forge, lying on its swift water diverted from Canary Creek. Unlike a great many iron families of increasing prosperity, the ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... use. When you enter them, seal them tightly and place your feet in the stirrups you will find in them. Grasp the handles which will be before you firmly in your hands. In an instant you will be dissolved into elemental atoms and carried on a beam of force to the receiving focus where you will again be materialized. There is no danger and no pain. It is our usual ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... spirit of literature is unifying; it joins the candle and the star, and by the magic of an image shows that the beauty of the greater is in the less. And, not content with the disclosure of beauty and the bringing together of all things whatever within its focus, it enforces a moral wisdom by the tracing everywhere of cause and effect. It consoles doubly—by the revelation of unsuspected loveliness, and by the proof that our lot is the common lot. It is the supreme cry ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... the Arabella he found Peter Blood alone and very far gone in drink—a condition in which no man ever before remembered to have seen him. As Wolverstone came in, the Captain raised bloodshot eyes to consider him. A moment they sharpened in their gaze as he brought his visitor into focus. Then he laughed, a loose, idiot laugh, that yet somehow ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... occasional active, compassionate woman fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular, compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downwards and inwards, to one common focus. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the 53d Regiment anyway!" declared the vice-chief, having in mind the fact that the staff was fifteen miles to the rear, where it could be at the wire focus. "You will find the roads blocked with the advance. You'll have to ride, you can't go all the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... expression "the objective" or "the military objective" (page 55), when unqualified, ordinarily indicates the mental objective. The term is properly applicable to a physical objective when the context makes the meaning clear. Ordinarily, and always when clarity demands, a tangible focus of effort is herein ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... Jones who first spoke. "But what do all these figures mean?" And Tom observed how the paper shook and rustled in the tremor of excitement that shook his hand. He raised the paper to the focus of his spectacles and began to read ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... process of law. Thereupon a counter-committee was organised for the defence of the man who, like Cromwell, judged that the people preferred their real security to forms, and had presumably saved the white population of Jamaica by striking promptly at the focus of rebellion. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... often said before, we think that a good lens requires no "actinic" focus to find. In a properly constructed lens the chemical and visual foci are identical; and we would ourselves not be troubled with the use of one in which they differed. Our advertising columns will point out to you where such a lens man be procured. We believe, where there is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... remark the notary and the president said a few words that were more or less significant; but the abbe, looking at them slyly, brought their thoughts to a focus by taking a pinch of snuff and saying as he handed round his snuff-box: "Who can do the honors of Saumur for monsieur so ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... the late war. You had a man at the head of your government (alluding to the first Lord Chatham), and your counsellors are men. But it is the curse of France that she is ruled by one who is, in fact, but the agent and organ of valets and strumpets. The Court of France is no longer the focus of the great men of the country, but a band of profligates that have driven away the great. This state of things, however, cannot last long, the reign of the Pompadours must draw to an end, and Frenchmen will one day take a terrible revenge ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... them, it is often likely that each of these groups of men is unable to see clearly the view-point of the other. Here lies our freedom. Here we must either think for ourselves or think with those wiser than ourselves whose opinions seem to us to ring true and to focus for us our ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... thriving, increasing place, of over six thousand inhabitants, solely Chinese, with the exception of a small Kling population, which keeps small shops, lends money, drives gharries and bullock-carts, and washes clothes. This place was the focus of the disturbances in 1873, and the Chinese seem still to need to be held in check, for they are not allowed to go out at night without passes and lanterns. They are miners, except those who keep the innumerable shops which supply the miners, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... we wish to see. The interpretation adopted is still, in a sense, the result of suggestion, but of one particular suggestion which the fancy of the moment determines. Or, to put it another way, the caprice of the moment causes the attention to focus itself in a particular manner, to direct itself specially to certain aspects and ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... all parts of Christendom the central and highest focus of Christian worship and devotion, and the great normal vivifying channel of spiritual renewal and power, has been the sacrament of Holy Communion. It has been celebrated amid great diversities of liturgy and ritual and circumstance, ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... methods have been adopted during the last two decades for the abatement of the liquor nuisance, but it remained for an American woman, under the spur of bitter memories, and a sort heart, to originate a method, at once so bold and radical as to sharply focus public attention upon the utter villainy and lawlessness of the ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... in the Memoir the focus of the Egyptian question changes; attention is centred on the diplomatic questions arising out of ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... fighting men, the Teal sailed again, and their time of arrival was so contrived that dawn of the next morning but one found the little fleet in delightfully calm weather forming a semi-circle from one point of the shore to the other, the focus of its radius being formed by ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... taking his wonted daily obervation of the sun to determine his latitude. Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean's immeasureable burning-glass. The sky looks lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God's ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... Jewish, and heathen writers, that the Temple of Jerusalem was never built again, for as the foundation was about to be laid, fire broke out of the ground accompanied by an earthquake. The same earthquake also destroyed Delphi, "the centre of the earth," and the focus of the religious and ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... part of the Polish nation should retain an independent and separate existence. For this reason, therefore, I consider the existence of Cracow as a state, having been thus secured by general treaty—whatever the complaints the three Powers had made that Cracow was the focus of disturbances; that revolutionary intrigues there found a centre and a means of organization; that there arose from that small state insurrection against the three surrounding Powers; that it was impossible to preserve those Powers from this insurrection: that if these reasons ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... seemed at length compressed to the point of a single battle, which was to decide its fearful issue. With divided sympathies, Europe looked with anxiety to this scene, where the whole strength of the two contending parties was fearfully drawn, as it were, to a focus. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... was saying, "that's the way you set those upper coils. Remember, each one has its own field angle, and you've got to set 'em down to within a tenth of a degree. Otherwise, you'll never get a sharp focus and your spray'll make a real mess." He swept his glance over ...
— Alarm Clock • Everett B. Cole
... rise out of the ground. In the centre of this pavilion I stood alone, happy to have got clear away from those terrible beasts and the gaze of their steadfast eyes. As I stood there, I became conscious of the fact that the nebulous light of the place was concentrating itself into a focus on the columned wall opposite to me. It grew there, became intenser, and then spread, revealing, as it spread, a series of moving pictures that appeared to be scenes actually enacted before me. For the figures in the pictures were living, and they moved before my eyes, though I heard neither ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... to get his train of thought to focus once more on the submarine problem. But for some reason the business with the microphone and the speaker in the next room kept lingering ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... Spain was left to Christianity, to sink down to what she is to-day. 3,000,000 persons are said to have been expelled as Jews, Moors and Moriscoes. The Moors departed,—they who had made the name of Spain glorious, and had spread science and thought through Europe from that focus of light,—they who had welcomed to their cities all who thought, no matter what their creed, and had covered with an equal protection Mahommedan, Christian, ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... a camp-stool by the side of the entrance gate to her house, was looking anxiously around her. Close by stood Ingold, with one eye tightly screwed up, and an old-fashioned telescope in her hand, trying in vain to adjust the focus. ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... give myself some coffee?)" Millner, in his walk around the table to fill his cup, paused a moment to lay an affectionate hand on Draper's shoulder. "Perhaps I know him better, in a sense: outsiders often get a more accurate focus." ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... mates who had stopped for her. Barnabas, slender and handsome in his best suit, advancing with a stern and almost martial air, tried not to see Charlotte Barnard; but it was as if her face were the natural focus for his eyes, which they could not escape. However, Charlotte was not talking to Thomas Payne; he was not even very near her. He was already in the top of a cherry-tree picking busily. Barney saw his trim dark head and his bright blue waistcoat among the ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... instructive in another way. It is not operated by light, at least not by light alone. A certain temperature must be attained, and that temperature suffices in complete darkness. Nevertheless, I find that on exposing to a very concentrated spectrum (collected by a lens of short focus) a slip of paper prepared as above (that is to say, by washing with the mixed solutions, exposure to sunshine, washing and discharging the uniform blue color so induced, as in the last article), its ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois
... "stratification," or arrangement in successive layers; and they do not contain fossils, except in the comparatively rare instances where volcanic ashes have enveloped animals or plants which were living in the sea or on the land in the immediate vicinity of the volcanic focus. The second great division of rocks is that of the Fossiliferous, Aqueous, or Sedimentary Rocks. These are formed at the surface of the earth, and, as implied by one of their names, are invariably deposited in water. ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... policy of the concern. When a man goes sticking his nose into the running of the house, he's apt to get it tweaked, and while he's busy drawing it back out of danger he's going to get his leg pulled, too. You let your wife tend to the housekeeping and you focus on earning money with which she can keep house. Of course, in one way, it's mighty nice of a man to help around the place, but it's been my experience that the fellows who tend to all the small jobs at home never get anything ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... chiefesses and common women without distinction, this king has made the Hawaiian nobility, the present alii say, bastard and dishonored. The chiefs descended from Keawe conceal their origin, and are by no means flattered when reminded of it. From Keawe down, the genealogies become a focus of disputes, and it would be really dangerous for the rash historian who did not spare the susceptibilities of chiefs on ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... claim of the doodwallah to be reckoned among the nowkers. His right is more than doubtful, and I will yield no further. Nevertheless, there is a cluster of petty dependents, a nebula of minor satellites, which have us for the focus of their orbit, and which cannot be left out of a comprehensive account of our system. Whence, for example, is that raucus stridulation which sets every tooth on edge and sends a rheumatic shiver up my spine? "It is only the Kalai-wallah," says the boy, and points to a muscular black ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... passed and paused, as wholly given up to the need, whatever it was, that had brought her there. She only sat and gazed before her, as he himself often sat; but she had placed herself, as he never did, within the focus of the shrine, and she had lost herself, he could easily see, as he would only have liked to do. She was not a wandering alien, keeping back more than she gave, but one of the familiar, the intimate, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... torch on a ledge of rock, tying the spring down by a piece of cord so that the light would focus on the big bowlder. Then, with their pocket-knives as chisels, and stones as mallets, they began their futile attempts to cut away ...
— Frank and Andy Afloat - The Cave on the Island • Vance Barnum
... remained as far asunder as if seas had rolled between them, the great capitals Cuzco and Quito were placed by the high roads of the Incas in immediate correspondence. Intelligence from the numerous provinces was transmitted on the wings of the wind to the Peruvian metropolis, the great focus to which all the lines of communication converged. Not an insurrectionary movement could occur, not an invasion on the remotest frontier, before the tidings were conveyed to the capital, and the imperial armies were on their march across the magnificent ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... gathering, appears to have been the focus of much ritual activity. This suggests that for the Washo the importance of ritual may have increased in proportion to the element of chance inherent in the activity undertaken. Gathering was a surety, assuming of course that there was a harvest to gather. With the wide variety ...
— Washo Religion • James F. Downs
... focussing-glass is placed at precisely the same distance from the lens as the collodionised glass is. To insure this, my practice is to place a piece of ground glass in the dark frame, which is afterwards to receive the collodionised glass, and to obtain the focus of the lens on that; then to put in the proposed plate, and obtain an impression as described by MR. SHADBOLT. In this way I secure myself from what I believe is often a source of fallacy in these experiments, and am sure that I give ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... from day to day it is necessary to stop the headlong progress of experience, and, for an hour, to look back upon the past. Often, before we remember to direct our mind to it, that past is already blurred, and dim. The picture is out of focus, and turning from it in sorrow instantly the flight of our time begins again. This should not be. "There is," says Emerson, "a relationship between the hours of our life and the centuries of time." Let us give history ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... travel at the same rate through space, at the rate of 186,000 miles per second. Then again the common lens, which is so familiar to every one, will prove the same fact by concentrating the rays of light to a focus, and by so doing will produce sufficient heat to burn a piece of paper, or even set fire to wood. If, therefore, the path of a ray of light be that of a straight line, proceeding from the luminous or lighted body, and the path of a ray of heat coincides with the path of a ray ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... destroyed the ships at Syracuse by focusing the image of the sun upon them by means of a concave mirror. The ancient Egyptians were proficient in the art of glass-making, so it is likely that the "burning-glass" was employed by them. Even a crude lens of glass will focus an image of the sun sufficiently well to ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... about Mary Louise unless it might possibly be a certain fine-drawnness. Her eyes, which were brown, had a sort of set focus on the immediate, and there were some fine lines from the corners of her lips to her nose. She was slim and straight, with small hands and feet, and her arms, which were bare to the elbow, might have been soft and round, were it not for a sinuous tension that showed itself in little corded creases ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... approach of summer, sent his younger children thither under the care of their faithful and intelligent nurse; and with Mrs. and Miss Trevanion, and Lilian, set out for Saratoga, at that season the great focus of fashion. Mrs. Trevanion, entering fully into his designs, had attended to Lilian's equipments for this important campaign, with no less care than to Anna's, and the result equalled their fondest expectations. Lilian was the beauty, the heiress, the belle of ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... thoughts away from aborigines and heat, and tried to focus his mind elsewhere. He didn't understand psionic processes, he thought; but then, nobody did, really, as far as he knew. But ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... conditions on the Canal Zone. It is hoped that the report which this mission will furnish will point out a way whereby the modicum of assistance which the United States may properly lend the Ecuadorian Government may be made effective in ridding the west coast of South America of a focus of contagion to the future commercial current ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... also, in comparatively modern times, when a reigning monarch did not disdain to pick up a painter's pencil, and a whole city mourned an artist's death, and paid honours to his remains; all the rank, wealth, genius, talent, taste, and intelligence of the people were concentrated in one grand focus. Among the states of ancient Greece and modern Italy, the city was in fact the nation; and at Athens, Rome, Venice, and Florence, was collected all of genius, taste, and talent, the people as a body possessed. The mental qualities were thereby rendered more acute, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... to Myrtle Forge from New York with a mingled sense of pleasure and the feeling that his place was unsupportably empty. The loneliness of which he had been increasingly conscious seemed to have its focus in his house. The following morning he walked restlessly down the short, steep descent to the Forge, lying on its swift water diverted from Canary Creek. Unlike a great many iron families of increasing prosperity, the Pennys had not erected ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the heart to be angry. Once some one remembered me, and brought me out a half a tumblerful of the playful, innocuous American cocktail. I drank it, and lo! veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus of conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for a quarter of an hour. I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will not court them. The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much French poetry ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an insuperable barrier around Jerusalem, would become the second cradle of Christianity. Assuredly, Jerusalem must remain forever the capital of the Christian world; nevertheless, the point of departure of the Church of the Gentiles, the primordial focus of Christian missions, was, in truth, Antioch. It was there that for the first time a Christian church was established, freed from the bonds of Judaism; it was there that the great propaganda of the apostolic age was established; it ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... us could have kept the direction except by such an obvious and continuous landmark as the sea to our left. It hardly seemed worth while to focus my mind, but I did it occasionally just by way of testing myself. Schwartz still threw away his gold coins, and once, in one of my rare intervals of looking about me, I saw Denton picking them up. This surprised me mildly, but I was too tired to be very ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... from the century-old custom of writing in parallel columns each theorem and its dual. He has not found that it conduces to sharpness of vision to try to focus his eyes on two things at once. Those who prefer the usual method of procedure can, of course, develop the two sets of theorems side by side; the author has not found this the better plan ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... follows a man's selection and decision as to whom he will marry. Consent to canvass their mutual adaptations implies consent to marry, if all is found satisfactory; yet a final test and consummation now become necessary, both to bring this whole matter to a focus, and allow both to state, and obviate or waive, those objections which must needs exist on both sides; including any improvements ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... which case he would be compelled to retrace his steps, and that at the imminent hazard of being captured. He carried habitually a small dark lantern, and had thought of so disposing of it in the lower branches of this very elm, as to form a focus of it, but hesitated about doing that which might prove a guide to his enemies as well as to himself. If Margery would take charge of this lantern, he could hope to reap its advantages without incurring the hazard of having a light suspended in the tree for any length of time. ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... tourists, as even the post brought by the diligence ended at Taravao, and letters for farther on were carried afoot by the mutoi, or postman-policeman of the adjoining district, who handed on to his contiguous confrere those for more distant confines. But for centuries Tautira was known as a focus of the wise, of priests, sorcerers, and doctors, and, said the knowing Brault, especially of the dancers, and those who, he explained, under ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... diminutive landscape dimly lighted up, the wonder is whether it is all artificial, or whether one is not oneself the victim of some morbid illusion; and if it is not indeed a real country view seen through a distorted vision out of focus, or through the wrong end ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... was also chromatic aberration. He next spoke of the question of optical center of lenses, and said that that was not, as had been hitherto generally supposed, the true place from which to measure the focus of a lens or combination. This place was a point very near the optical center, and was known as the "Gauss" point, from the name of the eminent German mathematician who had investigated and made known its properties, the knowledge of which was of the greatest importance in the construction ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... his train of thought to focus once more on the submarine problem. But for some reason the business with the microphone and the speaker in the next room kept lingering ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... a certain distance from you, if I'm to see you. Now you're within the focus, and your ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... their authority was eventually superseded, and they were compelled to bow to the storm by retiring from their seats of government. One common spirit pervaded the United Provinces of America, though it was more rampant in some colonies than others. The grand focus of rebellion was still at Massachusets Bay, where, towards the close of the year, in the course of predatory hostility, the town of Falmouth was cannonaded and totally destroyed, in revenge for some offence relative to supplies, and on the refusal of its ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Chitta, or Mind Substance. What Modern Science Says. A Living Dynamic Focus. Dynamic Correlate of Thought. Answer to Skeptical Critics. The World of Vibrations. Unchartered Seas of Vibration. The Human Wireless Telegraph Instrument. A Great Scientist's Theory. Human-Electro-Magnetism. ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... purchased of a peddler, and differing in color from its natural mate, perpetually getting out of focus by turning ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... a magic-lantern (which has a perfect focus), another to the pantomime, a third to a celebrated conjuror, a fourth to a Christmas tree ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... selection of limbs and features, but the ebullition of an heated fancy that burst forth; and the fine senses and enlarged understanding of the artist selected the solid matter, which he drew into this glowing focus. ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... employed by the Persians, and the constant reports and tributes sent from every province to the central court of the king, were well calculated to bring to it, as to a focus, the curious lore of the various nations who came in contact with ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear
... in disgust and swung back to the microscope. Then he gave up as his tired eyes refused to focus. "Why don't you ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... to be organist, and Isabella and the Clark make but a feeble quorum. The children have all nice, neat little clasped pray-books, and I have laid out 7s. 8d. in Watts's Hymns for Christmas presents for them. The eldest girl alone holds out; she has been at Boulogne, skirting upon the vast focus of Atheism, and imported bad principles in patois French. But the strongholds are crumbling. N. appears as yet to have but a confused notion of the Atonement. It makes him giddy, he says, to think much about it. But such ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... to the hospital, I tried to focus my mind on Helen's defense, but all the force seemed to have been sapped out of me. I felt weak and ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... father was at the horse-sheds, making ready to go home between services as was his habit, a cold bite being always set out on the kitchen table according to his orders. By means of these clever manoeuvres Patty made herself the focus of attention when the Wilson party came out on the steps, and vouchsafed Mark only a nonchalant nod, airily flinging a little greeting with the nod,—just a "How d'ye do, Mark? Did you have a good ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... right so far, that it is possible by just a touch to convert the noblest sentiment into commonplace. No more than a touch is necessary. The parabolic mirror will reflect the star to a perfect focus. The elliptical mirror, varying from the parabola by less than the breadth of a hair, throws an image which is useless. But Mr. Cardew was far more wrong than he was right. He did not take into account that what his wife said and what she felt might ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... peasant, in its intensive concentration and limitation to a few perfectly simple relations of life has infinite worth—the same worth as the religion and morality of extensive knowledge and of an existence rich in the compass of its relations and actions. This inner focus, this simple region of the claims of subjective freedom, the home of volition, resolution, and action, the abstract sphere of conscience—that which comprises the responsibility and moral value of the individual—remains untouched and is quite shut out from the noisy din of the world's history—including ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... the business of life is transacted. Manhattan Island has something over 2,500,000 inhabitants, and is surrounded by a belt of population, several miles wide, of 12,000,000 more, of which it is the focus, so that the entire city contains more than 14,500,000 souls. The several hundred square miles of land and water forming greater New York are perfectly united by numerous bridges, tunnels, and electric ferries, while the city's great natural advantages have been enhanced and beautified by every ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... ever attain to understand and find his proper place in this Universe, this great sweeping harmonious circle of which nevertheless he feels himself to be the diminutive focus? His senses are absurdly imperfect. His ear cannot catch any music the spheres make; and moreover there are probably neither spheres nor music. His eye is so dull an instrument that (as Blanco White's famous sonnet ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... dinners for two which took place in the private room above the Cafe Dame every Wednesday—and sometimes on Friday. Around the figure of the methodical major—with his conspicuous white hat as a sort of focus—was built up one of the most ingenious schemes of murder with which I have ever come in contact. The ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... title and function, no colors could paint to the imagination anything more venerable. In that light, the mind of an inquirer, subdued by such an awful image as that of the virtue and wisdom of a whole people collected into one focus, would pause and hesitate in condemning things even of the very worst aspect. Instead of blamable, they would appear only mysterious. But no name, no power, no function, no artificial institution whatsoever, can make the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... cautiously up or down, until my attention was arrested by a circular rift or opening in the foliage of a large tree that over-topped its fellows in the distance. In the centre of this rift I perceived a white spot, but could not, at first, distinguish what it was. Adjusting the focus of the telescope, I again looked, and now made it out ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... the least, for there is usually a runt, stayed near the mother and climbed on her back or pulled at her tail. They made a lovely picture as they played, and the wrestling group in the middle seemed the focus of it all at first; but a keener, later look would have rested on the mother, quiet, watchful, not without anxiety, but, above all, with a face full of motherly tenderness. Oh, she was so proud and happy, and she would sit there ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... lonely woman is not life made endurable, even pleasant, by the possession and the love of a devoted dog! The man who would focus the burning glass of science upon the animal, may well mock at such a mission, and speak words contemptuous of the yellow old maid with her yellow ribbons and her yellow dog. Nor would it change his countenance or ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... small apartment previously bespoken. He is in the next street to his own and at his journey's end. He can scarcely trust his good-fortune in having got thither unperceived, recollecting that at one time he was delayed by the throng in the very focus of a lighted lantern, and again there were footsteps that seemed to tread behind his own, distinct from the multitudinous tramp around him, and anon he heard a voice shouting afar and fancied that it called his name. Doubtless ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... reflecting infinite credit upon himself. After a few other remarks the ladies and gentlemen were invited to inspect the library, which for the rest of the evening was the centre of attraction. The coup d'oeil, when once one had fairly entered into this beautifully designed, permanent focus of intellectual wealth, around whose walls were ranged the imperishable memorials of nearly all of man's genius that has been thought worthy of preservation, was striking and memorable. As in the lecture room, those emblems, which are our symbolical as well as actual rallying points in all ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... won't spoil it by coming in now!" called Paul, who was keeping out of the focus of the camera by crouching down behind some bushes. He had heard what Russ said, and had given up his plan of rushing to rescue Ruth. Evidently there ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Snowbound - Or, The Proof on the Film • Laura Lee Hope
... influence of trifles upon the greater events of life is a constant theme of speculation among the pragmatics; no petty detail is overlooked in the possibility of its portentous consequences. Walter Shandy's hyperbolic philosophy turned about such a focus, the exaltation of insignificant trifles into mainsprings of action. ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... the end of the last century, formed a set of independent principalities, which varied in taste, in belief, and in literary tone, that we fail to realise the individuality of the scenes of literary activity. At the end of the last century there was one spot which became the very focus of intellectual life. The court of Karl August at Weimar, insignificant in political importance, was great in the history of the human mind.(706) There were gathered there most of the mighty spirits of the golden ago of ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... up, turned and twisted his lithe body into such a grotesque distortion that he was quite awful to look upon, and left no doubt in the girl's mind as to whom he referred. He brought the Far Hill people into focus, ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... could focus his sight upon them, these "shadows," without any light to cast them, moved in distorted guise there on the deck with a motion that was somehow rhythmical—a great movement as of dance ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... for instance—no great distance back—on the great high-priest of our national school of logic and metaphysics,—he who gathered up its divers rays, and, helping them with light from all other sources of human knowledge, concentrated the whole into one powerful focus. No one could look at the massive brow, the large, full, lustrous eyes, the firm compressed lip, without seeing that the demon of energy was powerful within him, and had it not found work in the conquest of all human learning, must ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... northern prairie and the gaunt school-teacher surrounded by his pupils in the thinning afternoon sunlight became memorable to me. It photographed itself on my mind, not sharply, but softened with a fringing prism of feeling, like a picture taken with what camera-men call a "soft-focus." It touched my heart, in some way, and threatened to bring a choke up ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... Norway was not able to avoid occupation by Germany in World War II. In 1949, neutrality was abandoned and Norway became a member of NATO. Discovery of oil and gas in adjacent waters in the late 1960s boosted Norway's economic fortunes. The current focus is on containing spending on the extensive welfare system and planning for the time when petroleum reserves are depleted. In referenda held in 1972 and 1994, Norway rejected joining ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... engrossed was he with his employment that he did not see me until I was within a few paces of him. When he looked up at me it was as though his eyes returned from some far journey. I felt at first out of focus, unplaced, and only gradually coming into view. In his hand he held a lump of earth containing a thrifty young plant of the purple cone-flower, having several blossoms. He worked at the lump deftly, delicately, so that the earth, pinched, powdered ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... Byfield, and brought it to focus upon one of these peepshow rifts: and lo! at the foot of the shaft, imaged, as it were, far down in a luminous well, a green hillside and three figures standing. A white speck fluttered; and fluttered until the rift closed again. Flora's handkerchief! ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... persons made every effort to be briefed and informed on as many aspects of the provisions of the proposed Code as possible. As stated later by Dr. S. L. Emsweller (a member of the committee, representing U. S. D. A. and the American Society for Horticultural Science), this situation brought into sharp focus the need in this country for a single horticultural organization of organizations that could serve as authorized in matters at the international level. The American Horticultural Council, to which the Northern Nut Growers Association belongs may ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... small pieces. Usually the prices paid for the nuts are not determined, actually, until the crop starts to move. Everybody has an idea what the market price will be for the nuts, but nothing is crystallized or brought to a focus until the first nuts are actually on the market. Then the nuts sold are examined as to quality, giving some idea of the future quality of deliveries that might be made in that section, and then prices can be established. As I say, it's a nutty ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... most logical of thinking beings has a subconscious as well as a conscious mind, and one of the ways of dealing with an insoluble problem is to make the problem disappear. There were only two ways of doing that, and killing the problem's main focus was a little more complicated. That couldn't be done by the subconscious mind; the conscious had to intervene ...
— Lost in Translation • Larry M. Harris
... as dean of the corps, stood in array to receive the august Emperor. From the spectacular standpoint Dresden is the climax of the Napoleonic drama. Surrounded by men who at least bore the style of sovereigns, the Corsican victor stood alone in the focus of monarchical splendor. At his side, and resplendent, not in her own but in his glory, was the daughter of the Caesars, the child of a royal house second to none in antiquity or majesty, his wife, his consort, his defiance to a passing system. Maria Louisa was as haughty as the Western ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... altogether they pointed to no end, they converged on nothing. She was, it grew more and more apparent, a miscellany bound in a body. She was an animated discursiveness. That passion to get all things together into one aristocratic aim, that restraint of purpose, that imperative to focus, which was the structural essential of Benham's spirit, was altogether foreign to ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... Polly tried to focus everything she knew of him, all her fleeting impressions, in one picture—and failed. He had made himself very agreeable, the single time she had met him; but.... There was Richard's opinion of him: Richard did not like him or trust him; he thought him unscrupulous in ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... intelligent. One's own time had not been exempt. Even since 1870 friends by scores had fallen victims to it. Within five-and-twenty years, a new library had grown out of it. Harvard College was a focus of the study; France supported hospitals for it; England published magazines of it. Nothing was easier than to take one's mind in one's hand, and ask one's psychological friends what they made of it, and the more because it mattered so little to either party, since ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... the fashion of young woman who goes to compose the background of life. She raised to the light of the window a face of creamy pallor, with large serious grey eyes, and lips of a gentle and serene composure; but it was not these that redeemed her from being merely negligible and made her the focus of the two men's eyes. It was rather a quality implicit in the whole of her as she sat, feminine and fragile by contrast with even the meager masculinity of Selby, with a suggestion about her, an emanation, of steadfastness and courage as piteous and endearing as the bravery of a lost child. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... attention, fix my thought on what I am reading, and easily take in its meaning. The act of will, the effort of attention, the intending of the mind on each word and line of the page, just as the eyes are focussed on each word and line, is the power here contemplated. It is the power to focus the consciousness on a given spot, and hold it there Attention is the first and indispensable step in all knowledge. Atten. tion to spiritual things is the first ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... her among the people going back to the village. Once she whirled with an inimitable movement, flinging her fingers toward Skag, in a gesture that seemed to focus the eyes of the whole world upon him. (And in that instant, the American men could not have spoken a word—for the richness ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... as wide as the lagoon: so that I was irresistibly reminded of what I had read of nebular convulsions. A thin cloud overspread the area of the reef and the adjacent sea—the dust, as I could not but fancy, of earlier explosions. And a little apart, there was yet another focus of centrifugal and centripetal flight, where, hard by the deafening line of breakers, her sails (all but the tattered topsail) snugly furled down, and the red rag that marks Old England on the seas beating, union down, at the main—the Flying ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... kill me—I did not know, but I had a dim vision of my sorrowing relatives developing the plate to see how it happened, for I pressed the button at the right time. The picture, such as it is, I give as Plate XL, c. I was so calm and cool and collected that I quite forgot to focus the camera. ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... both banks of the St. Lawrence, but chiefly on the northern shore, with the houses grouped into cotes or little villages which almost touched elbows along the banks of the stream. In each of these hamlets the manor-house or home of the seigneur, although not a mansion by any means, was the focus of social life. Sometimes built of timber but more often of stone, with dimensions rarely exceeding twenty feet by forty, it was not much more pretentious than the homes of the more prosperous and thrifty among the seigneur's dependents. Its three or four spacious rooms were, ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... wildly about. Her eyes fell on Caroline and this seemed to bring her into some sort of focus again; the color came back to ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... professional and family selves may be different; they do not always collide. But the various characters that we are in various situations not infrequently do clash. The self whose keynote is ambition or learning may conflict with the self whose focus is love. ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... curio-shops. Jiggle-joggle, jiggle-joggle...! For each pause she was grateful. Whenever Ah Cum (whose normal stride was sufficient to keep him at the side of her chair) pointed out something of interest, she had to strain the cords in her neck to focus her glance upon the object. Supposing the wire should break and her head tumble off her shoulders into the street? The whimsey caused another smile to ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... his assistant a torch in the hand. When I visited the Filipino priest, I was received in a friendly manner by a young girl who, when I offered my hand, thanked me with a bow, saying, "Tengo las sarnas" ("I have the itch"). The malady, which is very common in the Philippines, appears to have its focus in this locality. ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... proportion just mentioned of pupils of this type, the care which should be exercised by the school authorities in the matter of favourable conditions of light, avoidance of visual fatigue, proper distance-adjustments in all visual application as regards focus, symmetry, size of objects, copies, prints, etc., becomes at once sufficiently evident to the thoughtful teacher, as it should be still earlier to the parent. There should be a medical examination, by a competent oculist, ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... where the circumstances of the moment make the epoch such as to focus the life of the ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... said, unconscious that he spoke. At the same instant the stunned eyes found their focus—and found her beside his stirrup, leaning wide from her seat in sweet concern, one gloved hand resting on the pommel of ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... this machine, so as to liberate the force within the compass, say, of this room; but the problem has baffled me. The invisible rays which this machine sends out, and which will penetrate stone, iron, wood, or any other substance, must unite at a focus, and I have not been able to bring that focus nearer me than something over half a mile. Last summer I went to an uninhabited part of Switzerland and there continued my experiments. I blew up at will rocks and boulders on the mountain sides, the distances varying ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... imperative, flighty, irascible and rather foolish little Father, in an ever-increasing degree. "Very coldly received at Court," it is said: ill seen by Walpole and the Powers; being too likely to become a focus of ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... as yet much popular interest in the phenomena. Without Mercia's nullifier, the stars were not visible to ordinary eyes, since the light-rays would take years to reach the Earth. But every astronomer who had access to Mercia's nullifier hastened to focus his telescope on the region where extraordinary events were taking place out in the unfathomable gulf of night. Some terrific force was at work, creating worlds and disturbing the positions of stars within a radius already known to extend billions and trillions of miles from ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... my wardrobe, now allow me to show off the rest of my fortune and stock in trade. Father, you shall have the first peep. Let me put my box on the table, and the light—so. Now, stoop, so—look through that glass, so—and—have you got the right focus? Yes!—To the right, you beholds the gallant 'ero, Lord Nelson, him as lost his harm, a just fallin' in the harms of Capen 'Ardy and Victory.—To the left—but first his lordship is a singin' "England expects every man to do his dooty." ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular, compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downwards and inwards, to one common focus. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... man. The 'View' itself has been in a later edition eclipsed by the later 'History of the English Criminal Law.' In point of style it is perhaps better than its successor, because more concentrated to a single focus. Although I do not profess to be a competent critic of the law, a few words will explain the sense in which I take it to be ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus." EMERSON. ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... once said of man: "Stands he not thereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities?" One day I saw the American army standing "in the centre of immensities, in the conflux of eternities," at the focus of histories. One day I saw the American army in France march in answer to General Pershing's offer to the Allies at the beginning of the big drive, march to its place in history beside its Allies, the English and ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... so as to be such diverse organs of locomotion as the stilt-like leg of a horse, the flipper of a seal, the whale's paddle, and the bat's wing, while among the birds the wing may change into a flipper like that of the penguin, or become reduced to a vestige as in Apteryx. We may focus our attention upon the material likenesses and differences in such a series of locomotory organs, but an inevitable accompaniment of their physical changes in the transformation of species has ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... instance, contains a poem that reads like a parody of Belinda awaking in the first canto of Pope's Rape of the Lock. The author, identified as W. Overb - - ry, presents a realistic morning scene without either the charms and beauties that surround Pope's Belinda or the viciousness and focus of Swift's similar pictures (see pt. 3, ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... overhead, as if the answer might be etched there in the metal. "Since it is built in as an intrinsic part of the ship, I don't know if it can be counted as cargo or not." He brought his gaze down to focus on Mike. "What do you ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... sympathy; they pose as martyrs—refusing food at table, and eating sweets in their room, or stealing down to the larder at night—to the same end. If mild measures fail, then self-mutilation, half-hearted attempts at suicide, and baseless accusations against others are brought into play to focus ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... designation which, besides attributing to our tragedian his conceded general eminence in character and genius, serves also to distinguish him by merit from his younger brother, who wrote very good tragedy—was an illustrious figure at the Hotel de Rambouillet, that focus of the best literary criticism in France. Corneille reading a play of his to the coterie of wits assembled there under the presidency of ladies whose eyes, as in a kind of tournament of letters, rained influence on authors, and ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... terminated in a huge broken rock, with its nearby soda hill. No such ridge appeared, and no high, round hill. Suddenly his gaze became rivetted upon the southern horizon. What was that stretching away, long, and dark, and winding? Surely—surely it was—trees! Again and again he tried to focus his gaze upon that long dark line, but always his lids drew over his stinging eyeballs, and with a half-sobbed curse, he dashed the water from his eyes. At last he saw it—the green of distant timber. "The Missouri—five miles—maybe more. Oh God, if the horses hold out!" Running, ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... in business, Cyrus H. McCormick might be named. The inventor of the reaper and builder of the first American business which covered the world was not a man of extraordinary intellect, wit, or judgment. He had, however, the will and power to focus his attention on a single question until the answer was evolved. Again and again, his biographers tell us, he pursued problems which eluded him far into the night and he was frequently found asleep at his desk the morning following. ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... swung away from the yellow sun and swept its orbits. The dots that were planets came into focus and out again. Hugh McCann didn't even need to count them, nor to calculate their distance from the sun. He knew the system too well to have ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf
... magic. That is because those arts can accomplish their function in the choice and development of some special situation, which lifts or glorifies a character, in itself not poetical. To realise this situation, to define in a chill and empty atmosphere, the focus where rays, in themselves pale and impotent, unite and begin to burn, the artist has to employ the most cunning detail, to complicate and refine upon thought and passion a thousand-fold. The poems of ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... any reason there is immobility of labor, there is always lowering of the wage rate. The trades and general industries for which women are suited are highly localized. They focus in the cities and large towns, and women must seek them there. Great manufactories drain the surrounding country; yet even with these opportunities an analysis of the industrial statistics of the United States by General Walker showed that the women workers of the country made up but seven per ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... magnetic, electric conductor for the magician's will. It directs the flow of his thought and concentrates it upon a given point in space or an object. It is, magically, what the sights of a rifle are to a sportsman. It enables him to focus his powers with exact precision upon the mark against which, or upon which, his will is directed. Apart from this there is no power, per se, in the Wand itself, any more than there is in a lightning conductor ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... (similarly sterile) by its pragmatic treatment of the problem of knowledge. As the views of knowledge, reality and truth imputed to humanism have been those so far most fiercely attacked, it is in regard to these ideas that a sharpening of focus seems most urgently required. I proceed therefore to bring the views which I impute to humanism in these respects into focus ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... Valencia. Farther up is seen the bridge of boats which traverses the water. The principal object of this prospect, however, is the Golden Tower, where the beams of the setting sun seem to be concentrated as in the focus, so that it appears built of pure gold, and probably from that circumstance received the name which it now bears. Cold, cold must the heart be which can remain insensible to the beauties of this magic scene, to ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... confirmed by Christian, Jewish, and heathen writers, that the Temple of Jerusalem was never built again, for as the foundation was about to be laid, fire broke out of the ground accompanied by an earthquake. The same earthquake also destroyed Delphi, "the centre of the earth," and the focus of the religious ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... unclouded splendour and happiness for the woman in whom pity for her lover was soon replaced by a passion as ardent as his own. Fetes and banquets and balls succeeded each other in swift sequence, at all of which Aurora was Queen, the focus of all eyes, and receiving universal homage, won no more by her beauty and her position as the Elector's favourite than by her sweetness and graciousness to the humblest. No mistress of a King was ever more beloved than this daughter ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... 'meaning,' and finally by a deliberate effort of recollection and thought. Tennyson, partly because he was a born poet and partly perhaps because his excessive use of tobacco put his brain occasionally a little out of focus, was extraordinarily accurate in his account of those separate mental states which for most men are merged into one by memory. A song, for instance, in the 'Princess,' describes the succession which I ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... in a disconnected sort of way," he said, evidently trying to focus his thoughts on a problem set by the gods, and which, in consequence, was incapable of logical solution by a mere mortal. "It was a fine night. I felt restless. The four walls of a room were prison-like. I strolled out. I was thinking of you. ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... an absolute God, is the God of the human heart. The writer would suggest that the great outline of the theological struggles of that phase of civilisation and world unity which produced Christianity, was a persistent but unsuccessful attempt to get these two different ideas of God into one focus. It was an attempt to make the God of Nature accessible and the God of the Heart invincible, to bring the former into a conception of love and to vest the latter with the beauty of stars and flowers ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... diaphragm at b, which will serve as a support for an eye-piece micrometer. This last, B, is a scale engraved on glass, and may be purchased of any optical instrument maker, though it may be necessary to send the eye-piece to have it properly fitted. When resting on the diaphragm it is in focus for the upper lens, so that on looking through the microscope, the scale is clearly seen in whatever position the instrument may be as regards the object being looked at. Suppose this to be a small button of gold on a shallow, flat watch-glass, on the stage of the microscope. ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... our legs. The day was full of an intense nervous strain, an entire absorption in the precise present. We promptly forgot a difficulty as soon as we were by it: we had not time to think of those still ahead. All outside the insistence of the moment was blurred and unimportant, like a specialized focus, so I cannot tell you much about the scenery. The only outside impression we received was that the canon floor was slowly rising to ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... reawoke slumbering science with a trumpet-call which frightened the Inquisition out of its senses; Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, Da Vinci, Del Sarto created models of art for all succeeding time. Never was there in any region of the world such a focus of illuminating fire. Never will there live a race that does not own its debt to the great seers and creators ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... again, Mrs. Byrd? I'd like to ask you a few questions," interposed Farraday, who had been turning the pages of Mary's manuscript. "Mac, you be off. I can't focus my mind in the ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... carried into houses which gave then a full view. Mivart's, the retreat of princes, had the bustle of a Bond Street hotel. Ashburnham House was in a state of siege. And Buckingham palace, with its guards, cavalcades, musterings of the multitude, and thundering of brass bands, seemed to be the focus of a national revolution. But it was within the palace that the grand display existed. The gilt candelabra, the gold plate, the maids of honour, all fresh as tares in June; and the ladies in waiting, all Junos and Minervas, all jewelled, and none ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... afternoons in the botany laboratory. There were few students. How she loved to sit on her high stool before the bench, with her pith and her razor and her material, carefully mounting her slides, carefully bringing her microscope into focus, then turning with joy to record her observation, drawing joyfully in her book, if the ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... ancient (Mochura), which Ptolemy places in north lat. 24 30', applied to the whole district in South Midian, and then came to denote the chief place and centre of work. To judge by the extent of the ruins, and the signs of labour, this focus was at Umm el-Karyt (the "Mother of the Villages"), which, as has been shown, is surrounded by a multitude of miner-towns and ateliers. And the produce of the "diggings" would naturally gravitate to El-Bad, the great commercial station upon ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... then proposed that he (the mesmeriser) should place his hand over the card; in short, that the card should be blinded and not the eye. Our reason will be obvious. According to the known laws of vision, viz. the convergence of all the rays of light to a focus in the eye, were the least part of this exposed, vision, though imperfect, of every object within the visual angle, would follow; but, were the object covered, a partial opening would assist vision but little, and only quoad the part exposed. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... his eyes. Stella's keener vision made out a black, indistinct figure moving against the yellow background of a far away sand-ridge, and she stood up, clinging to Moore's seat, to gain a better view. Sikes got the object in focus. ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... was mainly due to her that Holland House became the focus of all that was brilliant in Europe. In the memoirs of her father - Sydney Smith - Mrs. Austin writes: 'The world has rarely seen, and will rarely, if ever, see again all that was to be found within the walls of Holland House. Genius and merit, in whatever ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... eyes went out over the hills to where Monticello brooded over great memories, "he was not a boob. He was so big that little people like us can't focus ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... leadership had been the same. J. G. Holland estimated that not more than one in five of the people in Washington in the winter of 1860-61 were glad to have Lincoln come. He was not far from right. Lamon called the city "a focus ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... emergence of minor constants, the inexorable trend toward Price Factor and then verification, verification, to each his own, with all the subtle and shaded values of the Augment Index brought finally to focus on ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... never fully carried out. They were only intended to make an impression on the outer world and to appease the continually growing body of supporters of the reform party, especially numerous in South China. The south remained, nevertheless, a focus of hostility to the Manchus. After his failure in 1898, K'ang Yo-wei went to Europe, and no longer played any important political part. His place was soon taken by a young Chinese physician who had been living abroad, Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), who ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... of the shocks lasted two seconds; the other, from ten to twelve seconds, accompanied by a rumbling noise. The line of disturbance was from north to south, striking the Mendips, and traversing parts of the shires of Somerset and Gloucester. 'The chief focus of oscillation was at Cheddar, where the hill is said to have waved to and fro during several seconds; and in the alluvial flat or marsh below Cheddar, some houses had the plaster of the ceilings cracked; while in others, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... my glasses and turned them on the store. The door was open, and so was the window. In the gloom of the interior I made out Henriques' legs. He was standing by the counter, and apparently talking to Japp. He moved to shut the door, and came back inside my focus opposite the window. There he stayed for maybe ten minutes, while I hugged my impatience. I would have given a hundred pounds to be snug in my old room with japp thinking ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... questions and receive answers from the figures he saw in the mirror. It was often necessary that the stone should be turned one way and another in different positions, before the person who consulted it gained the right focus; and then the objects to be observed would sometimes shew themselves on the surface of the stone, and sometime in different parts of the room by virtue of the action of the stone. It had also this peculiarity, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... "About that business—" he began desperately; but the poet's soft, heavy hand hovered in mid-air, and Wayne sat down so suddenly that when his eyes recovered their focus the poet ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... must have been like Ellen; her hair was the ashes of such a fire as burned over Ellen's brows, and she had Ellen's short upper lip, though of course she had never been fierce nor a swift runner, and no present eye could guess if she had ever been a focus of romantic love. The aged are terrible—mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which none can tell how tall the flames once were or what ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... of Engelberg lies high, and is little more than a cleft in the huge mass of mountains; a narrow gap where storms gather, and bring themselves into a focus. In the summer thunder-clouds draw together, and fill up the whole valley, while rain falls in torrents, and the streams war and rage along their stony channels. But when Jean Merle returned to it in March, after four months' absence, the valley was covered with snow stretching up to the summits ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... latitude of speech on the part of the acting personages to prevent monotony and to render intellectual scintillations of the compiler comparatively unnecessary. Occasionally, for the sake of sharper focus on the portrait of some leader, Dio will introduce this or that trivial incident and may perhaps feel called upon immediately, under the strictness of his self-imposed regime, ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... deck, with no other object in view than that of giving vent to my excited feelings. Then I went below for the telescope, and spent nearly ten minutes of the utmost impatience in vainly trying to get a focus, and in rubbing the skin nearly off my eyes, before I discovered that having taken off the large glass to examine the phosphoric water with I had omitted to put ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... latter part, the "Royal Society for the improvement of Natural Knowledge" had already become famous, and had acquired a claim upon the veneration of Englishmen, which it has ever since retained, as the principal focus of scientific activity in our islands, and the chief champion of the cause ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... above said, that all great European art is rooted in the thirteenth century; and it seems to me that there is a kind of central year about which we may consider the energy of the middle ages to be gathered; a kind of focus of time which, by what is to my mind a most touching and impressive Divine appointment, has been marked for us by the greatest writer of the middle ages, in the first words he utters; namely, the year 1300, the "mezzo del cammin" of the life ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... First, hypermetropia, or morbidly long sight: in this affection, the organ, instead of being spherical, is too flat from front to back, and is often altogether too small, so that the retina is brought too forward for the focus of the humours; consequently a convex glass is required for clear vision of near objects, and frequently even of distant ones. This state occurs congenitally, or at a very early age, often in several children of the same family, where one of the parents has presented ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... suspense. It was to be the grand realization of my hopes, the utter, the inevitable defeat of the minions of pride, prejudice, caste. Nor would such consummation of hopes affect me only, or those around me. Nay, even I was but the point of "primitive disturbance," whence emanates as if from a focus, from a new origin, prayer, friendly and inimical, to be focused again into realization on one side and discomfiture on the other. My friends, my enemies, centre their hopes on me. I treat them, one with earnest endeavor ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... sir, I was going to," retorted the lieutenant irritably; "but the idiot who uses this glass ought to be turned out of the service for being short-sighted. I shall never get it to the right focus." ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... 10% annually over the past six years. This growth has led to an overheated situation characterized by a tight labor market, strong inflationary pressures, and a rapidly rising current account deficit. Policymakers have stated they will focus attention on slowing inflation. In any event, the economy will remain the envy of the great majority of the world's peoples. GNP: purchasing power equivalent - $273 billion, per capita $6,300; real growth rate 8.7% (1991 est.) Inflation rate (consumer prices): 9.7% (1991) Unemployment rate: ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... statute book has seldom been so barren. Its principal acts were to narrow the county electorate to an oligarchy, to restrict the choice of constituencies to resident knights and burgesses, and to impair its own influence as a focus of public opinion. It was not content with legislative authority; it interfered with an executive which it could hamper but could not control. It was possessed by the inveterate fallacy that freedom and strong government are things incompatible; that the executive is the natural enemy of the Legislature; ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... which Altamont felt himself to be the focus of attention; not obtrusively, but, nonetheless, insistently. However, this was Loudon's field and Altamont preferred not ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... of the rebellion? No, he does not even pretend to do so. "But," says he, "in my travels I was obliged to avoid Fyzabad, upon account of the suspected rebellion there." Another chief-justice would have gone fifty miles about to avoid Lucknow, for everybody knows that Lucknow was the focus and centre of extortion, corruption, and peculation, and that a worse air for the lungs of a chief-justice could not be found in the world. If his lungs wanted the benefit of pure air, he would even have put himself in the focus of a rebellion, to have kept at a distance ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... city and the face slid out of focus; the vision faded like a darkened magic-lantern, and the grayness moved ...
— The Street That Wasn't There • Clifford Donald Simak
... exception of perhaps 6000, who attacked General Moore (ten and a half years later, the Moore of Corunna) when marching on the 26th towards Wexford, had been concentrated; and to this point, therefore, as a focus, had the royal army, 13,000 strong, with a respectable artillery, under the supreme command of General Lake, converged in four separate divisions, about the 19th and 20th of June. The great blow was to be struck on the 21st; and the plan was, that the royal forces, moving to the assault of ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... from Barcelona toward the celebrated mountain of Montserrat, whose hermitages, piled up one above another en amphitheatre, excite the traveller's wonder. Close in its vicinity lay the city of Manresa, the focus of the Catalonian insurrection. The German troops advanced in close column, although surrounded by infuriated multitudes, by whom every straggler was mercilessly butchered. The two regiments, nevertheless, succeeded in making themselves masters of Manresa, where they ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... space. We wish to describe a few of these intricate instruments, and mention several far-reaching discoveries made by their use; beginning with mechanism for the manipulation of light. Optics is based on the accidental discovery that a piece of glass of certain shape will draw light to a focus, forming an image of any object at that point. The next step was in learning that this image can be viewed with a microscope, and magnified; thus came the telescope revealing unheard of suns and galaxies. The first telescopes ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... duty to admire the world's standard, official heroes. But it is wrong to revere them to the exclusion of folk less showy but perhaps no less essential. It is almost as wrong as it would be for the judges at the horse-show to put the dog-cart before the horse and then focus their admiring glances so exclusively upon the vehicle that they forgot the very existence of its ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... outcries of Celich, Heerbrand, and Dieterich, he pondered over the problem in his little Saxon parsonage, until in 1681 he set forth his proofs that comets are heavenly bodies moving in parabolas of which the sun is the focus. Bernouilli arrived at the same conclusion; and, finally, this great series of men and works was closed by the greatest of all, when Newton, in 1686, having taken the data furnished by the comet of 1680, demonstrated that comets are guided in their movements ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... question more and more difficult. The old markets, some of the types of which still exist in various parts of Paris, were built of masonry and wood. They were massive structures into which the air and light penetrated with difficulty, and which consequently formed a dangerous focus of infection for those who occupied them, and for the inhabitants of the neighboring houses. So the introduction of iron into the construction of markets will bring about a genuine revolution whose influence ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... but it stands in the calm, unchanging strength that yonder mountain would maintain, were it surrounded by children shooting against it with arrows. Believe me, I do not fear for the Bible. If all the light of human knowledge were turned upon it in one burning focus, its intrinsic truth would only be revealed more clearly; and if superstition, as in the past, or infidelity, as was the case in France, creates temporary darkness, the moment that, in the light of returning reason, ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... was in 1680 that Newton discovered how to calculate the orbit of a body moving under a central force, and showed that if the force varied as the inverse square of the distance, the orbit would be an ellipse with the centre of force in one focus. The great discovery, which made the writing of his "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" possible, was that the attraction between two spheres is the same as it would be if we supposed each sphere condensed to a point at its centre. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... he fixes his attention on the eyes and the voice. He couldn't give me any very clear description of what he found in the eyes. I couldn't quite make out, anyhow, what he meant, unless it was a sort of meaninglessness, a want of what you might call intellectual focus. ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... laying his hand upon his heart and trying desperately to focus her with an eye that would waver in spite of him, "Sally Ruth, somebody's got to do something for you, and it might as well be me. My God, Sally Ruth, you're settin' like clabber! It's a shame; it's a cryin' shame, for you're a fine woman. I don't mean to scare or flutter you, Sally ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... way there was bred in Taunton a fiercer and more soldierly spirit than is usual in an English country town, and this flame was fanned by the unwearied ministerings of a chosen band of Nonconformist clergymen, amongst whom Joseph Alleine was the most conspicuous. No better focus for a revolt could have been chosen, for no city valued so highly those liberties and that creed which ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... trace in matters really and directly practical. Throughout the whole seventh century the annual public elections to the civil magistracies, especially to the consulship and censorship, formed the real standing question of the day and the focus of political agitation; but it was only in isolated and rare instances that the different candidates represented opposite political principles; ordinarily the question related purely to persons, and it was for the course of affairs a matter of indifference ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... but he is indifferent to accuracy in his sketches of the persons who came into contact, and often into collision, with Gordon. In this he resembles those French painters, such as Bastien Lepage, who focus their eye on one portion of their canvas, and work that up to a high perfection, while leaving the rest of the picture misty and vague. Even in that case the subordinate figures, if subdued in fogginess, should not be falsely drawn, but Mr. Strachey, intent upon the violent portrait ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... was carried by 236 votes to 24.[616] The Social-Democratic Federation resolved: "That this Conference declares that the time has arrived when equal rights of citizenship be extended to all women and men of full age; urges all members to take advantage of the present suffrage agitation to focus public opinion upon the only logical solution of the question, viz. the abolition of existing franchise qualifications and the establishment of universal adult suffrage; and calls upon them actively to work for this practical measure of reform." This resolution was carried by ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... time—the only thing, that is, that I wanted to do. It seemed like I couldn't get away fast enough." It was brazen of him, she thought, to treat it all so coolly. "And out here," he added thoughtfully, "I could get the proper focus on Myrt—which ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... Princeton University Library, while helpful in tracing the Urban League's contribution to the Navy's integration policy, lack the focus and comprehensiveness of the Forrestal Papers in the National Archives' Office of the Secretary of the Navy file. Another collection of particular interest for the naval aspects of the story is the Dennis ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... think the importance of the idea is, that once stated on paper, there is no difficulty in keeping it up. That it presents an odd, unsubstantial, whimsical, new thing: a sort of previously unthought-of Power going about. That it will concentrate into one focus all that is done in the paper. That it sets up a creature which isn't the Spectator, and isn't Isaac Bickerstaff, and isn't anything of that kind: but in which people will be perfectly willing to believe, and which is just mysterious and quaint enough to have a sort of charm for their ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... hundred and seventy-one pictures of different phases of range life, not counting as many that were over-exposed or under-exposed or out of focus. He had six unfinished stories, in each of which the heroine had big, blue-gray eyes and crimply hair, and the title and bare skeleton of a seventh, in which the same sort of eyes and hair would probably develop later. He had proposed to Mona three ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... wish to be inspired about. Let us say I am writing about the humble heroisms; for ten minutes before I go into the trance I think of nothing but orphans supporting their little brothers and sisters, of dull work well and patiently done, and I focus my mind on such great philosophical truths as the purification and uplifting of the soul by suffering, and the alchemical transformation of leaden evil into golden good." (Denis again hung up his little festoon of quotation marks.) "Then I pop off. Two or ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... all my heart. But it's coming to a focus soon, Hannah. Be patient and it may end better than ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... have told me the same thing. There the army begins to pour into the funnel, so to speak, that leads to France and the front. There all sorts of lines are brought together, all sorts of scattered activities come to a focus. There is ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... rock began to shake in an alarming way. Only it must not be forgotten that the significance of Jerusalem to Isaiah did not arise from the temple of Solomon, but from the fact that it was the city of David and the focus of his kingdom, the central point, not of the cultus, but of the sovereignty of Jehovah over His people. The holy mount was to him the entire city as a political unity, with its citizens, councillors, and judges (xi.9); his faith in the sure foundation on which Zion rested was nothing ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... gallery two quietly dressed young, women, one of them with her arm in a sling, leaned forward breathlessly and waited Laska's eyes glowed with deep fire. She was living her hour of hours, and the man who stood with such quiet courage the focus of that roar of rage ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... the compass, say, of this room; but the problem has baffled me. The invisible rays which this machine sends out, and which will penetrate stone, iron, wood, or any other substance, must unite at a focus, and I have not been able to bring that focus nearer me than something over half a mile. Last summer I went to an uninhabited part of Switzerland and there continued my experiments. I blew up at will rocks and boulders ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... in its ranks, and the white devotees of the game outnumber the colored five to one. Among the patrons of the policy-shops which, despite police raids and surveillance, still flourish in the district, of which the Post Office may be considered the focus, may be seen lawyers, journalists, advertising agents, book-keepers, mechanics, liquor-dealers, bar-tenders, peddlers, insurance agents, etc. Gamblers, as a class, are very superstitious, and the white policy-player is hardly less so than his colored brother. ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... We want to make the sun's rays converge to a common focus, and ice will do as much good ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... types: refractors and reflectors. A refracting telescope consists of an object-glass composed of two or more lenses, mounted at the upper end of a tube, which is pointed at the celestial object. The light, after passing through the lenses, is brought to a focus at the lower end of the tube, where the image is examined visually with an eyepiece, or photographed upon a sensitive plate. The largest instruments of this type are the 36-inch Lick telescope and the 40-inch ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... lines of their written words; it is a History; not alone of the American Negro on the "tented field"; the bloody trenches of France and Belgium, it is also a History and an arraignment, a warning and a prophecy, looking backwards and forward, the Negro being the objective focus, ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... diplomatists that the proceedings of the Poles was a violation of the treaty of Vienna, and that it was necessary to the integrity and peace of the Austrian empire that Cracow should be no longer a focus of rebellion. The Western governments satisfied themselves with protests, and the last green spot of Polish independence had its life stamped out by the foot ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... rational one. Let us suppose this exclamation: "It is admirable!" Some say it starting from the shoulder, others from the chest, others from the abdominal focus. These are three very distinct modes. There is more intelligence when the movement is from the thoracic centre. This concerns the honor, ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... a good-natured way of showing her interest in anything that her husband might happen to be talking about. But when he answered, "Anthony March," she came into focus directly. ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... picturesquely set forth in Emerson's "Journal." The War had unrolled a map of the Union, he said, and hung it in every man's house. There was a universal shifting of attention, if not always from the province or section to the image of the nation itself, at least a shift of focus from one section to another. The clash of arms had meant many other things besides the triumph of Union and the freedom of the slaves. It had brought men from every state into rude jostling contact with one another and had developed a new social and human curiosity. It may serve as another illustration ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... down from the galleries of the House of Representatives. The immense area below is supplied with two hundred and fifty-three seats, with desks arranged in semi-circular rows, having a point in front of the Speaker's desk as a focus. On the right of the spectator, as he looks from the gallery in front of the Speaker, is the Republican side of the House. But this prosperous organization has grown so rapidly since its birth, ten years ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... locality, and paid from local funds. None of these can be said to be matters of local, as distinguished from national importance. It would not be a matter personally indifferent to the rest of the country if any part of it became a nest of robbers or a focus of demoralization, owing to the maladministration of its police; or if, through the bad regulations of its jail, the punishment which the courts of justice intended to inflict on the criminals confined therein (who might have come from, or committed their offenses in, any other district) might ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... been the scholarly activity displayed and the fertility resulting, that it seems both desirable and timely to focus, as it were, the array of facts connected with the religions of the ancient world in such a manner that the summary resulting may serve as the point of departure for ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... with the greatest refinement of design and execution, and the aid of sculpture, both in relief and in the round, was invoked to give splendor and significance to the monument. The statue of the deity was the focus of internal interest, while externally, groups of statues representing the Olympian deities or the mythical exploits of gods, demigods, and heroes, adorned the gables. Relief carvings in the friezes and metopes commemorated the favorite national myths. ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... come to see the duel: and how strange is the fact, that as much as human nature is prone to shudder at death under the gentlest circumstances, yet men will congregate to be its witnesses when violence aggravates the calamity! A public execution or a duel is a focus where burning curiosity concentrates; in the latter case, Ireland bears the palm for a crowd; in the former, the annals of the Old Bailey can amply testify. Ireland has its own interest, too, in a place of execution, but not in the same degree as England. They have been too used to hanging in ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... people from their homes, submerges farmlands, and squanders economic resources. Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC) - represents the 145,000 Inuits of Russia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland in international environmental issues; a General Assembly convenes every three years to determine the focus of the ICC; the most current concerns are long-range transport of pollutants, sustainable development, and climate change. metallurgical plants - industries which specialize in the science, technology, and processing of metals; ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... sunlight as it falls in a flood through the window upon our desk. This diffuse sunlight will brighten the desk top and slightly increase its temperature, but no striking effects are seen. But now take this same amount of sun energy and, passing it through a lens, focus it on a small spot on the desk top—and the wood bursts almost at once into flame. What diffuse energy coming from the sun could never do, concentrated energy easily and quickly accomplished. Attention is to the mind's energy what the lens is to the sun's energy. It gathers the mental power into ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... business, or goes to sleep while this unseen judge weighs and balances, collects related facts, looks first at one side of the question and then at the other, and finally sends up into consciousness a decision full of conviction, a decision that has been formulated so far from the focus of attention that it seems to be something ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... as the six yoked mules dragged the carcass of the bull away. She was placidly putting up her book, the unmoved focus of a hundred eager and curious eyes. She smiled slightly as she saw me. "I was just telling Mr. Briggs what an extraordinary creature it was, and how you knew him. He must have had great experience to do that sort of thing so cleverly and safely. ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... being connected with some more central body of water. Having however gained a position so much higher to the north, and almost on the same meridian, and having crossed so remarkable a feature as the Stony Desert (which, as I suppose, was once the focus of a mighty current, to judge from its direction passing to the westward), I no longer encouraged hopes which, if realized, would have been of great advantage to me, or regretted the circumstances by which I was prevented from more fully examining the north-east and ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... speck moving on a distant spur of the mountain? The atmosphere was deceptive, but surely it was some animal approaching in his direction. He had up till then forgotten his binoculars, but he was now wide awake and, looking first to his rifle, he got out his glasses and twisted them into focus upon the moving object in the distance. A startled exclamation rose to his lips as the field-glasses covered the moving spot; it was a man. Yes running, stumbling, crouching and at times almost crawling the object which he saw was ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... nation's focus for a morning, adjusting it one way or the other. A President can set the focus for four years. But only a book can set the focus for a nation's next hundred years so that it can act intelligently and steadfastly on its main line from week to week ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... hatchets, had been despatched to the various Indian tribes of the region, and wherever these emblems of butchery had been accepted the savage hordes were gathering, and around their bale-fires in the midnight pantomimes of murder were concentrating their excitable natures into a burning focus which would light their path to ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... cost and sacrifice for the accommodation of all travelers. Each one of you who reaches the lower end of this valley should take the Mountain Trolley and spend a season at those schools. They occupy some of the grandest buildings in the world. Focus your glasses and behold ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... and Bernhardi. Bourdon (67) thinks Germany is jealous of the culture and the glory and the political and literary prestige of France. Collier (68) says that Germany is forever looking into a mirror rather than out the open window and even sees herself a little out of focus. The seriousness of the Germans, others think, is an indication that ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... is the product of all fine tendencies, is likewise their centre or focus out of which they start again, with some chance of fulfilment;—and we may judge in how many directions Friedrich was willing to expand himself, by the multifarious kinds he was inviting, and negotiating for. Academicians,—and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... back, reluctant, frogless. He entered upon an exhaustive account of the use of frogs for bait, and as he talked he constantly flung stones. Di grew restless. There was, she had found, a certain amount of this to be gone through before Bobby would focus on the personal. At length she was obliged to say, "Like me to-day?" And then he entered upon personal talk with the same zest with which he had ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... completes the evolution of Lincoln as a political thinker. It is his third, his last great landmark. The Peoria speech, which drew to a focus all the implications of his early life, laid the basis of his political significance; the Cooper Union speech, summing up his conflict with Douglas, applied his thinking to the new issue precipitated by John Brown; but in both these he was still predominantly a negative thinker, ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... to focus the attention of the would-be guides upon certain important essentials, the ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... mop was the only bad article on board, and I left it out loose in perfect confidence. Often and often it had evidently been turned over, but on examination it was found supremely bad, worse than the thief's own mop, and not worth stealing. At last, however, and in Cowes, too, the focus of yachting, if not of honesty, my mop was stolen. The man who took it is to be pitied, for, clearly, before he coveted a bad mop, he must have been ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... latter having a deeper swish, deeper and longer drawn-out. Their voices were so high and shrill that the singing of the jungle crickets seemed almost contralto in comparison. Finally, I began to feel myself the focus of one or more of these winged weasels. The swishes became more frequent, the returnings almost doubling on their track. Now and then a small body touched the sheet for an instant, and then, with a soft little tap, a ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... Blood alone and very far gone in drink—a condition in which no man ever before remembered to have seen him. As Wolverstone came in, the Captain raised bloodshot eyes to consider him. A moment they sharpened in their gaze as he brought his visitor into focus. Then he laughed, a loose, idiot laugh, that yet ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... in antiquities without being already trained archaeologists. It is the outcome of a recommendation made by the Archaeological Joint Committee, a body recently established, on the initiative of the British Academy and at the request of the Foreign Office, to focus the knowledge and experience of British scholars and archaeologists and to place it at the disposal of the Government when advice or information is needed upon matters connected with archaeological science. The Committee is composed of representatives of the principal ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... is able, when relaxed, to focus light accurately from objects which are twenty feet or more away and to accommodate itself to objects as near as five inches. An eye is said to be myopic, or short-sighted, when it is unable to focus ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... House. Don't remember what the subject was, but never forget CALDWELL's seething indignation, his righteous anger, his withering wrath. ROBERTSON smiled in affected disregard; but very soon after he found it convenient to withdraw from the focus of CALDWELL's eye, and take refuge on the Scotch Bench. As for CALDWELL, he withdrew his support from Ministers, tore up his ticket of membership as a Unionist, and returned to the Gladstonian fold. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... labor force by replacing foreign expatriate workers with local workers. Oman actively seeks private foreign investors, especially in the industrial, information technology, tourism, and higher education fields. Industrial development plans focus on gas resources, metal manufacturing, petrochemicals, and ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... secondary importance and the mind as everything. Now I am firmly convinced that the mind of man, so far from being a thing apart from the objects that form its environment, is, in fact, nothing else but a mirror or focus upon which objects register their impressions and that all the thinking in the world is done not really by the mind but by the objects that form our thoughts and the reasons, utterly divorced from what we call human reason, that connect together the ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... little wonder that the Browning Palace was for so many years a focus for all who revered and loved the wedded poets, Robert and ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... the capital city a carpenter named Focus. He was a diligent workman, laboring at his trade from early morning till late at night. One year, when the prince's birthday came round, he continued ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... their audiences. Such questions of chance influence of trifles upon the greater events of life is a constant theme of speculation among the pragmatics; no petty detail is overlooked in the possibility of its portentous consequences. Walter Shandy's hyperbolic philosophy turned about such a focus, the exaltation of insignificant trifles into mainsprings of action. Shandy bristles ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... to judge distance is due principally to our possessing two eyes situated in slightly different positions, from which we get two views of objects, and also to the power possessed by the eyes of focussing at different distances, others being out of focus for the time being. In a picture the eyes can only focus at one distance (the distance the eye is from the plane of the picture when you are looking at it), and this is one of the chief causes of the perennial difficulty in painting backgrounds. In nature they are ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... was of the last opinion. I read on. She was in a difficulty; but she did not say what the difficulty was. For one unworthy moment the thought of money entered my mind, to be ejected the next, as the Catherine of old came more and more into the mental focus. Pride was the last thing in which I had found her wanting, and her letter indicated no change in ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... reaching from your finger-tips, from your ears, your eyes, and every portion of your body come to a focus in your brain and carry information to it about the things you taste, see, hear, feel, and smell, so the wires of a telephone system come together at the central station. And as it is necessary for your right hand to communicate with your left through your brain, so it is ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... persons, almost out of focus and talking very interestedly together at one side. They are down in front at one side and their figures are larger than—-why, Billy, they ...
— The Hilltop Boys on the River • Cyril Burleigh
... Their course has been filled up between the wharf of the water-works and the end of the canal in St. James's-Park; and the Isle of St. Peter's is no longer to be traced. It is singular that such a marsh should have become the focus of the government, jurisprudence, and power, of this great empire! Yet, so it is, the offices of Government, the Houses of Parliament, and the Supreme Courts of Law, stand on the lowest ground in or near the metropolis; the greater part of which is still the swamp ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... principle, that some part of the Polish nation should retain an independent and separate existence. For this reason, therefore, I consider the existence of Cracow as a state, having been thus secured by general treaty—whatever the complaints the three Powers had made that Cracow was the focus of disturbances; that revolutionary intrigues there found a centre and a means of organization; that there arose from that small state insurrection against the three surrounding Powers; that it was impossible to preserve those Powers from this insurrection: that if these ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... the religious experience, that felt communion with a Person which is the clou of the devotional life, we get as it were the link between the extreme apprehensions of transcendence and of immanence, and their expression in the lives of contemplation and of action; and also a focus for that religious-emotion which is the most powerful stimulus to spiritual growth. It is needless to emphasize the splendid use which Christianity has made of this type of experience; nor unfortunately, the exaggerations to which it has led. ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... and autocrat[o]r). From this time there were two Bulgarias—eastern and western. The eastern half was now little more than a Byzantine province, and the western became the centre of national life and the focus of national aspirations. ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... And bade them loose his chain. The boar from that day forward Still followed in her train; Nor ever to the wildwood Attempted to return, But in the focus of Desire ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... Madame as a person to be recognized. Buckingham regarded her as a coquette deserving the cruelest tortures, and De Guiche looked upon her as a divinity; the courtiers as a star whose light might some day become the focus of all favor and power. And yet Louis XIV., a few years previously, had not even condescended to offer his hand to that "ugly girl" for a ballet; and Buckingham had worshipped this coquette "on both knees." De Guiche had once looked upon this divinity ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to power if it had not been that the Greek nation and its emperors were paralysed by political and moral corruption. Justice was dormant in the state, Christianity was torpid in the Church, orthodoxy performed the duties of civil liberty, and the priest became the focus of political opposition. By the middle of the fourteenth century the Othoman Turks had raided Thrace, Macedonia, the islands of the Aegean, plundered the large town of Greece, and advanced to the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... the two had entered one observer's mind, who also notes that the young Prince, greatly interested by all he saw of free England and its rulers, was above all taken with the "perfect domestic happiness which he found pervading the heart, and core, and focus of the greatest empire in the world." Four years later the Prince was again visiting England, a guest of the royal family in its Scottish retreat of Balmoral, where they had just been celebrating with beacon fires and Highland mirth and music the glad news of the fall of Sebastopol. He ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... other in the land. It is an aggregation from all the other portions of the country; it is the result, the precipitate, of the whole. It has no distinctive, individual character of its own; it is a condensation of all the rest, a focus. Thither all the country goes at times. Restless, fitful, changing, yet still the same in its change; like the waves of the sea, that toss and roll and move away, and still the mighty mass is ever there. New York, in its various phases and developments, its crowded and cosmopolitan ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... Philip II had ever thought or planned was thus concentrated as it were into one focus. The moment was come when he could subdue England, become master of the European world, and re-establish the Catholic faith in the form in which he professed it. When the fleet (on the 22nd July 1588) sailed out of Corunna, and the long-meditated, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... In this focus of decaying vegetation, nothing is so much to be dreaded as inactivity. We had, therefore, to find what exercise and amusement we could, when hunting was not required, in peering about in the fetid swamps; to have gone mooning about, in listless idleness, would have ensured fever in its worst ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... piety, good-nature, and good-humor of the people of England, from the dreadful pestilence which, beginning in France, threatens to lay waste the whole moral and in a great degree the whole physical world, having done both in the focus of its ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... knees, at the window, and prayed for strength, wisdom, and courage. She could realise absolutely nothing. She had thought so much and so continuously, that all mental vision was out of focus and had become a blur. Even his dear face had faded and was hidden from her when she frantically strove to recall it to her mental view. Only the actual fact remained clear, that in a few short minutes she would be taken to the room where ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... beings. Sometimes I felt myself touched, but not by them; invisible hands touched me. Once I felt the clutch as of cold soft fingers at my throat. I was still equally conscious that if I gave way to fear I should be in bodily peril; and I concentrated all my faculties in the single focus of resisting, stubborn will. And I turned my sight from the Shadow—above all, from those strange serpent eyes—eyes that had now become distinctly visible. For there, though in nought else round me, I was aware that there was a WILL, and a will of intense, creative, ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... by the Lares and Penates consecrated by Adrian. Now and then for purposes of airing and dusting, she entered the awful room—neither servants nor friends were allowed to cross the threshold; but otherwise it was always locked and the key lay in her jewel case. Adrian was the focus of her being. She put heavy tasks on Jaffery. There was to be a fitting monument on Adrian's grave, over which she kept him busy. In her blind perversity she counted on his cooeperation. It was he who carried ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... be a burning-glass That diligence to worship may succeed, That I may catch God's glories as they pass, And focus to ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... by Christian, Jewish, and heathen writers, that the Temple of Jerusalem was never built again, for as the foundation was about to be laid, fire broke out of the ground accompanied by an earthquake. The same earthquake also destroyed Delphi, "the centre of the earth," and the focus of the religious and ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... knowing why or wherefore, she was vaguely conscious that in some way she was different from what she was before she came to Carver House, and she also knew that things would never be just as they were before. Somehow or other the focus had changed, a corner had ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... not mad, most noble Festus! but in sober sadness I have suffered this day more bodily pain than I had before a conception of. My right cheek has certainly been placed with admirable exactness under the focus of some invisible burning-glass, which concentrated all the rays of a Tartarean sun. My medical attendant decides it to be altogether nervous, and that it originates either in severe ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... previous, when he had been working on a number of valuable inventions, unscrupulous men had tried to steal his ideas and models. To prevent this Tom had arranged a system of burglar alarms, and had also fitted up a wizard camera that would take moving pictures of anyone coming within its focus. The camera could be set to work at night, in connection with ...
— Tom Swift and his Photo Telephone • Victor Appleton
... the kissing made it almost an insult to the Janseniuses to identify with Henrietta the person he had seen. Jane suggested dragging the canal, but was silenced by an indignant "sh-sh-sh," accompanied by apprehensive and sympathetic glances at the bereaved parents. She was displaced from the focus of attention by the appearance of the two policemen who had been sent to the chalet. Smilash was between them, apparently a prisoner. At a distance, he seemed to have suffered some frightful injury to his head, but when he was brought into the midst of the company it appeared that ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... warmer winter climate, and the ruby-crown's chief distinguishing characteristics are told. These rather confusing relatives would be less puzzling if it were the habit of either to keep quiet long enough to focus the opera-glasses on their crowns, which it only rarely is while some particularly promising haunt of insects that lurk beneath the rough bark of the evergreens has to be thoroughly explored. At all other times ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... stood at the door and flashed on his electric torch long enough for the photographer to get the focus. Although it was less than five seconds that he stood with his back only a foot from the door from which Cummings and Gibson were to emerge, John's imagination created a terrible fear that they would come upon him in the helpless ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... as the lagoon: so that I was irresistibly reminded of what I had read of nebular convulsions. A thin cloud overspread the area of the reef and the adjacent sea—the dust, as I could not but fancy, of earlier explosions. And, a little apart, there was yet another focus of centrifugal and centripetal flight, where, hard by the deafening line of breakers, her sails (all but the tattered topsail) snugly furled down, and the red rag that marks Old England on the seas beating, union down, at the main—the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the officer commanding, so that practically nobody was hurt on either side. One force or the other would surrender after being caught in an impossible situation. Not any more. These days, they want blood. Plenty of blood. And they want the Telly cameras to focus right into ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... moment. I have succeeded. Tomorrow I shall bring to you the fact and the substance. I have lifted up the curtain and flooded it with the light of day. You shall have the fact for your senses. Tomorrow I shall explain it all. I shall deliver my greatest lecture; in which my whole Me has come to a focus. It is not spiritualism nor sophistry. It is concrete fact and common sense. The subject of my lecture tomorrow will ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... viewed, minute transparent specks, scarcely bigger than a pin's point. When the picture is backed with black lacquer, you have consequently small black spots, which deform the positive, especially when viewed through a lens of short focus. A friend of mine {452} cures this defect very easily. After having applied the amber varnish, he stops out the spots with a little oil-paint that matches the lights of the picture; of course the paint is put upon the varnished side of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... voice recalled her to the game, and she made an effort to focus her attention on the cards. But it was quite useless. Her play grew wilder and more erratic with each hand that was dealt, until at last a good no-trump call, completely thrown away by her disastrous tactics, brought the rubber to ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... before a clearance is made, for the oxyhydrogen charge has such terrible force that it completely pulverizes the rock, scooping out, even in granite, a deep wide pit of parabolic section of which the spot where the charge was is the focus. The dust is blown out in a cloud ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... Polaris," reported the traffic officer, his face in focus on the teleceiver screen. "Your orbit has been cleared for blast-off. Orbit number 3847—repeat, 3847—raise ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell
... cameras was invented. One consisted of a film-feeding mechanism which moves the film step by step in the focus of a single lens, the duration of exposure being from twenty to twenty-five times as great as that necessary to move an unexposed portion of the film into position. No shutter was employed. As time passed many other improvements were made. An ingenious Frenchman ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... came in contact. He was strong, self-contained and deliberate in speech, and having been an industrious student and an acute thinker all his life, his opinions always commanded attention and respect. It so happened that his services brought him into the very focus of events on more than one occasion. It so happened also that I was more or less intimate with him to the time of his death, from the date of my entry into the Military Academy, where I had the good fortune ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... nest. Why, she's half killing herself in all kinds of places and weather to teach people to love and protect the birds. She's that plum careful of them that Jim's wife says she has Jim a standin' like a big fool holding an ombrelly over them when they are young and tender until she gets a focus, whatever that is. Jim says there ain't a bird on his place that don't actually seem to like having her around after she has wheedled them a few days, and the pictures she takes nobody would ever believe who ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... to a focus"; it describes a "looped orbit round the sun." The eclipse of the sun is thus explained: "At the time of eclipses, the image is more or less so directly before or behind the earth that, in the case of new moon, bright rays of the sun fall and bear upon the spot where the figure of the earth ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... reason there is immobility of labor, there is always lowering of the wage rate. The trades and general industries for which women are suited are highly localized. They focus in the cities and large towns, and women must seek them there. Great manufactories drain the surrounding country; yet even with these opportunities an analysis of the industrial statistics of the United States by General Walker showed that the women workers of the country made up but seven per cent ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... at the times as they are, and see how the business of life is transacted. Manhattan Island has something over 2,500,000 inhabitants, and is surrounded by a belt of population, several miles wide, of 12,000,000 more, of which it is the focus, so that the entire city contains more than 14,500,000 souls. The several hundred square miles of land and water forming greater New York are perfectly united by numerous bridges, tunnels, and electric ferries, while the ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... absorption in the precise present. We promptly forgot a difficulty as soon as we were by it: we had not time to think of those still ahead. All outside the insistence of the moment was blurred and unimportant, like a specialized focus, so I cannot tell you much about the scenery. The only outside impression we received was that the canon floor was slowly rising ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... the irritated sportsmen generally beheld a tableau of inverted pocket-flasks, and feats of strength with a rapidly lightening ale-keg. But, although our friends bore the proximity of these city gunners with great patience for a while, an event soon occurred which brought matters to a focus. ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... in, were not contemplated, but they have led to our opening a path into the fine cotton-field in the North. You will see that the discoveries of Burton and Speke confirm mine respecting the form of the continent and its fertility. It is an immense field. I crave the honor of establishing a focus of Christianity in it, but should it not be granted, I will submit as most unworthy. I have written Mr. Venn twice, and from yours I see something is contemplated in Cambridge.... If young men come to this country, they must lay ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... closed off by a road barrier quite some distance away and tightly parked cars testified to the attraction of the expanding grass. Scorning these idle sightseers, I pushed and shoved my way forward to what had now become the focus of all my interests. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... where I told you," Quest replied, "I can see it. I promise you that. There, that's right. Hold it steady. I've got the focus of it now. Say, French, where did you say ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... no more questions, but bent his head to see the last of this wonderful craft. The sight of it, and what he had heard about it, suddenly gave point and focus to his thoughts. He knew at last what it was that had lurked, formless and undesignated, these many days in the background of his dreams. The picture rose in his mind now of Celia as the mistress of a yacht. He could see her reclining in a low easy-chair upon the polished deck, with the big ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... were silent—Trent with the bitter, brooding silence of a man who has battered uselessly against the bars that hem him in, and who at last recognizes that they can never be forced asunder, Herrick trying to focus his vision to that of the man ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... will be seen a wonderful volcanic tract. So vast, in fact, that Professor Johnstrup has termed it the Fire Focus of the North. To the north-east, again, is found a large lake, called 'Myvata,' or 'Midge Lake,' with a volcanic range of mountains which stretch from north to south; the most famous of these are 'Leivhnukr,' and 'Krafla,' ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... memory. Thus, in the very act of knowing anything at all, something greater than the physical object known is present. And Eucken would insist, therefore, that the mental and spiritual are present from the very beginning and bring to a mental focus the impressions of the senses. In the interpretation of Eucken's philosophy several writers [p.49] have missed the author's meaning here. They have, through the ambiguity of the term "spiritual" in English, conceived of "spiritual life" as something entirely different from the mental life. ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... of all is that of the Greyhounds, which evolves in gigantic spirals round a dazzling focus, and then loses itself far off in the recesses of space. Fig. 24 gives a picture ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... Greeks collected into one focus all that they found of beauty in art from many distant sources—Egyptian, Indian, Assyrian—and thus fired their inborn genius, which thenceforth radiated its splendour over the ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... no judge," he said. "To begin with, you cannot focus properly. You have a crooked eye. I have told you ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... lounging: about the square. As I found it impossible to think of rest until the truth or falsehood of my information was settled, I next wandered along the Boulevarde, in the direction of the Faubourg St Antoine, the focus of all the tumults of Paris; but all along this fine avenue was hushed as if a general slumber had fallen over the city. The night was calm, and the air was a delicious substitute for the hot and reeking atmosphere of this populous quarter ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... vicious grinding noise from the walled end of the passage. A moment later a blinding ray of light swung in, to focus upon them. ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... was a thing called a Tourograph, which differs from most other cameras in having the plate-holder on top of the box. The plates are dropped into a groove below, and then moved into focus, after which the cap is removed ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... become not only the capital of Greece, but the center of art and refinement, and, at the same time, of those democratical theories which formed the beau ideal of the Athenian notions of government." Athens became the center and capital of the most polished communities of Greece; she drew into a focus all the Grecian intellect, and she obtained from her dependents the wealth to administer the arts, which universal traffic and intercourse taught her to appreciate. The treasury of the state being placed in the hands of Pericles, he knew no limit to expenditure ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... upon our marriage at once!' Stephen answered, seeing a ray of hope in the very focus of her remorse. 'I hope he may, even if we had still to part till I am ready for you, as ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... devastated did not exceed twenty yards at most. One other tree, yet fixed in the soil, presented an awful example of the might of the tornado. It was a chestnut of the largest size, the trunk near the base being seven or eight feet in circumference; it reclined at what seemed to have been the very focus of the whirlwind; its roots yet clung to earth; but, through the resistance thus offered, the tree had been literally twisted round and round, until it was split into laths, the trunk having the appearance of a great bundle of saplings peeled and twined together by the hand of a Titan, as lads ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... from New York with a mingled sense of pleasure and the feeling that his place was unsupportably empty. The loneliness of which he had been increasingly conscious seemed to have its focus in his house. The following morning he walked restlessly down the short, steep descent to the Forge, lying on its swift water diverted from Canary Creek. Unlike a great many iron families of increasing prosperity, the Pennys had not erected ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... was not exactly a Paradise yet, though it is in a fair way of becoming one. It is a spot of some fifty acres reclaimed from the scrubbiest part of Wormwood Scrubbs, and made the focus of a club of working men, of whom I am very proud indeed to be one. Indeed, I do not see why throughout the remainder of this article I should not use the first person plural. I will. Well, then, we secured this spot, and we have got in the first place one of the finest—I believe ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... instantly reminded me of the removal of the obstacle. He was a good deal surprised at my collecting the rays of the sun upon my own hand, supposing that I was callous to the pain, from which he had himself before shrunk; but as I held the glass within the focus distance, no painful sensation was produced; after which he presented me his own arm, and allowed me to burn it as long as I chose to hold the glass, without flinching in the least, which, with greater reason, equally ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... D'Artagnan is, of course, the focus of the Romances. Dumas frequently admitted that D'Artagnan was the man he could never be. In The Vicomte de Bragelonne, the character expands even further. Although his primary symbolic representation is that of the virtue of Loyalty, he is not devoid of other virtues. He has ...
— Dumas Commentary • John Bursey
... enables you to see what is going on in another room. The focus may be altered in range so that the faces of those in the room may be recognized and the act of passing money or signing cheques, for instance, may be detected. The instrument is fashioned somewhat after the cytoscope of ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... Cyrus H. McCormick might be named. The inventor of the reaper and builder of the first American business which covered the world was not a man of extraordinary intellect, wit, or judgment. He had, however, the will and power to focus his attention on a single question until the answer was evolved. Again and again, his biographers tell us, he pursued problems which eluded him far into the night and he was frequently found asleep at his desk the morning following. When roused, ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... French Ministry, beset as they are with difficulties, and holding their offices de die in diem, may think a war the best expedient for occupying the nation and bringing all the restless spirits and unquiet humours into one focus. I have long been of opinion that such mighty armaments and such a nervous state of things cannot end without a good deal of blood-letting. [The Prussians did not support the Dutch, the French did march, and war did not ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... toward maturity his talents begin to focus and his interests to direct themselves toward some special life occupation. The matter of Vocational Guidance is the most vital thing in education to-day, but wisdom in this field is far to seek. Changes in the industrial world are so rapid that books giving ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... managed to get the tube pointed accurately, and then requested the astronomer to focus the lenses so as to bear upon ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... and geology of the region furnish topics of interest, which help to fill up pauses in the intervals of business. By making my office a focus for collecting whatever is new in the unexplored regions, excitement is kept alive, and knowledge in the end promoted. Lewis Saurin Johnston, of Drummond Island, sends me a box of specimens from that locality. This gentleman, who occupies a situation in ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... Worth turned toward the hearth, pushed the cedar logs on it to a focus, and at their leaping blaze lighted the pipe which he took from his pocket. "Lopez," he said, "it strikes me that I am just in time to prevent some infamous plan of Fray Ignatius and my ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... pleased when we see the further subdivision of labor going on, because the quantity of the output is increased thereby, and we apparently are unable to take our attention away from the product long enough to really focus it upon the producer. Theoretically, "the division of labor" makes men more interdependent and human by drawing them together into a unity of purpose. "If a number of people decide to build a road, and one digs, and one brings stones, ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
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