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More "Mechanical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... if his tender for the Slate Company's haulage is approved," Hayes began. "His traction engine is suited for the work and he is prepared to buy a trailer lurry, which we would find useful in the dale. Mechanical transport would be a public advantage ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... consideration of the state of the various sciences, mechanical, physiological (p. 355), and mental (p. 355), that no new difficulties can be suggested hereafter, distinct in kind from the present; nor any unknown kinds of evidence ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... methinks, has fostered and yet feeds Edward's suspicions of thy harmless father. The king chides himself for having suffered poor Warner to depart unscathed, and even recalls the disastrous adventure of the mechanical, and swears that from the first thy father was in treasonable conspiracy with Margaret. Nay, sure I am, that if I dared to wed thee while his anger lasts, he would condemn thee as a sorceress, and give me up to the secret hate of my old foes the Woodvilles. ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... about Drawbaugh is that he was a mechanic in a country village near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was ingenious but not inventive; and loved to display his mechanical skill before the farmers and villagers. He was a subscriber to The Scientific American; and it had become the fixed habit of his life to copy other people's inventions and exhibit them as his own. He was a trailer of inventors. More than forty instances of this imitative habit were shown at ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... of any other existing race. The incisores are thick and round, not, as usual, flattened into edges, but resembling truncated cones; the cuspidati are not pointed, but broad and flat on the masticating surface, like the neighbouring bicuspides. This may be attributable to mechanical attrition, depending on the nature of the food which the teeth are employed in masticating. The upper does not overlap the under jaw, but the teeth meet at their surfaces. This peculiarity of teeth has been noticed by Blumenbach as a characteristic ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... For all general mechanical work, this is the most valuable book for the farmer, blacksmith, carpenter, carriage and wagon building, painting and varnishing trades published. The department on Blacksmithing is based on the various text books by Prof. A. Lungwitz, Director of the Shoeing School of the Royal Veterinary ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... probably borrowed from the Tibetans, prevails among the Shokas. The Tibetans, with a more intense religion than the Shokas, use for this purpose not only the wind but even water to propel their praying machines. Let me explain these simple mechanical contrivances for prayers. One or more rags or pieces of cloth, usually white, but on occasions red or blue, are fastened and hung by one end to a string stretched across a road, a pass, or a path. On crossing a pass for the first time Shokas invariably cut a strip of ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... rights. For the Indian title to 116,349,897 acres acquired since the 4th of March, 1829, the United States have paid $72,560,056 in permanent annuities, lands, reservations for Indians, expenses of removal and subsistence, merchandise, mechanical and agricultural establishments and implements. When the heavy expenses incurred by the United States and the circumstance that so large a portion of the entire territory will be forever unsalable are considered, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... surprised with three rhymes together, to which the reader could not accommodate his voice, did he not obtain notice of the change from the braces of the margins. Surely there is something unskilful in the necessity of such mechanical direction. ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... officers with royal titles and fortified by signs, passwords, and ritual. Some of these orders decorated the faithful with high-sounding degrees. The societies adopted fantastic names such as "The Supreme Mechanical Order of the Sun," "The Knights of St. Crispin," and "The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor," of ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... lance merits most attention, as it is more generally used, and is usually of better mechanical and ornamental workmanship. The shaft is a piece of either palma brava or of kulippa palm, varying from 1.8 to 2.4 meters in length. It has a uniform diameter of about 16 millimeters for a distance equal to one-half of its length from, ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... boys wrote mere mechanical verses, Poe wrote genuine poetry; the boy was a born poet. As a scholar he was ambitious to excel. He was remarkable for self-respect, without haughtiness. He had a sensitive and tender heart and would do anything for a friend. His nature was entirely ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... an hour the Turks ascended this form in turn, stood, bowed, knelt, prostrated themselves in silent prayer, reiteratedly. They prayed very differently from Russian peasants. Their movements were abrupt and mechanical, like steps in a military drill. They were nearer to spiritual death and praying-boxes than any I had ever watched pray before. I felt myself in the presence of a new form of piety. I had crossed the great broad line that separates ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... described and illustrated daily to the public, who pay for seats as in an ordinary theatre, and keep the Urania profitably filled all the year round. Professor Spies is a young man of great mental alertness and mechanical resource. It is the photograph of a hand, his wife's hand, which illustrates, perhaps better than any other illustration in this article, the clear delineation of the bones which can be obtained by the Roentgen rays. In speaking of the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... little city of Roseland with its avenues of palms and magnolias had a boom. Large substantial brick and granite blocks were erected. Very many new and handsome residences were built, besides putting a new appearance on some of the old buildings. The commercial, professional and mechanical classes were all doing well, and living in ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... infirmities of body, continued to carry on the government, and to exercise hunting in all its branches; to teach his workers in gold and artificers of all kinds, his falconers, hawkers, and dog-keepers, to build houses majestic and good, beyond all the precedents of his ancestors, by his new mechanical inventions, to recite the Saxon books, and more especially to learn by heart the Saxon poems, and to make others learn them also; for he alone never desisted from studying, most diligently, to the best of his ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... American citizens. Don't be uneasy—we would not come to this little town. We'd hide somewhere, a long way off, in the north or in the south. I shall be changed by that time, and she will, too, in America. The doctors shall make me some sort of wart on my face—what's the use of their being so mechanical!—or else I'll put out one eye, let my beard grow a yard, and I shall turn gray, fretting for Russia. I dare say they won't recognize us. And if they do, let them send us to Siberia. I don't care. It will show it's our fate. ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... evolution of self-consciousness. Before that time, in the period of SIMPLE consciousness, when the human mind resembled that of the animals, fear indeed existed, but its nature was more that of a mechanical protective instinct. There being no figure or image of SELF in the animal mind, there were correspondingly no figures or images of beings who might threaten or destroy that self. So it was that the imaginative power of fear began with Self-consciousness, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... internal administration of whiskey. Having thus spoken, Mr. Fairley, with great promptitude and infantine simplicity, at once bared two legs of entirely different colors and mutely waited for his daughter to rub them. If Flip did this all unconsciously, and with the mechanical dexterity of previous habit, it was because she did not quite understand the savage eyes and impatient gestures of Lance in his encompassing wig and blanket, and because it helped ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... the crises of his life. For years he had suppressed his soul, in a kind of mechanical despair doing his duty and enduring the rest. Then his soul had been softly enticed from its bondage. Now he was going to break free altogether, to have at least a few days purely for his own joy. This, to a man of his integrity, meant a breaking of bonds, ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... attack, strong earth-works had been hastily thrown up entirely across it, and it had been further protected by a thick, impenetrable mass of abattis, the materials for which were so plentifully furnished by the Virginia woods and in the construction of which the quasi-mechanical army was rapidly efficient. The left was protected by the James River and the terror-inspiring gun-boats. In front the hill sloped gently down to the Charles City and Richmond road, and other points by which the enemy must debouch to ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... system, more perfect than that of any other state, just because no other state has ever regarded war as the final aim and the highest form of state action. She commanded unequalled resources in all the mechanical apparatus of war; she had spared no pains to build up her armament works, which had, indeed, supplied a great part of the world; she had developed all the scientific industries in such a way that their factories could be rapidly and easily turned to war ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... does rather more honour to the author's feelings than his taste. The mechanical part, with regard to numbers and language, is not so perfect as so short a work as this requires; but the pathetic it contains, particularly in the last stanza but one, is ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... class of rhetoricians and orators at Rome in the time of Cicero, who were famous for having made the same mistake. They would do every thing by a fixed and almost mechanical rule, by calculation and measurement. Their sentences were measured, their gestures were measured, their tones were measured; and they framed canons of judgment and taste, by which it was pronounced an affront on the intellectual nature ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... many points: still, I fancy that you and I have much in common. We belong to those who have learnt to 'look upwards'—there goes the ball, up again!—and who find comfort in doing so. Do you know that many men believe that the universe was formed by concurrence of mechanical processes and is still slowly developing, that there is no divinity whose love and power guard, guide and lend grace to the lives ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... early days of western settlement a community was founded in Illinois. It was an agricultural community, but in the midst of it a village grew, which in the course of time became a small city. One of the first settlers was a young farmer with a mechanical turn of mind. He began experimenting to improve the methods of planting grain. The result was the invention of a corn planter, the manufacture of which became one of the chief industries of the growing city, employing hundreds of men and sending machines to all parts of the world. Another ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... should reconnoitre the coast at the head of the Gulf as landing would be easier with every few miles we drew away towards the North. I told him it would be useless to land at any distance from my objective, for the simple reason that I had no transport, mechanical or horse, wheeled or pack, to enable me to support myself further than five or six miles from the Fleet and it would take many weeks and many ships to get it together; however, I ended, I would to-morrow see ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... are not mechanical; from any in which the mind, not the hand, has been the creating power. I saw you very much interested the other day in the Eddystone lighthouse; did it help you to form no opinion of ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... I., already two thousand years old when Constantinople was founded, was reared in the Hippodrome, by order of the great Emperor Theodosius, and some of the bas-reliefs on its pedestal still explain to us the mechanical devices by which it was lifted into position, while in others Theodosius, his wife, his sons, and his colleague sit in solemn state, but, alas! with grievously mutilated countenances. Near it is a spiral column of bronze which, almost till our own day, bore three serpents ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... meeting in the Church Family, in which, once a week, all the members—male and female, young and old—are gathered to overhaul the accounts of the week, and to discuss all the industrial occupations of the family, agricultural and mechanical, as well as housekeeping and every thing relating to their practical life. These weekly meetings are found to give the younger members a greater interest in the society, and they were established because it was thought necessary to make efforts to keep the youth whom they bring up. "We ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... and equipment, machinery and mechanical appliances, woven apparel, knit apparel, footwear, toys and sporting ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... went on, transfusing into his canvas the grandeur and simplicity of the Italian school; still, though he felt palpably within him the creeping advance of the deadliest and surest enemy to fame, he pursued, with an unwearied ardour, the mechanical completion of his task; still, the morning found him bending before the easel, and the night brought to his solitary couch meditation rather than sleep. The fire, the irritability which he had evinced ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... instead of a loom and a heap of guineas, they have had some erudite research, some ingenious project, or some well-knit theory. Strangely Marner's face and figure shrank and bent themselves {161} into a constant mechanical relation to the objects of his life, so that he produced the same sort of impression as a handle or a crooked tube, which has no meaning standing apart. The prominent eyes that used to look trusting and dreamy, now looked as if they had been made to see only one kind of thing that was ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... or the weaker beasts which from Oates's viewpoint would hardly survive the rigours of the winter. Apart from the animals picked for this journey, we had nine beasts left to be taken care of by the little Russian, Anton, and the trusty Lashly, whose mechanical knowledge and practical ability were needed to help get ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... woman who left everything to tend a mother with a six-weeks-old baby! But no. One could not. As Miss Annie Brett smiled at me pointedly, and rubbed her ringed hands, and kept on smiling with her terrific mechanical effusiveness, I lost all my self control; I would have resigned myself to a hundred horrible tomorrows under the omnipotent, inexplicable influence of the private bar. I ejaculated, as though ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... of the representatives of a class that from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical. As the upper strata of society were planed off by war, pestilence, civil slaughter, and assassination, the pressure on the great mass of men (peasants, serfs, unskilled labourers, the so-called "lower classes") was increasingly ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... bequeathed its vivid impressions to the world. Painting on glass, polishing diamonds, the Carillon, lace, and tapestry, were among the inventions which owed their birth to the Netherlands in these ages, when the faculties of mankind sought so many new channels for mechanical development. The discovery of a new world by Columbus and other eminent navigators gave a fresh and powerful impulse to European talent, by affording an immense reservoir for its reward. The town of Antwerp was, during the reign ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... and then a brisk cathartic of Glauber's salt two ounces, and common salts one ounce, dissolved in two wine pints of water, half a pint to be taken every hour till it purges. The worm extends from the stomach to the anus, and the amalgama tears it from the intestine by mechanical pressure, acting upon it the whole way. Electric shocks through the duodenum greatly assists the operation. Large doses of tin in powder. Iron filings in large doses. The powder of fern-root seems to be of no use, as recommended ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... character—the scenes at the boarding-school—all have a distinctness of delineation which approaches reality itself. But when the authoress comes to deal with great passions, and represent morbid characters, we find that she is out of her element. The character of Rochester is the character of a mechanical monster. The authoress has no living idea of the kind of person she attempts to describe. She desires to represent a reckless man, made bad by circumstances, but retaining many marks of a noble character, and she fills his conversation with slang, makes him impudent and lustful, a ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... pitchers' battle; and the game droned along, through inning after inning, with seldom more than three men to bat in each half, while the score board presented a most appropriate double procession of naughts. Spectators, warmly praising that smoothly oiled mechanical process of one, two, three and out, and telling each other that this was a great game, nevertheless yawned and dropped their score cards, and put away their pencils, and looked about the grandstand in ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... certain familiar mechanisms which constitute almost a routine of manipulation for the manufacture of paradoxes. One such mechanical process is the play with the derivatives of words. Thus he reminds us that the journalist is, in the literal and derivative sense, a journalist, while the missionary is an eternalist. Similarly "lunatic," "evolution," "progress," "reform," are etymologically tortured into the ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... your thirty pounds out of the biggest cans—a twenty and a ten. There's your opener," he added, pointing to a rather complicated mechanical can-opener fastened to the bulkhead. "Open everything before you ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... fifty per cent. annually on their whole capital, and yet cannot supply one tenth of the demand for their production. The result of only ten per cent. duties in excluding products from abroad, would give life and impetus to mechanical and manufacturing industry, throughout the entire South. Our people understand these things, and they are not afraid of results, if forced to declare Independence. Indeed I do not see why Northern Republicans should wish ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... favoured by the liberal sentiments of the age, has been eagerly utilized by enterprising managers of businesses in search of the cheapest labour. Not only women, but also children are enabled, owing to the nature of recent mechanical inventions which relieve the physical strain, but increase the monotony of labour, to make themselves useful in factories or home-work. Each year sees a large growth in the ranks of women- workers. Eager to earn each what she can, girls ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... times of which I have spoken, they said, "We can make all men think alike." All the mechanical ingenuity of this earth cannot make two clocks run alike, and how are you going to make millions of people of different quantities and qualities and amount of brain, clad in this living robe of passionate flesh—how are you going to make millions of them think alike? If the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... and efficient. Water is more intimately concerned with life than rock, air higher in the rank of service than water, electric and magnetic agencies more powerful than air; and light, the most delicate, is the supreme magician of all. Just think how much expenditure of mechanical strength is necessary to water a city in the hot summer months. What pumping and tugging and wearisome trudging of horses with the great sprinklers over the tedious pavement! But see by what beautiful and noiseless force Nature waters the world! The sun looks steadily on the ocean, and its beams ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... are concerned. She worked as a domestic and in factories until she was married for the first time at the age of twenty. She had no children by this marriage. It is stated on good authority that she took preventive measures against conception and if pregnant induced abortion by drugs and mechanical measures. At the end of eight years there was a divorce. Just which one of the partners was at fault is impossible to state, but that there was more than mere incompatibility is evident by the reticence of all concerned. Shortly afterward, she married her present husband with whom she has lived ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... violoncello-wood,—30 pipes each. Couplers: swell to great; choir to great; swell to choir; swell to great octaves, swell to great sub-octaves; choir to great sub-octaves; swell octaves; swell to pedal; great to pedal; choir to pedal. Mechanical accessories: swell tremulant, choir tremulant, bellows signal; wind indicator. Pedal movements: three affecting great and pedal stops, three affecting swell and pedal stops; great to pedal reversing pedal; crescendo and full ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy
... of the average six to seven words contained in the Virgilian hexameter for its usage elsewhere in Virgil's works or other Latin authors, would DALY have had to maintain the laborious mechanical process of flipping through these concordances, lexica, and editions each time. Nor would he have had to frequent as often the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at the Johns Hopkins University to consult the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. Instead of devoting countless hours, or the bulk of his research ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... matter, irreligious? Were the old alchemists atheists as well as dreamers in their attempts to transmute earth into gold? Or, to take an instance from force (power)—which stands one step nearer to efficient cause than form—was the attempt to prove that heat, light, electricity, magnetism, and even mechanical power, are variations or transmutations of one force, atheistical in its tendency? The supposed establishment of this view is reckoned as one of the greatest ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... afterwards giving it the requisite hardness by "tempering" it in oil. Many tools used by the gun stockers are to be bought ready made, which will fulfil all the requirements of this tool, but it is so easily made that I consider anyone with the least mechanical ability should be able to make one. The object of this tool is to run in under bones and to cut and drag out pieces of flesh through ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... irksome to have to write on every railway ticket that he delivered. He saw the clumsiness of the method of tearing the bit of paper off the printed sheet as it was wanted, and filling it up with pen and ink. He perceived how much time, trouble, and error might be saved by the process being done in a mechanical way; and it was when he set his foot down on a particular spot on the before mentioned field that the idea struck him how all that he wished might be done by a machine—how tickets might be printed with the names of stations, the class of carriage, the dates of the ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... that must naturally arrest the attention is the singular combination that it presents of an operative with a speculative organization—an art with a science—the technical terms and language of a mechanical profession with the abstruse teachings of a ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... of saints were carved, and innumerable Madonnas painted throughout Italy, in the earlier days of the Christian church, they were either literal transcripts of common life, or mechanical copies or imitations of works furnished from the great store looms of the Asiatic Greeks. There were thousands—nay, tens of thousands of men, who wrote themselves artists, while not one of them had enough of imagination and skill to ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... Psychological or mechanical aids are used to help put the subject in a state of hypnosis. The use of the aids helps increase the suggestibility of the subject toward hypnosis. The two most widely used hypnotic aids are the crystal ball and chain ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... the West," he said, "have advanced step by step, ever upward in the mechanical sciences, we of the East have advanced also step by step ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... of General Jackson as a presidential candidate, now the state of the country in respect of parties, now the merits of "American Writers," which afforded his 'prentice hand the requisite practice in the use of the pen. He had already acquired a perfect knowledge of typesetting and the mechanical makeup of a newspaper. During his apprenticeship he took his first lesson in the art of thinking on his feet in the presence of an audience. The audience to be sure were the members of a debating club, which he had organized. He was very ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... accompanied Linnet on her way to Marjorie's to spend the evening. Marjorie's pale face and mourning dress had touched him deeply. He had taught a class of boys near her class in Sunday school, and had been struck with the dull, mechanical tone in which she had questioned the attentive little ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... kind and agreeable. She shook hands, and hoped you were well; hoped you had had a pleasant journey, hoped you would be happy in College, hoped you would like your rooms; but there was a certain mechanical quality in her voice which betrayed the fact that she had said the same thing over and over again on innumerable occasions, would say it twenty times or more this very afternoon, and that your own personal arrival left ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... implied to produce the spontaneous ease with which Brunnhilde hailed the sun. More astounding even was the fact that this mere learning of notes was but the preliminary to what she called "real work." And when she had got through the mere mechanical part of it, she would have to study. Then when her practice was over, she would indulgently sit with her head in profile against a dark background, and Georgie would suck one end of his brush and bite the other, and wonder whether he would ever produce anything which he could dare to offer ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... afforded an opportunity to every soldier of becoming a general. There is nothing which a leader of genius might not accomplish with such men. He must have regretted, at this recollection of his earlier years, that he ever centred in himself all liberty and intelligence, that he ever created mechanical armies and generals only fit to obey. Bonaparte began the third epoch of the war. The campaign of 1792 had been made on the old system, with dispersed corps, acting separately without abandoning their fixed line. The committee of public ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... when, on the morning of her birthday, having presented her with a purse which he knew she had long coveted, he found himself thanked in a perfunctory and mechanical way. ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... was startled in my fitful, half-mechanical playing by a piercing scream; this was almost immediately followed by a confused noise of sobs and cries, and a running of people to and fro, which seemed, however, to be approaching nearer. I was just going to hurry to the spot whence the noise ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... The walls were crowded with highly-coloured chromos of Hindu gods and badly-painted indecent pictures. A cut-glass chandelier hung from the ceiling, and expensive but ill-assorted European furniture stood about the apartment. French mechanical toys under glass shades ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... soon a new village of respectable proportions sprang into being, and the chemical works were pushed forward with equal celerity. The arrangement of Addiewell Chemical Works is admirably calculated for their purpose. They cover nearly a half of the entire site, the buildings as well as the mechanical appliances being on a gigantic scale. The retort sheds are upwards of 200 yards in length taken together, and each shed contains a double row of retorts. Altogether, there are no less than 354 retorts, capable of distilling more than 3000 tons of shale per week, and producing ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... supplies, what single power could resist him? War with him became a mere mechanical calculation. Among the causes of his elevation, the use he made of the other continental Powers must not be forgotten; whether gained by corruption, treachery, or force, they all became his allies; they were all compelled to assist him ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... domestic objects sometimes bear christian names. We may mention spinning-jenny, and the innumerable meanings of jack. Davit, earlier daviot, is a diminutive of David. Fr. davier, formerly daviet, is used of several mechanical contrivances, including a pick-lock. A kind of davit is called in German Juette, a diminutive of Judith. The implement by which the burglar earns his daily bread is now called a jemmy, but in the ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... foundation; it was also mine: sundry letters in reply to sundry unsuccessful applications written on "thick double laid post," as the advertisements say, I seized upon, and thrust their crumpled forms between the sooty bars of the grate with some wood, the model of a mechanical invention of my own, which had been rejected by a Society, and why, I knew not; I severed limb from limb, and disposed their fragments across and athwart on the letters previously mutilated. How to obtain my coal posed me for a moment; but I recollected that in a geological cabinet under my window, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... that I do not propose to tell them—especially them—why I go. For I am going. I must go! There are reasons I cannot explain." He sighed, and looked wildly at Moya, whose smile was becoming mechanical. "I hate the excuse, but it will have to be said that I go for a change—for my health. My health! Great God! But ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... and obeyed their orders in a mechanical manner, that showed too plainly that his mind was wandering from the scenes about him. He looked helplessly around, and did not appear to realize the situation in which he was so suddenly and ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... wraith, the hall was empty when P. Sybarite entered it. But it echoed with sounds of rowdy revelry from the room in back: mechanical clatter of galled and spavined piano, despondent growling of a broken-winded 'cello, nervous giggling and moaning of an excoriated violin—the three wringing from the score of O You Beautiful Doll an entirely adequate accompaniment ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... newspaper work, being editor of the Charlottesville Morning News and editor on the Baltimore News. In the fall of 1906 he re-entered the University of Virginia as a graduate student. In 1907 he was elected Associate Professor of History and Economics at the Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College and filled that position for two sessions. In 1909 he was made Instructor of History at the University of Virginia and once more matriculated in the Graduate Department of that institution. He is a member of the American Historical Association and the Virginia Historical ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... some of the smaller and slower vessels of the auxiliary fleet, consisted of a microphone, or delicate mechanical ear, carefully guarded by metal discs from accidental damage, and connected to ear-pieces or ordinary telephone receivers by an electric wire which passed through a battery. Where the wire came in contact with the sea water it was heavily insulated ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... a mechanical process. The agitation of the cream dashes the oily globules in the cream against each other, and they remain together and grow larger, until the butter is, what the dairy woman calls, gathered. The butter in the milk, when drawn from the cow, is the ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... too, the old, red-blooded emotions of battle have all been eliminated by the mechanical conditions of modern warfare in which men and women are just so many units, automata. Don't you see? To fight war with its own weapons—that has become the ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... a thorough master of his trade in its more mechanical details, and there were signal instances of his intelligence in the higher things of it which might well have put Mrs. Maxwell to shame for her many hasty judgments of the actor. He was altogether more of a man, more of a mind, than she ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... wore away my spirit; my nerves became irritated by the fretful tinkling of the convent bell; evermore dinging among the mountain echoes; evermore calling me from my repose at night, my pencil by day, to attend to some tedious and mechanical ceremony of devotion. ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... constrained. By multifarious devices we have been endeavoring to dispense with governing; and by very superficial speculations, of laissez-faire, supply-and-demand, &c. &c. to persuade ourselves that it is best so. The Real Captain, unless it be some Captain of mechanical Industry hired by Mammon, where is he in these days? Most likely, in silence, in sad isolation somewhere, in remote obscurity; trying if, in an evil ungoverned time, he cannot at least govern himself. The Real Captain undiscoverable; the Phantasm Captain ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... to play it properly. I know people like Paderewski and—I can only think of Paderewski for the moment, I know that sort of person doesn't think much of the pianola artist; but they are quite wrong about it all. The mechanical agility with the fingers is nothing, the soul is everything. Now you can get the soul, the con molto expressione feeling, just as well in the pianola as in the piano. Of course you have to keep ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... they were anything but first-rate goers it certainly was not because the works could decently complain of want of room. In good sooth they were big enough, and perhaps, as the saying is, ugly enough, to be the most correct of all mechanical performers; in Mr Pinch's eyes, however they were smaller than Geneva ware; and when he saw one very bloated watch announced as a repeater, gifted with the uncommon power of striking every quarter of an hour inside the pocket of its happy owner, he almost wished that he were ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... town, but will be back this evening. After dinner we go round to the government konak and call on the Vali, Hallil Eifaat Pasha, whom Mr. Weakley describes beforehand as a very practical man, fond of mechanical contrivances; and who would never forgive him if he allowed me to leave Sivas with the bicycle without paying him a visit. The usual rigmarole of salaams, cigarettes, coffee, compliments, and questioning are gone through with; the Vali is a jolly-faced, good-natured man, and is evidently ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... DAUGHTER—I hope that the news I announce will give you as much joy as it has already given our dear Roland and me. Sir John, whose heart you doubted, claiming that it was only a mechanical contrivance, manufactured in the workshops at Vaucanson, admits that such an opinion was a just one until the day he saw you; but he maintains that since that day he has a heart, and that that heart ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... a day spent under the influence of a more terrible suspense than that which drank up the strength of this sinking girl during the trial of her lover. Actuated by a burning and restless sense of distraction, she passed from place to place with that mechanical step which marks those who seek for comfort in vain. She retired to her apartment and strove to pray; but the effort was fruitless; the confusion of her mind rendered connection and continuity of thought and language impossible. At one moment she repaired to ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... fled on and on, with only the blind instinct to hide her disgrace. The village was empty of all but the sick and the bed-ridden. There was not an eye on Mauryeen Daly as she fled by the open doors. With a mechanical instinct she turned in at the door of her mother's house. The cool darkness of it after the glare outside was grateful to her. She closed the door and barred it. Then she turned into a room off the kitchen, ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... to hear that. I think that greater good is obtained by not being too much in its immediate sphere. Of course greater mechanical skill is acquired by constant practice, but I know by my own experience that when the soul has reached a certain height of culture, the physical nature becomes subordinate to the spiritual, and is controlled by it, ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... examinations, a change which would involve the appointment of a larger number of inspectors than at present exist. It is all-important that this alteration should be undertaken without delay. The mechanical agglomeration of lifeless snippets of information which characterises the present method is an absurd and antiquated remnant of the bad old times, and the sooner this part of the system is hewn down the better it will be for ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... and seized him, sobbing and clinging to him, and kissing him. He clasped her with his left arm round her body, as if to protect her, but it was a mechanical action. He was not thinking of her. Wild with rage, and uttering hoarse cries, he plunged the broken spear again and again into the depths of the pool, seeking utterly to destroy the enemy that had so lately had him in its grip. Then slowly he came to himself, and wiped his forehead, and ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... rustling in the trees, caused by the freshening night breeze which Tom thought smelt of rain. And again the silent figure veered around with a kind of mechanical precision, the very perfection of clock-work German discipline, as if to give each point of the compass its allotted ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... all the mechanical difficulties had not been overcome. Many evenings had been devoted to discussing, not the form of its screw nor its dimensions, but whether it ought to be put behind, as the Tissandier brothers had done, or before as Captains Krebs and Renard had done. It is unnecessary ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... say without offense that in the course of time the personnel has apparently worked down to the level of vulgarity defined by the ways and means of this modern warfare; which means the level on which runs a familiar acquaintance with large and complex mechanical apparatus, railway and highway transport and power, reenforced concrete, excavations and mud, more particularly mud, concealment and ambush, and unlimited deceit and ferocity. It is not precisely that persons of pedigree and gentle breeding have ceased to enter or seek entrance to employment ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... been some secret mechanical contrivance, all wonders unknown to the ignorant being attributed by ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... intelligence has nothing to do; and which, when they rise up, like an enraged elephant from the jungle, scatter all the conventionalities of our training, and all the smooth and automaton-like operations of our minds to the winds. As I stood there, listening to the dead-level, unimpassioned, mechanical voice of the phonograph, pouring forth those deadly sentences, I realized for the first time what the sunny-haired ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... interval, during which he was busy as Elia, came the period of album verses, which lasted to the end. The impulse to write personal prose, which was quickened in Lamb by the London Magazine in 1820, seems to have taken the place of his old ambition to be a poet. In his later and more mechanical period there were, however, occasional inspirations, as when he wrote the sonnet on "Work," in 1819; on "Leisure," in 1821; the lines in his own Album, in 1827, and, pre-eminently, the poem "On an Infant Dying as Soon ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... simpler garb than that of my guide, but of similar fashion, was standing motionless near the threshold. My guide touched it twice with his staff, and it put itself into a rapid and gliding movement, skimming noiselessly over the floor. Gazing on it, I then saw that it was no living form, but a mechanical automaton. It might be two minutes after it vanished through a doorless opening, half screened by curtains at the other end of the hall, when through the same opening advanced a boy of about twelve years old, with features closely resembling those of my guide, so that they ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... life, aid and sympathy, on account of the common participation in human frailty and folly. This observation, however, puts aid and sympathy in the field of private and personal relations, under the regulation of reason and conscience, and gives no ground for mechanical and impersonal schemes. ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... manifestavit et ostendit veritatem et incorruptionem donavit"; III. 16. 9: III. 18. 1-7 and many other passages), that is, to regard Christ as having performed a work. Secondly, alongside of the deification of Adam's children, viewed as a mechanical result of the incarnation, he placed the other (apologetic) thought, viz., that Christ, as the teacher, imparts complete knowledge, that he has restored, i.e., strengthened the freedom of man, and that redemption (by which he means fellowship with God) therefore takes ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... BOSWELL. 'I understand he was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not dull in poetry.' JOHNSON. 'Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull every where.[961] He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.' He then repeated some ludicrous lines, which have escaped my memory, and said, 'Is not that GREAT, like his Odes?' Mrs. Thrale maintained that his Odes were melodious; upon ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... he does it in five he is miserable. He will never experience that happy surprise with which we hail our best strokes. Only his bad strokes surprise him, and then we may suppose that he is not happy. His length and accuracy are mechanical; they are not the result, as so often in our case, of some suddenly applied maxim or some suddenly discovered innovation. The only thing which can vary in his game is his putting, and putting is ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... advanced in civilized life to possess either the power or the will to wage that war against the order of nature which seems, hitherto, an almost inseparable condition precedent of high social culture, and of great progress in fine and mechanical art. Destructive changes are most frequent in countries of irregular and mountainous surface, and in climates where the precipitation is confined chiefly to a single season, and where, of course, the year is divided into a wet and a dry period, as is the case throughout a great ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... The gallows, formerly consisting of three posts, over which were laid three transverse beams. This clumsy machine has lately given place to an elegant contrivance, called the NEW DROP, by which the use of that vulgar vehicle a cart, or mechanical instrument a ladder, is also avoided; the patients being left suspended by the dropping down of that part of the floor on which they stand. This invention was first made use of for ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... dollars per year; with railway traffic of four to six thousand millions per year, and the annual domestic exchanges of the country, running up to nearly ten thousand millions per year; with over two thousand millions of dollars invested in manufacturing, mechanical, and mining industry; with over five hundred millions of acres of land in actual occupancy, valued, with their appurtenances, at over seven thousand millions of dollars, and producing annually crops valued at over three thousand ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... must have occurred in Berta's house, for the nurse seemed to have been seized by a sudden fit of restlessness that would not let her sit still for a moment. She went to and fro, upstairs and down, out and in, with the mechanical movement of an automaton. It was a sort of nervous attack that had in a moment increased twofold the housekeeper's domestic activity. Suddenly she would stand still, and placing her forefinger on her upper lip she would remain ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... the finest race and that most advanced in the arts of the entire west coast of North America." They and their almost equally advanced Tlingit and Tsimshian neighbors on the mainland displayed much mechanical skill, especially in canoe-building, woodcarving, and the working of stone and copper, as well as in making blankets and baskets. To this day they earn a considerable amount of money by selling their carved objects of wood and slate to traders and tourists. Their canoes were ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... united these two beings. Practical as they both were in the common affairs of life, they shrank from anything which would promise to materialise the subtleties of the mind. Some thoughts, they felt, were as impalpable as sounds, and, just as music ceases to be divine when it is poured out of some mechanical contrivance, so the mysteries of the human soul become mere bodily conditions—more or less humiliating—when demonstrated, catalogued, and legalised. There is nothing modern nor uncommon in this especial disposition. ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... Snarl; "only they are impossible, that is all. You have, however," concluded he, with a manner slightly supercilious, "succeeded in the mechanical parts; the hair and the dress are well, Mr. Triplet; but your Woffington is not a ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... Gimp Hines had finished rigging his bubb, minutes ahead of Frank, or anybody else. On second thought, maybe this was natural enough. Here, where there was no weight, his useless leg made no difference—as the space-fitness examiners must have known. Besides, Gimp had talented fingers and a keen mechanical sense, and had always tried harder ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... equipment of arms and accoutrements. The non-commissioned officers are former members of the regular army, in which they must have served three years in the infantry and cavalry or four years in artillery and engineers. During this period they are given a practical education in books and in the mechanical duties of the soldier. They are taught to repair guns, manufacture powder, make harness, shoe horses, and do everything else that is likely to come within their experience in the field. This training is highly valued by ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... springs of water which ever sparkled in the earth. They called it the Seven Sisters. Round the springs they built an immense and costly well. Over the well was a great leaden lid of extraordinary weight, and by a certain mechanical device this lid was closed on the well every evening at sundown. The springs became abnormally active between sundown and sunrise, so that there was always a danger that they might flood the valley and destroy the people. As security against this the citizens ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... common-sense philosophers of his day. For us, it is enough to say that he worships Nature but takes rather the aesthetic than the dialectical point of view. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful are all one, as he constantly insists, and the universe impresses us not as a set of mechanical contrivances but as an artistic embodiment of harmony. He therefore restores the universal element which is apt to pass out of sight in Pope's rhymed arguments. He indulges his philosophical enthusiasm in what he calls The Moralists, a Rhapsody. It culminates in a prose hymn ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... wandered out on the veranda, and amused themselves by jerking the rope ladder up and down. By a clever mechanical contrivance the ladder went up and down something on the principle of an automatic shade roller. It was great fun to roll it up and feel a certain security in the thought that nobody could get into "Breezy Inn" unless they saw fit to let down ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells
... in fact, more a mechanical mixture of social elements than a well differentiated chemical compound. For in spite of the great variety of ingredients thrown into its caldron of destiny, as no affinity existed between them, no combination resulted. The power to fuse was wanting. Capability to evolve anything is not one ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... according to a creed—a creed which was at that time unknown in business. The new is always thought odd, and some of us are so constituted that we can never get over thinking that anything which is new must be odd and probably queer. The mechanical working out of our creed is constantly changing. We are continually finding new and better ways of putting it into practice, but we have not found it necessary to alter the principles, and I cannot imagine how it might ever be necessary ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... relate the exploration of America and the East, or will point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of printing and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and by gunpowder; and will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance all the instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid the dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and perpetuate the new ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... last two days he had talked to himself as he quickened his steps under the influence of his thoughts. He had never thought much hitherto, as he had given all his mind, all his simple faculties to his mechanical work. But now fatigue and this desperate search for work which he could not get, refusals and rebuffs, nights spent in the open air lying on the grass, long fasting, the contempt which he knew people with a settled abode felt for a vagabond, and that question which he was ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... gather the lower moral-classes on Saturday and Sunday nights—the little troubled men who are pictured in the comics as "the Consumer" or "the Public." They have made sure that the place has three qualifications: it is cheap; it imitates with a sort of shoddy and mechanical wistfulness the glittering antics of the great cafes in the theatre district; and—this, above all, important—it is a place where they can "take a nice girl," which means, of course, that every one has ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... we should have done at Verdun without Lieutenant Roeder, our mechanical officer. All the boys behaved splendidly, but Lieutenant Roeder had the tremendously difficult task of keeping the Section going when the rolling-stock was none too good, and fearful weather and ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... is called well-bred; that is, languid, silent, perfectly dressed, and insipid. Of her two children, Arthur was almost the exclusive favourite, especially after he became the heir to such brilliant fortunes. For she was so much the mechanical creature of the world, that even her affection was warm or cold in proportion as the world shone on it. Without being absolutely in love with her husband, she liked him—they suited each other; and (in spite ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... insight into many kinds of literature suited to his varied tastes and temperament. In addition, however, to the hours spent in reading, he and his brother John found endless delight in turning the loft of an outhouse adjoining their yard into a sort of mechanical factory. Here they contrived, by saving up all their pence (the only pocket-money that came to them), to make crackers and other simple fireworks, and to turn old keys into toy cannon, besides making a large variety of articles for practical domestic purposes. Thus he cultivated ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... immortalized this vision in a poem, giving utterance to an irrepressible emotion, but still exhibiting the delicate lines of a beautifully designed composition." The other Germans are usually so taken up with technical and mechanical questions that they leave no room for aesthetic considerations. Whether Cynewulf wrote the poem or not,—and the probabilities favor his authorship, though we may not hesitate to say with Morley, "I don't know,"—it is certainly the work of a gifted Christian poet, who reverences the cross ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... in right of its metre only, they judge to be such rather by courtesy than by kind, on an apprehension that it costs the writer little trouble, that he has only to give his lines their prescribed number of syllables, and so far as the mechanical part is concerned, all is well. Were this true, they would have reason on their side; for the author is certainly best entitled to applause who succeeds against the greatest difficulty, and in verse that calls for the most artificial ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... properly speaking, may be termed his own; in which he introduced more cool tints into the shadows and flesh, approaching nearer to nature than the universal glow of Giorgione." After stating what little is known of the mechanical means employed by Titian in the colouring of his pictures, Sir Abraham observes: "Titian's grand secret of all, appears to have consisted in the unremitting exercise of application, patience, and perseverance, joined to an enthusiastic ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... abyss and fixed on the opposing hill, and as the long curve before me was diminished by successive sharp advances, still my heart was caught half-way in every breath, and whatever it is that moves a man went uncertainly within me, mechanical and half-paralysed. The great height with that narrow unprotected ribbon across it was more than I ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... said, on leaving his eastern home, after peace had been declared, for the then verge of civilization—the Ohio. Here the soldier lived to see the wilderness blossom like the rose, and here he died, grieving that infirmity prevented his flying from the din of the sledge hammer, and the busy hum of mechanical life. Mr. Duncan's father, in the vigor of manhood, crossed the Mississippi, and settled at the Cold Springs, a region then isolated from civilization, as the Ohio was many years before the white man had planted his foot west of the Alleghanies. But ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... chivalrous nature saw right threatened by might. In the Confederate navy under Commodore Pegram, in the Army of Northern Virginia under Longstreet, at the close of the war he was Chief Ordnance officer to General Fitzhugh Lee. But although the force of arms, of men, of money, of mechanical resources, of international support, had decided against the Confederacy, he refused to acknowledge permanent defeat for Southern ideals, and so cast his lot with those beside whom he had fought. His ambition was to help his adopted country in reconquering through journalism and sound ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... admiration for his great abilities, sagacity, and self-reliance, and disgust for his cruelties, his malice, his suspicions, and his tricks. He had no faith in virtue or disinterestedness, and trusted only to mechanical agencies—to the power of armies—to the principle of fear. He was not indifferent to literature, or the improvement of his nation; but war was alike his absorbing passion and his highest glory. Peter the Great was half a barbarian, and Charles ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... L. Horst, in his discussion on Leviticus XVii,-XXYi, and Ezekiel (Colmar, 1881), has strikingly shown that the mechanical style of criticism in which Dillmann even surpasses his predecessor Knobel, is not equal to the problem presented by the Law of Holiness. He goes on, however, to an attempt to save, by modifying it, the old Strassburg view ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... but the briefest span. His motor had begun again to splutter, in mechanical death. Then, with a sudden memory, sweat broke out on Bostwick's face. His gasolene was gone! He had thoroughly intended refilling his tank, having barely had a sufficient supply to run him from the claim to camp; and ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... out of the mud, and once more got afloat towards the middle of February following. This immense undertaking was accomplished by the indefatigable exertion and mechanical skill of her commander, Captain Kuper, C.B., assisted by Captain ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... and summer. There are no exceptions to this rule. If it storms, the outside blinds may be closed, but the windows must remain open. The city air is just as efficient for our purpose as is the air of any other vicinity—the point is, to get enough of it from a mechanical standpoint. The advantages from sending patients away, even under the old belief, were more than discounted by conditions incident to the new environment that were detrimental to their progress. Now ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... that they obey that commandment when they set a priest or a nun on the steps of the altar to repeat Ave Marias day and night. That is a way of praying without ceasing which we can all see to be mechanical and unworthy. But have we ever realised what this commandment necessarily reveals to us, as to what real prayer is? For if we are told to do a thing uninterruptedly, it must be something that can run unbroken through all the varieties of our legitimate ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... sat down rather suddenly on a Louis XIV chair which crackled. Several times he passed an ample hand over his features. A mechanical smile struggled to break out, but it was not the smile, any more than ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... not need strengthening, though his sense of humour might get the better of them for a moment; and of secular instruction he seems to have received as little from the one set of teachers as from the other. I do not suppose that the mental training at Mr. Ready's was more shallow or more mechanical than that of most other schools of his own or, indeed, of a much later period; but the brilliant abilities of Robert Browning inspired him with a certain contempt for it, as also for the average schoolboy intelligence to which it was apparently adapted. It must be for this reason that, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... how the retention of waste affects the system—how the deleterious effects are produced. There are three factors at work in this process, mechanical, gaseous and absorptive, the last named being infinitely the most pernicious. We will first consider ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... ever widening from the circumference towards the focus. In the case of a large mountain such fissures, whether filled with lava or otherwise, would be of great breadth towards the focus, or central crater, and could not fail to make manifest beyond dispute their mechanical origin. But no fissures of the kind here referred to are, as a matter of fact, to be observed. Those which do exist are too insignificant and too irregular in direction to be ascribed to such an origin; so that the views of Von Buch and Davy must be dismissed, ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... flash of a clenched fist in the lamp light knocks his companion into the gutter. Down the street he sees rows of tall smoke-begrimed brick buildings hanging black and ominous against the sky. At the end of a street a huge mechanical apparatus lifts cars of coal and dumps them roaring and rattling into the bowels of a ship that lies tied ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... in Bacon's sense, but a new Nature, the existence of which is dependent upon men's efforts, which is subservient to their wants, and which would disappear if man's shaping and guiding hand were withdrawn. Every mechanical artifice, every chemically pure substance employed in manufacture, every abnormally fertile race of plants, or rapidly growing and fattening breed of animals, is a part of the new Nature created by science. Without it, the most ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... a scale of the most magnificent proportions. These experiments were made in a large building which was especially built for this object. It contained every facility for his various new designs, and in it he anticipated many advances in electrical science and in mechanical devices, which have made the civilization of our day so remarkable. I recall distinctly as a boy his ingenious approximation to the telephone, and even the recent advances in wireless telegraphy, which has been the instrumentality by which ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... little farther along under the arcades was the stall where Mademoiselle la Pierre, the Prussian giantess, could be seen for a silver piece. Next to this place of amusement was a small salon containing a mechanical billiard-table, over which a billiard-ball, when adroitly struck, would roll, touching the door of a little gilded chateau and causing the images of celebrated personages to appear at each of the windows, to the huge delight of the easily ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... endeavouring to unveil them. He therefore would not suffer his mind to rest upon any inquiry in regard to the past, till the emotions which it might produce could be indulged unwatched; and, applying to the mechanical business of the pen, he wrote on to the conclusion, and then demanded, simply, "To whom am ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... looked rather blank. "Too different Johnsons, I think, my dear. But perhaps you didn't mean the Elizabethans; perhaps you mean the dramatists of the other Johnson's time. Well, I like Sheridan pretty well, though his wit strikes me as mechanical, and I really prefer Goldsmith; in his case, I prefer his Vicar of Wakefield, and his poems to his plays. Plays are not very easy reading, unless they are the very best. Shakespeare's are the only plays that one ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... up, like an enraged elephant from the jungle, scatter all the conventionalities of our training, and all the smooth and automaton-like operations of our minds to the winds. As I stood there, listening to the dead-level, unimpassioned, mechanical voice of the phonograph, pouring forth those deadly sentences, I realized for the first time what the sunny-haired ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... Another mechanical Method of making great Men, and adding Dignity to Kings and Queens, is to accompany them with Halberts and Battle-axes. Two or three Shifters of Scenes, with the two Candle-snuffers, make up a compleat Body of Guards upon the English Stage; and by the Addition of a few Porters ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... shells, I have been able to turn this propensity to good account; by placing them within their reach, the ants in a few days will remove every vestige of the mollusc from the innermost and otherwise inaccessible whorls; thus avoiding all risk of injuring the enamel by any mechanical process. ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... which seemed to have lain for ages in its present position. Yet under that stone was the end of the wheel's axle with cogwheels rigged to pass on the power engendered by the wheel to some mechanical contrivance ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... white apartment three black figures stood about a central glitter of crystal and silver. At once the aged, slightly mechanical voice of Don Balthasar rose thinly, putting himself and his house ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... as the 'education sponge method,' and was first described by Dr. D. J. Hamilton, of Edinburgh, in 1881. It has frequently been used in America since then. The sponge really acts in a mechanical manner to support the new finger-tissue that is developed. The meshes are filled in by growing tissue, and as it grows the tissue absorbs part of the sponge, which is itself an animal tissue and acts like catgut. Part of it is also ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... may not the fine morality of the Sacred Scriptures be engraven on the minds of the young? I believe the arm of the assassin may be often stayed by the lessons of his early life. When I see the village school, and the tattered scholars, and the aged master or mistress teaching the mechanical art of reading or writing, and thinking that they are teaching that alone, I feel that the aged instructor is protecting life, insuring property, fencing the altar, guarding the throne, giving space and liberty to all the fine powers ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... a piano-player fan, contending that when the principles of beautiful tone production are understood, mechanical means will probably come nearer to perfection than the human hand. Mr. Arthur Whiting, considering the horseless pianoforte some time ago, was also enthusiastic. The h. p. is entirely self-possessed, and has even more platform imperturbability ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... suggested that the great wings were a part of some ingenious mechanical device, for the limitations of the human mind, which is always loath to accept aught beyond its own little experience, would not permit him to entertain the idea that the creatures might be naturally ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Gordon Makimmon drove the stage between Greenstream and Stenton. At dawn he left Greenstream, arriving in Stenton at the end of day; the following morning he re-departed for Greenstream. This mechanical, monotonous routine satisfied his need without placing too great a strain on his energy; he enjoyed rolling over the summer roads or in the crisp clear sunlight of winter; he liked the casual converse ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... greater one and the number of complete cures will also be increased in a short time. Formerly tuberculous inflammation of the spine was treated as follows: the abscesses were opened and antiseptics carefully applied: mechanical apparatus and corsets were used to aid in a natural cure. These apparatus will surely be of inestimable value at the application of ...
— Prof. Koch's Method to Cure Tuberculosis Popularly Treated • Max Birnbaum
... there is small hope for your play as a play if you haven't some small idea in it somewhere and somehow, even if it is hidden—it is sometimes better for you if it is hidden, but it must of course be integral. Some ideas are mechanical. Then they are no good. These are the ideas for which the author does all the work, instead of letting the ideas do the work for him. One should write what one sees, but observe under the surface. It is a mistake to look at the reflection of the sky in the water of theatrical convention. Instead, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... me?" Indeed, this behaviour by no means detracted from the merit of the deed, or shortened by a single day the term of indulgence, in the estimation of the Italians. Their understanding of devotion and ours are totally different. With us devotion is a mental act; with them it is a mechanical act, strictly so. The mind may be absent, asleep, dead; it is devotion nevertheless. These peasants had undertaken to climb Pilate's staircase on their knees; not to give devout or reverent feelings into the bargain: they had done all they engaged to do, and ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... both get into habits—sometimes apart, sometimes in conjunction. Nowadays we seat the body to work the intellect, even in its lower form of mechanical labor: it is your clod that toddles about laboring. The Peripatetics did not endure: their method was not suited to man's microcosm. Bodily movements fritter mental attention. We sit at the feet of Gamaliel, or, as some call him, Tyndal; and we sit to Bacon and Adam Smith. But, when we are standing ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... In fact all the mechanical preparations were clumsy and inartistic, and the final scenes of the execution, therefore, revolting in the extreme. When the death-caps were all drawn over the faces of the prisoners, and they stood in line in the awful suspense between absolute life and immediate death, a man at the neck of ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... determining by actual tests the strength and value of all kinds of iron, steel, and other metals which may be submitted to them or by them procured, and to prepare tables which will exhibit the strength and value of said materials for constructive and mechanical purposes, and to provide for the building of a suitable machine for establishing such tests, the machine to be set up and maintained at the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... the self-made men of America. The third printer, Johnson, having a wife in England, was "brought up" and bound over before the court not to seduce the affections of the daughter of printer No. 2. The next Bostonians who tried their hands at the mechanical part of book-making—the printing and binding—were two of the most prominent citizens; Captain Green, a worthy man, the father of nineteen children by one wife and eleven by another, and rich, ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... money being pressing, he went to work in one of the local stores, selling behind the counter. If his father had lived he would, probably, have gone away after finishing high school and perhaps, if by that time the mechanical ability which he possessed had shown itself, he might even have gone to some technical school or college. In that case Jed Winslow's career might have been very, very different. But instead he went to selling groceries, boots, shoes, dry goods ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... compunction to turn both Charles and herself to his own profit.... Well, she thought, he might try, but he could not prevent either of them from making their reputations, and neither would ever sink to the mechanical docility of London players. ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... scene. His life, until the Colonel had recognized him as an acquaintance he had made at the house of a friend some years before, had been that of a recluse, the object of his retirement being to perfect some mechanical invention upon which he was engaged. He had soon developed into a friend of the family, and I had found him firmly installed as such when I made my appearance ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... the mechanical end of the business. It may interest some to learn that the photo-play, as seen in the theatre, is not taken all at once, nor in the order in which the scenes are seen as ...
— The Moving Picture Girls in War Plays - Or, The Sham Battles at Oak Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... she had since her marriage altered considerably in the right direction. She used to be a little dry, a little stiff, and a little stately. To the last I should be far from objecting, were it not that her stateliness was of the mechanical sort, belonging to the spine, and not to a soul uplift. Now it had left her spine and settled in a soul that scorned the low and loved the lowly. Her step was lighter, her voice more flexible, her laugh much merrier and more frequent, for now ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... they were as large as any ants he has ever seen, black and moving with a steady deliberation very different from the mechanical fussiness of the common ant. About one in twenty was much larger than its fellows, and with an exceptionally large head. These reminded him at once of the master workers who are said to rule over the leaf-cutter ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... who by this time was scanning the mechanical toys on the great center tables. "Why don't you come and see? We will be crowded away from the best ...
— Dorothy Dale's Queer Holidays • Margaret Penrose
... commonly due to an attempt to understand life without any attempt to understand it in relation to God. It is like an attempt to understand a work of art without an attempt to understand the artist, to estimate in terms of mechanical effort, rather than in terms of mind. A work of art means what the artist means when he creates it: life means what God means in His creation and government of it, and it is hopeless to expect to understand it without reference to the mind ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... himself immediately with mechanical thoroughness. He filled his tub with cold water, undressed and plunged into it, dipping his head under half a dozen times. Then he rubbed down with the roughest towel he could find, gave himself a vigorous massage from head to feet, took a sharp turn ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... fool. Moreover, on leaving Rouen, he and I had joined forces. Sitting beside him in the coupe, I had driven the car with his hands—after a little practice—with astonishing results. In two days we had, we prided ourselves, raised such collaboration from the ranks of the Mechanical to the society of the Fine Arts. My part was comparatively easy. Sinking his initiative he had more nearly converted himself into an intelligent piece of mechanism than I would have believed possible. It would, of course, be vain to suggest that Pong would ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... ever actually walked the earth [Footnote: Of course the bugaboo creature called 'the sceptic' in the logic-books, who dogmatically makes the statement that no statement, not even the one he now makes, is true, is a mere mechanical toy—target for the rationalist shooting-gallery— hit him and he turns a summersault—yet he is the only sort of relativist whom my colleagues appear able to imagine to exist.] has denied the regulative character in his own thinking ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... walls. The Turks rushed to the edge of the ditch, attempted to fill the enormous chasm and to build a road to the assault. In the attack, as well as in the defence, ancient and modern artillery was employed. Cannon and mechanical engines, the bullet and the battering-ram, gunpowder and Greek fire, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... baby, which settled the surgeon business forever. Now listen, boy! You've got the nerve—plenty of men have that—but you've also got the fingers, which few men have. With your touch and your steady nerve and your mechanical ingenuity—I've seen your machines, boy—you can be a great surgeon! But you must know your subject. You must think, dream, sleep, eat, drink bones and muscles and sinews and nerves. Push everything else aside!" he cried, waving his great ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... unknown ages. For a life of instinctive impulse, we shall titan receive a life in which impulse is ever parallel with the highest law, and, doing only what we would, we shall do only what we ought. For energy which wanes as the years wax, and delight in action which is soon worn down into mechanical routine of toil, there will be bestowed strength akin to His 'who fainteth not, neither is weary.' All of which maturity and old age robbed us is given back in nobler form. All the limitation and weakness which they brought, the coldness, the monotony, the torpor, the weariness, will drop away. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... Two sets of acquaintances. Grateful patients and loyal voters, and I've got to keep solid with both outfits, especially the wives and mothers. They're the people. So it's drums, and dolls, and sheep on wheels, and games, and monkeys on a stick, and the saleslady shows you a mechanical bear, and it costs too much, and you forget whether the Judge's second girl is Nellie or Susie, and—well, I'm just in for my annual circus this afternoon! You're in luck. Christmas don't trouble ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... prevent anyone entering the place were the most elaborate and ingenious I had ever seen. Even if any person learnt the secret of draining the lake, the shaft leading to the mysterious subterranean place was unapproachable by reason of this extraordinary mechanical device. ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... blossoming clematis? A finely organized sentence should throb and palpitate like the most delicate vibrations of the summer air. We talk of literature as if it were a mere matter of rule and measurement, a series of processes long since brought to mechanical perfection: but it would be less incorrect to say that it all lies in the future; tried by the out-door standard, there is as yet no literature, but only glimpses and guideboards; no writer has yet succeeded in sustaining, through more than some single occasional sentence, that fresh and perfect ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... man, releasing Montparnasse, put his purse in the latter's hand; Montparnasse weighed it for a moment, after which he allowed it to slide gently into the back pocket of his coat, with the same mechanical precaution as ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... of coolies, with baskets on their heads, are bringing sand from the summer-dry edges of the bed of the Cooum river. In the foreground of the picture, scores of chattering village-labourers, from Triplicane and other hamlets hard by, are working under the directions of the mechanical employees of the Company, chipping stone, mixing lime, sawing timber, carrying bricks and stones and mortar, or laying them adroitly in place, with little dependence on ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... of the mass, the Sacrament was to be carried to a sick person. Touched by unusual devotion at this perilous time, the whole assembly rose to escort the procession on its way, passing out slowly, group after group, as if by mechanical instinct, the more reluctant led on by the general consent. Gaston, the last lingerer, halting to let others proceed quietly before him, turned himself about to gaze upon the deserted church, half tempted ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... renewal of the outer layer of the cuticle. As a result of this, the sense of touch became for a while more acute, and was at times unpleasantly delicate. This seemed to me, as I first thought of its cause, a mere mechanical result, but I incline to suspect now that it was in a measure due to a true increase in capacity to feel, because I found also that the sister sense of pain was heightened. Slight things hurt me, and a rather gentle pinch gave undue discomfort. No doubt a part of this ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... mano f. hand. mansedumbre f. meekness. manta blanket. manteca butter. mantenedor m. maintainer. mantilla a feminine wrap for head and shoulders. Manuel Immanuel. manuscrito manuscript. manana to-morrow, morrow, morning; pasado —— day after to-morrow. maquinal mechanical. mar m. & f. sea. maravilla marvel, wonder. maravillar vr. to wonder, be amazed marcha march. marchar to march; vr. to go away. marchitar to wither. marchito faded. Maria Mary. marido husband. marinero sailor. marisco shellfish. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... am the Queen of this land and that all the troops thou hast seen, whether horse or foot, are women, there is no man amongst them; for in this our state the men delve and sow and ear and occupy themselves with the tillage of the earth and the building of towns and other mechanical crafts and useful arts, whilst the women govern and fill the great offices of state and bear arms." At this the youth marvelled with exceeding marvel and, as they were in discourse, behold, in came the Wazir who was a tall gray-haired ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... the process whereby the food we eat is turned into material fit to be assimilated by the blood. It begins in the mouth by the mechanical grinding and crushing of the food, and the chemical conversion of the starchy part into sugar, in which form alone it can be assimilated. This conversion is carried out by the saliva. Hence the necessity for thorough mastication, even of sloppy foods that do not ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... scientific and mechanical interests; one of the first to adopt vaccination, applying it to his own children, and recommending it in the parish of Clapham, where he was rector in 1800; the principal founder of the Church Missionary Soc., 1798, the ...
— Noteworthy Families (Modern Science) • Francis Galton and Edgar Schuster
... football which shaped my end. Owing to my skill in the game, I took a post-graduate at the Sheffield Scientific School, that the team might have my services for an extra two years. That led to my knowing a little about mechanical engineering, and when I left the "quad" for good I went into the Alton Railroad shops. It wasn't long before I was foreman of a section; next I became a division superintendent, and after I had stuck to that for a time I was appointed superintendent ...
— The Great K. & A. Robbery • Paul Liechester Ford
... as a Task, and pouting and reading good Books for a Week together. Much of this I take to proceed from the Indiscretion of the Books themselves, whose very Titles of Weekly Preparations, and such limited Godliness, lead People of ordinary Capacities into great Errors, and raise in them a Mechanical Religion, entirely distinct from Morality. I know a Lady so given up to this sort of Devotion, that tho' she employs six or eight Hours of the twenty-four at Cards, she never misses one constant Hour of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... structure, but, although he possessed iron, he had no smith's anvil, or hammer, or tongs, or bellows, wherewith to forge it. In these circumstances he commenced one of the greatest pieces of work ever undertaken by man—greatest, not only because of the mechanical difficulties overcome, but because of the influence for good that the ship, when completed, had upon the natives of the Southern Seas, as well as its reflex influence in exciting admiration, emulation, and enthusiasm in ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne
... on any account, without having competent advice on the subject, use iron instruments, or mechanical supports of any kind: the ankles are generally, by such artificial supports, made worse, in consequence of the pressure causing a further dwindling away and enfeebling of the ligaments of the ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... them both to Kitty's cell, and left them alone with her. She was seated on the bed in the corner of the cell, in an attitude of deepest dejection. When they entered she looked up in a mechanical sort of manner, and Vandeloup could see how worn and pinched-looking her face was. Pierre went to one end of the cell and leaned against the wall in an indifferent manner, while Vandeloup stood right in front of the unhappy woman. Kitty arose when ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... out this scheme in the first instance required a complete acquaintance with the text, a clear idea of the sequence of events, an ingenious head to plot out the work, and no small amount of purely mechanical skill to bring it to a ...
— Little Gidding and its inmates in the Time of King Charles I. - with an account of the Harmonies • J. E. Acland
... irritate him, for the Frenchman's mental wanderings increased with the darkness. What made him rouse one with his awful laughter? These spells of walking insensibility were pleasanter far. At last the big man fell. To Willard's mechanical endeavours to help he spoke sleepily, but with the sanity of a ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... defined and esteemed merely as habit, and (as it is expressed in the prize essay of Cochius) as a long custom acquired by practice of morally good actions. For, if this is not an effect of well-resolved and firm principles ever more and more purified, then, like any other mechanical arrangement brought about by technical practical reason, it is neither armed for all circumstances nor adequately secured against the change that may be wrought by ...
— The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics • Immanuel Kant
... copying; unnecessary maledictions, hissed, rather than spoken, in the heat of business; and especially by a continual discontent with the height of the table where he worked. Though of a very ingenious mechanical turn, Nippers could never get this table to suit him. He put chips under it, blocks of various sorts, bits of pasteboard, and at last went so far as to attempt an exquisite adjustment by final pieces of folded blotting paper. But no invention would answer. If, for the sake of easing ...
— Bartleby, The Scrivener - A Story of Wall-Street • Herman Melville
... single long deepening shadow that precedes daybreak, then grey lights dawned on the far horizon, paling the stars to points of pearl upon dim purple mists. Worn and weary, Rosemary slept until she was called to begin the day's dreary round of toil, as mechanical as the ticking ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... as that! Which town, may I ask?' he said, with mechanical politeness, for his mind was running on what ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... the Menageries, a volume of the Transformations of Insects, and another of their Architectural Labours. The present, in well-chosen continuity of a novel plan of illustrating the Animal economy, is devoted to "an examination of Birds in the exercise of their mechanical arts of constructing Nests." "This work," observes the ingenious Editor, "is the business of their lives—the duty which calls forth that wonderful ingenuity, which no experience can teach, and which no human skill ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... of the 'old duets with her mother. She saw her mother's breast lift in a mechanical effort to try imaginary notes, as if doubtful of her capacity, more at home in the dumb deep sigh they fell to. Her mother's heroism made her a sacred woman to the thoughts of the girl, overcoming wonderment at ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Chinese live. Those people are known there under the name of Sangleys. Although heathen they have been allowed to reside there for the sake of commerce and because they are employed in almost all the mechanical trades. It cannot be denied that that nation fomented and maintained with aid and cunning the rebellions of the Indians which we have just related. That is apparent, because, when the alcalde-mayor Don Francisco Pulido was killed in Pangasinan, some Sangleys were found among the rebels, who contrived ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... little down the street and stood in the same position staring into the Repos du Poilu, where a large sign "American spoken" blocked up half the window. Two officers passed. His hand snapped up to the salute automatically, like a mechanical signal. It was nearly dark. After a while he began to feel serious coolness in the wind, shivered and started to wander aimlessly down ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... in a mechanical way, and had just placed my hand on the instrument, when I was thrilled by a call which I would have recognized among a thousand. Others heard and identified it also, and held their breath. The next instant this ...
— The Telegraph Messenger Boy - The Straight Road to Success • Edward S. Ellis
... by introspection, we cannot discover exactly what the mind is. No one knows what electricity is, though nearly everyone uses it in one form or another. We study the dynamo, the motor, and the conductors through which electricity manifests itself. We observe its effects in light, heat, and mechanical power, and so learn the laws which govern its operations. But we are almost as far from understanding its true nature as were the ancients who knew nothing of its uses. The dynamo does not create the electricity, but only furnishes the conditions ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... Eileen found herself practically a prisoner in her own home. She received the visitors invited by her father at first with a mechanical courtesy, but later on with an assumption of cheerfulness that deceived her father and even to more extent the doctor. She had begun to realise that she would never shake off the vigilance which surrounded her until she had convinced ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... great peace round him as he stood there, stroking one of the uprights with a kind of mechanical tenderness; the men were silent as they saw the two monks there, and watched to see what they ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... get such desertion and quiet and imperturbability. Monnickendam has, however, a treasure that few English towns can boast—its charming little stadhuis tower, one of the prettiest in Holland, with a happy peal of bells, and mechanical horses in action once an hour; while the tram line running right down the main street ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... protestations never to leave the yacht again, R—— and I wore the night away. P—— remained impregnable to the attacks of bugs, fleas, and mosquitoes; and while he told us, in a sonorous language of his own, how profoundly he slept, he sometimes gave mechanical signs of feeling by scratching obstreperously his legs and arms, and slapping himself ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... up of two elements that never mix any more than oil and water mix. A religion is a mechanical mixture, not a chemical combination, of morality and dogma. Dogma is the science of the unseen: the doctrine of the unknown and unknowable. And in order to give this science plausibility, its promulgators ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... and seven months, but one day, when the south, north, and east platform-steps were already finished—it was in the July of the third year, and near sunset—as I left off work, instead of going to the tent where my dinner lay ready, I walked down to the ship—most strangely—in a daft, mechanical sort of way, without saying a word to myself, an evil-meaning smile of malice on my lips; and at midnight I was lying off Mitylene, thirty miles to the south, having bid, as I thought, a last farewell to all those toils. I was going to ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... personal relations, neither appropriation nor surrender, neither egoism nor altruism, nor indeed any precisely measured mechanical mixture of the two, will solve the problem. Here the recognition of a common good, a commonwealth in which each person has an equal worth with every other, is the only satisfactory solution. "Be ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... in quantity, but in use. You need not make thrones or golden gates with it unless you like, but assuredly you can't do anything else with it. You can't make knives of it, nor armour, nor railroads. The gold won't cut you, and it won't carry you: put it to a mechanical use, and you destroy it at once. It is quite true that in the greatest artists, their proper artistical faculty is united with every other; and you may make use of the other faculties, and let the artistical one ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... and labor was one of the bad effects of slavery; but he thought it attended with many excellent consequences. It did not apply to all kinds of labor—not, for example, to farming. He himself had often held the plow; so had his father. Manufacturing and mechanical labor was not degrading. It was only manual labor—the proper work of slaves. No white person could descend to that. And it was the best guarantee to equality among the whites. It produced an unvarying level among them. It not only did not ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... only, since they were centres of nothing but 'manufacture,' and served no purpose but that of the gambling market, they have left less signs of their existence than London. Of course, the great change in the use of mechanical force made this an easy matter, and some approach to their break-up as centres would probably have taken place, even if we had not changed our habits so much: but they being such as they were, no sacrifice ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... to reading aloud in the sick room, my experience is, that when the sick are too ill to read to themselves, they can seldom bear to be read to. Children, eye-patients, and uneducated persons are exceptions, or where there is any mechanical difficulty in reading. People who like to be read to, have generally not much the matter with them; while in fevers, or where there is much irritability of brain, the effort of listening to reading aloud has often brought on delirium. I speak with great diffidence; because there is an almost universal ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... with which the higher dramatic works abound, is more loudly called for in this than it has been in any former period of British history. We are no longer in the age of enthusiasm. The days of chivalry have gone by—and gone by, it is feared, never to return. We are in the age of commerce and the mechanical arts. Material appliances, creature comforts,—stimulants to the senses—now form the great moving power of society. Gain is every where sought after with the utmost avidity; but it is sought not for any lofty object, but on account of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... the action of plaster is very complex, and that it promotes the distribution of both magnesia and potash in the ground, exercising a chemical action upon the soil which extends to any depth of it; and that, in consequence of the chemical and mechanical modifications of the earth, particles of certain nutritive elements become accessible and available to plants ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... that it would be of such immense importance to them in many ways. It would be of great service for their tableware; they could use it for their electric work, which interested them more than any branch to which their time had been given, among the mechanical arts; with that they could make thermometers and testing instruments; and give their house the air of a modern home, because windows ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... masturbating, and also women masturbating men. Among the Tamils of Ceylon masturbation is said to be common. In Cochin China, Lorion remarks, it is practiced by both sexes, but especially by the married women.[188] Japanese women have probably carried the mechanical arts of auto-erotism to the highest degree of perfection. They use two hollow balls about the size of a pigeon's egg (sometimes one alone is used), which, as described by Joest, Christian, and others,[189] are made of very thin leaf of brass; one is empty, the other (called the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... young that we must look if the love of music is to be fostered and encouraged in the coming years. "Let the rising generation become thoroughly well acquainted with the best Musical works through the medium of concert-lectures, the mechanical piano-player, municipal, hotel, and garden concerts. Let them follow up their knowledge with reading about Musicians' lives, work, and influence. Throughout all this instruction—and from the very first—let ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... binding together the more delicate tissues of the body. It has retained more of its rights and privileges, and consequently possesses a greater amount of both biological and pathological initiative. In many respects purely mechanical in its function, fastening the muscles to the bones, the bones to each other, giving toughness to the great skin-sheet, and swinging in hammock-like mesh the precious brain-cell or potent liver-lobule, it still possesses and exercises ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... goods and textiles, agricultural products, mechanical goods, phosphates and chemicals, ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... quantity of pottery was also unearthed, dating from the fourth century. The method by which the plan of a pyramid was laid out by the ancient Egyptians was discovered in this excavation, and the designs show considerable mechanical ingenuity in their execution, and afford a perfect system for maintaining the symmetry of the building itself, no matter how uneven the ground on which it was ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... humus of the soil are made up of a great variety of substances. The larger part of these act simply as a mechanical support for the plants and also serve to bring about certain physical conditions. Only a very small portion of these substances serve as the direct food of plants and the chemical conditions of these substances are ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... without offense that in the course of time the personnel has apparently worked down to the level of vulgarity defined by the ways and means of this modern warfare; which means the level on which runs a familiar acquaintance with large and complex mechanical apparatus, railway and highway transport and power, reenforced concrete, excavations and mud, more particularly mud, concealment and ambush, and unlimited deceit and ferocity. It is not precisely ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... remarks, as she congratulated her father on his happiness; yet it was not like herself, and Natalie could see, what Mr. Santon in his blindness of joy did not discern,—there was no heart in his daughter's mechanical tones. Winnie had not as yet seen her intended mother-in-law; she might be all that could be desired of one standing in that peculiar relation, and she might be otherwise; it was not that which had quelled the buoyant spirits of ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... cathartic remedy in a cathartic dose for constipation; in that case the reaction, if reaction follows, is not in the right direction, consequently the constipation is often aggravated. I have hardly ever seen, excepting in cases of mechanical obstruction, a severe and troublesome case of constipation that had not been caused by the use of cathartic remedies. So if we give an opiate, or an astringent, for a diarrhoea, we can see that it is a direct effort to restrain the disease ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... I cried, seizing a dessert-knife which was on my bureau. I rushed forward with a mechanical movement upon my little Comte de Toulouse, whom I snatched from the hands of his father, and I was on the verge of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the room with the quick strides but the mechanical purposelessness of embarrassment. Then he stiffened and stood erect. Yet in spite of all this he was strikingly picturesque and unconventional in his Highland dress, worn with the freedom of long custom and a certain lithe, barbaric ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... immediate growths of nature or the immediate necessaries of man. Now the arte facta are sought by the higher classes of society in a proportion incalculably beyond that in which they are sought by the lower classes; and therefore it is that the vast increase of mechanical powers has not cheapened life and pleasure to the poor as it has done to the rich. In some respects, no doubt, it has done so, as in giving cotton dresses to maid-servants, and penny gin to all. A ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... lastly, as regards such serial homology as is exemplified by the backbone of man, there are also several objections to Mr. Spencer's mechanical explanation. ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... life in a Camp of Instruction requires a peculiar cast of mind. It requires a genuine liking for a tread-mill round of merely mechanical duties; it requiers a taste for rising in the chill and cheerless dawn, at the unwelcome summons of "reveille," to a long day filled with a tiresome routine of laborious drills alternating with tedious roll-calls, and wearisome parades and inspections; it requires pleased contentment ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... shirtsleeves; and he carried in one mottled hand the ruins of a palm-leaf fan, in the other a balled wet handkerchief which released an aroma of camphor upon the banana-burdened air. He bore evidences of inadequate adjustment after a disturbed siesta, but, exercising a mechanical cordiality, preceded himself into the room by a genial half-cough and a hearty, "Well-well-well," as if wishing to indicate a spirit ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... main, one must seek this and develop it for himself. A text-book can point out what constitutes good form, what is pleasing and impressive to the eye and to the ear, and, in a word, what make up the externals of a good delivery; but beyond these mechanical directions it cannot go. A student should observe the following fundamental directions as his first step toward becoming a successful speaker. Afterwards, he should cultivate earnestness, enthusiasm, perception, a sense of humor, and all other such qualities as go to make ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... The mechanical construction of a letter, whether social, friendly, or business, falls into six or seven parts. This arrangement has become established by the best custom. The divisions are ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... no doubt, then, that the Mound Builders were familiar with the use of copper, silver, and lead, and in all probability of iron. They possessed various mechanical contrivances. They were very probably acquainted with the lathe. Beads of shell have been found looking very much like ivory, and showing the circular striae, identical with those produced ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... consequence numerous improvements have been effected in it. The transition to the present portable form is due, partly to the substitution of silk and gingham for the heavy and troublesome oiled silk, which admitted of the ribs and frames being made much lighter, and also to the many ingenious mechanical improvements in the framework, chiefly by French and English manufacturers, many of which were patented, and to which we ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... of it. He knew that beyond the blue ranges of mountains, both to east and west, vast preparations were going forward. The North, the region of great population, of illimitable resources, of free access to the sea, and of mechanical genius that had counted for so much in arming her soldiers, was gathering herself for a supreme effort. The great defeats of the war's first period were to be ignored, and her armies were to come again, more numerous, better ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... quite dazed. Their mechanical, overbearing way was something she was unaccustomed to. It was like the jaws of a pair of insentient iron pincers. She rose, ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... his price, he went to an old-fashioned bureau, and opened one of those secret recesses which cannot for three minutes remain a secret to any investigator possessed of a tolerably accurate eye or a three-foot rule. From this hiding-place—which he evidently considered a triumph of mechanical art, worthy the cabinet of a D'Argenson or a Fouche—he produced a packet of faded yellow letters, about which there lurked a faint odour of dried rose-leaves and lavender, which seemed the very perfume of ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... reflection, he again forgot his formidable antagonist, and involuntarily raised his eyes. The bull, profiting by the momentary inattention, rushed upon the man; the latter, taken unawares, leaped backwards, and, by a mechanical movement, made a thrust with his sword. Several inches of the blade entered, but in the wrong place. The weapon met the bone; a furious movement of the bull made it rebound from the wound amidst a spout of blood, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... apologetic acquiescence the Young Electrician reached up a lean, clever, mechanical hand and smouched one more streak of black across his forehead in a desperate effort to reduce his tousled yellow hair to the particular smoothness that befitted the presence of a lady who owned a business block in ...
— The Indiscreet Letter • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... race. The incisores are thick and round, not, as usual, flattened into edges, but resembling truncated cones; the cuspidati are not pointed, but broad and flat on the masticating surface, like the neighbouring bicuspides. This may be attributable to mechanical attrition, depending on the nature of the food which the teeth are employed in masticating. The upper does not overlap the under jaw, but the teeth meet at their surfaces. This peculiarity of teeth has been noticed by Blumenbach as a characteristic of the Egyptian mummy; but he thinks the nature ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... the matter lies deeper; for it can be explained more clearly than appears at first sight. The power of inertia applied to bodies which may be moved by mechanical means only, becomes force of habit when applied to bodies which are moved by motives. The actions which we do out of sheer force of habit occur, as a matter of fact, without any individual separate motive exercised for the particular ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the morning with Sedley Taylor and Professor Stuart, M.P., an old friend of former visits, and inspected the mechanical laboratory and workshops. There were about seventy university men, more or less, engaged in these, and it was interesting to see English Cambridge adopting the same line which we have already taken at Cornell against so much opposition, and surprising to find the Cambridge ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... that city which is defended by a citadel which contains an abundant stock of rice and weapons,—which is protected with impenetrable walls and a trench, which teems with elephants and steeds and cars, which is inhabited by men possessed of learning and versed in the mechanical arts, where provisions of every kind have been well stored, whose population is virtuous in conduct and clever in business and consists of strong and energetic men and animals, which is adorned with many open squares and rows of shops, where the behaviour of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... in the explanation of the obscure text of his master, he was led into such frivolous distinctions, and tasteless propositions, that his works deserve inspection, as examples of the manner of a true mechanical critic. ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... window, and stood with his back to her. In one of the houses opposite, at a window on the same level, a girl was practising the violin; his eyes followed the mechanical movements of ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... into the roadway and soon the boring machines were busy again, eating into the coal; for those tireless arms of Robert's never halted. He swung the handle or wielded the pick or shovel, never taking a, rest, while the sweat streamed from his body working like some mechanical product for always in his mind he was calculating his chances for being able to blast it through the barrier ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... Some remnant of the traditional dairy thus survives in the stony streets that are separated so widely from the country. But here, beside the hay, the hedgerows, the bees, the flowers that precede the blackberries—here in the heart of the meadows the romance has departed. Everything is mechanical or scientific. From the refrigerator that cools the milk, the thermometer that tests its temperature, the lactometer that proves its quality, all is mechanical precision. The tins themselves are metal—wood, the old country material for almost every purpose, is eschewed—and ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... employment in some one of the mechanical departments of literature—the only region in which he could think to do anything. When the architect comes to necessity, it is well if stones are near, and the mason's hammer: if he be not the better mason that he is an architect, ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... number of themes for thought, of which the most insistent was the power some women had of drawing out the love of men. For the rest of the day her gardening became no more than a mechanical directing of the setting out of seedlings, while she meditated on the problem ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... place, I became convinced that the myriads of microscopic organisms which pervaded the water did not light up their tiny lamps in response to a mechanical shock, such as would be produced by agitation of the medium in which they floated. There was no breeze, at any time, nor was there the faintest indication of a ripple on the glassy surface of the sea. Between the flashes ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... continued to carry on the government, and to exercise hunting in all its branches; to teach his workers in gold and artificers of all kinds, his falconers, hawkers, and dog-keepers, to build houses majestic and good, beyond all the precedents of his ancestors, by his new mechanical inventions, to recite the Saxon books, and more especially to learn by heart the Saxon poems, and to make others learn them also; for he alone never desisted from studying, most diligently, to the best of his ability; he attended the mass and other daily services of religion: ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... it had been when they first saw this chamber. The breech of the huge cannon had cooled and its massive block was open. Tommy was there, fishing the radium capsule from the powdery residue in order that it might be used in exciting the next charge. A mechanical precision ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... that the object of perception, though composed of elements partly material, partly mental, yet exhibits both alike in a form modified by their relation to each other. The composition is not a mere mechanical juxtaposition, in which each part, though acting on the other, retains its own characteristics unchanged. It may be rather likened to a chemical fusion, in which both elements are present, but each of them is affected ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... scholarships, while dental and medical studies can be carried on concurrently. The course of study includes the passing of a Professional Preliminary Examination or Matriculation, followed by two years' mechanical work, and two years' hospital practice. The student can be articled to a qualified dental practitioner for mechanics, or can obtain tuition at the Dental Hospital. This branch includes the preparation of models, vulcanite and metal ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... it was impossible; and he looked again at the dark shore that they were passing, at the shimmering sea, and then at the bronzed backs of the warriors as they paddled on in their drowsy, mechanical way. ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... balcony; and there are white painted pillars that support the low roof, and these pillars make a kind of entrance to the passage which traverses the house from end to end. England—England clear and spotless! Nowhere do you find a trace of dust or disorder. The arrangement of things is somewhat mechanical. The curtains and wall-paper in the bedrooms are suggestive of trades people and housemaids; no hastily laid aside book or shawl breaks the excessive orderliness. Every piece of furniture is in its appointed ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... whether she were alive or dead, and I watched the horse trotting, interested in his shambling gait, or not at all interested in it—I do not know which. On occasions of great nervous tension one observes everything.... Everything I remembered best appeared with mechanical regularity; now it was a wood, a while afterward somebody's farmyard, later on a line of cottages, another wood, one of my own gate lodges. An old sawyer lived in it now—looking after it for me; and I hoped that the wheels of the car would not bring him out, for it ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... useful inventions, are not those which reflect the greatest honor on the human mind. It is to a mechanical instinct, which is found in many men, and not to true philosophy that ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... was as much amused as Crawford had been at seeing his sisters in their military attire. He fully approved of all Percy had done; and when he heard of the proposed dummies, he thought the idea excellent. While Crawford, who possessed a great deal of mechanical ingenuity, went in to assist Mrs Broderick, he hurried to the back of the house, where he found Mangaleesu and Kalinda employed in manufacturing Kaffir warriors. They had collected a number of poles and sticks, and had obtained from the storehouse a sufficient quantity of ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... sober as a Trappist monk; and his foremost impulse the next day was to plunge headlong into some physical labor which should not allow him a moment's interval of idleness. He found no labor to his taste; but he spent the day so actively, in the mechanical annihilation of the successive hours, that Gertrude's image found no chance squarely to face him. He was engaged in the work of self-preservation,—the most serious and absorbing work possible to man. Compared to the results here at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... spinal malady, had been hitherto dependent on her niece for one of the few pleasures she could enjoy, the pleasure of having the best new novels read to her as they came out. Discovering this, Arthur volunteered to relieve Miss Haldane, at intervals, in the office of reader. He was clever at mechanical contrivances of all sorts, and he introduced improvements in Mrs. Carbury's couch, and in the means of conveying her from the bedchamber to the drawing-room, which alleviated the poor lady's sufferings and brightened her gloomy life. With these claims on the gratitude ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... but recommends moderate ones as part of the physician's art. Asclepiades, in the time of Pompey the Great, called exercises the common aids of physic, and got great glory—and money, it is to be hoped—by various mechanical contrivances for the sick. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... as if she never wished to move again. She lay there counting the minutes that made the passing hours, counting them calmly, with an inexorable and almost cold self-possession. The process presently became mechanical, and she was able, at the same time, to dwell upon the events that had followed upon the discovery of the murdered woman by the tent: Androvsky's pulling aside of the door of the tent to find it empty, their short ride to the encampment close by, their rousing ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... Mosaic is so named from the tesselated pavements of the Romans, which being worked in a regular and mechanical manner, were called Opus musivum, opera quae ad amussim facta sunt. Hence the Italian musaico, the French mosaique, and our English mosaic. See "N. & Q.," Vol. iii., ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... at a little private hotel just across from the court house square with its scarlet geraniums and its pretty fountain. The house is filled with German civil engineers, mechanical engineers, and Herr Professors from the German academy. On Sunday mornings we have Pfannkuchen with currant jelly, and the Herr Professors come down to breakfast in fearful flappy German slippers. I'm the only creature in the place ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... mechanical memorizing, of the Catechism is of paramount import, Luther insisted that the instruction must be popular throughout. Preachers and fathers are urged to come down to the level of the children and to prattle with them, in order to bring the Christian fundamentals ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... elder stranger. "You seem a fine young springald, and at the right age to prosper, whether among men or women. What say you? I am a merchant, and want a lad to assist in my traffic; I suppose you are too much a gentleman to assist in such mechanical drudgery?" ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... acetic and trichloracetic acids, aldehyde and chloral, marsh gas and chloroform are pairs of compounds referable to the same type. He also postulated, with Regnault, the existence of "molecular or mechanical types" containing substances which, although having the same number of equivalents, are essentially different in characters. His unitary conceptions may be summarized: every chemical compound forms a complete whole, and cannot therefore ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... one could be found so blind to obvious inferences as to accept natural selection, "or the preservation of favoured machines," as the main means of mechanical modification, we might suppose him to argue much as follows:- "I can quite understand," he would exclaim, "how any one who reflects upon the originally simple form of the earliest jemmies, and observes the developments they have since attained ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... oaks on the Welbeck estate were transplanted thither under the fourth Duke's direction, a mechanical appliance being used ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... experiences; and old men grotesque in a dissolute senility; and sudden bursts of orchestral music, and simpering ballads, and comic refrains and crashing choruses; and lights, lingerie, picture-hats and short skirts; and over all, dominating all, the set, eternal, mechanical, bored smile ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... conversation turned upon music, and a guest regretted the mechanical performance of the ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... that they are making fifty per cent. annually on their whole capital, and yet cannot supply one tenth of the demand for their production. The result of only ten per cent. duties in excluding products from abroad, would give life and impetus to mechanical and manufacturing industry, throughout the entire South. Our people understand these things, and they are not afraid of results, if forced to declare Independence. Indeed I do not see why Northern Republicans should wish to continue a connection ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... with dried-up cigars, and an ill-smelling pipe—Archie hated pipes—and a box of cigarettes. A number of scientific magazines lay about and a forbidding array of books on mechanics and chemistry overflowed the shelves. He threw open a cabinet filled with blue prints illustrating queer mechanical contrivances. They struck him as very silly and he slammed the thing shut in disgust, convinced that Congdon was a crank, or he wouldn't have indulged in such foolishness. In a drawer of the desk was an automatic pistol and a box of cartridges. At ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... initiative but no endurance, and others with endurance but no initiative. Lastly, there are men, and a great many of them, who appear to be quite incapable of coherent thought, yet can handle machinery or any mechanical device to a marvel. Yes, we ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... He would not stay, however; he had bad news which compelled him to move on quickly—as quickly as possible. And then, with a certain whiteness about the lips, and a look of perplexed pain in his eyes, he picked up the papers as they lay strewn upon the grass, bowed to Gretchen with mechanical politeness, and made his way to the door by which he had come in. One thing he forgot; he never thought of it until long afterwards; the sweet, frail rose that Brother Dino had placed within his hand when he bade him God-speed. In less than an hour he was in ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... most useful inventions, are not those which reflect the greatest honor on the human mind. It is to a mechanical instinct, which is found in many men, and not to true philosophy that ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... ask, Sirs, what in the world is so dear as this power to see whether it be the beautiful or the foul that is disclosed? Need I, indeed, tell you of the way this flame spreads its feelers, and delicately darts and hovers in the darkness, conjuring things from nothing? This mechanical summoning, Sirs, of visions out of blackness is benign, by no means of malevolent intent; no more than if a man, passing two donkeys in the road, one lean and the other fat, could justly be arraigned for malignancy because they were not both fat. This, reverend ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Lungs is, as everybody knows, respiration, which may be considered from a mechanical or a chemical point of view. In this little work we are only concerned with the mechanical part of the subject. If we examine the lungs of a calf, which are very similar to those of a human being, we find that they are soft and elastic to the touch, giving out when pressed ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... Fanny washed the dishes with mechanical swiftness. Her mother had asked her if she would come to prayer meeting, and walk home with her afterwards. Not that Mrs. Dodge was timid; the neighborhood of Brookville had never been haunted after nightfall ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... were old enough to appreciate and enjoy the sight, they went into the Gymnasium, which they found furnished with every kind of machine and mechanical means for developing the muscles and increasing the strength of both ...
— Elsie at the World's Fair • Martha Finley
... divided into three classes,—Theorists, who by study and reflection have made themselves acquainted with all the rules or maxims of the art they profess; Martinets, who have confined their attention merely to the mechanical part of the trade; and Practical men, who have no other or better guide than their own experience, in either branch of it. This last description is in all services, excepting our own, the most numerous, but with ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... progress; and you haven't. Dear, listen to me; what you honestly believe to be unselfish and high-minded adherence to principle, is nothing but the circling reasoning of a hurt mind—an intelligence still numbed from shock, a mental and physical life forced by sheer courage into mechanical routine. . . . Wait a moment; there is nobody else to say this to you; and if I did not love you I would not interfere with this great mistake you are so honestly making of your life, and which, perhaps, is the only comfort left you. I say, 'perhaps,' for I do not believe that life holds nothing ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... or rich, did not fear the monk and priest, at least feared the "scholar," who held, so the vulgar believed, the keys of that magic lore by which the old necromancers had built cities like Rome, and worked marvels of mechanical and chemical skill, which the ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... of Richard's blow, and the leader of the gang, whom Hunterleys still held by the throat. Richard, with a clasp-knife which he had drawn from his pocket, cut the cord which they had tied around Mr. Grex's wrists. His action, however, was altogether mechanical. He scarcely glanced at what he was doing. Somehow or other, he found the ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... by no means simple, and required all his attention; but there is a blessing even in mere mechanical labour, that soothes the torment of the mind. In the particular occupation upon which he had been engaged there was, moreover, a hidden touching element. It was work for the helpless dead, work for ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... unaccountable condition of things, however, connected with the prepuce that does not exist with the other vestiges of our arboreal or sylvan existence. Firstly, the other conditions have nothing that interferes with their disappearance; whereas the prepuce, by its mechanical construction and the expanding portions which it incloses, tends at times rather to its exaggerated development than to its disappearance. Again, whereas the other vestiges have no injury that they inflict by their presence, or danger that they cause their possessors to run, the prepuce is from ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... by means so purely non-mechanical or physical, gave the Black Snake a pre-eminence in "medicine" which he has ever since maintained. It was useless to suggest poison, deception, or collusion, to explain the occurrence. The firm belief was that the spiritual power of the Black Snake ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... soon after midnight, crept from my bed and followed him. I overtook him at a village some twenty miles distant, where he was remaining a day or two, and easily procured an engagement with him, since I desired nothing but to serve him and be taught the mechanical details of his art. My father had no clue whatever to my direction, for he had not dreamed of anything unusual in my thoughts or plans. He was now entirely alone. But I knew that I was helpless against the phantom which was leading me forth; it also contained a stimulant which was able ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... illustration which I am setting before you, to imagine what cannot be. I say, let us imagine a project for organizing a system of scientific teaching, in which the agency of man in the material world cannot allowably be recognized, and may allowably be denied. Physical and mechanical causes are exclusively to be treated of; volition is a forbidden subject. A prospectus is put out, with a list of sciences, we will say, Astronomy, Optics, Hydrostatics, Galvanism, Pneumatics, Statics, Dynamics, Pure Mathematics, Geology, Botany, Physiology, Anatomy, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... of Abraham Tucker's Light of Nature, compiled the Eloquence of the British Senate, wrote a reply to Malthus's Essay on Population, and even composed an elementary English Grammar. It would be a mistake to suppose that these labors were performed according to a system of mechanical routine. Hazlitt impressed something of his personality on whatever he touched. His violent attack on the inhuman tendencies of Malthus's doctrines is pervaded by a glow of humanitarian indignation. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... which in half an hour a blaspheming costermonger "gets religion" and becomes a saint of God—nothing is more certain than that the human mind can like this, at a flash, turn topsy-turvy; the good coming to the top, the bad going to the bottom. Mechanical pressure on the cortex of the brain can bring this state of things about, even as it can convert a saint of God into a ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... American, Miss Falconer? You were born in the States? You are going to Italy—and then home again?" The questions came in a reassuringly mechanical fashion; the man was doing his ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... d. Mechanical details. Indent headings that are coordinate (that is, of equal value) an equal distance from the margin. One inch to the right is a good distance for successive subordinate headings. Use Roman numerals, capital letters, Arabic numerals, and small letters to indicate the comparative ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... coalesce into one, without anything being lost except the plurality of subsistence, inasmuch as the one substance would contain the degree of reality of all the former substances. Perhaps, indeed, the simple substances, which appear under the form of matter, might (not indeed by a mechanical or chemical influence upon each other, but by an unknown influence, of which the former would be but the phenomenal appearance), by means of such a dynamical division of the parent-souls, as intensive quantities, produce other souls, while the ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... Accident, the Ideot continued to strike and count the Hour without the help of it, in the same manner as he had done when it was entire. Though I dare not vouch for the Truth of this Story, it is very certain that Custom has a Mechanical Effect upon the Body, at the same time that it has a very extraordinary Influence ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the table] like this. And somehow it just began to run—I don't want to claim that there was anything mystical—anything of a spiritualistic nature back of it—for that kind of thing I don't believe in! It was a wholly unreasoned, mechanical process—my copying of that beautiful autograph over and over again. When all the clean space on the letter was used up, I had learned to reproduce the signature automatically—and then—[throwing away the penholder with a violent gesture] then I forgot all about it. That night I slept long ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... after the legislative chambers, are the Navy-yard, the President's mansion, the National Exhibition, connected with the patent-office, containing specimens of mechanical inventions either original or considered such by their industrious projectors, and lastly the offices for the department ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... thirty. It is the conditions of women's work which need changing in order that they may become, like those of primitive women, so various that they develop the mind and fortify the body. This, however, is an evil which will be righted by the development of the mechanical side of industry, for machines tend constantly to become larger, heavier, speedier, more numerous and more automatic, requiring fewer workers to tend them, and these ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... that the mechanical and agricultural employment of civilized life require a kind of exertion altogether too steady and sustained to agree with an indolent people like the Polynesians. Calculated for a state of nature, in a climate providentially adapted ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... letters. I have endeavored to present the Christian character, and the duties required of the followers of Christ, in the light of God's word. I know, however, that I have done it with much imperfection. But, do not rest with the mere mechanical performance of the duties here recommended. Do not engage in any of them with the hope of meriting God's favor. Use them only as the means of promoting your spiritual progress; depending on the ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... a stranded ship, whether invented or improved by him I am not prepared to say, nor whether the projectile was a rocket or a shot, or both, fired from a gun. Hollis, the eldest of our party, who had considerable mechanical talent, seemed clearly to ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... the hive"—where does it reside? It is not like the special instinct that teaches the bird to construct its well planned nest, and then seek other skies when the day for migration returns. Nor is it a kind of mechanical habit of the race, or blind craving for life, that will fling the bees upon any wild hazard the moment an unforeseen event shall derange the accustomed order of phenomena. On the contrary, be the event never so masterful, the "spirit of the hive" still will follow it, step by step, like an ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... he were going to be watched, he would be watched no matter where he went; but he ate his supper in the dining room of the Plaza Hotel, and sat in the lobby talking with a couple of facetious drummers until the mechanical piano in the movie show across the street ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... somewhat less judicial and more "impressionist," but also more general and less buckrammed out with abstracts of particular works.[4] There appeared to me to be more than one reason for this, all such reasons being independent of, though by no means ignoring, the mechanical pressure of ever-lessening space. In the first place, a very much larger number of readers may be presumed to be more or less familiar with the subjects of discussion, thus not only making elaborate "statement of case" ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... enough, we do not often find in houses of more aspiring habit, where it would he of even greater value. It is amazing to me that housekeepers will go on tugging trunks, coal-hods and heavy merchandise of all kinds up stairways, day after day and year after year, when a simple mechanical contrivance, moved by water, or weights and pulleys, would save us from all these heavy burdens. Think of the bruised knuckles, the trembling limbs that stagger along with the upper end of a Saratoga 'cottage,' the broken plastering at the sides, the paper patched with bright ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... any of these obsolete European Governments effect against a nation which was really a vast secret society of forty-five millions, directed by a sacred chief, and wielding all the mechanical resources of the West with the almost inhuman subtlety and ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... not persevere. Nor did the taste for these trifles long endure. A good ballade is almost as rare as a good sonnet, but a middling ballade is almost as easily written as the majority of sonnets. Either form readily becomes mechanical, cheap and facile. I have heard Mr. George Meredith improvise a sonnet, a Petrarchian sonnet, obedient to the rules, without pen and paper. He spoke 'and the numbers came'; he sonneted as easily as a living poet, in his Eton days, improvised ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... who had nothing else to do, either looked after the young, and taught them what was useful, or themselves learned such things from the old. For ample leisure was one of the blessings with which Lykurgus provided his countrymen, seeing that they were utterly forbidden to practise any mechanical art, while money-making and business were unnecessary, because wealth was disregarded and despised. The Helots tilled the ground, and produced the regular crops for them. Indeed, a Spartan who was at Athens while the courts were sitting, and who learned ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... from end to end. And from end to end, and back again and over again, she read the letter—at first in expectancy, lips parted, colour brilliant, then with the smile still curving her cheeks—but less genuine now—almost mechanical—until the smile stamped on her stiffening lips faded, and the soft contours relaxed, and she lifted her eyes, staring into space with a wistful, questioning lift ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... the self-conceit, effrontery, and aplomb of a strong-brained fellow in liquor, threw in his remarks somewhat peremptorily; and his aims having been what they were for so many years, everything the others said turned upon his tongue, by a sort of mechanical craze, to the subject of scholarship and study, the extent of his own learning being dwelt upon with an insistence that would have appeared pitiable to himself in his ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... of Colonel Lloyd wore the appearance of a country village. All the mechanical operations for all the farms were performed here. The shoemaking and mending, the blacksmithing, cartwrighting, coopering, weaving, and grain-grinding, were all performed by the slaves on the home plantation. The whole place wore a business-like aspect very unlike the neighboring ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... Allies, he walked a little down the street and stood in the same position staring into the Repos du Poilu, where a large sign "American spoken" blocked up half the window. Two officers passed. His hand snapped up to the salute automatically, like a mechanical signal. It was nearly dark. After a while he began to feel serious coolness in the wind, shivered and started to ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... are excluded from all power of advancing in real excellence. Whilst boys, they are arrived at their utmost perfection; they have taken the shadow for the substance; and make that mechanical facility the chief excellence of the art, which is only an ornament, and of the merit of which few ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... (natural philosophy) I could not understand why so many of the so-called "mechanical powers" were assumed, and why several of them were not reduced to cases ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... her white, still face, the big light violet eyes resting on him stonily. She had not uttered a sound. She faced him, steadying herself on the corner of the piano with one extended hand. The other went on rubbing with mechanical persistency the place his lips ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... gamesters, and the hollow laughter of hollow hearts. There was a hired singing-girl with a lute at one end of the room, babbling of Cupid and Daphne, and green meadow and larks. But she was poorly dressed and indifferent looking; and she sang with a sad, mechanical air, as if her thoughts were far off. Hyde would have passed her without a glance; but, as he approached, she broke her love-ditty in two, and began to sing, with ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... His hopes were fixed on the Emperor Rudolph, who was not only fond of science, but who was especially addicted to alchemy and astrology, and his friend Rantzau promised to have him introduced to the Emperor by proper letters. When Tycho learned that Rudolph was particularly fond of mechanical instruments and of chemistry, he resolved to complete and to dedicate to him his work on the mechanics of astronomy, and to add to it an account of his chemical labours. This task he soon performed, and his work appeared in 1598 ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... art we often contrast the useful or mechanical arts with the Fine Arts; by these terms we denote the difference between the arts which are used in making such things as are necessary and useful in civilized life, and the arts by which ornamental ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... Colonel Wright, who had them marched to the upper landing of the Cascades, where, after a trial by a military commission, nine of them were sentenced to death and duly hanged. I did not see them executed, but was afterward informed that, in the absence of the usual mechanical apparatus used on such occasions, a tree with a convenient limb under which two empty barrels were placed, one on top of the other, furnished a rude but certain substitute. In executing the sentence each Indian in ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... tranquility of mind. On the events of the next few days hovered the fearful chance that was soon, either for misery or happiness, to influence irretrievably the years of his future life. Round and round the mighty walls he watched with mechanical and useless anxiety. Every stone in the building was eloquent to his lonely heart—beautiful to his wild imagination. On those barren structures stretched for him the loved and fertile home; there was the shrine for whose glory his intellect had been enslaved, ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... some sort is essential to the growing of plants in pots or boxes, both because of the plant-food it adds to the soil, and because it improves its mechanical condition and sponginess or water-holding quality. Thoroughly rotted horse manure or horse and cow manure mixed is by far the best. Cow manure alone, or pig manure, is lumpy and cold, and hen, sheep, pigeon or other special manures are not safe in the ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... gone off, for she raised her head and came out of the coach in the slowest and most mechanical way, lifting her hand and pushing back her hair with a weary sort of gesture as he spoke. So weary her face was, so utterly subdued, it might have touched anybody to see it. It never seemed to occur to her that the question needed ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... of Stukeville. The smile on the elongated face of the pelican, who is scratching his left ear with a broad web flipper, reflects in mummied perpetuity the gratitude hidden behind the quiet exterior of the studious Emil Stuffer, ornithologist and mechanical engineer—but principally the latter, when he received word from the expert that ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... taken by erecting forts upon many of the great rivers of their neighborhood; of the ulterior intentions she thus announced to circumscribe their pastoral lands, until they would all be obliged to renounce their flocks, and to collect in towns like Sarepta, there to pursue mechanical and servile trades of shoemaker, tailor, and weaver, such as the freeborn Tartar had always disdained. 'Then again,' said the subtle prince, 'she increases her military levies upon our population every year; we pour out our blood as young men in her defence, or more ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... men and boys who annually take the field in the United States in the pursuit of birds and quadrupeds, is enormous. People who do not shoot have no conception of it; and neither do they comprehend the mechanical perfection and fearful deadliness of the weapons used. This feature of the situation can hardly be realized until some aspect of it ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... trip a mechanical defect of the calibration of the time-power carried the Ceres off its course, light years beyond the segment of the Galaxy occupied by ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... gas. Just before election you could go into your private office, throw in a large dose of campaign whisky, light a campaign cigar, fasten your buttonhole to the wall by an elastic band, so that there would be a gentle pull on it, and turn the electricity on your mechanical thought supply. It would save time and money, and the result would be the same as it is now. This would only be the beginning, of course, and after a while every qualified voter who did not feel like exerting himself so much, need only give his name and proxy to the salaried ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... drop of water, in itself, and apart from its mechanical relations to other matter, is really a very complex and a very wonderful thing; not at all likely to be "self-caused." Water is made up, we know, of oxygen and hydrogen—two elementary colourless, formless gases. Now we can easily divide the one drop into ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... believed, after his long seven years of waiting, fruition had come in the matter of the type machine. Paige, the inventor, seemed at last to have given it its finishing touches. The mechanical marvel that had cost so much time, mental stress, and a fortune in money, stood complete, responsive to the human will and touch —the latest, and one of the greatest, wonders of the world. To George Standring, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of parties, now the merits of "American Writers," which afforded his 'prentice hand the requisite practice in the use of the pen. He had already acquired a perfect knowledge of typesetting and the mechanical makeup of a newspaper. During his apprenticeship he took his first lesson in the art of thinking on his feet in the presence of an audience. The audience to be sure were the members of a debating club, which ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... able to produce so many books. If these authors had wrought as voluminously as newspaper editors do, the result would be something to marvel at, indeed. How editors can continue this tremendous labor, this exhausting consumption of brain fibre (for their work is creative, and not a mere mechanical laying-up of facts, like reporting), day after day and year after year, is incomprehensible. Preachers take two months' holiday in midsummer, for they find that to produce two sermons a week is wearing, in the long run. In truth it must be so, and is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... one character which needs any long rehearsal, that of the dog Fido, and luckily this is one which can easily be supplied by mechanical means, as by the use of a toy dog of sufficient size which barks upon the ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... marvel which is growing behind her; her limbs are used only for support; they take no part in the building of the nest. The nest is built, if we may say so, automatically. It is not the result of industry and the cunning of instinct; it is a purely mechanical task, which is conditioned by the implements, by the organisation of the insect. The nest, complex though it is in structure, results solely from the functioning of the organs, as in our human industries a host of objects are mechanically fashioned whose perfection ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... in forming this Establishment, and which will be attended to as soon as the measures for feeding the Poor, and giving them employment, are carried into execution, is the forming of a grand repository of all kinds of USEFUL MECHANICAL INVENTIONS, and particularly of such as relate to the furnishing of houses, and are calculated to promote domestic ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... of two heavily upholstered and matronly ladies who spoke, in a voice of many underscorings. The Doctor, who had removed his hat with a purely mechanical motion, knew himself a prey, identified his captor, and ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... he's mixed up with Schwen. From the looks of him I should say that this Simpson, as he calls himself, is the directing head of the whole business. He looks to be the moneyed man, and the brains of the plotters. Blakeson is smart, in a mechanical way, and Schwen is one of the best machinists I've ever employed. But this Simpson strikes me as being the slick one ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... were set with a look of strong determination. "I can't—I can't be poor," she was repeating to herself with a mechanical monotony. ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act—a scene from which Miriam was absent—Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... he answered slowly, "is much more sensitive, I think, than any mechanical or electrical eavesdropper that has ever been employed before. It is the detectaphone—a new ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... Midsummer Day by turning a wheel rapidly about an oaken pole, though it is not said that the new fire so obtained is used to light a bonfire. However, we must bear in mind that in all such cases the use of a wheel may be merely a mechanical device to facilitate the operation of fire-making by increasing the friction; it need not ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... ages and countries where mechanical ingenuity has but few outlets it exhausts itself in the constructions of bits, each more peculiar in form or more torturing in effect than that which has preceded it. I have seen collections of these instruments of ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... blue sky, and the green sea, and the white foam, and the everlasting hills, and the rivers which flow out of their bosoms. They will abolish themselves when their work is done, but not before. And we, who, with all our boasted scientific mastery over Nature, are, from a merely mechanical and carnal point of view, no more than a race of minute parasitic animals burrowing in the fair Earth's skin, had better, instead of boasting of our empire over Nature, take care lest we become ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... lying everywhere outside the cities for those who have eyes to see. Even the toy department in an ordinary shop abounds in treasures that never seem to reach England: queer cheap toys made of wood, and not mechanical. It must be a dull child who is content with a mechanical toy, and it is consoling to observe that most children break the mechanism as quickly as possible and then play sensibly with the remains. Many of the toys ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... better. The author of Westward Ho!, considering the Spanish and English navies of ELIZABETH'S time, found precisely the same contrasted elements of autocracy and brotherliness producing just those results that we find respectively in the German and French forces of to-day—on the one hand a mechanical perfection of command, on the other an informed equality which, somehow, does not make against efficiency whilst fostering individuality. Mr. IRWIN hardly refers to our own Army; but one is thankful to remember that discipline by consent, one of the virtues of true democracy, is not the exclusive ...
— Punch, Volume 153, July 11, 1917 - Or the London Charivari. • Various
... papers. The silence around him became oppressive, and suddenly looking up, he encountered the glance of both Mr. Whitney and the detective, the former with an expression of triumph in his keen eyes. Perplexed and bewildered, Scott exclaimed in a mechanical tone,— ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... all very natural thoughts, and such, no doubt, as would actually pass through the mind of the young lady, in the candour of desolation; but the mechanical iteration of her mode of putting them renders them irresistibly ludicrous. It reminds us of the wager laid by the poor queen in the play of Richard the Second, when she overhears the discourse ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... help, and still retain to the full one's own individuality. The strawberry is no more a plagiarist than the smilax, nor the grape than the nettle. If the vine clings to the cedar, the connection is but mechanical. Its spirit and life are as independent of the savin as of the planet Jupiter. Even the dodder, which not only twines about other weeds, but actually sucks its life from them, does not thereby lose an iota of its native character. If a man is only original to begin with,—so the ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... concluded with a concert of mechanical music: I cannot explain how it was produced, but the effect was pleasing. Madame Duval was in ecstasies; and the Captain flung himself into so many ridiculous distortions, by way of mimicking her, that he engaged the attention of all the company; and, in the midst of the performance ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... had been hitherto dependent on her niece for one of the few pleasures she could enjoy, the pleasure of having the best new novels read to her as they came out. Discovering this, Arthur volunteered to relieve Miss Haldane, at intervals, in the office of reader. He was clever at mechanical contrivances of all sorts, and he introduced improvements in Mrs. Carbury's couch, and in the means of conveying her from the bedchamber to the drawing-room, which alleviated the poor lady's sufferings and brightened her gloomy life. With these ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... With all the talent and industry of the native Egyptians, who must naturally depend upon the waters of the Nile for their existence, it is extraordinary that for thousands of years they have adhered to their original simple form of mechanical irrigation, without improvement. ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... puzzle and bother me, "Pray without ceasing." But it has become a great help to me. It puzzled me because I didn't see any practical way of doing it. It didn't seem to mean the repetition of prayers, with little mechanical helps, such as some use. It surely doesn't mean staying on your knees a long time. But, as I tried to pray my way into its meaning, it came to mean four distinct things to me. And I would not be surprised to find more yet ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... goodness to inquire for me among your readers and contributors, for the titles of any works on—or references to good articles in encyclopaedias or dictionaries on—or for remarkable isolated passages relating to—Aerostation, or the arts of, or attempts at, flying, either by means of mechanical wings, &c., or by the aid ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... to birds, lo! an astounding thing has happened. That there were flying reptiles in the fossil ages we know, and there are flying beasts in our own. But the wings of these are simple mechanical alterations, which the imagination of a child, or a savage, ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... these replies is determined by the knowledge at our disposal. The difference is not in nature but in man. The answers given by primitive man to these eternal questions are a complete inversion of those of his better informed descendants. The conception of natural force, of mechanical necessity, is as yet unborn, and the primitive thinker everywhere assumes the operation of personal beings as responsible for all that occurs. This is not so much the product of careful and elaborate philosophising, it is closer akin to the naive thinking of a child ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... Rajah, astute colonel of industry, had not left himself defenseless. On the contrary, he had provided for this precise contingency by leaving McGrath's fireman in mechanical command on the Rosemary. If Winton should attempt to build around the private car, the fireman was to wait till the critical moment: then he was to lessen the pressure on the automatic air-brakes and let the car drop back ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... old mill. The stone flume and the adjoining ruins are commonly ascribed by the people of Cuzco to-day to the Incas, but do not look to me like Inca stonework. Since the Incas did not understand the mechanical principle of the wheel, it is hardly likely that they would have known how to make any use of water power. Finally, careful examination of the flume discloses the presence of lead cement, a substance unknown in ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... Remedies. 1. A Cure if Taken in Time.—"If taken in time a felon may be cured without lancing, but if poultice or liniment is used it is important that they should be bound on tightly as the mechanical compression is more essential than the application. A good remedy is finely pulverized salt, wet with spirits of turpentine bound tightly and left two or three days, wetting with the turpentine when dry ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Perhaps the forefathers of one-fourth of our Anglo-Saxon thegns held the plough, or followed some craft mechanical." ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... —Embattled walls. "Another essential basis of mechanical unity in the poem is the construction of the rampart. This takes place in the seventh book. The reason ascribed for the glaring improbability that the Greeks should have left their camp and fleet unfortified ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... his mother for a few hairs from her fur coat to make paint brushes, and actually devising a ball and socket joint for a small windmill he was building. Everything he could lay his hands on he turned to some mechanical use, and all his thoughts seemed bent in ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... by this New Standard instead of by the old race-standard that constitutes the real New Thought. The New Thought which gives New Life to the individual will never be realized so long as we think that it is merely the name of a particular sect, or that it is to be found in the mechanical observance of a set of rules laid down for us by some particular teacher. It is a New Fact in the experience of the individual, the reason for which is indeed made clear to him through intellectual perception of the real nature of the Creative Process, but which can become an actual experience ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... mirror did not answer this question, Mr. Gorby lathered his face, and started shaving in a somewhat mechanical fashion, for his thoughts were with the case, and ran on ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... Abyssinian pumps, for which I had vainly applied at Cairo, would doubtless discover the prime necessary in the Wadys, many of the latter being still damp and muddy. Moreover, the crible continue grilles filtrantes, the invention of MM. Huet and Geyler, introduced, we are told, into the mechanical treatment of metals, a principle which greatly economizes fluid. Founded upon the fact that sands of nearly the same size, but of different densities, when mixed in liquid and subjected to rapid vertical oscillation, range themselves by order of weight, the heavier sinking and not allowing ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... time and again to offer an adequate explanation of the phenomenon of wind and storm but have failed signally, nor can they succeed while they seek a mechanical solution to what is really a manifestation of life. Could they see the hosts of sylphs winging their way hither and thither, they would know who and what is responsible for the fickleness of the wind; could they watch a storm at sea from the ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... them in pursuance of a deliberate purpose; but at that time he found himself in a mental condition similar to that above described. We may neither be magnetized nor hypnotized, nor put to sleep in any fashion, and yet the brain may remain alien to our mechanical productions. Its cells are functionally agitated, and doubtless act by a reflex impulsion on the motor nerves. We all then believed that Jupiter was inhabited by a superior race. These communications were the reflections of opinions generally held. In these days, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... it was as black, as softly deep, as plushy as a pansy. She walked swiftly into it as if with destination. But after five or six of the long cross-town blocks her feet began to lag. She stood for a protracted moment outside a drug-store window, watching the mechanical process of a pasteboard man stropping his razor; loitered to read the violent three-sheet outside a Third Avenue cinematograph. In the aura of white light a figure in a sweater and cap nudged up ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... of the 13th century, a French poet (quoted by Weber) looks forward with disgust to the supercession of the feats of chivalry by more mechanical methods of war:— ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... machines, not organisms. They have no inherent life of their own, no power of growth and renewal. In this they differ from animate creation because the highest achievement of the creative faculty in man in a mechanical way lacks the life principle possessed by the plant. And as the most perfect machine is inferior in this respect to the humblest flower that grows, so is the highest product of the vegetable kingdom inferior to man himself, the maker of the machine; for he can reflect upon his own and the ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... of the ancients, who, by virtue of congenial talents and cultivation have walked in their path and worked in their spirit, have ever been as rare as their mechanical spiritless copyists are common. Seduced by the form, the great body of critics have been but too indulgent to these servile imitators. These were held up as correct modern classics, while the great truly living and popular poets, whose reputation was a part of their nations' glory, and to whose ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... from the engine force a piston back and forth, which communicated with the warping levers and automatically accomplished what had up to that time, Bud went on to say, been done by the hand of the busy aviator. Thus a mechanical balancer had been arranged, so that the pilot need never bother himself as to whether a stiff gale were blowing or not, since practically ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Flying Squadron • Robert Shaler
... desperate resolve to do his duty, and make his animosity tell when he struck. A dangerous man under whom to sail, gentleman of the Randolph, and a dangerous man to meet, as well. He could not forget Kate, and, except in the distraction of a combat, life was a mere mechanical routine for him. But because he had been well trained he went ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Uncle John is an engineer now, and even as a little boy he had a great turn for mechanical inventions. Well, he pondered over some means by which such a sudden interruption to the enjoyment of his schoolfellows might be prevented in future; and I will ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... Guistiniani, whom he calls a false historian, an inconsiderate, partial, or malignant compatriot, for having, in his psalter, traduced his father, by saying, that in his youth he had been employed in mechanical occupations. ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... marvelous right-arm and fingerboard control, which enables him to produce at will the finest and most subtle tonal nuances in all bowings. Then, too, he overcomes the most intricate mechanical problems with seemingly effortless ease. And his tone has well been called "golden." His own definition of tone is worth recording. He says it should be "In music what the heart suggests, and the ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... bridge to facilitate a future coming together. But a bridge is not possible, nor if possible, necessary. There is no doubt that since the New Testament was written there have been great improvements in bridge building, both mechanical and theological; but between equal manhood on one side and race prejudice on the other, "there is a great gulf fixed," and no bridge can span the chasm. The Negro must surrender his manhood or the white man his prejudice. There is no half way. But when either is surrendered, there is no gulf, ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 10, October, 1889 • Various
... sentimentality is very often simply maudlin, almost always tiresome to us, and in very, very few cases justified by brilliant success even in its own very doubtful kind. Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the merely mechanical mountebankery—the blanks, and the dashes, and the rows of stops, the black pages and the marbled pages which he employs to force a guffaw from his readers. The abstinence from any central story in Tristram is one of those dubious pieces of artifice which may possibly show ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... of the death of Alboin is recognisable even when it is stated in the most general terms, as a mere formula; the story of Waltharius retains its life, even in the Latin hexameters; the plot of Hamlet is interesting, even in Saxo; the story of the Niblungs, even in the mechanical prose paraphrase. This gift of shaping a plot and letting it explain itself without encumbrances is not to be mistaken for the whole secret of the highest kind of poetry. But, if not the whole, it is the spring of ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... faculty (I can write music).—Now that I see the uselessness of such jealousy, and am for loosing and letting it go, it may be cramped possibly. Your music is more various and exquisite than any modern writer's to my ear. One should study the mechanical part of the art, as nearly all that there is to be studied—for the more one sits and thinks over the creative process, the more it confirms itself as 'inspiration,' nothing more nor less. Or, at worst, you write down old inspirations, what you ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... the grain so as to expose the greatest possible surface to the action of the digestive fluids; this is accomplished in several ways; by the formation of air cells through the medium of acetous fermentation, as in yeast bread; by the mechanical introduction of carbonic acid gas, as in aerated bread; by the mixture with the flour of a gas-generating compound, which needs only the contact of moisture to put it in active operation; and by the beating into the dough of atmospheric ...
— The Cooking Manual of Practical Directions for Economical Every-Day Cookery • Juliet Corson
... pounds out of the biggest cans—a twenty and a ten. There's your opener," he added, pointing to a rather complicated mechanical can-opener fastened to the bulkhead. "Open everything ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... at heart a Catholic,' she returned in a mechanical tone; 'but while my boy lived I was content that his Church should be mine. All my life I have had a leaning to the older faith; now in my desolation I mean to shelter in the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church. She receives all penitents; ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... was his true self only when under the conditions of his slavery. He had toiled a few years longer than he should have done, to attain the ability to keep his head above the waters of life without toil. The mechanical motion of his hands at their task of years was absolutely necessary to him. He had become, in fact, as a machine, which rusts and is good for nothing if left long inactive. Henry was at once pitiable and terrible when he came in sight of the many-windowed building ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... nearly insane from suffering, and after eight years of doctoring I found myself steadily growing worse. For four years I did not have a normal action of the bowels, and it was only by extreme effort and by resort to powerful drugs or mechanical means, with resultant suffering, that any action whatever could be ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... a subject which is hourly becoming of greater practical interest. Evidently it would have been altogether beside the purpose of this essay to have entered deeply into the abstract science, or closely into the mechanical detail, of construction: both have been illustrated by writers far more capable of doing so than I, and may be studied at the reader's discretion; all that has been here endeavored was the leading him to appeal to something like definite principle, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... from the cathedral town of Lichfield, where the Middle Ages still lingered, he set up, in a small building near Sutton Coldfields, a certain machine. That machine inaugurated, and forever symbolizes, the long and glorious series of mechanical triumphs which has made a large degree of leisure possible, not for a few thousand women, as was previously the case, but for millions and millions ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... the material organic world may be so constituted that the simultaneous action upon it of all known forces, mechanical, physical, chemical, magnetic, terrestrial, and cosmical, together with other as yet unknown forces which probably exist, may result in changes which are harmonious and symmetrical, just as the internal nature of vibrating ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... never forgive Lloyd George. It remains to be said that they are taking a narrow and immediate view of a drama so immense that its proper perspective will only be available many years hence. They are trying to test men's souls under strain in a small mechanical balance. Forces were at work such as are only met with once or twice in centuries. You cannot bring a puny, every-day judgment to bear on issues which may mean misery or happiness to millions of people, and life or death to a great proportion of them. In such circumstances the raw strength of ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... ambassador, to recommend him to your notice, and to expatiate on his misfortunes. Though he himself can scarcely move, his friend, who is often a little ragged boy or girl, light of weight and made for a chase, pursues the carriage and prolongs the whine, repeating, with a mechanical iteration, "Signore! Signore! datemi qualche cosa, Signore!" until his legs, breath, and resolution give out at last; or, what is still commoner, your patience is wearied out or your sympathy touched, and you are glad to purchase the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... certainly, the Queen was never found wanting in those days. In "natural curiosity" she was a veritable daughter of Eve, and granddaughter of George the Third. She was interested not only in the scientific discoveries, new mechanical inventions, and agricultural improvements which so interested her husband, but in odd varieties of animals and human creatures. She accepted with pleasure the gift of a Liliputian horse, supposed to be ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... of Edgar Poe was a familiar one in the office of the Evening Mirror. Neither in his character of Edgar the Dreamer nor that of Edgar Goodfellow was he especially known there, but simply as a modest, industrious sub-editor, doing the work of a mechanical paragraphist as quietly, as unobtrusively, as a machine. With rarely a smile and rarely a word, he stood from morning till night at his desk in a corner of the editorial room—pale, still and beautiful as a statue, punctual and efficient and ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... and new movements. Milton, it need hardly be said, is the master of those who know how to place and displace the stress and accent of the English heroic line in epic poetry. His most majestic hand undid the mechanical bonds of the national line and made it obey the unwritten laws of his genius. His blank verse marches, pauses, lingers, and charges. It feels the strain, it yields, it resists; it is all-expressive. But if the practice of some of the poets ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... whose surface could easily accommodate their plane. If they had needed further proof of some guiding intelligence behind all this, that cleared space was it. They were being deliberately lowered to a landing place through a portion of the "rind" made soft in some mechanical way to allow the weight of their plane to ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks
... and invention; but idle hands make active heads. Science and the Arts are themselves the children of luxury, and they discharge their debt to it. The work which they do is to perfect technology in all its branches, mechanical, chemical and physical; an art which in our days has brought machinery to a pitch never dreamt of before, and in particular has, by steam and electricity, accomplished things the like of which would, in earlier ages, have been ascribed to the agency of the devil. ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... therefore the influence of the different kinds of literature; he would also be driven to study the machinery for making books, the history of printing, illustrating, and binding books, and all the mechanical processes connected with the manufacture of books. The subject might take quite another turn, and be the development of fiction or drama; it might be a discussion of the influences, political or social, that have moulded literature; it ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... see a little TK here in the lab right along," she said. "At least, there are those who seem to have a small genuine edge on the cards that we can explain no other way. It's small, but apparently exists. But precognition? That's not simply mechanical or kinetic, like TK. PC is something terrifyingly different." Her voice hushed as she said it. "It's a kind of sensitivity that has nothing to do with mere kinetics. It defies time!" She looked back at me. "I simply find it comical that you thought ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... his back went one of those ingenious mechanical contrivances familiarly in vogue at fairs, which are designed to impress upon the victim to whom they are applied, the pleasing conviction that his ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... species; and even in modern Europe, to which we owe the great principle of representation, no example is seen of a government wholly popular, and founded, at the same time, wholly on that principle. If Europe has the merit of discovering this great mechanical power in government, by the simple agency of which the will of the largest political body may be concentred, and its force directed to any object which the public good requires, America can claim the merit of ...
— The Federalist Papers
... that is best within him, and not to depend upon one thing and reject another, favour one opinion, and oppose or even disregard another. And those in the school who first realised this, determined not to submit to the guiding and moulding of this mechanical institution, but to look at the world around and outside them—its beauty, its methods, its effects, its possibility, its wonder and its joy, and to develop for themselves, under the guidance and suggestion of those whom they trusted, their own powers, with their own principles to guide ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... self-improvement with the positive advance of the world. At present Lenny's genius had no bias that was not to the Positive and Useful. It took the direction natural to its sphere, and the wants therein,—namely, to the arts which we call mechanical. He wanted to know about steam-engines and Artesian wells; and to know about them it was necessary to know something of mechanics and hydrostatics; so he bought popular elementary works on those mystic ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... looked upon as being physiological. Excitement, strange surroundings, fatigue, and hot weather may all cause loss of appetite. Where there is cerebral depression, fever, profound weakness, disorder of the stomach, or mechanical difficulty in chewing or swallowing, the appetite is diminished or destroyed. Sometimes there is an appetite or desire to eat abnormal things, such as dirty bedding, roots of grass, soil, etc. This desire usually comes from a chronic ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... reader with popular and connected views of the actual progress and condition of the Physical Sciences, both at home and abroad. The Mechanical Arts, Dietetic Chemistry, the Structure of the Earth, Electricity, Galvanism, Gas, Heat, Light, Magnetism, the Mathematical Sciences, Philosophical Instruments, Rain, Steam, the Cometary System, Tides, Volcanoes, &c., have, among many others, been developed in original communications and ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... there is a great part of every one's life which is mechanical, instinctive, and all but involuntary. Habits and emotions and passing impulses very seldom come into men's consciousness, and an enormously large proportion of everybody's life is done with the minimum of attention, and is as little ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... have heard from various men engaged in the inquiry,—that certain persons among the community of thieves are very much at loggerheads with each other,—the higher, or creative department in thiefdom, accusing the lower or mechanical department of gross treachery in having appropriated to its own sole profit plunder, for the taking of which it had undertaken to receive a certain stipulated price. But then it may be the case that his lordship and her ladyship have set such a rumour abroad for the sake ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... surface of the water may reach the temperature of congelation, but the agitations due to the action of strong winds soon breaks up the thin pellicle of ice, which is quickly melted by the heat generated by the mechanical action of the waves. Nevertheless, in shallow and detached portions of the Lake, which are sheltered from the action of winds and waves—as in Emerald Bay—ice several inches ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... hesitation. Yes! She had even reached the level of being religiously proud of them! But now her bullied and crushed conscience leaped up again, and in the swift alarm of the shock her heart was once more violently beating. Yet amid the wild confusion of her feelings, a mechanical intelligence guided her hand to follow Arthur Dayson's final sentences. And there shone out from her soul a contempt for the miserable hack, so dazzling that it would have blinded him—had ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... the Executive Part of an Army, and indeed of the Gross of Mankind in general; but none of these Men of Mechanical Courage have ever made any great Figure in the Profession of Arms. Those who are formed for Command, are such as have reasoned themselves, out of a Consideration of greater Good than Length of Days, into such a Negligence of their Being, as to make ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... read through the "Cid" and "Rodogune." My impression is still a mixed and confused one. There is much disenchantment in my admiration, and a good deal of reserve in my enthusiasm. What displeases me in this dramatic art, is the mechanical abstraction of the characters, and the scolding, shrewish tone of the interlocutors. I had a vague impression of listening to gigantic marionettes, perorating through a trumpet, with the emphasis of Spaniards. There is power in it, but we have before us heroic ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... other, and resolutely kept my eyes off the abyss and fixed on the opposing hill, and as the long curve before me was diminished by successive sharp advances, still my heart was caught half-way in every breath, and whatever it is that moves a man went uncertainly within me, mechanical and half-paralysed. The great height with that narrow unprotected ribbon across it was more than I ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... Wonderful Lamp, I knew he would have trimmed it and lighted it, and delivered a lecture over it on the qualities of sperm-oil, with a glance at the whale fisheries. He would so soon have found out—on mechanical principles—the peg in the neck of the Enchanted Horse, and would have turned it the right way in so workmanlike a manner, that the horse could never have got any height into the air, and the story couldn't have been. He would have ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... long, straight hollows. They are the so-called "canals" discovered by Schiaparelli in 1877. The term "canal" is an unfortunate one. The word implies the existence of water and the presence of beings of sufficient intelligence and mechanical ability to construct elaborate works. Flammarion in France and Lowell in the United States claim the word is correctly used, i.e., that these markings are really canals and that Mars is actually inhabited. The consensus of opinion ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... and knew even more than the girl about the masters and their works. There was a player attachment to the piano, and the girl and Gowan had a contest, playing the same selections in turn, to see which could get the most expression by means of the mechanical apparatus. If anything, the girl came out second best. At least she said so; but Ashton would ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... forms of music may be considered in two aspects, the texture of the music from moment to moment, and the shape of the musical design as a whole. Historically the texture of music became definitely organized long before the shape could be determined by any but external or mechanical conceptions. The laws of musical texture were known as the laws of "counterpoint" (see COUNTERPOINT and HARMONY). The "contrapuntal" forms, then, are historically the earliest and aesthetically the simplest in music; the simplest, that is to say, in principle, but not necessarily the easiest ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... Hopelessly and drearily he accepted this as a fact even while with all his might fighting that tiger skin. So sure was he, indeed, of this, so implicitly had he accepted it as an unalterable certainty, that in time even his efforts to fight it became almost mechanical and unconscious in their stern round of ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... streets of the town. Little Poland was virtually a fief of Joe Hilliard's. Men, women, and elves looked up to him as to a benevolent feudal lord, and the naturalized males voted Joe Hilliard's party ticket with mechanical precision. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... they address, dealing only with what is of momentary interest, or if the question be deep, they move on the surface, lest the many-eyed crowd lose sight of them. The preacher gets an audience and pay on condition that he stoop to the gossip which centres around new theories, startling events, and mechanical schemes for the improvement of the country. If to get money be the end of writing and preaching, then must we seek to please the multitude who are willing to pay those who entertain and amuse them. Will not our friends, even, conceive a mean opinion of our ability, if we ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... friends advised me to do no work; but not wishing to eat the bread of idleness—although the bread was little now, as I had little appetite—I made it a rule to go every morning to the workhouse, and occupy myself for two or three hours with some light, mechanical task which put no strain on me, physical or mental. Even this playing at work fatigued me. Then, after changing my dress, I would repair to the music-room to resume my search after hidden knowledge in any books that happened to be there; for I could read now, a result which my sweet schoolmistress ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... new wind is getting up. We call it Labour versus Capitalism. We say it is a mere material struggle, a money-grabbing affair. But this is only one aspect of it. In so far as men are merely mechanical, the struggle is one which, though it may bring disaster and death to millions, is no more than accident, an accidental collision of forces. But in so far as men are men, the situation is tragic. It is not really the bone we are fighting for. We are fighting to ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... great advantages over most of his adventurous competitors; one was a heavy bank account, representing his earnings in the commission business, and the other a partner, Samuel Andrews, who was generally regarded as a mechanical genius in the production of illuminating oil. At the beginning, therefore, Rockefeller had the two essentials which largely explain his subsequent career; an adequate liquid capital and high technical resources. In the first few years the Rockefeller houses—he rapidly organized three, ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... you that God gave the male-germ life. It is necessary now to explain the character of this life. It is very brief; it is estimated that they are active for two hours, and then become inactive, or die. The best way to explain the brief activity to your daughter, is to liken the spermatozoa, to a mechanical toy, which is wound up to go for a certain time. After it runs out it becomes inactive; this is exactly what happens to the little human tadpole. If during this brief life none of them has happened to reach the female egg, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... a brief account of the curious manner in which I became possessed of it. As to my capacity for repeating the story correctly, I can answer for it that my memory may be trusted. I may claim it as a merit, because it is, after all, a mechanical one, that I forget nothing, and that I can call long-past conversations and events as readily to my recollection as if they had happened but a few weeks ago. Of two things at least I feel tolerably certain before-hand, in meditating over its contents: first, that I can repeat correctly all that ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... private picture gallery. Raphael's celebrated gallery in the Vatican at Rome was exactly repeated here with the most accurate copies of all the paintings, corner pieces and other ornaments of the same size and in the same situations. Medals, engravings, curious pieces of art, models of mechanical inventions and collections of specimens of minerals and of objects of natural history crowded the cabinets. Chambers were arranged for all species of amusements. A pleasure garden was constructed upon arches, with furnaces beneath them ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... washing is connected with that of mechanical purification, trituration, dismemberment in the parable, grinding (mill), and with the bath and solution (dissolution of the bridal pair). "Bath" is, on the other hand, the surrounding vessel, water bath. Arnold (Ros., I, 9): "The true beginning, therefore, is the dissolution and solution of the ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... out of a job. What to do? Don't want to study, like you. Can't crochet, like Peg. Darned if I'll sit cross-legged on a pillow and eat candy, like that Titian blonde over there on the floor. I know what—I'll build me a mechanical educator and teach Shiro to talk English instead of that mess of language he indulges in. How'd ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... land may have attained. The rights of the mill, that old European appanage of the lord of the soil, were also reserved to the seigneur, who alone can build mills within his domain, or use the waters within his boundaries for mechanical purposes; but he must erect them at convenient distances, and must make and repair roads. The miller, therefore, takes toll of the grist, which is another source of seignorial revenue, although not a very great one, for the toll is, excepting the miller's thumb ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
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