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More "Mechanism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... That the Falls of Niagara, however, dissipate untold natural forces is just as true as that England wastes immeasurable intellectual force because her forces are allowed to dissipate through not being disciplined and bridled by a fitting educational mechanism. Therefore let England turn to the prosaic ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... ceasing from their play, for, from this day, strictly speaking, he ate nothing more. His existence henceforward seemed to be the mere prolongation of an impetus derived from an eighty years' life, after the moving power of the mechanism was withdrawn. His physician visited him every day at a particular hour; and it was settled that I should always be there to meet him. Nine days before his death, on paying his usual visit, the following little circumstance occurred, which affected us both, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... machinery of a human brain, like any man-made mechanism of great nicety, may readily be thrown into confusion, its exquisite balance disturbed, its functioning confounded. Thirst, near-exhaustion, severe bodily distress and, on top of all, blood-lust anger ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... a more ready recognition; for there is no excellence which the writer of the passages which we have quoted could hereafter attain, the promise of which would not be at once perceived in them. But the public are apt to judge of books of poetry by the rule of mechanism, and try them not by their strongest parts but by their weakest; and in the present instance (to mention nothing else) the stress of weight in the title which was given to the collection was laid upon what ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... broader features of the social order of the coming time, less intimately related to transit, that it will be convenient to discuss at this stage. They are essentially outcomes of the enormous development of mechanism which has been the cardinal feature of the nineteenth century; for this development, by altering the method and proportions of almost all human undertakings,[20] has altered absolutely the grouping and character of the groups of human beings ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... Costecalde's, the gunsmith's, when Tartarin was explaining some mechanism of a rifle, the door was opened and an excited voice announced, "A lion! A lion!" The news seemed incredible, but you can imagine the terror that seized the little group at the gunsmith's as they asked for more news. It appeared that the lion was to be seen in a travelling ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... government is the latest invention of constitutional science. Several circumstances confer upon it at the present moment extraordinary prestige. It is a piece of political mechanism which has been found to work with success in three notorious instances. In its favour is engaged the pride—may we not say vanity?—of one of the leading nations of the earth. Americans regard Federalism with pardonable partiality. They are the original inventors of the best Federal system ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... conscription had invaded every family in France, from Normandie to La Vendee—while the untilled fields, the ruined granaries, the half-deserted villages, all attested the depopulation of the land, those talismanic words, "l'Empereur et la gloire," by some magic mechanism seemed all-sufficient not only to repress regret and suffering, but even stimulate pride, and nourish valour; and even yet, when it might be supposed that like the brilliant glass of a magic lantern, the gaudy pageant ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... sign. It tickles these anthropomorphic fancies, which are at the bottom of all their creeds. Imagine yourself playing at chess, not with an angel, but with an automaton, an admirably constructed automaton whose mechanism can outwit your brains any day: calm and strong, if you like, but no more playing for love than the clock behind me is ticking for love; there you have a much clearer notion of existence. A much clearer notion, and a much more satisfactory notion ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... was to open the flap of his belt holster and carefully withdraw the revolver which now rarely left his side. After a short examination of the mechanism, this came in for a good rub and polish from the ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... consist of figures of speech, images, and technical devices. It may well be, as Macaulay predicts, that the enlightened world will indeed resent and cease to practise "illusions" on the imagination, or on any other faculty. It may be the case also that the stock poetical diction and mechanism of Addison's time, with the "Delias" and "Phyllises," "nymphs," "swains," "lyres," and other tinsel elegancies in which it delights, will be—nay, are already—the abomination of a discerning world. But if by "poetry" ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... own mental attitudes and motives of conduct is an essential element of good living. But quite other is this extreme vigilance, this incessant observation of one's life and thoughts, this dissecting of one's self, like a piece of mechanism. It is a waste of time, and goes wide of the mark. The man who, to prepare himself the better for walking, should begin by making a rigid anatomical examination of his means of locomotion, would risk dislocating something before ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... sought—not in the palpable palaces where she is found. The ancients were not always right in hiding the goddess in a well; witness the light which Bacon has thrown upon philosophy; witness the principles of our divine faith—that moral mechanism by which the simplicity of a child may overbalance the wisdom of ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... startled me. What wonderful clock-work! What secret wheels! What intelligent mechanism! It is the machine of Marly applied to a human river. At Rome a special niche would have been devoted to the goddess ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... a new hare. I have got a glimpse of a method of causing a piston-rod to move up and down perpendicularly, by only fixing it to a piece of iron upon the beam ... I think it one of the most ingenious simple pieces of mechanism ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... If you have any love for the beautiful you simply cannot be happy about most Utopias, though they be Justice itself in civic form; and, when our "scientific" Fabian has demonstrated to you how to organise the national life in all its parts into one vast smoothly working State mechanism you will shudder, and then laugh. And then, without any rudeness, you will say: "Hang mechanism and a minimum wage! Live men and women want living crafts, ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... name applied to the mechanism employed for telegraphing purposes prior to the discovery of the electric telegraph; invented in 1767 by Richard Edgeworth, but first extensively used by the French in 1794, and afterwards adopted by the Admiralty ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... her cross the room, her skirts rustling slightly, and then the faint clicking of some delicately adjusted mechanism. As this sound ceased, her voice ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... is the flight of the seagull that it tempts us to fling aside the dry-as-dust theories of mechanism of flexed wings, coefficient of air resistance, and all the abracadabra of the mathematical biologist, and just to give thanks for a sight so inspiring as that of gulls ringing high in the eye of the wind over hissing combers that break on sloping ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... than in the evening: Fasting, than after a full meal. Can we give any reason for these variations, except experience? Where then is the power, of which we pretend to be conscious? Is there not here, either in a spiritual or material substance, or both, some secret mechanism or structure of parts, upon which the effect depends, and which, being entirely unknown to us, renders the power or energy of the ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... later they were fighting fiercely with half a dozen Germans who composed what was left of the automatic gun squad. The weapon appeared to be jammed, for one of the Huns was frantically working at the firing mechanism. And it was this same jamming, as was learned later, that, undoubtedly, saved the lives of Jimmy and ...
— The Khaki Boys Over the Top - Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam • Gordon Bates
... man of intelligent features but painfully distorted body; his right leg, permanently bent double, was supported at the knee by metal mechanism, and his arm on the opposite side ended at the elbow. None the less he moved with much activity, gesticulated frequently with the normal arm, and seemed always to be in excellent spirits. He was a Cambridge graduate, ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... quickly to the girl, and began explaining the mechanism of the gun to her, without appearing to notice her embarrassment, for she shrank perceptibly when ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... endless indiarubber band drawn over an inclined table, to which a revolving and side motion is given by ingenious automatic mechanism, the pulp being automatically fed from the upper end, and the concentrates collected in a trough containing water in which the band is immersed in its passage under the table; the lighter particles wash over the lower end. The only faults with ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... the act of opening, it was made to crush certain berries, and the oil they yielded, was carried by a small duct to the hinge, which was thus made to turn easily, and was prevented from creaking. While we were admiring its mechanism, an elderly man, rather plainly dressed, on a zebra in low condition, rode up, and showed that he was the owner of the mansion to which the gate belonged, and that he was not displeased with the curiosity we manifested. We found ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... incomplete. A carburetor had not been built, nor had a satisfactory burner or belt-shifting device. Charles had experimented with various shifting levers just before leaving Springfield: however, as he reported later, he did not succeed in designing a workable mechanism.[15] Frank Duryea, now left to finish the work unassisted, continued the experiments with the belt shifter. He finally worked out a fork mounted on a carriage that was supported by two rods, each of which slid in two bearings. Although the short distance between the two bearings ...
— The 1893 Duryea Automobile In the Museum of History and Technology • Don H. Berkebile
... on the couch looked to Henrietta like a doll animated by some diabolically clever mechanism, she was so pink and blue and fair. She was, in fact, a child's idea of feminine beauty and Henrietta felt a rush of sorrow that she should have to lie there, day after day, watching the seasons come and go. It was marvellous that she had ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... the shell of an egg; then the force of the "tidal explosion'' produced by the appulse of another sun would be more violent in consequence of the greater resistance overcome. Such, then, is the mechanism of the first phase in the history of a spiral nebula according to the Planetesimal Hypothesis. Two suns, perhaps extinguished ones, have drawn near together, and an explosive outburst has occured in one or both. The ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... were it not that the subject of style is cluttered up with such a mass of preconceptions, that it would be necessary to redefine our terminology, and then, after all, perhaps we should not understand one another. Men have an idea that they are thinking when they operate the mechanism of language which they have at command. When somebody makes the joints of language creak, they say: "He does not know how to manage it." Certainly he does know how to manage it. Anybody can manage a platitude. The truth is simply this: the ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... in mechanism had resulted in a machine which went far beyond Babbage's in its powers of calculation. Given the data, there was no limit to the possibilities in this direction. Babbage's cogwheels and pinions calculated logarithms, calculated an ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... system of communication, more magical than any mechanism, just because it was less perfect, just because it left room, along each separate channel, for the coming in of those slight, incalculable elements of personal emotion which lend the touch of ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... loud whirr of wheels, a buzz of internal mechanism, and all the little figures would stop dead with arms outstretched, whilst the beheaded doll rolled off the board and was lost to view, no doubt preparatory to going through ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... some pyramid monsters? You'd most likely be able to tell by that time!" Jarvis paused and drew a deep breath. "Lord! That queer creature! Do you picture it? Blind, deaf, nerveless, brainless—just a mechanism, and yet—immortal! Bound to go on making bricks, building pyramids, as long as silicon and oxygen exist, and even afterwards it'll just stop. It won't be dead. If the accidents of a million years bring it its food again, there it'll be, ready ...
— A Martian Odyssey • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... that the image is projected upside down by the lens on the plate, and that the bottom of the picture is taken before the top. The camera mechanism admits light, which makes the picture, in the manner of a roller blind curtain. The slit travels from the top to the bottom and, the image on the plate being projected upside down, the bottom of the object appears ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... Both these are excellent servants; we gave a luncheon party when we buried the Samoan bones, and I assure you all was in good style, yet we never interfered. The food was good, the wine and dishes went round as by mechanism. - Steward's assistant and washman Arrick, a New Hebridee black boy, hired from the German firm; not so ugly as most, but not pretty neither; not so dull as his sort are, but not quite a Crichton. When he came first, he ate so much of our good food ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... face wistfully. He held the keys of that beyond.... Something had snapped in his well-ordered mechanism, and he was going, going, drifting will-lessly into feeling and longing. And the next moment he held her, looking into a face that burned with love. There were no words. Life had been too strong for ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... head of Anatomy, and the first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae were folding-doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the human frame. A liberal education had of course left him free to read the indecent passages in the school classics, but beyond a general sense of secrecy and obscenity in connection with his internal structure, had left his imagination quite ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Monticello, too, he could gratify his delight in the natural sciences, for he was a true child of the eighteenth century in his insatiable curiosity about the physical universe and in his desire to reduce that universe to an intelligible mechanism. He was by instinct a rationalist and a foe to superstition in any form, whether in science or religion. His indefatigable pen was as ready to discuss vaccination and yellow fever with Dr. Benjamin Rush as it was to exchange views with Dr. Priestley ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... manner. Although, therefore, the entranced brain cannot spontaneously control the body, yet if we can apply an independent stimulus to it, the body will make a fitting and apparently intelligent response. The reader has doubtless seen those ingenious pieces of mechanism which are set in motion by dropping into an orifice a coin or pellet. Now, could we drop into the passive brain of an entranced person the idea that a chair is a horse, for instance,—the person would give every sensible indication of having adopted ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... load,' is now given—but not by Stentor. The forces at work are too great in some cases to be left to the uncertain human voice. A piece of mechanism, called a 'tell-tale,' communicates with infallible certainty that the monster is quite ready to feed! A hydraulic ramrod thereupon wets his whistle with a sponge, on the end of which is a small reservoir of water. The monster is temperate. ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... clothes and slipped into riding clothes and flannel shirt. As he buckled on his belt and hooked in canteen and holster, he heard the Sergeant galloping down the street with his led horse. A swift inspection of the mechanism of his big automatic, four extra clips added to the belt, and he ran downstairs ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... comes forward exhibiting a tablet, which announces the hours. He speaks also of a musical instrument which is connected, by means of a tube, with two peacocks sitting on a cross-bar, and when it plays, the mechanism causes the peacocks ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... were two pillars erected, at a small distance from each other. On one there was placed a brazen vessel, about the size of an ordinary cauldron: and on the other a little boy, which was most probably a piece of mechanism, who held a brazen whip with several thongs which hung loose, and were easily moved. When the wind blew, the lashes struck against the vessel, and occasioned a noise while the wind continued. It was from them, he says, that the forest took the name ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... species of mutilated limb, unequaled in mechanism and utility. Hands and Arms of superior excellence for mutilations and congenital defects. Feet and appurtenances, for limbs shortened by hip disease. Dr. HUDSON, by appointment of the Surgeon General of the U. S. Army, furnishes limbs ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the fact of nationality. Nationality is to political life what personality is to mental life, the mainspring, namely, of the mechanism. The two principles of organisation have this in common, that although by, through, and for them the entire pageant of our experience is unfolded, we are unable to capture either of them in a precise formula. That I am a person I know; but what is a person? That Ireland is a nation I know; but ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... fish, however, were not plentiful. Once Rick saw a snook that would have been worth taking, but the fish sped off into the watery gloom. Again, Scotty called his attention to a deadly scorpion fish. This small, rather weird-looking little creature had a dangerous defense mechanism in the spines of his back. His poison bore a strong resemblance to cobra venom. The boys ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin
... section," Robinson said—"the thickness of the wall—has been shifted to one side. No wonder we didn't see any joints or get a hollow sound from this panel any more than from the others. But why didn't we stumble on the mechanism? Maybe you'll ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... inability of a mechanism to compensate. The wind shifted after computer coordination. A pilot can feel it. Your instruments can't. There was no failure, there. The shut-off worked perfectly and Campbell was killed ...
— What Need of Man? • Harold Calin
... mill is paved with rough pieces of stone, while in the rest of the rooms it is made of stucco or compost. The use of water-mills, however, was not unknown to the Romans. Vitruvius describes their construction in terms not inapplicable to the mechanism of a common mill of the present day, and other ancient authors refer to them. "Set not your hands to the mill, O women that turn the millstone! sleep sound though the cock's crow announce the dawn, for Ceres has charged the nymphs with the ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... withdrawal of millions of men to join the colours, and the abnormal character of existing trade, due to the needs of the armies in the field, are not conditions favourable to the easy resumption of normal commercial relations. The dislocation of the mechanism of industry and commerce in Europe, on a much larger scale than ever before—a mechanism which has with growing international relations and interdependence become more complicated and more sensitive in recent years—cannot be immediately remedied ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... to shape the molten gold of April fervor in the rigid mold of the symphonic form, has escaped every appearance of mechanism and restraint. It is program music of the most legitimate sort, in full accord with Beethoven's canon, "Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei." It has no aim of imitating springtime noises, but seeks to stimulate by suggestion the hearer's creative imagination, and provoke by ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... toothed jaws. Let the fore-arm close upon the upper arm; and the imprudent insect, crushed between the two saw-blades, will be torn to pieces; wounded by the terminal hook, it will be eviscerated. This ferocious mechanism is the great danger; it is this that must be mastered at the outset, at the risk of life; the rest is less urgent. The first blow of the stylet, cautiously directed, is therefore aimed at the lethal fore-legs, which ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... her tears, and looked at the doctor in hopes that he might suggest some plan by which she could accomplish her end. To him she was but another case of a badly working mechanism. Either from the blow on her head or from hereditary influences she had a predisposition to a fixed idea. That tendency had cultivated this aberration about the woman her husband preferred to her. Should she happen on this woman in her wanderings about Chicago, there would be one of those ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... of the most delicate and complicated skill. It requires a deep knowledge of human nature and human necessities, and of the things which facilitate or obstruct the various ends, which are to be pursued by the mechanism of civil institutions. The state is to have recruits to its strength, and remedies to its distempers. What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... Castle. The most startling and frightful work of man I ever saw or expect to see was another specimen of work in steel, said to have been taken from one of the infernal chambers of the Spanish Inquisition. It was a complex mechanism, which grasped the body and the head of the heretic or other victim, and by means of many ingeniously arranged screws and levers was capable of pressing, stretching, piercing, rending, crushing, all the most sensitive ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... humanity. If I may speak in paradox, the true poet is more truly ourselves than we are. The astronomical telescope is constructed upon the same principles as the terrestrial one, only it is more powerful and more perfectly made. Not only the lenses, but all the details of the mechanism are more highly finished; more thought and more labour are bestowed upon them; the parts are more skilfully co-ordinated together; it is a better instrument. We do wrong to genius in connecting it with mental aberration; it is more normal, ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... are called sadhara@na-kara@na (common cause) as distinguished from the specific causes which determine the specific effects which are called sadhara@na kara@na. It may not be out of place here to notice that Nyaya while repudiating transcendental power (s'akti) in the mechanism of nature and natural causation, does not deny the existence of metaphysical conditions like merit (dharma), which constitutes a system of moral ends that fulfil themselves through the mechanical systems and ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... All at once the music stopped and the hour struck. At the same moment other steeples flung on the air other chimes, of which only the highest notes reached me, and when their chimes were ended they likewise struck the hour. This aerial concert, as I was told when its mechanism was explained to me, is repeated at every hour in the day and night by all the steeples of Holland, and the chimes are national airs, psalms, Italian and German melodies. Thus in Holland the hour sings, ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... not fail. It was a sheen of glowing colour. The strife of Athena with the brutish giants, her contest with Arachne, the deeds of the heroes of Athens—Erechtheus, Theseus, Codrus: these were some of the pictures. The car moved noiselessly on wheels turned by concealed mechanism. Under the shadow of the sail walked the fairest of its makers, eight women, maids and young matrons, clothed in white mantles and wreaths, going with stately tread, unmoved by the shouting as though themselves ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... or vital response.—I now proceed to a demonstration of the fact that whatever be the mechanism by which they are brought about, these plant responses are physiological in their character. As the investigations described in the next few chapters will show, they furnish an accurate index of physiological activity. For it will be found that, other things being equal, whatever ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... is the same with all structural variations of animal parts, which are not absolutely insignificant. When the insects acquired wings they must also have acquired the mechanism with which to move them—the musculature, and the nervous apparatus necessary for its automatic regulation. All instincts depend upon compound reflex mechanisms and are just as indispensable as the parts they have ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... time stretched their minds so as to embrace the darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing divine purpose. It used to be a question of purpose AGAINST mechanism, of one OR the other. It was as if one should say "My shoes are evidently designed to fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have been produced by machinery." We know that they are both: they are made by a machinery ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... been weeping, all faces turned to her at once. The two agents hoped as much as the household feared to see Laurence enter. This spontaneous movement of both masters and servants seemed produced by the sort of mechanism which makes a number of wooden figures perform the same gesture ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... necessary connections in the sense of physical necessity in the world of consciousness. The one idea may bring to me another idea by association, but as long as I consider both strictly as mental facts, I can never understand why this association happens, I can never grasp the real mechanism of the connection, I can never see necessity between the disappearance of the one and the appearance of the other. It remains a mystery which does not justify any expectation that the same sequence will result again. Whatever belongs to the psychical world ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... dozen words (to prove our generosity, we will let it be a baker's dozen) illustrative of this same principle of metaphor that governs the mechanism of language, and sheds a glory and a beauty around even our every-day fireside words; so that even those that seem hackneyed, worn out, and apparently tottering with the imbecility of old age—would we but get into the core of them—will shine forth with all the expressive meaning of their ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... ungracious in the eyes of Mr. Robarts after all the well-dressed holiday doings of the last week. She wore also a large, loose, dark-coloured wrapper, which came well up round her neck, and which was not buoyed out, as were her dresses in general, with an under mechanism of petticoats. It clung to her closely, and added to the inflexibility of her general appearance. And then she had encased her feet in large carpet slippers, which no doubt were comfortable, but ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... being rendered so by the admiring and excited state of his mind. He dwelt upon the matter of her "looks," and the way she lighted up the dingy dining-room, and so conversed that a man found himself listening and glancing when it was his business to be an unhearing, unseeing piece of mechanism. ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... machine. There are families who, instead of using one, employ a boy to ruin their knives by rubbing them on a board with Bath brick. They do so, they will tell you, "because machines wear out the knives." The slightest acquaintance with the mechanism of a good knife-cleaning machine should suffice to show that the brushes cannot wear out the knives, whereas the action of the board and brick is the most destructive that can be imagined. The objection of undue ...
— Nelson's Home Comforts - Thirteenth Edition • Mary Hooper
... think of a gun as something that is made primarily to shoot," he says. "The best gun is the simplest gun. When you begin loading a gun up with a lot of fancy contraptions and 'safety devices,' you are only inviting trouble. You complicate the mechanism and make that many more places for dirt and ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... is of opinion, that at the expense of a little mechanism, some part of the labour of composing these novels might be saved by the use of steam." There was a murmur of disapprobation at this proposal, and the words, "Blown up," and "Bread taken out of our mouths," and "They might as well construct a steam parson," were whispered. ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... up the wizard camera, which I have told you about in the book bearing that title. It would take moving pictures automatically, once Tom had set the mechanism to unreel the films back of the shutter and lens. The lights would instantly flash, when the electrical connections on the door locks were tampered with, and the pictures would ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton
... fold back and constitute a wagon-body. In this same wagon were carried the cotton canvas cover, the anchor and chains, and a due proportion of the balks, cheeses, and lashings. All the troops became very familiar with their mechanism and use, and we were rarely delayed by reason of a river, however broad. I saw, recently, in Aldershot, England, a very complete pontoon-train; the boats were sheathed with wood and felt, made very light; but I think these were more liable to ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... and such a treatment in such and such a manner, with very slight variation. The Doctor envied them their simplicity of faith. To him, on the contrary, the patient was a factor which could not be counted on, at all—a force about which he knew virtually nothing, acting upon a mechanism about which he knew little more, and capable of interactions, reactions, and counteractions innumerable, reversing and nullifying all past experience at a moment's notice—an ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... an ingenious but now twisted and tangled series of minute wires and electro-magnets in the delicate mechanism now broken open before us. Delicate brushes led the ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... laugh with your old words about a mission to fulfil. What a missionary! But there is in me an inexplicable mechanism which works in spite of all arguments; and I let it work because I cannot stop it. What disgusts me most is the certainty that beauty does not exist for the ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... make descriptions of machinery and mechanism interesting, but Mr. Williams has the enviable knack of doing so, and it is hardly possible to open this book at any page without turning up something which you feel you must read; and then you cannot stop till you come to the end ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... contemplated by the Atheist as the Theist contemplates it; for while the latter views it as God's vesture wherewith he hides from us his intolerable glory, the latter views it as the mere embodiment of force, senseless, aimless, pitiless, an enormous mechanism grinding on of itself from age to age, but towards no God and for no good. Here we must observe that the lecturer trespasses beyond the truth. The Atheist does not affirm that Nature drives on to no God and no good; he simply says he knows not whither ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... English grammar at the same time, and began to read Latin at six years old, after which, for some years, I read it daily. In this branch of study, first by my father, and afterwards by a tutor, I was trained to quite a high degree of precision. I was expected to understand the mechanism of the language thoroughly, and in translating to give the thoughts in as few well-arranged words as possible, and without breaks or hesitation,—for with these my father had ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... placed, and where, in all probability, still more numerous bodies are perpetually moving and illuminated for some great end; or whether we turn our prospect towards ourselves, and see the exquisite mechanism and active powers of things, growing from a state apparently of non-existence, decaying from their state of natural perfection, and renovating their existence in a succession of similar beings to which we see ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... be no reason why the same principle should not be extended to the sounds by which the voice utters these emotions of the soul, and blends syllables and lines into each other. It is to supply the inherent defect of harmony in the customary mechanism of language, to make the sound an echo to the sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo to itself—to mingle the tide of verse, "the golden cadences of poetry," with the tide of feeling, flowing and murmuring as it flows—in short, to take the language ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... horse lay motionless (his neck was broken, poor brute!) and by the lightning flashes I saw the black bulk of the overturned dog cart and the silhouette of the wheel still spinning slowly. In another moment the colossal mechanism went striding by me, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... to go up in my sanctum and examine a piece of mechanism, which, if you may not believe in, you, at least, will not laugh at, as I fear some others will. I want you to give me your frank opinion as a friend, for I know your interest in and love of the ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... also awaits the answers to two questions: Is there any chance that Robert Joy, the volunteer scientist who went up in the satellite, is still living? There seems to be little hope for his survival since radio communication from him stopped three days ago. Timing mechanism for the ejection of Joy are set for tonight. And that's the second question. Will the satellite, still in its orbit, eject the chamber containing Joy? Will it eject the chamber as scheduled, and will the chamber arrive back at earth at the ...
— The Day of the Dog • Anderson Horne
... dramatic poem. Thus, in regard to this last point, Zicari has already noted (p. 270) that Salandra's scenic acts were necessarily reproduced in the form of visions by Milton, who could not avail himself of the mechanism of the drama for this purpose. Milton was a man of the world, traveller, scholar, and politician; but it will not do for us to insist too vehemently upon the probable mental inferiority of the Calabrian monk, in view of the high opinion which Milton seems to have had of his talents. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... poking it with a pin. The carbon given off from the naphtha is very disposed to choke up the little hole through which the naphtha runs into the cup, and the costermonger pushes a pin into the little hole to allow the free passage of the naphtha. That, then, is the mechanism of this beautiful lamp of the Whitechapel traders, known as ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy
... that great result of the novel which has been noted in Defoe, in Richardson, and in others—the result of what the French vividly call enfisting the reader—getting hold of his attention, absorbing him in a pleasant fashion. The mechanism was often too mechanical: taken with the author's steady and honest, but somewhat inartistic determination to explain everything it sometimes produces effects positively ridiculous to us. With the proviso of valeat quantum, it is not quite unfair to dwell, as has often been dwelt, on the fact that ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... throughout the afternoon, but the time came when he thought the horse ought to rest, and with the coming of the twilight he had walked. He was not conscious of any weakness. His body, in a way, had become a mere mechanism. It worked, because the will acted upon it like a spring, but it was detached, separate from his mind. He took no more interest in it than he would in any other machine, which, when used up, could be cast aside, and be replaced with a ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... say that the four cannons were in perfect order. Since they had been taken from the water, the sailor had bestowed great care upon them. How many hours he had spent, in rubbing, greasing, and polishing them, and in cleaning the mechanism! And now the pieces were as brilliant as if they had been on board a frigate of ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... or a more honest woman than Mary Leffingwell, but I tremble for her. She is utterly incapable of managing that child. If Honora is a complicated mechanism now, what will she be at twenty? She has elements in her which poor Mary never dreamed of. I overheard her with Emily, and she talks like ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... immutable principle, innate in each bee, can alone account for the phenomena. On the other hand, the biologist, who traces out all the extant stages of gradation between solitary and hive bees, as clearly sees in the latter, simply the perfection of an automatic mechanism, hammered out by the blows of the struggle for existence upon the progeny of the former, during ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... said. "General Thayer had already sent another ship in to rescue the crew of the disabled vessel, staying low, below the horizon of the Russian radar. The disabled ship had had some trouble with its drive mechanism; it would never have deliberately exposed itself to Russian detection. General Thayer had already asked my permission to destroy the disabled vessel rather than let the Soviets get their hands on it, and, but for your suggestion, I would have given ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... fall away, new ones—as will hereafter be shown—are continually established, and by them the heavy work of life is for the most part performed. Personal goodness cannot be rightly understood till we perceive how it is superposed on a broad reflex mechanism. ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... Yes, it was this and nothing else that broke the profound silence of the dark room; it was indeed the deliberate ticking, rhythmical as the beat of a metronome, produced by a heavy brass pendulum. That was it! And nothing could be more impressive than the measured pulsation of this trivial mechanism, which by some miracle, some inexplicable phenomenon, had continued to live in the heart of the ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... at Cambridge, by so many thought to be the one referred to in The Old Clock on the Stairs. But no; that one was in the "Gold House" at Pittsfield, and is now in disuse; while this one is a fine piece of mechanism, striking the coming hour on each half hour, and on the hour itself sweet carillons are played for several moments, so familiar to the poet that it is no wonder that to hear ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume I, No. 2, February, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... crossing and mingling currents of wisdom and folly, ignorance and knowledge, truth and falsehood, weakness and force, the noble and the base, can analyze a systematized contradiction, and follow through its secret wheels, springs, and levers a phenomenon of moral mechanism? Who can define the Jesuits? The story of their missions is marvellous as a tale of chivalry, or legends of the lives of saints. For many years, it was the history of New France and of the wild communities ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... the relation of your soul to your body. That is infinitely mysterious, is it not? An emotion rises in your soul, and a flush of blood marks it. That is the subconscious mechanism of your body. But to say that, does not explain it. It is only a label. You follow me? Yes? Or still more mysterious is your conscious power. You will to raise your hand, and it obeys. Muscular action? Oh yes; but that is but another label." He turned his ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... of the adventurers saw the great stone door revolve on its axis and swing to one side, leaving a passage open through which they could pass. Goosal had discovered the hidden mechanism. ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... and industries contribute to air pollution; acid rain, resulting from sulfur dioxide emissions, is damaging forests; pollution in the Baltic Sea from raw sewage and industrial effluents from rivers in eastern Germany; hazardous waste disposal; government established a mechanism for ending the use of nuclear power over the next 15 years; government working to meet EU commitment to identify nature preservation areas in line with the EU's Flora, Fauna, ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... day's work behind them, finished; not at all like men in doubt, nor as if they suspected they were followed, although in fact they were. Three Sikhs emerged from the corner by the Gate and strolled along behind them. Detailed preparations for the round-up had begun. The unostentatious mechanism of it seemed more weird and terrible than ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... conversion, by unknown causes, of these innate potentialities into actual existences. The organ of thought, prior to experience, may be compared to an untouched piano, in which it may be properly said that music is innate, inasmuch as its mechanism contains, potentially, so many octaves of musical notes. The unknown cause of sensation which Descartes calls the "je ne sais quoi dans les objets" or "choses telles qu'elles sont," and Kant the "Noumenon" or "Ding an sich," is represented by the musician; who, ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... may even have enjoyed the tedious explanation of the mechanism of the time-piece given by the Watchmaker, and after skipping the "Comparison" (which made the boy represent a convert and the watch in his pocket illustrative of "Grace within his Heart"), they probably turned eagerly to the next Meditation Upon the Boy and his Paper of Plumbs. ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... vessel is more continuous and regular, it is a sort of direct rotation that is communicated by the motor, whatever the latter may be. No mistake is possible: the ship is propelled by some special mechanism. ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... language, for every gradation of the age, and character of masks. See the Onomasticon of Jul. Pollux. In the marble masks, however, we can neither see the thinness of the mass from which the real masks were executed, the more delicate colouring, nor the exquisite mechanism of the fittings. The abundance of excellent workmen possessed by Athens, in everything which had a reference to the plastic arts, will warrant the conjecture that they were in this respect inimitable. Those who have seen the masks of wax ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... thought, "how Pete could cram enough brain into one of those things to make it hunt and track so perfectly." He tried to visualize the computing circuits needed for the operation of its tracking mechanism alone. "There just isn't room for the electronics. You'd need a computer as big as the one at ...
— Survival Tactics • Al Sevcik
... placed it upon the hearth. My grandfather stepped upon it, seized one of the bronze sconces above the mantel and gave it a sharp turn. At the same moment, Bates, upon another chair, grasped the companion bronze and wrenched it sharply. Instantly some mechanism creaked in the great oak chimney-breast and the long oak panels swung open, disclosing a steel ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... proximate accession of the democracy means the beginning of another phase in human history, the creation of the society of to-morrow. And Rome cannot keep away from the arena; the papacy must take part in the quarrel if it does not desire to disappear from the world like a piece of mechanism ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... and substantive relations between signs and language, it is to be expected that analogies can by proper research be ascertained between their several developments in the manner of their use, that is, in their grammatic mechanism, and in the genesis of the sentence. The science of language, ever henceforward to be studied historically, must take account of the similar early mental processes in which the phrase or sentence originated, both in sign and ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... resound the widow's wail And weeping of the fatherless. So walk Sickness and health. One rounds the cheek at morn, The other with a ghost-like movement glides Unto the nightly couch, and lo! the wheels Of life drive heavily, and all its springs Revolving in mysterious mechanism Are troubled. And how slight the instrument That sometimes sends the strong man to his tomb, Revealing that the glory of his prime, Is as ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... enter the rancho of Carlos we shall see the fair-haired Rosita seated upon a petate, and engaged in weaving rebosos. The piece of mechanism which serves her for a loom consists of only a few pieces of wood rudely carved. So simple is it that it is hardly just to call it a machine. Yet those long bluish threads stretched in parallel lines, and vibrating ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... of supply is in the drafts which bankers in one country draw upon bankers in another in the operation of making international loans. The mechanism of such transactions will be treated in greater detail later on, but without any knowledge of the subject whatever, it is plain that the transfer of banking capital, say from England to the United States, can best be effected ...
— Elements of Foreign Exchange - A Foreign Exchange Primer • Franklin Escher
... city of Pretend, created by the hypnotism of moonlight.—Yet when I examined the moon she too seemed but a painting of a moon and the sky in which she lived a fragile echo of colour. If I blew hard the whole shy mechanism would collapse gently with a neat soundless crash. I must not, ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... parts of a rifle that an enlisted man is permitted to take apart are the bolt mechanism and the magazine mechanism. Learn how to do this from your squad leader, for you must know how in order to keep your rifle clean. Never remove the hand guard or the trigger guard, nor take the sights apart unless you have special permission from ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... curious device for altering the gearing automatically while one rode, so as to enable one to adapt it to the varying slope in mounting hills. This part of the mechanism he explained to me elaborately. There was a gauge in front which allowed one to sight the steepness of the slope by mere inspection; and according as the gauge marked one, two, three, or four, as its gradient on the scale, the rider pressed a button on the handle-bar with ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... possesses. Man is a voluntary agent. Animals are automatons. The robin fights its reflection in the window-pane because it is his instinct to fight and because he cannot reason out the physical laws that make this reflection appear real. An animal is a mechanism that operates according to fore-ordained rules. Wrapped up in its heredity, and determined long before it was born, is a certain limited capacity of ganglionic response to eternal stimuli. These responses ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... of madness is a most subtle inquiry. How slight the mysterious touch that throws the smooth-running human mechanism into a chaos of jarring elements, that transforms, in the turn of an eyelash, the mild humanity of the gentlest of beings into the unreasoning ferocity of ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... 840 yards, or nearly half a mile, every pound is nearly ten miles, and the whole, about 400,000 miles are produced in about sixty-six working hours. In round numbers, this is 6,000 miles per hour, or 100 miles a minute. What an astonishing effect of the combination of mechanism! What an inconceivable miracle, if it might not be witnessed by their favour ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... his surprise, her anger soon abated. A not too convincing light-heartedness took the place of this stormy ebullition. If Windebank had been more skilled in the mechanism of a woman's heart, he would have promptly divined the girl's gaiety had been wilfully assumed, in order to conceal from herself the anxiety that Windebank's words, with reference to the proper conduct of a true lover, had inspired. By the time they had reached her door, she ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... imperiously called for; and the want of it is a subtle evasion, for which Mr. Styles is fairly accountable. As he has been silent on this subject, it is for us to explain the plan and nature of this terrible and unknown piece of mechanism. Kimes, then, are neither more nor less than a false print in the Edinburgh Review for knives; and from this blunder of the printer has Mr. Styles manufactured this Daedalean instrument of torture, called a kime! ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... it.) A list would occupy several pages, and this is not the proper place to give their titles, as we are not here concerned with the means, but with the results of cross-fertilisation. No one who feels interest in the mechanism by which nature effects her ends, can read these books and memoirs ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... intimation I ever had of the zuend-nadel guns. I should like to know when and by whom they were invented, and their mechanism. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various
... next lesson, you will be taught how to separate the "I" from the mechanism of the mind—how you may realize your mastery of the mind, just as you now realize your independence of the body. This knowledge must be imparted to you by degrees, and you must place your feet firmly upon one round of the ladder before you take ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Mechanism in thought and morals,—a Phi-Beta-Kappa address, delivered at Harvard in 1870,—is one of Dr. Holmes' most luminous contributions to popular science. It is ample in the way of suggestion and the presentation of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... coupe in order to maintain the dignity of letters when he goes to dine with the duchesses who are some day or other to invite him. Yet I admire his self-confidence, though I laugh at it. A man gets on by a spring in his own mechanism, and he should always keep it wound up. Rameau will make a figure. I used to pity him; I begin to respect. Nothing succeeds like success. But I see I am spoiling your morning. ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to start with? Young man, go down to the library and get some books, and read of what wonderful mechanism God gave you in your hand, in your foot, in your eye, in your ear, and then ask some doctor to take you into the dissecting-room and illustrate to you what you have read about, and never again commit the blasphemy of saying you have no capital to start with. Equipped? ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... the Formation of the Heavens and the Earth, and these are Arguments which a Man of Sense cannot forbear attending to, who is out of the Noise and Hurry of Human Affairs. Aristotle says, that should a Man live under Ground, and there converse with Works of Art and Mechanism, and should afterwards be brought up into the open Day, and see the several Glories of the Heaven and Earth, he would immediately pronounce them the Works of such a Being as we define God to be. The Psalmist has very beautiful Strokes of Poetry to this Purpose, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... they reached the earthen throne again at last, and had hoisted the fakir back in position on it, there had been no casualties, and the morale of the men in Sergeant Brown's command was as good again as the breech-mechanism of the ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... and might have stumbled into some hole, striking his head and rendering himself unconscious; or there was a chance that he had wounded a stag which had thereupon charged vigorously upon him, as wounded bucks are apt to do; so that Eli, not being accustomed to working the mechanism of the repeating rifle, might have been caught ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... main herd crossing our track in their migration from the Republican to the Platte. In such case, there will be a detention of several hours, as the current of a main herd is not fordable by any known human mechanism. The halt will be taken advantage of by timid spectators looking safely out of car-windows,—by bona-fide hunters, who want fresh meat, and take along the tidbits of their game to be cooked for them at the next dinner-station,—and by excited pseudo-hunters, who will bang away with their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... were, by the first barbarian auxiliaries, burst a plague of seafaring savages from Denmark and Scandinavia; and the recently baptized barbarians were again flooded by the unbaptized. All this time, it must be remembered, the actual central mechanism of Roman government had been running down like a clock. It was really a race between the driving energy of the missionaries on the edges of the Empire and the galloping paralysis of the city at the centre. In the ninth century the heart had ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... the bones associated with the adductor mechanism; the area behind the orbit in Dimetrodon is relatively shorter, reducing the comparative longitudinal extent of the adductor chamber. Furthermore, the dermal roof above the adductor chamber slopes gently downward from behind the orbit to its contact with the ...
— The Adductor Muscles of the Jaw In Some Primitive Reptiles • Richard C. Fox
... wants for labor in this country at the present time are very great. The war has depleted our workshops, and materially lessened our supply of labor in every department of industry and mechanism. In their noble response to the call of their country, our workmen in every branch of the useful arts have left vacancies which must be filled, or the material interest of the country must suffer. The immense ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... the difficulty was not one of mechanism, but of responsibility. Who was qualified to decide on opening the desk and drawers? Who would be answerable for the safety of those papers? The only person who volunteered was Dolly, and Dolly's idea of taking care of things was to carry them about with her everywhere, and if they were in ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Piers dressed himself, and made ready for his journey. He was worn with fever, had no more strength to hope or to desire. His body was a mechanism ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... reconstructed on the subject of woman's toil. A vast majority of those who would have woman industrious shut her up to a few kinds of work. My judgment in this matter is that a woman has a right to do anything that she can do well. There should be no department of merchandise, mechanism, art, or science barred against her. If Miss Hosmer has genius for sculpture, give her a chisel. If Rosa Bonheur has a fondness for delineating animals, let her make "The Horse Fair." If Miss Mitchell will study astronomy, let her mount the starry ladder. If Lydia will be a merchant, let her sell ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... Man's Mechanism, Life, Force, Food, Digestion, Respiration, Heat, the Skin, the Kidneys, Nervous System, Organs of Sense, ...
— Captain Sam - The Boy Scouts of 1814 • George Cary Eggleston
... of the Cosmos or of physical cosmography. Separation of other kindred studies — p. 56-62. The uranological portion of the Cosmos is more simple than the telluric; the impossibility of ascertaining the diversity of matter simplifies the study of the mechanism of the heavens. Origin of the word 'Cosmos', its signification of adornment and order of the universe. The 'existing' can not be absolutely separated in our contemplation of nature from the 'future'. History of the ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... limited power,' if I may so describe it, must then be, not a mechanism which nothing can resist, but a living being! It must also be a creature striking panic, terrifying, ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... argue with metal? What can you add to a perfect mechanism, designed for its job, and integrated with a hundred other perfect mechanisms? What can you do when a thousand schools are so perfect they have a life of their own, with no need for human guidance, and, most significant, no ...
— There Will Be School Tomorrow • V. E. Thiessen
... particularly in the areas of improving victim protection and assistance; while the government elevated anti-trafficking responsibilities to the ministerial level, adopted a new National Action Plan, and drafted a National Referral Mechanism, it has yet to show tangible progress in identifying and protecting victims or in tackling trafficking complicity of government officials; the Armenian Government made some notable improvements in its anti-trafficking law enforcement efforts, but it failed to demonstrate evidence of ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... delight since youth. In imagination I pictured myself the owner of a sightly residence surmounted by a spacious observatory, in which was located a magnificent reflector-telescope operated by the newest and nicest mechanism. It was pleasing to be rich, even in fancy. My thoughts reverted to ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... revenge of Iago. But, if we accept the first act of King Lear as an incident in a fairy-tale, the motive of the Passion of Lear in the other four acts is not only adequate out overwhelming. Othello breaks free from mechanism of Plot in a similar way. Shakespeare as a writer of the fiction of human nature was as supreme among his contemporaries as was Gulliver among ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... conversations on the Sundays. I found at his breakfasts, tea and coffee, with hot rolls, and men of celebrity afraid to speak. At the conversations, there was something even worse. A few plausible talking fellows created a buzz in the room, and the merits of some paltry nick-nack of mechanism or science was discussed. The party consisted undoubtedly of the most eminent men of their respective lines in the world; but they were each and all so apprehensive of having their ideas purloined, that they took the ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... physicists by the engineer who wishes to facilitate transport or to produce better illumination, or by the doctor who seeks to know how such and such a remedy acts, or, again, by the physiologist desirous of understanding the mechanism of the gaseous and liquid exchanges between the cell and the outer medium, cause new chapters in physics to appear, and suggest researches adapted to the ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... at all, as many imagine. This man is only physically dead because he has lost his physical body. He is not intellectually and emotionally dead because he has not lost that part of his mechanism of consciousness which is the seat of thought and emotion. The physical body only allows us to express ourselves in the physical world, but it is not the man, any more than the clothes ...
— The Secret of Dreams • Yacki Raizizun
... history in our attempt to discover the essential character of the life of the Spirit, wherever it is found, we are now to see what psychology has to tell us or hint to us of its nature; and of the relation in which it stands to the mechanism of our psychic life. It is hardly necessary to say that such an inquiry, fully carried out, would be a life-work. Moreover, it is an inquiry which we are not yet in a position to undertake. True, more and more material is daily becoming available for it: but ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... was watching it in breathless silence, in which the clicking of the mechanism which kept the great telescope moving so as to exactly counteract the motion of the machinery of the Universe, sounded like the blows of a sledge-hammer on an anvil, Gilbert Lennard stood beside her, wondering if he should begin to tell her, ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... not particularly see the how or why; we do not follow the reasons, in event or character, which make these men sacrifice themselves or others, weep, storm, and so forth; nay, even when these reasons are clear from the circumstances, we are not shown the action of the mechanism, we do not see how Brunhilt is wroth, how Chriemhilt is revengeful, how Herzeloid is devoted to Parzival. There is, in the vast majority of this mediaeval poetry, no clear conception of the construction and functions ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... private collections in the country, his pride and sense of responsibility advanced step by step. He occupied his leisure hours in the study of bibliography; he read books on the old printers and their works; he spent hours with the bookbinder and printer at Overstone, studying the mechanism of a book; he even studied architecture, in connexion with the ventilation and lighting of libraries, and began to teach himself German, in order to be able to master the stores of book- lore buried in ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... in scientific terms, to the patient, meantime; which, of course, was immensely cheering and comfortable. There was an uncanny sort of fascination in watching him, as he peered and probed into the mechanism of those wonderful bodies, whose mysteries he understood so well. The more intricate the wound, the better he liked it. A poor private, with both legs off, and shot through the lungs, possessed more attractions for him than a dozen generals, slightly scratched in some "masterly retreat;" ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... notice—is drawn up by Mr. James Slight, curator of the museum of the Highland Society, a gentleman whose authority on such subjects stands deservedly high. To this monograph, as we may call it, upon the plough, we may again refer as another illustration of the union between agriculture and science. Mechanism perfects the construction of instruments, chemistry explains the effects which they are the means of producing in the soil—says also to the mechanic, if you could make them act in such and such a way, these effects would be more constantly and more fully brought about, and returns them ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... expected. But the human mind is a strange thing; and it is difficult to know where and how to touch its delicate and complex mechanism so as to produce any desired effect. You wish to produce a flow of tender feeling, and you tell a pathetic tale, which ought, you think, to move the heart. But at every sentence the features of the listeners harden into more and more rigidity, or even relax into mocking laughter; whereas ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... side," she continued, "is a piece of mechanism which will only work when a secret lock has been opened, and to effect this the bird's eye must first be pushed aside to make room for the key. Your ignorance of all this became apparent to me when I found both of the two keys in my room. One of them belongs to you, and I have brought it to ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... explaining the mechanism of that Winchester to Sheriff Collins we'll reluctantly dispense with your presence, Mr. Reilly. We have arranged a temporary treaty of peace," the ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... telegrams were handed in giving fresh details of the disaster—horrible details. The ship was a total loss; of that splendid mechanism, built by years of toil, by the expenditure of many millions, there remained only a twisted and useless mass of wreckage; and in that wreckage lay three hundred of France's sailors. Small wonder that the President sat, chin in hand, staring straight before him, and that the others ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... concentrated, and her ears only registered the surging of her own blood. With a sudden wrench the bar flew round in her hands, and she fell forward on her knees, flung with her own impetus. Would the aged mechanism respond? Was there more rust on the inner wheels and springs? Ah! she could hear a gurgling and a whirling of wheels. Yes! there came the water; she heard the trickle, the splashing; then the whole grotto seemed alive. She ran to a broken place in the outer ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... chemical agent, that its effect, as such, might perhaps alone account for the impulse which the spring gives to vegetation. But, in order to explain the mechanism of that operation, it has been supposed that the warmth of the spring dilates the vessels of plants, and produces a kind of vacuum, into which the sap (which had remained in a state of inaction in the trunk during the winter) rises: ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... weapons which they constructed, after iron had been recovered from the ore, was a bolo, and a number were subsequently manufactured. To this they added several spears. All weapons were kept out of Chief's reach, and the boys were cautioned against permitting him to learn the mechanism and use of the guns. He always looked longingly at the bolos, from the time he had witnessed their ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... mechanism through which passed a strip of metal. Click! 'Twas cut. Whir! 'Twas a cylinder. Click! Whir! Click! A corner, an edge, an end, and b-r-r-rr! It was dropped, a metallic cartridge, to do its part in peace or war. Even more fascinating was it ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... the Voice, duly and most appropriately embodied, sat half-facing him. The Voice's eyes confirmed his worst suspicions, and, dazed though they were at the moment, there were deep lights in them that wholly disordered his mental mechanism. Nor were her first words such as to restore ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... captured plenty of them." Tallis thumbed the stud that allowed the magazine to slide out of the butt and into his hand. Then he checked the mechanism and the power cartridges. Finally, he replaced the magazine and put the weapon into the empty sleeve holster ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... the one he had arranged to go by, and he had still to speak to Lydia on the second object of his visit, which like a second surgical operation seemed to require an interval. The hours had to go by; there was eating to be done; the children came in—all this mechanism of life had to be gone through with the dreary sense of constraint which is often felt in domestic quarrels of a commoner kind. To Lydia it was some slight relief for her stifled fury to have the children present: she felt a savage glory in their loveliness, as if it would taunt ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... delicate machinery of a human brain, like any man-made mechanism of great nicety, may readily be thrown into confusion, its exquisite balance disturbed, its functioning confounded. Thirst, near-exhaustion, severe bodily distress and, on top of all, blood-lust anger made Alan Howard over into another man. He was possessed, ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... almost ceased from Ceylon. Along with these the trunks of the larger trees are profusely covered with other delicate creepers, chiefly Convolvuli and Ipomoeas; and the pitcher-plant (Nepenthes distillatoria) lures the passer-by to halt and conjecture the probable uses of the curious mechanism, by means of which it distils a quantity of limpid fluid into the vegetable vases at the extremity of its leaves. The Orchideae suspend their pendulous flowers from the angles of branches, whilst the bare roots and the lower part of the stem are occasionally ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... nerves simply act as though their synapses had been shorted through. It only takes a small percentage of that kind of damage to the nerve fibers to ruin the whole nervous system. The signals get jammed up and confused, and the whole mechanism ceases ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... such a solid and well-regulated condition, that it kept on going like a good machine. The new driver had as much as he could manage, and there were some who thought that the more delicate parts of the complicated mechanism would be likely to suffer under ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... him. And he betook himself to the air-shed where the superb "White Eagle" rested all a-quiver for departure, palpitating, or so it seemed to him, with a strange eagerness for movement which struck him as unusual and "uncanny" in a mere piece of mechanism. ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... grasping the taut and, in one sense, irresponsive mechanism of a steering-wheel governed by steam, a sailor can "feel" the movement of his ship, a seaworthy vessel being a living thing, obedient as a docile horse to the least touch of the rein. But, in the unlikely event of fortune favoring Courtenay to the extent of giving ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... advising persons suffering from Insomnia to try a musical box in their bed-rooms; and I therefore purchased a rather expensive one, which plays six tunes, with drum and trumpet accompaniment. Something seems to have gone wrong with the mechanism, as, after being fully wound up, it remains obstinately silent for an hour or so, at the end of which period it suddenly starts off at break-neck speed, and repeats one of the tunes backwards over and over again. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... differences in efficiency and in the functions performed. The same functions may be performed and the same degree of efficiency reached apparently with different organizations. Cleveland shows, for example, how our own government might become much more efficient and make radical changes in the mechanism of the legislative and executive functions without sacrificing any principle we hold to, and perhaps without any ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... ship, and the wind keeps the sea in motion. This destroyer is a toy. Its terrible vitality is fed by the ship, the waves, and the wind, each lending its aid. What is to be done with this complication? How fetter this monstrous mechanism of shipwreck? How foresee its coming and goings, its recoils, its halts, its shocks? Any one of those blows may stave in the side of the vessel. How can one guard against these terrible gyrations? One has to do with a projectile that reflects, that ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... revolutions. It was hung in the year 1682, and was baptized in the presence of Louis XIV. and Queen Theresa. Its weight is thirty-two thousand pounds—the clapper alone weighing a thousand pounds. A clock in one of the towers is world-renowned for the intricacy and curiosity of its mechanism. The feats it performs every time it strikes the hour and quarter-hour, can hardly be credited by one who ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... had done heroic work under adverse conditions. A tentative theory of the mechanism involved had already been formulated, and the search had started for a means to duplicate the super-dielectricity in materials otherwise more suitable to man's needs. But as he grew familiar with the place and ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... the Carinthian, had carved upward of a hundred faces; a chessboard, the completion of which had occupied a Dutchman for eighteen years; golden carriages drawn by fleas; toys composed of porcelain or ivory in imitation of Chinese works of art; curious pieces of mechanism, musical clocks, etc., were industriously collected into the cabinets of the wealthy and powerful. This taste was, however, not utterly useless. The predilection for ancient gems promoted the study of the remains of antiquity, as Stosch, Lippert, and Winckelmann prove, and ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... Martian lives only on fruit, and he lives only a few degrees on either side of the Equator. All the businesses that in your earth arise from the preparation and sale of meat and all the various confections, disappear there, and also all the mechanism of house heating and lighting. Also there are no railroads, but innumerable canals, which form a labyrinth of waterways, and are fed from the tides of the great northern ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... tattler. He, Martin Eden, was a better man than that fellow. The thought cheered him. It seemed to draw him nearer to Her. He began comparing himself with the students. He grew conscious of the muscled mechanism of his body and felt confident that he was physically their master. But their heads were filled with knowledge that enabled them to talk her talk,—the thought depressed him. But what was a brain for? he ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... spinsters make it a point of honor to resemble the lay figures of a painter; they sit on their hips, never on their chairs. When any one speaks to them they turn their whole busts instead of simply turning their heads; and when their gowns creak one is tempted to believe that the mechanism of these beings is out of order. Mademoiselle Habert, an ideal of her species, had a stern eye, a grim mouth, and beneath her wrinkled chin the strings of her cap, always limp and faded, floated as she moved. Two moles, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... viewed as an industrial or economic mechanism, the structure of which is made up of what is called its economic institutions. These institutions are habitual methods of carrying on the life process of the community in contact with the material environment in which it lives. When ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... set bells ringing in all parts of the ship. By means of a complicated mechanism, the air was exhausted from each compartment in turn, and then replaced, and as the bells rang, the men at work trooped out of these compartments consecutively. This had been originated for the purpose of destroying any life ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... should attack again, Paul would be sure to waken him in time. The rain grew harder on the roof, and its steady patter was like the rocking of a cradle to a child. His nerves were of steel, and the mechanism of his body and brain were not upset at all. The half-dropped lids dropped down entirely, and he ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the man straightened up, stood for an instant with his eyes still on his work, then, as he was turning to another part of the intricate mechanism, he ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... physiological or vital response.—I now proceed to a demonstration of the fact that whatever be the mechanism by which they are brought about, these plant responses are physiological in their character. As the investigations described in the next few chapters will show, they furnish an accurate index of physiological activity. For ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... subject of debate was the Nottingham Frame-breaking Bill. Workmen were rioting and wrecking because their labour had been displaced by the introduction of machinery, and Byron's view was that "we must not allow mankind to be sacrificed to improvements in mechanism"—"the maintenance of the industrious poor is of greater consequence than the enrichment of monopolists"—"I have seen the state of these miserable men, and it is a disgrace to a civilised country." The speech was well received. The impression produced two days later ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... had twice gone over every part of these magnificent establishments. I had seen at the Bank the spirit of order operating like predestination, compelling the will of man to act necessarily and continually with all the precision of mechanism. I had beheld human creatures, called clerks, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... is not surprised at the regular motion of the ocean; he will never draw from it theological conclusions. The phenomena of nature prove the existence of a God only to some prejudiced men, who have been early taught to behold the finger of God in every thing whose mechanism could embarrass them. In the wonders of nature, the unprejudiced philosopher sees nothing but the power of nature, the permanent and various laws, the necessary effects of different combinations ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... causal order and assures us of our freedom, immortality, and God. It is because we possess this deeper source of truth in practical reason that freedom and an ideal kingdom in which purpose reigns are vouchsafed to us, and that we can free ourselves from the mechanism of the natural order. It is moral truth that both sets us free and demonstrates our freedom, and that makes harmony possible between the mechanical theory of science and the teleological conception of philosophy. The scientific understanding would plunge us into determinism ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... clearness the last sad chapter of the tale of Peter, Peter who had made me so intimately his confidante, whose love and hopes and solitary strivings I knew all about. Struck down in the moment of his triumph by a great stupid lump of soulless stone, by a blind, relentless mechanism which had been at work from the beginning, timing that rock to fall—just then. Not the moment before, not the moment after, out of an eternity of moments, but at that one instant when Peter stooped for the last of his brown bags—and then I rejected this, and knew that there was ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... the instrument, removed some plugs, turned some screws, and finally placed in his pocket a small concealed part of the mechanism. Then he ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... weight, are arranged in line upon each side of the chain of buckets of the dredging machine. See Figs. 1 and 2. The battering rams, suspended by chains, are raised by hydraulic power to a height varying from 1.50 to 6 meters (4 ft. 11 in. to 19 ft. 8 in.), and are then let fall upon the rock. The mechanism of the battering rams is carried by a metallic cage which can be moved forward or backward by the aid of steam as the needs of the work require. A series of five battering rams gives from 200 to 300 ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... stairs. Across the end, under the front windows, was a workbench, with a variety of carpenter's tools, few in number, and of the most useful kind. On the bench was an unfinished piece of work, whose intended use would have puzzled a philosopher, if several similar specimens of mechanism, completed and practically applied, had not appeared in the cellar to explain ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... I know is that Dick wants to build a heavy steel hull, and he is going to put something inside it that will take us out into space. Only occasionally do I see a little light as he tries to explain the mechanism of the ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... present, the new evidence that I produce, the interpretation that I place on certain acts of which the public has seen only the exterior manifestations without being able to discover the secret reasons or the invisible mechanism, all establish, if not an intimacy, at least amicable relations ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... him to make the offer. The way she had addressed him was not ingratiating, but he delighted in examining any fine mechanism and he had never handled such ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... in the creek was barely three feet deep, Officer Valden sprang from the car, holding his right hand, which had been caught in the brake mechanism. ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock
... static tests can be used for transverse bending, compression, tension, shear, and cleavage. A common form consists of three main parts, namely: (1) the straining mechanism, (2) the weighing apparatus, and (3) the machinery for ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... the north of Europe and Asia, from the marshes of the Baltic to the banks of the Amoor and the shores of the Pacific Ocean.[38] The languages of all those peoples, though various enough, had certain features in common. No one of them reached the delicate and complex mechanism of internal and terminal inflexion; they were guiltless of the subtle processes by which Aryans and Semites expressed the finest shades of thought, and, by declining the substantive and conjugating the ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... nickeled tube that carried the dripping water into the space over the glass bowl, had a second tube within it; through which his assistant from the adjoining room either blew, or sent by some mechanism, the chemicals (probably potassium) that would take fire and ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... relinquishing himself completely to the will of the old man. During the supper, which Droom prepared with elaborate care, and far into the night, the young man sat and listened without interest to the garrulous talk of his host, who explained the mechanism and ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... regardless of appearances; others rolled aside, bent upon placing some little distance between themselves and the invader. Bluff was trying to work the mechanism of his gun in order to secure a second shot, but as so often happens when the hunter is excited, he failed to accomplish what should have been ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... metaphors, who was unable to discover better similes in its praise. But what is the oil called which trickles down upon the hammers and stampers? And how would it console a workman who chanced to get one of his limbs caught in the mechanism to know that this oil was trickling over him? Passing over this simile as bad, let us turn our attention to another of Strauss's artifices, whereby he tries to ascertain how he feels disposed towards the universe; this question of Marguerite's, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... as on the last day of his life he sits discoursing with his friends, still holds good. He is discussing the same old question, whether there is anything more than force, material, mechanism in the world. He says that one might assign as "the cause why I am sitting here that my body is composed of bones and muscles; that the bones are solid and separate, and that the muscles can be contracted and extended, and are all inclosed ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... calm, but within his heart a storm was raging. Rather to the surprise of the spectators, he took the weapon, turned it over curiously in his hands, for it was the first German rifle he had handled, examined the mechanism of the lock, then raised his eyes to the motionless figure of the ...
— The Children of France • Ruth Royce
... there was some inaccuracy in former drawings of the species, I had the specimen suspended and drawn with great care by Mr. Edward Forbes. This position explained the mechanism of the mouth, showing its great size, even in the short Balaena Whales; its great capacity in the Mysticetus ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... direction, Darwin soon noticed that a good deal was occurring in an entirely unmystical and even unmeaning way of which the older speculative Deist-Evolutionists had taken little or no account. Nowadays, when we are turning in weary disgust and disillusion from Neo-Darwinism and Mechanism to Vitalism and Creative Evolution, it is difficult to imagine how this new departure of Darwin's could possibly have appealed to his contemporaries as exciting, agreeable, above all as hopeful. Let me therefore ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... mother, who is the mainspring of the smoothly running mechanism of the ideal home, will be scientifically trained for her position. Her "domestic science" will no longer be open to the criticism that it is not science at all, nor will she feel that her business is unworthy of scientific treatment. Always she will keep ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... night's rest was vouchsafed at last. Dick threw off the Arab robes he had worn since Abdur Kad'r and he climbed the hill overlooking Suleiman's Well. He opened and closed the breech of his heavy double-barreled Express rifle to make sure that the sand clouds had not clogged its mechanism, and fingered ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... of the rattlesnake's signal, like the shaking of dry peas in a pod, springs instinctively aside, even though he knows nothing of snakes. How much more, therefore, would a suspicious waiter, whose nerves were all alert for the soft, deadly purr of dynamite mechanism, spoil everything the moment his hand touched the bag? Yes, Dupre reluctantly admitted to himself, the handbag theory was not practical. It led to either self-destruction ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... was employed at a watchmaker's of repute. He spent all his working life with a magnifying glass in his eye, peering into the mechanism of watches, adjusting the delicate pivots and springs on which their lives moved. His occupation had perhaps encouraged in him a habit of introspection. Perhaps he found the human machine as worthy of interest as the works of watches and clocks. Anyhow, ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... front of the house and Eugene Morgan jump lightly down from it. The car was of a new pattern, low and long, with an ample seat in the tonneau, facing forward; and a professional driver sat at the wheel, a strange figure in leather, goggled out of all personality and seemingly part of the mechanism. ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... hearth. My grandfather stepped upon it, seized one of the bronze sconces above the mantel and gave it a sharp turn. At the same moment, Bates, upon another chair, grasped the companion bronze and wrenched it sharply. Instantly some mechanism creaked in the great oak chimney-breast and the long oak panels swung open, disclosing a steel door ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... he fell upon his knees, and his fingers sought the small projections of the gear on the inside of the door He could no more budge the mechanism than a child could open a ...
— Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat - or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure • Victor Appleton
... superstition; pilgrimages were suppressed, and many wonder-working images were pulled down and destroyed. The famous Rood of Boxley, a figure whose contortions had once imposed on the people, was taken to the market-place at Maidstone,[1058] and the ingenious mechanism, whereby the eyes and lips miraculously opened and shut, was exhibited to the vulgar gaze.[1059] Probably these little devices had already sunk in popular esteem, for the Blood of St. Januarius could not be treated at Naples to-day in the same cavalier fashion as ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... brought an encyclopaedic knowledge to bear upon his task; he can give an exact account of the machinery of a provincial printing-press; he can write a dissertation on the methods of military organization; he can reveal the secret springs in the mechanism of Paris journalism; he is absolutely at home in the fraudulent transactions of money-makers, the methods of usurers, the operations of high finance. And into all this mass of details he can infuse the spirit of life. Perhaps his masterpiece in realistic description is his account of ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... movements against these parapets, as they had stood there meditating on the aspect of affairs. In the case of the more friable bricks and stones even the flat faces were worn into hollows by the same mixed mechanism. The masonry of the top was clamped with iron at each joint; since it had been no uncommon thing for desperate men to wrench the coping off and throw it down the river, in reckless ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... great Mind which put harmony into the movements of celestial bodies, could also give it to the internal mechanism of society. We will see the advantages of this invention escaping from the individual, to become for ever the common patrimony ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... Charles he also sent the image of an ass, which, by touching a certain string, did open its mouth and wave its ears in a manner most curious to behold, wherewith the infant was infinitely delighted, as was I, without inquiring at that time into the exquisite mechanism whereby the extraordinary demonstrations were produced. But in the course of little more than a month he was led, by his inquiring turn of mind, to pry into the mystery; and in the pursuit of knowledge—laudable surely in a ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... once, a film moving horizontally across his large eyes and retracting, to show that he understood. Due to the difficulty of using his artificial speech mechanism, he refrained from speaking until ...
— The Indulgence of Negu Mah • Robert Andrew Arthur
... forward the dough between the different operations pass round rollers, which are each operated by an adjustable silent clutch feed, in place of the usual ratchet and pawl mechanism. Movement is given to each feed by the connecting links shown, to each of which motion is in turn imparted by the bell crank lever placed beside the eccentric. This lever is actuated by a crank pin on the main shaft, working into a block sliding in a slot in the shorter or horizontal ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... this very opulent bachelor was passionately fond of weapons. He used to buy pistols, revolvers, daggers, hang them on his wall and show them to acquaintances. He prided himself on them, and was quite a specialist on the mechanism of the revolver. Mitya, without stopping to think, went straight to him, and offered to pawn his pistols to him for ten roubles. The official, delighted, began trying to persuade him to sell them outright. But Mitya would not consent, so the young man gave him ten roubles, protesting that nothing ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... family and the community. It struggles to tear itself loose from the pitiless machinery of government, hemming every life within its iron pale. The Cossack took refuge in the wild freedom of nomadic life, and the Old Believer was equally averse to giving in to the complicated mechanism of government. He would have nothing to do with the census, with passports or stamped paper. He strove to elude the new systems of taxation and conscription, and to this day some of the Raskolniks are in a state of systematic revolt against ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... while they squatted on Nature's mattress of fragrant pine needles (see illustration, page 230), he told about leaves and their work, cells and their place, roots and their arrangement, tendrils and their mechanism, flowers and their devices, seeds and their travels. The third talk was upon the evolution of plant life, law and logic of creation, perpetuation of life in the lower forms, edible and poisonous mushrooms, and the perpetuation of life in the higher forms. The ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... even more expenditure of thought than in the composition of individual character and situations, otherwise he would be like the conductor of a puppet-show who has entangled his wires, so that the puppets receive from their mechanism quite different movements from those which ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... from himself to God, who gave him the companion by whose example he was betrayed into sin, instead of placing it upon the woman, who was the guilty cause. Thus he refuses or neglects to denounce the sin; but takes for granted that woman was as God made her, and acted in accordance with her mechanism. Hence, Adam argued, if any one was responsible, it was her Maker. She acted in accordance with the nature which had been given her. We hear this doctrine advanced daily. "I am what God made me." A cotton mill weaves ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... contemplation; bent and swung himself about; crept on his knees, and stuck his head into corners and between the machines, for he would know everything so exactly; he would see the screw in the propelling vessels, understand their mechanism and effect under water—and the water itself poured like hail-drops down his forehead. He fell unconscious, backwards into my arms, or else he would have been drawn into the machinery, and been crushed: he looked at me, and ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... to control its muscles; above all, the extraordinary and sudden lapse of a memory which had hitherto been wonderful for his years. There was something not right, some hidden wheel broken or locked in the mysterious mechanism that we call ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... in a striking part. Then the place for him to do this is the pit. Painters, I know, always get as close up to a picture they want to copy as they can; and I should imagine actors would want to do the same, in order to look into the texture and mechanism of their art. Even theatrical critics can make nothing of a part that they see from the boxes. If you sit in the stage-box, your attention is drawn off by the company and other circumstances. If you get to a distance ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... electro-magnetic mechanism an arrangement for converting the pull of the electro-magnet varying in intensity greatly over its range of action, into a pull of sensibly equal strength throughout. The use of a rocking lever acting ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... since 1999; thousands of Ituri refugees from the Congo continue to flee the fighting primarily into Uganda; 90,000 Angolan refugees were repatriated by 2004 with the remainder in the DRC expected to return in 2005; in 2005, DRC and Rwanda established a border verification mechanism to address accusations of Rwandan military supporting Congolese rebels and the DRC providing rebel Rwandan "Interhamwe" forces the means and bases to attack Rwandan forces; the location of the boundary in the broad Congo River with the Republic of the Congo is ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... sense of that which had eaten him like a vile leprosy. Mental futility, spiritual futility. Of physical he did not know. All that was left him of his youth was a belief in God. At sea he was too close to the immense mechanism of the stars, on land too close to milling millions, not to believe, not to accept ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... powerful blast of powder had been placed in the hollow of the stone-work, where the mechanism for opening and closing the great sluice-gates was fixed, and the result of the explosion was a huge chasm in the stone, and one of the gates blown right off, leaving the way ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... so enduring and its condition so tolerable. That has often made me say that I am not astonished men are sometimes sick, but that I am astonished they are sick so little and not always. This also ought to make us the more esteem the divine contrivance of the mechanism of animals, whose Author has made machines so fragile and so subject to corruption[131] and yet so capable of maintaining themselves: for it is Nature which cures us rather than medicine. Now this very fragility is a consequence of the nature of things, unless we are ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... generous and liberally cultivated nature might find a refuge and congenial souls in either of these two persuasions, but he objected to some points of the formal creed of the older church, and especially to the mechanism which renders it hard to get free from its outworn and offensive formulae,—remembering how Archbishop Tillotson wished in vain that it could be "well rid of" the Athanasian Creed. This, and the fact that the meeting-house was nearer than the chapel, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... processes by which thought moves. It was the machine he loved, not what the machine makes. The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise. So much, indeed, did the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he despised language, or looked upon it as an incomplete instrument of expression. Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the Muse's hollow hill creates and answers its own voice; ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... older men know nothing of the mechanism of the human body, as dissection is unknown to native science. Dr. Nosoki told me that he relies mainly on the application of the moxa and on acupuncture in the treatment of acute diseases, and in chronic ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... are several ways of constructing a gun-trap. Of course a gun is the principal part of the mechanism, and the trigger pulled by a string is the main point of the contrivance. In some countries the bait is tied to the string, and the animal on seizing the bait tightens the string, draws the trigger, and shoots itself. In this way, however, there is always some uncertainty as to the result. ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... prejudices and superstitions at variance with nature, and study natural organization to learn the intention of the Creator; learn the nature of plants, the organization of the earth, its components how formed, and of what—all animal creation—the mechanism of the universe, its motions—the exact perfection of every creation for the design of that creation; see and know God's will, and God's wisdom, and God's power in all of them; descend to the minor and most infinitesimal creation; learn its organization, and see God here with ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... of each kind there are numerous varieties—are capable of conversion, in the animal mechanism, into fat and oil. The non-plastic food substances do not contain nitrogen, hence they are commonly termed non-nitrogenous elements. The oily and fatty matters contain a large proportion of carbon, their next most ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... sixteenth century. We are apt to forget that alongside Shakespeare and at his heels other dramatists were supplying material for the theatre. The influence of Marlowe and particularly of Kyd, whose Spanish Tragedy with its crude mechanism of ghosts and madness and revenge caught the popular taste, worked itself out in a score of journeymen dramatists, mere hack writers, who turned their hand to plays as the hacks of to-day turn their hand to novels, and with no more literary merit than that caught as an echo from better ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... not read that early in the seventeenth century there appeared in Paris the philosopher Descartes, accompanied by the figure of a beautiful woman? She moved, spoke, and seemed life itself; but Descartes declared she was an automaton, a masterpiece of mechanism he himself had made. Yet many refused to believe his story, declaring he had by sorcery compelled a spirit to serve him in this form. He ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... secured my head had been loosened and the mechanism of the chair reversed, allowing me my freedom. I looked around the room in wonder. There stood the littered card-table and the empty glasses of the previous night, while the air was still heavy with the ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... phase in the Bain, that it was "dooll, varry dooll, but the mutton was good." I was a fool to go there; of course one cannot expect people with their livers and their spleens, and their entire internal tubular mechanism out of order, to be chirpy and frolicsome. There were a good many ladies there, pale, I could not quite make out whether from ill-health or from violet-powder; but I think the latter had something to do with their pallor, for, after drinking, ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... compact automatic pistol, a blunted shape no larger than his palm. It was a beautiful mechanism, and as with his silken razors, merely to hold it, to test the smooth action, gave ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... is itself instinctive. Young animals, notably the monkey and the child, fall spontaneously to imitating when they reach a certain age. Imitation shows itself to be instinctive in the case of the mocking bird, the parrot, etc. Furthermore, the mechanism of this function of imitation is now very well known. The principle of psychology recognised above under the phrase Kinaesthetic Equivalents, teaches us that the idea of a movement, coming into the mind through sight or some ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... no combination of material atoms—no mechanism, however strong and useful—that shall not dissolve and be rearranged, and take on ever higher forms of expression. This is, and has always been the unfailing law of progression, of the outworking of the ascending series. It involves all circumstances, and all earthly ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... hydraulics everything was done— the hoisting of ammunition, loading, training: guns intact, guns wrecked by the Dreadnoughts; and shimmering kitchens, which reeked a smell of heat, and the dairy-maids, and the line of kine, and the row of prison-doors, and the mechanism of ventilation, fans and blowers, the drainage-system, and the dynamos for lighting, for supplying power to motors, for heating, and for shimmering forth rich in the search-lights; and the central ballroom, the clothes ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... of trick pictures, or when some accident scene is shown, the camera takes views up to a certain point with real persons posing before it. Then the mechanism is stopped, "dummies" are substituted for real personages, and the taking of the film goes on. So the little "break" caused by Mr. Sneed could be ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... usefulness and thrift. Has it ever occurred to you what a wonderful piece of mechanism is that hand with which Nature has equipped you for seizing the oars of life's activities? Galen, the famous anatomist, after a prolonged study of the human hand, conceiving it to be the proximate instrument of the soul, was ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... him; two of his sons, quite elderly themselves, attend him almost to the front, so that he may have to make but a few steps unsupported. The old man is frosted with age, and moves stiffly, like a piece of mechanism rather than a living creature, nor is there any expression—neither smile nor interest—upon his absolutely immobile features. He wears breeches and gaiters, and a blue coat cut in the style of two generations since. There is a small clear space in the midst of ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... Creator, expressly directed to these purposes. We are on all sides surrounded by bodies wonderfully curious, and no less wonderfully diversified." Trifling, therefore, and, perhaps, contemptible, as to the unthinking may seem the study of a butterfly, yet, when we consider the art and mechanism displayed in so minute a structure, the fluids circulating in vessels so small as almost to escape the sight, the beauty of the wings and covering, and the manner in which each part is adapted for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 403, December 5, 1829 • Various
... Professor Page, has from time to time been noticed in our Journal, and we have now to give a further account of this interesting mechanism, as furnished by an American periodical. It appears that several of these machines have lately been submitted to critical examination by competent authority at Washington, and with very favourable conclusions. The principle has already been explained—namely, the alternate ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... was made.[9] It is tempting to set this down as a Johnsonian prejudice, and to deny or retort the comparison. Fielding, we might say, paints flesh and blood; whereas Richardson consciously constructs his puppets out of frigid abstractions. Lovelace is a bit of mechanism; Tom Jones a human being. In fact, however, such comparisons are misleading. Nothing is easier than to find an appropriate ticket for the objects of our criticism, and summarily pigeon-hole Richardson as an idealist and ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... then each class at the Academy—four companies—came out upon the grassy plain upon the double-quick. Their motions were light and swift, and yet so accurately timed that each company seemed one perfect piece of mechanism. A cadet stood at a certain point with a small color flying. Abreast of this their advance was checked as suddenly as if they had been turned to stone, and the entire corps was in line. Then followed a series of skilful manoeuvres, in which ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... eternally feminine. One should not attempt athletics unless she is sure that her physique will endure this. A strain may wreck one's health and looks. Most women are built like watches—one thing wrong upsets the whole mechanism. ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... N.Y., 1887; and for an able and impartial historical survey, Taussig's Tariff History of the United States, N.Y., 1888, may be recommended. For a lucid view of currency, see Jevons's Money and the Mechanism of ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... wrong in the calculation. The psychologist knows that the mental elements cannot be brought under such a simple formula according to which good will and insight are sufficient; he knows that the mental mechanism which is at work there has its own complicated laws, which must be considered with the same care for detail as those technical schemes for improvement. The psychologist is not astonished that though the technical improvements ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... say, all these measures, efforts, and plans—which were not at all worse than others issued in similar circumstances—did not affect the essence of the matter but, like the hands of a clock detached from the mechanism, swung about in an arbitrary and aimless ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... followed a regular pillage; everything went, from matches to toothpicks. Meanwhile the bell rings and the train starts. Not one of us disturbs himself, and while sitting on the walk, I explain to the painter how the tubes work, the mechanism of the bell. The train backs down over the rails to take us aboard. We ascend into our compartments again and we pass in review the booty we had seized. To tell the truth, there was little variety of food. Pork-butcher's ...
— Sac-Au-Dos - 1907 • Joris Karl Huysmans
... tears, and looked at the doctor in hopes that he might suggest some plan by which she could accomplish her end. To him she was but another case of a badly working mechanism. Either from the blow on her head or from hereditary influences she had a predisposition to a fixed idea. That tendency had cultivated this aberration about the woman her husband preferred to her. Should she happen on this woman in her wanderings about Chicago, there would be one ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Whereby we are led back to our old question, what sap is, and where it comes from, with the now superadded question, whether the young pith is a mere succulent sponge, or an active power, and constructive mechanism, nourished by the abundant ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... real wonder! We just begin to have glimpses of the effects of the mind upon the body. To me, Akron, the faculty has set too great store upon herbs and bitter drafts, and cutting with the knife. I would fain have the soul acknowledged more, our therapy built on the dual mechanism of mind and substance. For if an idea can lead to the apparent death of the whole body, so might other ideas bring about the apparent death of a part of the body, like, for example, a paralysis of the members, or of the senses of sight, feeling, hearing; and in ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... in question was laid with all the curves unnecessarily quick, even those in the "pass-bies," I thought it expedient to employ differential gear, as illustrated at D, Fig. 1, which is a sketch plan showing the mechanism employed. M is a Siemens electric motor running at 650 revolutions per minute; E is a combination of box gearing, frictional clutch, and chain pinion, and from this pinion a steel chain passes around the chain-wheel, H, which is free to revolve upon the axle, and carries ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
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