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More "Obtuse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... warty lenticels; shoots short-jointed, angled, with fine scurfy pubescence; diaphragms absent; tendrils intermittent, simple. Leaves small, broadly cordate or roundish; petiolar sinus wide, shallow; margin with obtuse, wide teeth; not lobed; dense in texture, light green color, glabrous above, sometimes pubescent along veins below. Cluster small (6-24 berries), loose; peduncle short; pedicels short, thick. Berries large, globular or somewhat oblate, black ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... obtuse, then," Mrs. Van Buren replied: "for, if all accounts which I hear are true, your mother is not the person to make a daughter-in-law happy. Neither, it seems, did you do what you could to please her. You annoyed her terribly with your codger-like ways, if I may be allowed that term. You made ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... to globular cells, which acquire a comparatively large size. These cells are filled with a protoplasm, to which the plant owes its orange colour. When they have attained their normal dimensions, they elongate at the summit into two, three, or four distinct, thick, obtuse tubes, into which the protoplasm gradually passes. The development of these tubes is unequal and not simultaneous, so that one will often attain its full dimensions, equal, perhaps, to three or four times the diameter of the generative cell, whilst the others are only just appearing. By degrees, ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... right with wrong, and declare barbarism equal with civilization. Of course, our argument is based upon the hypothesis that civilization is one thing, and barbarism another. To the mind which is so mentally and morally obtuse as not to discover the difference between these two conditions, this appeal must be in vain. But to the right-minded man, who is open to conviction of truth, who has the mental freedom to act and think independent of his prepossessions and prejudices, who is guided ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... epicondyle. The coronoid process may be detected on making deep pressure in the hollow in front of the joint. As the line of the radio-humeral joint is horizontal, while that of the ulno-humeral joint slopes obliquely downwards, the arm forms with the fully extended and supinated forearm an obtuse angle, opening laterally—the "carrying angle." This angle is usually more marked in women, in harmony with the greater width of the female pelvis. The ulnar nerve lies in the hollow between the olecranon and the medial condyle, and the median nerve passes over the front ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... similar joint, but at an obtuse angle. An example of its use is in fixing boarding around an ...
— Woodwork Joints - How they are Set Out, How Made and Where Used. • William Fairham
... broken and decayed, In which are kept our arrows. Rusting there In wild disorder and unfit for use, What wonder if discharged into the world They shame their shooters with a random flight, Their points obtuse and feathers drunk with wine. Well may the Church wage unsuccessful war With such artillery armed. Vice parries wide The undreaded volley with a sword of straw, And stands an ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... normal plants, and consequently the nucleus is larger, the cell is larger, and the whole plant is larger in every part. But giantism may occur without tetraploidy, and vice versa. In the OEnothera gigas the rosette leaves are broadly lanceolate with obtuse or rounded tips, more crinkled than in Lamarckiana, petioles shorter. The stem-leaves are also larger, broader, thicker, more obtuse, and more crinkled than in Lamarckiana. The stem is much stouter, almost double as thick, but not taller because the upper internodes are shorter and less ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... Marion's obtuse and unreasonable attitude puzzled me. I am quick tempered, and was about to reply hotly, when the door opened and ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... he continued, "that this man or spirit of a man has been sitting here night after night, and that we have not been able to see him, because our minds are dull and obtuse. Last night the elevating force of a strong passion, such as that which you have confided to me, combined with the power of fine music, so exalted your mind that you became endowed, as it were, with a sixth sense, and suddenly were enabled to see that which ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... be done? For three long hours the night after Lord Hartledon's death, she lay awake, thinking out her plans; perhaps for the first time in her life, for obtuse natures do not lie awake. The death had affected her only as regarded her own interests; she could feel for none and regret none in her utter selfishness. One was fallen, but another had risen up. "Le roi est mort: ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... I had said, eccellenza, that she was heading across toward Ischia," answered Raoul, with an air of obtuse innocence. ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... for he thought Tybalt was unusually obtuse. Tybalt thought so himself before the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... animal. I am persuaded that if the brutes even,—if the dog, the horse, the ox, the elephant, the bird, could speak, they would confess, that, at the bottom of their nature, their instincts, their sensations, their obtuse intelligence, assisted by organs less perfect than ours, there is a clouded, secret sentiment of this existence of a superior and primordial Being, from whom all emanates, and to whom all returns,—a shadow of the divinity ...
— Atheism Among the People • Alphonse de Lamartine
... in society, who would from their own consciousness smile at the simplicity with which he can so easily shape men's opinions and dispositions to his mind whether they will or not. He must have been the most charitable or the most obtuse of observers. ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... treating me like a child, Smith," I said, slowly. "No doubt I am hopelessly obtuse, but perhaps you will tell me what this Chinaman carried in a leather bag and released upon Forsyth. It was something which you recaptured, apparently with the aid of a plate of cold turbot and a jug of milk. It was something, also, which Karamaneh had been sent to recapture with ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... odd whim of Fate that left the destiny of half the American continent to Don Carlos IV, whom Henry Adams calls "a kind of Spanish George III "—virtuous, to be sure, but heavy, obtuse, inconsequential, and incompetent. With incredible fatuousness the King gave his consent to a bargain by which he was to yield Louisiana in return for Tuscany or other Italian provinces which Bonaparte had just overrun with his armies. "Congratulate me," cried Don Carlos to his Prime ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... three to seven eggs, and afford an acceptable dish. I obtained a live specimen, which Dr. Rayner of this ship describes thus:—"Cereopsis Novae Hollandiae. Body about the size of a common goose; bill short, vaulted, obtuse, two-thirds of which is covered by an expanded cere of a pale greenish-yellow colour, the tip of the bill being black, arcuated, and truncated. Nostrils large, round, open, and situated in the middle of the bill. Wings ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... his face fell, and his reply showed him less obtuse than he appeared on the surface, seeing he was the first and only person to see through my ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... names have been used, such, for example, as dog-tooth-spar for the crystals of scalenohedral habit, so common in the Derbyshire lead mines and limestone caverns; nail-head-spar for crystals terminated by the obtuse rhombohedron e, which are common in the lead mines of Alston Moor in Cumberland; slate-spar (German Schieferspath) for crystals of tabular habit, and sometimes as thin as paper: cannon-spar for crystals of prismatic habit terminated by the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... natural in itself—may be mischievous for them; our nation has never any sympathy for minorities. The leaders of the Clerical party have lowered their teaching and their practices to the level of the most obtuse intellects and the most childish enthusiasms; they make conquests by myriads; and as, in our present state of society, numbers are accounted for everything, the Government and ruling party have already encountered, and shall encounter ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... that their Congress must become a territorial legislature, and that the higher law for them is to be the laws of Congress. The Philippine flag is oriental in cut and color, having red and blue bars—a white obtuse angle—the base to the staff, and a yellow moon with fantastic decorations occupying the field. This flag is one that Admiral Dewey salutes with respect. General Aguinaldo is giving much of his strength to the production of proclamations, ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... apparatus—which, however, does not detract from but rather adds to its value as an invention—and has been a boon to the physician in locating and curing affections of the throat. Its essentials are a small mirror fixed at an obtuse angle to a slender handle. Introduced into the mouth it can be placed in such position that the larynx is reflected in the mirror and thus can be observed by the operator. Those who have had their throats examined with ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... Christian man does not pray for the guidance of God's good Spirit? The dispassionate reader of "The Force of Truth," will naturally say, that the arguments for the Calvinistic creed were either sound or unsound. If the former, then Mr. Scott was either very obtuse or very obstinate to resist so long their power. If the latter, he acted with great weakness in yielding at length to insufficient evidence, on the score of an undefinable impulse. In either case, his name is divested of commanding ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... supplications. Humiliation appears the very discipline of genius. At one time the manuscript was actually recalled by its author and despatched to Garrick. Before it had really come under his consideration, which very likely might have been just as obtuse, Johnson intervened. To send it to Garrick, in his opinion, would be tantamount to an acknowledgment of its refusal by Colman. This had not taken place. The manager would neither accept the piece nor produce it. He said he would keep his ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... removed. It was not that she had ever given him occasion to feel that marriage and not inheritance was the source of his distinction in the land, but that having a soul as keenly sensitive to small material rights as it was obtuse to great spiritual ones, he never felt the property quite his own until his wife was no longer within sight. Had he been a little more sensitive still, he would have felt that the property was then his daughter's, and his only through ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... that the door of this church led to social position and the most aristocratic circles. Of course, mistakes were made. People sometimes elbowed their way in who were evidently flaunting weeds among the patrician flowers, and occasionally plain, honest, but somewhat obtuse souls would come as to a Christian church. But people who were "not desirable"—the meaning of this phrase had become well understood in Hillaton—were generally frozen out by an atmosphere made so chilly, even in August, that they were glad to escape to other associations less benumbing. ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... tolerably thick skin—not literally, for she was fair and blooming, and decidedly handsome, having such a skin as became a young woman of family in northernmost Spain. But her sensibilities were obtuse as regarded some modes of delicacy, some modes of equity, some modes of the world's opinion, and all modes whatever of personal hardship. Lay a stress on that word some—for, as to delicacy, she never lost sight of the kind which peculiarly concerns her ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... like an aerolite, and, as the deed is explained to us, doubles up his yellow hand into a fist, and deals the animal a sharp blow on the skull. Directly, as the horsemen approach, he is found with his obtuse head bent over his prey, digging out its eyes by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... It affects a system without having any intelligible clue to one; and instead of unfolding a principle in various and striking lights, repeats the same conclusions till they become flat and insipid. Mr. Wordsworth's mind is obtuse, except as it is the organ and the receptacle of accumulated feelings: it is not analytic, but synthetic; it is reflecting, rather than theoretical. The EXCURSION, we believe, fell still-born from the press. There was something abortive, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... case, he had no choice but to do so, and did not mind doing so. He wanted to publish his new Doctrine of Divorce: was he to go the round of the twelve Reverend Gentlemen who had just been appointed licensers of all books of Theology and Ethics, and wait till he found one of them sufficiently obtuse, or sufficiently asleep, to give his imprimatur to a doctrine so shocking? Clearly, nothing remained but to get any printer to undertake the treatise that would print it in its unlicensed state, the printer trusting the author and both running the risk. Whatever hesitations the printer ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... part of it; a line perfectly circular has no straight parts; between two points given the straight line is the shortest; the centre of a perfect circle is equally distant from all the points of the circumference; an equilateral triangle has no obtuse or right angle: all these truths admit of no exception. There never can be any being, line, circle, or triangle, but according to these rules. These axioms are of all times, or to speak more properly, they exist before all time, and will ever remain after any comprehensible duration. Let ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... beveled edge flat on the stone, feeling to see if it does lie flat, then tip up the chisel and rub it at an angle slightly more obtuse than that which it was ground, Fig. 78. The more nearly the chisel can be whetted at the angle at which it was ground the better. In rubbing, use as much of the stone as possible, so as to wear it down evenly. The motion may be back and forth ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... as it now exists, dates back only to the time when the church was restored in the middle of the nineteenth century. Up to 1891 the side walls were about two feet lower than at present, and the gable more obtuse. At the summit of the old gable stood a block of masonry carrying a sundial; this, when the transept was altered, was removed, the new gable being finished with a cross. A pillar was built in the churchyard to the south of the western tower in 1894, and on ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins
... said that my touch had grown almost as delicate as that of a blind man; but had it been ever so obtuse, I could have told at that moment, what were the two flat round objects which I held between my fingers. There was no mistaking the "feel" of ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... city. Ten days previously the body had been removed thither from the brick tomb where it had reposed since August 8, 1885. Four massive granite piers, with rows of Doric columns between, supported the roof and the obtuse cone of the cupola, which rested upon a great circle of Ionic pillars. The interior was cruciform. In the centre was the crypt, where, upon a square platform, rested the red porphyry sarcophagus. From the ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... suggestions of a possible coarseness of fibre. If a vain man, he may take it as a tribute to his personal charms, or at least to the superior claims of a representative of old-world civilisation. But even to the obtuse stranger of this character it will ultimately become obvious—as to the more refined observer ab initio—that he can no more (if as much) dare to take a liberty with the American girl than with ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... after the threatened discovery of those fraudulent measures by which he lost his fortune, his mind had become singularly enfeebled; his memory failing, and all his faculties of judgment—never very strong—growing capricious, or else obtuse and unobserving. These were the symptoms of a rapid physical change, the catastrophe of which was at hand. How far the excitement growing out of his daughter's flight and marriage may have precipitated this result, is problematical. It may be said, in this place, that my wife's mother charged it ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... calls an English garden to a set of stone terraces, with steps of turf. There are three or four very high hills, almost as high as, and exactly in the shape of, a tansy pudding. You squeeze between these and a river, that is conducted at obtuse angles in a stone channel, and supplied by a pump, and when walnuts Come in I suppose it will be navigable. In a corner enclosed by a chalk wall are the samples I mentioned: there is a stripe of grass, another of corn, and a third en friche, exactly in the order of beds in a nursery. They ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... thrust a dimpled finger In each ear, shut eyes and ran: Curious Laura chose to linger Wondering at each merchant man. One had a cat's face, One whisked a tail, One tramped at a rat's pace, One crawled like a snail, One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry, One like a ratel tumbled hurry-scurry. She heard a voice like voice of doves Cooing all together: They sounded kind and full of ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... at this moment was of ideal nobility, and shone with additional splendour among all these women heated with the dance, over-excited and restless in their manner. The men looked at her and grew thoughtful; no mind was so obtuse or empty that she did not exercise a disturbing influence upon it, inspire some vague and indefinable hope. He whose heart was free imagined with a thrill what such a woman's love would be; he who loved already conceived a vague regret, and dreamed of raptures hitherto unknown; he who bore a ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... sceptics obtuse Who Progress impede with crude cackle, Predestinate duffers of prattle profuse, Who the biggest world-problems would tackle; State-quacks, shouting Emperors, queer School-Board cranks, We'll give you our best benediction, And speed you at parting ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... judgment of ignorance in words of flame. Her anger was not abated, but merely turned in another direction, by the discovery that it was not ignorance, but blindness which she had now to denounce—the blindness of the obtuse Englishman who had been granted a privilege which he was incapable ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... no water, and promised that if we would follow him he would shew us water in which we could swim. On this condition I turned as he desired, and keeping along the western base of the main or front range, took up a course somewhat obtuse to that by which I had crossed the plains of Cawndilla. The productions on the ground were of a salsolaceous kind, although it was so much elevated above the plains, but amongst them there was not any mesembryanthemum. At about three miles we passed a very ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... same moment the figures of Rupert and Teuta sank; they were taking their places on the aeroplane. An instant after, like a great golden bird, it seemed to shoot out into the air, and then, dipping its head, dropped downward at an obtuse angle. We could see the King and Queen from time waist upwards—the King in Blue Mountain dress of green; the Queen, wrapped in her white Shroud, holding her baby on her breast. When far out from the mountain-top and over the Blue ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... enough for a man to pass through with a wheelbarrow, and laid diagonally across the road, so that the torrents pouring down the gutter shall not have to turn a right angle, which they would gladly evade doing, but a very obtuse one, which they cannot in conscience refuse; and, as the road all the way is built a little higher on the precipice side than on the mountain side, the water naturally runs into the gutter on that side, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... baby slumbered and I packed experiment to "Find Period in middle" explained. This was difficult; not that Bess is as a general thing obtuse, but because the picture of Aunt Jane embarking for some wild, lone isle of the Pacific as the head of a treasure-seeking expedition was enough to shake the strongest intellect. And yet, amid the welter of ink ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... now ordered dinner to be served up; and he observed to his officers as they rose from the table: "Before this time to-morrow I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey." The enemy's ships were moored in compact line of battle, describing an obtuse angle, close in with the shore, flanked by gunboats, four frigates, and a battery of guns and mortars on an island in their van. This was a formidable position, and to some commanders one which would have deterred from an attack. But it was not so with Nelson. As soon as he discovered the enemy's ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Magdalena with her mouth half open. She was the least obtuse of mortals, but although she knew that pride was at the root of Magdalena's extraordinary behaviour, she concluded that love had fled, and marvelled, for she had believed Magdalena to be the deepest and most tenacious of women. But she ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... masses, some or all of the endoderm cells with thick outer walls. Cones from 10 to 17 cm. long, short-pedunculate, ovoid-conic; apophyses lustrous brown-ochre or fuscous brown, elevated into thick, often reflexed, beaks with obtuse mutic umbos; seeds with large nuts and adnate striated dark ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... deserve the rod for having, like a gudgeon, so greedily devoured the delusive bait, which you, so temptingly, threw out to catch the eye of my piscatorial inclination! I have read of right angles and obtuse angles, and, verily, begin to believe that there are also right anglers and obtuse anglers—and that I am really one of the latter class. But never more will I plant myself, like a weeping willow, upon the sedgy bank of stream or river. No!—on no account will I draw upon these banks ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... spurs on their wings. But the Egyptian goose (Chenalopex aegyptiacus) has only "bare obtuse knobs," and these probably shew us the first steps by which true spurs have been developed in other species. In the spur-winged goose, Plectropterus gambensis, the males have much larger spurs than the females; and they use them, as I am informed by Mr. Bartlett, in ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... or oval-oblong, spines, evergreen Holly A D Broad-ovate, one-sided, serrate Linden A D Obovate, oval, lanceolate, oblong Chestnut oaks A D Broad-ovate to broad-elliptical, thorny Thorns A E F Lobes rounded Sassafras A E F Base truncate or heart-shaped Tulip tree A E F Obtuse, rounded lobes White oaks A E F 3-5-lobed, white-tomentose to glabrous beneath White poplar A E G 5-lobed, finely serrate Sweet gum A E G Irregularly 3-7-lobed, serrate-dentate with equal teeth Mulberry A E H Pointed or bristle-tipped ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... the slight fringe of whiskers which distinguished Alken's merry sportsmen. His business taking him deep into the county among the farms, he was always in walking trim, with an umbrella crooked over one arm, his other hand grasping the obtuse-angled handle of a ground-ash stick. These sticks, of which he had scores, he cut himself, his eye never losing its vigilance as he passed through a copse. Under the handle, about an inch from the end, he screwed a steel peg, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... with Pa; it was Emmy who hated him in the middle of her love because he stood to her as the living symbol of her daily inescapable servitude in this household. Jenny could never have felt that she would like to kill Pa. Emmy sometimes felt that. She at times, when he had been provoking or obtuse, so shook with hysterical anger, born of the inevitable days in his society and in the kitchen, that she could have thrown at him the battered pot which she carried, or could have pushed him passionately against the mantelpiece in her fierce hatred of his helplessness and his occasional ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... true, I was called down within the hour; but that hour of suffering had done me much constitutional mischief. I was stupified as much as if I had committed a debauch upon fat ale. However, I was too angry to complain, or to seek relief from the surgeon. I went on deck at half-past eight, with obtuse faculties ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... little forced laugh, it was scarcely flattering to hear one had altered out of all recognition. Then, without allowing me time to reply, she plunged into a general topic of conversation which, as I should have been obtuse indeed not to take the hint, I did my best to ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... way inward along the wall, keeping a short distance back from it, and he saw that after twenty or thirty yards it turned again at a very obtuse angle away from him and once more ran on in a long straight line. Just beyond this angle he came upon a little wooden door thickly studded with nails. It was made to open inward, and on the outside there was no knob or handle ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... for this short-sighted person's immature feet, certain malicious spirits had so willed it that the chief and more autumnal of the Maidens Blank (who, nevertheless, wore an excessively flower-like name), had long lavished herself upon the possession of an obtuse and self-assertive hound, which was in the habit of gratifying this inconsiderable person and those who sat around by continually depositing upon their unworthy garments details of its outer surface, and when the weather was more than usually cold, by stretching its graceful ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... Flinders in the Investigator, despite contrary winds, covered the distance by the Bass Strait route in thirty days (April 9 to May 9), including several days spent at King Island and Port Phillip, is sufficient to show how much Baudin's obtuse temper contributed to aggravate the distress ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... of Le Mans is in the Hotel de la Prefecture, and as we heard that the famous enamel of Geoffrey Plantagenet, formerly on his tomb in the cathedral, was preserved there, we hastened to behold so interesting a remain of early art. A remarkably obtuse female was the exhibitor on the occasion, and, on my asking her to point out the treasure, she took me to a collection of Roman coins and medals, assuring me they were very old and very curious. It was impossible not to agree with ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... of a light brown colour. The epistoma is edged with brown. The labrum is prominent, white and trapezoidal. The mandibles are black, strong, short, obtuse, only slightly curved, sharp-edged and furnished each with a broad tooth on the inner side. The maxillary and labial palpi are brown and shaped like very small studs with two or three joints to them. The antennae, inserted just at the base of the mandibles, are brown, and consist ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... good. He would not take my advice. His brother-in-law, Strahan, sent him a subscription of fifty pounds, and said he would send him fifty more, if he would not publish.' GARRICK. 'What! eh! is Strahan a good judge of an Epigram? Is not he rather an OBTUSE man, eh?' JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, he may not be a judge of an Epigram: but you see he is a judge of what is not an Epigram.' BOSWELL. 'It is easy for you, Mr. Garrick, to talk to an authour as you talked to Elphinston; you, who ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... little wider than usual when he was asked sympathetically whether so many people in the house did not interfere with his quiet. "Mrs Hadwin's talk is very gentle," said the Curate; "she never disturbs me." And the mistress of the house was equally obtuse, and would not comprehend any allusion. The little household came to be very much talked of in Carlingford in consequence; and to meet that shabby figure in the evening, when one chanced to be out for a walk, made ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... himself to listen but with so bristling an expression that it was clear no explanation could satisfy him. Dick, however, took no heed of that. He spoke slowly as one lecturing to an obtuse class of scholars. ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... marks of the style justly denominated DEBASED, to distinguish it from the former purer styles. Depressed and nearly flat arched doorways, with shallow mouldings, square-headed windows with perpendicular mullions and obtuse-pointed or round-headed lights, without foliations, together with a general clumsiness of construction, as compared with more ancient edifices, form the predominating features in ecclesiastical buildings ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... understanding of his object: be sure it is honest and right, and then march directly to it. The covert, indirect, and insidious way of doing anything, is always the wrong way. It gradually hardens the moral faculties, renders obtuse the perception of right and wrong in human actions, weighs everything in the balances of worldly policy, and ends most generally, in the practical adoption of the vile maxim, "that the end sanctifies the means." If it be ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... lesson of our days; we are stepping on into the shadows. Our eyes see that ye see not; our ears hear that which ye have not considered. We read your melodious story through, but we have read other stories since, and only its haec fabula docet remains very fresh. You will be as obtuse as we are some day, young things! It is not neglect; it is not disapproval,—we simply forget. But from such forgetfulness may the good Lord graciously deliver us, ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... Limestone. It presents in the cross section the same radiated structure as the Turbinolia fungites, and nearly the same furrowed appearance in the longitudinal one; but, seen in the larger specimens, we find that it was a branched coral, with obtuse forky boughs, in each of which, it is probable, from their general structure, there lived a single polype. It may have been the resemblance which these bear, when seen in detached branches, to the older Caryophyllia, taken in connection with the fact that the deposit in ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... 21/2 Inches Diameter at the steeled end, the rest being somewhat more slender. The steeled end is so shaped, as makes it most apt to pierce the Rock, the Angles at that end being still to be made the more obtuse, the harder the Rock is. This Tool is to be first held by the hand, in the place, where the Hole, to be made for the use, which shall here be shewed, is to be placed; that is, in the middle between the sides of the Rock, that is to be cut, but as ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... we all have to learn if we try to draw, a given thing looks different in shape from every different point of view. If our table is 'really' rectangular, it will look, from almost all points of view, as if it had two acute angles and two obtuse angles. If opposite sides are parallel, they will look as if they converged to a point away from the spectator; if they are of equal length, they will look as if the nearer side were longer. All these things are not commonly noticed in looking at a table, because experience ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... but faithful valet or the garrulous narrative of the heroine's fille-de-chambre, when rehearsing the stories of blood and horror which she had heard in the servant's hall? Again, had my title borne 'Waverley, a Romance from the German,' what head so obtuse as not to image forth a profligate abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and mysterious association of Rosycrucians and Illuminati, with all their properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... will always be obtuse men in the pastoral office— men who know no way of getting into a sensitive soul except by knocking in the door and walking in with their boots on; but all such men are out of their place. The souls of ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... beak is bent, convex and sub-compressed, and in some degree obtuse; the tongue is obtuse, triangular and very short, and the feet are ambulatory. As this bird has a great abundance of feathers, it appears considerably thicker than it is. It is, in fact, about the size of a mistletoe thrush, ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... riches, inhabited the woods and the fields, and {followed} Pan, who always dwells in caves of the mountains; but his obtuse understanding[11] still remained, and the impulse of his foolish mind was fated again, as before, to be an injury to its owner. For the lofty Tmolus, looking far and wide over the sea, stands erect, steep with its lofty ascent; and extending in its descent ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... them; no visible sky. Even had there been both, it would scarce have mended the matter. The steersman could not tell whether, on straying from the channel, he had drifted to the south or the north, the east or the west; and, indeed, an intellect less obtuse than that of Tipperary Tom might have been puzzled upon the point. It has been already mentioned, that the Solimoes is so tortuous as to turn to every point of the compass in its slow course. The mere fact that the moon was ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... in the midst of his enjoyment an insistent despair of heart returned as he recalled a certain good fellowship in her attitude towards Raymond, which was missing with him. Obtuse as lovers usually are, it never occurred to him that this was one of the best ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... Bloc, the Neutral Bloc and such scraps as had been too obtuse to find themselves a Bloc were drawn into the whirlpool in an amazingly short time, if in a variety of ways. In less than two years the world was rid of most of what ...
— And All the Earth a Grave • Carroll M. Capps (AKA C.C. MacApp)
... see her relatives. It had been ascertained at the shipping offices that Browner had left aboard of the May Day, and I calculate that she is due in the Thames tomorrow night. When he arrives he will be met by the obtuse but resolute Lestrade, and I have no doubt that we shall have all our ...
— The Adventure of the Cardboard Box • Arthur Conan Doyle
... indignation. But the sisters are appalled at the revelation of her misdeed, and no less at the suggestion that they should join in her act of rebellion. Her prayer for the loan of one of their horses on which the woman may escape, meets with obtuse looks, headshakes, uncompromising denial. She is appealing urgently, hurriedly, to one after the other, when Sieglinde who, stony, death-struck, dazed with grief, has appeared unconscious, up to this moment, of all taking ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... Yardsley (obtuse). Ha, ha! Yes. Why, of course! Ha, ha, ha! For repartee I have always said-polite repartee, of course—Miss Andrews is—(Aside.) Now what the dickens did ...
— The Bicyclers and Three Other Farces • John Kendrick Bangs
... Holland, don't be so—" he hesitated for the right word, not wishing to be unjust,—"so obtuse. Listen to that wind! It's cold here. Think what it must be ...
— The Burglar and the Blizzard • Alice Duer Miller
... a psychological study. Amazement, consternation, humiliation—all seemed determined to possess her. Here was the obtuse Swede, for whose dear sake she had dallied with the intricacies of the language of Stockholm, furiously familiar with admirable English! The dense, dumb Scandinavian—the lady of the "me no understand" rejoinder—apparently had the "gift of tongues." ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... to speak more plainly than I like, Derek," she was saying, "because you make yourself so obtuse. You seem to forget that years have a way of passing, and that Dorothea is no longer ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... on the other hand, was liked by many. Still there were those who thought that John Ridd was a fool, a slow, obtuse rustic, and so on, while Lorna was too divine ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... a grotesque appearance. A wall with three windows looking out on to the canal ran aslant so that one corner formed a very acute angle, and it was difficult to see in it without very strong light. The other corner was disproportionately obtuse. There was scarcely any furniture in the big room: in the corner on the right was a bedstead, beside it, nearest the door, a chair. A plain, deal table covered by a blue cloth stood against the same wall, close to the door into the other flat. Two ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of Sir Nigel Anstruthers was that they were, on some points, singularly unbusinesslike. In the perfectly obvious and simple matter of the settlement of his daughter's fortune, he had felt that Reuben Vanderpoel was obtuse to the point of idiocy. He seemed to have none of the ordinary points of view. Naturally there was to Anstruthers' mind but one point of view to take. A man of birth and rank, he argued, does not career across the Atlantic to marry a New York millionaire's daughter unless he anticipates deriving ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... But by hypotheses he does not mean baseless assumptions—"mere theories—"but things self-evident and "obvious to all;"[540] as for example, the postulates and definitions of Geometry. "After laying down hypotheses of the odd and even, and three kinds of angles [right, acute, and obtuse], and figures [as the triangle, square, circle, and the like], he proceeds on them as known, and gives no further reason about them, and reasons downward from these principles,"[541] affirming certain judgments as ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... to what I have said about having upon a previous occasion made the speech at Ottawa as the one he took an extract from at Charleston, says it only shows that I practiced the deception twice. Now, my friends, are any of you obtuse enough to swallow that? Judge Douglas had said I had made a speech at Charleston that I would not make up north, and I turned around and answered him by showing I had made that same speech up north,—had made it at Ottawa; made it in his hearing; made it in the Abolition ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... attacked; just as a dog will attack a great beast of prey, so he hung upon the big man's fists, and would not be shaken off. He hated his father, and he longed in his heart to be a policeman when he was grown up. With his blind and obtuse courage he was particularly adapted to such a calling; but he actually ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... blatantly on politics, while Cuthfert, who had been prone to clip his coupons and let the commonwealth jog on as best it might, either ignored the subject or delivered himself of startling epigrams. But the clerk was too obtuse to appreciate the clever shaping of thought, and this waste of ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... on the brow, which was heavy, and made a massive shelter for the eyes. So looked the young German who had perhaps heard Melanchthon; so, in this middle nineteenth century, looked Jacob Delafield. No, anger makes obtuse; that, no doubt, was Lady Henry's case. At any rate, in Delafield's presence her theory ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to the end, That thou mayst use thyself to own thy thirst And men may mingle for thee when they hear." "O plant! from whence I spring! rever'd and lov'd! Who soar'st so high a pitch, thou seest as clear, As earthly thought determines two obtuse In one triangle not contain'd, so clear Dost see contingencies, ere in themselves Existent, looking at the point whereto All times are present, I, the whilst I scal'd With Virgil the soul purifying mount, And visited the nether world of ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... was some lack of courtesy, some annoying error in your bill which we were exasperatingly obtuse in rectifying? Were we stupid in filling some order or did we delay in delivery? Perhaps we did not have just what you were looking for, or our prices ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... fly outwards by centrifugal force, and as their velocity increases the quadrilateral figure contained by the four links expands laterally and shortens vertically. The angles between K K and L L become less and less obtuse, and the weight W is drawn upwards, bringing with it the fork C of the rod A, which has ends engaging with the groove. As C rises, the other end of the rod is depressed, and the rod B depresses rod O, which is attached ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... deal for the text of Massinger, but not as much as might easily be done. His comparison of Shakspeare with his contemporary dramatists is obtuse indeed.[1] ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... too harshly for being distant to former acquaintance, even though he may have been much obliged to them.' It is, no doubt, to be wished that a proper degree of attention should be shewn by great men to their early friends. But if either from obtuse insensibility to difference of situation, or presumptuous forwardness, which will not submit even to an exteriour observance of it, the dignity of high place cannot be preserved, when they are admitted into the company of those ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... followers of the blind, obtuse to every argument, impregnable to incontrovertible facts, who have cast in their lot with the avowed enemies of England. They have their day—every dog has it—but their day is far spent, and their night is at hand. For England will never again submit to Romish rule. ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... failed to get Jumbo he would have caused his notion of buying the Nelson Monument to be treacherously smuggled into print by some trusty friend, and after he had gotten a few hundred pages of gratuitous advertising out of it, he would have come out with a blundering, obtuse, but warm-hearted letter of apology, and in a postscript to it would have naively proposed to let the Monument go, and take Stonehenge in place of it at ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... performance some more; this they did for a time, and then stole off again, or slept in their seats, and the Ncomi were highly disgusted at those brutes of Fans, whom they regarded, they said in their way, as Philistines of an utterly obtuse and degraded type. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... the practical demands of daily life could hardly come in question. With such general laws we could never have mastered the concrete situations of society, because we should have had to leave out of view the fact that there are gifted and ungifted, intelligent and stupid, sensitive and obtuse, quick and slow, energetic and ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... least, such was his opinion; and being so, he would not be likely to attempt the enforcement of another view of his power on other men. He was afraid of himself now,—afraid that his own preferences had made him obtuse where loyalty would have given ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... consider, that I, his paid servant, am an ambassador whom it is derogatory to the dignity—not of the lady to whom I have the happiness of speaking; she has no existence in his mind—but of his wife, a part of himself, to receive. You may imagine how regardless of me, how obtuse to the possibility of my having any individual sentiment or opinion he is, when he tells me, openly, that I am so employed. You know how perfectly indifferent to your feelings he is, when he threatens you with such a messenger. As you, of course, have ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... part of a wild young cowpuncher ready for any mischief, but beneath his obtuse good humor Flandrau covered a vigilant wariness. Soapy held all the good cards now, but if he stayed in the game some of them would come to him. Then he would show Mr. Stone whether he would ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... he rushed blindly into the fray the moment his mother was attacked; just as a dog will attack a great beast of prey, so he hung upon the big man's fists, and would not be shaken off. He hated his father, and he longed in his heart to be a policeman when he was grown up. With his blind and obtuse courage he was particularly adapted to such a calling; but he actually became ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... his feet, riveted to the spot where he stood. Obtuse as he was, he saw at a glance what had occurred. In all his calculations this chance had never suggested itself—that Hugh Ritson would risk the personal ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... high, all its parts covered with hairs, simple and tomentose. Leaves heart-shaped, angular, obtuse, unequally serrate, smooth, soft, the lower surface hoary and bearing 9 well-marked nerves. Petioles longer than the leaves, with 2 stipules at the base. Flowers yellow, axillary, solitary. Peduncles long, with a node near the ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... combs approach each other in the middle of the hive at nearly right angles, an edge of comb is left there; but when an obtuse angle, the edges are generally joined, making a sheet of crooked comb. It is evident where the two combs join, there must be some irregular cells unfit for ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... Wednesday, the 28th? I give you a long notice, because you seem to have so many appointments. Yours always, Robert Kennedy." He had no alternative. He must refuse, even though double the notice had been given. He could only think that Mr. Kennedy was a very obtuse man and one who would not take a hint, and hope that he might succeed at last. So he wrote an answer, not intended to be conciliatory. "My dear Kennedy, I am sorry to say that I am engaged on the 28th. Yours always, Phineas Finn." At this period he did his best to keep out of Mr. ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... fire with great facility, and spread it in a wonderful manner. To produce it they take two pieces of dry soft wood, one is a stick about eight or nine inches long, the other piece is flat: The stick they shape into an obtuse point at one end, and pressing it upon the other, turn it nimbly by holding it between both their hands as we do a chocolate mill, often shifting their hands up, and then moving them down upon it, to increase the pressure as much as possible. By this method they get fire in less than two minutes, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... Areas with an obtuse angle above and below, sometimes rounded above; a minute projection on each side near the top. Bottom of area long-oval, smooth, sometimes with a perforation above the mouth. Mouth with a minute tooth ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... expression in our issue of April 6th concerning the possibility of a crisis in Anglo-Armenian relations. The incident of the Bobadig mules is already bearing fruit, and we can no longer doubt that popular feeling in the vilayet of Arimabug has been dangerously inflamed by the obtuse procrastination of the British Government. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... follows: 'He made me no answer, but sat sometime in a muse; then broke off that discourse, and fell upon another subject.' The result no doubt of that 'muse' was the suspicion, or, perhaps, the conviction, that the rest of the world would, in all probability, be as obtuse as Ellwood; and to that suspicion or conviction we appear to owe Paradise Regained. The Plague over, Milton returned to London, settling in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields. 'And when afterwards I went to wait on him there ... he shewed me his second poem, called Paradise Regained, and in ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... understand me as attributing to the Arabian originator of Aladdin all the sentiment of the case as I have endeavored to disentangle it. He spoke what he did not understand; for, as to sentiment of any kind, all Orientals are obtuse and impassive. There are other sublimities (some, at least) in the "Arabian Nights," which first become such—a gas that first kindles—when entering into combination with new elements ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Committee in Paris declined to give him information or furnish means, and even said that they did not wish volunteers. All this may readily be explained by the consideration that a man who thereafter proved to be so bitter an enemy was not sufficiently diplomatic to deceive even the obtuse perceptions of so undeserving a body as the author describes said committee. On the other hand, it would have been more prudent for the writer to have said less on this topic, as such hesitation in accepting his services might induce the reader to think that the Poles ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of sex-life can be learned in the flower, and the associations thus indelibly impressed cannot fail to leave at least a trace of fragrance and loveliness on even an obtuse nature. No matter what the later experiences or mistakes may be, the whole conception of this side of life cannot sink so low as might be the case if there were not this flower-sweet background. And ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... of each tooth, E, to its arm, D, by means of a round tenon arranged at an obtuse angle with the axis of the tooth, and going into the arm, the same being substantially as and for ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... him. She saw Nina's near-sighted eyes welling with hurt tears; Nina's check book eagerly surrendered to win from her lord a few delicious hours of the old flattery, the old attention. Harriet fancied Nina, poor, plain, obtuse little Nina, home again: "But you don't know how hard it is, Father. He is never there any more—he ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... this Government fall into the hands of men of either of these two classes, we shall show ourselves false to America's past. Moreover, the demagog and the corruptionist often work hand in hand. There are at this moment wealthy reactionaries of such obtuse morality that they regard the public servant who prosecutes them when they violate the law, or who seeks to make them bear their proper share of the public burdens, as being even more objectionable ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... describes: "An acute-angled street may be made to contain rectangular rooms on an upper story.... Draw an acute angle—say something a little less than a right angle—and cut it into compartments; or, if preferred, an obtuse angle, and cut this into compartments also. Now, the roadway may be so prescribed as to prevent right angles from being made on the basement, but the complementary angles are ingeniously made out by allowing the joists ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... free discussion Upon all points—no matter what, or whose— Because as Ages upon Ages push on, The last is apt the former to accuse Of pillowing its head on a pin-cushion, Heedless of pricks because it was obtuse: What was a paradox becomes a truth or A something like ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... there are many persons, of no insignificant rank in society, who would from their own consciousness smile at the simplicity with which he can so easily shape men's opinions and dispositions to his mind whether they will or not. He must have been the most charitable or the most obtuse of observers. ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... course they were not allowed to lie down while in the stocks, this being too comfortable a position. Upon studying the question he found that in this way much more ease was experienced owing to the more obtuse angle thus formed by the body and the legs. This did not suit him and he issued further orders that in future all prisoners in the stocks should be obliged to sit facing uphill, and that they should not be allowed to hold on to the stocks in order ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... in large masses, some or all of the endoderm cells with thick outer walls. Cones from 10 to 17 cm. long, short-pedunculate, ovoid-conic; apophyses lustrous brown-ochre or fuscous brown, elevated into thick, often reflexed, beaks with obtuse mutic umbos; seeds with large nuts and adnate striated dark gray or fuscous ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... was prepared to denounce the judgment of ignorance in words of flame. Her anger was not abated, but merely turned in another direction, by the discovery that it was not ignorance, but blindness which she had now to denounce—the blindness of the obtuse Englishman who had been granted a privilege which he was ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... should not change our drinks is a heresy; the tongue becomes saturated, and after the third glass yields but an obtuse sensation. ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... that whatever he undertook he engaged in with all his might. He was a rude, coarse boy. It was scarcely possible, with his past training, that he should be otherwise. But he was very faithful in fulfilling his obligations. Though his sense of right and wrong was very obtuse, he was still disposed to do the right so far as his uncultivated ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... which is already overthrown. In the succeeding stanza, 29, two other epithetal similes are bestowed upon the monsters—they become 'reptiles' and 'ephemeral insects.' All these repulsive images are of course here applied to critics of wilfully obtuse or malignant mind, such as Shelley accounted the Quarterly reviewer ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... seem unduly obtuse," said Jurgen, "for I am a little obtuse. It is a habit with me, a very bad habit formed in early infancy, and I have never been able to break myself of it. And so I have not any notion at ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... sympathetic audience in Nikita. Thence he passed to Bucharest, where he issued—for ten numbers—a Bulgaro-Roumanian newspaper; the Bulgars in Bucharest had grown too prosperous to be interested either in his journalistic or his military schemes, and he found the Bulgarian colonies in Russia equally obtuse. He was attacked by consumption while he was at work upon the Provisional Law for the National Bands in the Forests—a sort of written constitution for the heiduks, and in the intervals of his last sufferings he wrote ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... head in his hands, for some moments. At last he said slowly: "There is no one so obtuse as the thoroughly good man. It is not the messenger I am afraid of, after all. He is but the outward symptom of the inward trouble. What you are seeing is an example of the workings of conscience where you thought conscience was absent. The trouble with me is that I know the newspaper ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... gradation of his copy rendered it not so readily perceptible; or, more possibly, I owed my security to the masterly air of the copyist, who, disdaining the letter (which in a painting is all the obtuse can see) gave but the full spirit of his original for ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... And obtuse as he was, Quimby could not but observe that Nattie's eyes were shining in a way he had never seen them shine before, that the ever-coming and going flush on her cheeks was very becoming, and that there was an expression in her face, ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... she did not have to get up and go to the office was Una's chief impression at awakening, but she was not entirely obtuse to the morning, to the chirp of a robin, the cluck of the hens, the creak of a hay-wagon, and the sweet smell of cattle. When she arose she looked down a slope of fields so far away that they seemed smooth as a lawn. Solitary, majestic trees cast long shadows ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... listen but with so bristling an expression that it was clear no explanation could satisfy him. Dick, however, took no heed of that. He spoke slowly as one lecturing to an obtuse class of scholars. ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... added, would avowedly seek an increase of salary for gain's sake; and if such avowal were openly made by a clergyman, it would be found obnoxious to the sense of propriety among his congregation. It may also be noted in this connection that no one but the scoffers and the very obtuse are not instinctively grieved inwardly at a jest from the pulpit; and that there are none whose respect for their pastor does not suffer through any mark of levity on his part in any conjuncture of life, except ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... in some sort the more evident because he possessed in large measure a certain relieving element, in which those who are eminent in that character are very deficient. Generally such persons have but obtuse senses: we are prone to attribute the purity of their conduct to the dullness of their sensations. Milton had no such obtuseness: he had every opportunity for knowing the "world of eye and ear";[12] you cannot open his works without seeing how much he ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... sixty. When the number of degrees of angle between two lines is less than 90, the lines are said to form an acute angle one to the other, but when they are at more than 90 degrees of angle they are said to form an obtuse angle. Thus, in Figure 60, A and C are at an acute angle, while B and C are at an obtuse angle. F and G form an acute angle one to the other, as also do G and B, while H and A are at an obtuse angle. Between I and J there are 90 degrees of angle; hence they form neither an acute ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... not a match-maker, and I've no idea that Esther will ever marry George," replied Mrs. Murray with the patience which wives sometimes show to husbands whom they think obtuse. ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... native to our own. By the village of Pennington, situated about midway between Dalton and Ulverstone, is the Castle Hill, the residence of this family before the Conquest. The area of the castle-yard appears to have been an octagon or a square, with obtuse angles, about forty-five yards in diameter. The south and east sides have been defended by a ditch about ten yards wide, and by a vallum of earth, still visible. There are no vestiges of the ancient building. It stood apparently on the verge of a precipice, at the foot of which flows a ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... hollow in front of the joint. As the line of the radio-humeral joint is horizontal, while that of the ulno-humeral joint slopes obliquely downwards, the arm forms with the fully extended and supinated forearm an obtuse angle, opening laterally—the "carrying angle." This angle is usually more marked in women, in harmony with the greater width of the female pelvis. The ulnar nerve lies in the hollow between the olecranon and the medial condyle, and the median nerve passes over ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... which, next to the power of thought and expression, is the happiest gift an author's fairy godmother can bestow upon him, saves Kielland from saying too much—from enforcing his lesson by marginal comments, a la George Eliot. But he must be obtuse, indeed, to whom this reticence is not more eloquent and effective than a page of ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... 'that man is sinking under old age, his senses have become obtuse, suffering has destroyed his strength, and he is despised by his relations. He is without support and useless, and people have abandoned him, like a dead tree in a forest. But this is not peculiar to his family. In every creature youth is defeated by old age. Your ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... talked Lowland Scotch. But Scott has anticipated these cavils in the eighteenth chapter of the second volume. Certainly no Lowlander knew the Highlanders better than he did, and his ear for dialect was as keen as his musical ear was confessedly obtuse. Scott had the best means of knowing whether Helen MacGregor would be likely to soar into heroics as she is apt to do. In fact, here ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... unbroken waters, the fantastic wreaths which spring to meet it, and then, the shadowy mist that veils the horrors of its crash below, constitute a scene almost too enormous in its features for man to look upon. "Angels might tremble as they gazed;" and I should deem the nerves obtuse, rather than strong, which did not quail at the first sight of this ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... of the poor fellow?" asked Cap, scarcely knowing how to take the other's manner, which was so dry, while it was so simple, that a less obtuse subject than the old sailor might well have suspected its sincerity. "One who has passed the place knows how ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... feel amiable when passing through these desolating scenes, where nature, originally so beautiful, has been defaced, and the people, instead of deriving pleasure from natural beauties, are obtuse to all the surroundings, which, according to educated taste, would ensure appreciation. I felt inclined to upset the donkeys, capture their proprietors, and . . . I could not have hung them upon the trees that they had defaced, for no bough had been left that would ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... compare with these lakes, as seen under the Italian heaven. As to those persons who have pretended to discover that the effects of light and atmosphere were no finer than they found in our own lake scenery, I can only say that they must be exceedingly obtuse in organization,—a ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of a girl so obtuse that she permits a man like this fat, disgusting actor to dangle about her?" asked Mrs. Crego of her husband, who ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... sort. It includes all those heresies which result from wrong-headed mental elaboration, as distinguished from those which are the result of hasty and imperfect apprehension, the heresies of the clever rather than the heresies of the obtuse. The former are of endless variety and complexity; the latter are in comparison natural, simple confusions. The former are the errors of the study, the latter the superstitions that spring by the wayside, ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... are silly enough to accept when gallantry obliges us to make nooses to catch our happiness. We swear eternal faithfulness, and declare that we desire to pass our lives with them, and seem to await a husband's death impatiently. Let him die, and there are some provincial women obtuse or silly or malicious enough to say: 'Here am I, free at last.' The spent ball suddenly comes to life again, and falls plumb in the midst of our finest triumphs or our most carefully planned happiness. I have seen that you love Beatrix. I leave her therefore in a position where she loses nothing ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... touch had grown almost as delicate as that of a blind man; but had it been ever so obtuse, I could have told at that moment, what were the two flat round objects which I held between my fingers. There was no mistaking the "feel" ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... and her estimation of their relative powers was the same. Emily had a head for logic, and a capability of argument, unusual in a man, and rare indeed in a woman, according to M. Heger. Impairing the force of this gift, was a stubborn tenacity of will, which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned. "She should have been a man—a great navigator," said M. Heger in speaking of her. "Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... merits are grossly undervalued by a stiff-necked and obtuse generation. But what would you have, my learned brother? If poverty steps behind you and claps the occulting bushel over your thirty thousand candle-power luminary, your brilliancy is apt to ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... sat still on her bough, and gave herself up to the keen sense of unmerited reproach. She would have given the world not to have eaten all her puff, and to have saved some of it for Tom. Not but that the puff was very nice, for Maggie's palate was not at all obtuse, but she would have gone without it many times over, sooner than Tom should call her greedy and be cross with her. And he had said he wouldn't have it, and she ate it without thinking; how could she help it? The tears flowed so ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... tacked a piece of what he calls an English garden to a set of stone terraces, with steps of turf. There are three or four very high hills, almost as high as, and exactly in the shape of, a tansy pudding. You squeeze between these and a river, that is conducted at obtuse angles in a stone channel, and supplied by a pump; and when walnuts come in I suppose it will be navigable. In a corner enclosed by a chalk wall are the samples I mentioned; there is a strip of grass, another of corn, and a third en friche, exactly in the order of beds in a nursery. They have ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... interested in letters and in life, the work of a fastidious and yet a very robust artist. But the book is fairly certain to be misunderstood of the people. The publishers' own announcement describes it as "perhaps chiefly for youth," a description with which I disagree. The obtuse are capable of seeing in it nothing save a bread-and-butter imitation of "The Jungle Book." The woodland and sedgy lore in it is discreet and attractive. Names of animals abound in it. But it is nevertheless a book of humanity. The author may call his chief characters the Rat, the Mole, the ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... to the accidents of support; if it is fixed on a flat surface the under side, which is always moulded by the support, is itself flat. The nest then takes the form of a demi-ellipsoid, or, in other words, half an egg cut longitudinally; more or less obtuse at one end, but pointed at the other, and sometimes ending in a ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... at ease until I have given my friendly counsel. Thou art free to follow it or not to follow it. But for the sake of this beard Sheikh Khalid, do not speak at the Mosque to-day. I know the people of this City: they are ignorant, obtuse, fanatical, blind. 'God hath sealed up their hearts and their hearing.' They will not hear thee; they can not understand thee. I know them better than thou: I have lived amongst them for forty years. And what ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... or asteroids, between Jupiter and Saturn, they kept the maximum repulsion on Jupiter as long as possible, and moved at tremendous speed. Saturn was somewhat in advance of Jupiter in its orbit, so that their course from the earth had been along two sides of a triangle with an obtuse angle between. During the next four terrestrial days they sighted several small comets, but spent most of their time writing out their Jovian experiences. During the sixth day Saturn's rings, although ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... had spent many hours of each day in smoking and watching her thus; and the fact that he had never yet found the occupation monotonous was a danger-signal in itself. But your comfort-loving man is singularly obtuse in the matter of danger-signals: and loyalty apart, Richardson was too genuinely devoted to his friend to admit the possibility of that which was almost an accomplished fact. The man was not built for high tragedy; and, in truth, the sittings were an equal pleasure ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... shallow observer, whose testimony has done so much to prevent anthropology from being a science, would conclude, if he happened to see a Samoyede on one of these "amorous evenings," that he "loved" his wife, whereas it ought to be clear to the most obtuse that he loves only himself, caring for his wife merely as a means of gratifying his selfish appetites. In the preceding pages I endeavored to show that such a man may exhibit, in his relations to a woman, individual ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... his boots and was standing, hat in hand, with an air of meek expectancy. Angel, always so fluent when we were by ourselves, balked at explaining things to grown-ups, and, though the Bishop usually saw things from our point of view, one could never be absolutely certain that even he would not prove obtuse on such ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... angustifolius foliis obtuse carinatis rectis, floribus cernuis, Linn. Fil. Ait. Kew. v. i. ...
— The Botanical Magazine Vol. 8 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... had been obtuse to the insinuation of poisoning, fires up violently at the charge of doing ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... dear," and Anna shook her sleek black head with the air of explaining matters to an obtuse child. "I was the only one who understood. Gil misunderstood. He thought that I would really wait for him until he should have made enough money to come home and pay off the mortgage. I let him think ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... so rash as try to depict Mrs. Ellison's arts, for then, indeed, I should make her appear the clumsy conspirator she was not, and should merely convict myself of ignorance of such matters. Whether Mr. Arbuton was ever aware of them, I am not sure: as a man he was, of course, obtuse and blind; but then, on the other hand, he had seen far more of the world than Mrs. Ellison, and she may have been clear as day to him. Probably, though, he did not detect any design; he could not have conceived of ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... or hill, or eminence, termed Drumsnab, I would be proud to hold some dialogue with you, Sir Duncan, on the nature of the sconce to be there constructed; and whether the angles thereof should be acute or obtuse—anent whilk I have heard the great Velt-Mareschal Bannier hold a learned argument with General Tiefenbach during a ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... A bare-legged woman, surrounded by her half-naked children, leaving the potato she was peeling in front of her door, gazed, like her husband, after the rolling vision of elegance that went by her, and her obtuse brain probably summed up the implacable decrees of Destiny in ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... sending down aerial roots. Wood hard, bark smooth, not scaling, with prominent warty lenticels; shoots short-jointed, angled, with fine scurfy pubescence; diaphragms absent; tendrils intermittent, simple. Leaves small, broadly cordate or roundish; petiolar sinus wide, shallow; margin with obtuse, wide teeth; not lobed; dense in texture, light green color, glabrous above, sometimes pubescent along veins below. Cluster small (6-24 berries), loose; peduncle short; pedicels short, thick. Berries large, globular or somewhat oblate, black or greenish-yellow; skin thick, tough and ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... like "craze" which had rioted within his own blood when he was a boy, and had sent him out into the world to fight and jostle men, to win renown, and prove his manhood by risking life and limb in all kinds of mad adventure? Nothing had so moved that self-contained, moody man for years, and even obtuse Tom could see that his story had touched some hidden spring of feeling. The stern lines had relaxed, and there was a softer though more intense ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... possessing wealth and station,—in short, if Dorothy betrayed an intention to refuse his exalted hand,—then she, Mrs. Hanway-Harley, would interfere. She would take Dorothy in solemn charge, and compel that obtuse maiden to what redounded to her good. Mrs. Hanway-Harley doubted neither the propriety nor the feasibility of establishing a censorship over Dorothy's heart, should the young lady evince a blinded inability to see ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... hated him in the middle of her love because he stood to her as the living symbol of her daily inescapable servitude in this household. Jenny could never have felt that she would like to kill Pa. Emmy sometimes felt that. She at times, when he had been provoking or obtuse, so shook with hysterical anger, born of the inevitable days in his society and in the kitchen, that she could have thrown at him the battered pot which she carried, or could have pushed him passionately against the mantelpiece in her fierce ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... are seven men, and four more on land to relieve them regularly. {275} In the course of a lively conversation with their visitor, they said, "How lonely you must be!" Surely when the men exiled to a lightship pronounce the Rob Roy "lonely" there must be something in the charge; but my obtuse perception has not yet enabled me to find ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... knuckle, ankle, groin, crotch, crutch, crane, fluke, scythe, sickle, zigzag, kimbo^, akimbo. corner, nook, recess, niche, oriel [Arch.], coign^. right angle &c (perpendicular) 216.1, 212; obliquity &c 217; angle of 45 degrees, miter; acute angle, obtuse angle, salient angle, reentering angle, spherical angle. angular measurement, angular elevation, angular distance, angular velocity; trigonometry, goniometry; altimetry^; clinometer, graphometer^, goniometer; theodolite; sextant, quadrant; dichotomy. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... mind will say to itself, when it comes across them, 'You great duffer, aren't you going to ask Why?' Suppose that, by way of experiment, I assume that the fourth angle of my quadrilateral will be acute, or again obtuse, will the body of conclusions I can now deduce from my set of postulates be free from contradictions or not? If I really give my mind to the task, cannot I define a continuous function which is not differentiable? The raising ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... not understand the game. It puzzled him, just as the yellow men so stoically playing it puzzled him, just as the entire country puzzled him. Yet, obtuse as he was, he felt the gulf of centuries that divided the two races. These yellow men about him seemed as far away from his humanity, as detached from his manner of life and thought, as were the animals he sometimes stared at through the bars of the ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... in dreams as well as in waking moments, I bad been brooding over the identity of the lady of the ice, and had become convinced that the O'Halloran ladies knew something about it; yet so obtuse was I that I had not suspected that the lady herself might be found in this house. In fact, such an event was at once so romantic and so improbable that it did not even suggest itself. But now here was the lady herself. Here she stood. Now I could understand ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... diminution in the number of the teeth and their rapid decay, are matters of daily comment." In like manner, the Caucasian race is melting away in the colonies of Great Britain, in South Africa, Australia, and the West Indies. "In these uniform consequences the most obtuse cannot fail to recognise the operation of a universal law, whose primary effects are to diminish migration, and whose ultimate results are the extinction of the exotic population." We suppose none of our readers are obtuse ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... clear, and easily perceived by the most obtuse or indifferent observer; but these distinctly marked varieties pass into milder shades as they are exhibited in common Conversation, and then a nicer observation is needful to detect the varieties of hue that color language when used in ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... was not only base, but obtuse and absurdly wanting in human feeling and revolutionary sympathy, when he concurred in the execution of ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... was still gray and uncertain, as Csar and his retinue rode down upon the banks of the fatal river—to cross which with arms in his hands, since the further bank lay within the territory of the Republic, ipso facto proclaimed any Roman a rebel and a traitor. No man, the firmest or the most obtuse, could be otherwise than deeply agitated, when looking down upon this little brook—so insignificant in itself, but invested by law with a sanctity so awful, and so dire a consecration. The whole course of future history, and the fate of every nation, would necessarily ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... explain the majesty of the great Abbey to one so utterly obtuse as Sedgwick seemed to be. He drove on in silence for half an hour or forty minutes before he rallied enough to speak again. Then he pointed to a structure and called down to Sedgwick that the ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... I must say that I think you are rather obtuse, Captain Rowly, and I shall be under the painful necessity of helping you to see it. ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic
... the evening, and all were delighted except Kawawa himself. He showed symptoms of dread, and several times started up as if to run away, but was prevented by the crowd behind. Some of the more intelligent understood the explanations well, and expatiated eloquently on them to the more obtuse. Nothing could exceed the civilities which had passed between us during this day; but Kawawa had heard that the Chiboque had forced us to pay an ox, and now thought he might do the same. When, therefore, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... candid truth, 'squire, I do not," answered Ithuel, simply; for the nature of the tie which bound the young Frenchman so closely to Ghita was a profound mystery, in all that related to its more sacred feelings, to a being generally so obtuse on matters ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Perhaps her prominent thought was how cruel were those who fancied that Ethel's lofty faith was unfeeling, and how very good Leonard must be to be thus mourned. At any rate, she was an excellent comforter, in the sympathy that was neither too acute nor too obtuse; and purely to oblige her, Ethel for the first time submitted to her favourite panacea of hair brushing, and found that in very truth those soft and steady manipulations were almost mesmeric in soothing away the hard oppressive excitement, and ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The flakes, of course, did not rebound. But they did not come to rest either, not for the most imperceptible fraction of time. As soon as they touched the white, underlying surface, they would start to scud along horizontally at a most amazing speed, forming with their previous path an obtuse angle. So long as I watched the single flake—which is quite a task, especially while driving—it seemed to be in a tremendous hurry. It rushed along very nearly at the speed of the wind, and that was considerable, say between thirty-five ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... teeth are perfectly efficient instruments for mastication. But their true canine character, as Owen (42. 'Anatomy of Vertebrates,' vol. iii. 1868, p. 323.) remarks, "is indicated by the conical form of the crown, which terminates in an obtuse point, is convex outward and flat or sub-concave within, at the base of which surface there is a feeble prominence. The conical form is best expressed in the Melanian races, especially the Australian. The canine is more deeply implanted, and by a stronger fang than the incisors." ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... friendly power, it was evident to the Spaniards in the two remaining ships that the English frigate was approaching them with the most sinister and malevolent purpose. One glance at the sinking remains of their ruined and battered consort established that fact in the most obtuse mind. Consequently the exultant men on the Mary Rose could hear the shrill notes of the trumpeters on the two other ships calling their ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... down to us from the firmament; which animal calls itself man. We have, with sedulous care and patient industry, taught this singular creature in our school, and after a very severe examination, pronounce it to be very quick in its perceptions and very docile in its manners. Nevertheless, from its obtuse and miserable judgment—which we believe arises from its too hasty inferences—its ridiculous scepticism on unquestionable points, and its no less ridiculous credulity on doubtful ones, we may scarcely number it among sensible ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... parvenu who is most particular as to the cut of his coat, and the precision of his equipage, and the minutiae of his menage. Those between the parvenu and the exquisite, who know their own consequence, and have something solid to rest upon, are slow in following all the caprices of fashion, and obtuse in observation as to those niceties which neither give them another ancestor, nor add another thousand to the account at their banker's;—as to the last, rather indeed the contrary! There was a decided elegance about the Baron's house and his dinner. If he had been ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... of the district was clear in his mind—the valley he had just left and the main valley, forming an obtuse angle with the apex out on the wind-torn plain and a double range of mountains lying out between the sides ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... see who's got a right to interfere with you if you do,' she said, stiffly. Then, however, it occurred even to her obtuse and self-centred perception, that she was saying something unexpected and distasteful to a man who was clearly a great friend of the Farrells, and therefore a member of the world she envied. So she changed ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ministry of Christ included, that slavery was, pure and simple, a "Covenant with death and an agreement with hell;" and then, sad to say, they were convinced against their wills. Their sense of justice had become so obtuse as to wholly blunt the sense of reason, the brotherly sympathy of a common race-feeling, and the broad, liberal and just inculcations of Jesus Christ. The nation was sunk to the moral turpitude of Constantinople; ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... ovate and incumbent. The germ of the second species is round, smooth, inferior and pidicelled: the style long and thicker than the stamens, simple, cylindrical, smooth and erect. It remains with the corolla until the fruit is ripe, the stamen is simple and obtuse, and the fruit much the size and shape of our common garden currants, growing like them in clusters supported by a compound footstalk. The peduncles are longer in this species, and the berries are more scattered. The fruit is not ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... with the neat little sitting-room which Nettie's presence made dainty and refined in its homeliness, lounging in Nettie's way. He could not bring himself to speak with ordinary patience to Fred; and Fred, obtuse as he was, perceived his brother's disgust and contempt, and resented it sullenly; and betrayed his resentment to the foolish wife, who sulked and said spiteful things to Edward. It was not a pleasant family group. As for Nettie, she ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... a time, in the years gone by, that face has been uplifted heavenward from the pulpit of the East Meeting-House, when the Rev. Mr. Burroughs seemed to worship God. What!—he? The holy man!—the learned!—the wise! How has the Devil tempted him? His fellow-criminals, for the most part, are obtuse, uncultivated creatures, some of them scarcely half-witted by nature, and others greatly decayed in their intellects through age. They were an easy prey for the destroyer. Not so with this George ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Apropos of this, I might adduce an instructive and somewhat forbidding example. Strauss strongly resented the action of one of his opponents who happened to refer to his reverence for Lessing. The unfortunate man had misunderstood;—true, Strauss did declare that one must be of a very obtuse mind not to recognise that the simple words of paragraph 86 come from the writer's heart. Now, I do not question this warmth in the very least; on the contrary, the fact that Strauss fosters these feelings towards Lessing has always excited my ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Should an obtuse cabman, misled by some similarity of name or error in number (as may occur in large cities), permit a perplexed guest, perhaps a stranger, to drift across the wrong threshold, let it be a hospitable one. The hostess, though she may not be able to ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... beneficial action of marriage on hysteria, that is only true of slight cases and scarcely enables us to counsel marriage in hysteria.[201] Even a woman's intelligence is sometimes heightened by pregnancy, and Tarnier, as quoted by Vinay, knew many women whose intelligence, habitually somewhat obtuse, has only risen to the normal level during pregnancy.[202] The pregnant woman has reached the climax of womanhood; she has attained to that state toward which the periodically recurring menstrual wave has been drifting her at regular intervals throughout her sexual ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the feelings of HUME more obtuse, or did his temper, gentle as it was by constitution, bear, with a saintly patience, the mortifications his literary life so long endured? After recomposing two of his works, which incurred the same neglect in their altered form, he raised the most sanguine hopes of his History, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... parchment may be tightened or slackened by means of a series of screws disposed round the circumference of the hoop. Attached to the body, which has no back, is a long neck, terminating in a flat head acting as a peg-box and bent back slightly at an obtuse angle from the neck. There are five, six or nine strings to the banjo; they are fastened to a tail-piece as in the violin, pass over a low bridge, on the body, and are strained over the nut or ridge at the end of the neck, where they are threaded through holes and wound round ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... muttered, with a stealthy smile: "It was a coup de theatre, and it had evidently great success. They had to accept peace at my hands as a favor. Ah, if they had guessed how much I needed it myself! But these men are obtuse; they cannot see any thing. They have no aim; they only live from minute to minute, and whenever they find a precipice on their route, they stumble over it, and are lost beyond redemption. My God, ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... forty-foot street at a point thereon one hundred and sixteen and fifty-five hundredths feet Northwest from the point of beginning meets the said boundary at right angles to Falmouth street, sixty-six and seventy-eight hundredths feet; thence at an obtuse angle on said line at right angles to said forty-foot street sixty-seven and thirty-five hundredths feet to said forty-foot street; thence Southeasterly on said forty-foot street one hundred and sixteen and fifty-five hundredths feet to the point of beginning; containing ...
— Manual of the Mother Church - The First Church of Christ Scientist in Boston, Massachusetts • Mary Baker Eddy
... parts again offers difficulties. Sexual relations in women are, at the onset, almost inevitably painful; and to some extent the same experience may be repeated at every act of coitus. Ordinary tactile sensibility in the female genitourinary region is notably obtuse, but at the beginning of the sexual act there is normally a hyperesthesia which may be painful or pleasurable as excitement culminates, passing into a seeming anesthesia, which even craves for rough contact; so that in sexual excitement a woman normally ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... indolent, ignorant of the modes and implements of labor, and of the language of his master and, perhaps, of his fellow-laborers. To tame and domesticate, to instruct in the modes of industry, and to reduce to subordination and usefulness a barbarian, gross, obtuse, perverse, must have demanded persevering ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... Theobald was giving her a lively account of a concert at the Eyre Arms; and it was the fascination of his presence which made her answer at random to her cousin's questions about the last volume of the Laureate's, which she had been lately reading. Even Mr. Pallinson, obtuse as he was apt to be when called upon to comprehend any fact derogatory to his own self-esteem, was fain to confess to himself that this evening's efforts were futile, and that this dark-faced stranger ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... the idiot play Openly or 'neath decent cloak. Yet sometimes this or that deceit Encountered punishment complete, And sometimes into snares as well Himself just like a greenhorn fell. He could in disputation shine With pungent or obtuse retort, At times to silence would resort, At times talk nonsense with design; Quarrels among young friends he bred And to the field ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... his eyes fixed upon those of his companion. He distrusted his own powers, as is usual with persons of real merit, but he felt that if he could succeed in making his convictions penetrate his comrade's obtuse mind, their exactitude would ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... James Stanhope himself, and Spencer Cowper and Lord Coningsby and young Lord Finch and Pulteney, now in his period of full devotion to Walpole. There were Whig lawyers, like Lechmere; there were steady, obtuse Whigs, like Edward Wortley Montagu, husband of the brilliant and beautiful woman whom Pope first loved and then hated. There was Aislabie, then Treasurer of the Navy, afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer, who came to disgrace at the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... in terminal, dense, narrow obtuse spikes, 1 to 2 in. long. Calyx pink or greenish, 5-parted, like petals; no corolla; stamens 8 or less; style 2-parted. Stem: 1 to 3 ft. high, simple or branched; often partly red, the joints swollen ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... prudent observer of Mr. Ricketty would give his closest attention. He would look at the acute interior angle which it formed at the eyes, and think it much too acute to be pleasant and much too interior to be pretty. He would look at the obtuse exterior angle which it formed on its bridge, and wonder how any humane parent could have permitted such a development to grow before his very eyes when by one quick and dexterous strike with a flat-iron it might have been remedied. He would look at the angle of incidence made by the ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... the tearing asunder of those tender chains that renders slavery the horrible curse that it really is; human beings are reduced to the position of animals, without the blessings enjoyed by the brute creation—short memories and obtuse feelings. ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... add, but to the end, That thou mayst use thyself to own thy thirst And men may mingle for thee when they hear." "O plant! from whence I spring! rever'd and lov'd! Who soar'st so high a pitch, thou seest as clear, As earthly thought determines two obtuse In one triangle not contain'd, so clear Dost see contingencies, ere in themselves Existent, looking at the point whereto All times are present, I, the whilst I scal'd With Virgil the soul purifying mount, And visited the nether world of woe, Touching my ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... said Philippa: and the Grey Lady's penetration must have been obtuse if she were unable to detect a tone of deep sadness underlying the words. "And parents—living—did you ask me? By Mary, Mother and Maiden, I have but one living, and I hate—I hate him!" The passionate energy with which the last words were spoken ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt
... "How obtuse you are, step-papa! You are a lunatic; we have the certificates of two physicians to that effect; and that is all the law requires. Now, be ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Notwithstanding all his escapes and experiences, that indomitable man of science still ranges, like a mad philosopher, far and wide over the archipelago in pursuit of "booterflies ant ozer specimens of zee insect vorld." It is observed, however, even by the most obtuse among his friends, that whereas in former times the professor's nights were centrifugal they have now become centripetal—the Keeling Islands being the great centre towards which he flies. Verkimier is, and probably will always be, a subject ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... hands with this Moscow official, after a friendly chat, I asked him if he would be a little obtuse arithmetically as to the old and new style of reckoning, and let me have my January "Century" if it arrived before my departure for Petersburg, as my license expired January 1. He smilingly agreed to do so. I also ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... 'Yes! I see,' he said. 'How obtuse not to read it in his own manner! How much it explains!' and he silently rested ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... when the ladder by which he had attained them was removed. It was not that she had ever given him occasion to feel that marriage and not inheritance was the source of his distinction in the land, but that having a soul as keenly sensitive to small material rights as it was obtuse to great spiritual ones, he never felt the property quite his own until his wife was no longer within sight. Had he been a little more sensitive still, he would have felt that the property was then his daughter's, and his only through her; but ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest point of this, as he passed, I SAW. I understood for a moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could remember while retaining sanity. The angle was an obtuse angle, and I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or acute angle, I should have both suffered and 'seen' still more, and should probably ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... after expressing his condolences, and, overcome by the heavy silence and close atmosphere, had just fallen asleep. And everybody respected his slumber. Was he dreaming as he dozed of that map of Christendom which he carried behind his low obtuse-looking brow? Was he continuing in dreamland his terrible work of conquest, that task of subjecting and governing the earth which he directed from his dark room at the Propaganda? The ladies glanced at him affectionately ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... ranked accordingly at Court whilst his father, some poor Fellah, was ploughing the ground. Tanfik Pasha began his ill-omened rule by always placing natives close to him in the place of honour, addressing them first and otherwise snubbing Europeans who, when English, were often too obtuse to notice the petty insults lavished ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... zeal, my rustic Muse Feels fluttering fain to tell her news, And paint her simple, lowly views With all her art, And, though in genius but obtuse, May touch ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... finger by a ring. She gets an artificial grandeur out of superlative trivialities; she simply drops her hand impressively, letting it fall over the arm of her chair as dewdrops hang on the cup of a flower, and all is said—she has pronounced judgment beyond appeal, to the apprehension of the most obtuse. She knows how to listen to you; she gives you the opportunity of shining, and—I ask ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... render a wig unnecessary; I have got many white hairs, in spite of the proverb. My teeth, formerly square pearls, are now of the colour of wood, and will soon be of slate. My legs and thighs first formed an obtuse angle, afterwards an equilateral angle, and at length, an acute one. My thighs and body form another; and my head, always dropping on my breast, makes me not ill represent a Z. I have got my arms shortened as well ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... lizard''), an animal so closely allied to the crocodile that some naturalists have classed them together as forming one genus. It differs from the true crocodile principally in having the head broader and shorter, and the snout more obtuse; in having the fourth, enlarged tooth of the under jaw received, not into an external notch, but into a pit formed for it within the upper one; in wanting a jagged fringe which appears on the hind legs ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and when the central window of the nave was enlarged, and that, and the others which now enliven the inner wall, were filled with perpendicular tracery. The porch is vaulted with stone, and is entered by an obtuse arch, over which is an elliptical window, divided by mullions into six lights under cinquefoil arches, which are again subdivided in the head into ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... And it has been urged on high authority in our day that there is nothing really "fine" in Gray's "Churchyard." However conscious Gray was in limiting his address to "the common reader," we may be certain he was not writing to the obtuse, the illiterate or the insensitive. He was to create an evocation of evening: the evening of a day and the approaching night of life. The poem was not to be perplexed by doubt; it ends on a note of "trembling hope"—but on "hope." There are perhaps better evocations of similar moods, but not ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... immature feet, certain malicious spirits had so willed it that the chief and more autumnal of the Maidens Blank (who, nevertheless, wore an excessively flower-like name), had long lavished herself upon the possession of an obtuse and self-assertive hound, which was in the habit of gratifying this inconsiderable person and those who sat around by continually depositing upon their unworthy garments details of its outer surface, and when the weather ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... that could vanquish the ever-growing misery of his broken-down body. The mere thought that he could not grow well, while the cabra would daily continue to live in insolent impunity, was enough to give him convulsions of rage; he would foam at the mouth, gnash his teeth and, in that obtuse brain of his, concoct scheme upon scheme of vengeance, almost all of them impracticable, for he was chained to ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... of the elbow was growing obtuse as the shadowy arm straightened itself. Thirty seconds more! I began to count, and, gripping my staff, braced myself for what might be, when —with a sudden cry, Charmian sprang forward, and, hurling herself against the door, shut it with ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
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