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More "Tangent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cavern a great arena had been left bare, and thousands of turbaned men squatted round it in rings. At the end where the river formed a tangent to them the rings were flattened, and at that point they were cut into by the ramp of a bridge, and by a lane left to connect the bridge with the arena. The bridge was almost the most wonderful ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... 49 feet above sea-level will be able to see the top of the 100-foot tower at a distance of 11.43 8 or 19.43 nautical miles. Under these conditions an imaginary line drawn from the top of the tower to the eye will be just tangent to the spherical surface of the sea at a distance of 8 miles from the eye and ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... there remained but to wait. But the projectile was perceptibly nearing the moon, and evidently succumbed to her influence to a certain degree; though its own velocity also drew it in an oblique direction. From these conflicting influences resulted a line which might become a tangent. But it was certain that the projectile would not fall directly on the moon; for its lower part, by reason of its weight, ought ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... thought of the hospital sent her mind flying off at a tangent. Even the stage gave way for the moment to this new and all-absorbing occupation. Never in her life had she done anything so interesting. The escape from home, the personal contact with all those nice, jolly boys, ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... of much more recent date than the creation of the worlds, and could not therefore account for it. He next tried an ingenious idea, comparing the perpendiculars from different points of a quadrant of a circle on a tangent at its extremity. The greatest of these, the tangent, not being cut by the quadrant, he called the line of the sun, and associated with infinite force. The shortest, being the point at the other end of the quadrant, ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... position, figured P' N', and it be carried in similar directions, coinciding with the dotted horizontal curve so far, as to cut the magnetic curves on the same side with it, the current will be from P' to N'. If the wire be considered a tangent to the curved surface of the cylindrical magnet, and it be carried round that surface into any other position, or if the magnet itself be revolved on its axis, so as to bring any part opposite to the tangential wire,—still, if afterwards ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... off at a tangent, "to see Peter Auber, at the India House," or, "could not wait an instant; they were to meet Josh: ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... During the night we had observed a double-ringed lunar halo. The moon was almost full. From the horizon directly under the moon were innumerable radiations, not converging toward the moon but, curiously enough, the first two at a tangent to the larger halo, the others at ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... extreme western comer of Belgium, crossing the French frontier at a point northwest of Lille. From there it zigzagged its way to a point about sixty miles north of Paris, whence it then followed an eastern tangent paralleling the northern bank of the River Aisne; thence easterly to Verdun, forming there a queer half-moon salient arc with the points bent sharply toward the center. From the south of Verdun the line extended unbroken and rather straight ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... that Benham had given a considerable amount of attention to the development of the "white" and "yellow" race hostility on the Pacific slope; but his chief interest at that time had been the negro. He went to Washington and thence south; he visited Tuskegee and Atlanta, and then went off at a tangent to Hayti. He was drawn to Hayti by Hesketh Pritchard's vivid book, WHERE BLACK RULES WHITE, and like Hesketh Pritchard he was able to visit that wonderful monument to kingship, the hidden fastness of La Ferriere, the citadel built a century ago by the "Black Napoleon," ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... Trenby—except soup jellies. So it would just go running round and round in circles—with the memory of all I've missed as the pivot of the circle. I'm sure Maryon will at least be able to stop me from thinking in circles. He's always flying off at a tangent—and naturally I shall have to ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... in the mock-moons. Sometimes there are two large rings, the one outside the other, and then there may be four mock-moons. I have also seen part of a new ring above the usual one, meeting it at a tangent directly above the moon. As is well known, these various ring formations round the sun, as well as round the moon, are produced by the refraction of rays of light by minute ice crystals ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... pitched at us on Tuesday, only one of which reached its destination; the other nine went off at a tangent somewhere else, to the chagrin of curio company promoters. It would have been more tactful of the Boers, we thought, to have reserved their ammunition for a more aggressive foe. No great attention, however, was paid to their extravagances, and from anything ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... broken point of the lava bed, and at once becomes a pretty stream, glittering with great numbers of the finny tribe, which gives name to it. The circular wall which once inclosed the fountainhead is now partly broken down. Upon each side, and almost tangent, are ruins of pueblos so ancient that the traditions of present races do not reach them. They are nearly circular in form, and of equal dimension. One measured three hundred and fifteen short paces, about eight hundred feet, in circumference. They were of stone; but the walls have crumbled, leaving ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... discursive as ever! What I want to put down is about our going out visiting. There is really nothing much to say about our life at home. It was very happy, but there were no great events in it, and Eleanor says it will not do for us to "go off at a tangent," and describe what happened to the boys at school and college; first, because these biographies are merely to be lives of our own selves, for nobody but us two to read when we are both old maids; and secondly, because if we put down everything we had anything to do with ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... to time and verifying his course by the sound of the axe. This came and went, and by-and-by it ceased altogether, and Jeff crept forward with a real or feigned uncertainty. Suddenly he stopped. A voice called, "Heigh, there!" and the boy turned and fled, crashing through the underbrush at a tangent, with his dog at ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... as if the fact scarcely concerned her, and Lanfear drew a breath of relief in his surprise. He asked, at another tangent: "What made you ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... cause for believing that the development of Democracy also is, after all, not the opening phase of a world-wide movement going on unbendingly in its present direction, but the first impulse of forces that will finally sweep round into a quite different path. Flying off at a tangent is probably one of the gravest dangers and certainly the one most constantly present, in ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... opportunity is afforded you, Virginia, for mental discipline. I can see that Miss Kingsley has taken a fancy to you. She is not a person who goes off at a tangent. She must have discerned capabilities for culture in you, or she would never have invited you to one of her entertainments. To you, who are accustomed to society fine speeches that mean nothing, it will probably occur that ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... the Second Law of Motion and the Parallelogram of Forces, instead of the earth going off at a tangent in the direction of A E, it will take a mean path in the direction of A B, its path being curved instead of ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... and bending low to avoid the bullets he sped at a tangent in the opposite direction, for the timber of Wheeling Hill. The Indians afoot could not catch him, no bullet caught him; he would make it—he would make it; there he goes, up the hill. He ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... life! what scatter-brains women are born with!" marvelled Mr. Meredith. "No wonder the adage runs that 'a woman's mind and a winter's wind oft change'! In the name of evil, Jan, what started ye off on that tangent?" ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... different directions bisect one another, a special arrangement permits the passengers from one line to pass to the other by means of what is called a "tangent" station, without the trains of one line crossing the tracks of another, the purpose of which arrangement is to avoid those accidents that would inevitably occur through the crossing of a track by the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... saw the dancers warming to their work, till his bow moved so rapidly over the strings of his fiddle, and his arm and his head gave such eccentric jerks, that I half expected at any moment to see the one fly off at a tangent and the other come bounding into the middle of the room. Larry and I kept on one side, trying to look greatly interested with the performance, while we managed to have a few words now and then with some of the men, who were either seated ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... brig returned a broadside! But resistance ceased with this one act of energy, if it could be so termed. Although five guns were actually fired, and nearly simultaneously, no aim was even attempted. The shot all flew off at a tangent from the position of the ship; and no harm was done to any but the savages themselves, of whom three or four were injured by the recoils. From the moment the noise and smoke were produced, everything like order ceased on board the brig, which was filled ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... is an exact statement of the coincidences of phrase and thought in Shakspere and Montaigne. Not that such coincidences are the main or the only results to be looked for; rather we may reasonably expect to find Shakspere's thought often diverging at a tangent from that of the writer he is reading, or even directly gainsaying it. But there can be no solid argument as to such indirect influence until we have fully established the direct influence, and this can only be done by exhibiting ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... away from the earth at a tangent, and as the moon is near her third quarter we are going somewhere towards her. I will open ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... (French horse Bantam Lyons was anxiously inquiring after not in yet but expected any minute) Maximum II. Different ways of bringing off a coup. Lovemaking damages. Though that halfbaked Lyons ran off at a tangent in his impetuosity to get left. Of course gambling eminently lent itself to that sort of thing though as the event turned out the poor fool hadn't much reason to congratulate himself on his pick, the forlorn hope. Guesswork it reduced itself ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... with little labor and no help of any mathematical instrument you took so truly the height of one of the pyramids; for fixing your staff erect at the point of the shadow which the pyramid cast, two triangles being thus made by the tangent rays of the sun, you demonstrated that what proportion one shadow had to the other, such the pyramid bore ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... of the tent-poles, Pauthier's text has "trois coulombes de fust de pieces moult bien encuierees," etc. The G. T. has "de leing d'especies mout bien cures," etc. The Crusca, "di spezie molto belle," and Ramusio going off at a tangent, "di legno intagliate con grandissimo artificio e indorate." I believe the translation in the text to indicate the true reading. It might mean camphor-wood, or the like. The tent-covering of tiger-skins is illustrated by a passage in Sanang Setzen, which speaks of a tent covered with panther-skins, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... juxtaposition; abutment, osculation; meeting, appulse^, rencontre^, rencounter^, syzygy [Astr.], coincidence, coexistence; adhesion &c 46; touching &c v.. (touch) 379. borderland; frontier &c (limit) 233; tangent; abutter. V. be contiguous &c adj.; join, adjoin, abut on, march with; graze, touch, meet, osculate, come in contact, coincide; coexist; adhere &c 46. [cause to be contiguous] juxtapose; contact; join (unite) 43; link (vinculum) 45. Adj. contiguous; touching &c v.; in contact &c n.; conterminous, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... David! This is indeed Satan rebuking sin. Why there are three designs here—one I've just knocked over—beastly, wasn't it?—that you left with me when you went off at a tangent to South Africa.... Really, we ought to have some continuity ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... train of rambling meditations. First he thought of his friends, and wondered when they would join him; then his mind reverted to Mrs. Martha Bardell; and from that lady it wandered, by a natural process, to the dingy counting-house of Dodson and Fogg. From Dodson and Fogg's it flew off at tangent, to the very centre of the history of the queer client; and then it came back to the Great White Horse at Ipswich, with sufficient clearness to convince Mr. Pickwick that he was falling asleep: so he aroused himself, and began to undress, when he recollected he ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... there is no exception whatever. Especially, you cannot make a man of business out of a genius, any more than money out of a Jew, or the best nutmegs out of pine-knots. The creatures are always going off at a tangent into some fantastic employment, or ridiculous speculation, entirely at variance with the "fitness of things," and having no business whatever to be considered as a business at all. Thus you may tell these characters immediately by the nature of their occupations. If you ever ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... gone but a short distance before the rushing of a boat through the water was heard. They paused and Richard saw a sail, which he believed he had seen before that night, pass by the mouth of the inlet. He caught but a glance of it, as it cut a tangent along the small circle of ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... had forgotten he still held upon his arm, and began to walk forward gently with her. Something in the grave tenderness with which this was done, reminded Fleda irresistibly of the times when she had been a child under his care; and, somehow, her thoughts went off on a tangent back to the further days of her mother, and father, and grandfather, the other friends from whom she had had the same gentle protection, which now there was no one in the world to give her. And their images did never seem more winning ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... think about Sleep. I am determined to think (this is the way I went on) about Sleep. I must hold the word Sleep, tight and fast, or I shall be off at a tangent in half a second. I feel myself unaccountably straying, already, into Clare Market. Sleep. It would be curious, as illustrating the equality of sleep, to inquire how many of its phenomena are common to all classes, ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... necessarily steam tight. The head is screwed in and soldered, and the yoke, G, which receives the connecting rod pin, is screwed into the head. The connecting rod, H, is of steel with brass ends. The lower end, which receives the crank pin, is split, and provided with a tangent screw for taking up wear. The crank pin is secured in the crank disk, I, by a nut on the back. The eccentric rod, J, is of steel, screwed at its lower end into an eccentric strap of cast or wrought iron, which surrounds the eccentric, K. The valve, L, is ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... jam non domus accipiet te laeta; neque uxor Optima, nec dulces occurrent oscula nati Praeripere, et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent." ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... clearer. Draw a line from the laya center in the sun to that in the earth. Draw a narrow ellipse, with this line as its major axis, and shade it. At each end of the axis strike the beginning of an ellipse that will be tangent. If positive energy is along the shaded ellipse, negative energy is in each field beyond—earth and sun. This is a very crude illustration of a fundamental statement elaborated to the most minute detail in explanation ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... describing the hyperbola. The properties of the curve, upon which the action of the instrument depends, are illustrated in Fig. 2, where MM, NN, are the two branches of an hyperbola; C the center; AB the major axis; F and F' the foci. If now a tangent TT be drawn at any point as P of either branch, and a perpendicular let fall upon it from the nearer focus F be produced to cut at G a line drawn from P to the farther focus F', then this perpendicular will cut the tangent at a point I upon the circumference of a circle described about C upon AB ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... similar to our Comparator A1201. The top slide carries a divided circle for measuring position angles. The circle is arranged similar to a position micrometer. It is fitted with quick gear motion and tangent screw and the two verniers read to 1-100 degree. The microscope has variable magnifying power and is provided with reversing eye piece. This machine has been furnished for and is in use at Yerkes, Lick and Kirkwood ...
— Astronomical Instruments and Accessories • Wm. Gaertner & Co.
... Prairie, the favourite haunt of the plover. As they were nearing the creek they heard the galloping of a horse to their right, and saw a man with black hair and a swarthy face riding toward the woods at a tangent, as if he ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... the degrees of deflection of the needle as abscissas. The unbroken lines represent the curves obtained with the apparatus just described, while the dotted ones give the curve of deflection of an ordinary tangent galvanometer. These curves show that for strong intensities of current Mr. Kapp's instrument is more advantageous than the tangent galvanometer. Mr. Crompton has constructed an amperemeter upon the same principle, which is shown in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... element of a curve is very near being a straight line. And the smaller it is, the nearer. In the limit, it may be termed a part of the curve or a part of the straight line, as you please, for in each of its points a curve coincides with its tangent. So likewise "vitality" is tangent, at any and every point, to physical and chemical forces; but such points are, as a fact, only views taken by a mind which imagines stops at various moments of the movement that generates the curve. In reality, life is no more made of physico-chemical ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... tongue, they rewarded me with a disconcerting stare, and then began dragging the plow. As long as I held the pole straight the share cut its way evenly through the mold, but occasionally, owing to my inadvertence, it would go off at a tangent or curve quite out of the ground; and whenever this happened the horses would stop, turn round and stare at me, then, touching their noses together seem to exchange ideas on the subject. When the first furrow was finished, they did not double back, as I expected, but went ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... swiftly upward, mile after mile; but the long tangent at which he had started to clear the summit of Katahdin did not prove sufficient, and by and by they found themselves within a very few yards of the rocky side ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... be heard ticking in the next room; time, you could hear, going leisurely. There would be a long lath of sunlight, numberless atoms swimming in it, slanting from a corner of the window to brighten a patch of carpet. Two flies would be hovering under the ceiling. Sometimes they would dart at a tangent to hover in another place. I used to wonder what they lived on. You felt secure there, knowing it was old, but seeing things did not alter, as though the world were established and content, desiring no new thing. ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... can cut 'em off at the Gut," called Frank, and he struck away at a tangent from their course as the man disappeared around the house and the motor car could be heard roaring off ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... weariness, the daily expense of spirit, and that daily river of circumstance to be swum through, at any hazard, under the penalty of shame or death. I could not but think how good was the end of that long travel; and with that, my mind swung at a tangent to my lord. For was not my lord dead also? a maimed soldier, looking vainly for discharge, lingering derided in the line of battle? A kind man, I remembered him; wise, with a decent pride, a son perhaps too dutiful, a husband only too loving, one that could suffer and be silent, one whose hand ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... speech she seemed to strike off at a tangent. She spoke with a lightness that appeared to conceal a hint of pain. "They say the mounted police are the guides, philosophers and friends of the people up North. They say you have to do everything, from feeding babies to reading the ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... was a Lady. And rich people, too! Her machine couldn't have cost much under twenty pounds. His mind came round and dwelt some time on her visible self. Rational dress didn't look a bit unwomanly. However, he disdained to be one of your fortune-hunters. Then his thoughts drove off at a tangent. He would certainly have to get something to eat at ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... consequences. Nothing can be more convincing and satisfactory than all the conclusions concerning the properties of circles and triangles; and yet, when these are once received, how can we deny, that the angle of contact between a circle and its tangent is infinitely less than any rectilineal angle, that as you may increase the diameter of the circle in infinitum, this angle of contact becomes still less, even in infinitum, and that the angle of contact between other curves and their tangents may be infinitely ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... interesting, in some ways, not to have everything cut and dried from the start," she went on, striking off at a tangent, with an innate perversity incomprehensible to a mere man. "It prevents a headlong fall into the commonplace: and there is a certain excitement in looking on, so to speak, at one's own personal drama, without feeling quite sure of ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... and joyfully obeyed. The pony ran off at a sharp angle to inspect a lamp-post on the opposite side of the way, and then went off at a tangent to another lamp-post on the other side. Having satisfied himself that they were of the same pattern and materials, he came to a stop apparently absorbed in meditation. 'Will you go on, sir,' said the ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... particularly useful to you. Among these are Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt. You cannot know Lamb without knowing these men, and some of them are of the highest importance. From the circle of Lamb's own work you may go off at a tangent at various points, according to your inclination. If, for instance, you are drawn towards poetry, you cannot, in all English literature, make a better start than with Wordsworth. And Wordsworth will send you backwards to a comprehension of the poets against whose influence ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... yet greater difficulty: the leader refuses the ribbon laid before him; the cut end makes him distrustful. Failing to see the regular, uninterrupted road, he slants off to the right or left, he escapes at a tangent. If I try to interfere and to bring him back to the path of my choosing, he persists in his refusal, shrivels up, does not budge, and soon the whole procession is in confusion. We will not insist: the method is a poor one, very wasteful of effort for at ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... tossed from the high-piled waggon, another, on the highest point of the growing stack, caught it with his pitchfork and threw it on, with a sideways twist, to the man on the lower end who got further and further along as he packed the sheaves, so that the thrower had to increase the tangent of his twist at every throw. Each of the men caught and tossed and placed, always to the moment, with the unending flow of machinery. And again —so often before, but never so keenly as now—was Ishmael struck with the pattern ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... heartily agreed that a store was a disturbing feature on a ranch, and instantly went off on a tangent on the splendid business possibilities of the Mission. The matchmaker in return agreed as heartily with him, and grew reminiscent. "In the spring of '51," said he, "I made the match between Tiburcio and Dona Inez, father ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... now on another tangent. "Suppose it is true?" she asked herself. "Suppose he has fallen sick away up there, miles and miles from any nurse ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... while to go into its details, we should need some further diagrams to make it quite clear. Nor is it worth while to go into the description of various minor points of refinement about the gun mounting, such as the very exposed long tangent scale seen in the figure, by which the elevation or depression is read off, nor the still more exposed and rather ricketty arrangement by which the rear sight is arranged to rise and fall with the gun, and allowance for dispart ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... went on bravely, scrambling over, floundering through, and sometimes swimming; but when she had gained the farthest point reached by them, she sat down helplessly. Later on, she cut back to the shore at a tangent, landing on the deserted island above; and an hour afterwards trotted into camp minus the grub-pack. Then the two dogs, hovering just out of range, compromised matters by devouring each other's burdens; after which the attempt was given ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... reins, as drowning men seize at straws, he admirably served the purpose of an anchor. The Frenchman, who was on his legs, in the act of springing from the sleigh, took an aerial flight also, much in the attitude which boys assume when they play leap-frog, and, flying off in a tangent to the curvature of his course, came into the snow-bank head foremost, w-here he remained, exhibiting two lathy legs on high, like scarecrows waving in a corn- field. Major Hartmann, whose self-possession had been admirably preserved during the whole ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... open, and covered only with a smooth sward of gramma-grass. It was, in fact, a glade, nearly circular in shape, and about a hundred yards in diameter. On one side of this glade the river impinged, its bank being almost a tangent line to it. Here there was a gap in the timber, so that out of the glade could be obtained a view of the bottom on the other side of the stream. Diametrically opposite to this gap another opening, of an avenue-like form, led out into ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... eight is twinty-nine, subthract three f'r th' duchess, a quarther to one o'clock an' eighty miles fr'm Narragansett pier is two-an'-a-half, plus th' load-wather-line iv th' saloon companionway, akel to two-fifths iv th' differentyal tangent. Huroo! Misther Sicrety, ye can go home an' tell ye'er wife th' counthry's safe.' He has to be a smart man. A good book-keeper, as th' pote says, is th' counthry's on'y safety. He mus' be careful, too, d'ye mind. Th' honor iv th' ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... subject of it had had time to cast aside her fur cloak, to fasten upon her slender, arched feet, clad in dainty, laced boots, a pair of steel skates, with tangent blades, and without either grooves or straps, and to dart out upon this miniature sheet of water with the agility of a person accustomed to skating on ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... frontier garrison, once Geordie's home and refuge. The tall flag-staff came suddenly into view, and in less than four minutes they would be rushing by. Over forty miles to the hour were they flying now. Big Ben had just let out another notch as they swung into the two-mile tangent, when at the same instant he and Geordie caught sight of three or four black dots dimly bobbing in the midst of a little dust-cloud on the roadway far ahead, and almost at the same instant came from each the ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... climbing grade, And coast on the tangent mile, While the Driver toys with the throttle-bar, And gathers the track in ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... of oppositional lines has more variety and is therefore more picturesque than the tangent its equivalent. The simplest definition of picturesqueness is variety in unity. The lines of the long road in perspective offer easy conduct for the eye, but it finds a greater interest in threading its way over a track lost, then found, lost and found ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... Kedzie once as a pretty photographer's model, and had admired her as an exquisite dancing-creature who seemed to have spun off at a tangent from the painted side of an old Greek amphora. He had actually written poetry to her! And when a poet has done that for a girl he feels that he has done more for her than she can ever repay. Even if she gives him her mortal self, what is ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... circumscribing parallelogram, G L H E M, whose sides are respectively parallel to P S and P R. Join L M. By the conditions of this problem, the path must somewhere cut the circle E D F; and since L M cuts L H, which is a tangent to it, it is clear it must cut every path—such as a a, parallel to L H, or to P R—that cuts the circle. Similarly, the same line, L M, must cut every path parallel to P S, such as b b. Now if L M cuts every path that is parallel to either of the extreme directions, ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... wrote him that I was now more than ever convinced of the wisdom of choosing the law as my profession, and was satisfied that I had come to my senses at last. He had still been prepared to see me "go off at a tangent," as he expressed it. On the other hand, the powerful effect of the appeal made by Weathersfield and Mr. Watling must not be underestimated. Here in one object lesson was emphasized a host of suggestions each of which had made its impression. And ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... could recover at this thunderbolt of Gallicism, Denys went triumphant off at a tangent, and stigmatized all monks as hypocrites. "Do but look at them, how they creep about and cannot ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... ordered by the latter tribunal that the boundary on the lower counties on the Delaware (now the State of that name) and the Province of Maryland should be marked out. The boundary was an arc of a circle described around the town of Newcastle, with a given radius, and a meridian line tangent thereto. This was a far more difficult operation than to draw a meridian line from a given point, such as the source of a river. It was thought in 1763 worthy of the attention of the first assistant in the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, and the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... away. "I 'ate to 'ear of anybody dyin'," she said. "I never been in a 'ouse before where it's 'appened, an' besides she's been good to me!" Her mind wandered off at a tangent "Any'ow," she said, wiping her eyes, "I done me best. No one can't never say I ain't done me best, an' the best can't do ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... lay holding a hand of Nancy between his cheek and the pillow—with intervals of silence and blithe speech. His disordered mind, it appeared, was still pursuing its unfortunate tangent. ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... would join him; then his mind reverted to Mrs. Martha Bardell; and from that lady it wandered, by a natural process, to the dingy counting-house of Dodson & Fogg. From Dodson & Fogg's it flew off at a tangent, to the very centre of the history of the queer client; and then it came back to the Great White Horse at Ipswich, with sufficient clearness to convince Mr. Pickwick that he was falling asleep. So he roused himself, and began to undress, when he recollected he had left his ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... explained the circumstances of the case." And as he warmed to his theme the image of Victor Stott grew to a fearful grotesqueness. It loomed as a threat over the community and the church. Crashaw quoted, inaccurately, statistics of the growth of lunacy, and then went off at a tangent into the theory of possession by evil spirits. Since his rejection of science, he had lapsed into certain forms of mediaevalism, and he now began to dally with the theory of a malign incarnation which he elaborated until it became ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... going off at a tangent. "He'll catch it! And there—you see?—that tall, important-looking man trying to catch the eye of the Lord God, that's the Duke. But there's a lot of people ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... to enforce our own theory, to adduce instance from our own experience. Perhaps we were not patient enough to wait until our friend could express himself with ease and happiness. Perhaps we squandered the dialogue in tangent topics, in ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... "I suppose it's what the general run of people think—and do. It's keeping to the rules. It's trotting on the course. It isn't going off at some tangent ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... surprise and displeasure as he saw Clarissa serving the first course, but he quickly concealed these emotions and proceeded to plunge into an animated conversation with his guests. Indeed, it assumed the character of a monologue in which he frequently adverted to the weather, to be off on a tangent the next moment on a discussion of finance, politics, sociology, on which subjects, however, he was far from showing the positiveness and fixed opinion that he did while descanting upon the weather. In all the subjects he touched upon, he ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... experienced in gun-shot wounds, knew that bullets fired at close range often did freakish things. There had been a man recently discharged from the General as convalescent, who had been shot in the shoulder, and the bullet, striking the collar-bone, had taken a curious tangent, following up the muscle of the neck and lodging just beneath the ear. In that case there had been the external evidence of the bullet's location. In this case there was no ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... could turn off so suddenly at a complete tangent, spoke to her once or twice but got no other answer than a long, contented sigh. He stood for a little while trying to make out her outline in the dim corner of the room. Then he tiptoed out to the hall, possessed himself of a warm motor-rug, returned with ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... by automobile are many: to see the country, to travel agreeably, to be independent of railways, and to be an opportunist—that is to say to be able to fly off at a tangent of fifty or a hundred kilometres at a moment's notice, in order to take in some fete or fair, or celebration ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... left the ropes and turned our attention to the pegs. These required driving in with a wooden mallet and a correct eye. Persons unaccustomed to such work strike the peg on one side—the mallet goes off at a tangent and strikes the striker ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... never touch. Metallic blue fish, With fins wide and yellow and swaying Like Oriental fans, Hold the sun in their bellies And glow with light: Blue brilliance cut by black bars. An oblong pane of straw-coloured shimmer, Across it, in a tangent, A smear of rose, black, silver. Short twists and upstartings, Rose-black, in a setting of bubbles: Sunshine playing between red and black flowers On a blue and gold lawn. Shadows and polished surfaces, Facets of mauve ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... the Moon. It had by this time turned over considerably under the influence of attraction, but its own original motion still followed a decidedly oblique direction. The consequence of these two forces might possibly be a tangent, line approaching the edge of the Moon's disc. One thing was certain: the Projectile had not yet commenced to fall directly towards her surface; its base, in which its centre of gravity lay, was still turned ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... the high voice of Tharon as El Rey thundered down toward him. Then Buford, riding midway of the sweeping line, fired and the boy dropped his gun, swayed and clung to his saddle horn as his horse bolted and tore off at a tangent to the right, away ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... Green was so completely a star of a confined orbit, that his ideas seldom described a tangent to their ordinary revolutions. He was so much accustomed to hear of England ruling colonies, the East and the West, Canada, the Cape, and New South Wales, that it was not an easy matter for him to conceive himself to be without ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... tangent to describe the men in his platoon. "The best man in our lot is an ex-grocer's assistant, but in order to save us from vain generalisations it happens that the worst man—a moon-faced creature, almost incapable ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Niven there was the same eagerness to excel. When he could not beat him in wrestling or putting the stone, he was fain to content himself with a display of his superiority in mental calisthenics. The very fact that a charming fillette overset his trigonometry, and set him off at a tangent, is a characteristic ending to this summer of study. Peggy Thomson in her kail-yard was too much for the fiery imagination of a poet: 'it was in vain to think of doing more good ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... that the scraping-knife should never be a secant, and the brush always a tangent to ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... risk of seeming to run off at a tangent and forsake our ostensible subject, pretty Poll, altogether, I must just pause for one moment more to answer an objection which I know has been trembling on the tip of your tongue any time the ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... of a Jehu all right!" Mac shouted triumphantly. "It takes judgment to do the thing in style"; and the next moment, swinging round a patch of scrub, we flew off at a tangent to avoid a fallen tree, crashing through its branches and grinding over an out-crop of ironstone to miss a big boulder just beyond the tree. It undoubtedly took judgment this "travelling across country along the ridges"; but the keen, alert bushman never hesitated as he swung in and out and ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... novel may be, or half completed; however it is, off goes one's brain at a tangent. Scene follows scene, one touching the other; the characters unconsciously fall into shape; the villain takes a ruddy hue; the hero dons a white robe; as for the heroine, who shall say what dyes from Olympia are not hers? A conversation suggests itself, an act thrusts itself into notice. ...
— How I write my novels • Mrs. Hungerford
... am: but, my dear sir, do not let us fly off at a tangent to morality or philosophy; these have nothing to do with the present purpose. You have before you all the papers relative to this transaction. Now, will you do me the favour, the service, to look them over, and try whether you can make out le mot ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... Carse had the "feel" of the asteroidal ship and his controlling hand grew bolder. The steady pressure on the space-stick increased, it went up farther and farther, and the whole mighty mass of the asteroid streaked out at a tangent through the atmosphere of Satellite III toward ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... none in common arithmetic. After all, the imagination ought not to be startled any more at so many orders of infinites than at the so well-known proposition, viz., that curve lines may always be made to pass between a circle and a tangent; or at that other, namely, that matter is divisible in infinitum. These two truths have been demonstrated many years, and are no less incomprehensible than the things we have been ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering—that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, WHEREVER THEY MAY LEAD. But the reason why he wants sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is PREDESTINED to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the "direct" practical man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always does lead SOMEWHERE, ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... enough for her. But what can you do with a girl who throws herself at the heads of ineligibles, and when one trots out an unexceptionable PARTI and does one's best to bring them together, goes off at a tangent and lets the whole thing drop through. You know how it was with....' Lady Tallant ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... described in words as follows: Required the area between a curve, the axis of x and two ordinates; it is necessary to draw a new curve, such that its steepness, as measured by the tangent of the inclination, may be proportional to the ordinate of the given curve for the same value of x, then the ascent made by the new curve in passing from one ordinate to the other is a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... centripetal acceleration - and the concept of such acceleration itself - is the result of splitting circular movement into two rectilinear movements, one in the direction of the tangent, the other in the direction of the radius, and of regarding it - by a mode of reasoning typical of spectator-thinking - as composed of the two. This procedure, however, useful as it may be for the purpose of calculation, is contrary to observation. For, ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... apart. As quickly as one of them starts a rabbit, a second Indian runs as fast as he can along a line parallel with the course taken by the animal. Presently the rabbit sees the second Indian, and dashes off at a tangent. By this time the third hunter has come up and gives the quarry another turn. After the third or fourth zigzag, the rabbit is surrounded, and the hunters quickly close in upon him ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... the limit for that caliber of rifle; but the antelope turned a somersault and lay still, while its mates turned off at a tangent and tore away ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... you flying to? You are off at a tangent—I thought we were talking about the mercenary nature ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... not in a straight line, but in a curve. The revolution of the sun in such an orbit was known to the Author of the Bible when he wrote, "his circuit is to the end of heaven." The direction of the circumference of a circle being known, that of its center can be found; for the radius is always a tangent to the circumference, and the intersection of two of these radii will be the center; so that, if we certainly knew the sun's orbit to be circular, or nearly so, we could calculate the center. But as we do not certainly know its form, we can not certainly ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... egali, kunegali. Talmud Talmudo. Talon ungego. Tame malsovagxigi, kvietigi. [Error in book: kiretigi] Tame malsovagxa. Tamely kviete. Tamper intrigi, enmiksigxi pri. Tan tani. Tan tanilo. Tan (the skin) brunigi. Tangent tangento. Tangible palpebla. Tangle (entangle) enmiksigi. Tank akvujo. Tankard pokalo, kaliko. Tanner tanisto. Tannin tanino. Tantamount to egalvalora al. Tap bateti, frapeti. Tap krano. Tape kotonrubando. Tape worm solitero. Taper kandeleto. Taper ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... passages on the basement floor, which led, as he had rightly guessed, to a staircase communicating with the hall. They passed the servants' offices on the way. At the sight of the cook and the roaring fire, disclosed through the open kitchen door, Allan's mind went off at a tangent, and Allan's dignity scattered itself to the four winds of ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... hand clenched suddenly—his mind was off at a tangent, away for the moment from her. Well, they had failed last night in all save murder! Failed—and one of them had already paid the price, and another, in the Tombs awaiting trial, faced the certainty of the death chair in Sing Sing! But those two, Reddy Mull, and English Dick, had been little ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... to see the New York World fly off at a tangent about this latest of the Wilsonian hobbies. Frank Irving Cobb, the editor of the World, is, as I have often said, the strongest writer on the New York press since Horace Greeley. But he can hardly ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... at a tangent for the dark shadow of the trees. At the edge of the timber ensued another long wait, with Rathburn uncommunicative, moodily pacing restlessly back and forth. The horses had another excellent opportunity to rest and the fagged animals took ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... a tangent, leaving Jeffreys, cool in body and mind, to await his return. To an ordinarily excitable person, the position was a critical one. The water was numbing; the ice at the edge of the hole was rotten, and broke away with every effort ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... stress of a new force, my thoughts flew off at a tangent, and I said to myself, "Bravo, Romeo! You shall ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... Pont Neuf. Not content with this, they seized on some luckless men who were descending the steps, and clasping them with their powerful right arms, spun them around like so many tops and sent them whizzing off at a tangent. Loud bursts of laughter greeted this performance, and the stout river maidens returned to their ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... of conservative stock, and Beatrix and Bobby had been the first of the Danes to break down the barriers of their own exclusive set. To be sure, he realized that in a city like New York it was quite possible for circles of equal choiceness to exist tangent to each other, yet in mutual ignorance of one another; but his years abroad in slower-moving countries had not prepared him for the countless agile performers clambering up and down over the social trapeze. ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... one of the "built-up" type, with alternate layers of ash and mahogany, but some powerful force had torn and twisted the blades. The wood was splintered and split, and some jagged pieces, flying off at a tangent, so great was the centrifugal force, had torn holes in ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... whence it was constructed, very rhythmical, and continually changing its tone, now fast, now slow, bringing with it, for a moment, a vague recollection of seventeenth-century airs, then turning sharply at a tangent, to a barrel-organ tune, ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... the parallel Indefinitely forth, And cube a sledge till we can tell The real square root of North; Bisect a seal and bifurcate The tangent with a pack Of Polar ice, we get the rate Along the Polar track, And proof of corollary things Which ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... following is an example of such a device which was successfully employed in a chute of the above dimensions, 400 ft. long and having a drop of 110 ft. This chute had a maximum inclination of 45 and its lower end curved to a horizontal tangent, running into the storehouse. Near the bottom of the chute a horizontal strip was nailed across the upper edges and to it was nailed the upper end of a 20 ft., 112-in. board, the lower end of which rested on the bottom ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... said he, "tell me what on earth has sent Edgington off on this tangent. He's the man who first suggested to me that I ought to run. It was his scheme. He's my lawyer and my friend. What ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... particularly dwelt on the unheard-of manner in which I had picked up the Irish language, and drew from thence the conclusion that I was not fitted by nature to cut a respectable figure at an English university. 'He will fly off in a tangent,' said he, 'and, when called upon to exhibit his skill in Greek, will be found proficient in Irish; I have observed the poor lad attentively, and really do not know what to make of him; but I am afraid he will never make ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... on the rest so that the level is above the wood and the cutting edge is tangent to the circle or surface of the cylinder. The handle should be held ...
— A Course In Wood Turning • Archie S. Milton and Otto K. Wohlers
... had recently held an enthusiastic debate as to whether the American soldiers should be known as "Sammies" or "Battling Christians." The thought gagged him. He dropped the newspaper, yawned, and let his mind drift off at a tangent. He wondered why Gloria had been late. It seemed so long ago already—he had a pang of illusive loneliness. He tried to imagine from what angle she would regard her new position, what place in her considerations ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... cap and of the rope itself that he saw out of the corners of his eyes. It was the shadow that had lit upon the wife the year before, happily to lift forever; now it was settling upon the husband; and it rested with Langholm—if it did rest with him—and how could he be sure? His mind was off at a tangent. He was not listening to Steel; without ceremony he interrupted ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... ordinary sights should be lost or rendered useless, tangent firing may be resorted to against ships, by pointing with the wooden dispart-sight at such part of the ship as the Tables indicate for the distance, and according to the class of gun in use at ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... went off at a tangent when I reached that point of my reflection. I had found myself involved in the Banks's drama, but what hope had I of ever seeing them again after the next day? What, moreover, was the great thing I was called upon to do? I had decided only an hour or two before that my old ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... for dear Oliver went very deep—deeper, possibly, than any of us ever guessed. For, there is no doubt about it, poor Oliver did woo Clare; if he wasn't in love with her he was very near it, before he went off at a tangent after Jane, who was something new, and therefore attractive to him, besides being thrown so much together in Paris when Jane was working for her father. The dear child has put up a brave fight ever since the engagement, and her self-control ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... table and shivered to atoms against the log wall, contributing its full share to the discouraging mess on the floor. But, as it whirled past, a great wedge of the boiling water leaped out over the rim, flew off at a tangent, and caught the floundering calf full in the side, in a long flare down from the tip of the left shoulder. The scalding fluid seemed to cling in the short, fine hair almost like an oil. With a loud bleat of pain the calf shot to his feet and went galloping around the yard. Mrs. Jabe rushed ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... humanities" had, also, much increased of late, by an accidental bias in favor of what he supposed to be natural science. Somebody had accosted him in the street, mistaking him for no less a personage than Doctor Dubble L. Dee, the lecturer upon quack physics. This set him off at a tangent; and just at the epoch of this story—for story it is getting to be after all—my grand-uncle Rumgudgeon was accessible and pacific only upon points which happened to chime in with the caprioles of the hobby he was riding. For ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... You're the one thing that ..." He swerved sharply, at an abrupt tangent. "There's one thing we can do, ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... least it meant that there would be no loose rubble on the surface. It would have been tossed off long ago by the centrifugal force, flying off on a tangent to become more of the tiny rubble of the belt. Perhaps "flying" wasn't exactly the right word, though, when applied to a velocity of less than one centimeter ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... second time for the man's safety, and by great exertions tried to release him from his perilous condition; but our efforts were not a little crippled by the legs of the Norwegian, which he flung violently about at every possible tangent; and one arm, moving with the rapid oscillating motion of a steam-engine, brought the fist in sharp contact with the other Norwegian's chest, and threw him, head over heels, into the identical pool whence he had ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... Douglas needed watching himself." He viewed with some pain the Douglas departure over popular sovereignty; indeed he once declared that had he not been called away from the Senate for quite a time in 1856, Mr. Douglas would never have gone off on this tangent. When asked if Douglas were really a great man, Senator Toombs, in 1860, answered with characteristic heartiness and exaggeration, "There has been but one greater, and ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... give pain to any one. I had a vague sort of idea that a woman who was not very pretty must be unhappy and feel the inward pang of having missed her fate. I was oftener, therefore, with her than with Noemi, because I saw that she was melancholy. So I allowed my first love to go off at a tangent, just as, later in life, I did in politics, and in a very bungling sort of way. Once or twice I noticed Noemi laughing to herself at my simple folly. She was always nice with me, but at times her manner was slightly sarcastic, and this tinge of irony, which she made no attempt to conceal, only ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... off suddenly at a tangent. The tentacles of this crime octopus, of which Danglar seemed to be the head, reached far and into most curious places to fasten and hold and feed on the progeny of human foibles! She could not help wondering where the lair was from which emanated the efficiency and system that, as witness ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... bounded away with a hoarse Ka-a-a-a-h! of warning. One of the little ones followed her on the instant, jumping squarely in his mother's tracks, his own little white flag flying to guide any that might come after him. But the second fawn ran off at a tangent, and stopped in a moment to stare and whistle and stamp his tiny foot in an odd mixture of curiosity and defiance. The mother had to circle back twice before he followed her, at last, unwillingly. ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... operas, theatres, balls, receptions and levees, and they are in a perpetual whirl, like a whip-top, spinning round and round and round very prettily until it loses its equipoise and shoots off into a tangent. But the difference is, in one case it is a top and in ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... one first-class scare when the train drew up in the squalid station, where the branch line to Haifa meets the main Hedjaz railway and the two together touch a mean town at a tangent; for a French officer in uniform boarded the train and stalked down the corridors staring hard at everyone. He asked me for a passport, which was sheer bluff, so I asked him in turn for his own authority. He smiled and produced a rubber stamp, ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... But they were only too ready to help me without any of these inducements; and in an incredibly short time at least twenty catamarans, each containing one or two men, put off from the shore in my wake and made directly towards the ship, whilst I struck off at a tangent so as to head her off. I now see that without doubt we must have presented a very formidable appearance to the people on the vessel as we paddled over the sunlit seas, racing one another, yelling, and gesticulating like madmen. Of course, the people on board ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... becoming very intimate with Isaacs, and I wanted to think about him and excogitate the problem of his life; but when I tried to revolve the situation logically, and deliver to myself a verdict, I found myself carried off at a tangent by the wonderful pictures that passed before my eyes. I could not detach the events from the individual. His face was ever before me, whether I thought of Miss Westonhaugh, or of the wretched old maharajah, or of Ram Lal the Buddhist. Isaacs was the central figure in every picture, ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... you the most," said Nancy. "And it is there I am hoping for help from you." And here, perhaps to avoid the avowal which she felt might be coming, she took a tangent: ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... such a device which was successfully employed in a chute of the above dimensions, 400 ft. long and having a drop of 110 ft. This chute had a maximum inclination of 45 and its lower end curved to a horizontal tangent, running into the storehouse. Near the bottom of the chute a horizontal strip was nailed across the upper edges and to it was nailed the upper end of a 20 ft., 112-in. board, the lower end of which rested on the bottom of the chute. Several pieces of timber spiked to the ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... of the hospital sent her mind flying off at a tangent. Even the stage gave way for the moment to this new and all-absorbing occupation. Never in her life had she done anything so interesting. The escape from home, the personal contact with all those nice, jolly boys, the excitement of being of service ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... respectful compliments to Miss Williams. If once this tangent flight of mine were over, and I were returned to my wonted leisurely motion in my old circle, I may probably endeavour to return her poetic compliment in ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... all original. I claim the sole credit of it. Father and mother both saints. I am a moral tangent, flying off between them. Well, we are ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... no less by the contrariety than by the harmony of circumstance. For our surroundings affect us in two ways; subtly and permanently, tinging us through and through as wine tinges water, or, by some violent neighbourhood of antipathetic force, sending us off at a tangent as far as possible from the antagonistic presence that so detestably environs us. The fact that Charlotte Bronte knew chiefly clergymen is largely responsible for 'Shirley,' that satirical eulogy of the Church and apotheosis of Sunday-school teachers. ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... maintaining that the "sacredness" of the number was of much more recent date than the creation of the worlds, and could not therefore account for it. He next tried an ingenious idea, comparing the perpendiculars from different points of a quadrant of a circle on a tangent at its extremity. The greatest of these, the tangent, not being cut by the quadrant, he called the line of the sun, and associated with infinite force. The shortest, being the point at the other end of the quadrant, thus corresponded to the fixed stars or zero force; intermediate ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... almost the limit for that caliber of rifle; but the antelope turned a somersault and lay still, while its mates turned off at a tangent and tore ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... tree that had torn father from the stern of the motor boat," continued Polly Jarley. "It may have been a big root of the same tree, under water, that had proved the finish of the boat. For nobody ever saw the Bright Eyes again. She just ran off at a tangent, into the middle of the lake, somewhere, we suppose, ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... Law of Motion and the Parallelogram of Forces, instead of the earth going off at a tangent in the direction of A E, it will take a mean path in the direction of A B, its path being curved instead of being a ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... apposition, abuttal[obs3], juxtaposition; abutment, osculation; meeting, appulse[obs3], rencontre[obs3], rencounter[obs3], syzygy[Astron], coincidence, coexistence; adhesion &c. 46; touching &c. v. (see touch 379). borderland; frontier &c. (limit) 233; tangent; abutter. V. be contiguous &c. adj.; join, adjoin, abut on, march with; graze, touch, meet, osculate, come in contact, coincide; coexist; adhere &c. 46. [transitive][cause to be contiguous] juxtapose; contact; join (unite) 43; link (vinculum) 45. Adj. contiguous; touching &c. v.; in contact ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... heart still incommunicate! Perhaps we were too anxious to hurry the moment, to enforce our own theory, to adduce instance from our own experience. Perhaps we were not patient enough to wait until our friend could express himself with ease and happiness. Perhaps we squandered the dialogue in tangent topics, ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... of the case." And as he warmed to his theme the image of Victor Stott grew to a fearful grotesqueness. It loomed as a threat over the community and the church. Crashaw quoted, inaccurately, statistics of the growth of lunacy, and then went off at a tangent into the theory of possession by evil spirits. Since his rejection of science, he had lapsed into certain forms of mediaevalism, and he now began to dally with the theory of a malign incarnation which he elaborated until it became ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... that she could turn off so suddenly at a complete tangent, spoke to her once or twice but got no other answer than a long, contented sigh. He stood for a little while trying to make out her outline in the dim corner of the room. Then he tiptoed out to the hall, possessed himself of a warm motor-rug, returned with it and laid ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... the upper part of the wild whirl, high in the sky, a black spot flew. Thrown at a tangent, it fell, growing larger and more bat-like as it fluttered down, striking the earth with a crash. It was the roof of ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... joined in; he was fond of variety, and he sang some lines in a high falsetto which sounded like the whistling of the gaff (with perhaps a touch of razor-grinding added); then just when you expected him to soar off at a tangent to Patti's topmost A, he let his voice fall to his boots, and emitted a most bloodcurdling bass growl, which carried horrid suggestions of midnight fiends and ghouls and the silent tomb. Still, his mates thought he was a musical prodigy; ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... line and a curve (mixed angle) or between two curves (curvilinear angle) is measured by the angle between the line and the tangent at the point of intersection, or between the tangents to both curves at their common point. Various names (now rarely, if ever, used) have been given to particular cases:—amphicyrtic (Gr. [Greek: amphi], on both sides, [Greek: kyrtos], convex) or cissoidal (Gr. [Greek: kissos], ivy), ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... properties of the curve, upon which the action of the instrument depends, are illustrated in Fig. 2, where MM, NN, are the two branches of an hyperbola; C the center; AB the major axis; F and F' the foci. If now a tangent TT be drawn at any point as P of either branch, and a perpendicular let fall upon it from the nearer focus F be produced to cut at G a line drawn from P to the farther focus F', then this perpendicular will cut the tangent at a point I upon the circumference of a circle described about C upon ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... weirdness, her vitality. The whole atmosphere of the theatre was electrified by her personality. She was singing a song in a way that he had never heard before. He remembered it still. It was a Tango song. "His Tango girl!" His thoughts flew off at a tangent.... ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... wives forget that they cannot satisfy every mood of a man without study or effort, unless they are remarkably gifted. Many a wife has neglected her mind, body and powers and when some woman with developed powers enters her marriage orbit, she flies off at a tangent, admits defeat and gets a divorce without putting forth an effort to win back the husband who is ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... rambling meditations. First he thought of his friends, and wondered when they would join him; then his mind reverted to Mrs. Martha Bardell; and from that lady it wandered, by a natural process, to the dingy counting-house of Dodson & Fogg. From Dodson & Fogg's it flew off at a tangent, to the very centre of the history of the queer client; and then it came back to the Great White Horse at Ipswich, with sufficient clearness to convince Mr. Pickwick that he was falling asleep. So he roused himself, and ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... says Lady Rylton. "Just when you expect her to sympathize with you, she starts off at a tangent on some other absurd idea. She is full of fads. After all, it would be rash to depend on her. But you, ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... entire time to operas, theatres, balls, receptions and levees, and they are in a perpetual whirl, like a whip-top, spinning round and round and round very prettily until it loses its equipoise and shoots off into a tangent. But the difference is, in one case it is a top and in the other ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... or two from Charles, Biddle Street performs a jog, dashing off at a tangent from its former course, while Chase Street not only jogs and turns at the corresponding intersection, but does so again, where, at the next corner, it meets at once with Park Avenue and Berkeley Street. After this it runs ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... it was that Sebastian Dolores paid no attention to the progress of the released landlord of "The Red Eagle," though, by a glance out of the corner of his eyes, he made sure that the footsteps of liberated guilt were marching at a tangent from where he was—even to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... on Piedra Creek. Beyond this creek lay Long Prairie, the favourite haunt of the plover. As they were nearing the creek they heard the galloping of a horse to their right, and saw a man with black hair and a swarthy face riding toward the woods at a tangent, as if he ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... were not attracted by the Earth, she would glide through the Heavens along an indefinite straight line, escaping at the tangent. But in virtue of the attraction that governs the movements of all the Heavenly bodies, our satellite at a distance of 60 times the terrestrial half-diameter revolves round us in 27 days, 7 hours, 43 minutes, 11-1/2 seconds, continually leaving the straight ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... sake of economy of space, our cut omits the Point and Swannanoa tunnels (the latter is the summit tunnel), but covers all of the location which is of interest to engineers, the remainder at the Swannanoa end being almost "on tangent" to and through ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... temperature." Certain phenomena connected with the administration of electric baths having forced upon me some doubts in this respect, I made very careful experiments, both with and without the aid of the galvanometer (Bradley's Tangent), to satisfy these. Without wearying the reader with details, I will state that the result of my experiments leaves no room for doubt that water at the temperatures stated—and still more so at 98 1/2 deg.—is superior to the human body as a conductor of electricity. I do not mean ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... accipiet te laeta; neque uxor Optima, nec dulces occurrent oscula nati Praeripere, et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent." ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... Harcourt, "brush up your mathematics. At what angle, and with what degree of force, should we have swooped down there on a tangent, when the horses rounded ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... of this fact led almost immediately to the Method of Tangents of Fermat and Barrow; and this again is the stepping-stone to the Differential Calculus,—itself a particular application of that instrument. Dr. Barrow regarded the tangent as merely the prolongation of any one of these infinitely small sides, and demonstrated the relations of these sides to the curve and its ordinates. His work, entitled "Lectiones Geometricae," appeared in 1669. To his high abilities ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... one at the wheel the Maggie shot off at a tangent and the hawsers slacked immediately. In the twinkling of an eye Mr. Gibney had cast them off, and as the ends disappeared with a swish over the stern he ran back to the pilot house, rang for full ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... I should be reproached with indolence and even cowardice. I knew that I should be supposed to be one of those consistently impracticable people who insist on going off at a tangent when the straight course lies before them. That I should be relegated to the class of persons who have failed in life through some deep-seated defect of will. The worst of a serious decision of the kind is that, whichever ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... around, and bending low to avoid the bullets he sped at a tangent in the opposite direction, for the timber of Wheeling Hill. The Indians afoot could not catch him, no bullet caught him; he would make it—he would make it; there he goes, up the hill. He was safe—but ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... uttering a word. The only people who were excited were bawling drunkards and excitable individuals of the same sort as the gesticulatory cabinet-maker. Every one knew the latter as a man really of mild disposition, but he was liable on occasion to get excited and to fly off at a tangent if anything struck him in a certain way. I did not see Liza and Mavriky Nikolaevitch arrive. Petrified with amazement, I first noticed Liza some distance away in the crowd, and I did not at once catch sight of Mavriky Nikolaevitch. ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... makes you, after all, for the vulgar, indistinguishable from other men. What's the most inveterate mark of men in general? Why the capacity to spend endless time with dull women—to spend it I won't say without being bored, but without minding that they are, without being driven off at a tangent by it; which comes to the same thing. I'm your dull woman, a part of the daily bread for which you pray at church. That covers your ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... main. I shall not stop to describe the progress of the attack; suffice it that it was as successful as could have been wished, and that Seaforth was referred back again to the lady. The happy lover was off at a tangent; the botanical party was soon overtaken; and the arm of Caroline, whom a vain endeavor to spell out the Linnaean name of a daffy-down-dilly had detained a little in the rear of the others, was soon firmly ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... First he thought of his friends, and wondered when they would join him; then his mind reverted to Mrs. Martha Bardell; and from that lady it wandered, by a natural process, to the dingy counting-house of Dodson and Fogg. From Dodson and Fogg's it flew off at tangent, to the very centre of the history of the queer client; and then it came back to the Great White Horse at Ipswich, with sufficient clearness to convince Mr. Pickwick that he was falling asleep: so he aroused himself, and began to undress, when he recollected he had left his watch ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... sights should be lost or rendered useless, tangent firing may be resorted to against ships, by pointing with the wooden dispart-sight at such part of the ship as the Tables indicate for the distance, and according to the class of gun in use ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... room to do this, and as he paused on the threshold there was a sudden crash. Part of the air pump seemed to fly off at a tangent, and a second later had smashed down on the Cardite motor. This stopped in an instant, and the projectile began falling. Fortunately it was but a short distance above the moon's surface, and came down with a jar, which did not injure ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... 'argument' (to a function), used so often as to have become a new word (like 'piano' from 'pianoforte'). "The sine function takes 1 arg, but the arc-tangent function can take either 1 or 2 args." Compare {param}, ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... tartly, "a fly has no property—your Aunt Selina had. Oh, my dear," she added, darting away at a tangent, "to think that last night you and Basil should have been witnesses of a melodrama at the Marlow Theatre, at the very time this real tragedy was taking place in the ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... The revolution of the sun in such an orbit was known to the Author of the Bible when he wrote, "his circuit is to the end of heaven." The direction of the circumference of a circle being known, that of its center can be found; for the radius is always a tangent to the circumference, and the intersection of two of these radii will be the center; so that, if we certainly knew the sun's orbit to be circular, or nearly so, we could calculate the center. But as we do not certainly know its form, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Sequin hasn't been playing with Don Morley's money," said Decker, resuming the subject from which Mrs. Ivy had flown off at a tangent. "Donald has always left everything to him, and doesn't know anything more about his investments than I do. All he is concerned with is spending his income, and that keeps ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... {88} and, rejecting the force altogether, declared that if such a thing there were, it would be as the inverse square of the distance. Newton, ready prepared with the mathematics of the subject, tried the fall of the moon towards the earth, away from her tangent, and found that, as compared with the fall of a stone, the law of the inverse square did hold for the moon. He deduced the ellipse, he proceeded to deduce the effect of the disturbance of the sun upon the moon, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... was my fault," admitted Parmalee. "Mr. Drew accidentally knocked my cane out of my hand, and I flew off at a tangent and was nasty about ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... the subject of it had had time to cast aside her fur cloak, to fasten upon her slender, arched feet, clad in dainty, laced boots, a pair of steel skates, with tangent blades, and without either grooves or straps, and to dart out upon this miniature sheet of water with the agility of a person accustomed to skating on the great lakes ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... keep his health in a passable condition. I have had positions of some importance handed to me, which I discharged with eminent satisfaction to all concerned until I got ready to go off at some new tangent. If I did not imagine myself in the actual embrace of some grave physical or mental disease, I feared that something would in the near future attack me; and that brings me to the main topic ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... banked at their feet. A stronger gust came in the air. A scattering of leaves clustered together and moved with sudden agitation across the sward before them; paused and seemed to be trying to flutter a hold into the ground; rushed aimlessly at a tangent to their former direction; paused again; and again seemed to be holding on. Before a sudden gust they were spun helplessly upward, sported aloft in mazy arabesques, scattered ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... obliquely, or even with too great or too little force, drives it perilously wide of its mark. It can recover the safe track only by a sudden and often violent lunge of the opposing racket. The straight course is life, the tangent disease, the ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... by an onslaught from behind. It is the more surprising, as I think it may be conceded that I have myself pretty well in hand by this time, and that my nerves, unruly as nature saw fit to make them, are now my very abject slaves. Occasionally one of our fiction carpenters flies off at a tangent and treats us to a series of intellectual gymnastics, the significance of which—so we are called upon to digest—is that the soul of one dead, finding its present clime too warm—or too cold—or having left something undone ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... deemed me such. My father was greatly pleased when I wrote him that I was now more than ever convinced of the wisdom of choosing the law as my profession, and was satisfied that I had come to my senses at last. He had still been prepared to see me "go off at a tangent," as he expressed it. On the other hand, the powerful effect of the appeal made by Weathersfield and Mr. Watling must not be underestimated. Here in one object lesson was emphasized a host of suggestions each of which had made its impression. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the gravitational pull of the sun, which has a mass 333,432 times that of the earth. If at any moment the sun ceased to exert this pull the earth would instantly fly off into space straight in the direction in which it was moving at the time, that is to say, at a tangent. This tendency to fly off at a tangent is continuous. It is the balance between it and the sun's pull which keeps the earth to her almost circular orbit. In the same way the seven other planets are held to ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... pseudo-fashionable world, for his own family had been of conservative stock, and Beatrix and Bobby had been the first of the Danes to break down the barriers of their own exclusive set. To be sure, he realized that in a city like New York it was quite possible for circles of equal choiceness to exist tangent to each other, yet in mutual ignorance of one another; but his years abroad in slower-moving countries had not prepared him for the countless agile performers clambering up and down over the social trapeze. In ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... that degree of intellectual concentration which could enable him to examine a subject to its close. He would begin to talk with me seriously enough, and with a due solemnity, about the suit against him; but, in a tangent, he would dart off to the consideration of some trifle, some household matter, or petty affair, of which, at any other time, he must have known that his hearers had no wish to hear. Poor Julia confirmed ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... fly off at a tangent, ten to one Miss Clare'll be down the next day and set all straight again," was the general verdict on ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... sufferer lay holding a hand of Nancy between his cheek and the pillow—with intervals of silence and blithe speech. His disordered mind, it appeared, was still pursuing its unfortunate tangent. ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... directors in the flesh, but they were all scanning him. He stood at the end of the table and fastened his eyes on a railway map that bedecked the opposite wall, one of those mendacious maps showing a trans-continental line of unbroken tangent; three thousand miles of railway without a curve, the opposition ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... was certainly approaching the Moon. It had by this time turned over considerably under the influence of attraction, but its own original motion still followed a decidedly oblique direction. The consequence of these two forces might possibly be a tangent, line approaching the edge of the Moon's disc. One thing was certain: the Projectile had not yet commenced to fall directly towards her surface; its base, in which its centre of gravity lay, was still turned away considerably ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... slowly into the street, grumbling indistinctly to himself in a perplexed tone of voice. Salisbury looked out after him, and saw him maundering along the pavement, halting now and then and swaying indecisively, and then starting off at some fresh tangent. The sky had cleared, and white fleecy clouds were fleeting across the moon, high in the heaven. The light came and went by turns as the clouds passed by, and, turning round as the clear white rays shone into the passage, Salisbury saw the little ball of crumpled paper which the woman had ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... first-class scare when the train drew up in the squalid station, where the branch line to Haifa meets the main Hedjaz railway and the two together touch a mean town at a tangent; for a French officer in uniform boarded the train and stalked down the corridors staring hard at everyone. He asked me for a passport, which was sheer bluff, so I asked him in turn for his own authority. He smiled and produced a rubber stamp, saying that ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... big dividing board," he went on, "they are distributed and connected each in its place to the delicate tangent galvanometers and sensitive indicators you see in this room. These instantly announce the most minute change in the working of the current, and each office has a distinct separate metallic circuit. Why, even a hole as small as a lead pencil in ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... but the expression on his face was eloquent enough. I knew, without being told. Suddenly he broke out at a fresh tangent. ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and down thinking in what manner he might contrive it, when Jack, who was sitting, as usual, in a chair by the capstern with his porter by him, said to himself, "Now I'll lay my life that Ned wants to make friends, and is ashamed to speak first; I may be mistaken, and he may fly off at a tangent; but even if I am, at all events it will not be I who am wrong—I'll try him." Jack waited till Gascoigne passed him again, and then said, looking kindly and ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... the habit of wandering off on a meditative tangent to the circle of conversation. I was brought ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... run the risk of Senator Burleigh going off at a tangent," said Miss Carter, sharply. "By the way, you cannot deny that you have given him encouragement; you have neither eyes nor ears for any one else ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... beat into Annie's cheeks. She went off swiftly at a tangent. "Wouldn't it give a fellow a jar? This guy Jim Collins slips it to me confidential that he's off the crooked stuff. Nothin' doin' a-tall in gorilla work. He kids me that he's quit goin' out on the spud and porch-climbin' don't look good to him no more. A four-room ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... snow fell steadily and I tramped on over the joint signature of the girl and the rabbit. Near the lake they parted company, the rabbit leading off at a tangent, on a line parallel with the lake, while his pursuer’s ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... to feelings of great kindness, said to me, "I could, from this moment, consider the examination at an end. I will, however, for my own pleasure, ask you two more questions. What are the relations of a curved line to the straight line that is a tangent to it?" I looked upon this question as a particular case of the theory of osculations which I had studied in Legrange's "Fonctions Analytiques." "Finally," said the examiner to me, "how do you determine the ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... of the chair in silence, and the collector plodded off at a tangent in the direction of his next quarry. This appearing to be an old lady, he presently altered his course. With a caution bred of experience, he would approach her ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... grade, And coast on the tangent mile, While the Driver toys with the throttle-bar, And gathers ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... which, were it worth while to go into its details, we should need some further diagrams to make it quite clear. Nor is it worth while to go into the description of various minor points of refinement about the gun mounting, such as the very exposed long tangent scale seen in the figure, by which the elevation or depression is read off, nor the still more exposed and rather ricketty arrangement by which the rear sight is arranged to rise and fall with the gun, and allowance for dispart ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... They were as downright and unconsidering, as little capable of the reasoned middle attitude. Proudhon, perceiving that the world was obsessed by a misconception of the scope of property whereby the many were enslaved to the few, went off at a tangent to the announcement that "Property is Robbery," an exaggeration that, as I have already shown, still haunts Socialist discussion. The ultimate factor of all human affairs, the psychological factor, ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... so evenly his mood of irresponsible insouciance that the soberness with which he announced that it was his sister who was to join them at dinner sent Archie's thoughts darting away at a new tangent of speculation. He had so accommodated himself to the idea that the Governor was a man without ties, or with all his ties broken, that this intimation that he had a sister who was still on friendly enough terms with him to visit his house—an establishment which ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... there were two atoms which were each formed by a nucleus and a number of electrons swinging around about the nucleus as pictured in Fig. 104. The electrons are going of their own accord and the nucleus keeps them from flying off at a tangent, the way mud flies from the wheel of an automobile. Suppose these two atoms are free to turn but not to move far from their present positions. They will turn so as to make their electron paths parallel just as did ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills
... in their outward lot do not find in life sufficient enjoyment to make it valuable to them, the cause generally is, caring for nobody but themselves."] It is saner, less likely to be veered off on some tangent of ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... proximity to a German H.E. Woolly Bear exploding. It gives one rather a sickening sensation. Another came over. This time it burst nearer. "Gee! they're dropping the range." I hastily grabbed my tripod and hurried off at a tangent. Proceeding for a distance of about five hundred yards I turned off again and made tracks ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... hour, or more, on a straight railway; that the engine was exhibited at one shilling admittance, including a ride for the few who were not too timid; that it ran for some weeks, when a rail broke and occasioned the engine to fly off in a tangent and overturn, the ground being very soft at the time. Mr. Trevithick having expended all his means in erecting the works and enclosure, and the shillings not having come in fast enough to pay current expenses, the engine was not ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... Ishmael? you and the judge? Well, Merlin did start off at a tangent yesterday from Tanglewood. I suppose he is pining after his child, and has taken a sudden freak to rush over and see her. And as you are the staff of his age, of course, he would not think of undertaking so long a journey ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... cut 'em off at the Gut," called Frank, and he struck away at a tangent from their course as the man disappeared around the house and the motor car could be heard roaring ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... get ground up in the hopper like everybody else or shut the door of the industrial squirrel-cage on yourself in order not to starve. Perhaps that'll give some cleverer person the courage to start out on his own tangent." ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... this Happy Valley ran Market Street, a bias cut across the city that was to be. Market Street is about all that saved that city from making a checker-board of its ground-plan. Market Street flew off at a tangent and set all the south portion of the town at an angle that is rather a relief than anything else that I know of. Who wants to go on forever up one street and down another, and then across town at right angles, as if life ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... fibres of wood, it is clear at once why knots and "cross-grain" interfere with the strength of timber. It is due to the structural peculiarities that "honeycombing" occurs in rapid seasoning, that checks or cracks extend radially and follow pith rays, that tangent or "bastard" cut stock shrinks and warps more than that which is quarter-sawn. These same peculiarities enable oak to take a better finish than basswood ...
— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner
... Wycherley, was a madman with an illusion about a precipice; John Howard a moral lunatic in whom the affections were reversed; Saul a moping maniac with homicidal paroxysms and nocturnal visions; Paul an incoherent lunatic, who in his writings flies off at a tangent, and who admits having once been the victim of a photopsic illusion in broad daylight; Nebuchadnezzar a lycanthropical lunatic; Joan of Arc a theomaniac; Bobby Burton and Oliver Cromwell melancholy maniacs; Napoleon an ambitious maniac, in whom the sense of impossibility became ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... an unexpectedly disagreeable turn. Gray had anticipated an unpleasant moment or two, but this—well, it was indeed the crash. Calamity had overtaken him from the very quarter he had least expected and most dreaded, and his mind raced off at a tangent; a dozen unwelcome ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... of music, and all about them women darting into line, sudden banners floating out, and the white horse prancing in the archway, for all the world as if spun at a tangent off the ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... and heart that thumped painfully, I plied the paddle, while the craft swung off at a tangent across the dark green whirling which, marked by white concentric rings, swung round and round a down-sucking hollow in the center. Twice we shot past the latter, and had time to notice how a battered log of driftwood tilted endways and went down, but as on the second revolution we swept toward ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... fascination she ought to have married well. I'm sure her friends have tried hard enough for her. But what can you do with a girl who throws herself at the heads of ineligibles, and when one trots out an unexceptionable PARTI and does one's best to bring them together, goes off at a tangent and lets the whole thing drop through. You know how it was with....' Lady Tallant ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... Machines Unstable. The Application of Power. The Supporting Surfaces. Area not the Essential Thing. The Law of Gravity. Gravity. Indestructibility of Gravitation. Distance Reduces Gravitational Pull. How Motion Antagonizes Gravity. A Tangent. Tangential Motion Represents Centrifugal Pull. Equalizing the Two Motions. Lift and Drift. Normal Pressure. Head Resistance. Measuring Lift and Drift. Pressure at Different Angles. Difference Between ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... projectile visibly drew nearer the moon. It was, therefore, submitted in some proportion to its influence; but its own velocity also inclined it in an oblique line. Perhaps the result of these two influences would be a line that would become a tangent. But it was certain that the projectile was not falling normally upon the surface of the moon, for its base, by reason of its weight, ought to have been ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... space of ground. Men who had noticed how very little David's heart had been in his work were amazed to see the reckless courage he displayed. Round and round the mill he flew, keeping the outside stock from flying off at a tangent, and soothing and quieting the beasts nearest to him with his voice. The "run" was over as suddenly as it commenced, and the men, breathless and exhausted, stood around ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... is more interesting, in some ways, not to have everything cut and dried from the start," she went on, striking off at a tangent, with an innate perversity incomprehensible to a mere man. "It prevents a headlong fall into the commonplace: and there is a certain excitement in looking on, so to speak, at one's own personal drama, without feeling ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... Apsis. Chord. Cycloid. Conoid. Conic Section. Ellipsoid. Epicycloid. Evolute. Flying Buttress. Focus. Gnomes. Hexagon. Hyperbola. Hypothenuse. Incidental. Isosceles. Triangle. Parabola. Parallelogram. Pelecoid. Polygons. Pyramid. Rhomb. Sector. Segment. Sinusoid. Tangent. Tetrahedron. Vertex. ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... two hands, stand erect and whirl round on his heels till momentum was obtained, and then—let go. The missile would fly like a bullet, and woe betide any one who stood in its way. The performance precluded any kind of aim; the stone was hurled off at any chance tangent: and it was bad luck rather than any kind of malice that guided one three-pound boulder through the window, across the kitchen, and into a portrait of Judas de Beer which hung on the wall not half a dozen feet from the ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... a wonder, Arved. You fly off on a wild tangent stimulated by the mere sound of a word. Who said anything about dynamite-anarchy? There's another sort that men of brains—madmen if you will—believe and indirectly teach. Emerson was one, though he hardly knew it. Thoreau realized it for him, however. Don't you remember ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... incredible dexterity through each other's ranks; and the pattern was a cross, a tricolor. Then they wheeled round the circle that was and was not their goal, and did it all over again; but instead of intersecting at the center circle they struck off there at a tangent, and the pattern, blue by blue divided from white by white, and all red-flecked, was two wide V's set point to point, a pattern that ran away and vanished as each thread, returning, wheeled round the circle whence the other thread ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... be described in words as follows: Required the area between a curve, the axis of x and two ordinates; it is necessary to draw a new curve, such that its steepness, as measured by the tangent of the inclination, may be proportional to the ordinate of the given curve for the same value of x, then the ascent made by the new curve in passing from one ordinate to the other is a measure of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... Her eyes were glistening with as yet unshed tears. "I've never seen you go off on a wild tangent like this before! On the word of an old fraud like Forsythe, a man who lies about half the time, you talk the Administration into sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into the biggest space lift ...
— Fifty Per Cent Prophet • Gordon Randall Garrett
... dancers warming to their work, till his bow moved so rapidly over the strings of his fiddle, and his arm and his head gave such eccentric jerks, that I half expected at any moment to see the one fly off at a tangent and the other come bounding into the middle of the room. Larry and I kept on one side, trying to look greatly interested with the performance, while we managed to have a few words now and then with some of the men, who were either seated on the benches or standing against the wall. Among them were ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... explanation of his conduct. To abandon his bride on the day of his marriage—to abandon his high official position as governor of this State on the day of his inauguration, and without giving any living creature a hint of his intention, to fly off at a tangent and go to the Indian country and become a missionary to those red devils, and be massacred for his pains—it was the work of a raving maniac. But what drove him mad? Surely it was not his high elevation that turned his head, for if it had been, his madness would never have taken this particular ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... PHLOGISTON. Newton, suspecting that the influence of the earth's attraction, gravity, may extend as far as the moon, and be the force that causes her to revolve in her orbit round the earth, calculated that, by her motion in her orbit, she was deflected from the tangent thirteen feet every minute; but, by ascertaining the space through which bodies would fall in one minute at the earth's surface, and supposing it to be diminished in the ratio of the inverse square, it appeared that the attraction at the moon's orbit would draw a body through more than fifteen feet. ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... it was perhaps the philosophic breadth of view with which he regarded his subject at any time, and the desire of getting to the bottom of each subsidiary problem arising from it, that made him for many years seem constantly to spring aside from his own subject, to fly off at a tangent from the line in which he was assured of unrivalled success did he but devote to it his undivided powers. But he was prepared to endure the charge of desultoriness with equanimity. In part, he was ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... a lesson in riding. So soon, therefore, as Galors was upon him, Prosper slid his left foot from the stirrup and slipt round his horse almost to the belly, clinging with his shield arm to the bow of the saddle. The spear struck his shield at a tangent and glanced off. It was a bad miss for Galors, since horse and man drove down the incline and were floundering in the brook before they could stay. Prosper whipped round to see Galors mired, was close on his quarter and had cut through the shank of the ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... and none had the ordinary heroism to intervene, and I with ever increasing rapidity was borne helplessly down the declivity towards the gates of Hyde Park Corner, when, by the benevolence of Providence, the anterior wheel ran under a railing, and I flew off like a tangent into the comparative ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... itself that he saw out of the corners of his eyes. It was the shadow that had lit upon the wife the year before, happily to lift forever; now it was settling upon the husband; and it rested with Langholm—if it did rest with him—and how could he be sure? His mind was off at a tangent. He was not listening to Steel; without ceremony ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... to run off at a tangent and forsake our ostensible subject, pretty Poll, altogether, I must just pause for one moment more to answer an objection which I know has been trembling on the tip of your tongue any time the last five minutes. You've been waiting till you could get a word in edgeways to give me ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... muzzle-pivoting part of the arrangement, of which, were it worth while to go into its details, we should need some further diagrams to make it quite clear. Nor is it worth while to go into the description of various minor points of refinement about the gun mounting, such as the very exposed long tangent scale seen in the figure, by which the elevation or depression is read off, nor the still more exposed and rather ricketty arrangement by which the rear sight is arranged to rise and fall with the gun, and allowance for dispart avoided. The recoil of the gun is resisted ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... don't want to talk to Winthrop. He's too clever a young man, Winthrop. In the merger case, you remember—had me on the stand for three hours. Made me talk too." The mind of the old man suddenly veered at a tangent. "How the devil can Helen retain him?" he demanded peevishly. "She can't retain him. She hasn't any money. And he's District Attorney too. It's against the law. Is he doing it as a speculation? Does ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... taken an unexpectedly disagreeable turn. Gray had anticipated an unpleasant moment or two, but this—well, it was indeed the crash. Calamity had overtaken him from the very quarter he had least expected and most dreaded, and his mind raced off at a tangent; a dozen ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... I assumed was some obsolete firman. The result was truly amazing, and the scene had some real humour in it. With profound salaams, the Turks unhanded me, helped me to mount, and, as I rode off at a tangent with Andreas at my horse's head, called after me what sounded like friendly farewells. When we were back among the Russians—I don't remember seeing much of the Servians later on that day—Andreas explained that he had passed himself for the Turkish dragoman of a British ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... low to avoid the bullets he sped at a tangent in the opposite direction, for the timber of Wheeling Hill. The Indians afoot could not catch him, no bullet caught him; he would make it—he would make it; there he goes, up the hill. He ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... more explicit. If A B C, in Fig. 16, represent your blade lying flat on the paper, d o the intersection of a plane at right angles to the plane of the paper and also at right angles to the tangent to the curve at the point o, where we will suppose the edges of the blades to meet, it will be seen at a glance that the leverage from o to C is considerable, and that a great strain is thrown upon the thumb which is endeavouring to keep ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... after a very pleasant ride, and clattered up its one long street to the principal hotel; but Mr. Fosbrooke whipped into the yard to the left so rapidly, that our hero, who was not much used to the back seat of a dog-cart, flew off by some means at a tangent to the right, and was consequently degraded in the eyes ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... dashed after it with upraised paddle. The swan made a desperate detour, apparently bent on gaining the water; it ran round a bush, and was almost caught in the arms of the younger squaw, who, leaving her senior in the canoe, had joined in the pursuit. A shriek from the squaw sent it off at a tangent to the left, pinions aloft, and terror depicted on its visage. English Chief also doubled, but a crooked stump caught his foot and sent him headlong into the bush. At that instant, Coppernose, having ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne
... refuge. The tall flag-staff came suddenly into view, and in less than four minutes they would be rushing by. Over forty miles to the hour were they flying now. Big Ben had just let out another notch as they swung into the two-mile tangent, when at the same instant he and Geordie caught sight of three or four black dots dimly bobbing in the midst of a little dust-cloud on the roadway far ahead, and almost at the same instant came from each the low cry, ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... myself. I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering—that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, WHEREVER THEY MAY LEAD. But the reason why he wants sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is PREDESTINED to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the "direct" practical man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... a co-ordinate and living power by right of Christ's institution and express promise, I go along with them; but I soon discover that by the church they meant the clergy, the hierarchy exclusively, and then I fly off from them in a tangent. ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... circumstance. For our surroundings affect us in two ways; subtly and permanently, tinging us through and through as wine tinges water, or, by some violent neighbourhood of antipathetic force, sending us off at a tangent as far as possible from the antagonistic presence that so detestably environs us. The fact that Charlotte Bronte knew chiefly clergymen is largely responsible for 'Shirley,' that satirical eulogy of the Church and apotheosis of Sunday-school teachers. ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... send Creech off on another tangent which wound up in dark, mysterious threats. Then Slone caught the name of Lucy. It abruptly killed ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... Incidence—The angle which a line drawn from the leading to the trailing edge of the plane makes with the horizontal trailing angle between the tangent to the trailing edge of the plane and the chord or a line drawn from the leading to ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... never fall in love with the persons they are expected to, but invariably go off on an unknown tangent of their own, in obedience to the same law of Nature, perhaps, which causes an unusually tall girl to lose her heart to a very diminutive—though ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... Happy Valley ran Market Street, a bias cut across the city that was to be. Market Street is about all that saved that city from making a checker-board of its ground-plan. Market Street flew off at a tangent and set all the south portion of the town at an angle that is rather a relief than anything else that I know of. Who wants to go on forever up one street and down another, and then across town at right angles, as if life were a treadmill ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... been the first of the Danes to break down the barriers of their own exclusive set. To be sure, he realized that in a city like New York it was quite possible for circles of equal choiceness to exist tangent to each other, yet in mutual ignorance of one another; but his years abroad in slower-moving countries had not prepared him for the countless agile performers clambering up and down over the social trapeze. In his father's day, society had stood on ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... general effect to the last example is the work upon another important series of vases. Instead of the simple meandered or zigzag arrangement of parts, two of the dividing lines of the zone run tangent to the neck of the vase on opposite sides, forming arched panels and leaving upright panels between. In the example presented in Fig. 168 the arched areas are filled in with lattice-like arrangements of lines. In others ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... the growing stack, caught it with his pitchfork and threw it on, with a sideways twist, to the man on the lower end who got further and further along as he packed the sheaves, so that the thrower had to increase the tangent of his twist at every throw. Each of the men caught and tossed and placed, always to the moment, with the unending flow of machinery. And again —so often before, but never so keenly as now—was Ishmael struck with the pattern of it all.... This could not surely be the only ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... obviously, is an exact statement of the coincidences of phrase and thought in Shakspere and Montaigne. Not that such coincidences are the main or the only results to be looked for; rather we may reasonably expect to find Shakspere's thought often diverging at a tangent from that of the writer he is reading, or even directly gainsaying it. But there can be no solid argument as to such indirect influence until we have fully established the direct influence, and this can only be done by exhibiting a considerable number of coincidences. ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... study or effort, unless they are remarkably gifted. Many a wife has neglected her mind, body and powers and when some woman with developed powers enters her marriage orbit, she flies off at a tangent, admits defeat and gets a divorce without putting forth an effort to win back the husband who is ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... to Eliminate Momentum. Light Machines Unstable. The Application of Power. The Supporting Surfaces. Area not the Essential Thing. The Law of Gravity. Gravity. Indestructibility of Gravitation. Distance Reduces Gravitational Pull. How Motion Antagonizes Gravity. A Tangent. Tangential Motion Represents Centrifugal Pull. Equalizing the Two Motions. Lift and Drift. Normal Pressure. Head Resistance. Measuring Lift and Drift. Pressure at Different Angles. Difference Between ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... closely, but not necessarily steam tight. The head is screwed in and soldered, and the yoke, G, which receives the connecting rod pin, is screwed into the head. The connecting rod, H, is of steel with brass ends. The lower end, which receives the crank pin, is split, and provided with a tangent screw for taking up wear. The crank pin is secured in the crank disk, I, by a nut on the back. The eccentric rod, J, is of steel, screwed at its lower end into an eccentric strap of cast or wrought iron, which surrounds the eccentric, K. The valve, L, is ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... did see me, for he sprang to the wheel, thrusting the other man aside, and whirled it round and round, hand over hand, at the same time shouting orders of some sort. The vessel seemed to go off at a tangent to its former course and leapt almost instantly ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... me. But he now appeared wholly incapable of that degree of intellectual concentration which could enable him to examine a subject to its close. He would begin to talk with me seriously enough, and with a due solemnity, about the suit against him; but, in a tangent, he would dart off to the consideration of some trifle, some household matter, or petty affair, of which, at any other time, he must have known that his hearers had no wish to hear. Poor Julia confirmed the conjectures which I entertained, but did not utter, by telling me that her father had ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... he seemed to master the bowling, and soon fetched about ten runs in a classic manner. Then I tossed him a Yorker which he missed and it went off at a tangent as soon as it had reached the tree. "Not out," I cried hastily, for the face he turned to ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... worthy had easy steering to do, so he joined in; he was fond of variety, and he sang some lines in a high falsetto which sounded like the whistling of the gaff (with perhaps a touch of razor-grinding added); then just when you expected him to soar off at a tangent to Patti's topmost A, he let his voice fall to his boots, and emitted a most bloodcurdling bass growl, which carried horrid suggestions of midnight fiends and ghouls and the silent tomb. Still, his mates thought he was a musical prodigy; he was entranced with the sweetness and power ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... have married well. I'm sure her friends have tried hard enough for her. But what can you do with a girl who throws herself at the heads of ineligibles, and when one trots out an unexceptionable PARTI and does one's best to bring them together, goes off at a tangent and lets the whole thing drop through. You know how it was with....' Lady ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... Delight came in, straight from Boston, where she had been doing two days' shopping; and in her hand she carried a parcel in white paper. I was going to say a round parcel, which it would have been but for something which ran out in a sharp tangent from one side, and pushed the wrappings into an odd angle. This she put ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... magnet of my heart was here," he answered half-playfully, half-tenderly. "When that is gone, I shall be likely to fly off in a tangent again." ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... cleverly by a length. 1000 sovs with 3000 in specie. Also ran: J de Bremond's (French horse Bantam Lyons was anxiously inquiring after not in yet but expected any minute) Maximum II. Different ways of bringing off a coup. Lovemaking damages. Though that halfbaked Lyons ran off at a tangent in his impetuosity to get left. Of course gambling eminently lent itself to that sort of thing though as the event turned out the poor fool hadn't much reason to congratulate himself on his pick, the forlorn hope. Guesswork it reduced itself ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Y's, when I was almost in despair, I rammed down him a sort of general statement of the situation as I saw it; at least, I made a start. But soon he stopped me and ran off at a tangent on some historical statement I had made, showing that his mind was not at all on the real subject, the large subject. When I returned to Washington, and he had read my interviews with Grey, Asquith, and Bryce[45], and my own statement, ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... Europe, Ishmael? you and the judge? Well, Merlin did start off at a tangent yesterday from Tanglewood. I suppose he is pining after his child, and has taken a sudden freak to rush over and see her. And as you are the staff of his age, of course, he would not think of undertaking so long a journey without the support ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... strictly correspond with the fact; but, from the parallax, as derived from observation (and if this cannot be depended on certainly, no magnitudes in astronomy can), we find, that the moon does not fall from the tangent of her orbit, as much as the theory requires. As this is of vital importance to the integrity of the theory we are advocating, we have made the computation on Newton's own data, except such as were necessarily inaccurate at the time ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... the boundary on the lower counties on the Delaware (now the State of that name) and the Province of Maryland should be marked out. The boundary was an arc of a circle described around the town of Newcastle, with a given radius, and a meridian line tangent thereto. This was a far more difficult operation than to draw a meridian line from a given point, such as the source of a river. It was thought in 1763 worthy of the attention of the first assistant ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... versos equites iterumque reversos subgraduatorum pellentes agmina ferro, inque pavimentis equitantes undique turmas? proh pudor! o mores, o tempora! forsitan olim exercens operam curvo Moderator aratro inveniet mixtis capitum fragmenta galeris relliquias pugnae, et mentem mortalia tangent. me sacer Aegidius Musarum fana colentem aegide defendit, perque ignea tela, per hostes ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... mountains, separating every where the waters of the Adriatic Gulf from those of the Mediterranean. Where it forms an elbow, touching the Mediterranean, as a smaller circle touches a larger, within which it is inscribed, in the manner of a tangent, the name changes from Alps to Apennine. It is the beginning of the Apennine which constitutes the state of Genoa, the mountains there generally falling down in barren, naked precipices into the sea. Wherever there is soil on the lower parts, it is principally in olives ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... not see the beauty of the valley, but as, far below, he saw Judith trot up to the Day's corral, he was smitten suddenly by his sense of loneliness. Too bad of Jude, he thought, always to be flying off at a tangent like that! A guy couldn't offer the least criticism of her fool horse, that she didn't lose her temper. Funny thing to see a girl with a hot temper. Ordinary enough in a man, but girls were usually just mean and spitty, like cats. A guy had to admit that there ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... code, nor yet binding through the stern behest of mechanical necessity, but a law which finds definition at every moment, and at every moment also marks a direction of progress, being as it were the shifting tangent to ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... youngster," said he, with a significant twinkle in his eye which made the other two chaplains grin, I could see, at some joke they had between them. "I'll try and call on your father, if I can find time before he leaves Portsmouth. Tell him when you get back, that old Tangent ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... suddenly—his mind was off at a tangent, away for the moment from her. Well, they had failed last night in all save murder! Failed—and one of them had already paid the price, and another, in the Tombs awaiting trial, faced the certainty of the death chair in Sing Sing! ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... his arm and began to walk forward gently with her. Something in the grave tenderness with which this was done reminded Fleda irresistibly of the times when she had been a child under his care; and somehow her thoughts went off on a tangent back to the further days of her mother and father and grandfather, the other friends from whom she had had the same gentle protection, which now there was no one in the world to give her. And their images did never seem more winning fair than just then,—when ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... know me to go off on a tangent, without some sort of a string to hold on to? I ain't goin' to swarm all alone! I never heard of such a thing. Though if I couldn't swarm, and the thing was to be done, I say I'd try it. But Savira Golding is going to be ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... dialogue, the subject of it had had time to cast aside her fur cloak, to fasten upon her slender, arched feet, clad in dainty, laced boots, a pair of steel skates, with tangent blades, and without either grooves or straps, and to dart out upon this miniature sheet of water with the agility of a person accustomed to skating on ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... range often did freakish things. There had been a man recently discharged from the General as convalescent, who had been shot in the shoulder, and the bullet, striking the collar-bone, had taken a curious tangent, following up the muscle of the neck and lodging just beneath the ear. In that case there had been the external evidence of the bullet's location. In this case there was no such evidence to ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... suit, for our visit; not Countess Rudolf's kindness, as you may perhaps suppose)—"and a pretty old suit it is by this time! for I was young, a mere child, in fact, when it began, ha, ha!—By the way," she continued, flying off at a tangent, "they advised us to put an end to the suit by arranging a match between me and Karpathy. I was young then, as I have said—a mere child, ha, ha!—but I would not entertain the idea, ha, ha! I made a mistake, no doubt; for how rich should I not have been now, a good ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... spent, and any resolute hand could have impelled them away from the carriage-pole with which the roans threatened to impale their wretched sides. The front wheel, however, made him heroic, going off at a tangent into a cloth-merchant's shop, and precipitating a clash while he still clung to the reins. The door flew open on the under side and Hilda fell through, grasping at the dust of the road; while the driver, discovering that ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... searching in Wych Hazel's face to see whether she comprehended and how she enjoyed what he was giving her. As to the relations between them, his manner all the while, as well as during the ride, was very much what it had been before the disclosure made by Mrs. Coles had sent Wych Hazel off on a tangent of alienation from him. Nothing could exceed the watch kept over her, or the care taken of her; and neither could make less demonstration. There was also the same quiet assumption of her, which had been in his manner ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... was so completely a star of a confined orbit, that his ideas seldom described a tangent to their ordinary revolutions. He was so much accustomed to hear of England ruling colonies, the East and the West, Canada, the Cape, and New South Wales, that it was not an easy matter for him to conceive himself to be without the influence of the British laws. ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... believing that she could turn off so suddenly at a complete tangent, spoke to her once or twice but got no other answer than a long, contented sigh. He stood for a little while trying to make out her outline in the dim corner of the room. Then he tiptoed out to the hall, possessed himself of a ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... those incidents in which he has shown the strange and violent side of his character, and omitting the stretches between where his wisdom and judgment have had a chance. His conversation when he does not fly off at a tangent is full of pith and idea. "The greatest monument ever erected to Napoleon Buonaparte was the British National debt," said he yesterday. Again, "We must never forget that the principal export of Great Britain to the United States IS the United States." Again, ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... in two hands, stand erect and whirl round on his heels till momentum was obtained, and then—let go. The missile would fly like a bullet, and woe betide any one who stood in its way. The performance precluded any kind of aim; the stone was hurled off at any chance tangent: and it was bad luck rather than any kind of malice that guided one three-pound boulder through the window, across the kitchen, and into a portrait of Judas de Beer which hung on the wall not half a dozen feet from the slumbering ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... day removes the orient vault, The rustic peasant leaves his humble home, And when the sun with fiercer tangent strikes, Fatigued and parched, he sits him in the shade; Then plods again with hard, laborious toil, Until black night the hemisphere enshrouds. And then he rests. But I must ever chafe At morning, noon-day, evening, and ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... guns, shooting down men and horses. The 38th behaved splendidly, but all their officers were killed or wounded, a number of gunners, and many horses. Two guns were for a time in the hands of the Boers, who, I believe, removed the tangent sights. It appears that the M.I. escort of the Battery, owing, I suppose, to some misunderstanding, retreated. The situation was saved by Captain Budworth, of our Battery, who collected and brought up some mounted infantry, whether Yeomanry or ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... working beam and a vertical plunger-type pump beneath the other end. Heavy, flat chains were secured to a sector at each end of the working beam and to the engine and pump piston rods in such a way that the rods were always tangent to a circle whose center was at the beam pivot. The weight of the reciprocating pump parts pulled the pump end of the beam down; the atmosphere, acting on the open top of the piston in the steam cylinder, caused the engine end of the beam to be pulled down when the steam beneath the piston ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... coins began to drop, The Kid was firing at them. He didn't waste a bullet. With each quick explosion a piece of gold flew off on a tangent. Br-r-rang, cling! Br-r-rang, ting! There were six coins, and The Kid fired six times. He never missed one! He picked the last one out of the air, ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... in his own phraseology,—still affected in its prose by the classical pedantries caught from Pope by Ramsay,—"the sun entered Virgo, when a charming fillette, who lived next door, overset my trigonometry, and set me off at a tangent from the scene of my studies." We need not detail the story, nor the incessant repetitions of it, which marked and sometimes marred his career. The poet was jilted, went through the usual despairs, and resorted to the not unusual sources of consolation. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... his blood beginning to thrill with the anticipation of battle. "I'll give you half. I'm on duty from Fort Churchill, off on a tangent of my own." He did not take his eyes from the slit in the wall as he told Anderson in a hundred words what had happened since his meeting with Bram Johnson. "And with forty cartridges we'll give 'em a taste ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... high voice of Tharon as El Rey thundered down toward him. Then Buford, riding midway of the sweeping line, fired and the boy dropped his gun, swayed and clung to his saddle horn as his horse bolted and tore off at a tangent to the ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... could about devils and pitchforks and caldrons, he came to a sudden pause—a blank look came into his face, and, looking round the church and seeing the sunlight streaming through the door, his thoughts went off at a tangent. "Now, boys," he said, "if this fine weather continues, I hope you'll be all out in the bog next ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... triangle, A B H express algebraically the value of the sine, co-sine, tangent, and co-tangent of angle A in terms of a, b, and h, they being the altitude, base, and hypothenuse ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... "sacredness" of the number was of much more recent date than the creation of the worlds, and could not therefore account for it. He next tried an ingenious idea, comparing the perpendiculars from different points of a quadrant of a circle on a tangent at its extremity. The greatest of these, the tangent, not being cut by the quadrant, he called the line of the sun, and associated with infinite force. The shortest, being the point at the other end of the quadrant, thus corresponded to the ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... phenomena connected with the administration of electric baths having forced upon me some doubts in this respect, I made very careful experiments, both with and without the aid of the galvanometer (Bradley's Tangent), to satisfy these. Without wearying the reader with details, I will state that the result of my experiments leaves no room for doubt that water at the temperatures stated—and still more so at 98 1/2 deg.—is superior to the human body as a conductor of electricity. I do not mean to be understood ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... at Rosses Point, Cyaptin, till ye loighten up t' fourteen faate. Thin, thr'll be watther f'r yes at th' Quay, but..." (Another tangent to the lee rail.) ... "Ach! What-t's th' matther wit' ye now. Be m' sowl, it's heart-breakin' ye are, wit' yer shoutin' an' that-t! What-t? Salt baafe an' a few bisskits! No! Oi will natt!! Ast 'im yersilf ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... arithmetic. After all, the imagination ought not to be startled any more at so many orders of infinites than at the so well-known proposition, viz., that curve lines may always be made to pass between a circle and a tangent; or at that other, namely, that matter is divisible in infinitum. These two truths have been demonstrated many years, and are no less incomprehensible than the things we ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... connection. The laws of the universe forbade it. Napoleon Bonaparte de Neville lost his hold as she crashed into the sorghum patch. George Washington Marlborough tripped over an irrigation ditch, and soared away at a tangent, like a sputtering remnant of a burnt-out world. Don Juan San Diego went the wrong side of a mulberry tree, and the lasso parted with a snap. He never stopped until his momentum carried him through the slats of ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... raised the Idiot to his feet, and brought him, maundering, to a room where no light was. He kneeled before him with a lighted torch of bear's fat and the tendons of the deer, and waving it gently to and fro, sang the ancient rune, until the eye of the Idiot, following the torch at a tangent as it waved, suddenly became fixed upon the flame, when it ceased to move. And the words of the chant ran through Grah's ears, and pierced to the remote parts of his being; and a sickening trouble ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... father from the stern of the motor boat," continued Polly Jarley. "It may have been a big root of the same tree, under water, that had proved the finish of the boat. For nobody ever saw the Bright Eyes again. She just ran off at a tangent, into the middle of the lake, somewhere, we suppose, ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... this fact led almost immediately to the Method of Tangents of Fermat and Barrow; and this again is the stepping-stone to the Differential Calculus,—itself a particular application of that instrument. Dr. Barrow regarded the tangent as merely the prolongation of any one of these infinitely small sides, and demonstrated the relations of these sides to the curve and its ordinates. His work, entitled "Lectiones Geometricae," appeared in 1669. To his high ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... a new force, my thoughts flew off at a tangent, and I said to myself, "Bravo, Romeo! You shall find me a ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... any evidence of a current of any kind, until there came on a storm from the northwest that drove a great deal of ice around the great ring; but it seemed to keep rather clear of the great wall of ice and to go off in a tangent toward the south. The lead showed no bottom at one hundred fathoms, even within a quarter of a ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... yet the food cycle is not complete. Some of the processes of decomposition appear to cause a portion of the nitrogen to fly out of the circle at a tangent. In the process of decomposition which is going on through the agency of micro-organisms, a considerable part of the nitrogen is dissipated into the air in the form of free nitrogen. When a bit of meat decays, part of the meat is, indeed, converted into ammonia ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... formula for centripetal acceleration - and the concept of such acceleration itself - is the result of splitting circular movement into two rectilinear movements, one in the direction of the tangent, the other in the direction of the radius, and of regarding it - by a mode of reasoning typical of spectator-thinking - as composed of the two. This procedure, however, useful as it may be for the purpose of calculation, is contrary ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... passing over into red, and then into blue. Similar colors could also be distinguished in the mock-moons. Sometimes there are two large rings, the one outside the other, and then there may be four mock-moons. I have also seen part of a new ring above the usual one, meeting it at a tangent directly above the moon. As is well known, these various ring formations round the sun, as well as round the moon, are produced by the refraction of rays of light by minute ice crystals floating ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... Annie's cheeks. She went off swiftly at a tangent. "Wouldn't it give a fellow a jar? This guy Jim Collins slips it to me confidential that he's off the crooked stuff. Nothin' doin' a-tall in gorilla work. He kids me that he's quit goin' out on the spud and porch-climbin' don't look good to him no more. A four-room flat, a little ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... joyfully obeyed. The pony ran off at a sharp angle to inspect a lamp-post on the opposite side of the way, and then went off at a tangent to another lamp-post on the other side. Having satisfied himself that they were of the same pattern and materials, he came to a stop apparently absorbed in meditation. 'Will you go on, sir,' said the old gentleman, gravely, 'or are we to wait here for you ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... a break of music, and all about them women darting into line, sudden banners floating out, and the white horse prancing in the archway, for all the world as if spun at a tangent off the narrative ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... displeasure as he saw Clarissa serving the first course, but he quickly concealed these emotions and proceeded to plunge into an animated conversation with his guests. Indeed, it assumed the character of a monologue in which he frequently adverted to the weather, to be off on a tangent the next moment on a discussion of finance, politics, sociology, on which subjects, however, he was far from showing the positiveness and fixed opinion that he did while descanting upon the weather. In all the subjects he touched upon, he exhibited a certain ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... iam non domus accipiet te Iaeta, neque uxor Optima, nee dulces occurrent oscula nati Praeripere et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent: Non poteris factis florentibus esse, tuisque Praesidium: misero misere" aiunt, "omnia ademit Una dies ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... age; and her father's small legacy gave her a measure of independence. But how could one set about getting married in the face of open opposition? And—how keep the truth from Roy? Or tone it down, so that he would not go off at a tangent straightaway? ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... longer run, he crawled. Naked, now, and with only a few kifs still clinging to him. And the blind tangent of his flight had taken him well out of the path ...
— Happy Ending • Fredric Brown
... sharp crescent of Venus in the pale sky, and about half the apparent size of the moon. The object-glass of the instrument was divided into squares, and she passed rapidly across the field of the telescope, sailing, as it were, in ether; by the slightest motion of a tangent-screw of great length, we were able to bring her back as often as we liked, to the centre of the field. This mechanical process might, however, have been rendered unnecessary, had the machinery attached to the instrument been wound up; for when this is the case, ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... Shakespeareville, Kansas. It seemed that the Shakespeareville Chamber of Commerce had recently held an enthusiastic debate as to whether the American soldiers should be known as "Sammies" or "Battling Christians." The thought gagged him. He dropped the newspaper, yawned, and let his mind drift off at a tangent. He wondered why Gloria had been late. It seemed so long ago already—he had a pang of illusive loneliness. He tried to imagine from what angle she would regard her new position, what place in her considerations he would continue to ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... block or two from Charles, Biddle Street performs a jog, dashing off at a tangent from its former course, while Chase Street not only jogs and turns at the corresponding intersection, but does so again, where, at the next corner, it meets at once with Park Avenue and Berkeley Street. After this it runs but a short way and dies, as though ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... I knew that I should be reproached with indolence and even cowardice. I knew that I should be supposed to be one of those consistently impracticable people who insist on going off at a tangent when the straight course lies before them. That I should be relegated to the class of persons who have failed in life through some deep-seated defect of will. The worst of a serious decision of the kind is that, whichever step one takes, one is sure to be blamed. ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... adjusted to the upper surface of the mercury in the tube; for this purpose its back and front edges should be made to coincide, that is, the eye should be placed in exactly the same plane which passes through the edges; they should then be brought carefully down until they form a tangent with the curve produced by the convex surface of the mercury and the light is just excluded from between them and the point of contact. It is desirable in making this adjustment that the eye should be assisted by a magnifying-glass. The reading ...
— The Hurricane Guide - Being An Attempt To Connect The Rotary Gale Or Revolving - Storm With Atmospheric Waves. • William Radcliff Birt
... gaining in effectiveness by doing so. It seems that each speaker was allowed only twenty minutes, and rather than run the risk of going off on a tangent, he had written the whole thing out—but he ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... what need is there of flying off at such a tangent?" said Mr. Stillinghast, with a grim smile; "I did not mean that, but what will become of you when ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... mollifying Miss Gallifer. Without explaining who Letty was she insisted on her right to remain. If Miss Gallifer was mystified, it was no more than Miss Towell was, or anyone else who touched the situation at a tangent. To that Barbara was indifferent, while Letty didn't ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
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