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noun
Alternation  n.  
1.
The reciprocal succession of things in time or place; the act of following and being followed by turns; alternate succession, performance, or occurrence; as, the alternation of day and night, cold and heat, summer and winter, hope and fear.
2.
(Math.) Permutation.
3.
The response of the congregation speaking alternately with the minister.
Alternation of generation. See under Generation.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Alternation" Quotes from Famous Books



... &c.] These two lines express the true spirit of chivalry. "Agi" is understood by the commentators whom I have consulted,to mean "the ease procured for others by the exertions of knight-errantry." But surely it signifies the alternation of ease ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... satisfaction that is given by Parismus: and after all, if a man will not take the trouble to finish writing his book (which Orrery never did) why should his readers take the trouble even to finish reading what he has written? The scene is Parthia, with alternation to Syria, and diversions and episodes elsewhere: and though there is a certain amount of fighting, the staple is quite decorous but exceedingly dull love-making, conducted partly in the endless dialogue (or rather automatic monologue) already referred to, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... and the papal party at home had assumed an attitude of suspended insurrection, the fortunes of the Protestants entered into a new phase. The persecution ceased; and those who but lately were carrying fagots in the streets, or hiding for their lives, passed at once by a sudden alternation into the sunshine of political favour. The summer was but a brief one, followed soon by returning winter; but Cromwell and Latimer had together caught the moment as it went by; and before it was over, a work had been done in England which, when it was accomplished once, was accomplished ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... Henry IV. spent a great part of his childhood like any peasant child—towered above us, and the scenery around became considerably more picturesque than any we had passed through that morning. The banks of the river were more shapely, and the alternation of bushes and meadow, with the varying lights and shades on the distant peaks and the nearer slopes, would have seemed more than beautiful, if our wedged positions and the accompanying warmth had not somewhat evaporated our admiration. Though ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough

... encounter some of them as it advances through the unknown. Many singular speculations have been indulged in by astronomers concerning the possible effects upon the earth of the varying state of the space that it traverses. Even the alternation of hot and glacial periods has sometimes been ascribed to this source. When tropical life flourished around the poles, as the remains in the rocks assure us, the needed high temperature may, it has been thought, have been derived from the presence of the earth in a warm region ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss

... cheeks, as if she would tear them with scratches, rocked herself forwards and backwards and from side to side, the tears poured down her brown cheeks, she screamed and blubbered and whimpered in quick alternation, and in a few moments tumbled into the corner of a big chair, a sobbing and convulsed ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford

... sex at another. But Mr Huxley shews, by observation and experiment on Salpa and Pyrosoma, that each has independent powers of reproduction, and his facts are conclusive against the theory of 'alternation of generations.' The two generations, as now appears, are not of distinct individuals, but are both required to make a complete individual. This paper will be sure to provoke criticism, and perhaps excite further research. Mr Hopkins has been enlightening the Geological Society 'On the Causes of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various

... flagged and there was a lull in the storm of sound made by human voices and the clatter of arms. Then the men on the walls would look with strained attention on the cavalry battle in the plain, would follow the fortunes of the king with every alternation of joy or fear, and shout advice or exhortation as though their voices could reach their distant friends.[1041] Marius, who conducted the assault at that portion of the wall which commanded this absorbing view, formed the idea of encouraging this distraction of attention by a feint ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... waving trees and moving animals—comes the ability of passing from one environment to another, on the other side of the globe perhaps, in the twinkling of an eye. The transitions of the Elizabethan stage sink into insignificance beside the possibilities of the moving-picture screen. Such an alternation as is now common in the film play, where two characters, talking to each other over the telephone, are seen in quick succession, would be impossible on the ordinary stage. The Elizabethan auditor, if his imagination were vivid and ready, ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... alternation of light and shadow there is in this Arctic land. When I went up to the crow's-nest next morning (September 9th) I saw that the ice to the north had loosened from the land, and I could trace a channel which might lead us northward into open water. I at once gave the order to get up ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... German literature—such as Goethe's Faust. In large institutions both courses can probably be given side by side, the students taking their choice according to their preference, but in most colleges an alternation of two courses of this kind ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... Alternation. The change in direction of a current. The number of such changes is expressed as number of alternations; thus a current may have a frequency of 500 ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone

... the bay and anchored half a mile within the North-East point. This took us till the afternoon to reach, in consequence of our having a light land breeze until 3 P.M. when it became steady from North-East, drawing round to south, after sunset, and veering to South-West again in the morning. This alternation of land and seabreezes continued during our stay, for three ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes

... school was a room for the young at the Hive, where mothers could leave their children in the care of the Nursery Group whilst they were engaged in industrial work, or as a kindly relief to themselves when fatigued by the care of them; for a primary doctrine was "alternation of employments." It was believed that more and better work could be done by not being confined to one employment all the day of labor; that it was better for the mental as well as the physical system to have a change—in ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman

... succession. Perhaps the rapidity with which we were crossing them brought them nearer to each other. To me there appeared no level ground between these land-billows. Up hill and down hill in quick alternation was the manner of our progress—a severe trial upon the girths—a hard killing gallop for my poor horse. But life and death were upon the issue, and the spur must be plied ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... alternation of comma-separated alternatives; thus, 'foo{baz,qux}' would be read as ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... diabolical resentment and vengeance against the baronet, and yet it was impossible to get out of him the means by which he proposed to visit them upon him. On leaving Father M'Mahon, therefore, he experienced a state of alternation between a resolution to make disclosures and a determination to be silent and work out his own plans. He also feared death, it is true: but this was only when those rare visitations of conscience occurred that were awakened by superstition, instead of an enlightened and Christian sense of religion. ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... to mere versification, while metre, or rhythm, in general, is the real question at issue;" that, "Versification is not the art, but the act'—of making verses;" that, "A correspondence in the length of lines is by no means essential;" that "Harmony" produced "by the regular alternation of syllables differing in quantity," does not include "melody;" that "A regular alternation, as described, forms no part of the principle of metre:" that "There is no necessity of any regularity in the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... them the whole solid frame presents a complicated system of connected beams. The Madrepores have also twelve tentacles, but they have a more definite character than those of the Porites, on account of their regular alternation in six smaller and six larger ones; in these also the transverse floors are perfect, but exceedingly delicate. Another remarkable feature among the Madrepores consists in the prominence of one of the Polyps ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various

... not come, and then she had declined to make any further attempt. Indeed, a new idea had struck her. Brooke Burgess, her guest, should sit at one end of the table, and Mr. Gibson, the clergyman, at the other. In this way the proper alternation would be effected. When Martha heard this, Martha quite understood the extent of the good fortune that was in store for Dorothy. If Mr. Gibson was to be welcomed in that way, it could only be in preparation of his becoming one ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... to be undulatory, and our journey, like the journey of life, seemed to be a pretty regular alternation of up hill and down, and here and there it was diversified with copses and woods; the majestic Thames every now and then, like a little forest of masts, rising to our view, and anon losing itself among the delightful ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz

... jocund personal remarks in his Terpsichorean commands: "Gents, forward to the centre—back—swing: the lady ye love the best." Then in alternation, "Ladies, forward to the centre—back——" and as the mountain damsels teetered in expectation of the usual supplement of this mandate he called out in apparent expostulation, "Don't swing him, ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... selfishness which desires to be left undisturbed: it is simply composure of mind in view of changes over which we have no control. While we vividly experience joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure—inwoven as these are with the change of seasons, of the weather, &c.—with the alternation of life and death, of happiness and misery, we ought nevertheless to harden ourselves against them so that at the same time in our consciousness of the supreme worth of the mind we shall build up the inaccessible stronghold of Freedom in ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz

... no sooner left behind me the Norway coast than I began to meet the ships, the ships—ship after ship; and by the time I entered the zone of the ordinary alternation of sunny day and sunless night, I was moving through the midst of an incredible number of craft, a mighty ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... wives and children sat on the dark oaken benches, but the husbands usually chose the distinctive dignity of a stall under one of the twelve apostles, where, when the alternation of prayers and responses had given place to the agreeable monotony of the sermon, Paterfamilias might be seen or heard sinking into a pleasant doze, from which he infallibly woke up at the sound of the concluding doxology. And then they made their way back again through the miry ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot

... had, in 1780, shown that the limestone strata of Italy had accumulated in a deep sea, at least far from land, and he was the first to observe the alternation of marine and fresh-water strata in the ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... secured a little privacy by the adoption of strange and sometimes cruel social customs, and more has been done since then by systems of 'studies' and 'houses.' Experience seems, however, to show that during childhood a day school with its alternation of home, class-room, and playing field, is better suited than a boarding-school to the facts of ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas

... reflecting mind. The Eternal Sovereign arranges a solar or an astral system, by dispositions imparted primordially to matter; he causes, by the same means, vast oceans to join and continents to rise, and all the grand meteoric agencies to proceed in ceaseless alternation, so as to fit the earth for a residence of organic beings. But when, in the course of these operations, fuci and corals are to be, for the first time, placed in these oceans, a change in his plan of administration is required. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... well known domain, the thought meets me: what would be the effect on us men of such a periodical alternation between nothing and abundance as these woods undergo? Perhaps in the endless variety of worlds there may be one in which that is among the means whereby its dwellers are saved from self and lifted into life; a world in which ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... beginning with igneous rocks and passing through the stages of weathering, sedimentation, cementation, etc., each of which stages has been responsible for certain mineralogical, chemical, and textural features now characterizing the rock. The alternation of constructive and destructive changes of the metamorphic cycle, and the repetitions of the cycle itself, periodically work over the earth materials into new forms. Usually the cycles are not complete, in the sense that they seldom bring the rock back to exactly the same condition ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith

... of using a single loop, we may make four loops (Fig. 107), which at the same speed as we had in the case of the single loop, will give four alternations, instead of one, and still further, to increase the periods of alternation, we may use the four loops and two magnets, as in Fig. 108. By having a sufficient number of loops and of magnets, there may be 40, 50, 60, 80, 100 or 120 such alternating periods in each second. Time, therefore, is an element in the operation of ...
— Electricity for Boys • J. S. Zerbe

... events by the mind, and the correct inferences as to the relations between them, constitute knowledge, and it is chiefly by knowledge that men have become better able to live well on earth. Therefore the alternation between experience or observation and the intellectual processes by which the sense, sequence, interdependence, and rational consequences of facts are ascertained, is undoubtedly the most important process for winning increased power to live ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... communicate his ecstasy and persuade other men to share it—a constant juxtaposition of concrete and metaphysical language; swift alternations between the most intensely anthropomorphic, the most subtly philosophical, ways of apprehending man's communion with the Divine. The need for this alternation, and its entire naturalness for the mind which employs it, is rooted in his concept, or vision, of the Nature of God; and unless we make some attempt to grasp this, we shall not go far in ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)

... after another passed without event and with scarcely even the faintest sound. Then, all at once, a little touch of breeze sprang up and sighed overhead through the tree tops, and from that time on, there was an alternation of utter silence with the ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston

... only an alternation of physical and mental amusements, but some instruction to be passively received. They delight in stories, and a wise teacher can make this subservient to the highest uses by reading beautiful creations of the imagination. Not only such household-stories as "Sanford and Merton," Mrs. Farrar's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various

... Lucien Levy-Coeur about Christophe. He had passed through many crises of despair before he had been able to strike a compromise between himself and the rest of the world. In his youth and budding manhood, when his nerves were not hopelessly out of order, he lived in a perpetual alternation of periods of exaltation and periods of depression which came and went with horrible suddenness. Just when he was feeling most at his ease and even happy he was very certain that sorrow was lying in wait for him. And suddenly it would lay him low without giving ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... or alternation of crops (p. 114). Some of the diseases remain in the soil and attack the plant year after year. Whenever any crop shows signs of root disease, or soil disease, it is particularly important that another crop be grown on ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey

... but a picture and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. It is not that the soul puts forth friends, as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf?[293] The law of nature is alternation forevermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a season, that it may exalt its conversation ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... system on the inutility of repose, or place perfection in the vacuity of rest, when every thing that truly exists, exists in motion; when every real information which we have is derived from a change; and when every excess in nature is compensated, not by rest, but by alternation. ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton

... fell to Tayoga's deadly arrow, and on the third day as they were concealed in dense forest they saw smoke on a high hill, rising in rings, as if a blanket were passed rapidly over a fire and back again in a steady alternation. ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler

... gazing up and down on each other, Iollan staring down into sweet grey wells that peeped and flickered under thin brows, and Uct Dealv looking up into great black ones that went dreamy and went hot in endless alternation. ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens

... with which the scenes are altered allows us not only to hurry on to ever new spots, but to be at the same time in two or three places. The scenes become intertwined. We see the soldier on the battlefield, and his beloved one at home, in such steady alternation that we are simultaneously here and there. We see the man speaking into the telephone in New York and at the same time the woman who receives his message in Washington. It is no difficulty at all for the photoplay to have the two alternate a score of times in the few minutes of the ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg

... the moorland waste bewitching in its alternation of softly checkered gray and shade, where acres of feathery grasses flowed in wind-blown furrows; where in the purple obscurity of hollows the strange and aged little forests grew restless and full of echoes; ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers

... almost close enough now and he was steeling himself to shoot and I remember wondering for a split second what his damn gun did to you, and then me and the girl had started the alternation routine. I'd stop dead, as if completely cowed by the threat of his weapon, and as he took note of it she'd go in a little further, and as his gaze shifted to her she'd stop dead and I'd go in another foot ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... the clear-cut horizon; no variety of landscape more pronounced than the alternations of glowing sunlight and snowy moonlight and twinkling starlight, all streaming through diaphanous air. No contrast more admirable than the alternation of iron upland whereupon hardly a blade of grass may grow and the Wady with its double avenue of leek-green tamarisks, hedging now a furious rain-torrent then a ribbon of purest sand, or the purple-gray shadow rising majestic in the Orient to face the mysterious Zodiacal Light, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... turn our attention to some examples of the remarkable alternation of winged and wingless generations in the yearly life-cycle of the same species, mentioned at the end of the last chapter. Cockroaches and grasshoppers belong to an order of insects, the Orthoptera[5], characterised by firm forewings ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter

... reveal new facts to us, they can only tell us, provided we actually know a fact belonging to a given class, to what other class facts which we shall know bye and bye will belong. Thus, once we have classified facts as belonging to two classes, daylight and darkness, and have observed the invariable alternation of facts belonging to these classes, then, whenever we know directly facts which can be classed as daylight, we can predict, according to our law of the alternation of the two classes, that bye and bye these facts will give place to others which can be classed as ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen

... no longer experimenting with the W-ray! He was using a new type of ray altogether, the next series, the psenium electron emanation discovered only a few years before, which had the peculiar property of non-alternation, even when the psenium electron changed its orbit around the central ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... Schiller that he was grievously ill. In eight or ten days he recovered, and reappeared at his accustomed station. I complained to him bitterly, but he consoled me. A few months passed in this strange alternation of suffering; sometimes it was he, at others I, who was unable even ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico

... stern rebuke of Bajazet himself, who as the monk of St. Denis admits was much better than his Christian foes. The same writer, moralizing over the disaster at Agincourt, attributes it to the general corruption of the nation. Sexual relations, he says, were an alternation of disorderly lust and of incest; commerce was nought but fraud and treachery; avarice withheld from the Church her tithes, and ordinary conversation was a succession of blasphemies. The Church, set up by God as a model and protector of the people, was false to all ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... himself away from the conventional and commonplace. By beating out the substance of Pindar very thin, he contrived a kind of balloon which, tumid with gas, did certainly mount a little, into the clouds, if not above them, though sure to come suddenly down with a bump. His odes, indeed, are an alternation of upward jerks and concussions, and smack more of Chapelain than of the Theban, but his prose is very agreeable,—Montaigne and water, perhaps, but with some flavor of the Gascon wine left. The strophe of his ode to Dr. Scarborough, in which he compares his surgical friend, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... die was doubtless true. Like every other person involved in irretrievable sufferings and sorrows, he wanted to live, and he wanted to die. The two contradictory desires shared dominion in his heart, sometimes struggling together in a tumultuous conflict, and sometimes reigning in alternation, in calms more terrible, in fact, than the tempests which preceded and ...
— Queen Elizabeth - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... panels, easily distinguished by the arrangement of the brickwork. In one division the bedding of the bricks is strictly horizontal; in the next it is slightly concave, and forms a very flat reversed arch, of which the extrados rests upon the ground. The alternation of these two methods is regularly repeated. The object of this arrangement is obscure; but it is said that buildings thus constructed are especially fitted to resist earthquake shocks. However this may be, the fortress is extremely ancient, for in the Fifth Dynasty, the nobles of Abydos ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero

... grown fresh again and new As Spring and to the touch is not more cool Than it is warm to the gaze; and now I might As happy be as earth is beautiful, Were I some other or with earth could turn In alternation of violet and rose, Harebell and snowdrop, at their season due, And gorse that has no time not to be gay. But if this be not happiness,—who knows? Some day I shall think this a happy day, And this mood by the name of melancholy ...
— Poems • Edward Thomas

... moistness and firmness. Ordinarily black loam soils, sandy loam soils, sandy soils, humus soils and the volcanic ash soils of the West are made sufficiently fine without great labor. Clay soils may call for the free use of the harrow and roller used in some sort of alternation before they are sufficiently pulverized. Excessive fineness in pulverization of these soils is also to be guarded against in rainy climates, lest they run together, but this condition is present far less frequently than ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw

... much to be cheerful for herself. In his absence she feigned free and open talks with him, and explained everything, and experienced a kind of ghostly comfort in his imagined approval and forgiveness, but in his presence, nothing really happened except the alternation of her kindness and unkindness, in which she was too ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... hours played in flashes and forked darts, and moved frightfully between the clouds and the earth, with a most surprising action, and the earth was felt to tremble. The moment this singular alternation of the lightning passing to and fro ceased, the hurricane burst forth with a violence which exceeded all that had yet been experienced. The winds blowing with appalling velocity, changed their course frequently and almost instantaneously, ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers

... like, make it part of their qualification for the scientific degree by all means—that is its proper place; but to require that gentlemen whose whole faculties should be bent upon the acquirement of a real knowledge of human physiology should worry themselves with getting up hearsay about the alternation of generations in the Salpae is really monstrous. I cannot characterize it in any other way. And having sacrificed my own pursuit, I am sure I may sacrifice other people's; and I make this remark with all the more willingness because I discovered, ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... Admiral, which obtained for him no redress. In the midst of these complaints the Admiral wished to introduce some ladies (who had arrived in the Doric) to Napoleon; but he declined, not approving this alternation of affronts and civilities." He, however, consented, at the request of their Colonel, to receive the officers of the 53d Regiment. After this officer took his leave. Napoleon prolonged his walk in the ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... given time it has found expression. In other words, an indefinite number of scientific truths are compatible with a single practical truth. An instance of this is the consistency with my expectation of the alternation of day and night, of either the Ptolemaic or Copernican formulation of the solar system. Now expectation that the sun will rise to-morrow is an excellent analogue of my religious belief. Celestial mechanics is as relevant to the one as metaphysics to the other. ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... "about the constancy of the relative proportion of the sexes, and wondering whether Buddhist doctrine furnishes an explanation. For it seems to me that, under ordinary conditions of karma, human rebirth would necessarily proceed by a regular alternation." ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn

... to make, he takes two sunbeams and, placing them side by side, is borne off in a twinkling whither he wills. Red is the color proper to sunlight in their symbolism, but the red and blue together represent sunbeams in the morning and evening skies when they show an alternation of blue and red. It will be seen later that the sunbeam shafts, the halo, and the rainbow are represented by the same colors. In form, however, the halo is circular, and the rainbow is distinguished by its curvature, and it is usually anthropomorphic, while the ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews

... is to be multiplied into millions. "The beautiful is never plentiful." On the whole, I say to myself, that our conditions in America are not easier or less expensive than the European. For the poor scholar everywhere must be compromise or alternation, and, after many remorses, the consoling himself that there has been pecuniary honesty, and that things might have been worse. But no; we must think much better things than these. Let Lazarus believe that Heaven ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... feeble, fluctuating candlelight, the latter seemed endowed with some peculiar and emphatically weird life—their glistening, polished surfaces threw a dozen and one fantastic but oddly human shadows on the boards, as at the same time they appeared in bewildering alternation to increase ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell

... her only handsome feature; and she had a great abundance of crisp dark hair, finely frizzled, which was always braided in a manner that suggested some Southern or Eastern, some remotely foreign, woman. She had a large collection of ear-rings, and wore them in alternation; and they seemed to give a point to her Oriental or exotic aspect. A compliment had once been paid her, which, being repeated to her, gave her greater pleasure than anything she had ever heard. "A pretty woman?" some one ...
— The Europeans • Henry James

... and I found it immediately under the bush, freshly broken, between two other roses which remained on the branch, and I returned home then, with a much disturbed mind; for I am certain now, as certain as I am of the alternation of day and night, that there exists close to me an invisible being that lives on milk and on water, which can touch objects, take them and change their places; which is, consequently, endowed with a material nature, although it is impossible to our senses, and ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various

... the unavoidable few seconds' wait necessary to the changing of the scenery. But, even if his playlet is so big and dramatic that it admits of a change of scenes, he must conform it to the obvious vaudeville necessity of scenic alternation. [2] With this scenic "rule" the matter of unity of place in the playlet turns to the question of a playwright's art, which ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page

... end as well as he might. But what he gained in purse, he lost in honour, for such agricultural and commercial negotiations were very ill looked upon by his brother lairds, who minded nothing but cock-fighting, hunting, coursing, and horse-racing, with now and then the alternation of a desperate duel. The occupations which he followed encroached, in their opinion, upon the article of Ellangowan's gentry, and he found it necessary gradually to estrange himself from their society, and sink into what was then a very ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... and he's right here in the thick of this battle, leading his own Mississippi regiment. His horse was killed under him early this morning, and he's fought all day on foot, swearing in the strange and melodious fashion that you know. It's hop! swear! hop! swear! in beautiful alternation!" ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler

... slope of 3 or 4 feet which led down the surface of the ice, and then stood to watch the effect of the current on the flame. The experiment proved that the currents alternated, and, as I fancied, regularly; and in order to determine, if possible, the law of this alternation, I observed with my watch the exact duration of each current. For twenty-two seconds the flame of the bougie was blown away from the entrance, so strongly as to assume a horizontal position, and almost to leave ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne

... these into more or less compact beds of rock (the mica-schist formation), producing the first crust or solid envelope of the globe. Upon this, other stratified rocks, composed sometimes of a mixture, sometimes of an alternation of precipitations, sediments, and occasionally of conglomerates, were by degrees deposited, giving ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... when the marvellous has become commonplace, that property of right-angled triangles... already discussed... comes to the mind as a remarkable and notable fact: it must have seemed a stupendous marvel to its discoverer, to whom, it appears, the regular alternation of the odd and even numbers, a fact so obvious to us that we are inclined to attach no importance to it, seemed, itself, to be something wonderful. Here in Geometry and Arithmetic, here was order and harmony unsurpassed and unsurpassable. What wonder then that Pythagoras ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove

... more immediate and practical end in view. A primeval forest is a great sponge which absorbs and distills the rain water. And when it is destroyed the result is apt to be an alternation of flood and drought. Forest fires ultimately make the land a desert, and are a detriment to all that portion of the State tributary to the streams through the woods where they occur. Every effort should be made to minimize their destructive ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... the defile, for advanced or rear-guard movements, threes alone afford the power to occupy the entire width of a lane, road, street, or defile, with the perfect facility of constant and instant alternation of retiring and advancing. Without some central wheel, columns or divisions occupying the width of a road or street, can not retire; or when retiring, cannot show front to the enemy. With reining back and passing (and they are easily acquired) ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood

... fables alone seem originally marked out for tragedy: such, for example, as the long-continued alternation of crime, revenge, and curses, which we witness in the house of Atreus. When we examine the names of the pieces which are lost, we have great difficulty in conceiving how the mythological fables (such, at least, as they are known to us,) could have furnished ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... it has fifty words, in each fifty blessings.' (Q.) 'What verse hath in it nine signs [or wonders]?' (A.) 'That in which quoth God the Most High, "Verily, in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of night and day and the ship that runneth in the sea with what profiteth mankind and in what God sendeth down from heaven of water and quickeneth therewith the earth, after its dearth, and spreadeth abroad therein all manner cattle, and the shifting ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous

... raise up another Philip."[2] Or this passage: "Shall we sail against Macedon? And where, asks one, shall we effect a landing? The war itself will show us where Philip's weak places lie."[2] Now if this had been put baldly it would have lost greatly in force. As we see it, it is full of the quick alternation of question and answer. The orator replies to himself as though he were meeting another man's objections. And this figure not only raises the tone of his words but ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus

... be incorporated into a story, uniting narrative and dialogue so as to be more attractive to the young. John Bunyan was the first to adopt this style, and his inimitable Pilgrim's Progress charms the young reader, not only by its graphic imagery, but also by its alternation of narrative and dialogue. Since his day, others have adopted a similar style, particularly in works of fiction, with success. Why may not truth appear in such a dress as successfully as fiction? Why may not actual lives be presented ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer

... founded upon it the requirement that its possessors should be holy;—but it would be the soft, sensual, idolatrous doctrine which flattered human corruption, because from that it had its origin. Thus the Jehovah of the Israelites became in reality what they sometimes called Him by way of alternation—a Baal. And the matter was now much more dangerous than if they had deserted Him [Pg 178] externally also, inasmuch as they now continued to trust in His covenant and promises, and to boast of their external services,—thus strengthening themselves ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg

... sometimes absurd contentions for the privileges of rank—as when he demanded precedence of the English ambassador in an interview with the Sultan, and, on its refusal, could only be pacified by the assurances of the Austrian internuncio. In converse with indifferent persons he displayed a curious alternation of frankness and hauteur, and indulged a habit of letting people up and down, by which he frequently gave offence. More interesting are narratives of the suggestion of some of his verses, as the slave-market in Don Juan, and the spectacle of the dead criminal tossed ...
— Byron • John Nichol

... the dusk came notes from another pair of feathered lovers, "chukwa, chukwi," "chukwa, chukwi," in a sort of mournful alternation. They were the branning ducks, he on one side, she on the other side of the stream, as is their habit, whence they are fabled to be a pair of lovers who must yearn unavailingly through the long nights from opposite banks ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... born in the Indias, although they were few, had obtained a bull from his Holiness, so that between them and the fathers from Castilla there should be alternation [in the celebration of Corpus Christi]. Its execution was committed to the archdean of Manila, Alonso Garcia, a creole, who was much inclined to it. Accordingly he proceeded without allowing any appeal or ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various

... next Clelia made herself listlessly busy, and Sabrina was away, nursing a child who was sick of a fever. Clelia was pondering now on her own hurt, now on the story her friend had told her. It seemed like a soothing alternation of grief, sometimes in the pitiless sun-glare of her own loss, and again walking in a darkened yet fragrant valley where the other woman had lived for many years. But on an evening of the third week, she had news that sent her speeding through the Half-Mile ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown

... married women of senior status on our staff have been selected to sit in alternation on the Standard Recordings Purchasing Committee and the Features Purchasing Committee. They will not be able to hear with every auditioning officer all episodes of features or all single recordings of songs. To duplicate auditioning staff for this purpose would require the full-time ...
— Report of the Juvenile Delinquency Committee • Ronald Macmillan Algie

... upon the perception of a certain constant relation among a series of objects to which the subject is required to attend and respond. Such relations are, for example, secondness from one end of the group, middleness, simple alternation of ends, or progressive movement by constant steps from one end of a group to ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes

... shade of pink, crossed the left shoulder and was caught at the waist in a large rose bow, ambassadorial style. A double necklace of diamonds, one bearing a great pendant of emeralds, and the other an alternation of emeralds and diamonds, encircled her short, thick neck. A diamond coronet fitted well around her wonderful amber-colored wig—for, true to her determination, she had anticipated the now passee Mrs. Ames and had boldly launched the innovation ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... superior through the richness of the same. Thus we see that Bruno anticipates the doctrine, proclaimed later by Goethe and by Darwin, of the transformation of species and of the organic unity of the animal world; and this alternation from segregation to aggregation, which we call death and life, is no other than ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno

... of doom approached; and now, as it came nearer and nearer, a painful and sickening alternation of incredulity and horror surged through every Irish heart. Meanwhile, the Press of England, on both sides of the Channel, kept up a ceaseless cry for blood. The government were told that to let ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown

... that keep the human ship moving; and the pressure of the judicious pilot's hand upon the tiller is a relatively insignificant energy. But the affections, passions, and interests are shifting, successive, and distraught; they blow in alternation while the pilot's hand is steadfast. He knows the compass, and, with all the leeways he is obliged to tack toward, he always makes some headway. A small force, if it never lets up, will accumulate effects more ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... forms to more and more complex developments. How this law operates, what influences determine the development of the eggs and germs, and impel them to assume constantly new forms, I naturally cannot pretend to say; but I can at least adduce the great analogy of the alternation of generations. If a 'Bipinnaria', a 'Brachialaria', a 'Pluteus', is competent to produce the Echinoderm, which is so widely different from it; if a hydroid polype can produce the higher Medusa; if the vermiform Trematode 'nurse' ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley

... fairly enough represented in his portraits; but no portrait that I have seen gives any idea of his expression. There were so many things in it, and they chased each other in and out of his face. I have seen people who were grave and gay in quick alternation; but Mark Ambient was grave and gay at one and the same moment. There were other strange oppositions and contradictions in his slightly faded and fatigued countenance. He seemed both young and old, both anxious and indifferent. He had evidently ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James

... of this poem is open to the obvious objection that it is not a monologue; but a dialogue or alternation of monologues, in which the second speaker, Balaustion (who is also the narrator), is, for the time being, as real as the first. Its conception is, however, expressed in the first title; and the arguments and descriptions which Balaustion supplies only contribute to the vividness with which Aristophanes ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... seen together at a little distance, give the desired effect. Backgrounds can be covered over with some small geometrical pattern carried out in this way, such as is shown in fig. 24, perhaps using in alternation bright blue and black instead of a single medium tint of blue all over. At a slight distance the tone may be the same in either case, but this method gives a pleasantly varied and refined effect, which avoids muddiness, and shows up the pattern better. This same method is used for expressing form ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie

... stooped and kissed the plain little face, cutting short the narrative. It was strange to note how these two of diverse ages—between whom for the length of their acquaintance no dispute of mastery had arisen—now suddenly and in quick alternation, out of pure love, asserted will against will. "You shall tell me to-morrow. (I always knew that your meekness and weakness were only pretence.) But ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... albeit they see So great a bulk of lands to bulge and break! And lest the winds blew back again, no force Could rein things in nor hold from sure career On to disaster. But now because those winds Blow back and forth in alternation strong, And, so to say, rallying charge again, And then repulsed retreat, on this account Earth oftener threatens than she brings to pass Collapses dire. For to one side she leans, Then back she sways; and after tottering Forward, recovers then ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else ...
— The Yellow Wallpaper • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... Med. and Surg. Jour., Dec. 2, 1915.] after studying 200 cases of heart disease, finds that men are more subject to auricular fibrillation, auricular flutter, heart block and alternation of the pulse than are women. The greater frequency of syphilis in men than in women should be considered in this ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.

... worms, such as the tape worms and the liver-flukes. Some of the most fascinating cases, on account of the beauty of the little creatures concerned, are found amongst the surface-swimming Ascidians of the sea—the glass-like Salps. But our common ferns and mosses also show this same alternation of sexual and sexless generations, the two generations differing greatly in size, form, and structure from one another, whilst the whole story of "flowers" and their structure is bound up with a wonderful "telescoping" or rolling ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... noblest in its past, and all that is potential in its infinite future. The problem evolves into a definite work to be fulfilled, and this work, in turn, leads to another problem involving its demonstration, in actual performance, as well; and by this alternation life progresses,—growing ever larger and deeper and more exalted with its increasing power. In this way man produces his circumstances—creates his outer conditions. His successive environments become the expressions of his inner life and ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting

... drives. He would like her never to go beyond the garden and beyond reach of the columns of his newspaper. She declares that it is only by getting out and afield that she can bear the strain and the constant alternation of enforced work and anxiety. Nature was, indeed, a second nature to her. Charles Kingsley himself could scarcely write ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... the volume of the world's business. However well men may try to balance the trend of affairs so as to produce a normal relation between the output and the needs of humanity, the natural laws do not cease to operate in a rhythmic alternation between the high prices which stimulate production and the glut of goods which overtakes the demand of the ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook

... the farmer's life, owing to the variations of the season," I said, "has always been the alternation of slack work and periods of special exigency, such as planting and harvesting, when the sudden need of a multiplied labor force has necessitated the severest strain of effort for a time. This alternation of too little with too much work, I should suppose, would still continue ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... between the evolution of nerve force at the ganglionic centres and at the cerebro-spinal. For if so the process of digestion would necessitate such absolute torpor of the brain and spinal cord as certainly would be quite incompatible with the exigencies of civilized life. There is a certain alternation between the periods of activity of the two systems, but this varies in infinite gradation; from the digestive torpor of the savage, analogous to that of ruminating animals, up to the unconscious digestion of healthy men of temperate habits and marked intellectual and physical ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... whole, the stability of the British Government, rooted in the main on the traditional belief in the representation of the electorate, would seem to make more surely for national progress and wider political liberty than the alternation of revolution and reaction which France has known in the last hundred ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton

... canyon are composed of friable sandstone, and are usually vertical. Their height is not given with precision. The engraving also shows the outline forms and comparative size of the several structures, with specimens of three varieties of masonry used in the walls. No. 2 shows an alternation of courses of stone from four to six inches thick and from eight to twelve inches long, with intervening courses of several thin stones. The same alternation of courses reappears in the pueblos in ruins on the ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan

... interminable diarrh[oe]a, of a dysenteric character, extreme prostration and a sense of fainting. In such cases the tumultuous action of Apis is mitigated, and the continued use of this drug, rendered possible by giving Apis in alternation with Aconite in water, every ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf

... Principle here indicated is that of the Alternation and Equation between Absorption and Radiation—a taking-in before, ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... thought, that it is as one who peevishly resents the improvements made in mechanical and other departments of knowledge, we dwell upon these particulars. We are quite awake to the fact that the world turns round, and although the consequence is an alternation of light and darkness, are satisfied with the change. With the philosopher Pangloss we would rather believe, "dans ce meilleur des mondes possible," than to entertain any less cheerful opinion. No. It is rather ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... is most offensive in the final syllable of a verse, because there the measure is more impaired than ever, and in this way that alternation of male and female rhymes is suppressed, which produces so flowing and graceful a ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... the means of creating an entire revolution in the science of astronomy, by transferring the centre of our system from the Earth to the Sun. He accounted for the alternation of day and night by the rotation of the Earth on her axis, and for the vicissitudes of the seasons by her revolution round the Sun. He devoted the greater part of his life to meditating on this theory, and adduced several weighty reasons in its support. Copernicus could not help ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard

... of nature and of the atmosphere, conspiring against heaven. The seven-headed Hydra reappears in another form in the Rig-Veda, where the rain cloud is compared to the serpent whom head rests on seven springs. I have Max Mueller's authority for the vigorous alternation of myths in those primitive ages, their extreme mobility, their resolution into vivified physical forms, and the slight consistency of specific types. Aurora and Night are often substituted for ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli

... a crown; but if you examine it in a good light, you will convince yourself that it is not an ordinary crown. It is a heraldic crown—a badge of rank, and it consists of an alternation of four pearls and strawberry leaves, the proper badge of a marquis. We may infer, therefore, that the person whose initials end in B was entitled to ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... fire clay commonly underlies a coal seam, and there occur also beds of iron ore. We give a typical section of a very small portion of the series at a locality in Pennyslvania. Although some of the minor changes are omitted, the section shows the rapid alternation of ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... poisons are among the most astonishing outward manifestations. And as a single example of the many applications of this fruitful discovery, the characteristics of an artificial retina gave a clue to the unexpected discovery of "binocular alternation of vision" in man;—each eye thus supplements its fellow by turns, instead of acting as a continuously yoked pair, as ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose

... Nono, who was usually of a contented spirit, seemed continually displeased with the weather. It was now the last of January. There had for many weeks been a pleasant alternation of sunshine and storm, of cold and a milder temperature. The snow had been continually on the ground, but not deep enough to be in any way an inconvenience; yet Nono was not satisfied. At last the light flakes had fallen slowly for several days, ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker

... White Sulphur—of course went to Narragan-sett Pier. It may be accepted as an incontrovertible truth that a Philadelphian of a certain class who missed coming to the Pier for August would refuse to believe, for that year at least, in the alternation of the four seasons; while an enforced absence from that damply delightful watering-place for two successive summers very probably would lead to a rejection ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier



Words linked to "Alternation" :   alternation of generations, succession, alternate, sequence



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