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Plastic   Listen
noun
plastic  n.  A substance composed predominantly of a synthetic organic high polymer capable of being cast or molded; many varieties of plastic are used to produce articles of commerce (after 1900). (MW10 gives origin of word as 1905)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Plastic" Quotes from Famous Books



... side, immediately beneath a layer of hard, mortar- like substance. The fact that this mortar had completely filled the interstices, and in many cases the skulls also, showed that it had been placed over them while in a plastic state, and as it must soon have hardened and assumed the condition in which it was found, it is evident the skeletons had been buried after ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas

... the ball. The horn is of greyish-blue, and both this and the other parts of the relief are of exceptionally hard plaster, answering to the Italian gesso duro.... Such as it is, this painted relief is the most magnificent monument of Mycenaean plastic art that has come down to our time. The rendering of the bull, for which the artists of the period showed so great a predilection, is full of life and spirit. It combines in a high degree naturalism with grandeur, and it is no exaggeration to say that no figure of ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... of this little world there was no life except for the handful of hardy Martian and Terran prospectors who searched for minerals. Later on, a few rude mining communities sprang up under plastic airdromes, but never came to much. Argon City was ...
— B-12's Moon Glow • Charles A. Stearns

... romantic school, and the works of Herold (1791-1833) show how powerfully the new leaven had acted. But Weber was not the only foreigner at this time who helped to shape the destiny of French music. The spell of Rossini was too potent for the plastic Gauls to resist, and to his influence may be traced the most salient features of the school of opera comique which is best represented by Auber. Herold, though divided between the camps of Germany and Italy, had individuality enough to write music which was independent ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... BRAIN.—The plastic brain of the foetus is prompt to receive all impressions. It retains them, and they become the characteristics of the child and the man. Low spirits, violent passions, irritability, frivolity, in the pregnant woman, leave indelible marks ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... alabaster the flowing curls of Sennacherib's hair, just like a modern coachman's wig, this work of primaeval art was already hoary with the rime of ages. When Memphian artists were busy in the morning twilight of time with the towering coiffure of Ramses or Sesostris, this far more ancient relic of plastic handicraft was lying, already fossil and forgotten, beneath the concreted floor of a cave in the Dordogne. If we were to divide the period for which we possess authentic records of man's abode upon this oblate spheroid into ten epochs—an epoch being a good high-sounding word ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... be urged, granting that organic beings in a state of nature present some varieties,—that their organisation is in some slight degree plastic; granting that many animals and plants have varied greatly under domestication, and that man by his power of selection has gone on accumulating such variations until he has made strongly marked and firmly inherited races; ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin

... effort of concentration, gazing into the thin light of the dying fire and two watery tallow dips. Her coarsely spun dress, coloured with sassafras bark and darker than the yellow hickory stain, drew about her fine shoulders and full, plastic breast. "I'd like it," she repeated; ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... now that the weakness which had made her so plastic a creature in her father's hands had been an injustice to her husband; that it was not herself only she had been bound to consider in this matter. It was one thing to fling away her own chances of happiness; but ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... smashing glass, such songs as never were sung in Carmelo before; an infernal clash of sound which mingled incongruously with the solemn mass of the surf. Chonita's eyes flashed. Even Estenega's face darkened: the traditions planted in plastic youth arose ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... inherited specific craving. With drink inaccessible and other vices offering his lapse may take another line. An aggressive, proud and greatly mortified man may fall upon the same courses. An unwary youth of the plastic type may be taken unawares and pass from free indulgence to excess before he perceives that a habit is ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... got from his family connexions (such as his wife’s sisters) of his appearance in youth. With the single exception of Tennyson, he was the most poetical-looking poet I have ever seen. And circumstances put to the best uses his natural gift of style; for it was in the plastic period of his life that he met the best people on the Continent and in England. I suspect, indeed, that after the plastic period in a man’s life is passed it is not of much use for him to come ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... looked at the smoke still oozing from the den and nodded approvingly. Then he came over and looked at Ed. He clacked his tongue in concern and bent over, touching Ed's wrist. Ed noticed there was now a cast on it, and it didn't hurt so much. There was also a plastic binding around his ribs and shoulder, where the claws of the first fighter had raked as it tossed him. That was a mighty neat trick, because the rags of his shirt were still buttoned around him, and he was pretty sure it had not ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams

... that pattern of doctrine to which ye were delivered," writes the apostle (Rom. 6: 17). The pattern, as the context shows, is Christ dead and risen. If the church truly lives in the Spirit, he will keep her so plastic that she will obey this divine mold as the metal conforms to the die in which it is struck. If she yields to the sway of "the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience," she will be stereotyped according ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon

... a revolutionary plastic which Mr. Swift had developed, possessed amazing insulating properties against both heat and radiation. One of its secret ingredients came from certain plants found only in Far Eastern waters. Mr. Swift hoped ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton

... and the scientific treatment of particular questions. These may be summed up under the phrase, views of the world. The necessity for constant reconsideration of them is from this standpoint at once evident. The Greek view of the world is as classic as the plastic art of Phidias and the epic of Homer; the Christian, as eternally valid as the architecture of the Middle Ages; the modern, as irrefutable as Goethe's poetry and the music of Beethoven. The views of the world which proceed ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... fenced pastures, could have counted the number of their steps—each hoof had stamped its impression in the soft loam as clearly as a steel die-cut in soaked leather. But that was where they had ridden while the land was still plastic from the rain. Farther, wind and sun had dried the ridge-turf to its normal firmness and baked the dobe flats till in places they were of their old flinty hardness. Yet Piegan crossed at a lope places where neither MacRae nor I could glimpse a sign—and when we would come again ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... joined L'Institut Canadien already far advanced in the struggle with the church which was later to result in open warfare. Those two acts revealed his political affiliations and fixed the environment in which he was to move during the plastic twenties. Ten years had passed since a group of ardent young men, infected with the principles and enthusiasm of 1848, of which Papineau returning from exile in Paris was the apostle, had stormed the constituencies of Lower Canada and had appeared in the parliament of Canada as a radical, ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe

... visible in a couple of plaster busts, one of the wife, and another of a neighbor's child; visible also in a couple of water colors of flowers and birds; an ambitious unfinished portrait of his wife in oils: some paint decorations on the pine mantel; and an excellent human ear, done in some plastic material at 16. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... unstaid^, inconstant; unsteady, unstable, unfixed, unsettled; fluctuating &c v.; restless; agitated &c 315; erratic, fickle; irresolute &c 605; capricious &c 608; touch and go; inconsonant, fitful, spasmodic; vibratory; vagrant, wayward; desultory; afloat; alternating; alterable, plastic, mobile; transient &c 111; wavering. Adv. seesaw &c (oscillation) 314; off and on. Phr. a rolling stone gathers no moss; pictra mossa non fa muschis [It]; honores mutant mores [Lat.]; varium et mutabile semper femina ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... no, but you call [it] careening of an old morphewed lady, to make her disembogue again: there 's rough-cast phrase to your plastic. ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster

... fun Paolo loved best of all was when he could get in a corner by himself, with no one to disturb him, and build castles and things out of some abandoned clay or mortar, or wet sand if there was nothing better. The plastic material took strange shapes of beauty under his hands. It was as if life had been somehow breathed into it by his touch, and it ordered itself as none of the other boys could make it. His fingers were tipped with genius, ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... upon this scene as he grew older as the mere expression of a whim of dissolution, but it had made so deep an impression upon him at the time that insensibly the words sank into his plastic mind creating a superstition that refused to yield to reason. The ruby was Helene's birthstone and she was passionately fond of it. She had begged and coaxed to wear this jewel, and upon one occasion had stamped her little foot and sulked throughout the ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... This brief plastic moment is the inventor's opportunity, when the metal will take on any shape for use or beauty. Similarly the fields offer a strategic time to the husbandman. In February the soil refuses the plow, the sun refuses heat, the sky ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis

... one of the greatest trials of Mr. Williams's stay in Canada was the discovery that his little daughter, Eunice, had been taught by her Canadian captors to say prayers in Latin. But this was only the beginning of the sorrow of the good man's life. Eunice was a plastic little creature, and she soon adopted not only the religion, but also the manners and customs of the Indians among whom she had fallen. In fact and feeling she became a daughter of the Indians, and there among them she married, on arriving at womanhood, an Indian by whom ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford

... concerning them, reflexions upon them, reflexions and imaginings such as were natural to the time and at the author's level of culture. What we have here is not falsehood, not misrepresentation of the truth. It is a plastic, naive, and, at the same time, often most profound apprehension of truth, within the area of religious feeling and poetic insight. It results in narrative, legendary, mythical in nature, illustrative often of spiritual truth in a manner more perfect ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... and passions and ambitions and to make a picture of them with your own body—your face and hands and voice—compare our plastic opportunity with the handling of a brush to do it, or a pen or ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... hand, can only be worked "intensively." Nothing requires more care and attention. To begin with, the aspect of the vine garden influences the quality of the wine immensely. Then there is the soil. The best is the plastic clay (nyirok), which appears to be the product of the direct chemical decomposition of volcanic rock. This clay absorbs water but very slowly, and is, in short, the most favourable to the growth of the vine. As the vines are mostly on the steep hillsides, low walls are built to prevent ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse

... would have made but little progress if they had not been trained in the nursery to be hardy, modest, truthful, unselfish, and obedient. This work had effectually been done when alone it can be effectually done, in the earliest childhood, when the sweet and plastic nature may acquire for all that is right and good the powerful aid of habit, before the will and the passions are fully conscious of ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... institutions and the conceited tribe of teachers originated thereby. These very people, using these very means, are fighting against the natural hierarchy in the realm of the intellect, and destroying the roots of all those noble and sublime plastic forces which have their material origin in the unconsciousness of the people, and which fittingly terminate in the procreation of genius and its due guidance and proper training. It is only in the simile of the mother that we can grasp the meaning and the responsibility ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... that to say that stones and fossils were made before or since "the beginning" is contrary to Scripture. Again we find theological substitutes for scientific explanation ripening into phrases more and more hollow—making fossils "sports of Nature," or "mineral concretions," or "creations of plastic force," or "models" made by the Creator before he had fully decided upon the best ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... worked best when the concrete was mixed not quite wet enough to be plastic. If mixed too wet the charge was liable to be "lost," and if dry it would choke the chute. An excess of gravel permitted water to ascend in the tube; and an excess of sand tended to ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette

... not merely "plastic clay" to be moulded, or a "block of marble" to be hewn according to the will of ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux

... and as such are not included in the scheme of this book. In the field of criticism his most important works are the Letters on Literature (1759-1765), which set a new standard of critical plain-speaking; the Laokoon (1766), which undertook to delimit the provinces of poetry and of plastic art; the Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767-1769), which assailed the prestige of the French classical tragedy, and the Anti-Goeze (1778), a notable defense of what is now called the higher criticism. He exerted an immense influence ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas

... minuet of court-life without impinging upon a single Serene or Well-born bunyon. Mirabeau himself would have elbowed his way through furbelows and court-rapiers more forbearingly than Richter. It was not possible to make this genius plastic, in the aesthetic sense which legislated at Weimar. Besides, Goethe could not look at Nature as Richter did. To such a grand observer Richter must have appeared like a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... I leave the management to Mrs. Gummer, she will probably provide a tepid Irish stew with flakes of congealed fat on it, and a plastic suet-pudding or something of that kind, and turn the house upside-down in getting it ready. So I thought of having a cold spread and getting the things in from outside. But I don't want it to look as if I had been ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman

... the day they'd set foot on Hirlaj. Manning was hard and ambitious—a leader of men, Rynason thought sardonically as he surveyed the tables in the dim interior. The floor of the bar was a dirty plastic-metal alloy, already scuffed and in places bloodstained. The tables were of the cheap, light metals so common on the spacer-supplied worlds of ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr

... land, and at great heights above the sea-level, attempts were made to explain this almost unintelligible phenomenon upon the hypothesis that the fossils in question were not really the objects they represented, but were in truth mere lusus naturoe, due to some "plastic virtue latent in the earth." The common-sense of scientific men, however, soon rejected this idea, and it was agreed by universal consent that these bodies really were remains of animals which formerly lived in the sea. When once this was admitted, ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... theorem visibly needs to be modified; Clerk Maxwell's medium no longer figures as an indispensable factotum; "absolute zero" is known to be situated on an asymptote to the curve of cold. Ideas, in short, have all at once become plastic, and none more completely so than those relating to astronomy. The physics of the heavenly bodies, indeed, finds its best opportunities in unlooked-for disclosures; for it deals with transcendental conditions, and what is strange to terrestrial experience may serve ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... clipped: the line of her brows altered. And now, in the light of my tube as it shone upon her earnest face, I could remark other changes. Glutz, the little beauty specialist, was in this secret. With plastic skill he had altered the set ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings

... threatens, when his mutt'ring thunder rolls. Of one already I descried the face, Shoulders, and breast, and of the belly huge Great part, and both arms down along his ribs. All-teeming nature, when her plastic hand Left framing of these monsters, did display Past doubt her wisdom, taking from mad War Such slaves to do his bidding; and if she Repent her not of th' elephant and whale, Who ponders well confesses her therein Wiser ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... the log had been replaced by a stone monument erected to the memory of the Exodus VII, which had been cut apart for its valuable steel. Around the monument was a park, and on three sides of the park was a shining town—not really large enough to be called a city—of plastic and stone, for New Earth had no iron ore, only zinc and a little copper. This was ...
— Where There's Hope • Jerome Bixby

... resulting from these necessarily heroic measures is not so great as might be expected, and can be further diminished by plastic operations, which should be undertaken ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... promoted by building the houses contiguously, and cutting doors of communication between them, or by erecting covered passages. Storehouses, kitchens and other accessory buildings, may be constructed in the same manner, and a degree of convenience gained which would be attempted in vain with a less plastic material. These houses are durable, the wind has little effect on them, and they resist the thaw until the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... procured by the imagination, may, without a paradox, be reckoned among the solid comforts of life. Maria now, imagining that she had found a being of celestial mould—was happy,—nor was she deceived.—He was then plastic in her impassioned hand—and reflected all the sentiments which ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... that though Faraday lived amid such speculations he did not rate them highly, and that he was prepared at any moment to change them or let them go. They spurred him on, but they did not hamper him. His theoretic notions were fluent; and when minds less plastic than his own attempted to render those fluxional images rigid, he rebelled. He warns Phillips moreover, that from first to last, 'he merely threw out as matter for speculation the vague impressions of his mind; for he gave nothing as the result of sufficient ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall

... unmistakable smirk which fatigue had clawed into her plastic young mouth-lines there was certainly nothing special the matter ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... wet hair plastic, and easily obtained the long, even sweep backward from the brow, lacking which no male person, unless bald, fulfilled his definition of a man of the world. But there ensued a period of vehemence and activity caused by a bent collar-button, which went on strike with a desperation that ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington

... goods (plastic, furniture, batteries, textiles, soap, cigarettes, flour), processing agricultural products; oil ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... the dune. Then the thing contracted, pulling itself lower into the sand. At the same instant something thin and sharp lashed out through a fold in the skin, striking at Brion's boot and withdrawing. There was a scratch on the hard plastic, beaded with drops ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison

... himself to whomever the chances of the way offered to him, with a ready sensibility that made its way through every barrier that even English exclusiveness, in whatever rank of life, could set up. The plastic character of Middleton was perhaps a variety of American nature only presenting itself under an individual form; he could throw off the man of our day, and put on a ruder nature, but then it was with a certain fineness, that made this only [a] distinction between it and ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... the crate, its gray plastic material giving in readily to the application of their tools. But when it was opened, they stood aside in ...
— The Delegate from Venus • Henry Slesar

... become too obtrusive I can keep them at a distance by vigorous words of authority and also by a lash of the whip. This perhaps sounds strange to you, dear reader, but you must in truth understand that even in the senseless sphere, thought alone is not efficacious without a certain plastic expression in shape of a visible, audible or palpable form. If this spectral company becomes too much for me I must loudly command them, even shout at them, "begone," and if that does no good I must wish for a whip - which forthwith appears - and give them a sound thrashing. ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... but the greater certainty of conviction and the greater severity of punishment rendered it incomparably more formidable than the ordinary benches of justice. The law of libel grew up in this unwholesome atmosphere, and was moulded by the plastic hands of successive judges and attorneys-general. Prosecutions of this kind, according to Hudson, began to be more frequent from the last years of Elizabeth, when Coke was attorney-general; and it is easy to conjecture ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... ago, and there should then be some evidence to present in relation thereto. There are cases reported in some of the older surgeries wherein an attempt has been made, in the absence of a prepuce, to restore or manufacture one by means of a plastic operation. Vidal describes such an operation,[89] but there is no reason given as to why the operation was undertaken; there is no record of any diseased condition which it was intended either to cure ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... derives the materials for thought as well as those for artistic expression.[15] Imagination evidently has much to do with Aristotle's conception of the nature of poetic. Imitation, then, to him, meant a conscious selection and plastic mastery of the sense impressions stored as images by the image-forming faculty of the author, whose writings are addressed to the imagination of the reader or auditor. Furthermore, Butcher's interpretation of "imitation of nature" ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark

... Landor's prose to his verse, for in the former he does not aim at the dramatic: the passion peculiar to verse is not congenial to his genius. He sympathizes most fully with men and women in repose, when intellect, not the heart, rules. His prose has all the purity of outline and harmony of Greek plastic art. He could not wield the painter's brush, but the great sculptor had yet power to depict the grief of a "Niobe," the agony of the "Laocooen," or the majesty of a "Moses." Like a sculptor, he rarely ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... must be the last living human, wandered contentedly about the city of Denver looking for the coffin he liked best. He settled at last upon a rich mahogany number with platinum trimmings, an Automatic Self-Adjusting Cadaver-contour Innerspring Wearever-Plastic-Covered Mattress with a built in bar. He climbed in, drew himself a generous slug of fine Scotch, giggled as the mattress prodded him exploringly, closed his eyes and sighed in solid comfort. Soft music played ...
— And All the Earth a Grave • Carroll M. Capps (AKA C.C. MacApp)

... that still kept well within constructional expediency—were doubtless covered with a coating of plaster where they occurred inside of the rooms. At Tusayan and Cibola, on the other hand, the tendency has been rather to elaborate the plastic element of the masonry. The nearly universal use of adobe is undoubtedly largely responsible for the more slovenly methods of building now in vogue, as it effectually conceals careless construction. It is not to be expected that walls would be carefully constructed ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various

... was reporter on the staff of a newspaper; he had written a book which, although successful, had created no very intense excitement; he was moreover a young man, and consequently plastic, and fifteen pounds a month would be a small fortune to him; so at least argued the artist and his friends. How little they understood the resolute, self-reliant character of this unknown writer! The result ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... life, which demands first what is necessary and then what is pleasing. It is but a step from the painter's canvas to the weaver's loom, and the pictures which are leaving the easel to-day will show themselves in the patterns that sweep the untidy sidewalks to-morrow. The same plastic power which is showing itself in the triumphs of American sculpture will reach the forms of our household-utensils. The beans of Beverly shall yet be baked in vases that Etruria might have envied, and the clay pipe of the Americanized ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... most easily denationalized. Unwittingly the soul of Christophe had already begun to assimilate from Latin art a clarity, a sobriety, an understanding of the emotions, and even, up to a point, a plastic beauty, which otherwise it never would have had. His David was the proof ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... experimenting with aerial layering in 1945 found one instance of root production on a hickory where the branch was girdled at the base of the one-year wood. This method offers possibilities, especially now that polythene plastic is available for retaining moisture in the moss about the girdle or wound on the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various

... and jolted under her weight, began skidding, then held firm to the two guy ropes remaining. A horde of gray creatures hurled themselves on those lines as a hatchway opened above and a ladder dropped down. The men scurried up the ropes just as the plastic dome of the Control Tower ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse

... supernatural and ethical truth, as we are to-day able to represent the highest relations of our mind to the supernatural and the ethical only in pictures and parables; but the Biblical representations offer us, under this plastic covering, a substance which, in view of the most extensive criticism, of the deepest speculation, and of the most enlightened and practically most successful piety, is still established as the purest, the most correct, and the most fruitful ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid

... fluorine and fluoride gasses, the soil was metallic fluorides, damp with acid rains, and the river was pure hydrofluoric acid. Even the ordinary spacesuit would have been no protection; the glass and rubber and plastic would have disintegrated in a matter of minutes. People came to Niflheim, and worked the mines and uranium refineries and chemical plants, but they did so inside power-driven and contragravity-lifted armor, and they lived on artificial satellites ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr

... was a dead silence until it came to my friend and myself, to each of whom it gave a most rappingly emphatic "Yes." Accordingly, we rose and left the field to those whose greater gullibility rendered them more plastic objects for working upon. Never in my life did I witness greater humbug; and yet so intense was the anxiety of the Boston public to witness the miracle, that during all the day and half the night the spirit was being invoked by the witch, into whose pockets were pouring ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... furnished to him by the hotel management approached him in the drawing room, holding a four-inch-square wafer of white plastic. ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper

... O Holy One, Thy care Wrought us from the plastic clay, Made us Thine own image bear, And for our perfection fair Did Thy Breath ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius

... a plastic cup and rapidly extracted from it a series of others in diminishing sizes. "I wouldnt have thought it to look at you. The dirty deed, I mean—not the exzemical hotdog. O K, Mister Weener—who's this scientific magnate? Whyre you holding him out ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... steward in the absence of the rightful owner. Again, some of our ornamental species, which are fast diminishing, are fitted from their peculiar structure and life habits to occupy places in nature which no other kinds, however plastic they may be, can even partially fill. The wryneck and the woodpecker may be mentioned; and a still better instance is afforded by the small, gem-like kingfisher—the only British bird which can properly be described as gem-like. When the goldfinch goes—and we know that he is going rapidly—other ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson

... proportion among the banished Poles, and the exiles of 1825 included many of Russia's ablest minds. The influence of these exiles upon the intelligence, habits, and manners of the Siberians, has left an indelible mark. As a new civilization is more plastic than an old one, so the society of Northern Asia may have become more polished than that ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox

... effects. But if we have a surface that retains our successive stampings we may change the substance from wax to plaster and from plaster to bronze, and the effects of our labour will survive and be superimposed upon one another. It is the actual plastic form in both mind and body, not any unchanging substance or agent, that is efficacious in perpetuating thought and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... three major shipping routes of the Federation of the Hub crossed within a few hours' flight of one another, the Seventh Star Hotel had floated in space, a great golden sphere, gleaming softly in the void through its translucent shells of battle plastic. The Star had been designed to be much more than a convenient transfer station for travelers and freight; for some years after it was opened to the public, it retained a high rating among the more exotic pleasure ...
— Lion Loose • James H. Schmitz

... chamber directly above the long power tubes of the Ceres. The lock door hung open, making an improvised landing porch fifty feet above the charred ground. Lord paused for a moment at the head of the runged landing ladder. Below him, in the clearing where the ship had come down, he saw the rows of plastic prefabs which his crew had thrown up—laboratories, sleeping quarters, a kitchen, and Ann ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox

... that a third person had been in the house last night; but if so, one of the two men had lied. The bit of candle found by me on the rear stairs had adhered to somebody's shoe while still plastic; if either Burke or Maillot had used these stairs at or about the time of the murder, then both had studiously kept the fact from me. It was possible that one of the two could have made fast the front door behind a fugitive, ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk

... is a broad one, including cooking, nursing, housekeeping, sewing, knitting, crocheting, weaving and basketry; drawing and color work, brush and plastic work; bench work with tools, making useful articles; sports and games, including folk-dancing for girls and ball for boys. The primary and kindergarten classes offer a delightful round of song, story, games, excursions, paper ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... high degree of heat obtained by the combustion of pulverized coal, which is injected into the interior of the kiln. This combustion effects a chemical decomposition of the chalk, and causes it to assume a plastic consistency and to collect together in the form of small spherical balls, which are known as "clinker." Kilns are usually arranged with a slight incline, at the upper end of which the chalk is fed in and gradually works its way down to the interior flame of burning fuel at the other end. When it ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... recurring to it in later life, as he often did, he never spoke of any games or sports in which he had shared, nor, in fact, of any amusements before the time when he began to attend lectures and the theatre. It was the childhood of what we call in America a self-made man—one in which the plastic human material is rudely dealt with by circumstances. His mother taught him his prayers, the schoolmistress his letters, necessity his daily round of duties, and for the rest he was left very much to himself and to that interior Master of whose stress and constraint upon him he grew more intimately ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... instruction, in which astronomical, archaeological, geological, palaeontological, physical, historical, geographical, natural history—in short, all conceivable scientific lectures were delivered, illustrated by the most comprehensive display of plastic representative art. The lectures are written by the most talented specialists, delivered by the most eloquent orators, and placed on the stage by the most skilful engineers and decorators. This kind of theatre is the most frequented; as ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... between life and death, turning an exquisite shade of purple and black as each new coughing fit seized him. This not unusual phenomenon impressed its vivid seal upon the plastic wax of his unfledged memories with extraordinary precision. In after life, for a long while, he was quite unable to gaze at an ordinary muscat grape or a coal-scuttle without either biting his comforter right through or being ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward

... ending in stone), statues of a transition period in the history of plastic art, in which the trunk of the figure was of wood, and the head, hands and feet of marble. The wood was concealed either by gilding or, more commonly, by drapery, and the marble parts alone were exposed. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... various influences which, during the plastic years of boyhood and youth, went to shape the outlook of the future Chief Justice high rank must be accorded his pioneer life. It is not merely that the spirit of the frontier, with its independence of precedent and its audacity of initiative, breathes through ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin

... paint with some cleverness on wood, cloth, parchment, ivory, and plastic material, as well as on gold and silver,—a sort of enamelling. They also retain a fair knowledge of effect in fresco, tracing the outline on the wet ground, and laying on the color in a thin glue; in some of their later work of this kind that I have seen, the idea of the designer ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... was the adjustment of the emigrants of the thirties and forties to Middle Western conditions; the response to the opportunity to create a new type of society in which all gave and all received and no element remained isolated. Society was plastic. In the midst of more or less antagonism between "bowie knife Southerners," "cow-milking Yankee Puritans," "beer-drinking Germans," "wild Irishmen," a process of mutual education, a giving and taking, was at work. In the outcome, in spite of slowness of assimilation where different ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... apparently not sophisticated, as were most of the young women at home whom I knew intimately (as were the Watling twins, for example, with one of whom, Frances, I had had, by the way, rather a lively flirtation the spring before); she seemed refreshingly original, impressionable and plastic.... ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... admit," returned Barbesieur. "But the idiot had so set his heart upon it that I was forced to yield to his whims; there was no other way of controlling him. I had no sooner given him this paper, than he became as plastic ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach

... training and education during the life of the individual, must start with the realization that man is a human animal. As a human being he is strikingly set off by his upright posture and his large and flexible hand. But chiefly he is distinguished by his plastic brain, upon which depends his capacity to perform the complex mental activities—from administering a railroad to solving problems in calculus—which constitute man's ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... quiet little laugh of deep content. "Oh, Gene is absolutely plastic. Just a handsome musician. And of good, plain people. His father was a German band leader; his mother is Irish—Margaret Hogan. That will help. And he ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... his condition, is it not futile to forbid him to re-make his world as beat he can? Why prematurely claim to have reached finality, when unexpected novelties may shatter any system before it is even completed? Our world is plastic, it is most 'really' what we can make of it, and the process of our making is not ended. Whether a decree of Fate has fixed any ultimate limits to our efforts we have no means of knowing, and no occasion ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray

... party became a chief influence in the education of the boy Henry in the six years 1848 to 1854, and violently affected his character at the moment when character is plastic. The group of men with whom Mr. Adams associated himself, and whose social centre was the house in Mount Vernon Street, numbered only three: Dr. John G. Palfrey, Richard H. Dana, and Charles Sumner. Dr. Palfrey was the oldest, and in spite of his clerical education, was to a boy often ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... and shows a young and attractive face. The male figure was doubtless sacrificed to Octavianus's command to destroy Antony's statues. We are indebted to Herr Dr. Walther, in Alexandria, for an excellent photograph of this remarkable piece of sculpture. Comparatively few other works of plastic art, in which we here include coins, that could render us familiar with our heroine's ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... envious of her, and also surprised. It seemed strange that this ribboned and elegant and plastic creature, whose long, thin arms were used only to dalliance, ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett

... detonating cap. The schoolroom and boys form a galvanic battery. His brain may be likened to a conducting-wire. He enters the schoolroom; the chemical elements are seething in riot, books are being torn and thrown, ink spilt, etcetera. Before opening the door, the good man is a quiet piece of plastic dynamite, but the instant his eye is touched, the electric circuit is, as it were, completed; the mysterious current flashes through the brain, and fires his detonating heart. Instantly the gleaming flame shoots ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne

... gone on a few paces, when we entered what might easily have been taken for a majestic temple, with lofty arches, supported by beautiful pillars, formed by the plastic hand of ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz

... understand by 'Violin Mastery'? Well, it seems to me that the artist who can present anything he plays as a distinct picture, in every detail, framing the composer's idea in the perfect beauty of his plastic rendering, with absolute truth of color and proportion—he is the artist who deserves to ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens

... mind did not rust from the want of intelligent companions. The clear perception, accurate knowledge, and unerring judgment of Trenchard, the fantastic cynicism of St. Barbe, and all the stores of the exuberant and imaginative Waldershare, were brought to bear on a young and plastic intelligence, gifted with a quick though not a too profound sensibility which soon ripened into tact, and which, after due discrimination, was tenacious ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli

... same kind look of compassion in his eyes. He was fond of telling his fellow-artists that he had a "plastic" face,— and this quality served him well just now. He might have been a hero and martyr, from the peaceful and patient expression of his features, and he so impressed by his manner a lay-brother who presently entered to give ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... Cuba, but was educated and has resided in France. He attracted notice among the Parnassiens by the degree of perfection with which he rendered in words the element of plastic beauty and the rare finish and precision of his style. He has used almost exclusively the form of the sonnet, to which he has given a ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield

... physiologically. The rest assume his classification without reserve, and work from the axiom that heat-making, carbonaceous and non-nitrogenous foods (e.g. fat and sugars), necessary to support life in the arctic and polar regions, must be exchanged for the tissue-making, plastic or nitrogenous (vegetables), as we approach the equator. They are right as far as the southern temperates, their sole field of observation; they greatly err in all except the hot, dry parts of the tropics. Why, a Hindoo will drink at a sitting a tumbler of gli (clarified butter), and the European ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... around him for assistance, he naturally selected those men whom he could control. The first that recommended himself was one Harold, a youth of inane and plastic character, carried away by the example of an actor, and full of execrable quotations, going to show that he was an imitator of the master spirit both in text and admiration. This Harold was a gunner, and therefore versed in arms; he had traversed the whole lower portion of Maryland, and was therefore ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend

... painters are thus, satisfying with magnificent models an impetuosity of temperament which does not mount from the senses to the heart. Accustomed to regard the human form from a certain point, they find in beauty, which would appear to us simply animal, principles of plastic emotion which at times suffice for their amorous requirements. They are only more deeply touched by it, when to that rather coarse intoxication is joined, in the woman who inspires them, the refined graces of mind, the delicacy of elegance and ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget

... whom Ganganelli called the "beautiful" Braschi, well deserved that epithet. No nobler or more plastic beauty was to be seen; no face that more reminded one of the divine beauty of ancient sculpture, no form that could be called a better counterfeit of the Belvedere Apollo. And it was this beauty which liberal ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... mache and various plastic cement materials are used for modeling mouths, of which papier mache is probably the best; plaster paris is often used in an emergency but is brittle and heavy. For modeling use finely ground paper pulp mixed with glue and plaster or whiting. Only ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham

... Where, springing from the heart, the fancy shines, Thy enterprising mind had here bestow'd, To honour Felpham as thy sire's abode! All to thy mental eyes were present here; The scene, we join'd to deck, all yet endear, Tho' hardly embrios of plastic grace, Many yet want their features, and their place. These vacant circlets, that still court mine eye, Can I survey, without a bursting sigh, When fond remembrance tells me that from these Thy filial ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley

... replica of the ship in plastic was less than a two-hour job. The materials were at hand; a special foam plastic is used as insulation from the chill of the lunar substrata. The foam plastic was impregnated with ammonium nitrate and foamed up with pure oxygen; since it is catalyst-setting, ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett

... was neatly bound in thin, tough, plastic tangle-cord, swathed from chin to boot-bottoms, my arms imprisoned, my feet caught. And tangle-cord is about as easy to get out of as a spider's web ...
— The Hunted Heroes • Robert Silverberg

... was excluded. Then a coating of the same compound was laid over the finished conductor, and thus the core was solidified. Next, the core was surrounded with a coating of the purest gutta-percha—a splendid non-conductor, impervious to water—which, when pressed to it, while in a plastic state, formed the first insulator or tube to the core. Over this tube was laid a thin coat of Chatterton's Compound for the purpose of closing up any small flaws or minute holes that might have escaped detection. Then came a second coating of gutta-percha, followed ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne

... Greece and Rome. We characterize this difference by calling the first Romantic and the other Classic. Yet these appellations are only uncertain rubrics, and have led hitherto to the most discouraging, wearisome entanglements, which become worse since we give to antique poetry the designation of "Plastic," instead of "Classic." From this arose much misunderstanding; for, justly, all poets should work their material plastically, be it Christian or heathen; they should set it forth in clear outlines; in short, plastic form should be the main desideratum ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... the opening of a fresh existence, the necessity of new relationships,—this fuses the crust of conventionality, quickens the springs of life, and renders character sympathetic and fluent. The past is easily put away; we become plastic to new influences; we are delighted at the discovery of unexpected affinities, and astonished to find in ourselves so much wit, eloquence, and fine susceptibility, which we did not before ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various

... patrician surroundings, were only half popular; and lastly, the familiarity with the different offshoots of Greek comedy, thrown out in rank profusion at Alexandria, and capable of assimilation with the plastic materials of the Mimus. These worthless products, issued under the names of Rhinthon, Sopater, Sciras, and Timon, were conspicuous for the entire absence of restraint with which they treated serious subjects, as well as ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... Riders' Fight in Brussels suffice to show the influence exercised by the seventeenth century school of painting on Jef. Lambeaux, Van der Stappen and J. de Lalaing. The most original of Belgian sculptors, Constantin Meunier (1831-1904), while possessing similar plastic qualities, opened a new field by his idealization of agricultural and industrial work. His miners, dockers, puddlers, and field labourers are known to all students of art and will stand in the future as the symbol of the economic renaissance of a people who could, ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts

... and the other gentry were gone from church, the rage, which had hitherto been confined, burst into an uproar; and, having vented itself at first in opprobrious words, laughs, hisses, and gestures, betook itself at last to certain missile weapons; which, though from their plastic nature they threatened neither the loss of life or of limb, were however sufficiently dreadful to a well-dressed lady. Molly had too much spirit to bear this treatment tamely. Having therefore—but hold, as we are diffident of our own abilities, let us here invite a superior ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... established for the attainment of various ends of felt value. The establishment of these systems of means is only possible because in the human infant the nervous system is relatively unformed at birth, is relatively plastic, and so is capable of being organised in such and such a definite manner. On the other hand, in many animals the nervous system of each is definitely formed at birth; it is so organised that experience does little to add to or aid in its further development. Now, while the nervous system ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch

... better way. The stingaree poses for his picture. The picture is used as a model for making a kite, probably of black plastic. The kite gets flown ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin

... your anterior affinities and inner consciences:—whereas the old idea of education was that the baby material of you, however accidentally or inevitably born, was at least to be by external force, and ancestral knowledge, bred; and treated by its Fathers and Tutors as a plastic vase, to be shaped or mannered as they chose, not as it chose, and filled, when its form was well finished and baked, with sweetness of sound doctrine, as with Hybla honey, or ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin

... believed that the present was the settled state of things; and that the old order of things was unsettled for ever: that the French revolution was as much more permanent than had been the French despotism, as was the great fabric of nature, than the petty plastic productions of art. To exclude the period since the revolution, would be to exclude some of the strongest evidences of the friendship of one nation, and the ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall

... strange. Of course, there are men to whom one great city is as another—commercial travellers, impresarios, globe-trotting millionaires. Being none of these, I am not as much at home in St. Petersburg as in Buda-Pesth, in Berlin as in Paris, and, while once I might have envied such plastic cosmopolitanism, I am realizing, this last day or two in London, that, were such an accomplishment mine, it had been impossible for me to feel as deeply as I do my brief reincarnation into a city and a country with which I was once so intimate, and which now seems so romantically strange, while ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... formed the background for more than one of his stories. At the age of fifteen, while still a student at Prato, he published his first volume of poems, 'Intermezzo di Rime' (Interludes of Verse): "grand, plastic verse, of an impeccable prosody," as he maintained in their defense, but so daringly erotic that their appearance created no small scandal. Other poems followed at intervals, notably 'Il Canto Nuovo' (The New Song: Rome, 1882), 'Isotteo ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... himself and family, which, though amusing from its very simplicity, afforded at the same time a certain indication that the good old grandfather whom they all loved so well, and whose benignant character had been only mellowed by age into a more plastic affection for them all, was soon to be removed from before their eyes, never again to diffuse among them that charm of domestic truth and love, and the holy influences of all those fine old virtues which ancestral integrity sheds over ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... but not at once to dance; instead, she executed a series of postures; almost without apparent transition she melted from one pose to another of plastic grace, her body the mere, boneless, obedient servant of ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... result of his botanical studies from 1768 to 1793, and being puzzled, as systematic botanists are, by the variations of the more plastic species of plants, led to ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... of such powers of judgment as she had, and long habit of always giving way, had helped to convert Mrs. Lake's naturally weak will and unselfish disposition into a sort of mental pulp, plastic to any pressure from without. To men she invariably yielded; and, poor specimen of a man as the Cheap Jack was, she had no fibre of personal judgment or decision in the strength of which to oppose his assertions, and every instant she became more and more convinced that wares she neither ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... medium height, fairly stout, and with a good-natured look. His head (very similar to those found in many Italian paintings of the sixteenth century), without being beautiful in the plastic sense of the word, gave an impression of great strength of character, power and intelligence. Short hair stood up straight on the high, well-developed forehead. A straight nose stopped short, as if cut off suddenly above the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... part of Italy during the thirteenth century, otherwise a statue so imbued with true classical feeling and so correct in technical finish as that of Sigilgaita in Ravello Cathedral could never have been produced; yet the names of the artist or artists who thus anticipated the great plastic revival remain undiscovered. Portrait-busts, similar in treatment and idea to that of the so-called Sigilgaita, are to be found here and there in museums, but this effigy in remote Ravello remains ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... of chili and crackers, Tom recalled another problem. "We'll need an undetectable sub to test my analyzer," he mused. "That means a repeat job of rigging all those transducers. Whew! I'd better get busy on that plastic sheathing." ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton

... education, have, it is true, been frequently stated with regard to the plan of educating youths in the public grammar schools of our own country; that some of the most precious years of their lives, when the faculties were in growing vigour, and the plastic mind most susceptible of receiving and retaining impressions, are wasted in poring over the metaphysics of a Latin Grammar, which they cannot possibly comprehend; and in learning by heart a number of declinations, conjugations, and syntax rules, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... be ungrateful, however, were I not to devote a few lines to the great convenience and merit of so-called "centering cement." This substance has two or three very valuable properties. It is very tough and strong in itself, and it remains plastic on cooling for some time before it really sets. If for any reason a small tube has to be cemented into a larger one, which is a good deal larger, so that an appreciable mass of cement is necessary, and particularly if the joint requires to have great mechanical strength, this cement is invaluable. ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall

... luxurious vision of the pre-Christian civilisation in Greece and Rome, as yet little affected by the deeper spiritualism of Asia; he is absorbed in contemplation of the beautiful sensuous aspect of the old nature-worship, as it is represented by poetry and the plastic arts, by singers and sculptors who (one may remark) knew better than to deal with its darker and degrading side, its orgies and unabashed animalism. And we may add that Mr. Swinburne would have done well to follow the example, in this respect, of these ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... would be struck dumb with amazement. He submits, however, that the amazement ought to be lessened when we reflect that beings almost infinite in number during an almost infinite lapse of time have often had their whole organization rendered in some degree plastic, and that each slight modification of structure which was in any way beneficial under excessively complex conditions of life has been preserved, whilst each which was in any way injurious has been rigorously destroyed. The long-continued accumulation of beneficial variations ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... his predecessors, succeeded, by virtue of his "plastic energy and power of harmonious modulation" in recreating the measure. He found it "monotonous, monosyllabic, and divided into five feet of tolerably regular alternate short and long [i. e., unstressed and stressed]. He left it various in form and structure, sometimes redundant by a syllable, ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum

... pleasure for the first time, those snowy and purplous cheeks whose velvet smoothness is like the Venus flower, half in bloom, that new-born flesh which palpitates softly with desire and voluptuousness, that hand which you press so delicately, those round thighs, those plastic buttocks, that voice sweet and touching,—what comparison can be made between all this and pronounced features, rough beard, hard breast, hairy body, and the strong disagreeable voice of man? Juvenal has wonderfully ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... understand that all entities reside in me in the same way.[219] All entities, O son of Kunti, attain to my nature at the close of a Kalpa. I create them again at the beginning of a Kalpa.[220] Regulating my own (independent) nature I create again and in this whole assemblage of entities which is plastic in consequence of its subjection to nature.[221] Those acts, however, O Dhananjaya, do not fetter me who sitteth as one unconcerned, being unattached to those acts (of creation). Through me, the overlooker, primal nature produceth the (universe of) mobiles and immobiles. For the reason, O son ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... true love-songs, only one refers expressly to the winter season. That, however, is the lyric upon Flora, which contains a detailed study of plastic form in the bold ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various

... face still bandaged following plastic surgery, spent a couple of hours in the Rube Goldberg department inspecting the latest ...
— Revolution • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... doubt that this encyclopaedic diversity has turned to the great advantage of his glory. It is precisely because Goethe is an elusive Proteus that all doctrines may equally claim him. Romanticists turn with predilection to the creator of Werther or the first "Faust." Classicists admire the plastic beauty of Tasso and Iphigenia. The cosmopolitan sees in Goethe the Weltbuerger, the citizen of the world, the incarnation of die Weltweisheit. The patriot acclaims in him the poet who has sung the myths and legends dear ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea

... square to square of the big rope hairnet that served as guidelines on the outer surface of the big wheel, Mike Blackhawk completed his inspection of the gold-plated plastic hull, with its alternate ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond

... the iron horse performs its work, it gradually wears out its pistons, its rods, its wheels, its boiler-tubes, all of which have to be made good from time to time. The founder and the smith repair it, supply it, so to speak, with 'plastic food,' the food that becomes embodied with the whole and forms part of it. But, though it have just come from the engine-shop, it is still inert. To acquire the power of movement, it must receive ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre

... with clear ideas of right, and high ideals of duty. He was a man far ahead of his times, broad-minded, spiritual in its best sense, and with a winning personality, just the man to attract a clear-sighted, keen-witted boy who quickly saw through shams and despised affectations. Russell at that plastic period could have fallen into no better hands. With loving interest in the boy's welfare, Asa Niles inspired him to get the broadest education in order to make the most of himself, yet ever held before him the highest ideals of life and manhood. Out of the stores ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr

... may interest the critic, but we are only concerned with Mr. Ruskin here, for one reason. His disparagement of Coleridge as 'useless' is a survival of the belief that art should be 'useful.' This is the savage's view of art. He imitates nature, in dance, song, or in plastic art, for a definite practical purpose. His dances are magical dances, his images are made for a magical purpose, his songs are incantations. Thus the theory that art is a disinterested expression of the imitative faculty is scarcely warranted by the little we know of art's beginnings. ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang

... a good citizen must begin at the cradle, and be continued through the plastic period of boyhood and carried forward by his parents, until the youth crosses his native threshold to act his part and assume his responsibilities in the broader field of his ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.

... debates in Committee are illuminating expositions of different varieties of bigotry. His body was almost forgotten, while the philanthropists were trying to decide what to do with his soul. Few of the reverend gentlemen "would be content unless they could seize him when his young nature was plastic and try to imprint on immortal clay the ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... sporting country Glenmutchkin is unrivalled; but it is by the tourists that its beauties will most greedily be sought. These consist of every combination which plastic nature can afford: cliffs of unusual magnitude and grandeur; waterfalls only second to the sublime cascades of Norway; woods of which the bark is a remarkably valuable commodity. It need scarcely be added, to rouse the enthusiasm inseparable from this ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various

... rapidly-moving, evanescent forms, has already been described; we have now to note how it is affected when the human mind formulates a definite, purposeful thought or wish. The effect produced is of the most striking nature. The thought seizes upon the plastic essence, and moulds it instantly into a living being of appropriate form—a being which when once thus created is in no way under the control of its creator, but lives out a life of its own, the ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater

... the same plastic kind as his conception of character or passion. "It glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven." Its movement is rapid and devious. It unites the most opposite extremes; or, as Puck says, in boasting of his own feats, "puts a girdle round about the earth in ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... an orderly sequence of development of mental traits. While these powers are in their earlier, so to speak embryonic, stages of development, they can be fostered and increased or retarded. They are still plastic. Very early in a child's life acquisitiveness shows itself; he begins to say "I," and "mine," and desires things to be his "very own." And this can be fostered so that the child will grow up a "covetous machine." Or he may be taught to share ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... triumphs; and well should the elephant know it. He had the best chance of all. Wiser even than the lion, or the wisest of apes, his wisdom furthermore was benign where theirs was sinister. Consider his dignity, his poise and skill. He was plastic, too. He had learned to eat many foods and endure many climates. Once, some say, this race explored the globe. Their bones are found everywhere, in South America even; so the elephants' Columbus may have found some road here before ours. They are cosmopolitans, these suave and well-bred ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day

... Judge Passarelli, too. Foozled his vision, whatever you want to call it. When the 'cutor handed him the evidence, the five dollar bill she had tried to pass for a hundred, all sealed up in plastic, Passarelli saw a hundred, thanks to her ...
— Modus Vivendi • Gordon Randall Garrett

... was a soaring, chastely white structure of silicoid plastic, dazzling in the hot morning sun. It crossed Allen's mind fleetingly that everything built nowadays would long outlast the builders. That seemed right, but he didn't ...
— DP • Arthur Dekker Savage

... Spreading itself where'er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own. He is a portion of the loveliness Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood

... of the master's; but it serves again as well as another to transport—there is no other word—those of his lovers for whom, in far-away days when Venice was an early rapture, this strange and mystifying painter was almost the supreme revelation. The plastic arts may have less to say to us than in the hungry years of youth, and the celebrated picture in general be more of a blank; but more than the others any fine Tintoret still carries us back, calling up ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... Brott admitted. "Yes, it is true. But after all," he added cheerfully, "I believe that our disagreements are mainly upon the surface. The Countess is a woman of wide culture and understanding. Her mind, too, is plastic. She ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... water and deposited in geologic basins according to their specific gravity and degree of fineness (see CLAY). These deposits have been formed in all geologic epochs from the "Recent" to the "Cambrian," and they vary in hardness from the soft and plastic "alluvial" clays to the hard and rock-like shales and slates of the older formations. The alluvial and drift clays (which were alone used for brickmaking until modern times) are found near the surface, are readily worked and require little preparation, whereas ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... together into one whole scene or series of events, which, though it may be very incongruous and absurdly impossible from a waking point of view, nevertheless makes a single object for the dreamer's internal vision, and has a certain degree of artistic unity. This plastic force, which selects and binds together our unconnected dream-images, has frequently been referred to as a mysterious spiritual faculty, under the name of "creative fancy." Thus Cudworth remarks, in his Treatise concerning Eternal ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully

... daubed with bright colours, yet, by a vivacity of attitude and gesture which the mystery of their setting enhanced, conveyed a thrilling impression of the sacred scenes set forth; and Odo was yet at an age when the distinction between flesh-and-blood and its plastic counterfeits is not clearly defined, or when at least the sculptured image is still a mysterious half-sentient thing, denizen of some strange borderland between art and life. It seemed to him, as he ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... that particular form is to be; leaving it passively to be determined by the conjunction of circumstances, the accident of locality, and the influence of friends or worldly prospects of gain. Still, in the hands of the Christian missionary, they are by no means the plastic substance which such a description would suggest—capable of being moulded into any form, or retaining permanently any casual impression—but rather a yielding fluid which adapts its shape to that of the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... appeared disturbed by them, troubled, despite the evident attention which he gave to the work of the artist, or rather to the artist herself, to the triumphant grace of this girl whom her beauty seemed to have predestined to the study of the plastic arts. ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... At Philae and at Denderah, Phtah is represented as piling upon his potter's table the plastic clay from which he is about to make a human body, and which is somewhat wrongly called the egg of the world. It is really the lump of earth from which man came forth at ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... better books. It has a number of individual sketches that are admirably drawn. We might quote a variety of isolated passages that impress us deeply with the vigor of the writer, and which, if wrought up with as much plastic skill as is usually connected with such inventive talents, would secure his rank among the elite of American authors. He has not yet done justice to his remarkable gifts, not even in the inimitable ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various

... were fixed on the thronging streets, but, unlike hers, they reflected the restless animation, the pathetic hunger, which made each of those passing faces appear to be the plastic medium of an insatiable craving for life. Handsome, well-preserved, a little over-coloured, a little square of figure, with his look of worldly importance, of assured material success, he stood ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... sincere was the enthusiasm of the Renaissance for Greek ideals as well as for modes of expression, how classicism had come to be understood as a synonym for perfection in form whether in literature or the plastic arts,—all the pretty imagery of the Golden Age and its demigods becomes as natural a poetic rendering of sincere feeling as the equally formal restrictions of the measure of the sonnet or the rules which govern the composition of a concerto. Having once ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney



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