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Precursor   Listen
noun
Precursor  n.  One who, or that which, precedes an event, and indicates its approach; a forerunner; a harbinger. "Evil thoughts are the invisible, airy precursors of all the storms and tempests of the soul."
Synonyms: Predecessor; forerunner; harbinger; messenger; omen; sign.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Precursor" Quotes from Famous Books



... divined that this injunction was the precursor of a terrible vengeance: the whole town echoed with cries and groans, the mosques were filled with people praying for deliverance. The appointed time arrived, they embraced each other as if parting for ever, and then the men, unarmed, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... reveal the essence of things, the greatest artists would be those who best succeeded in doing this, and the greatest works would all be identical; whereas we know that the very opposite is the case. Veron was a precursor of Guyau, and we seek for scientific system in vain in his book. Veron looks upon art as two things: the one decorative, pleasing eye and ear, the other expressive, "l'expression emue de la personalite humaine." He thought ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce

... gazing, like myself, between the bars of the huge windows; for the ball is conducted upon exclusive principles, and is accessible only with tickets of admission. Two 'policias,' armed with revolvers and short Roman Swords, are stationed at the entrance-door, and this looks very much like the precursor of a row. Mulatto balls generally do end in some unlooked-for 'compromisa,' and it would not surprise me if this particular ball were to terminate ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman

... our mother thought the speech with which he opened that precursor of the Prussian Chambers, and the address showed him in fact to be an ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... above referred to, and to whom we were apprenticed, was fat, and that is to say, he was jolly. He had ever a word of kind encouragement, wise counsel or assistance to give his employees. Harshness, want of sympathy or interest is often the precursor and stimulator to the many troubles with organized labor that continue to paralyze so many of our great industrial concerns at the present time, resulting in distress to the one and great material loss to the other. Mr. Gibbons had but a limited education, but he possessed that aptitude, energy, ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs

... London. Murray; Bruxelles, De Mat, 20 Avril 1817. This work merits a note. Metternich (vol, i. pp. 312-13) says, "At the time when it appeared the manuscript of St. Helena made a great impression upon Europe. This pamphlet was generally regarded as a precursor of the memoirs which Napoleon was thought to be writing in his place of exile. The report soon spread that the work was conceived and executed by Madame de Stael. Madame de Stael, for her part, attributed it to Benjamin Constant, from whom she was at this time separated by some disagreement." ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... work is accomplished by this method. The composing-room of a large daily paper, for instance, presents, day and night, a spectacle of the almost ceaseless industry of jaded operatives. The need of relief in this respect was long ago recognized. The attempt at combination-letters was not less a precursor of reform than an acknowledgment of its necessity. It remained for American inventive genius, in this generation, to conceive and perfect the greatest labor-saving device that has ever been applied to the art of printing,—the last need ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... sure precursor, if she had thought to remember, if she had been less engrossed in the bitterness of ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris

... the deity's power, they would ascend vertical rocks of great height by touching the smooth surface with tiny idols which they held in their hands, and without any contact by their feet. These demoniacs recall the oracles of ancient nations, and especially Simon Magus, the precursor of innumerable fathers of new religions, who by the power of the "Christian God" fell to a horrible death when he tried to fly before the Roman emperor on ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... of what? I could not have answered that question then, any more than I can now after much reflection. I was on the eve of my fifteenth birthday, and I was in a state of expectation as to the future of my life. That particular morning seemed to me to be the precursor of a new era. I was not mistaken, for on that September day my fate ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... rent, From the best youth in England their dear pride, Their joy, in England; this, too, at a time In which worst losses easily might wean The best of names, when patriotic love 305 Did of itself in modesty give way, Like the Precursor when the Deity Is come Whose harbinger he was; a time In which apostasy from ancient faith Seemed but conversion to a higher creed; 310 Withal a season dangerous and wild, A time when sage Experience would have snatched Flowers out of any hedge-row ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth

... when the vessel does not roll- much. I remember very well being over the side painting in this way, one fine afternoon, our vessel going quietly along at the rate of four or five knots, and a pilot-fish, the sure precursor of a shark, swimming alongside of us. The captain was leaning over the rail watching him, and we went quietly on with our work. In the ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... the wall; now, which Endymion had not yet heard, the brother of Trenchard had most unexpectedly died, and that gentleman come into a good estate. "Jawett remains, and is also the editor of the 'Precursor,' but his new labours so absorb his spare time that he is always at the office of the paper. So it is pretty well all over with the table at Joe's. I confess I could not stand it any longer, particularly ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli

... yet another possibility of connection between Goethe and the Koran. This work contained the story of the Graf von Gleichen, which is acknowledged to have been a precursor of Goethe's "Stella." Dntzer in his "Erluterungen zu den deutschen Klassikern" says it is impossible to determine whence Goethe took the story for "Stella." He mentions that it was contained in Bayle's Dictionary, which ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer

... your fancy the closing-in of a fine, blue-skied, sunny American Saturday evening, whose tranquillity and repose rendered it the fit precursor of the Sabbath. Imagine the tea-table placed in your sitting-parlor, all the windows open, and round it, first, the housekeeper pouring out tea; next her, Miss C. Borland; next her, your mother, whose looks spoke love as often as you were mentioned, and that was not infrequently, I assure you. ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse

... hideous invention of modern times. They date from the seventeenth century. Before that time there were only guard-houses where the soldiers played cards and told tales. Louis XIV was a precursor of Bonaparte. But the evil has attained its plenitude since the monstrous institution of the obligatory enlistment. The shame of emperors and of republics is to have made it an obligation for men ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France

... the principles of science, from granites and syenites to melaphyres and basalts. After thirty years of study and progress, other savants, without differing from him, progressed further in the intimate knowledge of rocks; but the historian of science will not forget that Delesse was the precursor of this order of research. His studies of metamorphism will long do him honor. The mineralogical modifications which the eruptive rocks have undergone in the mass are the permanent witnesses which attracted all his attention. ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various

... fifteenth centuries, and almost without exception princely houses set out to rival one another in the splendour of their surroundings. Now came in the ornamental garden as distinct from the verger, and the preau became a greensward accessory, at once practical and decorative, the precursor of the pelouse and the ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield

... as he has celebrated them, written on the fine white paper, tied with ribbon. Yellow and faded age has made them, yet at their touch I seemed to feel the fire of youth, immortally glowing, more and more expansive, with which his soul has pervaded this century. He was the precursor of all we most prize. True, his blood was mixed with madness, and the course of his actual life made some detours through villanous places; but his spirit was intimate with the fundamental truths of human nature, and ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... twofold trap, the theorists will reply that the Scoliae are descended from a precursor, an indeterminate creature, of changeable habits and changing form, modifying itself in accordance with its environment and with the regional and climatic conditions and branching out into races each of which has become a species with the attributes which distinguish it to-day. The ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... Zachary recalls the Precursor's mission of proclaiming the Messiah and the new alliance. It is altogether appropriate to the Office of daybreak, as ushering in the dawn of a new era. The closing verse speaks of the light which the announcement ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley

... in an apartment on the north-east side of the quadrangular building, where the sunshine never entered. Even daylight never came, but only a feeble, sickening twilight, precursor of the grave itself. It was not merely the gloom that intensified the horrors of the situation, or the ghastly traditions of the place, or the impending fate of our callous client; but there was a tier of shelves occupying the side of the apartment, ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton

... Ishrakat (p. 5).—Praise be to God who manifested the Point and sent forth from it the knowledge of what was and is (i.e. all things); who made it (the Point) the Herald in His Name, the Precursor to His Most Great Manifestation, by which the nerves of nations have quivered with fear and the Light has risen from the horizon of the world. Verily it is that Point which God hath made to be a Sea of Light for the sincere among His servants, ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne

... for some foolish behaviour on his part I had not noticed anything particular about him. I was surprised, however, that he should have selected my address as his lodging in Venice. He told me that he was merely the precursor of a certain Princess Galitzin, for whom he had to arrange winter quarters in Venice; that he knew nobody there, but having heard in Vienna that I was staying here, it was very natural he should apply first at my hotel. I argued with him that this was not an hotel, and announced ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner

... became an effort to walk. The area of vision had widened, but no mountains yet showed through the white mist. He was becoming tired with a tiredness that was scarcely to be born. If he stood still long enough to rest he became cold, a deadly chill that he knew to be the precursor of death's benumbing sleep would creep over him, and then he would force himself to resume the monotonous, ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler

... Thomas, who is their spokesman, has now become an absolute necessity of thought. Unless the great Dumb Ox is given a hearing, our mysticism will fill, not the churches, but the asylums and the little self-authorized Bethels where every man is his own precursor ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas

... death, in 1841, seven volumes of the "Prodromus" had appeared: Alphonse completed the seventeenth volume in 1873. In 1855 appeared his "Geographie botanique raisonnee," "which was the most important work of his life," and if not a precursor, "yet one of the inevitable foundation-stones" of modern evolutionary principles. He also wrote "Histoire des Savants," 1873, and "Phytographie," 1880. He was lavish of assistance to workers in Botany, and was distinguished by a dignified and charming personality. (See Sir W. Thiselton-Dyer's ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... it,—large and lofty apartments with many windows, commanding a fine view. But to one unused to many stairs, and weakened by continuous illness in a long sea-voyage, the exhaustion of that first ascent was something to be remembered. It was, however, but the precursor of hundreds of similar feats, which our residence involved, as nearly all families live up several flights of stairs. Only once did we see an elevator in Germany. In the elegant hotel known as the Kaiserhof, the sojourning-place ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton

... given by the middle classes, and they were in no mood to imperil their own cause by revolutionary claims. They could not always succeed, however, in checking the fury of the populace, which had been taught to clamour for reform as the precursor of a good time coming for the suffering and toiling masses of mankind. The streets of London were illuminated, and the windows of those who omitted to illuminate or were otherwise obnoxious were tumultuously demolished by the mob, which did not even spare Apsley ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick

... terminated the military operations of the year, for the rainy season, precursor of the winter, had now set in. Leicester, leaving Sir William Stanley, with twelve hundred English and Irish horse, in command of Deventer; Sir John Burrowes, with one thousand men, in Doesburg; and Sir Robert ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... the hygienist's view of why people get sick. The sequence of causation goes: enervation, toxemia, alternative elimination, disease. However, there is one more link in this chain, a precursor to enervation that, for good and understandable reasons, seemed unknown to the earlier hygienists. That precursor is long term sub-clinical malnutrition. Lack of nutrition effects virtually everybody today. Almost all of us are ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon

... the ablest of historic men. In another sphere, it is the vision of a higher world to be intimate with the character of Fenelon, the cherished model of politicians, ecclesiastics, and men of letters, the witness against one century and precursor of another, the advocate of the poor against oppression, of liberty in an age of arbitrary power, of tolerance in an age of persecution, of the humane virtues among men accustomed to sacrifice them to authority, the man of whom one enemy says that ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... in the woods; they are well out by the end of January or early in February, and as they ripen, clouds of pollen are disseminated by the wind. Tennyson speaks of "Native hazels tassel-hung." The female bloom, which is the immediate precursor of the nut itself, is a pretty little pink star, which can be found on the same branch as the catkin but is much less conspicuous; and both are a very welcome sight, as almost the earliest hint of spring. The hazel bloom ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... of serious determination came into Jane's face, a look that her friends would have recognised as the precursor of a resolute and determined attempt to achieve the thing in hand. She seized the horn of the saddle, put her foot into ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor

... for argument, one analogous to that by which we showed the anterior probability of a self-existence. Things positive must precede things negative. Sight must have been, before blindness is possible; and before we can arrive at a just idea of no sight. Power must be precursor to an abstraction from power, or weakness. The minor-existence of ignorance is an impossibility, unless you preallow the major-existence of wisdom; for it amounts to a debasing or a diminution of wisdom. Sin is well defined to be, the transgression of law; for without law, there can ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... already appearing in the eastern sky, precursor of the sun, Paddy and I at once set off. As we drew near he shouted, "Pullingo, Pullingo." Directly afterwards we saw the black crawl out of his hut. "Our friend doesn't take much time to dress in the morning," observed Paddy, "seeing ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston

... dwell on the awful sensations with which Mrs. Legend heard the first ring at her door, on the eventful night in question. It was the precursor of the entrance of Miss Annual, as regular a devotee of letters as ever conned a primer. The meeting was sentimental and affectionate. Before either had time, however, to disburthen her mind of one half of its prepared phrases, ring upon ring proclaimed more company, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper

... the precursor of a terrible tropic tempest, with bluish lightning that was blinding, while the roar of heaven's artillery was incessant. But not a man blenched as the rowers bent to their oars, gladdened by the feeling that the current was with them, as they sent the boat rapidly along for their last ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn

... island, which measures 1,334 Castilian yards, and the highest point, denominated El Yunque, can be seen at the distance of 68 miles at sea. The summit of this ridge is almost always enveloped in mist, and when its sides are overhung by white fleecy clouds it is the certain precursor of the heavy showers which fertilize the northern coast. The soil in the center of the mountains is excellent, and the mountains themselves are susceptible of cultivation to their summits. Several towns and villages ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk

... of doors had now set in—a sure precursor of the starting whistle. Before it was quite completed, the inevitable late passenger appeared in the distance. This time it was a lady, middle-aged and stout, and short of wind, but with an iron will, as was clearly ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne

... combatants. There elephants and cars, adorned with gold, looked in that night like clouds charged with lightning. Swords and darts and maces and scimitars and clubs and lances and axes, as they fell, looked like dazzling flashes of fire. Duryodhana was the gust of wind that was the precursor (of that tempest-like host). Cars and elephants constituted its dry clouds. The loud noise of drums and other instruments formed the peal of its thunders. Abounding with standards, bows formed to lightning flashes. Drona and the Pandavas formed its ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... above shows us the Redeemer of the world, seated with extended arms, having on the right the Virgin in her usual place, and on the left, also in his accustomed place, St. John the Baptist; both seated, and nearly on a level with Christ. The Baptist is here in his character of the Precursor "sent to bear witness to the light, that through him all men might believe." (John i. 7.) The Virgin is exhibited, not merely as the Mother, the Sposa, the Church, but as HEAVENLY WISDOM, for in this character the Catholic Church has applied to her the magnificent passage in Proverbs: ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson

... during that winter, the sun had shown itself a little in the afternoon, but it was the 2d of February, that ancient Candlemas day whose treacherous sun, the precursor of a six weeks' cold spell, inspired Mathieu Laensberg with these two lines, which ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... color had heightened. The smile was still on his lips; it had altered, taken on a quality of gameness. He did not shake his fist at the embodied spirit of metropolitanism before him, as had a famous Gallic precursor of his, also a determined seeker for Success in a lesser sphere; but he paraphrased Rastignac's ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... was only the mild precursor of the one which shook Europe to its foundations in 1848. It had centers wherever there were patriots and aching hearts. In Paris, Louis Philippe had fled at the sound of the word Republic, and when in Paris workmen ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele

... 1861, revealed the real intention of the Southern people in their unprovoked assault upon Fort Sumpter. The thunder of rebel cannon shook the air not only around Charleston, but sent its thrilling vibrations to the remotest sections of the country, and was the precursor of a storm whose wrath no one anticipated. This shock of arms was like a fire-alarm in our great cities, and the North arose in its might with a grand unanimity which the South did not expect. The spirit and principle of rebellion were so uncaused and unprovoked, that scarcely could any one be found ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens

... An English precursor of Voltaire and Paine wrote A Discourse on Freethinking. His name was Anthony Collins, and in a certain sense he was the father of English Freethought. He was a man of exemplary life and manners, yet the saintly Bishop ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... inferior to some of his disciples, Yet he gave a turning-point to a new period when he awakened the idea of knowledge, and was the founder of the method of scientific inquiry, since he pointed out the legitimate bounds of inquiry, and was thus the precursor of Bacon and Pascal. He did not attempt to make physics explain metaphysics, nor metaphysics the phenomena of the natural world; and he reasoned only from what was generally assumed to be true and invariable. He was a great pioneer ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord

... literature. Junius Palmota wrote tragedies; selecting his subjects principally from Slavic history. But his most esteemed production is a Slavic version of a great Latin epic on Christ, by M.H. Vita, which may be considered as a kind of precursor to Klopstock's Messiah. John Gondola, a dramatic writer before him, translated Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered; and ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson

... like planets, and, once so liberated, the whole man reeling drunk to the music, they never quite subside to their old stony state. But what is the Imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the Reason. And books that treat the old pedantries of the world, our times, places, professions, customs, opinions, histories, with a certain freedom, and distribute things, not after the usages of America and Europe, but after the laws of right reason, and with as daring a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... took all—bore all—for the sake of the triumph of the independence of human reason. Devotion does not change its worth in changing its cause, and this was his virtue in the eyes of posterity. He was not the truth, but he was its precursor, and ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... world over, new competitions arose, and the weaker stocks began to show the effects of the strenuous life. One momentous event seems to have occurred in the Pliocene, and that was the transformation of the precursor of humanity into man—the culmination of the highest ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... admitted to a share in the management of the college. The following letter from a prominent Trustee of Dartmouth to the president, written just at this period, shows that the animated contest in Connecticut was only the natural and logical precursor of one more animated and much ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith

... and ethics that the rabbis could not contain themselves. Chayyim Malach, Judah Chassid, and other Galician mystics, in the second decade of the eighteenth century brought down upon themselves a rabbinical decree of excommunication. The mystical tendency was the precursor of the heretical half-Christian sect of Frankists, who ventured so far as to lift a hand against the fundamentals of Judaism: they rejected the Talmud in favor of the Zohar (1756-1773). At the same time a much more profound movement, instinct with greater vitality, made its appearance ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow

... sent all King Henry's saints about their business, or rather about their no-business—their faineantise—but he had laid them under rigorous contribution for the purposes of his holy war; and having made them refund to the piety of the successor what they had extracted from the piety of the precursor, he compelled them, in addition, to give him their blessing for nothing. Matilda, therefore, from all these circumstances, felt little hope that her lover would be any thing but ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock

... should generally have been referred to very humble houses in our cities. Those who now inquire for them will find their answer in the beautiful volume lately published by Messrs. Putnam and Co., the precursor of others destined to show the literary men of this country enjoying residences as agreeable as any that had been occupied by such men in any part of the world; and in almost every case, those homes have been due to the profits of the pen. Less than half a century since, ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey

... suppose a precursor of the Calicurgi (The Calicurgus, or Pompilus, is a Hunting Wasp, feeding her larvae on Spiders. Cf. "The Life and Love of the Insect": chapter 12.—Translator's Note.) dwelling in the prehistoric coal-forests. ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... Chicawgun to-night. Get a move on you!" will bring you sullen service, and probably breed kicks on the grub supply, which is the immediate precursor of mutiny. ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White

... he been to his age, and what was he to be for later generations? Has he been rightly called a precursor of the modern spirit? ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga

... might have given life and relief to the action of many scenes now unvaried and unbroken in their gravity of emotion and event. Shakespeare, one would say, might naturally have been expected to take up and remodel the well-known figure of which his humble precursor could give but a rough thin outline, yet sufficient it should seem to attract the tastes to which it appealed; for this or some other quality of seasonable attraction served to float the now forgotten play of Samuel Rowley through ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... situation and the documents there preserved; various of the "Plain Sermons"; some controversial pamphlets defending the cause of the Church; and above all, the treatise on "Eucharistic Adoration." He assisted Dr. J. M. Neale in drawing up the Salisbury Hymnal, a precursor of Hymns Ancient and Modern, and contributed several hymns, especially those for Rogation days, for the service for Holy Matrimony, and a very grand one for the Feast of St. John the Evangelist, which has not found place in ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge

... answer from Emmanuel Rask, one of the most gifted minds in the new school of philology, who had the honor of being a precursor of both Grimm and Burnouf. He showed that the list of the Jehangiri referred to an epoch later than that to which Zend must have belonged, and to parts of Persia different from those where it must have been spoken; he showed further ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various

... impressiveness to the preacher's words; in Hyde Park at midnight, in darkness which might be felt, when men's hearts were panic-stricken at the prospect of the approaching earthquake, which was to be the precursor of the end of the world; on Hampton Common, surrounded by twelve thousand people, collected to see a man hung in chains—the scenery would all lend effect to the great preacher's utterances. Outdoor ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... and seventy miles up the river a large crew was shipping and excavating at the iron mine. These things and many others being on foot, Clark had experienced that intellectual restlessness which in him was the precursor ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan

... cause of the French was championed. Finding the French yoke as heavy as the Spanish yoke, Toussaint struck for absolute liberty.[418] He was not, in a real sense, the liberator of the Haitians, as commonly supposed, but he was the precursor of their liberty.[419] His deportation aroused them to struggle with new vigor. Under Dessalines, one of the generals in the army of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the rebellion grew more successful, and on January 1, 1804, the army swore to abjure their allegiance to France forever, and thereupon ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... Latin American cocaine entering the European market; producer of synthetic drugs, precursor chemicals; transshipment point for Southwest Asian heroin; money-laundering ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... read the rifacimento of Orlando's Innamorato, or the more distinctively Bernesque Capitoli. Two years later (see Letter to Murray, February 21, 1820, Letters, 1900, iv. 407; and "Advertisement" to Morgante Maggiore) he had discovered that "Pulci was the parent of Whistlecraft, and the precursor and model of Berni," but, in 1817, he was only at the commencement of his studies. A time came long before the "year or two" of his promise (March 25, 1818) when he had learned to simulate the vera imago of the Italian Muse, and was able not only to surpass his "immediate model," ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... the other brave officers and men composing the expedition the General tenders his cordial thanks and congratulations. He is proud of them and hails the success achieved by their valor as but the precursor of still greater victories. Each corps engaged in the action will in future bear upon its colors the name of ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke

... able to bear the light which the inevitable progress of humanistic criticism would throw upon them? As the wiser of his contemporaries saw, Erasmus was, at heart, neither Protestant nor Papist, but an "Independent Christian"; and, as the wiser of his modern biographers have discerned, he was the precursor, not of sixteenth century reform, but of eighteenth century "enlightenment"; a sort of broad-church Voltaire, who held by his "Independent Christianity" as stoutly ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... a member of the State Assembly, and in September of the same year among the delegates of the five States which, at the instance of Virginia, met at Annapolis to confer on the commercial interests of the country; a too limited representation, indeed, to achieve the objects in view, but the precursor of the great Federal Convention at ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... giants. Hardly seven years have passed since that day. Fortunately I escaped along with my old man out of the house before it fell in with a crash behind us. There was no business doing; everybody on the Rialto seemed stunned, and everything lifeless. But this dreadful event was only the precursor of another approaching monster, which soon breathed out its poisonous breath over the town and the surrounding country. It was known that the pestilence, which had first made its way from the Levant into ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... broken through by the sea in 1767, the year after the declaration of American independence, an occurrence which was at the time deemed ominous of the severance of the colonies from the mother country, and which proved in reality to be the precursor of that event. ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell

... halt at Kabinda before he ended his miraculous journey at Zanzibar on the Pacific Ocean. He had been accompanied in his perilous journey by stout-hearted, brave, and faithful natives. Their mission almost completed, they began to sink into that listlessness which is often the precursor of death. They had been true to their master, and were now ready to die as bravely as they had lived. Read Mr. Stanley's account ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... accounted for the act of Charles III. as being but revenge for the tumult of Aranjuez under the ministry of Esquilace,*1* arguing that the Jesuits were in fact the authors of it, and that it was but the precursor of a plot to dethrone the King and place his brother Don Luis upon the throne, as being not so liberal in his ideas. Others, again, have stated*2* that the Jesuits set about a calumny that Charles III. was not the Queen's son by her ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham

... arguments apply elsewhere?" and we are told of people whose conditions of life are worse than some of those of coal-miners. Why stop here? Who ever said we would stop here? I welcome and support this measure, not only for its own sake, but much more because it is, I believe, simply the precursor of the general movement which is in progress all over the world, and in other industries besides this, towards reconciling the conditions of labour with the well-ascertained laws of science and health. If we are ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill

... change of his court was too powerful. It bore the look of desperation; though for what purpose, was still a mystery to the million. I heard many a whisper among the diplomatic circle, that this whirl of life, this hot and fierce dissipation, was, in all Russian reigns, the sure precursor of a catastrophe; though none could yet venture to predict its nature. It was like the furious and frenzied indulgence of a crew in a condemned ship, breaking up the chests and drinking the liquors, in the conviction that none ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various

... form of wrong-headedness and wrong-heartedness flourish like the seven plagues of Egypt. But it was all inevitable from the day that meddling German busybody invented printing—if not from the day his heathenish precursor invented letters." ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland

... was in press I for the first time came across Prof. J. Russell Soley's "Naval Campaign of 1812," in the "Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute," for October 20, 1881. It is apparently the precursor of a more extended history. Had I known that such a writer as Professor Soley was engaged on a work of this kind I certainly should not ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt

... for a time but eventually happy. For though there is in Agnimitra, as in all heroes of his type, something contemptible, there is in Malavika a sweetness, a delicacy, a purity, that make her no unworthy precursor of Sita, of Indumati, of the Yaksha's bride, and ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa

... gives of Miss Sophia Walder. However this may be, we have made her acquaintance in the course of the previous chapter, but I am constrained to state that she has, up to the present, shown herself exceedingly circumspect in substantiating the evidence of her precursor. ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... exhilaration is often the precursor of disaster, and mine was to have a sudden downfall. It was getting on for noon and we were well into England—I guessed from the rivers we had passed that we were somewhere in the north of Yorkshire—when the machine began to make odd sounds, and ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan

... that the usual canal of open water was not to be seen along the face of the Barrier meant that the ice in Ross Sea had a southerly drift. This in itself was unusual, and was caused by a northerly wind with snow, the precursor here of a storm from the south-west. The sky looked black and threatening, the barometer began to fall, and before long down came snowflakes on the upper heights of ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... talents and notorious for his dissipation. He became an usher under his father, but soon tired of the drudgery, and commenced professional author. He published a poem called 'The Actor,' which attracted attention, and was the precursor of 'The Rosciad.' He wrote for periodicals, produced some theatrical pieces of no great merit, and edited the St James' Magazine. This failed, and Lloyd, involved in pecuniary distresses, was cast into the Fleet. Here he was deserted by all ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... hauled down. It was whilst we were thus engaged that an increasing uneasiness in the motion of the ship first became apparent; and looking about us for the cause, we became aware of the fact that a cross swell had begun to gather, and was slowly creeping down to us from the north-west—the sure precursor, Forbes affirmed, of a stiff blow from that quarter. In this opinion I fully agreed; still there was at that moment nothing of a menacing character in the aspect of the sky, beyond an increasing thickness of the atmosphere; and I was therefore hopeful that we should have a sufficiency ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood

... night black and starless, for a heavy mass of lowering cloud seemed to unite with the dense vapor that arose from the river, and the low-lying grounds alongside of it. The air was hot and sultry, too, like the precursor of a thunder-storm, and the rush of the stream as it washed among the willows sounded preternaturally loud in ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... he said this; he breathed quickly; and there was a curious working of the mouth and nostrils, which Mr. Claypole thought must be the immediate precursor of a violent fit of crying. Under this impression he ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens

... feel not the least surprise at one species of a genus being rare and another abundant; why then should we be surprised at its extinction, when we have good reason to believe that this very rarity is its regular precursor ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin

... point in the Western, Southern, and Southwestern States, and vice versa. Thus at least one important advantage to the West is already apparent, growing out of the comprehensive action of the Grand Trunk managers, while the action of the New York Central is the sure precursor of a momentous era in railroad annals. The present year is likely to witness the first battle in a war for the European and domestic trade of the West, that may in the end turn the entire current into ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland

... Argentine Republic, and trade with those countries is improving. A provision for regular and more frequent mail communication, in our own ships, between the ports of this country and the nations of South America seems to me to deserve the attention of Congress as an essential precursor of an enlargement of our commerce with them and an ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Rutherford B. Hayes • Rutherford B. Hayes

... that He knows already, for it relieves the burdened heart to tell Him. It asks Him to see and hear what it knows that He does see and hear. But the prayer is not for mere observance followed by no divine act, but for taking knowledge as the precursor of the appropriate help. Of such seeing and hearing by God, believing prayer is the appointed condition. 'Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him'; but that is not a reason for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... seek. The newcomers found England in possession of a native romanticism of a very robust type, by the side of which the imported article showed like a delicate exotic. Carlyle affirms that Madame de Stael's book was the precursor of whatever acquaintance with German literature exists in England. He himself worked valiantly to extend that acquaintance by his articles in the Edinburgh and Foreign Review, and by his translations from German romance. But he found among English ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... which we left him—two hundred miles nearer his goal. This galleon, called the Griffin because it carried on its prow the carving of a griffin, "in honor of the armorial bearings of Count Frontenac," was the precursor of those mighty fleets that now stir those waters ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... filled with unfriendly savages, five hundred miles from any of the settlements of civilization, would seem to invite death. A family could not long be concealed. Their discovery by the Indians would be almost the certain precursor of their destruction. Boone, in his autobiography, says in ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott

... developing an independence in money matters that was extremely annoying to Roland. He felt that his applications to Elizabeth were perpetual offences to Denasia, and if he had been a thoughtful man he would have understood that this separation of their interests in financial matters was the precursor of a much wider ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... the higher classes to tyrannise over the others for any long time. What that society was like is best seen in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Chaucer was in many ways the exact opposite of Langland, and was the precursor of modern literature as Wycliffe was the precursor of modern religion. He was an inimitable story-teller, with an eye which nothing could escape. He was ready to take men as he found them, having no yearning for the purification of a sinful ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner

... miles per hour, burn about 35 lb. of coal per mile, when taking trains weighing about 230 tons gross. A variation from this type has been adopted on the Northern and Welsh sections, known as the "Precursor" class. These engines have 5 ft. 6 in. coupled wheels, and weigh 31 tons 8 cwt. in working order, but in other respects are very similar to the standard engines just described; with the Scotch express, averaging in total weight 187 tons, between Crewe and Carlisle, over heavy gradients, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various

... and far distant countries, to tell them harrowing tales, let them know it is intended to take them for a view behind the dike,—that they may understand the source of the trickling stream of brothel slaves that, almost unobserved, flows steadily into our fair land, and know that the stream is the precursor of a flood. No mere wall of immigration restrictions will ever get control of the flow so long as men are permitted to hold slaves after they have once been landed. And for the further reason, that so soon ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell

... vast system of commerce, the emporium, in fact, where will take place the exchange of the products of the Indian Archipelago for those of the vast plains of Australia. It may require some effort of the imagination, certainly, to discover the precursor of such a state of things in the miserable traffic now carried on by the Macassar proas; but still, I think, we possess some data on which to found such an opinion, and I am persuaded that Port Essington will ultimately hold the proud position I ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes

... whether positive or negative. Moreover, to curb the prolongation of the signals due to induction, each signal was made by two opposite currents in succession—a positive followed by a negative, or a negative followed by a positive, as the case might be. The after-current had the effect of curbing its precursor. This self-acting cable key was brought out in 1876, and tried on the lines of the ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro

... at Angers; author of "The Republic," in six books, published at first in French and then in Latin, which summed up all the political philosophy of his time, and contributed to prepare the way for subsequent speculations; was the precursor ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... into such a depth of bitter and angry despondency as that in which he now found himself. But the rebuff had been too uncompromising to leave him a single hope. He was too shrewd not to see that here was no pretty feminine nay, precursor of the yielding yea, not to realise that Madeleine had meant what she said and would abide by it. And, under the sting of the moment betrayed into a degradingly ill-mannered outburst, he had shown that he measured the full ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... exhale her soul like a flash of light, and communicated the sparkle of flame to all her motions. Beauvouloir shuddered when he noticed this phenomenon, which we may call in these days the phosphorescence of thought; the old physician of that period regarded it as the precursor ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac

... the commencement, but he exemplifies the principle (like Micah, chapter vi.) chiefly from the early history of Jacob and Moses: as for the really historical period he belongs to it too much himself to survey it from so high a point of view. In this also he is a precursor of later writers, that he regards the human monarchy as one of the great evils of Israel: he certainly had very great occasion for this in the circumstances of the ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... with a judge in Concord, New Hampshire. He said fiercely, "I will buy two guns, go to Concord, kill Judge Stanton with one, and shoot myself with the other, or else wait quietly till spring and see what will come of it." A possible precursor ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn

... consideration on which the patent is to issue bears no just proportion to that of the ordinary preemptor, and that this bill is but the precursor of a system of land distribution to a privileged class, unequal, unjust, and which ought not to receive the sanction of the General Government. Many thousand pioneers have turned their steps to the Western Territories, seeking, with their wives ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson

... moreover by the unpleasant fact that it grew late. Soon the dusk would fall, its coming hastened by the mist, now settling into a steady drizzle of rain precursor of a dark and early night. To hunt any longer would be useless. She must give it up. Yet her maidenly pride, her sense of what is seemly and becoming, revolted from exposing herself to Timothy Proud's coarse leering glances or even—should he by luck be her waterman—to ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... Alfred de Vigny has endured extraordinary vicissitudes in France. First he was lauded as the precursor of French romantic poetry and stately prose; then he sank in semi-oblivion, became the curiosity of criticism, died in retirement, and was neglected for a long time, until the last ten years or so produced a marked revolution of taste ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny

... the weaknesses—the aristocratic pride, the spiritual vanity—which we fancy that we discover. We may lament—and in that we shall not be wrong—the influence which such men as Jerome obtained over them— the example and precursor of so much which has since then been ruinous to family and social life: but we must confess that the fault lay not with the themselves, but with their fathers, husbands, and brothers; we must confess that ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley

... this decision was reached, and Esther, below stairs, raised her finger warningly for the cook to listen as her mistress trilled a few notes of a song. It was the first time since her return from Silverton that a sound like that had been heard within the house, and it seemed the precursor of better days. At lunch, too, Katy's face was very bright, and Esther was surprised when, later in the day, she was sent for to arrange her mistress' hair, as she had not arranged it since baby died. Greatly annoyed, Wilford had been by the smooth bands combed so plainly ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes

... respectively were the Liberals and Conservatives, and to their dissensions were mainly due the subsequent disorders; and up to the present day they form the party divisions of Mexican politics. These measures were the precursor of the famous Reform Laws of 1859, under Juarez, which disestablished the ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... told him of the aptness of her pupil, of her intention to persevere in teaching me, and of the duty which she felt it to teach me, at least to read the bible. Here arose the first cloud over my Baltimore prospects, the precursor of drenching ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass

... at, for the Zohar contains some ideas which are more Christian than Jewish. Christians, like Pico di Mirandola (1463-1494), under the influence of the Jewish Kabbalist Jochanan Aleman, and Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), sharer of Pico's spirit and precursor of the improved study of the Scriptures in Europe, made the Zohar the basis of their defence of Jewish literature against the attempts of various ecclesiastical bodies to ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams

... declining strength or of declining spirit as would in a short time provoke the aggression of rivals and enemies. Abdication of royal or imperial authority is with States no less than with individuals the precursor of death. Loss of territory, indeed, in consequence of defeat, is in itself only in so far damaging as defeat may imply a want of capacity to resist attack, or as the diminution of territory may involve loss of resources. Thus the surrender of Lombardy by Austria, of Alsace by France, of Schleswig-Holstein ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey

... never before been experienced by the Battalion. An hour later all was normal again, and the indications seemed to point to the subterranean eruption having been accidental and attributed by the Turk to our side as the precursor ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett

... made up his mind that he would write about "Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in life" and about "The artistic life considered in its ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris

... state have appointed "city foresters." This is a step in the right direction, if it is a precursor to the establishment of municipal forests for these men to manage; otherwise it is a misnomer and can only be misleading to the people. The city governments, in an endeavor to create a complete park organization, have so far adopted this title from European practice ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... birth of Christianity was one of fermenting opinion and decaying faith. Then, as now, men's minds were seething and unsettled, and that unrest which is the precursor of great changes in intellectual and spiritual habitudes affected the civilised world. Such a period is ever one of predisposition to superstition. The one true bond which unites God and man being obscured, and to the consciousness of many snapped, men's minds become the prey of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... which instinct and sense seem first to appear and write, as it were, a genealogy of reason based on circumstantial evidence. Reason was born, as it has since discovered, into a world already wonderfully organised, in which it found its precursor in what is called life, its seat in an animal body of unusual plasticity, and its function in rendering that body's volatile instincts and sensations harmonious with one another and with the outer world on which they depend. It did not arise ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... our laughter Pat came down the Walk, his stately tail waving over the grasses. He proved to be the precursor of Dan, clothed and in ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... Dialogo entre el amor y un viejo has real charm, and has saved his name from the oblivion to which most of his fellows have justly been consigned. The bishop Ambrosio Montesino (Cancionero, 1508) was a fervent religious poet and the precursor of the ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various

... in the pursuit of knowledge. It is ever seeking new fields of conquest. It must advance: with it, standing still is the precursor of defeat. If necessary it invents new methods of attack, and rests not until it gains its objective point, or demonstrates the hopelessness of its quest. The world needs but be informed that on ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... branched off from the other vertebrata before bone had become abundant in the inner skeleton, which is consequently in their case cartilaginous, with occasional "calcification" and no distinct bones at all. Unlike the majority of fish, they possess no swimming bladder— the precursor of the lungs; but in many other respects, notably in the uro-genital organs, they have, in common with the higher vertebrata, preserved features which may have been disguised or lost in the perfecting of such modern and specialized fish ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells

... evening that followed the exposure; the precursor of many and many miserable evenings in days to come. Mr. and Mrs. Channing, Hamish, Constance, and Arthur sat in the usual sitting-room when the rest had retired—sat in ominous silence. Even Hamish, with his naturally sunny ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood

... no opportunity of pondering over his love just then, for Bob Sawyer's return was the immediate precursor of the arrival of a meat-pie from the baker's, of which that gentleman insisted on his staying to partake. The cloth was laid by an occasional charwoman, who officiated in the capacity of Mr. Bob Sawyer's housekeeper; and a third knife ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... Caligula was killed, and the tidings of his death began to spread about the palace and into the streets of the city, a considerable tumult arose, the precursor and earnest of the dissensions that were to follow. Upon the first alarm, a body of the emperor's guards that had been accustomed to attend upon his person, and whom he had strongly attached to himself by his lavish generosity in bestowing ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott

... development to which society tends. The scheme was visionary: but, as a protest against unjust monopolies which existed in that age, it woke up a response in society (cfr. Mill on Liberty, p. 47-50); and in its tendency it made Rousseau the precursor of the French revolution; but in typifying that movement it represented only its transient aspect of subversive energy, not its ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... in 1892. When we remember all the strange literary effort gathered round about that year in the West—Symbolism, the Yellow Book, Art for Art's sake—and the limbo into which it has been thrust by now, we may realise how great a precursor and, in his own despite, a leader, Anton Tchehov was. When Western literature was plunging with enthusiasm into one cul de sac after another, incapable of diagnosing its own disease, Tchehov in Russia, ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry

... observation," returned the other, in a dry, reticent, ultra-professional manner. "But I will go so far as to say that I do not think it is a case of shell-shock. If it is what I suspect, that first attack was the precursor of another, possibly a worse attack. Ha! it is commencing. Look at his thumb—that is the ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees

... to be that of some avenging angel who came, not to renew, but to destroy. There is truth in both these pictures; but the Gracchus whom they portray as the force that annihilated centuries of crafty workmanship, as the first precursor of the coming monarchy, is the Gracchus who rightly lives in the historic imagination which, unfettered by conditions of space or time, prefers the contemplation of the eternity of the work to that of the environment of the worker; it is a presentment which ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... grasped the essential facts of the situation as we see them to-day. "The author of The Project of Perpetual Peace" concludes Prof. Pierre Robert in a sympathetic summary of his career (Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la Langue et de la Litterature Francaise, Vol. VI), "is the precursor of the twentieth century." His statue, we cannot doubt, will be a conspicuous object, beside Sully's, on the future Palace of any ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... Your toleration of them appears to me one of the worst symptoms of your political state of health. It shows among your public men an ignorance or a cowardice, or a desire of ill-earned popularity, which is generally a precursor of a ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville

... nations to their car. Of fear he evidently had no comprehension whatever. The rustling of the autumn breeze in his gown alarmed him as much, as did the clang of those horses' hoofs upon the pavements, though he so well knew it was the precursor of suffering and death. ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware

... voice, he looked across to the shores of Europe, and there in the night stood a great colossal form, not of a naked savage, but a form clad perhaps, in the panoply of the Macedonian phalanx, the representative of the Europe that then was and was yet to be, the precursor, it may be, to the classically informed mind of the missionary to the Gentiles, of that long procession of great world conquerors. It was the Man of Macedon who stood there in the might of his strength and cried, ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various

... anxiously waiting for the return of Captain M—-, whose value as a commanding officer was more appreciated for the change which had taken place. Seymour was cordially greeted by his former shipmates, not only for his own sake, but from the idea that his having rejoined the frigate was but a precursor of the ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat

... (feicidad y alivio), could be of any duration. But soon, instead of enjoying the present, they yielded to chimerical fears, and imagined that the order of nature was perverted. Some old Indians, the sages of the place, asserted that the disappearance of the insects must be the precursor of a great earthquake. Warm discussions arose; the least noise amid the foliage of the trees was listened to with an attentive ear; and when the air was again filled with mosquitos they were almost hailed with ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... boys pushed past the tenant farmer and ran through the screen door on the porch. The plane was not yet in sight and it was very dark out. The moon was hidden by a bank of low-lying clouds, a precursor ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin

... points of light in a galaxy, some standing apart in glorious constellations; I recognize Arcturus and Orion and Perseus and the glittering jewels of the Southern Crown, and the Pleiades shedding sweet influences; but the Evening Star, the soft and serene light that glowed in their van, the precursor of them all, has sunk below the horizon. The spheres, meanwhile, perform their appointed courses; the same motion which lifted them up to the mid-sky bears them onward to their setting; and they, too, like their bright leader, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various

... "Register," and in constant correspondence with him. Even as I write, in Dunfermline old men who knew Grandfather Morrison speak of him as one of the finest orators and ablest men they have known. He was publisher of "The Precursor," a small edition it might be said of Cobbett's "Register," and thought to have been the first radical paper in Scotland. I have read some of his writings, and in view of the importance now given to technical education, I think the most remarkable of them is a pamphlet ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie

... of his appearance: "When he spoke he was transformed, his eye kindled, his voice rang, his face shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly. For an hour and a half he held his audience in the hollow of his hand." This address may be regarded as a precursor, and a worthy precursor, of the First Inaugural, and by many competent critics it has been given the first place among the discussions of the political situation just before the war. After such a performance there could be no hesitation on the part of those that heard ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln

... forward with steadfast will and humble heart, so that our Hope for the Future may be fed, not dulled or diverted by our Love for the Past, we shall not long be left without a Guide:—the way will be opened, the Precursor appointed—the Hour will come, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of Christ our Lord," and are called to follow "the example of their steadfastness in the faith and obedience to God's holy commandments." There are days dedicated to the memory of the Blessed Virgin; the Apostles; the Baptist as the precursor, and St. Stephen as the {118} protomartyr; to St. Mark and St. Luke as Evangelists; to St. Paul and St. Barnabas on account of their extraordinary call; to the Holy Innocents as the earliest who suffered for Christ's sake; to St. Michael and All Angels, to remind us of the ...
— The Worship of the Church - and The Beauty of Holiness • Jacob A. Regester

... to dreams, we can find the rationale of the popular superstition that facts are generally inverted in dreams. To dream of something good is generally taken to be the precursor of something evil. In the exceptional cases in which dreams have been found to be prophetic, the dreamer was either affected by another's will or under the operation of some disturbing forces, which cannot be calculated except ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... fruit, is now recognized not only as one of the most profound and clearest thinkers of his time, but as the very first among its experimental philosophers, and as a prophet of truths which, then neglected and despised, have since been adopted as axioms in the progress of science. "The precursor of Galileo," says M. Haureau, in his work on Scholastic Philosophy, "he learned before him how rash it is to offend the prejudices of the multitude, and to desire to give lessons ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... from the Master's lips, every member stamps with his right foot on the floor, and at the same instant brings his hands together with equal force, and in such perfect unison with each other, that persons situated so as to hear it would suppose it the precursor of some dreadful catastrophe. This is called "THE SHOCK." The members ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan

... misty, drizzly day the precursor of a long spell of dark and gloomy weather, that Claudia at length grew to fear would never come to ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... in the analysis of character in its lowest as in its highest forms which produced the essayists and the novel. Above all the "Absalom" was the first work in which literature became a great political power. In it Dryden showed himself the precursor of Swift and of Bolingbroke, of Burke and of Cobbett. The poem was bought eagerly, and it undoubtedly helped to bring about that triumph of the king with the prophecy of which it closed. But prisoner as Shaftesbury was, the struggle with him ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green

... had never before beheld such a weird, awe-inspiring spectacle, but as I gazed upon it the memory came to me that I had somewhere read of something similar, and I also remembered that it had been described as the precursor of a hurricane, ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood

... aggrandizement for itself, the hands work for their good alone, or the feet strive to bear the body alone the paths they only wish to tread. Disease follows, if the evil is not remedied; disease, the sure precursor of dissolution. How disturbed and unhappy each member of such an aggregated man must be, you can ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur

... the thought. The Preacher had dwelt on the sudden alternations of the disease, how apparent recovery was sometimes the precursor of death. She hurried up the stairs, and through the seemingly endless suite of rooms which nobody wanted, which never might be inhabited again perhaps, except by bats and owls, to his lordship's chamber, and found him sitting up in bed, with his eyes fixed ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... David, holding his wife closely to him.—"At Saintes, not very far from here, in the sixteenth century, there lived one of the very greatest of Frenchmen, for he was not merely the inventor of glaze, he was the glorious precursor of Buffon and Cuvier besides; he was the first geologist, good, simple soul that he was. Bernard Palissy endured the martyrdom appointed for all seekers into secrets but his wife and children and all his neighbors were against him. His wife used to sell his tools; nobody ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... carried equal weight with Henry of Susa's throughout the Middle Ages, quotes the same text as authority for sending heretics to the stake.[2] According to this peculiar exegesis, the law and custom of the day merely sanctioned the law of Christ. To regard our Saviour as the precursor or rather the author of the criminal code of the Inquisition evidences, one must admit, a very peculiar ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard

... of the blood tends to develop low inflammation, dropsical effusion, tubercular deposits, Bright's disease, derangements of the liver, diarrhea, leucorrhea, and is a precursor of low, protracted fevers. This condition of the blood predisposes to the development of other affections, providing they are in existence, and often it is found associated with Bright's ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... had become well civilized and after those of America were also sufficiently civilized to assimilate new ideas, a stray ship or two was blown by the trade-winds across the Atlantic. That hypothetical voyage was the precursor of the great journey of Columbus. Without the tradewinds this historic discoverer never could have found the West Indies. Suppose that a strong west wind had blown him backward on his course when his men were mutinous. Suppose ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington

... is, Thalvogt, Ruler of the Valley—the name given figuratively to a dense grey mist which the south wind sweeps into the valleys from the mountain tops. It is well known as the precursor ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

... Rotton Park.—The Mission Room in Coplow St., in connection with St. John's, Ladywood, is the precursor of this ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... 1 Rousseau its most direct speculative precursor 2 His distinction among revolutionists 4 ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley



Words linked to "Precursor" :   somebody, mortal, person, material, biochemistry, indication, forerunner, individual, predecessor, soul, indicant, herald, harbinger, someone, stuff



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