"Superincumbent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... place, must be inclosed in an envelope through which it cannot escape. Silk prepared with India-rubber is the material usually employed. As the balloon rises, the gas in the interior distends, because the air becomes lighter the less it is condensed by its superincumbent masses; hence it is requisite to leave a margin for this increase in the volume of the gas, otherwise the balloon would burst ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... panoply which it is accustomed to wear. The strength of his imagination triumphed over every obstacle. So intense and ardent was the fire of his mind, that it not only was not suffocated beneath the weight of fuel, but penetrated the whole superincumbent mass with ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... treated by popular science. Mr. Vincent says that 'clairvoyance and phrenology were Elliotson's constant stock in trade.' (Phrenology was also Braid's stock in trade.) 'It is a matter of congratulation to have been so soon delivered from what Dr. Lloyd Tuckey has well called "a mass of superincumbent rubbish."'[18] Clairvoyance is part of a mass of rubbish, on page 57. On page 67, Mr. Vincent says: 'There are many interesting questions, such as telepathy, thought-reading, clairvoyance, upon which it would be perhaps rash to give any decided opinion.... All these strange psychical conditions present ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... which however it is defended by a strong stone balustrade, so that however fearful in appearance, its only real danger lies in an accident which sometimes happens, that large fragments detach themselves from the superincumbent rock, and roll down the precipice, carrying before them every thing that might obstruct ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... stones projects slightly beyond the one underneath it. Fig. 11 is a section of the chamber itself, and the succession of small chambers shown one above the other was evidently formed for the purpose of distributing the weight of the superincumbent mass. From the point C a narrow well leads almost perpendicularly downwards to a point nearly at the bottom of the first-mentioned gallery; and the purpose to be served by this well was long a subject of debate. ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... evident on examination that a space had been cleared out under the cargo, and filled with straw and shavings and other light matter. This had caused the smoke, though until the bales above it had been removed the flames were kept down. When the superincumbent bales were lifted off, the flames quickly rose up; but the material which fed them being light, had speedily burned out before they had time to ignite the surrounding cargo, which, fortunately being very tightly packed, did not easily catch fire. ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... was once level, but that there had been a cavern below it, which was gradually increased by the roof crumbling away, and the debris being washed out by the sea, until the rock became too thin to bear the superincumbent weight of earth, when the centre gave way, and sinking down, the surrounding earth followed, until it was formed into its present shape. The sea continually rushing in, again cleared out the cavern. As we were anxious to look up it, we hurried back to the boat, and the tide ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... friendship comes so often to a violent and sudden death as under the pressure of travel. It is like the fate which the Scientific ascribe to a box sunk in the sea; after a certain depth, which varies according to the strength of the box, the weight of the superincumbent water bursts it up. It is merely a question of how deep or how strong. Our travelling companion remains our friend for a day, for a week, for even a month; but at the month's end he is our friend no longer. Our relations have probably become what the diplomatists ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... broad avenues intersect them. You shall walk for hours in parks of palm-tree alleys, regular, like soldiers on parade; in the recesses of the hills you may stumble on a mill-house, toiling and trembling there, fathoms deep in superincumbent forest. On the carpet of clean sward, troops of horses and herds of handsome cattle may be seen to browse; and to one accustomed to the rough luxuriance of the tropics, the appearance is of fairyland. The managers, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cylinders and for planing and other expensive work should be avoided. In the aneroid barometer a shallow circular box is fitted with a cover, which is corrugated in concentric circles, and the pressure of the superincumbent air is caused to depress the centre of this cover through the device of partially exhausting the box of air and thus diminishing the internal resistance. To the slightly moving middle part of the cover is affixed a lever which actuates, after some intermediate ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... still nearly at the boiling point, disintegrated and wore down many of these rocks, and, in the lapse of ages, deposited their remains, in thick layers of sand and mud, at the bottom of the seas. Baked by the heat from beneath, and pressed by the weight of superincumbent waters, these layers slowly hardened into stratified rocks. Forms of vegetable and animal life, though only of the lowest type, the origin of which is to be explained hereafter, now began to appear. Some sea-plants, zooephytes, infusory animalcules, and a few of ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... when it has lately been overthrown. It is the custom with Protestant writers to consider that, whereas there are two great principles in action in the history of religion, Authority and Private Judgment, they have all the Private Judgment to themselves, and we have the full inheritance and the superincumbent oppression of Authority. But this is not so; it is the vast Catholic body itself, and it only, which affords an arena for both combatants in that awful, never-dying duel. It is necessary for the very life of religion, ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... Toller. Things from the abyss of Time that float upwards into dreams—sleeping things whose breath sometimes breaks the surface of our waking consciousness, like bubbles rising from the depths of Lethe—these had become the sober certainties of Toller's life. The superincumbent waters had parted asunder, and the children of the deep were all astir. Toller had awakened into a past which lies beyond the graves of buried races and had joined his fathers in the ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... sort of loose marly foundation: this being perpetually exposed to the undermining action of the sea at its foot; accelerated in wet seasons by the marle being rendered soft and yielding,—it is evident that, sooner or later, such a foundation would give way to the immense superincumbent pressure, and be attended with all the direful effects of a ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon
... Starboard your helm, my man, and bring her to the wind." As she came round, blaze went our carronades and long—gun in succession, with goodwill and good aim, and down came his foretop—sail on the cap, with all the superincumbent spars and gear; the head of the topmast had been shot away. The men instinctively cheered. "That will do; now knock off, my boys, and let us run for it. Keep her awav again; ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... parts, at least, covered with a bituminous cement, which time has made harder than the stone itself. In some places where the ravines had been filled up with masonry, the mountain torrents, wearing on it for ages, have gradually eaten a way through the base, and left the superincumbent mass—such is the cohesion of the materials—still spanning the valley like ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... To Friedrich's intense and long-continued scrutiny, they indicate, what is next to incredible, but is at length fatally undeniable, That the old TREATY, which we called OF WARSAW, "Treaty for Partitioning Prussia," is still (in spite of all subsequent and superincumbent Treaties to the contrary) vigorously alive underground; that Saxon Bruhl and her Hungarian Majesty, to whom is now added Czarish Majesty, are fixed as ever on cutting down this afflictive, too aspiring King of Prussia to the size of a Brandenburg Elector; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... After this latter, Altman reformed and put it upon a most respectable footing—in 1080. He was, however, a severe disciplinarian. Perhaps the crypt mentioned by M. Klein might be of the latter end of the XIIth century; but no visible portion of the superincumbent building can be older than the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... inserted a finger under the corpus callosum, the fibres of which are above our finger, we may feel below, the structure which may be called the bottom of the ventricle, and which is likewise the base or trunk of the superincumbent parts from which they spring, as a tree from ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... are not built immediately over the lower walls, but on large beams supported on masonry piers. In the much higher terraces of Zuni, the strength of many of the inner ground walls must be seriously taxed to withstand the superincumbent weight, as such walls are doubtless of only the average thickness and strength of ground walls. The dense clustering of this village has certainly in some instances thrown the weight of two, three, or even four additional, stories upon walls in which no provision was made for the unusual ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... being thrown up in all directions; they resemble the billows of a tempestuous ocean suddenly solidified into stone, or as though a hundred thousand million Pelions had been upon as many million Ossas hurled, and as though the falling masses, with superincumbent weight, falling, flattened out the summits of the ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... was at work there with his mattock or his homely plough. And, perchance, some stroke of the spade, or push of the coulter, went a little deeper than usual, and there flashed the gold, or some shower of rain came on, and washed away a little of the superincumbent soil, and laid bare the bag. Now, that is what often happens, for you have to remember that though you are not seeking God, God is always seeking you, and so the great saying comes to be true, 'I am found of them that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... to attest their restless energies. That igneous matter has, during many periods, been protruded from below—that mountains have risen in succession from the sea, and injected their molten substance through cracks and fissures of superincumbent strata—are facts resting on indubitable evidence. Many masses of granite became the solid bottom of some portions of the sea before the secondary strata were laid gradually upon them. The granite of Mont Blanc rose during a recent tertiary period. ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... various beds, each of which would make a Giant's Causeway entire, piled over each other like stories in a building, and divided into columns, vertical, or nearly so, in every instance except in one bed near the base, in which the pillars incline to a side, as if losing footing under the superincumbent weight. Innumerable polygonal fragments,—single stones of the building,—lie scattered over the slope, composed, like almost all the rest of the Scuir, of a peculiar and very beautiful stone, unlike any other in ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller |
