Diccionario ingles.comDiccionario ingles.com
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Rudimentary   /rˌudəmˈɛntəri/   Listen
Rudimentary

adjective
1.
Being or involving basic facts or principles.  Synonyms: fundamental, underlying.  "A fundamental incomatibility between them" , "These rudimentary truths" , "Underlying principles"
2.
Being in the earliest stages of development.
3.
Not fully developed in mature animals.  Synonym: vestigial.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Rudimentary" Quotes from Famous Books



... fight until it is educated out of them, just as they will no doubt retain rudimentary tails and live in trees till they know better. It's all owing to how a man was ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye

... into an irregular melee, in which the boldest exchanged broadsides and the shirkers hung back, there were attempts to fight in regular lines, the ships giving each other mutual support. Want of traditional experience, marked differences in the speed and manoeuvring power of ships, and the rudimentary character of the signalling, made it difficult to keep the line, but it was early recognized as an ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale

... bards to continue their pagan incantations, they continued to exert some authority, and it is said Irish priests adopted the tonsure which was their distinctive badge. The bards, who could recite and compose poems and stories, accompanying themselves on a rudimentary harp, were considered of much higher rank than those who merely recited incantations. They transmitted poems, incantations, and laws, orally only, and no proof exists that the pagan Irish, for instance, committed ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... wanting, he quite naturally, without giving it a second thought, engaged himself as a labourer, and worked all day carrying sacks of grain out of a vessel's hold. For a large part of his nature was patient and simple, docile as an animal's. There was in him so much that was rudimentary, that in accepting this burden of physical toil he was acting not in contradiction to, but in full and perfect harmony with, ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore

... new-world apes and monkeys, and the lemurs. Every lemur which has yet been examined, in fact, has its cerebellum partially visible from above, and its posterior lobe, with the contained posterior cornu and hippocampus minor, more or less rudimentary. Every marmoset, American monkey, old-world monkey, baboon, or man-like ape, on the contrary, has its cerebellum entirely hidden, posteriorly, by the cerebral lobes, and possesses a large posterior cornu, with a well-developed hippocampus minor." ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... many temperate electors were alienated from Commander Beauchamp, though no doubt the Radicals were made compact: for they may be the skirmishing faction—poor scattered fragments, none of them sufficiently downright for the other; each outstripping each; rudimentary emperors, elementary prophets, inspired physicians, nostrum-devouring patients, whatsoever you will; and still here and there a man shall arise to march them in close columns, if they can but trust him; in perfect subordination, a model even for Tories while they keep shoulder to shoulder. And ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... in the mind without the name, or general term. It was seen, however, that our first perception of any object becomes a sort of standard by which other similar experiences are intercepted, and is, therefore, general in character. From this it is evident that a rudimentary type of conception exists prior to language. In the case of the young child, as he gains a mental image of his father, the experience evidently serves as a centre for interpreting other similar individuals. We may notice that as soon as he gains control of language, ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education

... is treated in a concise manner, the aim being to embody in each publication as completely as possible all the rudimentary information and essential facts necessary to an understanding of the subject. Care has been taken to make all statements accurate and clear, with the purpose of bringing essential information within the understanding of beginners in the different fields of study. Wherever practicable, ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton

... into two regions, anterior and posterior brachial. The most of these muscles originate on the posterior border and inferior extremity of the shoulder bone, and terminate inferiorly on the superior extremities of the principal and second or rudimentary bone of the forearm. The posterior brachial muscles are heavy and powerful. They are sometimes termed elbow muscles, because they are attached to the ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.

... accommodating functional conditions might reasonably be expected. It is, indeed, an interesting fact well known to ornithologists that our own American cuckoos, both the yellow-billed and black-billed, although rudimentary nest-builders, still retain the same exceptional interval in their egg-laying as do their foreign namesake. The eggs are laid from four days to a week apart, instead of daily, as with most birds, their period of perilous nidification on that haphazard apology of a ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson

... later documents which pretend to give an account of times similarly early, but which were compiled under philosophical or theological influences. If by any means we can determine the early forms of jural conceptions, they will be invaluable to us. These rudimentary ideas are to the jurist what the primary crusts of the earth are to the geologist. They contain, potentially, all the forms in which law has subsequently exhibited itself. The haste or the prejudice which has generally refused them all but the most superficial examination, must bear the ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

... case; but in this case their horror was deepened by the circumstance that the assailants sometimes were African semi-savages—the Senegalese whom France brought to Greece, as to other parts of Europe, oblivious of the most rudimentary dictates of decency and sound policy. On one occasion (22 Feb.) the coloured libertines paid for their lust with their lives: a patrol of a dozen of ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott

... fine tail. The head is perfectly flat, very thin, and armed on each side with very sharp bones pointing tailward; a wound from one of these causes intense inflammation. The fins are small—so small as to appear almost rudimentary—yet the fish swims, or rather darts, along the bottom with amazing rapidity. They love to lie along the banks a few feet from the shore, where, concealed in the sand, they can dart out upon and seize their prey in their enormous ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke

... remedial paraphernalia has been confined to the action of matter over mind. This has seriously interfered with the evolutionary tendencies of the doctors themselves, and consequently the psychic factor in professional life is still in a rudimentary or comparatively undeveloped state. But the light of the nineteenth century has dawned, and so the march of mankind in general is taken in the direction of the hidden forces of nature. Doctors are now ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine

... the moderate Indian Nationalists whose influence is sure to predominate over all the old traditions of Indian governance if the new reforms are successful. Some Princes are wise enough to swim with the current and have introduced rudimentary councils and representative assemblies which at any rate provide a modern facade for their own patriarchal systems of government. But all are more or less conscious that their own position is being profoundly modified by ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... dug by the Germans were filled with human corpses in thick, serried masses. Quicklime and straw had been thrown over them by the ton. Piles of bodies of men and of horses had been partially cremated in the most rudimentary fashion. The country seemed to be one endless charnel-house. The stench of the dead was appalling. Of the fifty odd houses that form the village of Etrepilly, not one remained intact. Some of them had been hit by a shell that penetrated through the roof, falling into the cellar, and by its explosion ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard

... individuals. It soon becomes plain that the crazy cry for equality is really only a weak protest against the hardships of the battle for existence. The brutes have not attained to our complexity of brain; ideas are only rudimentary with them, and they decide the question of superiority by rude methods. Two lions fight until one is laid low; the lioness looks calmly on until the little problem of superiority is settled, and then she goes off with the victor. ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... minister in the next half-hour, which she devoted to private spiritual instruction. Psychology proved wholly unequal to the task of fathoming the twins, and she fancied that theology might have been more helpful. Their idea seemed to be- -if the rudimentary thing she unearthed from their consciousness could be called an idea—that they would not mind repenting if they could see anything of which to repent. Of sin, as sin, they had no apparent knowledge, either by sight, by hearsay ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... Its small pink-purple, lilac, or whitish flowers, that are only about half as long as the protruding pair of stamens, are borne in loose terminal clusters at the ends of the stiff, branched, slender, sometimes reddish, stem. A pair of rudimentary, useless stamens remain within the two-lipped tube; the exserted pair, affording the most convenient alighting place for the visiting flies, dust their undersides with pollen the first day the flower opens; on the next, the stigma will be ready to receive pollen ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... public-houses nor public amusements at this time, turkeys unknown and beef scarce. In fact a rudimentary Christmas festival of a holiday, not ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett

... the time of fertilization were developed under the influence of the nucleus, which in turn got them half and half from its male and female parents. These characters carried by the female across one generation are so rudimentary that they are completely covered up, in the developing embryo, by those of the new nucleus formed by the union of the sperm with ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard

... has yielded another bird Ichthyornis (Fig. 5), which also possesses teeth; but the teeth are situated in distinct sockets, while those of Hesperornis are not so lodged. The latter also has such very small, almost rudimentary, wings, that it must have been chiefly a swimmer and a diver, like a Penguin; while Ichthyornis has strong wings and no doubt possessed corresponding powers of flight. Ichthyornis also differed in the fact ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley

... a difficult question. Weston could not very well tell her, even had he quite realized it, that there was in him a vein of rudimentary chivalry that had been carefully fostered by his mother. The males of the Weston line had clung to traditions, but they had for the most part been those of the Georgian days, when very little refinement of sentiment was expected ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... outline from the point of view of its value as a means of definition of form and fact—its power is really only limited by the power of draughtsmanship at the command of the artist. From the archaic potters' primitive figures or the rudimentary attempts of children at human or animal forms up to the most refined outlines of a Greek vase-painter, or say the artist of the Dream of Poliphilus, the difference is one of degree. The tyro with the pen, learning to write, splotches and scratches, and painfully ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane

... make on each other; what each thinks about the duty of having children. These elementary facts of human life, which must confront those who marry, are faced by them without any kind of preparation, without the most rudimentary knowledge of each other's point of view. And that there are so many happy marriages in spite of all this makes one realize how extraordinarily loyal, fine and courageous, on the whole, ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden

... begins. All the persons of the drama utter one strange tongue. They are no better than the characters in a Punch and Judy show, where one concealed manipulator furnishes voice for each of the figures. But in Lyly's novel there is not even an attempt at the most rudimentary ventriloquism. ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent

... difficulty. A Council subject only to a veto on its acts, even though it could neither pass a by-law nor strike a rate, would undoubtedly be said by the Unionist opposition to be a rudimentary parliament. A group of chairmen possessing administrative powers like those of Ministers would be labelled a Ministry; and the Liberals who had pledged themselves not to give effect to their Home Rule principles were sensitive to charges ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn

... Inspector-General of Fortresses and Pioneers, who has done inestimable service to his country, laid the foundations of a new organization. This follows the idea of the field pioneers and the fortress pioneers—a rudimentary training in common, followed by separate special training for their special duties. We must continue on these lines, and develop more particularly the fortress pioneer branch of the service in better ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi

... moments, when he was made with her destroying him, when all his complacency was destroyed, all his everyday self was broken, and only the stripped, rudimentary, primal man remained, demented with torture, her passion to love him became love, she took him again, they came together in an overwhelming passion, in which he knew ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... family, or in any essential way is looked down upon, there high forms of affection are by the nature of the case impossible, though some affection doubtless exists; it necessarily attains only a rudimentary development. Now it is conspicuous that the conception of the nature and purpose of woman, as held in the Orient, has always been debasing to her. Though individual women might rise above their assigned position the whole social ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... be heard, and, what is worse, being accepted as such by the uninstructed crowd. Thus Professor Huxley, who, as some one once said, "made science respectable," was wont to utter pontifical pronouncements on the subject of Home Rule for Ireland. His knowledge of that country was quite rudimentary, and his visits to it had been as few and as brief as if he had been its Sovereign; but that did not prevent him from delivering judgment, nor unfortunately deter many from following that judgment as if it had been inspired. I am not now arguing as ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

... Eumaeus, the pious swineherd of the Odyssey—who evolved the blasphemous myths of Greece, of Egypt and of India. We must look elsewhere for an explanation. We must try to discover some actual and demonstrable and widely prevalent condition of the human mind, in which tales that even to remote and rudimentary civilisations appeared irrational and unnatural would seem natural and rational. To discover this intellectual condition has been the aim of all mythologists who did not believe that myth is a divine tradition depraved by human weakness, or a distorted version ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... the Doctor's cry of surprise. Clinging to a shelf of rock which extended out from the wall of the cavern and half hidden among the seaweed was a huge marine creature. It looked like a huge black slug with rudimentary eyes and mouth. The thing was fifty feet in length and fully fifteen feet in diameter. It hung there, moving sluggishly as though breathing, and rudimentary tentacles projecting from one ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various

... vastly significant, nevertheless. If there were not some congruity in the materials, they would never be brought together as the subject of one science. Unless "good," "right," "obligation," "approval," etc., or the rudimentary conceptions which foreshadow them in the mind of the most primitive human beings, had a core of identity which could be traced in societies the most diverse, there would be no significance in speaking of the enlightened morality of one people and the ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton

... the albumen. There is a line down the middle, and, if we carefully bend back the edges of the cotyledon, it splits along this line, showing the plumule and caulicle within. The plumule consists of successive layers of rudimentary leaves, the outer enclosing the rest (Fig. 10, 1, c). The latter is the first leaf and remains undeveloped as a scaly sheath (Fig. 10, 2, c). In Wheat and Oats the cotyledon can be easily seen in the largest seedlings by pulling off ...
— Outlines of Lessons in Botany, Part I; From Seed to Leaf • Jane H. Newell

... forgetful of the plight in which the Honourable George would now find himself. He is as good as lost when not properly looked after. In the ordinary affairs of life he is a simple, trusting, incompetent duffer, if ever there was one. Even in so rudimentary a matter as collar-studs he is like a storm-tossed mariner—I mean to say, like a chap in a boat on the ocean who doesn't know what sails to pull up nor how to steer ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... assessment: NA domestic: rudimentary telephone services provided by an open-wire ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... the recording, form and color, of what had flitted past his eyes, with unsurpassed fidelity of memory; but it left one as cold as the painting of an iceberg. His recognition of art as distinguished from nature was far too rudimentary to fit him for a teacher, for his love of facts and detail blinded him to every other aspect of our relations with nature, in the recognition of which consist the highest ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James

... 'Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe,' and, therefore, your faith that craves the support of some outward thing, and often painfully feels that it is feeble without it, is as yet but very imperfect and rudimentary. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... help carry home her purchases. She would join company with some of her acquaintance, and leave the lovers to walk together, only accompanied by little Diego, or Diggo as they called him, whose English was of the most rudimentary description. ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge

... told him that in 1855 you meant by such expressions as "species being created on the type of pre-existing ones closely allied," and by what you say of modified prototypes, and by the passage in which you ask "what rudimentary organs mean if each species has been created independently," etc., that new species were created by variation and in the way ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... organization and independence of life. All these degenerate forms enlarge our conception of adaptation by adding the essential point that progress is not always the result of evolution. Indeed we have learned this in the case of vestigial and rudimentary structures of higher forms like whales, and now we find that entire animals may degenerate as a result of changes no less adaptive than ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... same region in the ape. For example—the hair on the forearm points outward and upward; on the upper arm down-ward and outward and so on throughout in the human and simian types. Every child comes into the world with a coat of rudimentary hair which is shed at once. Aside from the growth of hair on the head, including the brows and the lashes, the skin is quite free from any noticeable growth of hair for months or even years. Beginning at ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall

... interesting to notice that the metaphor of the Christian armour occurs in Paul's letters throughout his whole course. It first appears, in a very rudimentary form, in the earliest of the Epistles, that to the Thessalonians. It appears here in a letter which belongs to the middle of his career, and it appears finally in the Epistle to the Ephesians, in its fully developed and drawn-out shape, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... Darwinism. Evolve 'em into higher types, and turn 'em all white in time. Professor Wilder gave us a lecture about it. I'll send you round a Times with the account. Spoke about their thumbs. They can't cross them over their palms, and they have rudimentary tails, or had until they were educated off them. They wore all the hair off their backs by leaning against trees. Marvellous things! All they want ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... The diminution of the Window-Tax made light and ventilation possible. Personal cleanliness became fashionable, and the means of attaining it were cultivated. The whole art or science of domestic sanitation—rudimentary enough in its beginnings—belongs to the nineteenth century. The system which went before it was too primitively abominable to bear description. Sir Robert Rawlinson, the sanitary expert, who was called in to inspect Windsor Castle ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... of vision of these creatures before they developed bones were of a rudimentary nature, at least such was the condition of the two eyes in front with which they sought for their food upon the ground. But there was a third eye at the back of the head, the atrophied remnant of which is now known ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot

... companion with him. This companion, whom he had met in the woods, was known as Wolf, because his countenance reminded one of a wolf. He could hardly be called a gentleman, even as times and terms went then. He was evidently not of an old family, for he possessed something more than a rudimentary tail, and, had his face looked less like that of a wolf, it would have been that of a baboon. He was hairy, and his speech of rough gutturals was imperfect. He could pronounce but few words. He was, however, very strong, ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo

... the highest power. So in 1869 Pfleiderer speaks of the "primeval childlike naive prayer" of Rig Veda vi. 51. 5 ("Father sky, mother earth," etc.);[15] while Pictet, in his work Les Origines Indo-Europeennes, maintains that the Aryans had a primitive monotheism, although it was vague and rudimentary; for he regards both Iranian dualism and Hindu polytheism as being developments of one earlier monism (claiming that Iranian dualism is really monotheistic). Pictet's argument is that the human mind ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... A volume might be written comparing Mr. Webster with other great orators. Only the briefest and most rudimentary treatment of the subject is possible here. A most excellent study of the comparative excellence of Webster's eloquence has been made by Judge Chamberlain, Librarian of the Boston Public Library, in a speech at the dinner of the Dartmouth Alumni, which has since ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge

... their own cisterns, on the grandfather principle. These are underground, for the most part, and are regularly supplied from the roof-drainage. Also, they are intermittently supplied by leakage from adjacent privy-vaults, Charleston having a very rudimentary and fractional sewerage-system. Therefore typhoid is not only logical but inevitable. I have no such revolutionary contempt for private rights as to deny the privilege of any gentleman to drink such form of sewage as best pleases him; ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various

... that the sexual impulse does not suddenly emerge as a new phenomenon at the age of puberty, but that the form assumed at this period is gradually evolved from rudimentary elements present even in the earliest years of life. Sexuality is not absent in the child, it is merely different, being unorganized and imperfectly adapted to its later functions. All this primordial mass ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... one of the men made a laborious journey to the settlement for provisions, and in places a fallen tree had been chopped through or a thicket partly hewn away. That, however, did little to relieve the difficulties of the march, for the trail was rudimentary, and the first two leagues of it would probably have severely taxed the strength of a vigorous ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss

... easily be comprehended by any one in any language; we can follow his intention perfectly, and be certain of his true meaning, without having a thorough knowledge of the language in which he wrote; in fact, a quite rudimentary acquaintance is sufficient. We need make no researches concerning the life, the pursuits, or the habits of the author; nor need we inquire in what language, nor when he wrote, nor the vicissitudes of his ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza

... my struggle, I fall back not on reason but on instinct, on a primal desire, and perhaps this is my rudimentary soul, the mystical hanker after something higher. That is a real thing. The purpose of nature seems to be to put it into me and make it very important to me. That being so I can not overlook it, and ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... been said it is apparent that in Ilongot society we have a most rudimentary stage of political development. There is no tribe. There is no chieftainship. There are no social classes, for the Ilongot have neither aristocracy nor slaves nor what is very common in most Malayan communities, a class of bonded debtors. They have words to designate such classes, ...
— The Negrito and Allied Types in the Philippines and The Ilongot or Ibilao of Luzon • David P. Barrows

... regular churches, religious instruction was primarily carried on by mothers "abel to instruct," as Mrs. Hamilton put it.[31] Prayer, the reading of the Bible, and a rudimentary catechism were all a part of this home worship, conducted by one or both parents. Baptism and other sacraments of the church were provided by itinerant pastors who made their "rounds" through the valley. Presbyterians and, later, Methodists developed the practice of gathering together in their ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf

... must pause, to point out to you the short-sightedness of human contrivance. This ingenious young man, Mr. David Faux, thought he had achieved a triumph of cunning when he had associated himself in his brother's rudimentary mind with the flavour of yellow lozenges. But he had yet to learn that it is a dreadful thing to make an idiot fond of you, when you yourself are not of an affectionate disposition: especially an idiot with a pitchfork—obviously ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot

... heart as that passage with the Chinese waiter. This new attitude was loose in the back, tight across the shoulders, short in the seams—it was not made to fit Bertram Chester. When he launched out into rudimentary art criticism, stringing together the stock slang which he had picked up in the studios, when he tried to impress her with his refined acquaintance, his progress toward "society" of the conventional kind, her ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin

... boar is twice as big. A characteristic of the peccary is, that its tail is rudimentary, and the bristles spotted with black and white; moreover, only its legs ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart

... wild country Peter Burnett grew to manhood, attending school occasionally in summer, and getting a pretty good rudimentary education. Coming of intelligent, honest, able ancestors, he used his opportunities well, and learned a great deal from books, but more from a close observation of the natural wonders by which he was surrounded. His acute and kindly remarks upon the wild animals and ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton

... of course an absolute and convinced pessimist. A malevolent giant is not so bad a God as an insane child. And Browning means that pessimism is what we should naturally expect from so rudimentary an intellect as Caliban's, which judges the whole order of the universe from proximate ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps

... have Junior educated according to modern methods of child training, a year and a half did not seem too early an age at which to begin. As Doris said: "There is no reason why a child of a year and a half shouldn't have rudimentary cravings for self-expression." And really, there isn't any reason, when you come right ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley

... that are content to lie ever on the bottom, and they are but one-sided fish. They see with one eye only, the other has been absorbed and become dead. Every creature has in it a promise of something better than what it is. The slow-worm has rudimentary legs, but they are never developed; the oyster has rudimentary eyes, but they come to nothing. The larva has in it the promise of wings, and it grows into a butterfly or dies a grub. The soul of man has its wings so battered by its cage and is so enamoured of its ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... of a general call to arms. We find ourselves here confronted with a social malady which was more than an economic weakness. The Empire was, no doubt, a complex and expensive form of government superimposed upon a society which stood at a rudimentary stage of economic development. Barbarous methods of taxation and corrupt practices among the ruling classes had aggravated the burden to such a degree that the municipalities of the provinces were bankrupt, and the ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis

... to deceive her, or make her think him better than he thought himself. With a woman of Hester's instincts, there might have been less danger if he had; she also would then perhaps have been aware of the present untruth, and have recoiled. But if he had any he had but the most rudimentary notion of truth in the inward parts, and could deceive the better that he did not know he was deceiving. As little notion had he of the nature of the person he was dealing with, or the reality to her of the things of which she spoke;—belief was to him at most the mere difference ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... reply. She meant to talk about this later, but preferred to choose her time. Her education had been rudimentary, but she was naturally clever. She liked admiration, but was not to be led into foolishness by vanity. Sadie knew her value. It had for some time been obvious that a number of the young farmers who dealt at the store and frequented the hotel did so for ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss

... quotations—or misquotations quite as often. Like most of the Boers, the Bible is his only literature—that book he certainly studies a good deal, and his religion is a very large part of his being, but somehow he misses the true spirit of Christianity, in that he leaves out the rudimentary qualities of ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... auction, and which he proposed to exhibit through the country. The "Professor" who was engaged to travel with him, it seems, was highly gifted so far as good clothes, a fine head of hair, and a sweet expression, were concerned. He could also play rudimentary music upon the flute. But he couldn't handle his mother tongue glibly enough to accompany the scenes ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various

... hollowed out spoonwise on the inner side. Below the mandibles is a fleshy part crowned with two very tiny nipples. This is the lower lip with its two palpi. It is flanked right and left by two other parts, likewise fleshy, adhering closely to the lip and bearing at the tip a rudimentary palp consisting of two or three very tiny joints. These two parts are the future jaws. All this apparatus of lips and jaws is completely immobile and in a rudimentary condition which is difficult to describe. They are budding organs, still faint and embryonic. The labrum and the complicated ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... themselves and being deceived—which means again that they are susceptible to illusions produced by the suggestions of the author. And for the same reason I have had a feeling that, in our time, when the rudimentary, incomplete thought processes operating through our fancy seem to be developing into reflection, research, and analysis, the theatre might stand on the verge of being abandoned as a decaying form, for the enjoyment of which we lack the requisite conditions. The prolonged ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg

... remains to us of Hellenic gastronomy is associated with cannibalism. It is the story of Pelops—an episode almost pre-Homeric, where a certain rudimentary knowledge of dressing flesh, and even of disguising its real nature, is implied in the tale, as it descends to us; and the next in order of times is perhaps the familiar passage in the Odyssey, recounting the adventures ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt

... colored people to see those of their own race trusted and advanced, had induced them to employ him as an assistant teacher, even before he was really competent for such service. It is true he was given charge of only the most rudimentary work, but that fact, while it inspired his ambition, showed him also the need of improvement and made him a ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... between the upper and the lower wrists. A few hundred-thousand years ago his remote ancestor would have recoiled violently from the touch of what was then a strangler vine, but now he casually disengaged the half-sentient tendril and with his mind caught the faint, faint flicker of rudimentary awareness; thus far had nature progressed with the vine, apparently reluctant to abandon a false start toward mobility and intelligence for an unsuitable species. Or perhaps, Andra added, in nature's long-term view the experiment ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan

... spoken words is the more surprising, as his repetition of them continues still to be of a very rudimentary character. With the exception of some interjections, especially j[a][)e] as a joyous sound and of crowing sounds, also screaming sounds, which, however, have become more rare, the child has but few expressions of his own with a recognizable meaning; ndae, ndae, da is ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... In a savage rudimentary way he went over the ethical aspect of the affair, coming to no very clear conclusion. He would have destroyed the thing himself if she had asked him, but she should have asked him. And even in his ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)

... is produced by no life more than by that of the Apostle Paul. He was given to Christianity when it was in its most rudimentary beginnings. It was not, indeed, feeble, nor can any mortal man be spoken of as indispensable to it; for it contained within itself the vigor of a divine and immortal existence, which could not but have unfolded itself in the course of time. But, if we recognize that God makes use of means ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker

... of a city. It was difficult to apply them to the vast territory she attempted to govern with their aid. They were a clumsy {4} apparatus that worked only by sudden starts, a rudimentary system that could ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

... of new Races by breeding. Hypotheses of definite and indefinite Modifiability equally arbitrary. Competition and Extinction of Races. Progression not a necessary Accompaniment of Variation. Distinct Classes of Phenomena which Natural Selection explains. Unity of Type, Rudimentary Organs, Geographical Distribution, Relation of the extinct to the living Fauna and Flora, and mutual Relations of successive Groups of Fossil Forms. Light thrown on Embryological Development by Natural ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell

... small and ill-equipped and were regarded with doubt and suspicion by the military leaders of the various countries. Compared with what has since taken place, the experiments previous to the war were only the most rudimentary beginnings. ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser

... into a magnificent shop, where all the flowers looked rather like little girls dressed up for a party, and ordered some roses to be sent to Clara, for whom he had begun to feel a rudimentary responsibility. It comforted him to do that. Somehow it broke the stillness which had infected him, and most profoundly shocked him, so different was it from the theatre in which he had been born and bred, the rather fatuous, very sentimental ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan

... Fourth Dimension," she said, patiently. She had the air of one in a position of difficulty; of one aware of it and ready to brave it. She had the listlessness of an enlightened person who has to explain, over and over again, to stupid children some rudimentary point ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad

... which will be put in action against those dealers, even though the one who sold the stone makes good the loss, is something that can be ill afforded by any dealer, and all this might have been avoided by even a rudimentary knowledge of the means of distinguishing precious stones. The dealer was doubtless honest, but, through carelessness ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade

... of England in being founded upon precedents. The code which was supposed to have been revealed by Ea, or Oannes, belonged to the infancy of Chaldean society and contained only a rudimentary system of legislation. The actual law of the country was a complicated structure which had been slowly built up by the labors of generations. An abstract was made of every important case that came before the judges and of the decision given in regard to it; these abstracts were carefully ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce

... time of the famous Stone Age, when man learned the first rudimentary principles of what we ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon

... so much packing between the other organs? And yet, at the outset of his studies, he finds that no adaptive reason whatsoever can be given for one-half of the peculiarities of vegetable structure; he also discovers rudimentary teeth, which are never used, in the gums of the young calf and in those of the foetal whale; insects which never bite have rudimental jaws, and others which never fly have rudimental wings; naturally blind creatures have rudimental eyes; and the halt ...
— The Darwinian Hypothesis • Thomas H. Huxley

... botanizing boxes (for lunch transportation), and American school-marms realizing at last the dream of their modest and laborious lives. Accommodation was cheap, manners were easy, and knowledge of the gay city less than rudimentary. ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke

... as Tembarom's was to his solicitor naturally suggested problems. Mr. Palford found his charge baffling because, according to ordinary rules, a young man so rudimentary should have presented no problems not perfectly easy to explain. It was herein that he was exotic. Mr. Palford, who was not given to subtle analysis of differences in character and temperament, argued privately that an English youth who had been brought up in the streets ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... remarkable power in the acquisition of knowledge. He learned the rudimentary branches of education almost without a teacher. Mathematics, Latin, and Greek came to him almost by intuition. When engaged in study, he was so deeply absorbed that he seemed wholly unconscious of time, place, or surroundings. When in his tenth year he was taken ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith

... Service, and the like, I may be permitted to press for the need of uniting both types, the scientific and the practical, into a single one—a civic museum and active centre in one. Of this type, my own Outlook Tower at Edinburgh is, so far as I am aware, the earliest beginning; and, despite its rudimentary condition, may thus serve to suggest a type of institution which will be found of service alike to ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes

... its centre; loreal plates two, square; labial plates large; ears none, only a very indistinct sunk dot in their place. Body cylindrical; tail conical, tapering. Scales smooth, ovate, imbricate, those of the belly 6-sided. The front limbs very small, rudimentary, undivided; the hinder limbs moderately developed, ending in two very unequal toes, with ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey

... therefore imagine Watson's chagrin when, after highly commending Mr. Bell's invention, Sir William Thompson added, 'This, perhaps, greatest marvel hitherto achieved by electric telegraph has been obtained by appliances of quite a homespun and rudimentary character.'" ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett

... load a gun, and that is about all. I don't believe one of them ever fired a weapon before this trip. They haven't the most rudimentary ideas of aiming. Don't even know what sights are for. My boys will soon whip them into some sort of shape. I came over to see how much ammunition you have for their muskets. They really ought to fire a few rounds—after a week ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al

... between the eyes. After that he, too, forgot that he liked the man before him, and rushed him in all directions. There was no doubt as to who would have won if it had been a competition. Trevor's guard was of the most rudimentary order, and O'Hara got through when and how he liked. But though he took a good deal, he also gave a good deal, and O'Hara confessed himself not altogether sorry when Moriarty ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse

... energy which men with any fondness for art possess very seldom indeed—an earnestness in making acquaintances, and a love for using them. They give their whole attention to the art of dining out, after mastering a few rudimentary facts to serve up in conversation. Now after saying that, do I seem a man likely ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy

... of publishing booksellers' and auctioneers' catalogues, rudimentary as it was at the outset, succeeded by the more systematic descriptive accounts of public and private collections, gradually extended the knowledge of the surviving volumes of early literature, and laid the foundation of a National Bibliography. We shall probably ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... The ovules are the rudimentary seeds, situated in a case at the base of the pistils, each consisting of a central portion, called the nucleus, which is surrounded by two coats, the inner called the secundine, the outer the primine. When the hairlike tube of the pollen-grain ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot

... contradictions in the present distributions of sovereign power are further intensified by the vulgarization of the general ideal. It is one thing to say, 'Some men shall rule,' quite another to declare, 'All men shall rule,' and that in virtue of the most primitive and rudimentary attribute they possess,—that, namely, of sex. If the original contempt for masses of men has ever diminished, and the conception of mankind been ennobled, it is because, upon the primitive animal foundation, human imagination has built a fair structure of mental and moral attribute ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson

... epoch or country, will discover that children correspond unconsciously to his multifarious interests. They are not standardised. They are more generous in their appreciations, more sensitive to pure ideas, more impersonal. Their curiosity is disinterested. The stock may be rudimentary, but the outlook is spacious; it is the passionless outlook of the sage. A child is ready to embrace the universe. And, unlike adults, he is never afraid to face his own limitations. How refreshing to converse with folks who have no bile to vent, no axe to grind, no prejudices to air; who are pagans ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... dire penalties have been devised for their benefit. Laws against sacrilege, heresy and blasphemy still ornament our statute-books; but these invented crimes that were once punishable by death are now obsolete, or exist in rudimentary forms only, and manifest themselves in a refusal to invite the guilty party to our Four-o'Clock. This hot intent to support and uphold the volunteers in their explanations of how the world was made, is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... her still, to a yet more wretched part of the city, they saw her knock at a door, pay something, and be admitted. It looked a dreadful refuge, but she was at least under cover, and shelter, in such a climate as ours in winter, must be the first rudimentary notion of salvation. No longer haunted with the idea of her wandering all night about the comfortless streets, "like a ghost awake in Memphis," Donal said, they went home. But it was long before they got to sleep, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... duodecimo[obs3]; dumpy, squat; short &c. 201. impalpable, intangible, evanescent, imperceptible, invisible, inappreciable, insignificant, inconsiderable, trivial; infinitesimal, homoeopathic[obs3]; atomic, subatomic, corpuscular, molecular; rudimentary, rudimental; embryonic, vestigial. weazen|!, scant, scraggy, scrubby; thin &c. (narrow) 203; granular &c. (powdery) 330; shrunk &c. 195; brevipennate[obs3]. Adv. in a small compass, in a nutshell; on a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... the edge of the rim which is so nimbly turned at each point of inflexion. The caterpillars in distress, starved, shelterless, chilled with cold at night, cling obstinately to the silk ribbon covered hundreds of times, because they lack the rudimentary glimmers of reason which would advise them ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... the Brahmans were learned philosophers, and had seen as far into every mystery as mortal eyes will ever see. We have progressed a little lately; our universities, it is true, are a few hundred years old, but in comparison with the East we are still savages; our culture is but rudimentary, and my correspondent's letter is proof of it. It is characteristic of the ideas that still flourish on the banks of the Thames, ideas that have changed only a little since the Mayflower sailed. It would have been ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... Ajax with a tag of political partisanship, his servitude to surroundings defines his conscience as an artist; and when painting by contrasts he poses the weak Ismene and Chrysothemis as foils to their heroic sisters, we see that his dramatic power in the essential was rudimentary. Yet Mr. Matthew Arnold, a living English poet, writes that Sophocles 'saw life steadily and saw it whole.' This is true of no man, not of Shakespeare nor of Goethe, much less of Sophocles or Racine. The phrase itself is as offensively out of date ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris

... facts, quite in accordance with, and even necessary deductions from, the law now developed, are those of rudimentary organs. That these really do exist, and in most cases have no special function in the animal oeconomy, is admitted by the first authorities in comparative anatomy. The minute limbs hidden beneath the skin in many of the snake-like lizards, the anal hooks of the boa constrictor, the complete series ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... as they are into small tribes, without agricultural or mineral resources, without connexions, and with a climate which makes them strangers to want, they could but remain stationary or cultivate none but the most rudimentary arts and industries. Yet in spite of all this, how often have their instruments, their canoes, and their nets, excited the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne

... art, the deep symbolical knowledge, the over-strung but tranquil mysticism of the believers who erected cathedrals. But for them the church in its rough-hewn state, as Nature had formed it, was but a soulless thing, a sketch, rudimentary; the embryo only of a basilica, varying with the seasons and the days, at once living and inert, awaking only to the roaring organ of the wind, the swaying roof of boughs wrung with the slightest breath; it was lax and ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... enlargement, either by a great increase of its blood-vessels or a development of the capsules and increase of their contained jelly. Dr. S. V. Clevenger considers these organs to have had a branchial or respiratory origin, saying that there are many reasons for believing them to be rudimentary gills. Owen says that the thymus appears in vertebrates with the establishment of the lung as the main or exclusive respiratory organ. It is wanting in all fishes, also in the gill-bearing batrachians, siren and proteus. The thyroid appears in ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris

... "vagabond Robin," her "small pariah." He was a boy entranced and exalted by his first passion and because he was a sort of young superman it was not a common one, though it shared all the unreason and impetuous simplicities of the most rudimentary of its kind. He could not think very calmly or logically; both the heaven and the earth in him swept him along as with the rush of the spheres. It was Robin who was foremost in all his thoughts. It was because she was so apart from all the world that it had seemed beautiful ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... The tales of the Leabhar na Huidhre are in prose, but prose whose source and original is poetry. The author, from time to time, as if quoting an authority, breaks out with verse; and I think there is no Irish tale in existence without these rudimentary traces of a prior metrical cycle. The style and language are quite different, and indicate two distinct epochs. The prose tale is founded upon a metrical original, and composed in the meretricious style then in fashion, while ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady

... terminal buds of the preceding season, sterile and fertile flowers on separate trees,—sterile flowers with 9 stamens, each of the three inner with two stalked orange-colored glands, anthers 4-celled, ovary abortive or wanting: fertile flowers with 6 rudimentary stamens in one row; ovary ovoid; ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame

... already been said. Houston found a rough American settlement, composed of scattered villages extending along the disputed frontier of Mexico. Already, in the true Anglo-Saxon spirit, the settlers had formed a rudimentary state, and as they increased and multiplied they framed a simple ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... best, and half filled the car. Then some other impulse seized the bewildered rudimentary brains; the cattle balked. J.B. did it again, and yet again, until the ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... which in the course of time all organic beings have been subjected, certain organs or parts have occasionally become at first of little use and ultimately superfluous; and the retention of such parts in a rudimentary and utterly useless condition can, on the descent-theory, be simply understood. On the principle of modifications being inherited at the same age in the child, at which each successive variation first appeared in the parent, we shall see why ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... aft of "midships" a pyramidal lump of fatty substance projected several feet above the line of the vertebras. It was the spurious or rudimentary dorsal fin, with which the ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid

... revealed himself as unaware that the mode in which I had cited a group of cases upon destruction of prizes was the correct mode, I thought it well to provide him with the rudimentary information that, "in referring to a decided case, the page, mentioned is, in the absence of any indication to the contrary, invariably that on which the report of the case commences." He replies that he has ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland

... build up his strength; too many of us only begin to take thought of our health when it is too late to do us much good. Almost everything is possible in childhood. The heaviest life handicaps can be fed and played and trained out of existence in a child. Even the most rudimentary knowledge, the simplest and crudest of precautions, in childhood may make all the difference between misery and happiness, ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson

... be heard—out of his holy temple, if indeed that be the living soul of man, as St. Paul believed; but there was no sign that the preacher regarded his office as having any such end, although in his sermon lingered the rudimentary tokens that such must have been ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... proofs, the bearing of which is real and incontestable"; who concedes that "his theory accords very well with the great facts of comparative anatomy and zooelogy,—comes in admirably to explain unity of composition of organisms, also to explain rudimentary and representative organs, and the natural series of genera and species,—equally corresponds with many palaeontological data,—agrees well with the specific resemblances which exist between two successive faunas, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... which was remarkable for its vividness. But the image was of nothing he had ever seen before—of thousands upon thousands of miniature beings, utterly alien to man; they resembled amphibious insects, with thin, elongated heads, large eyes, and antennae set upon a scaled, four-legged body, with rudimentary beetle-like wings. Curiously, they seemed ageless; he could detect no difference among them—all appeared to be the ...
— McIlvaine's Star • August Derleth

... more rudimentary than these halting-places established on the mountains by the Alpine Club of Switzerland. A single room, in which an inclined plane of hard wood serves as a bed and takes up nearly all the space, leaving but little for the stove and the long table, screwed to the floor like the ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet

... expressions, but Clement had apparently been through that trifling experience, and could not be coaxed into saying more than he meant to say. Murray Bradshaw was very curious to find out how it was that he had become the victim of such a rudimentary miss as Susan Posey. Could she be an heiress in disguise? Why no, of course not; had not he made all proper inquiries about that when Susan came to town? A small inheritance from an aunt or uncle, or some such relative, enough to make her a desirable party in ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... huh?" the younger soldier snapped. "You haff a peekneek here, huh?" And turning to his companion he poured a kind of guttural volley at him, which his comrade answered with a brisk return of heavy verbal fire. Archer, listening intently and using his very rudimentary knowledge of German, gathered that whoever and whatever these two were, they were themselves in ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh

... universities at a much earlier age than is now the case. Not, indeed, that the boys of thirteen knew more then than the boys of thirteen know now. But the education imparted in the universities at that time was of a much more rudimentary kind than that which we understand by university education at present. In illustration of this Dr. Dreyer tells us how, in the University of Wittenberg, one of the professors, in his opening address, was accustomed to point out that even the processes of ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball

... purposely omitted pleasure (which, in the analysis of the ordinary embrace, reduces all the other ingredients to an almost invisible faction), because I fail to find it; but I am willing to believe that in some rudimentary form it does exist, because man attends to no purely unpleasant matter with such praiseworthy assiduity. Anything more fixedly stolid than the Park Lover when he passes his arm round his chosen one and takes her crimson hand ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... in the laborious decoration of canoe paddles, ax-handles, and other weapons, is, under such technical disabilities as to tools, really very impressive. This being so, there is no inherent reason why such a rudimentary form of the art as "chip" carving should not be practised in a way consistent with its true nature and limitations. As its elemental distinctions are so few, and its methods so simple, it follows that in recognizing such limitations, we shall make the ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack

... simile is true, aye, to the supreme part played by "the struggle for existence!" Under its influence, through the "natural selection" of the public, a new and nobler species of journalism has arisen and now exists. The newspaper of to-day, evolved from rudimentary forms, is a splendid and heroic organism; and the last upholder of the dogma of its miraculous creation and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various

... projecting gunwale of cork, and hollow air-cases within it; one of these being at the head, the other at the stern. It was ballasted by means of a false iron keel. In these respects this boat possessed, in rudimentary form, the essentials of the lifeboat of the present day. A coble was converted into a lifeboat on these principles by Lukin, and launched at Bamborough, where, in the course of the first year, it was the means of saving many lives. This was the first lifeboat ever brought ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne

... may be innumerable other senses, and that some of these may perhaps be already developed in other creatures than man. Such a suggestion stirs our curiosity and desire; but how few of us have learned to rightly use the five senses we have! And of the moral perceptions we have but a most rudimentary development. We are unconscious of most of the world we live in, unconscious even of what many of our fellow-men discern. Did you ever happen to be in the presence of a sunset, flooding the heavens with glory, with a companion who showed no sign of perceiving the splendor? Ah! perhaps ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... mistress, whose work was in and for the world and the people, not withdrawn to any exceptional refuge or shelter—which has always been most dear to the Anglo-Saxon race. The influence of such an example in a country where manners and morals were equally rudimentary, where the cloister proved often the only refuge for women, and even that not always a safe one—was incalculable, and the protection of a virtuous Court something altogether novel and admirable. The gentlewomen ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... love, a charming little poetical boy-love; but it was love. Everything which he did in those days was with the thought of little Lucy for incentive. He stood better in school than he had ever done before, but it was all for the sake of little Lucy. Jim Patterson had one talent, rather rudimentary, still a talent. He could play by ear. His father owned an old violin. He had been inclined to music in early youth, and Jim got permission to practise on it, and he went by himself in the hot attic and practised. Jim's mother did not care for music, and her son's preliminary scraping tortured ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... "was voted heretical," and burned by the hands of the small-beer drawer, while the author was expelled. In the author's advice to freshmen, he gives a not uninteresting sketch of these rudimentary creatures. The chrysalis, as described by the preacher of a University sermon, "never, in his wildest moments, dreamed of being a butterfly"; but the public schoolboy of the last century sometimes came up ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang

... like to move." I'm afraid this little fat old man has simply a bad conscience. It's no small burden for one who likes the Italians—as who doesn't, under this restriction?—to have so much indifference even to rudimentary purifying processes to dispose of. What is the real philosophy of dirty habits, and are foul surfaces merely superficial? If unclean manners have in truth the moral meaning which I suspect in them we must love Italy better than consistency. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... length is five or six feet and the width about three. In the best known genus, Triceratops, the paired horns are long and stout and the front horn quite short or almost absent, while in Monoclonius these proportions are reversed, the front horn being long while the paired horns are rudimentary. ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew

... a complex amalgam of custom and statute, largely criminal law; rudimentary civil code in effect since 1 January 1987; new legal codes in effect since 1 January 1980; continuing efforts are being made to improve civil, administrative, ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... dagger-like teeth, of which the observers gained an excellent view, since the creature opened its mouth several times. It was a quadruped; that is to say, it was provided with four legs, but while its front legs were so short as to be little more than rudimentary, its hind legs were as long and apparently as powerful, proportionately, as those of a kangaroo. And, like a kangaroo, it was provided with a long tail, as thick at the root as its own body, tapering ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood

... curse for any one's admiration: but this state of not-caring, just as much as desire, required its related object—namely, a world of admiring or envying spectators: for if you are fond of looking stonily at smiling persons—the persons must be and they must smile—a rudimentary truth which is surely forgotten by those who complain of mankind as generally contemptible, since any other aspect of the race must disappoint the voracity of their contempt. Grandcourt, in town for the first time ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... the skin, as in the forehead; and it is pointed out that many animals have such muscles at the present time, and it is argued that the ability of some men to move the whole scalp points to the existence of muscles with such function in our brute ancestors. The vermiform appendix in man is termed rudimentary, being but a remnant of the much longer and more complex appendix of the same ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner

... emotional states. Any human quality may be enlisted in the service of religion, but there are none that are specifically religious. It is a pure assumption that the religious visionary possesses qualities that are either absent or rudimentary in other persons. Human faculty is everywhere identical although the form in which it is expressed differs according to education, the presence of certain dominating ideas, and the general influence of one's environment. To ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... forms is one of the most spontaneous of human achievements. Stories of mighty deeds, of the prowess and death of heroes, are among the earliest productions of even semi-civilised man—the earliest subjects of epic and lyric verse. But this rudimentary form is never more than biographical. With increasing complexity of social evolution it dies away, and history proper, as distinct from annals and chronicle, does not arise till circumstances allow of general and synthetic views, till societies can be surveyed ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison

... still has his ten-acre lot, where he may run and play. There are flowers and freckles in the spring; kite-flying, fishing, hunting, and trapping in summer and autumn. The general farm is a storehouse of useful information in rudimentary form. From day to day and from year to year the country ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... a day or two after, being thenceforth regarded as a neophyte no longer, to take part in all the regular drills of the ship, and one morning, subsequent to breakfast, underwent that rudimentary stage of seamanship styled 'boxing the compass'—though I might have really told the painstaking instructor, who painfully and ploddingly laboured to instil the cardinal points into my head as if I were an ignoramus, ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson

... share it with us gladly as we will instruct you in many things you wish to know. Allow me to operate the educator—I would gaze into your minds and reveal my own to your sight. But first I must tell you that your machine is too rudimentary to work at all well, and with your permission I ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... on James Jenkins of Alverton, also in rhyming triplets. The curious little song, which is all that remains of Jenkins’s poetry, seems to show indications of a feeling for internal rhymes and something like a rudimentary Cynghanedd, but there is not enough of it to reduce to any definite rules. Even in Boson’s verses and in those of Gwavas and Tonkin of St. Just (not the historian), in the Gwavas MS., the old system of counting syllables and taking very little account ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner

... of movement, and many other scientists have described the several forms assumed by perfect flowers of the same species to secure cross-fertilization. Some members of the clan also bear blind flowers, which have been described in the account of the white wood-sorrel. Even the rudimentary leaves of the seedlings "go to sleep" at evening, and during the day are in constant movement up and down. The stems, too, are restless; and as for the mature leaves, every child knows how they droop their three leaflets back to back ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... discord with the almost mystic view he took of his right. The Gould Concession was symbolic of abstract justice. Let the heavens fall. But since the San Tome mine had developed into world-wide fame his threat had enough force and effectiveness to reach the rudimentary intelligence of Pedro Montero, wrapped up as it was in the futilities of historical anecdotes. The Gould Concession was a serious asset in the country's finance, and, what was more, in the private budgets of many officials as well. It was traditional. It was known. It was said. It was ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... fantastic is what has still to be told. The most marked property of this ectoplasm, very fully illustrated in the photographs, is that it sets or curdles into the shapes of human members—of fingers, of hands, of faces, which are at first quite sketchy and rudimentary, but rapidly coalesce and develop until they are undistinguishable from those of living beings. Is not this the very strangest and most inexplicable thing that has ever yet been observed by human eyes? These faces or limbs are usually ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle

... and was apparently amusing himself with the simplicity of her relatives. A clatter of tea-things filled her mind with dismay. The ideas of the "help" on the subject of cleanliness were in a very rudimentary stage, and that the cloth would be in anything but its first freshness, was a moral certainty. Impossible, however, to avert the catastrophe, and the general servant, actuated by a determination to get another look at Miss Bluebell's ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston

... 'Ha-a-a-a-ay!' Authority melts from you, apparently.—Leaves nothing but a few rudimentary theories, of no use to anyone except the owner, inasmuch as no one else can develop them properly; just a few evanescent footprints on the sands of Time, which would require only a certain combination of age and facilities for cohesion to mature into ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... so, who carry in their brains the ovarian eggs of the next generation's or century's civilization. These eggs are not ready to be laid in the form of books as yet; some of them are hardly ready to be put into the form of talk. But as rudimentary ideas or inchoate tendencies, there they are; and these are what must form the future. A man's general notions are not good for much, unless he has a crop of these intellectual ovarian eggs in his own brain, or knows them as they exist in the minds ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... anthropology is necessary to help out the deficiencies of both history and folklore. The questions involved in totemism alone compel us to this course. It is questionable whether there is any existing savage or barbaric people who are non-totemic in the sense of either not possessing the rudimentary beginnings of totemism, or not having once possessed a full system of totemism. Totemism, at one stage or another of its development, is, in fact, one of the universal elements of man's life, and all consideration of its traces ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... application was, doubtless, the only thought that our primitive ancestor had in mind; quite probably the question as to principles that might be involved troubled him not at all. Yet, in spite of himself, he knew certain rudimentary principles of science, even though ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... fencing, poison, traps, dogs, guns, stoats, weasels, ferrets, cats, and a host of instruments of destruction. In poisoning the rabbit the stock-owners have well-nigh swept the native birds from wide stretches of country. The weka, or wood-hen, with rudimentary wings like tufts of brown feathers, whose odd, inquisitive ways introduce it so constantly to the shepherd and bushman, at first preyed upon the young rabbits and throve. Now ferrets and phosphorus are exterminating it in the rabbit-infested districts. Moreover, just as Vortigern had reason to regret ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... the elder does not permit man truculently to exalt himself by contrast with discourteous woman. He expressly disclaims the declaration of the implication that man is mannerly, while woman is not. In many men he remarks indifference to rudimentary courtesies, and in many women a gentle regard for others which deserves even eulogy. The sum of the whole matter, nevertheless, is that the average woman is more neglectful of common courtesy ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis

... and then run away yelling with fright at the horrible appearance of the man with a red and white face. These manifestations of childish disgust and fear stung Willems with a sense of absurd humiliation; he sought in his walks the comparative solitude of the rudimentary clearings, but the very buffaloes snorted with alarm at his sight, scrambled lumberingly out of the cool mud and stared wildly in a compact herd at him as he tried to slink unperceived along the edge ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad

... Rhizocarpae there are two kinds of spores, microspores and macrospores, producing prothallia which bear respectively antheridia and archegonia; in the Lycopodiaceae, the two kinds of spores produce very rudimentary prothallia; in the cycads and conifers, the microspore or pollen grain only divides once or twice, just indicating a prothallium, and no antheridia or antherozoids are formed. The macrospore or embryo-sac produces a prothallium called the endosperm, in which archegonia or corpuscula ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various

... to admit that, as a matter of fact, we began, owing to circumstances, in a kind of rudimentary way with the idea of getting people to take up goodness by ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee



Words linked to "Rudimentary" :   basic, undeveloped, biology, uncomplete, underlying, vestigial, rudiment, fundamental, biological science, incomplete



Copyright © 2024 Diccionario ingles.com