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More "Conformation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I am going to tell you about a very singular animal to-night—singular both in its conformation and its habits. I allude to ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley
... were to be captured. It was necessary, however, first to allow them to land, for with their close, short hair, and their fusiform conformation, being excellent swimmers, it is difficult to catch them in the sea, while on land their short, webbed feet prevent their having more ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... like instrumental tone, a commixture of fundamental and overtones, and the manner in which the composite conformation of collective waves strikes the ear being largely determined by the cavities of resonance, the control of these is of great importance to the singer. This control should, by thorough training, be brought to such a degree of efficiency that it becomes ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... of this new, Old World differed but little from those with which he was familiar; in size and conformation they were almost identical, but instead of shedding the leopard spots of cubhood, they retained them through life as definitely marked as ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... primary and necessary ideas, which seldom alter in any people; in the next, there is a high degree of improbability in supposing a rude dialect to supplant a substantial portion of a more polished one; and, thirdly, we must not overlook the collateral evidence of the similarity of conformation pervading the entire race from Polynesia to the archipelago—distinct alike from the Caucasian and ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... Duke of Milan; those who have neglected it have lost even hereditary kingdoms, like the last Sforzas, who sank from dukedom into private life. Even amid the pleasures of the chase a prince should always be studying the geographical conformation of his country with a view to its defense, and should acquire a minute knowledge of such strategical laws as are everywhere applicable. He should read history with the same object, and should keep before his eyes the example of those great men of the past from ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Colonia, a magazine published by the Colonial College, Hollesley Bay, Suffolk. He declares that "the great advantage of Rhodesia as an agricultural country is the facility with which irrigation can be carried on; the conformation of the land is undulating, and even the so-called 'flats' are intersected in all directions by valleys, each of which possesses its watercourse, so that by the simple expedient of throwing a dam across these valleys, water may be ...
— 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
... Polar currents. It would enable us, it is said, by a series of pendulum observations at or near the Pole, to render essential service to the science of geology, to form a mathematical theory of the physical condition of the earth, and to ascertain its exact conformation. It would probably throw light on the wonderful phenomena of magnetism and atmospheric electricity and the mysterious Aurora Borealis—to say nothing of the flora of these regions and the animal life on the land and in ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... reduces him to an unpleasant dilemma. Aided by a legal adviser, however, his judgment must be strengthened, and his decision would be more weighty, without creating in his breast those uneasy sensations which must arise under different circumstances. In the present conformation of the government, the governor has no legal adviser to have recourse to when an appeal is made to his decision, which is not rarely the case, except the judge advocate, and this officer having previously given his opinion in the court below cannot, ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... was reformed to my right and rear, my division was at length drawn through the cedars and debouched into an open space near the Murfreesboro' pike, behind the right of Palmer's division. Two regiments of Sill's brigade, however, on account of the conformation of the ground, were obliged to fall back from the point where Woodruff's brigade of Davis's division had rallied after the disaster of the early morning. The division came out of the cedars with unbroken ranks, thinned by only its killed and wounded—but few missing. When we came ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... of forms which he has brought together carries us from the top to the bottom of the Tertiaries. Firstly, there is the true horse. Next we have the American Pliocene form of the horse (Pliohippus); in the conformation of its limbs it presents some very slight deviations from the ordinary horse, and the crowns of the grinding teeth are shorter. Then comes the Protohippus, which represents the European Hipparion, having one large digit and two small ones on each foot, and the general characters ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the Germans was very difficult owing to the peculiar conformation of the course of the river Scheldt at the point of attack. This made especially difficult the laying of concrete foundations ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... carnivorous, will do more; he will gnaw off his own leg to escape. Do they die in consequence? no, they live and do well; but could a man live under such circumstances? impossible. If you don't believe me, gnaw your own leg off and try. And yet the conformation of the Mammalia is not very dissimilar from our own; but man is the more perfect creature, and therefore has not the ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... distinguished as Dandie Eassil-gate, Dandie Wassilgate, Dandie Thumbie, and Dandie Dumbie. The two first had their names from living eastward and westward in the street of the village; the third from something peculiar in the conformation of his thumb; the fourth from his ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... well suited to their commercial and piratical purposes. This little island had been occupied by a few Spaniards as early as 1591; but their numbers were so small as not to interfere with the object of the buccaneers, while its rocky conformation afforded peculiar facilities for defence in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... or rather dusty hue; her forehead low; her nose long, sharp, and, towards the extremity, always red in cool weather; her lips skinny, her mouth extensive, her teeth straggling and loose, of various colours and conformation; and her long neck shrivelled into a thousand wrinkles — In her temper, she is proud, stiff, vain, imperious, prying, malicious, greedy, and uncharitable. In all likelihood, her natural austerity has been soured by disappointment in love; for her long ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... a small volume. From that moment we never doubted each other for one second. He knew and I knew. Each morning when I came into the rose- garden he came to call on me and discover things he wanted to know concerning robins of my size and unusual physical conformation. He did not understand but he was attracted by me. Each day I held myself still and tried to make robin sounds expressive of adoring tenderness and he came each day a little nearer. At last arrived a day when as I softly left my seat and moved about ...
— My Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... circular knot, which covered the entire back of the head, and gave a classical outline to the whole. The eyelashes were longer and darker, the complexion had lost its sickly hue, and, though there was no bloom on the cheeks, they were clear and white. I have spoken before of the singular conformation of the massive brow, and now the style in which she wore her hair fully exposed the outline. The large gray eyes had lost their look of bitterness, but more than ever they were grave, earnest, restless, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... before him as before one of the Elect! Let us regard him as one of those whom the belief of the people marks as "Good Genii!" The attribution of superior power to beings believed to be beneficent to man, has received a sublime conformation from a great Italian poet, who defines genius as a "stronger impress of Divinity!" Let us bow before all who are marked with this mystic seal; but let us venerate with the deepest, truest tenderness those who have ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... conformation of the Roman empire, while it facilitated in many respects its growth and final settlement under the dominion of the Capitol, led by a process not less certain, and still more rapid, to its ruin, when that empire was fully extended. If any one will look at the map, he will see that the ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... round chest, giving free play to the lungs; while your chest is narrow and flat. Without any compression, the action of your lungs is not so free and healthy as hers would be, laced as tightly as you say she laces. But when to your natural conformation you add artificial pressure, the action of your lungs becomes not only enfeebled, but the unhealthy action induced tends to develop that peculiar form of disease, the predisposition to ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... imagination of a reader any accurate presentation of the picture, which the writer has in his mind's eye. She was dark. Hair, brows, eyes, and complexion, were all dark; and the contour of the face was of the long or oval type of conformation—very delicate—transparently delicate—more so, the Englishman thought, not without a pull at his heart-strings, than was quite compatible with a due daily supply of nourishment. Still she did not look unhealthy. At seventeen a good deal of pinching may be undergone without ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... and yards. 1. Side and posterior view of bull showing conformation favorable to the development of disease. 2. Insanitary yards. 3. Showing where pulse of horse is taken. 4. Auscultation of the lungs. 5. Fever thermometer. 6. Dose syringe. 7. Hypodermic syringes. 8. Photograph of model ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... on the page before me an image which I mistook at first for the likeness of Richard Owen. It was the conformation of the head that gave rise to the mistake, a head domed and massive, white and smooth—it was a head that had always interested me. But as I looked, my mind already searching for the reason of this hallucination, I saw that the lower part of the face was that of an infant. ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... smile at this if they will, and take exception to my taste; but, I ask, does the modern round hat, whatever the insignificant variations of its form, possess either quality? No, not a jot of it. One would think, by our pertinacious adherence to the head-ach giving, circular conformation, that we wished to show our anger at the Almighty for not shaping our caputs like cylinders. In fine, though the parson's and the quaker's hat has each its several merits, commend me to the fan-tailed shallow. The flap part attached to the cap seems, at first sight, as to use, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... anterior curvature of the spine with the convexity forwards, is chiefly met with in the lumbar region as an exaggeration of the natural curvature. A minor degree of lordosis sometimes occurs as a peculiarity in the conformation of the individual and may be present in several members of the same family; also in street-hawkers and others who carry weights suspended in front of them; in very obese persons; in those who suffer from large abdominal tumours, such as fibroids; ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... the peculiarities in the form of the bony fabric, those of the skull are the most striking and distinguishing. It is in the head that we find the varieties most strongly characteristic of the different races. The characters of the countenance, and the shape of the features depend chiefly on the conformation of the bones of ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... ring only, if you please." Having said which, he shut the door again; that is to say,—very nearly, for strive as he might, his efforts were unavailing, by reason of a round and somewhat battered object which, from its general conformation, he took to be the end of a formidable bludgeon or staff. But, applying his eye to the aperture, he saw that this very obtrusive object was nothing more or less than a leg (that is to say, a wooden one), which was attached ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... and the distinguished author of that theory has seemed to favor this view. Yet, in fact, the development theory has nothing to do with the question. If we suppose that the existing and—so far as we know—the only species of man appeared upon the earth with the physical conformation and mental capacity which he retains at this day, we make merely the same supposition with regard to him that we make with regard to every other existing species of animal. How it was that this species came to exist is ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale
... Their conformation of skull has marked differences from that of any known races in the upper world, though I cannot help thinking it a development, in the course of countless ages of the Brachycephalic type of the Age of Stone in Lyell's 'Elements of Geology,' C. X., p. 113, as compared with the Dolichocephalic ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... fall, and nature again assume the barren and bleak appearance it had worn when I first beheld the woods and the lovely moon. Yet I did not heed the bleakness of the weather; I was better fitted by my conformation for the endurance of cold than heat. But my chief delights were the sight of the flowers, the birds, and all the gay apparel of summer; when those deserted me, I turned with more attention towards the cottagers. Their ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... the farm itself: VI. How conformation of the land affects Agriculture VII. How character of soil affects Agriculture VIII. (A digression on the maintenance of vineyards) IX. Of the different kinds of soils X. Of the units of ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... in the evening I had seen peering out at me an old woman's face. Conceive my astonishment at finding the spot still lighted and a face looking out, but not the same face, a countenance as old, one as intent, but of different conformation and of a much more intellectual type. I considered myself the victim of an illusion; I tried to persuade myself that it was the same woman, only in another garb and under a different state of feeling; but the features were much too dissimilar ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... the conformation of the Alps, two hypotheses have been advanced, which may be respectively named the hypothesis of fracture and the hypothesis of erosion. The former assumes that the forces by which the mountains were elevated produced fissures in the earth's ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... and within this inclosed sea, is a place where the water is just of the right depth, and the bottom of just the right conformation for the convenient anchoring of ships of war. This place is called Spithead, and it forms one of the most famous anchoring grounds in the world. It is here that the vast fleets of the English navy assemble, and here the ships come to anchor, when returning ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... The increasing Chinese immigration already intrudes upon the attention of American statesmen questions of the utmost social and political importance. What influence will this entirely new and strange element exercise over the conformation of American relations? Will the Chinese found a State in the States, or go into the Union on terms of political equality with the other citizens, and form a new race by alliance with the Caucasian element? These problems, which can only be touched upon here in a transitory form, have been dealt ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... cases in history. For instance, suppose the condition of a people known as respects (1) civilization, as respects (2) relation to the sovereign, (3) the prevailing mode of its industry, (4) its special circumstances as to taxation, (5) its physical conformation and temperament, (6) its local circumstances as to neighbours warlike or not warlike, (7) the quality and depth of its religion, (8) the framework of its jurisprudence, (9) the machinery by which these laws are made to act, (10) the proportion ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... and ignorant of the fate which may await us, we are occasionally oppressed by a thousand melancholy apprehensions. I might, indeed, have boasted of my fortitude, and have made myself an heroine on paper at as small an expence of words as it has cost me to record my cowardice: but I am of an unlucky conformation, and think either too much or too little (I know not which) for a female philosopher; besides, philosophy is getting into such ill repute, that not possessing the reality, the name of it is ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... men, because some predominant and divine cause has implanted this power in them, or whether it is accidental. We see those things which the earth produces preserved in vigour by their bark and roots, which happens to animals by the arrangement of their senses, and a certain compact conformation of limb. And with reference to this subject, although I agree with those men who think that all these things are regulated by nature, and that if nature neglected to regulate them, the animals themselves ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... reflections were, the extraordinary beauty of a small Moss irresistibly caught my eye; and though the whole plant was not larger than the top of one of my fingers, I could not contemplate the delicate conformation of its roots, leaves, and fruit, without admiration. Can that Being (thought I) who planted, watered, and brought to perfection, in this obscure part of the world, a thing which appears of so small importance, ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... a science which, like a faithful mirror, reveals to us that which we cannot see. As the gymnastic teacher reveals by a system of measurement (anthropometry) the defective muscles that need development, so should the psychologist discover in the conformation of the brain the special ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... The future conformation of parties under the union is difficult to forecast. At present the Dutch parties—they may be called so for lack of a better word—have large majorities everywhere except in Natal. In the Transvaal General ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... birds the herons, the cranes, the bitterns, the snipes, and the plovers are almost necessarily, by the very nature of their typical conformation, beautiful and graceful in form. Their tall, slender legs, which they require for wading, their comparatively light and well-poised bodies, their long, curved, quickly-darting necks and sharp beaks, which they need in order to secure their rapid-swimming prey, all these things make the waders, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... which lie much nearer to the Pacific Coast than to the eastern shore of America: many of these birds being, for the first time, made known to ornithologists. We have selected two of the most singular in their conformation: one from the Owls, which are numerous and beautiful; and the other from the Grouse, of which ten fine ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... living in country villages than sidewalks which are good at all seasons of the year. Those fortunate villages which are built on a gravelly soil, with a perfect natural drainage, need little more in this direction than such a conformation of the surface as will prevent water from standing on the footway when the ground is frozen. At all other times it sinks naturally away into the earth. It is much more often the case that the character of the soil ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... lighting up in front showed that he was nearing the edge of the wood. Two bounds carried him clear, and then, with the utmost speed of which he was capable, he ran along the margin to a slight turn in the conformation of the grove, when he leaped out into the open air and was off with as great fleetness as he displayed on the home-stretch in his race with Ralph Genther, after the turkey shoot ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... cretaceous sea. Paradoxical as it sounds to say so, the Celtic kingdom of the Regni, the South Saxon principality of AElle the Bretwalda, the modern English county of Sussex, have all had their destinies moulded by the geological conformation of the rock upon which they repose. Where human annals see only the handicraft and interaction of human beings—Euskarian and Aryan, Celt and Roman, Englishman and Norman—a closer scrutiny of history may perhaps see the working of still deeper elements—chalk and ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... to almost anything. Most of the men had had sufficient experience by that time to embark with comparative ease. Nevertheless, there were a few whose physical conformation was such that ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... the animal it is necessary to observe the condition or state of nutrition, the conformation, so far as it may indicate the constitution, and the temperament. By observing the condition of nutrition one may be able to determine to a certain extent the effect that the disease has already had upon the animal and to estimate the amount of strength ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... of each man, his bodily conformation, and his degree of skill must always be taken into account. When the instructor is demonstrating the combinations, feints, returns, and parries the rapidity of his attack should be regulated by the ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... to demonstrate that the human embryo receives the rational soul on the third day after conception and to discuss at length such subjects as the efficient cause of embryogeny and the proposition that the conformation of the fetus is a vital, not a natural, action. Various expressions of Aristotelian and scholastic biology were clearly abroad during the first half of the seventeenth century, and there is reason, then, for Digby's attack upon Aristotelian ideas ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... shoulders, after we had put in it our guns, covered these with ferns and twigs, and upon these laid Philip's bulky form, and a very few moments' progress showed that the work before us was to be no child's play. The conformation of the canoe made it a rather awkward thing to carry, to begin with. To bear it right side up, laden as it was, over eight miles of almost continuous ascent, through a perfectly unbroken wilderness, was as laborious an undertaking as it ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... in proof, that the boss of pirouettiveness is strangely wanting in human conformation, and that there is consequently all the excuse of ignorance for the wild enthusiasm lavished by London on the operative class. Ten guineas per night—five hundred for the season—is the price exacted for a first-rate opera-box; and as the exclusives ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... patient, a man somewhat advanced in years, but of a robust conformation, in bed: he had been seized with a fit, which was supposed to be apoplectic, a few hours before; but was already sensible, and out of immediate danger. After I had prescribed a few simple remedies, I took aside the patient's wife, and went with her to the parlour below stairs, ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as being of peculiar and unsuitable conformation to the various conditions of life amid which they are placed; with strong moral proclivities, for the most part subservient to a weak and ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... accounts for much of Cowper's morbid state of mind and fits of depression, as well as for the circumstance of his running away from his place in the House of Lords. It relates to some defect in his physical conformation; some body found out his secret, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... commonwealth is, for the most part, an idle question. "Forms of government," somebody has said, "are like shoes—that is the best form which best fit the feet that are to wear them." Shoes are to be fitted to the feet, not the feet to the shoes, and feet vary in size and conformation. There is, in regard to government, as distinguished from the state, no antecedent right which binds the people, for antecedently to the existence of the government as a fact, the state is free to adopt any form that it finds practicable, or judges the wisest and best for itself. Ordinarily the ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... This day Brother Kline and Jacob Miller are together at a meeting in a place called Powell's Fort. This is a very singular conformation of country. It is entirely surrounded by high mountain walls, with the exception of one notch or outlet for drainage and a road. It is about twenty miles south of Winchester, Virginia. Some well-to-do people live in this secluded ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... succeeded in restoring a vagina to a young girl of twenty who had an hypertrophied clitoris and no signs of a vagina. The accompanying illustrations show the conformation of the parts before operation with all the appearance of ill-developed male genitalia, and the appearance afterward with restitution of the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... sat a man of about three-and-forty,—dark-eyed, sallow, with short, prominent features, a massive conformation of jaw, and thick, sensual, but resolute lips; this man was the Prince di —. His form, above the middle height, and rather inclined to corpulence, was clad in a loose dressing-robe of rich brocade. On a table before him lay an old-fashioned sword and hat, a mask, dice and dice-box, a portfolio, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... you will find some rich mines near here soon. Stay; it can do you no harm. I will tell you something: three days ago I followed up the river, and about twenty miles above this spot I became attracted by the conformation of the country, and remarked it as being very similar to some very famous spots in South America. 'Here,' I said to myself, 'Maximilian, you have your volcanic disturbance, your granite, your clay, slate, and sandstone upheaved, and seamed ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... with the peculiar conformation of Cape Cod. It juts out into the Atlantic like an immense elbow, and, indeed, is understood to be modelled after the brawny arm of the gallant CHARLES SUMNER. Vessels passing between ports on the western and those on the southern coast of Massachusetts, are now ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... friends, those who believe, or fancy that they believe such things, must be able to do so only through some peculiar conformation either of brain or heart. Only want of imagination to conceive the consequences of such doctrines can enable them, if they have any love and pity for their fellow-men, to preach those doctrines without pity and horror. They know not, they know ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... stupendous natural fortifications of cliff and rock come to an end. Nothing finer in the way of scenery is to be found throughout the Jura than this, and it is quite peculiar, being unlike any other mountain conformation I have ever seen, whilst the narrow winding valley of soft gold-green is in beautiful contrast with the rugged grandeur, not to ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... what particular conformation of the organ it happens, but I have always found that this composition is surprisingly gratifying to the palate of a young chimney-sweeper—whether the oily particles (sassafras is slightly oleaginous) do attenuate and soften the fuliginous ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... anatomical details arises from the fact that they show us the true central region of the brain from which its development must be determined; and although this work, designed for the general reader, cannot say much of the brain, it is necessary to show its true conformation to enable us to estimate the living brain correctly, so as to describe accurately living men, study the forms of crania, and derive some profit in ethnological studies from the forms of crania which to ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... whole of the surrounding area was also at some time a sea, though volcanic action has since altered its surface conformation, and in places it bears evidence of having been covered with lava. It is not unusual on our world for volcanoes to burst up from under the sea, so even the evidence of volcanic action does not, as some ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... which possesses longings after devotion and scriptural truths, without knowing exactly how to express them; and this, moreover, in spite of the mere animal propensities, and gay habits of his physical conformation, ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... beg favors. Jewish travellers' tales of the Middle Ages are heavily laden with these legends. Of course, the traveller would also bring genuine news about his brethren in distant parts, and sober information about foreign countries, their ways, their physical conformation, and their strange birds and beasts. These stories were in the main true. For instance, Petachiah tells of a flying camel, which runs fifteen times as fast as the fleetest horse. He must have seen an ostrich, which is still called the flying camel by Arabs. But we cannot linger over this matter. ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... working as well as ever, and by keeping over the sea, Smith was able to avoid any gusts or cross-currents of air that might be set up by irregularities in the conformation of the land. Taking turns as usual with Rodier at the wheel, he was able to get a few hours of sleep; about an hour and a half after daybreak he descried the strange shape of Mount Astrolabe towering nearly four thousand feet into ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... holding their position on the ridge of the Aisne. It could not have retreated without fearful loss as that ridge was the last conformation of any military value in the practically flat country between the ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... chief,"—a stretch of the outside philosophy which we certainly were not prepared to meet with; for little did we dream that this noble science could ever have attained such eminence, that men of intellect would be able to discover immorality in particular noses, and crime in a certain conformation of the chin. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... him in "the world." His son Lord Randolph, too, I saw once at Court at Peterhof, and once again at the Winter Palace of the Tsar. I noticed in their great stature, shaggy heads of hair, ears of a very peculiar conformation, and a certain aggressiveness of demeanour—a strong likeness ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... at this time"—he wanted to know—"about the physical conformation of this world? What I mean is, when you came out of this tunnel were you on the inside or the outside of ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... conversation in the stage was pretty general, led by the individual aforesaid, who lectured and preached, rather than conversed. Few subjects were untouched by his eloquence; he spoke with equal ease on a difficult point in theology, and on the conformation of the sun. He lectured on politics, astronomy, chemistry, and anatomy with great fluency and equal incorrectness. In describing the circulation of the blood, he said, "It's a purely metaphysical subject;" and the answering ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... accident, or skill—it is unnecessary to decide which—has associated symmetry with quality and conformation, as a point of great importance in animals calculated for fattening; and there is no doubt that, to a certain extent, this is so. The beast must be a system of mathematical lines. To the advocate of symmetry, the setting-on of a tail will ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... on those beachless shores, of that multitude of creeks and inlets and little bays, no two of them alike, yet all trackless abysses? We may almost fancy that Nature took pleasure in recording by ineffaceable hieroglyphics the symbol of Norwegian life, bestowing on these coasts the conformation of a fish's spine, fishery being the staple commerce of the country, and well-nigh the only means of living of the hardy men who cling like tufts of lichen to the arid cliffs. Here, through fourteen ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... strong light that fell upon her face, Mr. Gray had an opportunity to examine her features more closely. Her eyes, which were dark and singularly brilliant, were half closed, either from some peculiar conformation of the lids, or an habitual effort to conceal expression. Her skin was colorless with that satin-like lustre that belongs to some brunettes, relieved by one or two freckles that were scarcely blemishes. Her face was squared a little at the lower angles, but the chin ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... description he gave I thought the ground referred to would be a favourable site; and asked him to tell me definitely how to reach it. He offered to guide me to the place. On getting to the position I found that the conformation of the ground constituted almost a natural parapet for a six gun battery—requiring but little work to complete it for use. It afforded immediate shelter ...
— Company 'A', corps of engineers, U.S.A., 1846-'48, in the Mexican war • Gustavus Woodson Smith
... chart of the place, to scale, as nearly as he could, from memory; and after half an hour's arduous labour—for chart drawing was not one of Dyer's strong points—he produced a sketch that, rough as it was, promised to be of the utmost value to the adventurers. For it showed how, owing to the conformation of the land, Hawkins, with his small squadron, had, a year ago, been able to keep the whole of the Spanish fleet from entering the harbour until he had concluded an agreement with the treacherous Viceroy to permit them to do so; and how a small, well-found fleet outside might, ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... far different occupations. But at the epoch of which I speak, the analogy which a casual observation of a star offered to the conclusions I had already drawn, struck me with the force of positive conformation, and I then finally made up my mind to the course which ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... honest and sincere. His bushy iron-gray hair, his keen gray eyes, his healthy florid color, and the well-trimmed black moustache, which gave his face an unusually youthful appearance for a man of his age, went with a fine stalwart physique and a general bodily conformation apparently in keeping with the ideas of early rising, cold ablutions and breakfasts of oatmeal porridge that the ingenuous mind is apt to associate with Scotch descent and bringing-up. His daughter was a very beautiful girl. Born in the shadow of the pines, she had been educated successively ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... Conformation to Catholicism by Henry IV; Pope Clement VIII refuses to absolve him. The Parliament of Paris declares against foreign interference ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... her that Mars was under a military government, and that the military class had absolute control of the planet. I was somewhat startled, then, in looking at the head and center of the great military system of Mars, to find in his appearance a striking conformation of the speculations of our terrestrial phrenologists. His broad, mis-shapen head bulged in those parts where they had placed the so-called organs of combativeness, ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... society, with all its faults, is the best that man, endowed as he is to-day, can establish, and that the highest service one can pay to man or to God is found in conforming to the social compact, at whatever cost of physical pain, or mental anguish, if the conformation does not require a moral breach. That was the faith he lived by, that by service to his fellows and by sacrifice to whatever was worthy in the social compact, he would find a growth of soul that would pay him, ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modelling of ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... perception. The most wonderful elephant in the world could not command an army, or govern a state. An ourang-outang may eat, and drink, and dress, and move like a man; but he could never write an ode, or learn to relinquish his own good for the good of his species. The human conformation, however it may be altered by the operation of physical or moral causes, differs from that of all other beings, and on this ground, the negro's claim to be ranked as a man, is ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... With the progress of discovery some resemblance has been found to exist between the physical conformation, the language, and the habits of the Indians of North America, and those of the Tongous, Mantchous, Mongols, Tartars, and other wandering tribes of Asia. The land occupied by these tribes is not very distant ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... twice its own weight in three hours. Among several Austro-Malay genera, such as Ptenochirus and Balionycteris, the tube-nosed bats of the genus Gelasinus (or Harpyia) are remarkable for the conformation of the nostrils (fig. 5). Cephalotes, with one species, ranging from Celebes to the Solomon group, has the dentition i. 1/1, c. 1/1, p. 2/3, m. 2/3, premaxillae not united in front, nostrils simple, muzzle short, index finger without a claw, tail short. As in Gelasinus, the wing-membrane ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... Tasman's time all bore an accidental character. Eendrachtsland was discovered by accident in the year 1616, and after that time a number of Dutch ships unexpectedly touched at those shores, thus continually shedding additional, though always imperfect light on the question of the conformation of the coast-line. How was it, we may ask, that it was especially after 1616 that this coast was so often touched at, whereas there had never been question of this before that time? The question thus put ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... crater, along the vine-clad slopes of Orotava, to the orange gardens and banana groves that skirt the shore. In scenes like these, it is not the peaceful charm uniformly spread over the face of nature that moves the heart, but rather the peculiar physiognomy and conformation of the land, the features of the landscape, the ever-varying outline of the clouds, and their blending with the horizon of the sea, whether it lies spread before us like a smooth and shining mirror, or is dimly seen through the morning ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... adduced in conformation of my thesis, is, that they were not by themselves of sufficient strength, to support the weight of administration. It is certainly a melancholy consideration, that there should not be virtue enough left in a people to support an administration of honest views and uniform principles, ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... Charles Holloway) weighing eight grains less than nine ounces. This sort is also termed amas lichin or smooth gold, and appears to owe that quality to its having been exposed, in some prior state of the soil or conformation of the earth, to the action of running water, and deprived of its sharp and rough edges by attrition. This form of gravel is the most common in which gold is discovered. Gold-dust or amas urei is collected either in the channels ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... same height in all places. The structure necessarily varied according to the nature of the ground, being high wherever the ground without was such as to give the enemy an advantage in an attack, and lower in other situations, where the conformation of the surface was such as to afford, of itself, a partial protection. It is not, perhaps, impossible that, at some particular points—as, for example, across glens and ravines, or along steep declivities—the walls ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... under three years of age these parts are of a gray brown; the rest of the plumage is deep, dark brown, each feather tipt with pale brown, lightest on the shoulder of the wing, and darkest towards its extremities. The conformation of the wing is admirably adapted for the support of so large a bird; it measures two feet in breadth on the greater quills, and sixteen inches on the lesser; the longest primaries are twenty inches in length, and upwards of one inch in circumference where they enter the skin; the broadest secondaries ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various
... had never before felt with such gratification the warmth of the sun or known the ecstasy of motion. He saw every flower in the roadbank, every small glacial brook, every new conformation of the snow clouds hanging above the ragged peaks of the Argentieres. He sniffed with delight the pungent wind from off the glaciers, the short, warm puffs of grass-scented air from the fields in the Valley of Trient. He noticed the flight of birds, the lazy swinging of ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... bungled conformation is at once accounted for; and in lieu of the sloth leading a painful life, and entailing a melancholy and miserable existence on its progeny, it is but fair to surmise that it just enjoys life as much as any other animal, and that its extraordinary ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... traveller. Occasional specimens, with all their characteristics in full and vigorous development, may still be met, but these are merely isolated survivors of a once widespread family. The Americans that one meets to-day in Europe, both those who travel and those who reside there, are of a different conformation and belong to a different type. The crudeness which so shocked Europeans in their predecessors they have, with characteristic adaptability, readily and gracefully outgrown. But whether they have improved in other respects, and whether, on other grounds, we have cause to be particularly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... at the nape of the neck, whose world was of the worst description—a phrenologist or physiognomist would have hung him at once. It is fortunate for some men that these sciences are not more extensively understood, or a great many persons would suffer for their natural and cerebral conformation. ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... anthropoid apes. As a result of its bodily formation, it may have begun to walk erect at a very remote date, with a consequent straightening of the joints and muscular development of the legs. When this condition was fully attained, it was practically a man in physical conformation, though mentally still an ape, and with a long development of the brain to pass through before it could reach the ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... developments. Indeed, so little did any distinct type predominate in some of the bewildering results, that you could only have guessed at any known animal as the original, and even then, what likeness remained would be more one of general expression than of definable conformation. But what increased the gruesomeness tenfold was that, from constant domestic, or indeed rather family association with the goblins, their countenances had grown in grotesque resemblance ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... nearly all fallen in. The houses are entirely constructed of sun-dried mud bricks, now quite soldered together by age and reduced into a compact mass. A few of the more important dwellings have two storeys, and all the buildings evidently had formerly domed roofs. In order that the conformation of each house may be better understood, a plan of one typical building is given. On a larger or smaller scale they all resembled one another very closely, and were not unlike the Persian ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... criminal any bodily and mental characteristics which differentiate him from the ordinary man? Does he differ from his fellows in height and weight? Does he possess a peculiar conformation of skull and brain? Is he anomalous in face and feature, in intellect, in will, in feeling? Is he, in short, an individual separated from the rest of humanity by any set or combination of qualities which clearly mark him off ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... completing a tortuous and rugged descent, the Mochuelo commanded a halt. The place where this occurred was in a narrow gorge between two lines of hills, or it should rather be said of mountains; for although their altitude was only here and there very considerable, their cragged and precipitous conformation and rocky material entitled them to the latter denomination. The passage between them continued narrow only for a few hundred yards, after which, at either of its extremities, the mountains receded, and the valley opened into plains of some extent. To the right ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... ship-building trades—in one of which the men, while in the other the women, of many families are employed—is one of the most powerful instruments of social progress. The narrow sea which separates it from Scotland and the geographical conformation of Belfast Lough have, moreover, a great bearing on its prosperity. Independence of Irish railways with their excessive freights, crippling by their incidence all export trade, in a town like Belfast, nine-tenths of ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... up-stairs; janitors, with brooms, and charwomen with pails, and a red, sarcastic man, the engineer, and a meek puppet who was merely the superintendent of the whole thing.... Una watched these village people, to whom the Zodiac hall was Main Street, and in their satisfied conformation to a life of marble floors and artificial light she found such settled existence as made her feel at home in this town, with its eighteen strata called floors. She, too, at least during the best hours of the day, lived in the ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... is, there is no other animal of equal size which is at all its match in speed. Witness the conformation of its body: the light, small drooping head (narrow in front); (49) the (thin cylindrical) (50) neck, not stiff and of a moderate length; straight shoulder-blades, loosely slung above; the fore-legs attached to them, light and set close together; (51) the undistended chest; (52) ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... Terms appear at their due Intervals; if there be a sparkling and agreeableness in the Eyes; and if other Signs are observ'd, that commonly distinguish a Woman from a Man, these are Arguments that the Hermaphrodite has the Privities of the Female Sex of a good Conformation; and if the Vagina is not too defective, such an Hermaphrodite ought to pass for ...
— Tractus de Hermaphrodites • Giles Jacob
... the grace of all graciousness; hence He assumeth the conformation of the Forehead, which is disclosed in the most intense light (otherwise, hath a formation in the figure of ...
— Hebrew Literature
... a little heat at the word, "I bought the finest-lookin' pair you ever saw in New York this spring,—all-around action, manners, conformation, everything; I'll show 'em to you. One of 'em's all right now; this confounded railroad injured the other gettin' him up here. I've put in a claim. They say they didn't, my man says they did. He tells me the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... that the foregoing general ruling will enable junior and inexperienced officers, temporarily employed on famine duty, to classify appropriately and with facility as denticulate or edentulous all individuals afflicted with dental hiatus, mal-conformation and labefaction, without further reference ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 12, 1919 • Various
... the masculine organ of mentality in other particulars so marked that one who has given the subject attention can determine with perfect ease the probable sex of the owner of almost any skull which might be presented to him. This difference in the conformation of the skull is undoubtedly due to a difference in mental character, which, in turn, depends upon a difference in cerebral development. Faculties which are generally largely developed in one are usually smaller in the other, ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... fields, so that the house was at high water upon an island, and at low water was defended by an impassable barrier of mud, so that the advances to it could be made only from the river, where a small hard, edged with posts worn down to the conformation of decayed double-teeth, offered the only means of access. The house itself was one storey high; dark red bricks, and darker tiles upon the roof; windows very scarce and very small, although built long before the damnable tax upon light, for it was probably built ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... masther mind, Heller, an' ought to been in howly ordhers. An' that brings me to another idee av high importince. There should be somebody to run about with howly wather an' exthrame unction, an' the like. Now that business wouldn't shuit me pheesical conformation, an' nayther would it shuit the character I have to bear. It's betther that you should do the outside trampin', Heller. Ye know the tradditions an' docthrines av the Church well enough, an' y' are a dab at Latin. As for yer not bein' av the prastely office, ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... were during which I gazed down this tremendous and even wondrous shaft, I had a sufficient glimpse of it to give me some idea of its physical conformation. Its sides, which were almost as perpendicular as those of a well, presented numerous projections which doubtless ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... "Life is short and art is long." He divides the causes of disease into two principal classes,—the one comprehending the influence of seasons, climates, and other external forces; the other from the effects of food and exercise. To the influence of climate he attributes the conformation of the body and the disposition of the mind. He also attributes all sorts of disorders to a vicious system of diet. For more than twenty centuries his pathology was the foundation of all the medical sects. He was well acquainted with the medicinal properties of drugs, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Makkarika, of which I have had no experience by comparison. Accepting the fact of five distinct languages from the Equator to 12 degrees N. lat., it would appear by analogy that Central Africa is divided into numerous countries and tribes, distinct from each other in language and physical conformation, whose origin is perfectly obscure. Whether the man of Central Africa be pre-Adamite is impossible to determine; but the idea is suggested by the following data. The historical origin of man, or Adam, commences with a knowledge ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... way to Devil's Hole, taking the south-shore road, Colin had an opportunity of noticing its amazing contrast to the north shore, which had seemed so desolate and uninviting as the steamer came in. The conformation was widely different, marked by higher cliffs, rocks jutting out boldly into the sea, with the waves boiling over them and throwing up the spray, wide stretches of fine white sand, and as far as the eye could see, small ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... coal-strata. (Edward Hull Quarterly Geological Journal volume 24 page 327.) The carboniferous strata most productive of workable coal have so often a basin-shaped arrangement that these troughs have sometimes been supposed to be connected with the original conformation of the surface upon which the beds were deposited. But it is now admitted that this structure has been owing to movements of the earth's crust of upheaval and subsidence, and that the flexure and inclination of the beds has no connection with the original geographical ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... less analogy to that of the tiger, the vulture, or the fox, the form of his retreating forehead, and his bony, lank, and protruding jaws, supported by a neck of immense length, resembled entirely the conformation of a serpent's head. Total baldness increased this resemblance still more, for, under the rough skin of this reptile-shaped forehead, could be distinguished the slightest protuberances, the smallest sutures of his skull; as to his visage, let one imagine some old parchment drawn over ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... certain convictions and principles, derived from contemplating the facts and results of his own life, which he believed must produce upon other people's mental and moral constitutions as good an effect as upon his own. And possibly, could we divest our regimen of life of all personal flavor and conformation, it might, other things being favorable, suit our friends very tolerably well. But, until we are able to throw off the fetters of our own individuality, the measure of our garments can never accurately ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... development; and the supposition that, like morsels of a planaria, they may also, when retained in contact with living parts, and in other favourable circumstances, continue to live and be gradually changed into creatures of analogous conformation, is surely not so absurd as to be brought into comparison with the Metamorphoses of Ovid. * * We think the hypothesis is also supported in some degree by the fact, that the origin of the entozoa is favoured by all causes which tend to disturb the equality ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... in these cases the things employed are of the same kind, it is answered that even in the case of men and women, the nature of the two persons is the same. And as the difference in their ways of working arises from the difference of their conformation only, it follows that men experience the same kind of ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... signal for general lamentation and horror. This first sense of pain lay in a rigorous constriction of the breast and lungs, and an insufferable dryness of the skin. It could not be denied that our atmosphere was radically affected; and the conformation of this atmosphere, and the possible modifications to which it might be subjected, were now the topics of discussion. The result of investigation sent an electric thrill of the intensest terror through the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... prominency of his nose. They insisted that both were artificial, the first they said, was produced when he was an infant, by dipping him in milk, and they insisted that his nose had been pinched every day, till it had acquired its present unsightly and unnatural conformation. On his part, without disputing his own deformity, he paid them many compliments on African beauty. He praised the glossy jet of their skins, and the lovely depression of their noses; but they said, that flattery, or as they emphatically ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... other; thus, the hunter who knows the red-deer in his father's forest, may know in every forest on earth how the stag will behave in any given case. The better a genus is fitted for variability in the conformation of its individuals, the higher is the rank it is entitled to hold in the graduated series of creatures capable of development; and it is precisely that wonderful many-sidedness of his inner life, and of its outward manifestation, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to the imagination of a reader any accurate presentation of the picture, which the writer has in his mind's eye. She was dark. Hair, brows, eyes, and complexion, were all dark; and the contour of the face was of the long or oval type of conformation—very delicate—transparently delicate—more so, the Englishman thought, not without a pull at his heart-strings, than was quite compatible with a due daily supply of nourishment. Still she did not look unhealthy. At seventeen a good deal of pinching may be undergone without destroying ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... Himself is the grace of all graciousness; hence He assumeth the conformation of the Forehead, which is disclosed in the most intense light (otherwise, hath a formation in the ...
— Hebrew Literature
... the skin swarthy. His eye, too, was black as jet, and his cheek was half covered in whiskers of a hue dark as the raven's wing. His face, as a whole, was singularly beautiful—for handsome is a word not strong enough to express all the character that was conveyed by a conformation that might be supposed to have been copied from some antique medal, more especially when illuminated by a smile that, at times, rendered the whole countenance almost as bewitching as that of a lovely woman. There was nothing ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... man, four inhabitants called Andrew, or Dandie, Oliver. They were distinguished as Dandie Eassil-gate, Dandie Wassilgate, Dandie Thumbie, and Dandie Dumbie. The two first had their names from living eastward and westward in the street of the village; the third from something peculiar in the conformation of his thumb; the fourth ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... that a first class dog in every respect mated with a number of equally well bred typical bitches would produce on an average a comparatively uniform type of pups. Nothing could be further from actual results. The same dog bred, say to four females practically alike in style, size, conformation, color and markings, and from common ancestry, will give perchance in one litter two or three crackerjacks, and the other three will contain only medium pups. This same thing will occur every time the dogs are bred. This is because the bitch with the choice pups and the ...
— The Boston Terrier and All About It - A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog • Edward Axtell
... Insanitary dairy stable and yards. 1. Side and posterior view of bull showing conformation favorable to the development of disease. 2. Insanitary yards. 3. Showing where pulse of horse is taken. 4. Auscultation of the lungs. 5. Fever thermometer. 6. Dose syringe. 7. Hypodermic syringes. 8. Photograph ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... they show us the true central region of the brain from which its development must be determined; and although this work, designed for the general reader, cannot say much of the brain, it is necessary to show its true conformation to enable us to estimate the living brain correctly, so as to describe accurately living men, study the forms of crania, and derive some profit in ethnological studies from the forms of crania which to the ethnologists ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... visible till they were close upon it, on account of the conformation of the land; but when they did come in sight, the scene was so curious that they halted with cocked pieces, gazing down from the rocks at black Peter ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... exceedingly handsome and clear-cut features, but a peculiar head. The peculiarity of his head was that it seemed to be perfectly round on top—that is, its diameter from ear to ear appeared quite equal to its anterior and posterior diameter. The curious effect of this unusual conformation was rendered more striking by the absence of all hair. There was nothing on the Baron's head but a tightly fitting skull cap of black silk. A very deceptive wig hung upon one ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... I said, was to ascertain how to best protect ourselves from like dangers. We then proceeded to discuss the physical conformation of our country. It is a vast table-land, situated at a great height far above the tropical and miasmatic plains, and surrounded by mountains still higher, in which dwell the remnants of that curious white race first described by Stanley. The only access to our region from the lower country ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... so much solemnity, that it is difficult to believe it conveys nothing of any value. Another device for improving the effect of a cold idea, is, to embody it in a verse of unusual harshness and asperity. Compound words, too, of a portentous sound and conformation, are very useful in giving an air of energy and originality; and a few lines of scripture, written out into verse from the original prose, have been found to have a very happy effect upon those readers to whom they have the recommendation ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... followed a native. This man's face was in conformation that of the typical negro; but there the resemblance ceased. Behind the features glowed a proud, fierce spirit that transformed them. His head was high but his eyes roved from right to left restlessly, never still save when they ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... say things feel hard or soft, the varying density of the objects being the cause of the varying sensations they awaken. Smoothness and roughness are varying outlines of surface, existing as physical conformation; the pleasurable or disagreeable sensations awakened in us by contact being due to the greater or less irritation of the nerves of feeling that attrition with it occasions. Motion is absolutely necessary ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... head and face no slight resemblance to the ace of hearts. An apron was tied on with great care, ornamented with embroidery of the preceding century. Her complexion, was dark but clear, and her eyebrows high and well-arched. Her mouth was drawn in, raised slightly on one side,—a conformation more particularly apparent when engaged in scolding the maids, or in ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... an agony, lest the fog should close in again, and the vision fade before my eyes; for, following the sweep of the tusk, I was aware of the phantom presentment of some monster creature lying imbedded within the ice, its mighty carcase prostrate as it had fallen; the conformation of its enormous forehead presented directly to our gaze. Its little toffee-ball eyes—little proportionately, that is to say—squinted at us, it seemed, through half-closed lids, and a huge, hairy ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... Anglo-Saxon in his physical conformation, by his black skin, his curly hair, his flat nose and broad flat foot. Nor is he less distinctly marked by his mental characteristics. Content to repose on the bosom of his mother terra firma, he is not disturbed by dreams of honor, wealth or fame. ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... as they increase, can keep together, will, in the rude state of knowledge in which reliance for subsistence must be principally upon the spontaneous offerings of nature, very largely depend upon climate, soil, and physical conformation. Where much animal food and warm clothing are required; where the earth seems poor and niggard; where the exuberant life of tropical forests mocks barbarous man's puny efforts to control; where mountains, deserts, or arms of the sea separate ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... been adopted. It is true that this boundary would have included some districts which had taken no share in the national struggle, and would have excluded others which had taken an active part in the war; but still it was the most proper. The natural conformation of the line gave it a special political recommendation; and where boundaries do not coincide with some great natural features, but are lines arbitrarily laid down, they tend to tempt an usurper by the dangerous facility which they offer to violation. Sooner or later ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... she was excellent; but her own strong conformation prevented her from understanding that young girls were incapable of such tension of intellect as an enthusiastic scholar of forty-two, and that what was sport to her was toil to a mind unaccustomed to constant attention. Change of labour is not rest, unless it be through gratification ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... stones. Through constraint they suffered the king to appropriate to himself the public portion. The primitive foundation remains, property as organized in ancient times, the fettered or exhausted land supporting a social conformation that has melted away, in short, an order of privileges and of thralldom of which the cause and the purpose ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... is no change of conformation to note, except that the intestinal tube is naturally much longer than ours, on account of the difference of food: as a general rule, it is ten or twelve times the length of the body. The sheep, who is able to pick up a living in the poorest pastures, is indebted for this inestimable power, which ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... to the west of the double basin that the untoward effects of the territorial conformation were chiefly felt. The valley of the Euphrates is not like that of the Nile, a canal hollowed out between two clearly marked banks. From the northern boundary of the alluvial plain to the southern, the slope is very slight, while from east to ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... with iron, and constituted the boom or chief water defence of Hamburgh. We passed through, and found an entire regiment under arms, close by the Custom—house. Somehow or other, I had drank deep of that John Bull prejudice, which delights to disparage the physical conformation of our Gallic neighbours, and hugs itself with the absurd notion, "that on one pair of English legs doth march three Frenchmen." But when I saw the weather—beaten soldierlike veterans, who formed this compact battalion, part of the elite of the first corps, more commanding in its, aspect from ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... for there they would have found themselves in the presence of one of the greatest of Theological intellects. Black and Cavendish were born ready-made chemists, and Linnaeus and Cuvier were naturalists, in spite of themselves; and so, there is a mental conformation which almost necessitated Augustine and Athanasius, Calvin and Arminius, to be dogmatists and systematic divines. With the opposite aptitudes for large generalization and subtile distinction, as soon as some master-principle ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... (kitchen remains) of Denmark, of the same epoch, we find the remains of a dog, which, according to Rutymeyer, belongs to a breed which is constant up to its least details, and which is of a light and elegant conformation, of medium size, with a spacious and rounded cranium and a short, blunt muzzle, and a medium sized jaw, the teeth of which form a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... The mental conformation of the English people, which we may admit to be less lively and less easily amused than the temperament of Irishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, or even the German branch of our own Teutonic race, is what it is from natural causes, whether remote descent, or that coupled with ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... not far to seek. The physical conformation of no other continent is so unfavorable for exploration and development. Africa's straight coast-lines, affording little shelter to the primitive ships of early mariners, repelled the enterprising Phoenicians and other seafarers ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... dropped the prejudices of my former humble situation in life, and forgotten the bellows-mender in far different occupations. But at the epoch of which I speak, the analogy which a casual observation of a star offered to the conclusions I had already drawn, struck me with the force of positive conformation, and I then finally made up my mind to the course which ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... deal of information in respect to the countries which they had visited, and Caesar called together as many of them as he could find, when he had reached the northern shores of France, to inquire about the modes of crossing the Channel, the harbors on the English side, the geographical conformation of the country, and the military resources of the people. He found, however, that the merchants could give him very little information. They knew that Britain was an island, but they did not know its extent or its boundaries; ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... detecting small effusions in this situation. The elbow was to a certain extent protected by the possession of a degree of fixity somewhat resembling that already mentioned in the case of the hip-joint, although here depending on the conformation of the bones alone. I think this explained the absence of free effusion in many cases of fracture of the humeral shaft, but when the latter affected the lower third effusion into ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... line was reformed to my right and rear, my division was at length drawn through the cedars and debouched into an open space near the Murfreesboro' pike, behind the right of Palmer's division. Two regiments of Sill's brigade, however, on account of the conformation of the ground, were obliged to fall back from the point where Woodruff's brigade of Davis's division had rallied after the disaster of the early morning. The division came out of the cedars with unbroken ranks, thinned by only its killed and wounded—but few missing. When we came into ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... projected on the page before me an image which I mistook at first for the likeness of Richard Owen. It was the conformation of the head that gave rise to the mistake, a head domed and massive, white and smooth—it was a head that had always interested me. But as I looked, my mind already searching for the reason of this hallucination, I saw that the lower part of the face was that of ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... form of the bony fabric, those of the skull are the most striking and distinguishing. It is in the head that we find the varieties most strongly characteristic of the different races. The characters of the countenance, and the shape of the features depend chiefly on the conformation of the ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... must be for a moment supposed that our Women are destitute of affection. But unfortunately the passion of the moment predominates, in the Frail Sex, over every other consideration. This is, of course, a necessity arising from their unfortunate conformation. For as they have no pretensions to an angle, being inferior in this respect to the very lowest of the Isosceles, they are consequently wholly devoid of brain-power, and have neither reflection, judgment nor forethought, and ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... on approaching these little mountain lakes, with the extensive preparation that is made for them in the conformation of the ground. I am thinking of a depression, or natural basin, in the side of the mountain or on its top, the brink of which I shall reach after a little steep climbing; but instead of that, after I have accomplished ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... head. Having lived in the East, I am aware that Oriental women ride astride, but I have not seen any of them voluntarily go out of a walk. It is not difficult to trot and canter in a man's plain hunting saddle, but I think our conformation requires the assistance of knee rolls for jumping. We may see even fair horsemen thrown by a horse suddenly stopping dead at a fence, an accident that rarely occurs to a woman in a side saddle, as the grip afforded by her crutches gives her greater ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... which in the distance seem insignificant, are really heavy rain, however local; these are the gray wisps well zigzagged with lightning. The darker ones are torrent rain, which on broad, steep slopes of favorable conformation give rise to so-called "cloudbursts"; and wonderful is the commotion they cause. The gorges and gulches below them, usually dry, break out in loud uproar, with a sudden downrush of muddy, boulder-laden floods. Down they all go in one simultaneous gush, roaring ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... enable us, it is said, by a series of pendulum observations at or near the Pole, to render essential service to the science of geology, to form a mathematical theory of the physical condition of the earth, and to ascertain its exact conformation. It would probably throw light on the wonderful phenomena of magnetism and atmospheric electricity and the mysterious Aurora Borealis—to say nothing of the flora of these regions and the animal life on the ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... been executed, and the drum, A, continuing to revolve, the punches rise a little owing to the conformation of the cam-wheel, and through the action of the springs, b, and allow the moistener to move forward to dampen the little circles which remain at the orifice of the punches. The moistener or dampener is a sort of pad equal in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... virtually blockading all the Mediterranean ports of France. At Toulon, as has been told, they actually entered, and departed only after losing control of the promontory which forms the harbor. There is a similar conformation of the ground at the entrance to the port of Marseilles, but Buonaparte found that the fortress which occupied the commanding promontory had been dismantled. With the instinct of a strategist and with no other thought than that of his duties as inspector, he sat down, and on January ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... represents the now extinct mylodon. Some time afterwards, the discovery of another carapace under similar conditions added weight to Ameghino's supposition.[110] In the midst of the pampas, those vast treeless plains, where no rock or accident of conformation affords shelter from heat or cold or a hiding-place from wild beasts, man was not at a loss; he hollowed out for himself a hole in the earth, roofing it over with the shell of a glyptodon, and securing a retreat where he could be safe at ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... there is a high degree of improbability in supposing a rude dialect to supplant a substantial portion of a more polished one; and, thirdly, we must not overlook the collateral evidence of the similarity of conformation pervading the entire race from Polynesia to the archipelago—distinct alike from the ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... it almost seems to try to resume its old condition. This will be borne out by watching the effect of much wet upon any wood that has been previously bent into shape, or upon the separated ribs of a violin. The efforts of the wood to return to its original conformation will be apparent in the instance of the ribs, perhaps provoking, as the re-bending without injuring the varnish, which may happen to be of the most lustrous and delicate description, is often a matter of great difficulty, and at ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... to do with the comfort of those living in country villages than sidewalks which are good at all seasons of the year. Those fortunate villages which are built on a gravelly soil, with a perfect natural drainage, need little more in this direction than such a conformation of the surface as will prevent water from standing on the footway when the ground is frozen. At all other times it sinks naturally away into the earth. It is much more often the case that the character of the soil or subsoil prevents a settling away ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... escaping with their lives by hastily climbing up the side of the canyons, beyond the reach of the roaring waters, and of others being overwhelmed and drowned. Such a flood, caused by a cloud-burst, may have buried the alleged Gunsight Lead and have changed the conformation of ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... the seat of all the greatest disturbances, this part naturally manifests the greatest number of anomalies, which extend from the external conformation of the brain-case to the ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... given, for the walling of an ancient city was seldom of the same height in all places. The structure necessarily varied according to the nature of the ground, being high wherever the ground without was such as to give the enemy an advantage in an attack, and lower in other situations, where the conformation of the surface was such as to afford, of itself, a partial protection. It is not, perhaps, impossible that, at some particular points—as, for example, across glens and ravines, or along steep declivities—the walls of Babylon may have been raised even to ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... or less analogy to that of the tiger, the vulture, or the fox, the form of his retreating forehead, and his bony, lank, and protruding jaws, supported by a neck of immense length, resembled entirely the conformation of a serpent's head. Total baldness increased this resemblance still more, for, under the rough skin of this reptile-shaped forehead, could be distinguished the slightest protuberances, the smallest sutures of his skull; as to ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... were not so learned as we, yet they were wiser. They did not explain the phenomena of nature, but described with a graceful and imposing imagery. The rainbow, reduced in our colleges to a mere conformation of matter, was the scarf of Iris; the light-footed hours preceded the car of night, and the rosy-fingered Aurora opened the horizon to permit the car of Jove to pass. When the thunder rolled, Jupiter spoke to attentive mortals. When volcanic mountains trembled, the old Titans sought to throw ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modeling of ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... the moral and intellectual perceptions promote spiritual progress or perfection. The system of animal sensations and motions, then, comprises the conception of the animal nature. This is the ground on which all the activities of the soul depend, and the conformation of this fabric determines the duration of the spiritual activity itself, and the degree of ease with which it works. Here, then, we find ourselves in possession of the first member of the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... rugged descent, the Mochuelo commanded a halt. The place where this occurred was in a narrow gorge between two lines of hills, or it should rather be said of mountains; for although their altitude was only here and there very considerable, their cragged and precipitous conformation and rocky material entitled them to the latter denomination. The passage between them continued narrow only for a few hundred yards, after which, at either of its extremities, the mountains receded, and the valley opened into plains of some extent. To the right of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... o' Fundy: The Bay of Fundy is remarkable for its high and violent tides, owing to the peculiar conformation of ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Islands, to which our examinations were limited, are moderately high, woody land; they slope down nearly to the water on their west sides, but on the east, and more especially the south-east, they present steep cliffs; and the same conformation seemed to prevail in the other islands. The stone of the upper parts is grit or sandstone, of a close texture; but the lower part of the cliffs is argillaceous and stratified, splitting in layers of different ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... lower or nether extremities go first, and the head behind: it follows its tail, instead of being followed by it; and this curious peculiarity in its mode of progression, though, of course, on the whole, the mode best adapted to its conformation and instincts, sometimes proves fatal to it in calm weather, when not a ripple breaks upon the pebbles, to warn that the shore is near. An enemy appears: the creature ejects its cloud of ink, like a sharp-shooter discharging his rifle ere he retreats; and then, darting away, tail ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... that the path by which we had come was the only one by which we could reach the spot where we stood. The circles of black rocks above the tops of the highest trees, though indescribably beautiful, were strangely repellent in their weird conformation. They struck us as the walls of a prison from which the only way to liberty lay across ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... of the water itself, only the conformation of the lava stream whose edge could be seen upon the other side of the second river at least ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... is the great event of the voyage. It is always rough there, from the peculiar conformation of the land, and the conflict of the waters from the Gulf of Georgia, and other inlets, with the ocean-tides. Our captain had been sailing on this route for fifteen years, but said he had never seen a worse ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... more careful than before at Mrs. Peck. She was of the age to be Francis's mother, but otherwise she was quite at fault; there was not any likeness there either. A conformation of the little finger was rather peculiar, but it was an exaggeration of a little defect on Mrs. Phillips's otherwise very handsome hand, but ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... . . writing of a species of rock-fish, says—'I found that it had a beautiful contrivance in the conformation of its mouth. It has the power of prolongating both its jaws to nearly the extent of half-an-inch from their natural position. This is done by a most beautiful bit of mechanism, somewhat on the principle of what are called 'lazy tongs.' The cat-fish possesses ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... which we are lies between three large rivers, and, owing to the conformation of the country and the winding of the rivers, its fourth side is a narrow neck of land not more than a mile and a half wide. Here there is a very lofty and rugged range, and it is the spot agreed on as our final rendezvous, being some fifteen miles ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... suppose the condition of a people known as respects (1) civilization, as respects (2) relation to the sovereign, (3) the prevailing mode of its industry, (4) its special circumstances as to taxation, (5) its physical conformation and temperament, (6) its local circumstances as to neighbours warlike or not warlike, (7) the quality and depth of its religion, (8) the framework of its jurisprudence, (9) the machinery by which these laws are made to act, (10) the ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... discovered by accident in the year 1616, and after that time a number of Dutch ships unexpectedly touched at those shores, thus continually shedding additional, though always imperfect light on the question of the conformation of the coast-line. How was it, we may ask, that it was especially after 1616 that this coast was so often touched at, whereas there had never been question of this before that time? The question thus put ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... from the summit fountains toward Yosemite, and the exposed rocks around the shores, and the projecting bosses of the walls, ground and burnished beneath the vast ice-flood, still glow with silvery radiance, notwithstanding the innumerable corroding storms that have fallen upon them. The general conformation of the basin, as well as the moraines laid along the top of the walls, and the grooves and scratches on the bottom and sides, indicate in the most unmistakable manner the direction pursued by this mighty ice-river, its great depth, and the tremendous energy it exerted in thrusting ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... Jacques-Emile Blanche's portrait of the Spanish painter explains other things. There is the physique of a man who can work many hours a day before an easel; there are the penetrating eyes of an observer, spying eyes, slightly cruel; the head is an intellectual one, the general conformation of the face harmonious and handsome. The body is that of an athlete, but not of the bull-necked sort we see in Goya. The temperament suggested is impetuous, controlled by a strong will; it has been fined down by study ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... (October 24, 1795), in which each of the three powers took her share, followed as a natural consequence, and Poland ceased to exist as an independent state. Not, however, for ever; for when in 1807 Napoleon, after crushing Prussia and defeating Russia, recast at Tilsit to a great extent the political conformation of Europe, bullying King Frederick William III and flattering the Emperor Alexander, he created the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, over which he placed as ruler the then King ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the human family, so called, is divided into many distinct races, having each its peculiar conformation, color, and so forth, which together constitute essential differences; but it is to be remembered that these essentials are all physical; and so far they are properly generic, as implying a difference in kind. But, though a striking difference is also observable in their moral being, it is by ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... up there, studying the conformation and general appearance of the island, we fell to discussing our future prospects, and soon arrived at the conclusion that, situated just where the island happened to be, far away from all the regular ship tracks, its very existence apparently unknown—since it was not marked upon the chart—it ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... precedence as to development and proportions. This diversity in the relative capacity of the thorax and abdomen at different stages of development, and also in persons of different sexes, stamps each individual with characteristic traits of physical conformation; and it is required that we should take into our consideration this normal diversity of character, while conducting our examinations of individuals in reference to ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... the secret of the place should have been kept all down the centuries; for it was the hollow middle of a limestone mountain, that could neither be looked down into from above, because the heights were not scalable, nor guessed at from the conformation of the country. The river, that flowed out of rock and went plunging down into the chasm, must be snow from the Himalayan peaks, on its way to swell the sea. There was no other way to account for that; but that explanation ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... highly amusing to observe the peculiarity which the consciousness of superior knowledge impressed upon the conversation and personal appearance of this decaying race. Whatever might have been the original conformation of their physical structure, it was sure, by the force of acquired habit, to transform itself into a stiff, erect, consequential, and unbending manner, ludicrously characteristic of an inflated sense of their extraordinary knowledge, and a proud and commiserating ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... that, as Mind is always associated with Matter within experience, there arises a presumption against Mind existing anywhere without being thus associated, so that unless we can trace in the disposition of the heavenly bodies some resemblance to the conformation of cerebral structure, we are to conclude that there is a considerable balance of probability in favour of Atheism. Now, as this argument—if we rid it of the grotesque allusion to the heavenly bodies—is one that is frequently met with, ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... broad-faced Laotian, to the more classic profile of the Rajpoot, armed with sword and shield, and the bearded Moor. A panorama in life-size of the diverse nationalities, it yet displays, in the physical conformation of each race, a remarkable predominance of the Hellenic type—not in the features and profiles alone, but equally in the fine attitudes of the ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... general conformation of the parrots, as well as the arrangement and strength of their toes, they climb very easily, assisting themselves greatly with their hooked bill, but walk rather awkwardly on the ground, from the shortness and wide separation of their legs. The bill of the parrot is moveable in both ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... pray and to beg favors. Jewish travellers' tales of the Middle Ages are heavily laden with these legends. Of course, the traveller would also bring genuine news about his brethren in distant parts, and sober information about foreign countries, their ways, their physical conformation, and their strange birds and beasts. These stories were in the main true. For instance, Petachiah tells of a flying camel, which runs fifteen times as fast as the fleetest horse. He must have seen an ostrich, which is still called ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... a man somewhat advanced in years, but of a robust conformation, in bed: he had been seized with a fit, which was supposed to be apoplectic, a few hours before; but was already sensible, and out of immediate danger. After I had prescribed a few simple remedies, I took aside ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to have been made for it in the conformation of the ground, even in the deep underlying geological strata! Vast rocks and ledges are piled for it, or cleft asunder that it may find a way. Sometimes it is a trickling thread of silver down the sides of a seamed and scarred precipice. Then again the stratified ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... he has brought together carries us from the top to the bottom of the Tertiaries. Firstly, there is the true horse. Next we have the American Pliocene form of the horse (Pliohippus); in the conformation of its limbs it presents some very slight deviations from the ordinary horse, and the crowns of the grinding teeth are shorter. Then comes the Protohippus, which represents the European Hipparion, having one large digit and two small ones on each foot, and the general ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... there no appeal in this wonderful and enchanting fact to man's highest reason? Does it contain no suggestion that man, representing the highest pinnacle of created life upon the globe, must undergo a final metamorphosis, as supremely more marvelous and more spiritual, as man is greater in physical conformation, and far removed in mental construction from the humble worm that at the call of nature straightway leaves the ground, and soars upon the gleeful air? Is the fact not a thousand-fold more convincing than the assurance of ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... characteristic of the wonderful region to which we were all more or less strangers,—for even Dr. Epaminondas and Senhor Tavares Bastos were here for the first time,—the conversation turned naturally enough upon the nature of this Amazonian Valley, its physical conformation, its origin and resources, its history past and to come, both alike and obscure, both the subject of wonder and speculation. Senhor Tavares Bastos, although not yet thirty, is already distinguished in the politics of his country; and from the moment he entered upon public life to the present time, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... and east of the Rocky Mountains, which lie much nearer to the Pacific Coast than to the eastern shore of America: many of these birds being, for the first time, made known to ornithologists. We have selected two of the most singular in their conformation: one from the Owls, which are numerous and beautiful; and the other from the Grouse, of which ten fine ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... holes bored in the bottom of ships by the worms, which appear to answer the same purpose in water as the termites do upon land. How convincing is this fact of the infinitely wise arrangements of the Creator, who has united, in the whole system of creation, one uniform conformation of order and utility; for although the vermis, or worm, which is so pernicious to shipping in tropical climates, and the termite, possess so many destructive qualities, yet these very properties serve the most important purposes and designs. Scarcely ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... Calder's conformation of eye enabled him to express much surprise by facial expression, and at this moment he used his power to ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... continued, gaining a little heat at the word, "I bought the finest-lookin' pair you ever saw in New York this spring,—all-around action, manners, conformation, everything; I'll show 'em to you. One of 'em's all right now; this confounded railroad injured the other gettin' him up here. I've put in a claim. They say they didn't, my man says they did. He ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... traced a few words, and then resumed his reclining position, apparently absorbed in reflection, and utterly regardless of all the occupants, male and female, of the imperial apartment. Judging from his general appearance, he could scarcely be twenty-five years of age. The conformation of the upper part of his face was thoroughly intellectual—the forehead high, broad, and upright; the eyes clear, penetrating, and thoughtful;—but the lower part was, on the other hand, undeniably sensual. The lips, full and thick, formed ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... This conformation accompanies any great proportional developement of the vital system; and it is frequently observable in the woman of the Saxon population of England, as in the ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... it seemed a strange, critical entrance into another world, which she was destined to know and to love. The pines were big, brown-barked, seamed, and knotted, with no typical conformation except a majesty and beauty. They grew far apart. Few small pines and little underbrush flourished beneath them. The floor of this forest appeared remarkable in that it consisted of patches of high silvery grass and wide brown areas ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... coverts, and tail, are white in the perfect, or old birds of both sexes, in those under three years of age these parts are of a gray brown; the rest of the plumage is deep, dark brown, each feather tipt with pale brown, lightest on the shoulder of the wing, and darkest towards its extremities. The conformation of the wing is admirably adapted for the support of so large a bird; it measures two feet in breadth on the greater quills, and sixteen inches on the lesser; the longest primaries are twenty inches ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various
... rhinoceros or behemoth. One other corporeal fact I could not help observing, was, that his cheeks rose at once from the collar of his green coat, his neck being invisible, from the hollow between it and the jaw being filled up to a level. The conformation was just what he himself delighted to contemplate in his pigs, to which his resemblance was greatly increased by unwearied endeavours to keep himself close shaved.—I could not help feeling anxious about his son and Jane Rogers.—He gave a quantity of gossip about various people, evidently anxious ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... the general distribution of the reef-building corals, but there are some very interesting and singular circumstances to be observed in the conformation of the reefs, when we consider them individually. The reefs, in fact, are of three different kinds; some of them stretch out from the shore, almost like a prolongation of the beach, covered only by shallow water, and in the case of an island, surrounding ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... for Nature's bulwarks. Here again geographical features will be found to have had an important bearing on the course of history, the close connection of the two countries, in almost every age, resulting from their physical conformation. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... life-giving breath of the sea, when she could distinguish the green line of ocean beyond the trees, she clapped her hands with ecstasy. She became a guide for Genevieve, explaining to her the conformation of Carnac, and recounting with pretty fancy the legends of the country they ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... view her aunt, broken under the news, and Hugh still unknowing to them; her own separate existence Fleda was hardly conscious of. Hugh especially how was he to be told, and how could he bear to hear, with his most sensitive conformation of both physical and moral nature? And if an arrest should take place there that night! Fleda shuddered, and, unable to go on thinking, rose up and went to her aunt's bedside. It had not entered her mind till the moment she read Mr. Thorn's letter that ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... overhanging conformation of the place, it was quite impossible for us to descend in front where pressure had made the snow hard as stone, we were obliged to risk a march over the looser material upon its flank. As there was nothing to be gained ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... at, minutely circumstantial in its details, and the veracity of which admits of no dispute. As the researches of comparative anatomists have enabled us, from the examination of a single bone, to pronounce with certainty upon the general conformation and habits of the animal to which it belonged; and as, in many cases, from the existence of such animals, we may go on, step by step, to the nature of the earth's surface at the period when they lived: so the meanest relic of art will ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... the ai does not move rapidly over the ground, but the ground is not its proper place no more than it is that of the orang-otang, or other tree-monkeys. Its conformation shows that nature intended it for an inhabitant of the trees, where it can move about with sufficient ease to procure its food. On the branches it is quite at home, or, rather, I should say, under the branches, for, unlike the squirrels ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... Enright, never fails in the administration of justice. Doctor Peets will be glad to exhibit this memento mori to all who care to call. Doctor Peets, who is eminent as a phrenologist, avers that said skull is remarkable for its thickness, and that its conformation points to the possession by Bear Creek, while he wore it, of the most powerful natural inclinations to crime. From these discoveries of Doctor Peets, the committee which suspended this felon to the windmill is to be congratulated on acting just in time. It seems plain from the ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... be no mistake about it, for all of them recognized the conformation of the ground in the immediate neighborhood, since they had taken particular pains to impress the same on their ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... unpleasant dilemma. Aided by a legal adviser, however, his judgment must be strengthened, and his decision would be more weighty, without creating in his breast those uneasy sensations which must arise under different circumstances. In the present conformation of the government, the governor has no legal adviser to have recourse to when an appeal is made to his decision, which is not rarely the case, except the judge advocate, and this officer having previously given his opinion in the court below cannot, of course, be again ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... underlip ending in a precipitous dent above her chin. He liked that chin. There was courage there and strength, softened at once by the curve of the throat, flowing to where it joined the fine deep breast. Yesterday she had seemed like a boy. To-day she was a woman grown, feminine in every graceful conformation, on tiptoe at the very ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... of level between the source and mouth of the brook is about 190 feet. The sharpest descent is just above the hatchery and rearing troughs, which therefore receive well-aerated water. The conformation of the ground offers good facilities for the distribution and utilization of ...
— New England Salmon Hatcheries and Salmon Fisheries in the Late 19th Century • Various
... find some rich mines near here soon. Stay; it can do you no harm. I will tell you something: three days ago I followed up the river, and about twenty miles above this spot I became attracted by the conformation of the country, and remarked it as being very similar to some very famous spots in South America. 'Here,' I said to myself, 'Maximilian, you have your volcanic disturbance, your granite, your clay, slate, and sandstone upheaved, and seamed with quartz;—why should you not discover ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... masculine organ of mentality in other particulars so marked that one who has given the subject attention can determine with perfect ease the probable sex of the owner of almost any skull which might be presented to him. This difference in the conformation of the skull is undoubtedly due to a difference in mental character, which, in turn, depends upon a difference in cerebral development. Faculties which are generally largely developed in one are usually smaller in the ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... began to con their lessons together, Reuben, who was as much superior to Jeanie Deans in acuteness of intellect, as inferior to her in firmness of constitution, and in that insensibility to fatigue and danger which depends on the conformation of the nerves, was able fully to requite the kindness and countenance with which, in other circumstances, she used to regard him. He was decidedly the best scholar at the little parish school; and so gentle was his temper and disposition, that he was ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... essential differences. In all those modifications of the features which are produced by habits and sentiments, no two persons were less alike. Nature seemed to have intended them as examples of the futility of those theories which ascribe every thing to conformation and instinct and nothing to external circumstances; in what different modes the same materials may be fashioned, and to what different purposes the same materials may be applied. Perhaps the rudiments of their intellectual character, ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... consul at Alexandria a certificate declaring me to be an Indo-British subject named Abdullah, by profession a doctor, aged thirty, and not distinguished—at least so the frequent blanks seemed to denote—by any remarkable conformation of eyes, nose, or cheek. For this I disbursed a dollar. And here let me record the indignation with which I did it. That mighty Britain—the mistress of the seas—the ruler of one-sixth of mankind—should charge five shillings to pay for the shadow of her protecting ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... miscarriage in this manner was of eight months' growth and was accompanied by its placenta. The older observers thought this woman must have had two orifices to her womb, one of which had some connection with the stomach, as they had records of the dissection of a female in whom was found a conformation similar ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Holloway) weighing eight grains less than nine ounces. This sort is also termed amas lichin or smooth gold, and appears to owe that quality to its having been exposed, in some prior state of the soil or conformation of the earth, to the action of running water, and deprived of its sharp and rough edges by attrition. This form of gravel is the most common in which gold is discovered. Gold-dust or amas urei ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... Buch compares the Lofodens to the jaws of a shark, and most travellers since his time have resuscitated the comparison, but I did not find it so remarkably applicable. There are shark tooth peaks here and there, it is true, but the peculiar conformation of Norway—extensive plateaus, forming the summit-level of the mountains—extends also to these islands, whose only valleys are those which open to the sea, and whose interiors are uninhabitable snowy tracts, mostly above the line ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... to overcome an habitual trepidancy—an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter, than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament. His action was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic concision—that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... wrestlers. If it be said that in these cases the things employed are of the same kind, it is answered that even in the case of men and women, the nature of the two persons is the same. And as the difference in their ways of working arises from the difference of their conformation only, it follows that men experience the same kind ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... displacing the preexistent and probably more primitive peoples of the Mississippi valley. While the time is not yet ripe for making final answer to these inquiries, it is not premature to suggest a relation between a peculiar development of the aboriginal stocks and a peculiar geographic conformation: In general the coastward stocks are small, indicating a provincial shoreland habit, yet their population and area commonly increase toward those shores indented by deep bays, along which maritime and inland industries naturally ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... within this inclosed sea, is a place where the water is just of the right depth, and the bottom of just the right conformation for the convenient anchoring of ships of war. This place is called Spithead, and it forms one of the most famous anchoring grounds in the world. It is here that the vast fleets of the English navy ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... last acts of some of our best dramatic writers, there wants that degree of finish and grouping equal to the rest. Shakspeare sometimes has this want in common with others; but in this play he has lost none of his force and propriety of character—here all continue to speak the language of their conformation, and lose none of their original importance. Barry was an actor that, in this particular, kept pace with the great poet he represented—he supported Othello throughout with unabating splendor—his ravings over the dead body of the innocent ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... or skill—it is unnecessary to decide which—has associated symmetry with quality and conformation, as a point of great importance in animals calculated for fattening; and there is no doubt that, to a certain extent, this is so. The beast must be a system of mathematical lines. To the advocate of symmetry, the setting-on of ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... light ground. The general grouping is in three horizontal or encircling bands agreeing with or following the foundation coil. Details are governed by the horizontal and the oblique structure lines. The vertical construction lines have no direct part in the conformation of the design excepting in so far as they impose a stepped character ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... among them, until one day when the company after a fierce charge found itself hugging the ground in a wide field, on the far side of which the enemy—infantry and artillery—was posted in force. Lying down they were pretty well protected by the conformation of the ground from the artillery; and lying down, the infantry generally, even with their better guns, could not hurt them to a great extent; but a line of sharp-shooters, well placed behind cover of scattered rocks on the far side of the field, could ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... and drug habitue wards of hospitals as well as in medicolegal cases of degenerates, gunmen and other criminals, the characteristic conformation and diagnostic stigmata of the thymo-centric are often encountered. Life treats them badly. Misunderstood and misjudged, they are the hopeless misfits of society. If the pituitary and the thyroid can enlarge to ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... is borne by a single immensely-extended finger (fig. 178). No trace of the actual wing-membrane itself has, of course, been found fossilised; but we could determine that the "Pterodactyles" possessed the power of flight, quite apart from the extraordinary conformation of the hand. The proofs of this are to be found partly in the fact that the breast-bone was furnished with an elevated ridge or keel, serving for the attachment of the great muscles of flight, and still more in the fact that the bones were hollow and were filled with air—a ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... bottom' one, which indeed does stand in front of the rest,—but if therefore it is to be called the front petal—which is the back one?) You may find in the next paragraph description of a "singular conformation," and the interesting conclusion that "no one has yet discovered for what purpose this singular conformation was provided." But you will not, in the entire article, find the least attempt to tell you the difference between ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... thing from a soldier's point of view. Pay was drawn from the Field Cashier, and distributed for the first time in France. Next came the notification that in conformation with the policy of re-forming the 33rd and the 2nd Divisions by forming brigades, each consisting of two new battalions and two regular battalions, the 99th Brigade was to lose the 17th and 24th Battalions Royal Fusiliers, receive the 1st Royal Berks and the 1st King's Royal ...
— The 23rd (Service) Battalion Royal Fusiliers (First Sportsman's) - A Record of its Services in the Great War, 1914-1919 • Fred W. Ward
... to the reverence of infinite generations, and of centuries beyond the vision of prophecy. A plausible hypothesis has been started in modern times, that the facial structure, and that the intellectual conformation, may be deduced more frequently from the corresponding characteristics in the mother than in the father. It is certain that no very great man has ever existed, but that his greatness has been rehearsed and predicted in one or other of his parents. And it cannot be denied, that in the most eminent ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... very brief notice of the above varieties of fish sufficient,—they have been described over and over again by much abler pens than mine, and I advise all those who are desirous of minute details, as to their conformation and habits, to have recourse to one of the published Histories of British Fishes,[2] indeed all the above fish and their varieties have been faithfully and naturally described in (I take it for granted) every angling book ...
— The Teesdale Angler • R Lakeland
... said of Reynolds, as Macaulay said of Horace Walpole: "The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great; and whatever was ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... from other nations by a thin beard, they try to eradicate the few hairs that nature has given them. They think themselves embellished in proportion as they heighten the characteristic marks of their race, or of their national conformation. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the Neanderthal, near Hochdal, between Dusseldorf and Elberfeld. Of this, however, I was unable to procure more than a plaster cast of the cranium, taken at Elberfeld, from which I drew up an account of its remarkable conformation, which was, in the first instance, read on the 4th of February, 1857, at the meeting of the Lower Rhine Medical and Natural History Society, at Bonn.* ([Footnote] *'Verhandl. d. Naturhist.' Vereins der Preuss. Rheinlande ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... pick out on the map the headquarters of all the more notable peoples, not merely as they are now, but also as they were at various outstanding moments of the past. His next business is to master the main facts about the natural conditions to which each people is subjected—the climate, the conformation of land and sea, the animals and plants. From here it is but a step to the economic life—the food-supply, the clothing, the dwelling-places, the principal occupations, the implements of labour. A selected list of ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... gable-end where, earlier in the evening I had seen peering out at me an old woman's face. Conceive my astonishment at finding the spot still lighted and a face looking out, but not the same face, a countenance as old, one as intent, but of different conformation and of a much more intellectual type. I considered myself the victim of an illusion; I tried to persuade myself that it was the same woman, only in another garb and under a different state of feeling; ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... afforded; although the extreme right rested on no obstacle which superiority in numbers could not overcome. And a heavy force, massed in the clearing at Dowdall's as a point d'appui, was indispensable to safety, inasmuch as the conformation of the ground afforded nothing for this flank ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... lifted his nose, which by its natural conformation betrayed an aspiring character, and looked ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... stranger's friend. At this moment the extreme beauty of a small moss in fructification caught his eye. Though the whole plant was not much larger than the top of one of his fingers, he could not contemplate the delicate conformation of its roots, leaves, and capsules without admiration. "Can that Being," he thought, "who brought this plant to perfection look with unconcern upon the situation and sufferings of creatures formed after his own image? Surely not." He started up and, disregarding ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... peculiar to America, but in this he is certainly mistaken; and probably, as Pallas has observed in his Zoology, the Phalanger itself is a native of the East Indies, as the animal which was caught by Mr Banks resembled it in the extraordinary conformation of the feet, in which it differs from ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... red, sarcastic man, the engineer, and a meek puppet who was merely the superintendent of the whole thing.... Una watched these village people, to whom the Zodiac hall was Main Street, and in their satisfied conformation to a life of marble floors and artificial light she found such settled existence as made her feel at home in this town, with its eighteen strata called floors. She, too, at least during the best hours of the day, lived in the Zodiac ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... the work done by the men who have laid bare so many of the secrets of the interior, and by deductions to be drawn from the physical conformation and climatic peculiarities already revealed, we may, to some extent, conjecture the possibilities of the future. With every variety of climate between temperate and tropical, with enormous mineral treasures—the extent of which, even at the present time, can only be conjectured—boundless ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... snow-dust in a loose condition on exposed slopes, where there is a free upward sweep to leeward, it is tossed back into the sky, and borne onward from peak to peak in the form of banners or cloudy drifts, according to the velocity of the wind and the conformation of the slopes up or around which it is driven. While thus flying through the air, a small portion makes good its escape, and remains in the sky as vapor. But far the greater part, after being driven into the sky again and again, is at length locked fast in bossy drifts, or in ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... mysterious light became stronger and soon they could make out the conformation of the rock walls they were passing at such a snail's pace. Layers of vari-colored rock showed here and there, and, at one point there was a stratum of gold-bearing or mica-filled rock that glistened with a million reflections and re-reflections. The air grew warmer and more humid ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... sights to be seen on those beachless shores, of that multitude of creeks and inlets and little bays, no two of them alike, yet all trackless abysses? We may almost fancy that Nature took pleasure in recording by ineffaceable hieroglyphics the symbol of Norwegian life, bestowing on these coasts the conformation of a fish's spine, fishery being the staple commerce of the country, and well-nigh the only means of living of the hardy men who cling like tufts of lichen to the arid cliffs. Here, through fourteen degrees of longitude, barely seven hundred thousand souls maintain existence. Thanks ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... close Southern ports, and the South to destroy Northern commerce, the advantage was clearly with the South. From Cape Henry to the Rio Grande the Navy of the United States was called upon to create an effective blockade against all ingress and egress. The conformation of the coast, which along great distances prevented the entrance and exit of ocean-going vessels, materially aided in the task, but it was still such a one as had never before been attempted in the naval history of the world. The line to be subjected to blockade was ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... surf-swimmers these men are;—they will go far out for mere sport in the roughest kind of a sea, when the waves, abnormally swollen by the peculiar conformation of the bay, come rolling in thirty and forty feet high. Sometimes, with the swift impulse of ascending a swell, the swimmer seems suspended in air as it passes beneath him, before he plunges into the trough beyond. ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... understands the conformation of the brain, and the general character of its different regions. It is important that he should as soon as possible begin the study of heads, and learn to judge correctly their development. When he can do this, he has an inexhaustible ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... the ledge had seemed to be four or five feet wide; now she saw that it was nearer ten. The conformation of the rocks, beetling above it, had led her to imagine that a straight wall of cliff rose abruptly just at the back of the ledge. In reality they overhung the rudely level space like out-jutting eaves over the sun-deck ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... will see many a pretty face enveloped in a fur-trimmed hood, and observe how much grace and modest dignity is given by that simple habiliment. It is something of this kind which we would recommend. For example—if a hood, so cut as not to admit of too close a conformation to the shape of the head, were attached to a tippet which might descend and protect the shoulders, or come even lower, at the fancy of the wearer, and were fastened round the neck, the hood itself might be elevated so as to cover the head, and might be drawn even over the face; or it might be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... language, being a fool or lumpish stupid person. And, besides that name, it bore that of Toelpel in German, which has the same signification. The Dod-aers of the Dutch is most probably a vulgar epithet of the Dutch sailors, expressive of its lumpish conformation and inactivity. Our sailors would possibly have substituted heavy-a——. I find the Dodo was also called the Monk-swan of St. Maurice's Island at the commencement of last century. The word Dronte is apparently neither Portugese nor Spanish, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... Wealden lake, or filled up the hollows of the old inland cretaceous sea. Paradoxical as it sounds to say so, the Celtic kingdom of the Regni, the South Saxon principality of AElle the Bretwalda, the modern English county of Sussex, have all had their destinies moulded by the geological conformation of the rock upon which they repose. Where human annals see only the handicraft and interaction of human beings—Euskarian and Aryan, Celt and Roman, Englishman and Norman—a closer scrutiny of history may perhaps see the working of still deeper elements—chalk and clay, volcanic upheaval ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... knows the difficulty experienced in singing very high tones to different syllables, each requiring a different conformation of the buccal cavity. The passage quoted—expressing Tell's bitterness at the recollection of his past sufferings in prison, "Well I know the weight of galling chain"—has to be declaimed with great energy. So far as the relative value of the notes is concerned, it is entirely ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
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