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More "Mechanical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... next, it was to leave very little to the differences of intellectual power: it was to level minds and capacities. It was to give all men the same sort of power which a pair of compasses gives the hand in drawing a circle. "Absolute certainty, and a mechanical mode of procedure" says Mr. Ellis, "such that all men should be capable of employing it, are the two great features of the Baconian system." This he thought possible, and this he set himself to expound—"a method universally applicable, and in ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... the house was not only well kept, but presented many evidences of refinement. A mechanical piano stood against the log wall, and books and magazines, dog-eared with use, littered the table; and Norcross, feeling the force of Nash's half-expressed criticism of his "superior," listened intently to Mrs. McFarlane's ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... his teeth went over his under lip. Then, to the man's evident surprise, he laughed again, throwing his head back so that the muscles of his throat showed under his beard, working, as it were, automatically. It really seemed as if the man's mechanical merriment were no part of himself. He was, in fact, gaining time to propound an explanation which he did not believe in the least, but which happened to ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... dear, that I do not propose to tell them—especially them—why I go. For I am going. I must go! There are reasons I cannot explain." He sighed, and looked wildly at Moya, whose smile was becoming mechanical. "I hate the excuse, but it will have to be said that I go for a change—for my health. My health! Great ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... sawing up into planks, and Pablo and I are to commence to-morrow. At first we made but a bad hand of sawing off the slabs, but before we had cut them all, we got on pretty well Pablo don't much like it, and indeed no more do I much, it is such mechanical work, and so tiring; but he does not complain—I do not intend that he shall saw more than two days in a week; that will be sufficient: we ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... by the exceptional opportunities he enjoyed for a careful study of leaking cylinder jackets, insulating tape, red-leaded joints and missing engines the intrepid Doctor must have added largely to his knowledge of mechanical science, to say nothing of the botanical discoveries he made when his machine came within a few inches of contact ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... a proper domestic training was a pretty good schooling in any direction. He didn't see any relationship between a perfectly baked apple pie and a neatly kept cash book. He had expected his wife to fall down on the mechanical aspects of typewriting, but he forgot that she had been running a sewing machine since she was fifteen years old. And even in his wife's early childhood people were still using lamps for soft effects and intensive reading. Any woman who knew the art of keeping a kerosene lamp in shape must of ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... the saloon, passed through the library and the dining-room, and arrived forward, in the machine-room, where the electrical apparatus was established, which supplied not only heat and light but the mechanical power ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... /tit'ee/ [ITS, but some UNIX people say it this way as well; this pronunciation is not considered to have sexual undertones] n. 1. A terminal of the teletype variety, characterized by a noisy mechanical printer, a very limited character set, and poor print quality. Usage: antiquated (like the TTYs themselves). See also {bit-paired keyboard}. 2. [especially UNIX] Any terminal at all; sometimes used to refer to the particular terminal ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... stupid and dizzy with the pain, the praying, the jostling, the elbowing, the scrambling and the uncomfortable penitential murmurs of the whole crowd. I knew not what I was about, but went through the forms in the same mechanical spirit which pervaded all present. As for that solemn, humble, and heartfelt sense of God's presence, which Christian prayer demands, its existence in the mind would not only be a moral but a physical impossibility in Lough Derg. I verily think that ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... Madeline, those new and thrilling possessions. For the moment, however, there was no exhilaration in his heart, rather a depressed questioning whether, after all, everything beautiful was a sham. Was the daily grind a mechanical millwheel? Dick and Dick's marriage, were they but samples of the way life deals with hope? A pang stabbed through him as his own marriage rose and stood beside Dick's in his mind. It meant so much to him; yet only a few months before his friend had been bubbling with ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... Bellevite, his father's large steam yacht, now a man-of-war in the navy. In two years the young man had worked his way up to the rank of lieutenant. He was very large for his age, and his nautical and mechanical education had prepared him for service to a degree which made him almost a prodigy, though his courage and skill had been fully equalled, if not surpassed, by other naval officers not older ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... Weak-Hands in and out among the rocks until the climax. Brain desperately triumphs. Weak-Hands slays Brute-Force with the startling invention. He wins back his stolen bride, Lily-White (impersonated by Mae Marsh). It is a Griffith masterpiece, and every actor does sound work. The audience, mechanical Americans, fond of crawling on their stomachs to tinker their automobiles, are eager over the evolution of the first weapon from a stick to a hammer. They are as full of curiosity as they could well be over the history of Langley or ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... few examples must be given. When one body strikes another, that which we usually regard as the effect, is a change of position or motion in one or both bodies. But a moment's thought shows us that this is a very incomplete view of the matter. Besides the visible mechanical result, sound is produced; or, to speak accurately, a vibration in one or both bodies, which is communicated to the surrounding air; and under some circumstances we call this the effect. Moreover, the air has not only been made to undulate, but has had ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... seemed to me that the mere existence of printed questions in text-books proves that the publishers must have rather a poor opinion of the average intelligence of teachers; and it also seemed as if the practical effect of such questions must often be to make the exercise of recitation more mechanical for both teachers and pupils, and to encourage the besetting sin of "learning by heart." Nevertheless, there are usually two sides to a case; and, in deference to the prevailing custom, for which, no doubt, there is ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... overall supply and exchange of soil air. Compacted soil also acts as a mechanical barrier to root system expansion. When gardening with unlimited irrigation or where rain falls frequently, it is quite possible to have satisfactory growth when only the surface 6 or 7 inches of soil facilitates root development. When gardening ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... flute and the violin, but, though bright and intelligent enough, and always maintaining a creditable position at school, it was evident that nature had intended him for a musician, and that he could never succeed in anything prosaic or mechanical. Accordingly his father taught him not only to play, but also instructed him in the theory and literature of music, and, when he was old enough, had him entered as a chorister in Bristol Cathedral, where, in addition ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... grew older, my great desire was to be a mechanical engineer, but the fates were against this; and, while very young, I commenced the study of medicine under a medical brother-in-law. But, though the Institute of Mechanical Engineers would certainly not own me, I am not sure that I have not all along been a sort ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... abstain from their former cruel and sanguinary practices, they go about clothed and live in neat cottages, and industriously cultivate the ground; they can generally read and write their own language, and have learned many mechanical arts; they understand the principles of Christianity, attend Divine worship, and respect the sabbath, while undoubtedly some, and perhaps many, have been 'created anew in Christ Jesus unto good works,' and not a few have risked their lives, and laid them down for the gospel's ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... commoner should thwart a lord! Yet not a commoner. A baronet Is fish and flesh. Nine parts plebeian, and Patrician in the tenth. Sir Thomas Clifford! A man, they say, of brains! I abhor brains As I do tools: they're things mechanical. So far are we above our forefathers They to their brains did owe their titles, as Do lawyers, doctors. We to nothing owe them, Which ...
— The Hunchback • James Sheridan Knowles
... Prehistoric Time.[1]—Present time is measured in terms of centuries, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds, but the second is the determining power of mechanical measurement, though it is derived mainly by the movement of the earth around the sun and the turning of the earth on its axis. Mechanically we have derived the second as the unit. It is easy for us to think in hours or days or weeks, though it may be the seconds ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... awkward leisure separate beneficial lenient Spaniard decimal license speak exhilarate mechanical specimen familiarize mediaeval speech fiber medicine spherical fibrous militia subtle genuine motor surely gluey negotiate technical height origin tenement hideous pacified their hundredths phalanx therefore hysterical physique thinnest icicle ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... all events, been put to some use, and I have lived and been active. During the next eight days I shall try to see whether I can put myself into the proper humor for my Demetrius, which, however, I fear I shall not be able to do. If it cannot be managed, I shall have to look up some other semi-mechanical work. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... Mothers' Remedies. 1. A Cure if Taken in Time.—"If taken in time a felon may be cured without lancing, but if poultice or liniment is used it is important that they should be bound on tightly as the mechanical compression is more essential than the application. A good remedy is finely pulverized salt, wet with spirits of turpentine bound tightly and left two or three days, wetting with the turpentine when dry without removing ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... proudly the name of "rhetoric." At the same time there is gain in one respect—the poets no longer conceal their own personality behind their work: they instruct, edify, moralise, express their real or simulated passions in their own persons; if their art is mechanical, yet through it we make some acquaintance with the men and manners ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... that under even the most favorable conditions there was realized in mechanical work of the energy stored in coal only 10%, he was convinced that the extravagant waste of 90% of energy was in itself sufficient argument against the present method as being the best possible. Ever since his graduation, ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... hall. Indeed it more closely resembled a studio, being partly lighted by a most curious dome. It was furnished in a manner quite un-English, but very luxuriously. A magnificent oaken staircase communicated with a gallery on the left, and at the foot of this staircase, in a mechanical chair which she managed with astonishing dexterity, ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... his eye had a fixed look, yet he moved and spoke with a species of mechanical action, which had something almost ghastly in it. Causing the body to be removed into the house, he bade the captain summon the servants of the deceased and then motioning with his hand to the awe-struck ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... you think," he ventured to say, "that that would look rather mechanical—rather stagey, in fact? I know nothing about writing; but I should think you would want to deal mostly with the expression of the ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... pretty sharply," she said. "Take them as a race, as a unit—of course there are exceptions, there always are—but the great body of them are mechanical. They are imitative. They are not developing anything great of their own in their own country. They are spreading all over the world and carrying home sewing machines and threshing machines and automobiles and cantilever bridges and ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... on, hearing every word and trying to appear as if they did not. They spoke to one another with forced voices and mechanical smiles, and did their best not to be self-conscious in the ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... present case he has been the go-between for this man Trubus, who, posing as a reformer to cover his activities, has kept in touch with the work of the Vice Trust, managed by Clemm. They had a dictagraph and a mechanical pencil register which connected ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... as regards such serial homology as is exemplified by the backbone of man, there are also several objections to Mr. Spencer's mechanical explanation. ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... nations can discover any thing to justify them. If indeed politeness consisted in the repetition of a certain routine of phrases, unconnected with the mind or action, I might be obliged to decide against our country; but while decency makes a part of good manners, or feeling is preferable to a mechanical jargon, I am inclined to think the English have a merit more than they have hitherto ascribed to themselves. Do not suppose, however, that I am going to descant on the old imputations of "French flattery," and "French ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... parasols and departed, while Gustavo stood in the gateway bowing. The motion was purely mechanical; his ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... and the lounging arrogance of uniformed menials. At close intervals women passed rapidly across the pavements to or from these automobiles. If they were leaving a shop, the automobile sprang into life, dogs, menials, and all, the door was opened, the woman slipped in like a mechanical toy, the door banged, the menial jumped, and with trumpet tones the entire machine curved and swept away. The aspect of these women made Audrey feel glad that she was wearing her best clothes, and simultaneously made her feel that her best ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... letter from the Secretary of the Navy, accompanied by a letter from the secretary of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, who transmits a memorial, addressed to the Government of the United States, in relation to the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... the character of a "dark saturnine man." I have said incidentally that I never saw him smile— never. He spoke seldom, and, as a general thing, only upon matters of duty; but at times, when he fancied himself alone, I have heard him mutter threats, while a convulsive twitching of the muscles and a mechanical clenching of the fingers accompanied his words, as though he stood in the presence of some deadly foe! I had more than once observed these frenzied outbursts, without knowing aught of their cause. Harding Holingsworth—such was his full name—was a man with whom no one would ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... for each word I utter, as if he were a mechanical toy pulled by a string; when he is seated before me on the ground, he limits himself to a duck of the head—always accompanied by the same ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... and healthiness? It is the qualities of skill and enlightenment. It is only by these qualities that men can work in the best manner, with the least waste, and for the largest remuneration. Where the laborer is uninformed and merely mechanical in his work, there he knows labor somewhat as an animal does; and he is led almost blindly to the same dull, animal-like endurance of toil, which is the characteristic of the beast of the field. His work, ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... crude information, to be presently disgorged in the same state. The examination system flourishes best where there is no genuine desire for mental cultivation. If there were any widespread enthusiasm for knowledge as an integral part of life the revolt against this mechanical and commercialised system of testing results would be universal. As things are, a clever boy trains for an examination as he trains for a race; and goes out of training as fast as possible when it is over. Meanwhile the romance of his life is centred in those more generous and less individual ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... Now, mechanical philosophy informs us that, the instant a mass begins to rotate, there is generated a tendency to fling off its outer portions—in other words, the law of centrifugal force begins to operate. There are, then, ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... movements, which are not only related to each other by a bond of sympathy established by the keys chosen but also by their emotional contents. Without this higher bond the unity of the work would be merely mechanical, like the unity accomplished by sameness of key in the old-fashioned suite. (See Chapter VI.) The bond of key-relationship, though no longer so obvious as once it was, is yet readily discovered by a musician; the spiritual bond is more elusive, and presents ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... that might be done to-day! The things indeed that are being done! It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the former. When I think of the progress of physical and mechanical science, of medicine and sanitation during the last century, when I measure the increase in general education and average efficiency, the power now available for human service, the merely physical increment, and compare it with anything that has ever been at man's ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... with a slow mechanical motion, as if with a conscious effort of the will. His face was so white, and wore such a look of loss, that it almost terrified me like the presence of something awful. I stood speechless. He looked at me for a moment, ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... with Sedley Taylor and Professor Stuart, M.P., an old friend of former visits, and inspected the mechanical laboratory and workshops. There were about seventy university men, more or less, engaged in these, and it was interesting to see English Cambridge adopting the same line which we have already taken at Cornell against so much opposition, and surprising to ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... all of his usual joys; His books and his blocks made him tired, And so did his games and mechanical toys, And the songs he had always admired; So I told him a story, a story so new It had never been heard anywhere; A tale disconnected, unlikely, untrue, Called The Grocery Man and ...
— Bib Ballads • Ring W. Lardner
... her arms looked twisted and rigid, and finally she bent slowly forward, gazing up into his face with eyes expanded to twice their natural size and not a vestige of color in her cheek or lips: she looked like a corpse still engaged in the mechanical act of gazing on the scene of agony which had preceded its death. Suddenly she sprang to her feet and threw out her hands. ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... a trifle, lowered her eyes, and began to plait her thin skirt across her knee with small, delicate fingers. Hudson stopped in his walk to watch this mechanical occupation. She struggled dumbly with her emotion and managed to answer ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... another standard skiagraph which he already had, "there is a marked diminution in size of the sella turcica, as it is called. Yet there is no evidence of a tumor." For several moments he pondered deeply over the photographs. "And it is impossible to conceive of any mechanical pressure sufficient to cause such a change," ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... essential factor is the drilled and trained infantryman. The artillery is developing as a means of breaking the infantry; cavalry for charging them when broken, for pursuit and scouting. To this day this triple division of forces dominates soldiers' minds. The mechanical development of warfare has consisted largely in the development of facilities for enabling or hindering the infantry to get to close quarters. As that has been made easy or difficult the offensive or the defensive ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... up by the jovial assembly rang in Valentin's ears, but he could not grasp the sense of a single word. Vague thoughts crossed him of the Breton peasant's life of mechanical labor, without a wish of any kind; he pictured him burdened with a family, tilling the soil, living on buckwheat meal, drinking cider out of a pitcher, believing in the Virgin and the King, taking the sacrament ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... mechanical anthelmintics are strictly confined to those agents which kill the worm in the body by piercing its cuticle with the sharp darts or spiculae of the cowhage hairs, or the fine metallic points of powdered tin (pulvis stanni). When these drops are employed, ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... laughing cousin, are also advantages not always appreciated at the time, but which boys, when they have become men, often think over with gratitude, and a little remorse at the ungracious spirit in which they were received. Not even the dancing-master had afforded his mechanical aid to Coningsby, who, like all Eton boys of his generation, viewed that professor of accomplishments with frank repugnance. But even in the boisterous life of school, Coningsby, though his style was free and flowing, was always well-bred. His spirit recoiled from that gross familiarity ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... learning, and ingenuity in establishing a catena of patristic and orthodox authority for their principles, reaching back to the earliest times, and handed down in this country by a series of Anglo-Catholic divines. This unbroken tradition was conceived of as purely static, a 'mechanical unpacking,' as Father Tyrrell puts it, of the doctrine once delivered to the Apostles. The Church, according to their theory, was supernaturally guided by the Holy Ghost, and its decisions were consequently infallible, as long as the Church remained ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... Mechanical genius, which ought to be regarded as the first and greatest effort of human intellect, is only now beginning to be recognised as such. The statesman, warrior, poet, painter, orator, and man of letters, all have their niche in the temple ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... hints in reference to my profession. He said it was the genteelest profession in the world, and must on no account be confounded with the profession of a solicitor: being quite another sort of thing, infinitely more exclusive, less mechanical, and more profitable. We took things much more easily in the Commons than they could be taken anywhere else, he observed, and that set us, as a privileged class, apart. He said it was impossible to conceal the ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... aiding the memory is quite too mechanical to commend itself to any one accustomed to reflect or to take note of his own mental processes. Such an elaborate system crowds the mind with a lot of useless furniture, and hinders rather than helps a rational and straightforward habit of memorizing. It too much resembles ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... in Industry, by Robert B. Wolf, vice-president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, member of the Federated American ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... and efficient. Water is more intimately concerned with life than rock, air higher in the rank of service than water, electric and magnetic agencies more powerful than air; and light, the most delicate, is the supreme magician of all. Just think how much expenditure of mechanical strength is necessary to water a city in the hot summer months. What pumping and tugging and wearisome trudging of horses with the great sprinklers over the tedious pavement! But see by what beautiful and noiseless force Nature waters the world! The sun looks steadily on the ocean, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... mainly chemical and has not affected the original proportions of the rock to a marked extent. Its prevalence is due to the unstable composition of the original minerals of the rock, such as olivine, hypersthene, and pyroxene. Along Catoctin Mountain, however, both chemical and mechanical deformation have taken place, so that the original rock structure is completely merged into pronounced schistosity. This was materially assisted by the weak lath shapes of the feldspar and ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... heart of the servant leapt with a flash, and he felt the strength come over his body. But he turned in mechanical obedience, and set on at a heavy run downhill, looking almost like a bear, his trousers bagging over his military boots. And the officer watched this blind, plunging run ...
— The Prussian Officer • D. H. Lawrence
... moved on slowly, doing their work expeditiously, and apparently callously, but really only with that mechanical movement that saves emotion. Only once they were moved to an outbreak of indignation,—the discovery of the body of an officer whose pockets were turned inside out, but whose hand was still tightly grasped on his buttoned waistcoat, as if resisting the outrage that had been done while still ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... thickly bordered with willows and alders, that made an arbored and feasible path through the dense woods and undergrowth. He continued along it as if aimlessly; stopping from time to time to look at different objects in a dull mechanical fashion, as if rather to prolong his useless hours, than from any curious instinct, and to occasionally dip in the unfrequent pools of water the few crusts of bread he had taken from his pocket. Even this appeared to be suggested more by coincidence of material in the bread and water, ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... process of development actually going on, and observations like those of Lord Rosse and Arrest gave yet further confirmation to this view. Then came the great contribution of the nineteenth century to physics, aiding to explain important parts of the vast process by the mechanical theory of heat. ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... draws back again finger-like processes, thereby modifying its form. Finally, the young cell has feeling, and is more or less sensitive. It performs certain movements on the application of chemical and mechanical irritants." ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton
... their backs, they struck out with their fore-arms in a sort of mechanical manner. These with the long horny claws they kept playing in front of their bodies, striking alternately with them, and rapidly, as a dog will do when suddenly plunged into water. Guapo did not put his hands near them. He knew they would not bite, but he also ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... Queen night and day were mechanical—the lighting in the cabins did not vary much. Dane did not know how long he lay there forcing his mind to consider his stupid action, making himself face that in the Service there were no short cuts which endangered others—not unless those taking ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... in and leaned on my table. Tripp was something in the mechanical department—I think he had something to do with the pictures, for he smelled of photographers' supplies, and his hands were always stained and cut up with acids. He was about twenty-five and looked forty. Half of his face was covered with short, ...
— Options • O. Henry
... hours which would seem to demand many days even from the most rapid reader. I have heard of Southey, who would read a book through as he stood in a bookseller's shop; that is, his eye would glance down the page, and by a process partly mechanical, partly intellectual, formed by long habit, he would extract in his synoptical passage all that he required to know. (Macaulay was, and George Lewis is, just as wonderful in this respect.) Some of the books ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... abound, is more loudly called for in this than it has been in any former period of British history. We are no longer in the age of enthusiasm. The days of chivalry have gone by—and gone by, it is feared, never to return. We are in the age of commerce and the mechanical arts. Material appliances, creature comforts,—stimulants to the senses—now form the great moving power of society. Gain is every where sought after with the utmost avidity; but it is sought not for any lofty object, but on ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... our early years, whatever our surroundings may have been, seem to us sweet and fair because life itself is then a clear-flowing fountain, they cannot help blending the memory of that innocent and happy time with thoughts of base and mechanical objects, or, it may be, of ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... capitalism in this respect, the Taylor System—as well as all progressive measures of capitalism—combine the refined cruelty of bourgeois exploitation and a number of most valuable scientific attainments in the analysis of mechanical motions during work, in dismissing superfluous and useless motions, in determining the most correct methods of the work, the best systems of accounting and control, etc. The Soviet Republic must adopt valuable and scientific and technical advance ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... say what it will do," states The Daily Mail. Waiting for The Daily Mail to say it first must not be allowed to degenerate into a mere mechanical habit. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 12, 1919 • Various
... Mr. Bennet's manner is almost painfully thoughtful. His eye constantly seeks hers; and when he speaks to her, the mechanical smile which greets every body else is replaced by a kind of indescribable, touching appeal for forgiveness. It is conveyed in no particular thing that he says or does, but it pervades his whole intercourse with her. As Gabriel and Ellen grow up toward maturity, Mrs. Bennet ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... Church, administered its business, and guarded its property, while the regular clergy illustrated the necessity of personal piety and self-denial. Monasticism at its best was a monitor standing beside the Church and constantly warning it against permitting the Christian life to sink into mere mechanical and passive acceptance of its ceremonies as all-sufficient for salvation. It supplied the element of personal responsibility and spiritual ambition upon which Protestantism has laid so ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... can not produce parallels to Oxford and Cambridge in opulence, buildings, libraries, professorships, scholarships, and all the external dignity and mechanical apparatus of learning. If there is an inferiority, it is in the persons, not in the places or their constitution. And here I can not help confessing that a desire to please the great, and bring them to the universities, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... town a clever lad, with a geni of a mechanical turn, who made punch-bowls of leather, and legs for cripples of the same commodity, that were lighter and easier to wear than either legs of cork or timber. His name was Geordie Sooplejoint, a modest, douce, and well-behaved young man—caring ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... was such a shock that I had no strength to ask her any of the questions I had premeditated. Besides, my maid was in the room, and the fear of exposing myself operated, I think, almost as strongly as emotion. I set about choosing some pieces of lace in a mechanical way, and told my maid to go and fetch my purse. No sooner had she left the room than the lace-seller fell at my feet and ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... repeated Herbert, like a rather blase child confronted with a new mechanical toy; 'did I really say that? well, honestly, it wasn't bad; it's what one would expect on that hypothesis. You see, we are only different, as it were, in our differences. Once the foot's over the threshold, it's nine ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... the Cascades, where, after a trial by a military commission, nine of them were sentenced to death and duly hanged. I did not see them executed, but was afterward informed that, in the absence of the usual mechanical apparatus used on such occasions, a tree with a convenient limb under which two empty barrels were placed, one on top of the other, furnished a rude but certain substitute. In executing the sentence each Indian in ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 1 • Philip H. Sheridan
... watch of the last century. It was so tiny, so pretty with its enamel and gold chasing. And it kept time as on the day when a woman first bought it, enraptured at owning this dainty trinket. It had not ceased to vibrate, to live its mechanical life, and it had kept up its regular tick-tock since the last century. Who had first worn it on her bosom amid the warmth of her clothing, the heart of the watch beating beside the heart of the woman? What ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... having the subject and predicate transposed without any further change in the proposition. The forms also of Reduction (a term which will be explained later on) would be simplified; and generally the introduction of the quantified predicate into logic might be attended with certain mechanical advantages. The object of the logician, however, is not to invent an ingenious system, but to arrive at a true analysis of thought. Now, if it be admitted that in the ordinary form of proposition the ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... to say which is the harder task, to compare the total wealth of the world at two given periods, or to compare the value of money at different times. Even the mechanical difficulties in the comparison of prices are enormous. When we read that wheat at Wittenberg sold at one gulden the scheffel, it is necessary to determine in the first place how much a gulden and how much a scheffel represented in terms of dollars and bushels. When we discover that there ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... who engaged to make an elegant costume in the time given her. The first measurements were taken, and we drove back to Ninth Street with a lasting memory in my mind of the cold and rigid form of Miss Oliver standing up in Madame's triangular parlor, submitting to the mechanical touches of the modiste with an outward composure, but with a brooding horror in her eyes that bespoke ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... distinct species. The epic, whether "literary" or "authentic," is a single form of art; but it is a form capable of adapting itself to the altering requirements of prevalent consciousness. In addition, however, to differences in general conception, there are certain mechanical differences which should be just noticed. The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read. It is more difficult to keep the attention of hearers than of readers. This in ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... MAKERS.—A lady keeping a first-class school requiring a good piano, is desirous of receiving a daughter of the above in exchange for the same." "The Moor, seizing a bolster boiling over with rage and jealousy, smothers her." "The Dying Zouave the most wonderful mechanical representation ever seen of the last breath of life being shot in the breast and life's blood leaving the wound." "Mr. T—— presents his compliments to Mr. H——, and I have got a hat that is not his, and, if he have a hat that is not yours, no ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... paradox that Shakspere would have done better to write in prose. In three of these early essays—on the Signs of the Times, 1829; on History, 1830; and on Characteristics, 1831—are to be found the germs of all his later writings. The first of these was an arraignment of the mechanical spirit of the age. In every province of thought he discovered too great a reliance upon systems, institutions, machinery, instead of upon men. Thus, in religion, we have Bible Societies, "machines for converting the heathen." "In defect of Raphaels and Angelos and Mozarts, we have ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... wind is getting up. We call it Labour versus Capitalism. We say it is a mere material struggle, a money-grabbing affair. But this is only one aspect of it. In so far as men are merely mechanical, the struggle is one which, though it may bring disaster and death to millions, is no more than accident, an accidental collision of forces. But in so far as men are men, the situation is tragic. It is not really the bone we are fighting for. We are fighting to have somebody's head off. The conflict ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... he was occupied; then, as other men read by syllables or by words, he had the faculty, acquired by use, of reading by whole sentences, of swallowing, as it were, whole paragraphs at once, and thus he infinitely abbreviated the mere mechanical part of study; that as an educated man would read any number of pages much more quickly than an uneducated man, so much more quickly would Macaulay read than any ordinary man. Therefore it is first and foremost the power of abstraction, ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... many things to criticize in Gibbon's masterpiece,—the author's love of mere pageants; his materialism; his inability to understand religious movements, or even religious motives; his lifeless figures, which move as if by mechanical springs,—but one who reads the Decline and Fall may be too much impressed by the evidences of scholarship, of vast labor, of genius even, to linger over faults. It is a "monumental" work, most interesting to those ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... should resemble it! The peculiarity in his case was the unusual defect of amalgamation and subordination: the highest lay side by side with the lowest; not morally combined with it and spiritually transfiguring it; but tumbling in half-mechanical juxtaposition with it, and from time to time, as the mad alternation chanced, irradiating ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... that hitherto, in considering the deformation of solids under strain, two distinct periods, relative to their mechanical properties, have alone been recognized. These periods are of course the elastic limit and the breaking point. In the course of M. Tresca's own experiments, however, he has found it necessary to consider, at the end of the period of alteration ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... thanking him for the offered position, but declining it. "What you say about my work," he wrote, "encourages me to ask a favor. I wish to be transferred from one mechanical department to another until I have made the round. Then, perhaps, I may venture to ask you to renew ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... such mechanical descriptive skill would hardly give more satisfaction to the reader than the skill of the photographer does to the anxious mother desirous to possess an absolute duplicate of her beloved child. The likeness is indeed true, but it is a dull, dead, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... between the Church and the world are dim. Never did greater problems confront a council of the Church. An Apostolic Church has a graver work than discussion about its name or the amending of its canons and rubrics. I fear that some of this unbelief is a revolt from a caricature of God. These mechanical ideas about the universe are the outcome of a mechanical theology which has lost sight of the Fatherhood of God. There is much honest unbelief. In these yearnings of humanity, in its clubs, brotherhoods, ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... its old mechanical bent, the trend of long habit, as she looked out from that low window. How often she had stood there and thought "If only we might have had a child!" And now, by sheer force of habit, she thought it yet again. And then a slow rapture took possession of her whole being, mounted, mounted till she ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... the ruins of these temples, blocks of hewn stone thirty-six feet long, nine feet wide, and six feet in thickness. Their great highways, spanning the gulfs, clinging to the precipitous cliffs and climbing the mountains, were wonderful works of mechanical skill. ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... got ready with the same fury of mechanical energy. During its preparation Iley stole to the door and looked in. The only women on the place, held outside the councils of the men, she longed to make some unformulated appeal to Judith, to have at least such help and comfort as might come ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... photographing birds, and I've just got a cinema camera. There's a sparrow-hawk's nest in the next tree, and I want to take pictures of it; only I knew the clicking of the cinema business would scare them away probably for hours, so I made a little mechanical contrivance that would go on clicking and let them get used to the noise, so that they'd take no notice when I really went to work. You can look at it if ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... The clergy will worry about souls, too, but we won't. They have a lot of stuff we haven't. If they're people, they know a sublime hell of a lot more than we do; and calling it psionics or practical magic is merely labeling it, not answering any questions. If they're machines, they operate on mechanical principles utterly foreign to either our science or our technology. In either case, is the correct word 'unknown' or 'unknowable'? Will any human gunner ever be able to fire an Oman projector? There are a hundred other and much tougher questions, half of which have been scaring ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... the sake of simplicity, only the essential elements of boiler and furnace testing are treated in this bulletin. For rules covering the refinements for an exhaustive test, the reader is referred to the boiler test code of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Copies of this code can be obtained from the secretary, 29 West Thirty-ninth Street, ...
— Engineering Bulletin No 1: Boiler and Furnace Testing • Rufus T. Strohm
... Pelham Bay, N.Y. Here the men have many months' instruction. As their training approaches completion they are sent where needed, and thus the work of creating an immense army of trained seamen qualified for any sort of a task proceeds with mechanical precision. ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... have an additional interest to many readers as the last monument of her highly-gifted mind. At her earnest request, my name appears with hers on the title-page, but the assistance rendered by me has been, in fact, little more than mechanical. The preface, and the greater part of the notes, are her composition:—the selection and arrangement have been determined almost exclusively by her critical judgment, or from records in her possession. A few slight corrections and unimportant additions ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... inheritance of mankind, and whose names go down through long generations with a pleasant memory. To a certain extent, he was to the great primeval industry of the world, what Arkwright, Watts, Stephenson, Fulton and Morse were each to the mechanical and scientific activities of the age. He did as much, perhaps, as any man that ever preceded him, to honor that industry, and lift it up to the level of the first occupations of modern times, which had claimed higher qualities of intelligence, genius and enterprize. ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... between the different tribes of the vegetable world, and many other things of which older people are often ignorant. But acquainted as Michael was with the inhabitants of the garden, they did not afford him his most vivid enjoyment. Mechanical pursuits were his passion. ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... No one had the courage to say so, and the pumping went on—though it was evident, from the slowness of the motion and the want of energy exhibited, that the men who were working the handle were exerting themselves, only with a sort of mechanical effort that would soon yield to despondency ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... is to be observed, as animals become more highly organized, that nerves have the power of discriminating between stimuli, and "it is this power of discriminating between stimuli," as Romanes puts it, "irrespective of their relative mechanical intensities, that constitutes the physiological aspect of choice" (volition). It is also through the faculty of discrimination that the special senses, upon which the entire psychical structure ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... of western settlement a community was founded in Illinois. It was an agricultural community, but in the midst of it a village grew, which in the course of time became a small city. One of the first settlers was a young farmer with a mechanical turn of mind. He began experimenting to improve the methods of planting grain. The result was the invention of a corn planter, the manufacture of which became one of the chief industries of the growing city, employing hundreds of men and sending machines to all parts of the world. Another ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... manta blanket. manteca butter. mantenedor m. maintainer. mantilla a feminine wrap for head and shoulders. Manuel Immanuel. manuscrito manuscript. manana to-morrow, morrow, morning; pasado —— day after to-morrow. maquinal mechanical. mar m. & f. sea. maravilla marvel, wonder. maravillar vr. to wonder, be amazed marcha march. marchar to march; vr. to go away. marchitar to wither. marchito faded. Maria Mary. marido husband. marinero sailor. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... come to America without the permission of the King, under penalty of loss of property and even of loss of life. Spaniards, only, could trade, keep stores or sell goods in the streets. The Indians and mestizos could engage only in mechanical trades. ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... apartments, except this, were warmed in winter by immense stoves, which greatly injured the effect of the interior architecture. Between the study and the Emperor's room was a very curious machine, called the flying chariot, a kind of mechanical contrivance, which had been made for the Empress Maria Theresa, and was used in conveying her from one story to the other, so that she might not be obliged to ascend and descend staircases like the rest of the world. This machine ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... tariff and internal revenue the sums derived from the sound national inheritance tax I have mentioned above it is evident we would have supplied for the period of change from one tax system to another an 'adequate governor' to use a mechanical illustration, to prevent undue oscillation of ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... water, in itself, and apart from its mechanical relations to other matter, is really a very complex and a very wonderful thing; not at all likely to be "self-caused." Water is made up, we know, of oxygen and hydrogen—two elementary colourless, formless gases. Now we ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... The car, without a driver, its engines whirring madly, dashed into a helpless corner fruit stand, scattering oranges, bananas, apples and desolation in its wake, as it vainly endeavored to climb to the second story with super-mechanical intelligence! Shirley, stunned and bruised, fell to the pavement where he lay until an excited ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... with fresh energy, rapidly pushed on the work. Now was proved the sound judgment of the commander when manning the corvette at Toulon, in selecting sailors who were also skilled in some mechanical employment. Blacksmiths, sail-makers, rope-makers, sawyers, all worked with zeal at the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... neither talkative nor taciturn. At one moment his face seemed to radiate hope; the next, he appeared to fall under a shadow of solicitude. When his hostess talked of her son, he plainly gave no heed; his replies were mechanical. When she asked him for an account of what he had been doing down in the country, he answered with broken scraps of uninteresting information. Thus passed the quarter of an hour before luncheon, and part of luncheon itself; but at length Dyce recovered his ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... to drive machines so that machines could serve them. Minds were cramped and emotions were starved, but hands must go on guiding levers and keeping machines in operation. Lives were reduced to such a mechanical routine that men wondered how long human minds and human bodies could stand the restraint. There is a good deal in the writings of the times to show that life was becoming almost unbearable for three-fourths ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... a penman with uncommon genius for scroll-work; a group of water-lilies in wax, floating on a mirror-lake and protected by a glass globe; a full-rigged schooner, built cunningly inside a bottle by a matricide serving a life-sentence in the penitentiary at San Quinten; and a mechanical canarybird in a gilded cage, acquired at the Philadelphia Centennial,—a bird that had carolled its death—lay in the early winter of 1877 when it was wound up too hard and its little insides snapped. In the parlour a few ornamental books were grouped with rare precision on ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... A leap backwards of half this period is what one seems to make at Rhodes, a perfectly preserved city and fortress of the middle ages. Here has been none of the Vandalism of Vauban, Cohorn, and those mechanical-pated fellows, who, with their Dutch dyke-looking parapets, made such havoc of donjons and picturesque turrets in Europe. Here is every variety of mediaeval battlement; so perfect is the illusion, that one wonders the waiter's horn should be mute, and the ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... to the particular navigation of these islands, or the uncommon simplicity and ingenuity of its fabric and contrivance, or the extraordinary velocity with which it moves, we shall find it worthy of our admiration, and meriting a place amongst the mechanical productions of the most civilized nations, where arts and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... could find anywhere out of the islands, or often there, the parallel of Fatty, a mountain of a girl, who must have weighed near as many stones as she counted summers, could have given a good account of a life- guardsman, had the face of a baby, and applied her vast mechanical forces almost exclusively to play. But they were all three of the same merry spirit. Our washing was conducted in a game of romps; and they fled and pursued, and splashed, and pelted, and rolled each other in the sand, and kept up a continuous noise of cries and laughter like holiday children. ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by a languid Belgian barrister, tired of the invidious role of mechanical pleading for the lives of prisoners, especially where, as in this case, they were foredoomed, and eloquence was waste of breath, and even got you disliked by the impatient ogres, thirsty for the blood of an English man or woman.... "Du reste," he said to a colleague, "agissait-il ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... evil resulting simply from the direction in which this force is made to flow. It is a universal law that if we reverse the action of a cause we at the same time reverse the effect. With the same apparatus we can commence by mechanical motion which will generate electricity, or we can commence with electricity which will generate mechanical motion; or to take a simple arithmetical instance: if 10/2 5, then 10/5 2; and therefore if we once recognize the power of thought to produce any results at all, we ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... necessary equipment and data they would need to deal with the problems they would face. Like all patrol ships, the Lancet was equipped with automatic launching, navigation and drive mechanisms; no crew other than the three doctors was required, and in the event of mechanical failures, maintenance ships were on ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... exchequer. He also bought the freedom of superior poets and artists [761], and gave a noble gratuity to the restorer of the Coan of Venus [762], and to another artist who repaired the Colossus [763]. Some one offering to convey some immense columns into the Capitol at a small expense by a mechanical contrivance, he rewarded him very handsomely for his invention, but would not accept his service, saying, "Suffer me to find maintenance ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... not in the slightest doubt as to Charlotte's own attitude towards him. He understood to the full the signification of the word grocer for her. He was, to her mind, hardly a man at all, rather a mechanical dispenser of butter and eggs for the needs of a superior race. But he understood also the childish innocence and involuntariness of this view of hers. He recognized even the ludicrousness of the situation which perverted tragedy ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... vocabulary; and it really seems difficult to assign any satisfactory reason for a man refusing to live upon the exercise of the finer gifts of his intellect, and throwing himself for his bread upon the daily performance of mere mechanical drudgery. ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... tradesmen; young men with tennis-bats in their hands, taking prodigiously long strides, eager to get a game of play before dusk; girls who went by twos and threes, chattering, laughing, making funny short quick steps of it, like as if on the dance to reach sweethearts and green lanes. A man selling a mechanical toy—sort of a tin frog that jumped so soon as you put ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... most hardened of "best-sellers" catering for semi-detached suburbia would venture nowadays to handle such a theme. Yet Hamsun dares, and so insistently unlike all else is the impress of his personality that the mechanical structure of the story is forgotten. It is interspersed with irrelevant fancies, visions and imaginings, a chain of tied notes heard as an undertone through the action on the surface. The effect is that of something straining towards an impossible realization; ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... great store of teacher's knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically, sing at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments mechanically, even play the great church organ mechanically. From his early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage. The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always ready to meet the demands of retail dealers history here, geography there, astronomy to the right, political economy to the left—natural history, the physical sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... into the over-ornate bedroom in which Nita Leigh Selim had been murdered—shot through the back as she sat at her dressing-table powdering her face. If her murder had been accomplished by mechanical means, how had it been done? There was ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... may be to measure or proportion. Yet our author uses his negatives with such licentiousness, that it is hardly safe to make any alteration.—Scant may mean to adapt, to fit, to proportion; which sense seems still to be retained in the mechanical term scantling. (see 1765, ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... The entire mechanical staff of the Issaquena County Weather Herald, consisting of Fred Lang, publisher and editor-in-chief, aged fifteen, and a general assistant with the blackest face and the whitest teeth in the county, aged seventy, named Dan'l, turned at ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... delightful picture in his best manner, but not much labored; and, like several other pictures in this church, it seems to me to have been executed at some period of the painter's life when he was either in ill health, or else had got into a mechanical way of painting, from having made too little reference to nature for a long time. There is something stiff and forced in the white draperies on both sides, and a general character about the whole which I can feel better than I can describe; but which, if I had been the painter's ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... almost every young woman has seen many steamboats, yet it may be doubtful whether one understands the mechanical principle by which they are propelled and directed. They have seen the flowers and vegetation, birds and beasts, of our region of country, and yet they doubtless are about as ignorant of them as of the products of the torrid zone. They live under our form of ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... the argument for design from adaptations in Nature is relevant, not whether it is independent or sure. It is conceded that the argument is analogical, and the parallel incomplete. But the gist is in the points that are parallel or similar. Pulleys, valves, and suchlike elaborate mechanical adaptations, cannot differ greatly in meaning, ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... Petrarch's utterance I find Laura, a pure spiritual shape in mind and body and soul; but in her portrait I see only Laura clogged and choked and bound about with the trammels of early art and the weight of crude, untruthful detail. Thus, I believe that art at its best is but a dull, material, mechanical means for the translation or reproduction of thought and Nature, and that for the swift, living, electric flame of truth we must refer in all ages and climes to speech pure and simple—the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... took you at your word. And I think I've landed you one. Radbourne & Company want a good man to do mechanical drawing. They'll pay a hundred and fifty to the right man at the start, and they'll raise that later if you turn out well. Do you care ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... brought up in that science to which they are best fitted. While I was at the seminary of Keba, the bishop had four sons there, preparing for a military course; four others, whose father was a counsellor, were learning mechanical arts, and two maidens were studying navigation. The rank and sex of the scholars are entirely overlooked, in their regard ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... first evening at the Loyal Legion, called him up and asked to see him; and he came to Montague's room that evening, and after chatting awhile about old times, proceeded to unfold a business proposition. It seemed that the Major had a grandson, a young mechanical engineer, who had been labouring for a couple of years at a very important invention, a device for loading coal upon steamships and weighing it automatically in the process. It was a very complicated problem, needless ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... true. Dream pictures these are of snow and moonlight, marsh and forest, the real Germany lying everywhere outside the cities for those who have eyes to see. Even the toy department in an ordinary shop abounds in treasures that never seem to reach England: queer cheap toys made of wood, and not mechanical. It must be a dull child who is content with a mechanical toy, and it is consoling to observe that most children break the mechanism as quickly as possible and then play sensibly with the remains. Many of the toys known to generations ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... and then at Prince Saracinesca, after which he carefully resettled the glasses upon his long nose and proceeded with his task until he had reached the end of another set of clauses, when he repeated the former operation with mechanical regularity, never failing to give San Giacinto the precedence of ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... were considered to have a concrete force, so that the mere repetition of words produced an effect analogous to their sense. The purely mechanical repetition of prayers was held to be a virtuous act, and this idea was carried to the most absurd length in the Buddhist's praying-wheel, where merit was acquired by causing the wheel with prayers ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... the fine arts sets his hand to the same block, he has no scruples either in doing violence to it, he only avoids showing this violence. He does not respect the matter in which he works, any more than the mechanical artist; but he seeks by an apparent consideration for it to deceive the eye which takes this matter under its protection. The political and educating artist follows a very different course, while making man at once his material and his end. In this case the aim or end meets in the material, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... in a state. Should men and women be permitted to retire from the struggles and duties of active life in the world? Is the monastery, with its steady and depressing routine, its religious observances, often mechanical, and its quiet life, more or less degrading than the wearing toil of the world without, and the coarse pleasures of the club or the tavern? Is it better that a woman, whom choice or necessity has deprived of every ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... meeting-house and now in a paved square of the metropolis. How often must his heart have been gladdened by the delight of children as they viewed these animated figures, or his pride indulged by haranguing learnedly to grown men on the mechanical powers which produced such wonderful effects, or his gallantry brought into play—for this is an attribute which such grave men do not lack—by the visits of pretty maidens! And then with how fresh a feeling must he return at intervals to his own peculiar ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... where, under the light of the hanging lamps, the table shone with napery and crystal; followed him as the criminal goes with the hangman, or the sheep with the butcher; took the sherry mechanically, drank it, and spoke mechanical words of praise. The object of his terror had become suddenly inverted; till then he had seen Attwater trussed and gagged, a helpless victim, and had longed to run in and save him; he saw him now tower up mysterious and menacing, the angel of the Lord's wrath, armed with knowledge ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... of the workshops of Wolverton without the aid of diagrams and woodcuts would be a very unsatisfactory task. It is enough to say that they should be visited not only by those who are specially interested in machinery, but by all who would know what mechanical genius, stimulated as it has been to the utmost during the last half century, by the execution of profitable inventions, has ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... that his experience has a parallel in the picture here presented. Many men have at various times attempted reform, but the difficulty heretofore encountered has been that the mechanical application was in the hands, not of the owners and reasoners, but in those of a class of men who are, for the most part, ignorant, prejudiced, and, consequently, apt to oppose any innovation upon the old abuses ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... to dispute the conclusions logically involved in the Binomial Theorem; or in the Parallelogram of forces; or in correlative mechanical equivalents; or in many of the known laws ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... man, with a pale, shaven, ascetic face, dark hair, and astonishingly quick glittering black eyes. He stood just within the office door, to which he must have come without a sound, looking at me with a mechanical smile of inquiry, while his eyes searched me with ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... your brain through so much solid wood; but in a blind helpless fashion they tottered on, and, bending down, each caught one of the man's ankles, and dragged him back by their weight more than by any mechanical action of their own, each movement being a kind of fall forward and the natural recovery. The result was that step by step Wriggs was dragged from where the vapour was inhaled till Drew was reached, and they sank upon the bare burnt earth ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... stretch, as if about to break; a mist passes over his eyes: his head becomes dizzy, the cord escapes his grasp. But, by a mechanical movement, he has seized one of the highest projections of the tunnel, he holds it, ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... was rapid, and the statues of the Ramesside period are of little or no artistic value. The form of these figures is poor, the technique crude, and the expression of the faces mean and commonplace. They betray the hand of a mechanical workman who, while still in the possession of the instruments of his trade, can infuse no new life into the traditions of the schools, nor break ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... The Frontiersman was cutting through the water out into the open. Sconda was at the wheel, with Glen by his side, while Taku, an Indian with special mechanical gifts, looked after ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... Myra with that mechanical noting of her progress, his eyes, which were very keen, caught some movement in a fringe of willows that lined the opposite shore of the river some three hundred yards below. He looked more sharply. He had developed a hunter's faculty for interpreting movement in the forest, and ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... usual dark fusty room reeking with foul odours, but in a bright, cheerful little apartment with comfortable furniture and a table set with a white cloth and spotless china by a window overlooking the river. There was a mechanical organ, too, which enlivened us with "La Marseillaise" and "Loin du Pays" as a pretty waiting-maid in Russian costume served us with some excellent cutlets and an omelette, which were washed down with a bottle of Crimean wine. These culinary details may appear ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... be struck, the pains set against the satisfactions that life offers. When we judge that the balance is on the wrong side, we are merciful,—put the creature out of its misery, as we say. But no human being is an animal in that sense. And no human being can cast his balance of good and evil in that mechanical way—nor any ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... the expectations of my curiosity, I turned over the volume of philosophy, well thumbed and hard used as a priest's breviary, and I inhaled long draughts of tobacco, debating whether I should read, or meditate, or dream. Deciding in favour of the more mechanical form of intellectuality, I fixed on a page that looked inviting, and followed the lines, from left to right, lazily at first, then with increased interest, and finally in that absorbed effort of continued comprehension which constitutes real study. ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... in a low voice. "Believe me, I have carefully studied conspiracies and assemblages; there are certain purely mechanical means which it is necessary to adopt. Follow my advice here; I know a good deal of this sort of thing. They want something more. Give them a little contradiction; that always succeeds in France. You will quite make them alive again. Seem not to wish to retain them against ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... rail; the foot of the pedestrian, solid earth; the wing of the bird rests upon the relatively stable air to support his body, and upon his body to gain power over the air. Nor is it alone of operations mechanical that the law holds good: it is universal; and its application to pure mental action may be shown without difficulty. A single act of the mind is represented by the formation of a simple sentence. The process ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... consciously and unconsciously aiding in capture; fire in the form of torches, beacons, burning out and smoking out; poisons and asphyxiators; the accessories to hunting, including such changes in food, dress, shelter, travelling, packing, mechanical tools and intellectual apparatus as demanded by these arts. Finally, in this connexion, the first steps in domestication, beginning with the improvement of natural corrals or spawning ground, and hunting with trained dogs and animals. Zootechnic products ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... get into habits—sometimes apart, sometimes in conjunction. Nowadays we seat the body to work the intellect, even in its lower form of mechanical labor: it is your clod that toddles about laboring. The Peripatetics did not endure: their method was not suited to man's microcosm. Bodily movements fritter mental attention. We sit at the feet of Gamaliel, or, as some call him, Tyndal; and we sit to Bacon and Adam Smith. But, when we are standing ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... human mind can be illustrated only by that which is vital, not by anything mechanical. Mind reacts upon whatever is given to it according to the divine laws of its own organism. The human mind, like the plant, must exhibit vitality in abundance before it finds a higher and more complex manifestation. The unskilled teacher, instead of inviting out ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... but the clouds were not thick, and from time to time we had a glimpse of the sun through them. The going on that day was rather different from what it had been; sometimes the ski went over it well, but at others it was pretty bad. We advanced that day in the same mechanical way as before; not much was said, but eyes were used all the more. Hanssen's neck grew twice as long as before in his endeavour to see a few inches farther. I had asked him before we started to spy out ahead for all he was worth, and he did so with a vengeance. ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... which laboratories are provided for soil physics, chemistry, entomology, and botany. In the Department of Applied Science courses are given in civil engineering, mining engineering, and in electrical and mechanical engineering. ...
— Our Government: Local, State, and National: Idaho Edition • J.A. James
... no animal. Mere physical satisfaction does not suffice for the full gratification of his energetic and vehement instinct. He requires also spiritual affinity and oneness with the being that he couples with. Is that not the case, then the blending of the sexes is a purely mechanical act: such a marriage is immoral. It does not answer the higher human demands. Only in the mutual attachment of two beings of opposite sexes can be conceived the spiritual ennobling of relations that rest upon purely physical laws. Civilized man demands that the mutual attraction continue ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... attend him, and to fall on enterprises he became associated with. Whatever were the reasons, either inseparable from him, or special in each case, it's certain that his affairs did not thrive, with the exception of those in which he played the merely mechanical part of a drudge under the orders, and for the profit, of Mr. Bagley. As for bad luck, the name was, in effect, equivalent to the thing itself, for it cut him out of many opportunities in the theatrical market, with people not above ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... published, I have caused trials to be made, and have found, as a matter of fact, that the photographic process of which I there spoke enables us to obtain with mechanical precision a generalised picture; one that represents no man in particular, but portrays an imaginary figure possessing the average features of any given group of men. These ideal faces have a surprising ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... verses, which lasted to the end. The impulse to write personal prose, which was quickened in Lamb by the London Magazine in 1820, seems to have taken the place of his old ambition to be a poet. In his later and more mechanical period there were, however, occasional inspirations, as when he wrote the sonnet on "Work," in 1819; on "Leisure," in 1821; the lines in his own Album, in 1827, and, pre-eminently, the poem "On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born," ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... world is more ghastly than these Italian roads, new, mechanical, belonging to a machine life. The old roads are wonderful, skilfully aiming their way. But these new great roads are desolating, more desolating than all ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... same hour, are drilled at the siege or seacoast battery. The work here is sometimes hard and sometimes not. When firing, the drill is pleasant and interesting, but when we have mechanical manoeuvres all this pleasantness vanishes. Then we have hard work. Dismounting and mounting is not a ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... him in brief Mr. Simon's threats and offers, and the whole incident of the bravo, with the subsequent scene at Prestongrange's. Of my first talk, according to promise, I said nothing, nor indeed was it necessary. All the time I was talking Stewart nodded his head like a mechanical figure; and no sooner had my voice ceased than he opened his mouth and gave me his opinion in two words, dwelling strong ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would have found difficulty in moving that tub, but by some mechanical contrivance it had turned with the ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... such serial homology as is exemplified by the backbone of man, there are also several objections to Mr. Spencer's mechanical explanation. ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... of Turwin (for the king stoode not long thrumming of buttons there) it happened me fall out (I would it had fallen out otherwise for his sake) with an vgly mechanical Captaine. You must thinke in an armie, where tronchios are in their state house, it is a flat stab once to name a Captaine without cappe in hand. Well, suppose hee was a Captaine, & had nere a good cap of his owne, but I was faine to lend him one of my Lords cast veluet caps, and a weatherbeaten ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... could be better in this respect than The Snow-Image (a little masterpiece), or The Great Carbuncle, or Doctor Heidegger's Experiment, or Rappacini's Daughter. But in such things as The Birth-Mark and The Bosom-Serpent, we are struck with something stiff and mechanical, slightly incongruous, as if the kernel had not assimilated its envelope. But these are matters of light impression, and there would be a want of tact in pretending to discriminate too closely among things which all, ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... directed, premising that throughout a great portion of the western country, except in large towns, almost every mechanic is almost necessarily a farmer; the population being in but few places sufficiently dense to support that designation of mechanical employments which is common in the eastern ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... of new mechanical appliances, have come to recognize the value of demonstration, or instruction, in the use of articles as an aid to purchase. The advocate of better dwellings must take a leaf from the commercial book and show how. It is in this that philanthropy has been weak in the past. It ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... in such thoughts; the operations of Nature are always admirable. But when the relics of humanity are deliberately appropriated to such mechanical or scientific purposes as we shall relate, before they have entirely lost their original (we should say latest) form, then most men would look upon the act as in some sort a desecration. With what holy horror would the ancient Egyptians ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... out of the body, before it has given up as much nourishment, as it is capable; as the liquid part of the secretion of urine, sweat, saliva, and of all other secretions, which are poured into receptacles. Hence they have been said to brace the body, and been called tonics, which are mechanical terms not applicable to the living bodies of animals; as explained ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... criticism of knowledge, father of theoretical liberalism, god-father at least of the American political system, of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedia, at home he was the ancestor of that whole school of polite moderate opinion which can unite liberal Christianity with mechanical science and with psychological idealism. He was invincibly rooted in a prudential morality, in a rationalised Protestantism, in respect for liberty and law: above all he was deeply convinced, as he ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... observed facts. They fail to see that the more blind, the more accidental, so to speak, the process of differentiation may be; the more it is shown that the struggle for existence drives the wheels of progress along the {37} lines of least resistance by the most commonplace of mechanical necessities, in the same proportion must a law be posited behind all this process, a reason in nature which gathers up the beginning and the ending. The protoplasmic cell which the imagination of evolutionists places at the beginning of time ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... in this. Not that this objection could always be justified, yet there were sufficient grounds for it. The great value of Rolf's mode of expressing himself was shown in the way in which he added letter to letter in accordance with their sounds (and I doubt whether any mechanical aids or accessories would have been likely to achieve the same results), thus giving proof that he was capable of independent expression. Their system proved incidentally to have what I might call a "side value," for Lola's mode of expression, due to my own method of teaching led to quite different ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... on my Herr's behalf, learned his directions for the road, and set off after a draught of goat's milk, munching my last slab of chocolate. I was still strung up to a mechanical activity, and I ran every inch of the three miles to the Staubthal without consciousness of fatigue. I was twenty minutes too soon for the train, and, as I sat on a bench on the platform, my energy suddenly ebbed away. That ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... of a removal from Yonkers, where they had always lived, was not so new to the elders. Stephen was in New York nearly all the week now. Joseph was studying for a doctor. John was not in love with farming and had a great taste for mechanical pursuits. Margaret, a tall, fair girl of seventeen, was begging to be sent away to school another year, and learn some of the higher branches people were talking about. Joe thought she should. Her father ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... is become civil and courteous now; he touches his cap to you 'like a soldier;' he can afford now to be respectful to others, because he respects himself, and expects you to respect him. You talk to him, and find that the change is not merely outward, but inward; not owing to mere mechanical drill but to something which has been going on in his heart; and ten to one, the first thing that he begins to talk to you about, with honest pride, is his regiment. His regiment. Yes, there is the secret which has ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... standing the expenses, and Louis was generous enough to propose that some means be secured to elevate Johnny to the top of the fence. No more intense brain work was expended on the Ferris wheel than these two boys gave to the proposed elevation. It took mechanical skill of the highest order, for the management had provided for these emergencies, and there was nothing in sight to help them. But necessity kindly became again the mother of invention. There was a small tool chest a short distance down the back fence waiting ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... comfortably, was of his own ordering. Two feet eight inches deep, two feet wide, and three feet long were the exact dimensions of the box, lined with baize. His resources with regard to food and water consisted of the following: One bladder of water and a few small biscuits. His mechanical implement to meet the death-struggle for fresh air, all told, was one large gimlet. Satisfied that it would be far better to peril his life for freedom in this way than to remain under the galling yoke of Slavery, he entered his box, which was safely nailed up and hooped with five hickory hoops, ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... had always admired. He went in great state and pretended that he was bound on a diplomatic mission, but it is thought that the real reason for the trip was his desire to see new forms and methods in the mechanical arts. He visited what is now modern Germany and went to Holland, where for a time he worked in one of the shipyards as a common carpenter, dressed in a workman's clothes. He was keenly interested in everything, and one ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... pin it down to with any real certainty," Kessler said. "No mechanical defects that we're sure of, no sabotage we can put our finger on, no murder or suicide schemes, nothing! We've put that plane back together so perfectly that it could almost fly again! We've got dossiers an ...
— The Last Straw • William J. Smith
... his trials, had never belonged to her. Where he had been sincere, erring only from impulsiveness, she had been double-minded and calculating; and, now that her delusion had been broken down, she had nothing to rest upon. Her whole religious life had been mechanical, deceiving herself more than even others, and all seemed now swept away, except the sense of hypocrisy, and of having cut herself off, for ever, from her innocent child. Her father saw that it ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... who made an airplane. Of course it was just a toy, but it had all the parts. He had gotten a pattern from a mechanical magazine, with explicit instructions; he scoured around and got the dozen or more materials necessary, then worked for days and some nights in the basement. Finally, the thing was completed. It had a twist-rubber propeller, and would actually fly a little—not much. But it was a thing ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... long lingered in the Scottish Highlands, that it was unlucky for a clansman to learn any handicraft engaged in by Lowlanders. If a Highland youth left his native mountains and engaged in mercantile or mechanical pursuits, his friends thought he turned effeminate. For warfare he became unsuited, either as a leader or follower. The prowess of his ancestors forsook him, he became incapable of handling the bow or spear skilfully, and, what was worse, he carried ill luck with himself and to his companions ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... admired Kalkbrenner's finished technique despite his platitudinous manner. Heine said—or rather quoted Koreff— that Kalkbrenner looked like a bonbon that had been in the mud. Niecks thinks Chopin might have learned of Kalkbrenner on the mechanical side. Chopin, in public, was modest about his attainments, looking upon himself as self-taught. "I cannot create a new school, because I do not even know the old," he said. It is this very absence of scholasticism ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... hot and exhausted. I have now been three months continuously in the water, which is certainly a long time. Much amused with a toy called ——'s Mechanical Rabbit. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... and kissed his forehead. Was the kiss rather mechanical? Eric lay with his eyes shut, trying to analyze the double change. Was a nervous break-down always like this? Barbara was stroking his head gently; she had kissed him compassionately, lovingly, but he had fancied a change in her, ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... astronomy are amongst the finest triumphs of mechanical skill in the world. In a great modern observatory the different instruments are to be counted by the score, but there are two which stand out pre-eminent as the fundamental instruments of modern astronomy. ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... unthinking public generally imagine; in fact more than is imagined by nine-tenths of the Daguerreotypists themselves. And we see as a natural result, that while the business numbers its thousands of votaries, but few rise to any degree of eminence. It is because they look upon their business as a mere mechanical operation, and having no aim or pride beyond the earning of their daily bread, they calculate what will be a fair per centage on the cost of their plate, case, and chemicals, leaving MIND, which is as much CAPITAL ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... secret of which she has studiously mastered. A nosegay, the last of the tributary shower, discharged from a distance, fell at her feet. She gave it unconsciously preference over the rest, and picked it up. A little paper was fixed in the centre. She opened it with a mechanical hand, thinking there might be patriotic orders enclosed for her. It was a cheque for one thousand guineas, drawn upon an English banker by the hand of Antonio-Pericles Agriolopoulos; freshly drawn; the ink was only half dried, showing signs of the dictates of a furious ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... being, not one living being among these grotesque and sinister creatures, with whom she was shut up; sometimes she had hallucinations, she imagined herself buried at the bottom of a tomb, in company with mechanical corpses, who, when the strings were pulled, moved their heads, and agitated their legs and arms. The thick atmosphere of the dining-room stifled her; the shivering silence, the yellow gleams of the lamp penetrated her with vague terror, ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... music is a human creation, and as far as the substances of the world are concerned, a mere accident. As well can it be said that man creates the colors of the prism, and that they are not in the properties of the light, because he shapes the prism by his own mechanical art. Or if still we doubt; if it seems incredible that the soul of music is in the heart of all created being; then the laws of harmony themselves shall answer, one string vibrating to another, when it is not struck itself, and uttering ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... came a period of steady desk work, every morning, of re-writing, compression, more compression, and the more or less mechanical work of technical revision, what a member of my family calls "cutting out the 'whiches'". The first thing to do each morning was to read a part of it over aloud, sentence by sentence, to try to catch clumsy, ungraceful phrases, overweights ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... the subject of a pewter half-crown which was tendered him as a portion of his 'change,' walked back to the George and Vulture, where he was pretty busily employed until bed-time in reducing clothes and linen into the smallest possible compass, and exerting his mechanical genius in constructing a variety of ingenious devices for keeping the lids on boxes which had ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... their children to school as soon as they are old enough, where their morals will be an object of attention, as well as their improvement in school learning; and when they arrive at a suitable age, let it be your especial care to have them instructed in some mechanical art suited to their capacities, or in agricultural pursuits; by which they may afterwards be enabled to support themselves and a family. Encourage, also, those among you who are qualified as teachers of schools, and when you are of ability to pay, never ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... gate was shut, and he had to wake up the poor little porter, as on that night when he returned from Madame Uccelli's. The porter was again equal to his duty, and contrived to light a new candle to show him the way to his room. The repetition, almost mechanical, of this small chicane made Colville smile, and this apparently encouraged the porter to ask, as if he supposed him to have been in ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... I remark An English countess goes upon the stage. A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance, Another bank defaulter has confessed. I keep my countenance, I remain self-possessed Except when a street piano, mechanical and tired Reiterates some worn-out common song With the smell of hyacinths across the garden Recalling things that other people have desired. Are these ideas ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... example, in Sussex—do you get such desertion and quiet and imperturbability. Monnickendam has, however, a treasure that few English towns can boast—its charming little stadhuis tower, one of the prettiest in Holland, with a happy peal of bells, and mechanical horses in action once an hour; while the tram line running right down the main ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... bejewelled ornaments, such European articles as a pair of common scissors in a pasteboard case, several penknives of the commonest quality, an India-rubber squeaking doll, a child's toy train in tin, and a mechanical mouse. All were, no doubt, considered as treasures by the Arab potentate, yet I reflected that nearly every article in the whole of that miscellaneous collection had been acquired by the ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... had lax notions in those days of the distinction between actual statements and inferences by themselves as to the construction they bore. Coke's Reports show it abundantly. Caesar in particular would feel in no way bound to mechanical accuracy. His endeavour would be to give the prevailing force and significance of the charges, of the defence, and of the evidence; the impression they made upon him with a view to his judicial conclusion. We know the judgment formed in advance by him and his colleagues ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... activity at the age of twenty-three. He possessed two great advantages over most of his adventurous competitors; one was a heavy bank account, representing his earnings in the commission business, and the other a partner, Samuel Andrews, who was generally regarded as a mechanical genius in the production of illuminating oil. At the beginning, therefore, Rockefeller had the two essentials which largely explain his subsequent career; an adequate liquid capital and high technical resources. In the first few years the Rockefeller houses—he rapidly organized three, ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... relief. As an engineer, too, he built a canal in northern Italy and constructed fortifications about Milan. He was a musician and a natural philosopher as well. This many-sided man liked to toy with mechanical devices. One day when Louis XII visited Milan, he was met by a large mechanical lion that roared and then reared itself upon its haunches, displaying upon its breast the coat-of-arms of France: it was the work ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... and mechanical jauntiness. There are some powerful and sinister passages in it, the final gesture, with its sudden tonic minor chord, capping the realism ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... to overcome the mechanical difficulties by making the bore of the bass clarinet serpentine. A specimen by Nicolas Papalini of Pavia[3] in the museum of the Brussels Conservatoire has the serpentine bore pierced through two slabs of pear-wood; the two halves, each forming a vertical section of the instrument, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... soul are religious, that religion is that kind of feeling, of motive power that drives the writer and the scientist, the statesman and the sculptor as well as the priest and the Prophet to serve mankind for the joy of serving: that religion is creative, or it is nothing: not mechanical, not a force imposed from without, but a driving power within. The "religion" I had learned was salvation from sin by miracle: sin a deliberate rebellion, not a pathetic missing of the mark of life; useful service ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... distinct ideas, and exploring the secret of what has been passing within, the reason also comprehends the necessity of subjecting to control the faculties and forces that are the condition of the greatest satisfaction of human nature. In the place of the merely mechanical impulsion of passion, which is coupled with grave disadvantages, it puts forward, as a new principle of action, the rational calculation of interest. The faculties are brought into the service of ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... little of this mechanical work now; it was the sense and not the wording which had to be mastered. Thus geography was studied from an atlas and not by the mere parrot-like learning of the names of towns and rivers. In grammar the boys ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... Nijni; no new shape, pattern, or colour just coming out to catch popular favour; no unknown mechanical contrivance; no discovery likely to affect human progress and brought here for the entertainment of the intelligent, un-commercial visitor. There are only the shop-keeper and his customer, though it is a wholesale shop and on a ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... of its shapeless face ... but now there were stirrings in his heart when he thought of it, and he wished that he could be with Eleanor and watch the gradual growth of the baby into a recognising being. His work at the Sensation office had become mechanical, and he worked at the table in the sub-editors' room without any consciousness of it; but he consoled himself for the fatigue and the dullness by promising himself a swift and brilliant release from Fleet Street when his second book was published. Even if his book were not to make money, ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... illustrates how the above problems were satisfactorily solved. In the city of London a law compelling the use of drains was enforced, and in the early 70's the effect of this law was felt in this country. The introduction at this time of the mechanical water closet, known as the "pan closet," and the English plumbing material which was brought to this country was the beginning of "American plumbing," which today outstrips that of any other country in the world. The "pan closet" ...
— Elements of Plumbing • Samuel Dibble
... and control of their engines. It was a difficult and clumsy kind of gear, which was apt to break down at a critical moment, as I saw when I rode in one on their field of maneuver. These first tanks were only experimental, and the tail arrangement was very weak. Worse than all mechanical troubles was the short-sighted policy of some authority at G.H.Q., who had insisted upon A.S.C. drivers being put to this job a few days before ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... the dark facade. It would be impossible to imagine anything more fresh or charming than this apparition at such a moment. Leaning upon the balustrade, the young woman rested her face upon a hand which was as white as a lily, and her finger smoothed with a mechanical caress the ringlets of chestnut hair that lay upon her forehead, while her large brown eyes gazed into the depths of the clouds from which the lightning was flashing, and with which they vied in brilliancy. A poet would have said it was Miranda ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... engineering he devoured books like "Engineering Wonders of the World," "How it Works," "How it is Made," "Engineering of To-day," "Mechanical Inventions of To-day"; also books on wireless telegraphy and aviation. A great lover of books, he liked on off-days to visit London bookshops and rummage their shelves. Very proud he was of his purchases during these excursions. From time to time he would ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... Goldsborough between Raleigh and New Berne. From Savannah to Goldsborough he had led his army 425 miles in fifty days, amid disadvantages of ground and of weather which had called forth both extraordinary endurance and mechanical skill on the part of his men. He lay now 140 miles south of Petersburg by the railway. The port of New Berne to the east of him on the estuary of the Neuse gave him a sure base of supplies, and would enable him quickly to move his army by sea to Petersburg and Richmond if Grant should ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... more; but on killing her and opening her abdomen, plenty of the gum was found in the little silk bags into which it is secreted. As this has always been the case, I have concluded that the evolution of the silk is almost entirely a mechanical process, which is but little controlled by the spinners themselves, and that the gum requires some degree of preparation after it is secreted before it is fit for use as silk; for it must be remembered that with the spider, as with the silk-worm, the silk ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... helping himself when the wind served with his sail, and having only a small crew, could not afford much oar-power, though he had often to trust to it. But for the fighting ship, oar-power and speed were as important as mechanical horse-power is for the warships of the twentieth century. So the war galley was built longer than the trader, to make room for as many oars as possible on either side. In the Mediterranean in those early days, as with the Vikings of later centuries, the "Long Ship" ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... Sewing Machines.—There was a time when a cry arose to the effect that the introduction of mechanical sewing would lead to divers calamities, physical and mental. The ladies were to become crooked in the spine, and regular operators were to become regular cripples. It is scarcely necessary to ask, Has this been so? The operators of to-day are, I think, superior in physical attainments ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... Pritchard's playing in general that 'it was quite mechanical;' post, April 7, 1775. See also post under ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... head of the god. Then hurried by a crowd of priests and priestesses, Maenads, Bacchantes, Bassarids, women crowned with the vine, or with garlands of snakes, and girls bearing the mystic vannus Iacchi. And still the procession was not ended. A mechanical figure of Nysa passed, in a chariot drawn by eighty men, among clusters of grapes formed of precious stones, and the figure arose, and poured milk out of a golden horn. The Satyrs and Sileni followed close, and behind them six hundred men dragged on a wain, a silver vessel that held six hundred measures ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... considering it a favor to get into the service of the whites, and do their degrading offices. That the difference between the whites and themselves, consisted in the superior advantages of the one over the other, in point of attainments. That if a knowledge of the arts and sciences, the mechanical occupations, the industrial occupations, as farming, commerce, and all the various business enterprises, and learned professions were necessary for the superior position occupied by their rulers, it was ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... and put the next question with sarcasm. "And, now, do you mean to stand there and tell this court that the clicks—the purely mechanical clicks—made over a telegraph wire by an operator miles away will sound different to the clicks made ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... together in the shade of the trees, with their books and work. There were no sounds but such as, in the country, seem to accentuate the quiet, and are aids, not to thought, but to that higher faculty which awakes in the silence, and is to thought what the mechanical instrument is ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... his letters. Throughout the proceedings the restless-eyed gentleman continued to make humorous observations of this nature, at which everybody laughed, excepting always the melancholy pianist—a short, sharp, mechanical laugh, devoid of the least suggestion of amusement. The restless-eyed gentleman, it appeared, was the leading low comedian of ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... the work in secret, and this for a reason which to us will seem the strangest; for its being, as we should say, a Benthamite work! Many are the bitter aphorisms we find, among his Fragments, directed against /Meister/ for its prosaic, mechanical, economical, coldhearted, altogether Utilitarian character. We English again call Goethe a mystic; so difficult is it to please all parties! But the good, deep, noble Novalis made the fairest amends; for notwithstanding all this, Tieck ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... in her upstairs room, struggling with all the force of her ardent, undisciplined nature to brace herself for the struggle which lay before her. Prayer had become of late a mechanical, stereotype repetition of phrases; to-day there were no phrases—hardly, indeed, any definite words. In the extreme need of life she took refuge in that voiceless cry for help, that child-like opening of the heart which is the truest relationship between the soul and God. She ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... out of the house, but returned in a minute with his arms full of the superb mechanical horse, the box of leaden soldiers, and the rest of the costly playthings bought by him in the afternoon, and which had not even been taken out of ...
— The Lost Child - 1894 • Francois Edouard Joachim Coppee
... streets that are separated so widely from the country. But here, beside the hay, the hedgerows, the bees, the flowers that precede the blackberries—here in the heart of the meadows the romance has departed. Everything is mechanical or scientific. From the refrigerator that cools the milk, the thermometer that tests its temperature, the lactometer that proves its quality, all is mechanical precision. The tins themselves are metal—wood, the old ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... among them I can find all that I shall need. You yourself know how completely you are provided with engineering tools and machines of all kinds. You have even an electric foundry aboard. With the aid of your mechanical genius, and the skill of your assistants, together with that of my own men, who are accustomed to work of this kind, I have not the faintest doubt that I can design and construct a diving-bell, large enough to contain a half-dozen persons, and perfectly ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... voluminous, for days on desert islands are many and long; he must be varied in his moods, his topics, and his interests; he must have a great deal to say, and must have a power of saying it that shall arrest a depressed and dolorous spirit. Englishmen, of course, would with mechanical unanimity call for Shakespeare; Germans could hardly hesitate about Goethe; and a sensible Frenchman would pack up the ninety volumes of Voltaire. It would be at least as interesting to know the object of a second choice, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... never to leave the yacht again, R—— and I wore the night away. P—— remained impregnable to the attacks of bugs, fleas, and mosquitoes; and while he told us, in a sonorous language of his own, how profoundly he slept, he sometimes gave mechanical signs of feeling by scratching obstreperously his legs and arms, and slapping himself smartly ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... like this!" said the girl. "No, no, Mr. Hayes; there are not many to hear these shots, and none that would not sooner fight against us than on our side. We must depend on ourselves. But oh," she wailed, her woman's heart betraying itself through the mechanical calm she had maintained so long, "oh, I am sorry that your friendship for us should have brought you into such peril—to think that your visit here may cost you your life," and she broke off and covered her ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... analogy of domestic productions. It is rather hard to say what these words imply; they may mean anything from a baby to an apple dumpling, but if they imply that Lamarck drew inspirations from the gradual development of the mechanical inventions of man, and from the progress of man's ideas, I would say that of all sources this would seem to be the safest and most ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... "Nothing of mechanical achievement to me compares with a ship like this that we are sailing on. Panoplied in steel, with heart of fire, with iron arms picking up the burden of ten thousand horses; facing the storm and the night without a quiver except ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... our sea captains run on safer lines; that, too, the law has made compulsory. But it will be long before man's overweening self-confidence rises from the shock which has been given to his belief in his mechanical ability. Nature is not conquered yet. Ocean has still a strength beyond ours. Ships are not unsinkable; and Death will still take his toll of bold men's lives in the future as he has done in the past. We know that cowardice costs ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... give the practical character which such a department needed; that its graduates must have a direct, practical acquaintance with the construction and use of machinery before they could become leaders in great mechanical enterprises; that they must be made, not only mathematicians and draftsmen, but skilled workmen, practically trained in the best methods and processes. A very shrewd artisan said to me: "When a young mechanical engineer comes among us fresh from college, only able to make figures and pictures, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... go about my work in a mechanical way, and only three things seemed to have much joy for me—my home, parents, ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... Tony," he continued, "that a good job can't be done with bad tools,—that split shows it. No doubt the man who made it excused himself by saying that he was never intended for a mechanic. But that was a poor excuse for being without a gimlet. Every man or boy has some mechanical ability, and exercising that ability, with first-rate tools, will generally make him a good workman. Now as to what odd jobs a farmer will find to do. He steps out into the garden, and finds a post of his grape-arbor ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... entirely across it, and it had been further protected by a thick, impenetrable mass of abattis, the materials for which were so plentifully furnished by the Virginia woods and in the construction of which the quasi-mechanical army was rapidly efficient. The left was protected by the James River and the terror-inspiring gun-boats. In front the hill sloped gently down to the Charles City and Richmond road, and other points by which the ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... was slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him. Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: Whosoever ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... of these causes, indeed, may be looked upon as being physiological. Excitement, strange surroundings, fatigue, and hot weather may all cause loss of appetite. Where there is cerebral depression, fever, profound weakness, disorder of the stomach, or mechanical difficulty in chewing or swallowing, the appetite is diminished or destroyed. Sometimes there is an appetite or desire to eat abnormal things, such as dirty bedding, roots of grass, soil, etc. This desire usually comes from a chronic ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... Switzerland in Mission where he was graduated at the Zurich Polytechnic University as Mechanical ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... we are a more practical and mechanical-minded people, here and in Europe," Paula added, holding down her gorge by main strength. "We have lethal-gas chambers that even Hitler ...
— Hunter Patrol • Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... dead silence for a few moments. Then James spoke. But it was not the voice of James. It was not that cheery and hearty voice which had just been filling the shop with mirth. It was a voice harsh, forced, mechanical,—the voice of a man paralyzed ...
— By The Sea - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... Sculpture," gives as his "Conclusion" an account of the mechanical methods of the sculptor, and I believe that I can add nothing here which will be of greater use to my readers than a quotation ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... I cried, seizing a dessert-knife which was on my bureau. I rushed forward with a mechanical movement upon my little Comte de Toulouse, whom I snatched from the hands of his father, and I was on the verge of sacrificing ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... had become almost a mania in the four months. But in the mechanical, phraseological movement of his thought he was able to hide himself. Thus he listened to Tesla and looked at the cafe. The inn was filled with people—elaborately dressed women and shiningly groomed men—grouped about white-linened, silver-laden tables; ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... good letter must be correct in every mechanical detail, finished in style, interesting in substance, and intelligible in construction. Few there are who do not need write them; yet a letter perfect in detail is rarer than any other ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... former cruel and sanguinary practices, they go about clothed and live in neat cottages, and industriously cultivate the ground; they can generally read and write their own language, and have learned many mechanical arts; they understand the principles of Christianity, attend Divine worship, and respect the sabbath, while undoubtedly some, and perhaps many, have been 'created anew in Christ Jesus unto good works,' and not a few have risked their lives, and laid ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... courage of Edmund, who has been basely slandered by his enemies, the baron asks him to spend three nights in the haunted apartment of the castle. Up to this point, there has been nothing to differentiate the story from an uneventful domestic novel. The ghost is of the mechanical variety and does not inspire awe when he actually appears, but Miss Reeve tries to prepare our minds for the shock, before she introduces him. The rusty locks and the sudden extinction of the lamp are a heritage from Walpole, but the "hollow, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... servitude and labor was one of the bad effects of slavery; but he thought it attended with many excellent consequences. It did not apply to all kinds of labor—not, for example, to farming. He himself had often held the plow; so had his father. Manufacturing and mechanical labor was not degrading. It was only manual labor—the proper work of slaves. No white person could descend to that. And it was the best guarantee to equality among the whites. It produced an unvarying level among them. It not only did not excite, but did not even admit ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... my lord?" Hamlet replied, "Words. Words. Words." That is a world-old trouble. The mechanical calling of words is not expression, by a long stretch. Did you ever notice how hollow a memorized speech usually sounds? You have listened to the ranting, mechanical cadence of inefficient actors, lawyers and preachers. Their trouble is a mental one—they ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... bourgeois. The same person, perhaps, whom Marius had one day heard, through his love fever, near the same grand basin, counselling his son "to avoid excesses." He had an affable and haughty air, and a mouth which was always smiling, since it did not shut. This mechanical smile, produced by too much jaw and too little skin, shows the teeth rather than the soul. The child, with his brioche, which he had bitten into but had not finished eating, seemed satiated. The child was dressed as a National Guardsman, owing to the insurrection, and the father had remained ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... be uneasy—we would not come to this little town. We'd hide somewhere, a long way off, in the north or in the south. I shall be changed by that time, and she will, too, in America. The doctors shall make me some sort of wart on my face—what's the use of their being so mechanical!—or else I'll put out one eye, let my beard grow a yard, and I shall turn gray, fretting for Russia. I dare say they won't recognize us. And if they do, let them send us to Siberia. I don't care. It will show it's our fate. We'll work on the land ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... commercial exchange, but it has since been greatly altered, and served as a fortification in the civil wars. It is to-day occupied for the purposes of a prison, where convicts are judiciously taught various mechanical trades. The view from the summit of this rude old building takes in the town, the long, narrow gulch, the gray and rugged hills which reach upward towards the deep blue sky, dotted here and there by the ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... tribes have long ago learnt many of the arts of civilised life; can spin their own thread, and sew skilfully as any sempstress of the palefaces; weave their own cloth, dress and dye it in fast colours of becoming patterns; in short, can do many kinds of mechanical work, which no white artisan need feel ashamed to acknowledge as his own. Above all, are they famed for the "feather-work," or plume embroidery—an art peculiarly Indian— which, on their first becoming acquainted ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... lance merits most attention, as it is more generally used, and is usually of better mechanical and ornamental workmanship. The shaft is a piece of either palma brava or of kulippa palm, varying from 1.8 to 2.4 meters in length. It has a uniform diameter of about 16 millimeters for a distance equal to one-half of its length from, the head; the other half tapers very gradually ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... each of the average six to seven words contained in the Virgilian hexameter for its usage elsewhere in Virgil's works or other Latin authors, would DALY have had to maintain the laborious mechanical process of flipping through these concordances, lexica, and editions each time. Nor would he have had to frequent as often the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at the Johns Hopkins University to consult the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. Instead of devoting countless hours, ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... justly say, few will be found more useful and desirous of acting for the general good. I am about forty-two years of age, and my wife is a little older; my son is fourteen, and we are fully prepared for active life. I have no knowledge of any mechanical trade, but am fond of it as well as agriculture and gardening; I possess a fair share of health; am fond of writing and bookkeeping; only occasionally disposed to gaiety, but rather for scientific relaxation; not fanatical in religion, but a regarder ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... preceding volumes of this series, know, Jack Chadwick and Tom Jesson, his cousin, had won the titles of Boy Inventors through their ingenuity and mechanical genius. Jack's father, Chester Chadwick, was an inventor of note, and unlike the majority of inventors, he had turned his devices to such good account that he had accumulated a substantial fortune and was able to maintain a fine estate, already ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... the mechanical labour; I hate to stoop and sit still. I could dictate it, though, with pleasure, to an amanuensis who suited me. Would Mademoiselle Lucy write for me if ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... able to produce so many books. If these authors had wrought as voluminously as newspaper editors do, the result would be something to marvel at, indeed. How editors can continue this tremendous labor, this exhausting consumption of brain fibre (for their work is creative, and not a mere mechanical laying-up of facts, like reporting), day after day and year after year, is incomprehensible. Preachers take two months' holiday in midsummer, for they find that to produce two sermons a week is wearing, in the long run. In truth it must be so, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... passing, that this was before Bigelow's mechanical genius had unlocked for America the higher secrets of carpet-weaving, and made it possible to have one's desires accomplished in Brussels or velvet. In those days, English carpet-weavers did not send to America for their looms, as they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... proves that the publishers must have rather a poor opinion of the average intelligence of teachers; and it also seemed as if the practical effect of such questions must often be to make the exercise of recitation more mechanical for both teachers and pupils, and to encourage the besetting sin of "learning by heart." Nevertheless, there are usually two sides to a case; and, in deference to the prevailing custom, for which, no doubt, there is much to be said, full sets of questions ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... floor. He held her close, and hummed and chatted. And through the alcoholic haze saw she was a stiff-smiled, stiff-bodied, mechanical dancing doll. ...
— The First One • Herbert D. Kastle
... walls for their cities and ramparts, that they might restrain the river, and hinder its waters from stagnating, upon its running over its own banks: they set them also to build pyramids, [17] and by all this wore them out; and forced them to learn all sorts of mechanical arts, and to accustom themselves to hard labor. And four hundred years did they spend under these afflictions; for they strove one against the other which should get the mastery, the Egyptians desiring to destroy the Israelites ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... and full of the mighty desire of a man for a maid. Beside all this, he printed lovely books by other writers, and designed wall-paper, and painted pictures, and thundered against the deadening effect on men of mechanical toil, and in social theories was far in advance of his age. Such a man was William Morris—known to-day to the mass of mankind for one of the most accursed articles of furniture ever devised by human ingenuity gone astray! Every day, in a million homes, men and women sit in Morris ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? They have never entered into mine, but into yours, we thought—Haven't we all to struggle against life's daily greyness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion? I struggle by remembering my friends; others I have known by remembering some place—some beloved place or tree—we thought you ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... its sharps and flats, its high notes and low notes, its chords and discords, and it is not impossible that in the future science may make it a means of regulated and written harmonies:—that some master colourist who has mechanical and inventive genius as well, may so arrange them that they can be played by rule; that colour may have its Mozart or Beethoven—its classic melodies, its familiar tunes. The musician, as I have said—has gathered his tones from every audible thing in nature—and fitted and assorted and built ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... knowledge of men and of life, gained at cost of desperate conflict, made the youth's soul an open book to him. Recognising the boy's aptitude, he had in holiday seasons set Tony behind the machines in his planing mill, determined for his father's sake to make of him a mechanical engineer. To Tony each new machine was a toy to be played with; in a week or two he had mastered it and grown weary of it. Thenceforth he slacked at his work and became a demoralizing influence in his department, a source of anxiety to his steady-going father, a ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... against extremes of heat and cold would [19] be afforded by houses and clothing; drainage and irrigation works would antagonise the effects of excessive rain and excessive drought; roads, bridges, canals, carriages, and ships would overcome the natural obstacles to locomotion and transport; mechanical engines would supplement the natural strength of men and of their draught animals; hygienic precautions would check, or remove, the natural causes of disease. With every step of this progress in civilization, the colonists would ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... principles arising out of the combination of primary principles are quite different in their nature from the entities out of whose combination they came into existence. The combinations in question are not of the nature of mere mechanical juxtapositions, as it were. They do not even correspond to chemical combinations. Consequently no valid inferences as regards the nature of the combinations in question can be drawn by analogy from the nature [variety?] ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... confused dream to me. A dream of suffering, of incessant wandering from pan to pan; here a few mouthfuls of stagnant water, and there a few t'samma still keeping myself and the horses alive. For days the wandering must have been purely mechanical: but one day I came to myself just as the sun was setting. I felt weak and exhausted but perfectly sane. I was parched, and my water-skin was gone, probably thrown away in a fit of frenzy or despair ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... they proceed to find out what chords in the hearts of their husbands are most easily touched; and when once they discover this secret, they eagerly proceed to put it into practice; then, like a child with a mechanical toy, whose spring excites their curiosity, they go on employing it, carelessly calling into play the movements of the instrument, and satisfied simply with their success in doing so. If they kill you, they will mourn over you with the best grace in the world, as the most virtuous, the most excellent, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... different kinds have been composed in Iceland, century after century, in a more or less mechanical way, by the repetition of old adventures, situations, phrases, characters, or pretences of character. What the worst of them are like may be seen by a reference to Mr. Ward's Catalogue of MS. Romances in the British Museum, ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... Holmes. The padrone protests—non, monsieur, non, cela vous derange—that he only wanted me to translate the words, he does not want to disturb me. Nevertheless, we go. I feel I have the honour of mechanical England in ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... indeed were they confronted by one of the theatres of the earliest dramatic times. Nothing could present a much greater contrast than the elaborate drapery and the ingenious trap-doors, side wings, and numerous other mechanical contrivances which are now a necessary complement of the modern stage, and the superlative simplicity which characterised the theatres of three hundred ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... dancing in great variety, dioramas, panoramas, models of Niagara, Dublin, Paris, and Jerusalem; Hannington's dioramas of the Creation, the Deluge, Fairy Grotto, Storm at Sea; the first English Punch and Judy in this country, Italian Fantoceini, mechanical figures, fancy glass-blowing, knitting machines, and other triumphs in the mechanical arts; dissolving views, American Indians, who enacted their warlike and religious ceremonies on the stage—these, among others, were ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... long at this strange mechanical eye. Shaped like a small pipe, it ran up from the conning tower and protruded above the vessel. A large lens at the top turned off as does an elbow in a stove pipe. This portion, when necessary, moved in all directions. When ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... love for her, notwithstanding the intimacy that grew between them at Choisy. In his closet Louis XVI. was immersed in deep study. At the Council he was busied with the welfare of his people; hunting and mechanical occupations engrossed his leisure moments, and he never thought on ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... his word. He had a natural turn for mechanical work, and, backed by Dot's more methodical genius, he prolonged the days of the broken toys by skilful mending, and so acquired an interest in them which was still more favourable to their preservation. ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... along this reach of the upper Thames, was a marvel in his make-up. He was as large as he was luscious, as abundant as he was both and was a great feature in the food supply of the time. Not merely was he a feature in the food supply, but in a mechanical way, and the first object sought by the boys, after their plan had been agreed upon, was the shell of the great clam. They had no difficulty in securing what they wanted, for strewn all about each cave ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... and opinions, and to rely upon her help, and he realized that she was no longer in his life with something like the shock a man experiences when the loss of a limb, which continues a part of his inveterate consciousness, is brought to his sense by some mechanical attempt to use it. But even in this pang he did not regret that all was over between them. He knew now that he had never cared for her as he had once thought, and on her account, if not his own, he was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... is equal to the imported product, but we ought to have a little more equipment. We ought to have steam and run this steam into our cooking vat to keep it boiling at the right temperature right along, and boil it for an hour, and then have a mechanical agitator in the bottom of the tub that keeps it stirred up, and keep the cover closed down as nearly tight as possible so as to exclude the air as much as possible, letting the surplus steam escape, and in that way ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... stood close to him while she selected, with great deliberation, a book from the shelf beside his head. And Ward Warren, perfectly normal and not over twenty-five or so, pushed his chair out of her way with a purely mechanical movement, and read and read, and actually was too absorbed to feel her nearness. And he really was reading The Ring and the Book; Billy Louise was rude enough to look over his shoulder to make sure of that. She gave up, then, and though she picked a book at random from the ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... history of our literature in the fifteenth century. He was born in Kent in the year 1422. He was not merely a printer, he was also a literary man; and, when he devoted himself to printing, he took to it as an art, and not as a mere mechanical device. Caxton in early life was a mercer in the city of London; and in the course of his business, which was a thriving one, he had to make frequent journeys to the Low Countries. Here he saw the printing-press ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... significantly smaller percentage of Negroes than the Army and Air Force. A similar disparity existed in assignment procedures. The commission found that both services failed to match the record of the civilian economy in the use of Negroes in technical, mechanical, administrative, clerical, and craft fields. It suspected that the services' recruiting and testing methods intensified these differences and wondered whether they might not operate to exclude Negroes ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... little town. We'd hide somewhere, a long way off, in the north or in the south. I shall be changed by that time, and she will, too, in America. The doctors shall make me some sort of wart on my face—what's the use of their being so mechanical!—or else I'll put out one eye, let my beard grow a yard, and I shall turn gray, fretting for Russia. I dare say they won't recognize us. And if they do, let them send us to Siberia. I don't care. It will show it's our fate. We'll work on the land here, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... its proportions. They were all dressed in white robes, they seemed to have arisen that moment from their seats, and they were regarding Graham steadfastly. At the end of the table he perceived the glitter of some mechanical appliances. ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... mathematically formulated natural laws, presupposes that nature is deprived of all inner life [2] and all qualitative distinctions, that all that exists is compounded of uniformly acting parts, and that all that takes place is conceived as motion. With this Hobbes's programme of a mechanical science of nature is fulfilled. The heavens and the earth are made subject to the same law of gravitation. How far Newton himself adhered to the narrow meaning of mechanism (motion from pressure and impulse), is evident ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... that in this case special importance is attached to shoes with high heels, and the subject considers that the pressure of such shoes is for mechanical reasons most favorable for procuring ejaculation. Nearly all heterosexual shoe-fetichists seem, however, to be equally attracted by high heels. Restif de la Bretonne frequently referred to this point, and he gave a number of reasons for the attractiveness ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... chattered overhead. Little animals rustled now and then in the thickets, fish leaped in the river, but there was no sound to indicate that man was near. They were not nervous nor restless. Inured to danger, waiting had become almost a mechanical act, and they were able to lie perfectly still, however ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... phraseology of the country rectory recurred to Lady Meadowcroft—"our poorer brethren," and so forth. "Oh, of course," she answered, with the mechanical acquiescence such women always give to moral platitudes. "One must do one's best for the poor, I know—for conscience' sake and all that; it's our duty, and we all try hard to do it. But they're so terribly ungrateful! Don't you ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... The mechanical mixture would be complete; as it would probably be put, the white race would have absorbed the black. There would be no inferior race to domineer over; there would be no superior race to oppress those who differed from them in racial ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... over its external surface, or by the oar-like movement of certain portions of its frame especially adapted to the purpose. In other animals, the weight of the body rests directly upon the ground, and has, therefore, to be lifted from place to place by more powerful mechanical contrivances. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... should be to help the free peoples of the world, through their own efforts, to produce more food, more clothing, more materials for housing, and more mechanical power to ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... creeping things. They were shut in by the hand of God. The scripture passes silently over all horrors that filled the earth as man and beast were destroyed. We may imagine them trying by strength to get out of reach of the rising waters, but no mental culture or mechanical skill or physical culture, neither tears and entreaties could deliver man from the destruction which God had determined because of sin. It was seven months before the Ark rested on Ararat and more than five more before the ransomed ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... had been opened, and he had no thought but for his distress whilst, in mechanical fashion, he performed the rites and made the customary gestures. Since his return from Rome three years previously, he had been living in the very worst anguish that can fall on man. At the outset, in order to recover his lost faith, he had essayed a first experiment: he had ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... would never pass that way again—and each one wondered sometimes if he would be claimed by that Mechanical Death which none of ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... is infused by mechanical means. Sacraments and the like have a magical or miraculous potency. The Homeric hymn to Demeter insists only on ritual purity as the condition of salvation, and we hear that people trusted to the mystic baptism to wash out all their previous ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... business, and guarded its property, while the regular clergy illustrated the necessity of personal piety and self-denial. Monasticism at its best was a monitor standing beside the Church and constantly warning it against permitting the Christian life to sink into mere mechanical and passive acceptance of its ceremonies as all-sufficient for salvation. It supplied the element of personal responsibility and spiritual ambition upon which Protestantism ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... sense, sir—ha, ha! Yonder it is, removed from over the way, new white-washed posts, and red lattice—fat man in his doublet at the door—Ned himself, sir—worth a thousand pounds, they say—better singeing pigs' faces than trimming courtiers—but ours is the less mechanical vocation.—Farewell, sir; hope your custom. "So saying, he at length permitted Nigel to depart, whose ears, so long tormented with continued babble, tingled when it had ceased, as if a bell had been rung close to them for the ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... to overcome difficulties," says Smiles. "If there were no difficulties, there would be no success. In this necessity for exertion we find the chief source of human advancement,—the advancement of individuals as of nations. It has led to most of the mechanical inventions and improvements of ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... of Popular Mechanics Handbooks is to supply a growing demand for high-class, up-to-date and accurate text-books, suitable for home study as well as for class use, on all mechanical subjects. ...
— Mission Furniture - How to Make It, Part I • H. H. Windsor
... of this book have performed a valuable service, one which will tend to facilitate and aid very much the development of military training in this country. In addition to the purely mechanical details of training the book presents in a very effective and simple manner the tactical use of ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... distinct break between the crisp, official atmosphere of Berlin—where the war hurts least and the mechanical appearance of success is strong—and the sentiment of the rank and file of people whose suffering, as the war continued, became a more and ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... was an Irish bricklayer; he wrote an "Earl of Essex." ["Having a natural inclination for the Muses," says his biographer, "he pursued his devotions to them even during the labours of his more mechanical avocations, and composing a line of brick and a line of verse alternately, his wall and poems rose up in growth together." His tragedy of the "Earl of Essex" came out at Covent Garden in 1753, and met with considerable success. He died in ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... the moral truth: the minister's black veil, emblem of the secret of every human heart; the print of a hand on the heroine's cheek in "The Birthmark," a sign of earthly imperfection which only death can eradicate; the mechanical butterfly in "The Artist of the Beautiful," for which the artist no longer cares, when once he has embodied his thought. Zenobia in "The Blithedale Romance" has every day a hot-house flower sent down from a Boston conservatory and wears it in ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... the meaner, and the dog to be eaten before the lion. Nay, I should think, my lords, that men of birth and quality will leave the practice, when it begins to be vilified, and come so low as to barber-surgeons and butchers, and such base mechanical persons. And for the greatness of this presence, in which I take much comfort, both as I consider it in itself, and much more in respect it is by his Majesty's direction, I will supply the meanness of the particular cause, by handling of ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... denominated the enterprising, the hardy, the mechanical, and working period, commencing with the opening of the country to emigrant settlers, the age of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures, of harbors, cities, canals, and railroads, when the landscapes of the forest ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... eaten up,—not only raw, but alive. Simply the circumstance of his having held on to the harpoon. Had he dropped that weapon on falling, it would never have been grasped by him again. Fortunately, he had the presence of mind to hold on to it; or perhaps the tenacity was merely mechanical. Whatever may have been the reason, he did hold on. Fortunately, also, he was gliding down on the side opposite to that on ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... volume further into the canvas before the spectacle of this ungodly opulence; a large Bible on a funereal trestle-like stand, and the primmest and barest of writing-tables, before which she was standing as at a sacrificial altar. With an almost mechanical movement she closed her portfolio as her husband entered, and also shut the lid of a small box with a slight snap. This suggested exclusion of him from her previous occupation, whatever it might have been, caused a faint shadow ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... ii., p 199.) will find a long article on Aerostation in Rees' Cyclopaedia; but his inquiry reminds me of a conversation I had with the late Sir Anthony Carlisle, about a year before his death. He wished to consult me on the subject of flying by mechanical means, and that I should assist him in some of his arrangements. He had devoted many years of his life to the consideration of this subject, and made numerous experiments at great cost, which induced him to believe in the possibility ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various
... presented still fails to move the critic, he must shift from the scientific analysis to those qualities governing the artist subjectively. He is lacking in "temperament," and without temperament who in art has a chance? With years in the schools and a technique of mechanical perfection he lacks the divine fire and leaves us cold. It is for the critic to say this, and herein he becomes a ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... a clever lad, with a geni of a mechanical turn, who made punch-bowls of leather, and legs for cripples of the same commodity, that were lighter and easier to wear than either legs of cork or timber. His name was Geordie Sooplejoint, a modest, douce, and well-behaved young man—caring ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... purity of maiden-fame, now hung unbound and dishevelled over her face, and almost concealed her features. On receiving this hint from the attendant, the unfortunate young woman, with a hasty, trembling, and apparently mechanical compliance, shaded back from her face her luxuriant locks, and showed to the whole court, excepting one individual, a countenance, which, though pale and emaciated, was so lovely amid its agony, that it called forth a universal murmur of compassion and ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... for this it was a wholly mechanical din. Human brains directed operations, human hands carried them out, but the sound of the human voice was, for the most part, lacking. The diggers were a sombre, preoccupied race, little given to lip-work. Even the "shepherds," ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... for the key and studied it sombrely. The act was mechanical, a bit of sparring for time: his anger was searching about for a new vent. He was a just man, and he did not care to start any thunder which was not based upon fairness. He had no wish to go foraging in ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... sufficient witness to Maggie's youth and inexperience that she was enraptured by this event. It was not only that she had never seen a cuckoo-clock before; she had, for that matter, never heard of the existence of such a thing. It gave her greater happiness than any bare mechanical discovery could have done. The bird seemed to have come to her, in the friendliest way, to remove some of the chilly passivity of the house. Her greatest fear since her arrival had been that this was a house "in which nothing was ever ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... eat, and had a little cup of superb black coffee without charge to finish his meal. Brilliant piano music swept the rooms whenever any guest cared to send the waiter with a five-cent piece to the old mechanical piano, and sprightly conversation, carried on from table to table, gave the place that tone that Monsieur Montiverte considered to be its most valuable asset. Monsieur himself was a dried-up little rat of a man, grizzled, and as brown as a walnut. ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... could not disguise the resentment which he felt at being thus directly held up to the scorn, as well as the censure, of the assembled inhabitants of the little world in which he lived. His brow grew red, his lip grew pale, he set his teeth, he clenched his hand, and then with mechanical readiness grasped the weapon of which the clergyman had given so hideous a character; and at length, as the preacher heightened the colouring of his invective, he felt his rage become so ungovernable, ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... abide by the issue of the contest. What a spectacle to the world! After years of military devastation, with tens of thousands dead on her battle-fields, with the flower of her children slain, with her wealth destroyed, her commerce swept away, her agricultural and mechanical pursuits almost ruined, the South yielded. The North, victorious and strong, could not forget what she owed to liberty and human rights. We may well swear now that as long as liberty is ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... Geology; Mr. W. T. Blanford, the head of the Indian Geological Survey, is sure to do honour to his subject; in Section D, Biology, Professor Moseley, a man of thoroughly Darwinian type of mind, will preside; in F, Economic Science, Sir Richard Temple will be a host in himself; while in G, Mechanical Science, Sir F J. Bramwell is sure to be vigorous and original; finally, in the new section H, Anthropology, Dr. E. B. Tylor is the very man that ought to have been selected. Lord Aberdare, we regret to say, has been compelled to retire from the presidency of the Geographical Section; ...
— The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters • Clara Rayleigh
... associated with that great public safeguard—the Press; secondly, because he knew from some slight practical experience, what the duties of correctors of the press were, and how their duties were usually discharged; and he could testify, and did testify, that they were not mechanical, that they were not mere matters of manipulation and routine; but that they required from those who performed them much natural intelligence, much super-added cultivation, readiness of reference, quickness of resource, an excellent memory, and a clear understanding. He most gratefully ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... of the beak's being a mechanical tool which chiefly regulates the form of a bird's face, as opposed to a four-footed animal's. If the question of food were the only one, we might wonder why there were not more four-footed creatures living on seeds ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... simple incident seemed, told just thus! Homer was always telling [101] things after this manner. And one might think there had been no effort in it: that here was but the almost mechanical transcript of a time, naturally, intrinsically, poetic, a time in which one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or, the sailors pulled down their boat without making a picture in "the great style," against a sky charged with marvels. Must not the mere prose of ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... His mind obsessed, Jimmie Dale's physical acts were almost wholly mechanical. It was perhaps fifteen minutes since he had discovered the loss of the letter, and he was walking now through the heart of the Bowery. Exactly how he had got there he could not have told; he had only a vague realisation that, following an intuitive sense of direction, he ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... equivalents combined in a like manner and exhibiting similar properties; thus acetic and trichloracetic acids, aldehyde and chloral, marsh gas and chloroform are pairs of compounds referable to the same type. He also postulated, with Regnault, the existence of "molecular or mechanical types" containing substances which, although having the same number of equivalents, are essentially different in characters. His unitary conceptions may be summarized: every chemical compound forms a complete whole, and cannot therefore consist of two parts; and its chemical ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... dug up the ground in an open space near it, to form a garden, which he had begun to rail in. "The fellow seems determined to make himself at home, as if he expected to live here for years to come. A low-born fellow has mechanical talents such as I don't possess; they certainly give him an advantage over me, under the circumstances in which we are placed, but I must see what I can do for myself. My cave has only hitherto afforded me shelter, but should the wind blow ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... of it is not an inheritance of thine, and let all thy deeds be done in the name of God." 18. R. Simeon said, "Be careful in reading the Shema and the Amidah; and when thou prayest, consider not thy prayer as a fixed (mechanical) task, but as (an appeal for) mercy and grace before the All-present, as it is said, 'For he is gracious and full of mercy, slow to anger, and abounding in loving-kindness, and repenteth him of the evil'; and be not wicked ...
— Pirke Avot - Sayings of the Jewish Fathers • Traditional Text
... of existing beings. This throws such Natural Sciences as Botany, Zoology, Mineralogy, Geology, etc., out of his range. He also excludes the domain of practical Knowledge, comprising what is included under the terms, the Applied Sciences, the Arts, the Mechanical Sciences, etc. A Classification, far more detailed and comprehensive in its scope than anything yet published, is in preparation by Professor P. H. Vander Weyde, of the Cooper Institute—advanced sheets of which, so far as it is elaborated, have been kindly ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... alacrity, discipline, and strength of counsels, should march against a foe. When his position is otherwise, he should avoid defensive operations.[21] The king should provide himself with power of wealth, power of allies, power of foresters, power of paid soldiery, and power of the mechanical and trading classes, O puissant one.[22] Among all these, power of allies and power of wealth are superior to the rest. The power of classes and that of the standing army are equal. The power of spies is regarded by the king as equal in efficacy to either of the above, on many occasions, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... forcing himself into a sort of mechanical regularity of life which helped him through the day. Gianluca needed him still, though less than formerly, and as long as he could be of use, and could control his face and voice, he would stay in Muro. Since Veronica ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... manufactories to resort to when they are in want of work; no unaccustomed departments of mechanical or agricultural labour are open to receive them, to stimulate their ingenuity and reward their industry. When they know how to ply the hoe, pick the coffee-berry, and tend the sugar-mills, they have learned almost all the industry of the island can teach them. If, ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... wheel; those too small for the fields begged food in the streets of the town. Little Poland was virtually a fief of Joe Hilliard's. Men, women, and elves looked up to him as to a benevolent feudal lord, and the naturalized males voted Joe Hilliard's party ticket with mechanical precision. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... who himself suffers from the same uncertainty. Non me tua fervida terrent Dicta; ... Dii me terrent, et Jupiter hostis.[20] Two kinds of dilettanti, says Goethe, there are in poetry: he who neglects the indispensable mechanical part, and thinks he has done enough if he shows spirituality and feeling; and he who seeks to arrive at poetry merely by mechanism, in which he can acquire an artisan's readiness, and is without soul and matter. And he adds, that the first does most harm to art, and the ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... the night before; wondered that I should ever have attributed those shocking cries to one of whom I now conceived as of a saint, spectral of mien, wasted with maceration, bound up in the practices of a mechanical devotion, and dwelling in a great isolation of soul with her incongruous relatives; and as I leaned on the balustrade of the gallery and looked down into the bright close of pomegranates and at the gaily dressed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... receiver and stood a moment in thought. Iron Skull was now Jim's superintendent and right hand. His mechanical and electrical engineers were gone, too, leaving only cubs who had never seen a flood. Benson came running down the trail ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... through hardship and labor, to summits of the highest joy that can be known to human heart and brain. Then, puzzled and disturbed by his sense of the responsibility of his solitude, Ivan would perform by day his mechanical duties, and then hurry away, at evening, to labor undisturbed through the strange northern twilights, at ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... order that they might have more cool and accurate opportunity to form a judgment upon the whole, and transmit their orders, without being disturbed by any thoughts of personal safety. Even so, brave barbarian, in the art of embroidery, (marvel not that we are a proficient in that mechanical process, since it is patronized by Minerva, whose studies we affect to follow,) we reserve to ourselves the superintendence of the entire web, and commit to our maidens and others the execution of particular parts. Thus, in the same manner, thou, valiant ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... save Oppenheim's or Solomon's money but because it is a demonstration that we are dependent upon some community on the other side of the world, that their damage is our damage, and that we have an interest in preventing it. It teaches us, as only some such simple and mechanical means can teach, the ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... son, his physician, his personal servant, and even Miss Stackpole. Mrs. Touchett did not figure in the list, and this was an obstacle the less to Isabel's finding her host alone. He sat in a complicated mechanical chair, at the open window of his room, looking westward over the park and the river, with his newspapers and letters piled up beside him, his toilet freshly and minutely made, and his smooth, speculative face ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... Pharaohs, the human race had looked for a means by which the dead might be preserved against the ravages of time. Great had been the art of the Egyptians in the embalming of their deceased, a practice which was later lost to humanity of the ensuing mechanical age, never to be rediscovered. But even the embalming of the Egyptians—so Professor Jameson had argued—would be futile in the face of millions of years, the dissolution of the corpses being just as eventual as immediate cremation ...
— The Jameson Satellite • Neil Ronald Jones
... which it is used by Professor Huxley. But the latter goes on to avow his belief that the human body, like every other living body, is a machine, all the operations of which will sooner or later be explained on physical principles, insomuch that we shall eventually arrive at a mechanical equivalent of consciousness, even as we have already arrived at a mechanical equivalent of heat. He considers that with the same propriety with which the amount of heat which a pound weight produces by falling through the distance of a foot, may be called ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... first book of this series I have described the mechanical part of moving pictures, how they are made and prepared for projection on the screen. To briefly sum it up, I might say that the pictures, or negatives, are taken on a continuous strip of celluloid film in a specially prepared camera, which takes ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... and God." The words are the very soul of St Paul, as it conveys the Spirit's oracle to us here. St Paul dreads exceedingly for the Philippians the incursion of "error and misunderstanding"; the advent of a mechanical rigorism of rule and ordinance, and (as we shall see in later pages) the subtle poison also of the specious antinomian lie. How does he apply the antidote? In the form of an appeal to them to be sure ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... Miss Falconer? You were born in the States? You are going to Italy—and then home again?" The questions came in a reassuringly mechanical fashion; the man was doing his duty, ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... at his son, who was showing signs of returning animation; but it evoked no sympathy before us, whatever he might have felt, for he only frowned as, in a shivering mechanical way, we two wretched boys seized an oar apiece, sat down on the wet ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... satisfactory and economical service and a long life, any range or mechanical device must be kept clean. This applies to the gas range as well, and we therefore wish to emphasize that the little attention required is very ...
— Fowler's Household Helps • A. L. Fowler
... More from mechanical instinct than from any actual purpose of mind—for he did not, at the first instant, fully comprehend her meaning—Sergius followed the motion of her hand, and gazed at the wall above his head; then passed his fingers along until he touched the empty nail—then ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... texts of lost authors, including Menander. We will give a few specimens of the private letters and documents, which will show how extremely modern the ancient Egyptians were, and how little difference there actually is between our civilization and theirs, except in the-matter of mechanical invention. They had no locomotives and telephones; otherwise they were the same. We resemble them much more than we resemble our mediaeval ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... found behind the grocery. Large, high windows throw a flood of light into the mixing room. The oven is of a modern type, large, easily controlled and economical. Five men work at the baking and a boy wraps bread in waxed paper with a mechanical device which automatically folds and seals. The three delivery wagons bear the cooperative motto, "Each for All, and All for Each." They are used in the morning for the delivery of baked goods and in the afternoon for the delivery of groceries. It keeps three boys busy all day covering the territory ...
— Consumers' Cooperative Societies in New York State • The Consumers' League of New York
... child. He's always in his mother's pocket She coddles him too much." It came back to me afterwards, too—the manner in which he spoke these words. They were not petulant; they expressed rather a sudden coldness, a kind of mechanical submission. We went a few steps further, and then he stopped short and called the boy, ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... melancholy and a little touched by suspicion; not exactly the manner of a lady, and, at the same time, not the manner of a woman in the humblest rank of life. The voice, little as I had yet heard of it, had something curiously still and mechanical in its tones, and the utterance was remarkably rapid. She held a small bag in her hand: and her dress—bonnet, shawl, and gown all of white—was, so far as I could guess, certainly not composed of very delicate or very expensive ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... could enjoy, the pleasure of having the best new novels read to her as they came out. Discovering this, Arthur volunteered to relieve Miss Haldane, at intervals, in the office of reader. He was clever at mechanical contrivances of all sorts, and he introduced improvements in Mrs. Carbury's couch, and in the means of conveying her from the bedchamber to the drawing-room, which alleviated the poor lady's sufferings and brightened her gloomy ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... new movement was shared by many different nations. From every standpoint it has been of infinitely greater moment than anything hitherto seen. Not in one but in many different peoples there has been extraordinary growth in wealth, in population, in power of organization, and in mastery over mechanical activity and natural resources. All of this has been accompanied and signalized by an immense outburst of energy and restless initiative. The result is as ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... facade. It would be impossible to imagine anything more fresh or charming than this apparition at such a moment. Leaning upon the balustrade, the young woman rested her face upon a hand which was as white as a lily, and her finger smoothed with a mechanical caress the ringlets of chestnut hair that lay upon her forehead, while her large brown eyes gazed into the depths of the clouds from which the lightning was flashing, and with which they vied in brilliancy. A poet would have said it was Miranda ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... beneath the rule of the hammer, the chisel, the loom, and have been promptly vulcanized. Is not Vulcan, with his hideousness and his strength, the emblem of this strong and hideous nation—sublime in its mechanical intelligence, patient in its season, and once in a century terrible, inflammable as gunpowder, and ripe with brandy for the madness of revolution, with wits enough, in fine, to take fire at a captious word, which signifies to it always: ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... and of eras, or definite and completed periods of time. As man is begotten, born, developed to maturity and then is brought downward to the grave, so in the case of races and nations and the clearly defined epochs into which the history of man divides itself. There is no mechanical system of "progress," no cumulative wisdom and power that in the end will inevitably lead to earthly perfection and triumph. For every individual there is the possibility of spiritual evolution within the time allotted that ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... called from its form. The mechanical appliance, a wheel, with several handles for turning it, by which power is increased, and also transmitted from the steersman on deck to the tiller below, in order to steer ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... in the manner of Mrs. Kukor, the kitchen was filled with the fruity aroma of stewing prunes, and Johnnie, with several saucers of bright-hued beads before him, was busy at his stringing—a task which, being mechanical, could be performed without conscious effort. And he was so engrossed over his saucers that Barber had to speak to him twice before the boy started up from his chair, letting the beads impaled on his long ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... writer than myself add to the elegant and forcible narrative of Robertson? So adieu to my vision. I awake, like John Bunyan, 'and behold it is a dream.' Well enough that I awake without a sciatica, which would have probably rewarded my slumbers had I profaned Queen Mary's bed by using it as a mechanical resource to ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... deafening; the appearance of the man, whose expression was one of settled rage but whose actions were of the coldest regularity, was most bewildering, partially obscured as it was by the flying billets of wood; the mechanical attempts of Miss Gould to rise from the soap-box, invariably checked by a fierce brandishing of the stick just taken from the lessening pile, were at once startling and fascinating, inasmuch as she was methodically waved ...
— A Philanthropist • Josephine Daskam
... her wrist, full of fine pure blood,—gauged herself coolly, her lease of life, her power of endurance,—measured it out against the work waiting for her. The work would be long, she knew. She would be old before it was finished, quite an old woman, hard, mechanical, worn out. But the day would be so bright, when it came, it would atone for all: the day would be bright, the home warm again; it would hold all that life ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... presentation of the life of Christ, or a formal directory of moral conduct. The data are supplied, but these data require to be interpreted and unified so as to form a system of Ethics. The authority to which Christian Ethics appeals is not an external oracle which imposes its dictates in a mechanical way. It is an authority embodied in intelligible forms, and appealing to the rational faculties of man. Christian Ethics, though deduced from scripture, is not a cut and dry code of rules prescribed by God which man must blindly ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... Godwin's Political Justice; but it is not beyond the mark to affirm that after his time such abstract systems were on the defensive. Therein, with all his faults, he had given Burke the clue to those truths he so profoundly saw—the sense of the State as more than a mechanical contrivance, the high regard for prescription, the sense of law as the voice of past wisdom. He was, said Burke, "the greatest genius which has enlightened this age"; and Burke had every reason to utter that noble panegyric. But Montesquieu ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... the first few nights which had succeeded her husband's death. But since the inquest she had no longer been haunted by that scene—the double scene of the hands, the pretty little hands, engaged in that simple, almost mechanical, action of pouring the contents of one bottle into another, and the vision of the man on the wall looking down, slantwise, through the window, and uttering that queer, long-drawn-out whistle of ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... to birds, lo! an astounding thing has happened. That there were flying reptiles in the fossil ages we know, and there are flying beasts in our own. But the wings of these are simple mechanical alterations, which the imagination of a child, ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... been formed for the purpose of studying conditions and introducing improved methods in preparing the soil and rotating crops. More of the food supply of the South is to be raised at home; better homes and farm buildings are being erected, and better machinery is being used. The invention of a mechanical cotton picker, which has been accomplished, should reduce materially the cost of ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... thorough breaking up of the food into the smallest particles, and insalivation means the mixing of the small particles with the saliva. The mechanical work is done with the jaws and tongue, and the chemical work is performed by the saliva. When the mechanical work is done thoroughly the chemical work is also thorough, and the test for thoroughness is loss of taste. Masticate the food until all taste has disappeared, and ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... idiotic as then, but still vaguely persistent in his thought, he remained for some moments in this attitude. Then rising and taking advantage of the moonlight that flooded the desk, he set himself to mend the broken lock with a large mechanical clasp-knife he produced from his pocket, and the aid of his workmanlike thumb and finger. Presently he began to whistle softly, at first a little artificially and with relapses of reflective silence. The lock of the desk restored, he secured into position again that part of the door-lock ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... the surest monuments of history, as well as muniments of individual distinction, there should be given to them, besides intrinsic value and durability of material, the utmost grace of design, with the highest finish in mechanical execution. All this is necessary to give the greater or adventitious value; as in the present instance, the medal is to be, at once, an historical record and a reward of distinguished merit. The credit of the donor thus becomes even ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... railways. She could trust to her superbly organised military system, more perfect than that of any other state, just because no other state has ever regarded war as the final aim and the highest form of state action. She commanded unequalled resources in all the mechanical apparatus of war; she had spared no pains to build up her armament works, which had, indeed, supplied a great part of the world; she had developed all the scientific industries in such a way that their factories could be rapidly ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... in connection with Art, be wonderfully improved, and to this in time came the consideration that the human Will, with all its mighty power and deep secrets, could be disciplined and directed, or controlled with as great care as the memory or the mechanical faculty. In a certain sense the three are one, and the reader who will take the pains, which are, I trust, not very great, to master the details of this book, will readily grasp it as a whole, and understand that its contents form a system of education, yet ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... only of her father. After hearing what Aubert told her, the malady of Master Zacharius took fantastic proportions in her mind; and it seemed to her as if his existence, so dear to her, having become purely mechanical, no longer moved on ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... Stuart's 'Anecdotes of the Steam Engine,' there has been no such bit of delicious mechanical gossip as this little book of Mr. Bernan.... For six months or more every year, we must depend much more on the resources of science and the practical arts for our health and comfort, than on the natural climate: in ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.11.17 • Various
... determined, and it can be considered as only relatively finished on any one side. Education is impossible to him who is born an idiot, since the want of the power of generalizing and of ideality of conscious personality leaves to such an unfortunate only the possibility of a mechanical training. ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... double entendre, Slawkenbergius's Tale; nothing to match that painfully elaborate piece of low comedy, the consultation of philosophers and its episode of Phutatorius's mishap with the hot chestnut; no such persistent resort, in short, to those mechanical methods of mirth-making upon which Sterne, throughout a great part of the fourth volume, almost exclusively relies. The humour of the fifth is, to a far larger extent, of the creative and dramatic order; the ever-delightful collision of intellectual incongruities in the persons of the two brothers ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... either he never knew or has forgotten. And there is something about it, about the nature of stated times, as about all things conventional and mechanical and precise, that peculiarly ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... doubtful aspects. The device is becoming so popular that it will probably prevail; and as it prevails, it may have the indirect beneficial result of diminishing the number of regular elections; but at bottom it is a clumsy and mechanical device for the selection of party candidates. It is merely one of the many means generated by American political practice for cheapening the ballot. The way to make votes important and effective is not to increase ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... of this the pirate captain, as might have been expected, performed a prominent part. His great physical strength enabled him to act with a degree of vigour that rendered his aid most valuable. He wrought with the energy of a huge mechanical power, and with a quick promptitude of perception and a ready change of action which is denied to mere, mechanism. He tore down the bulk-heads that rendered it difficult to get at the place where the fire was; he hurled bucket after bucket of ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... a great part of every one's life which is mechanical, instinctive, and all but involuntary. Habits and emotions and passing impulses very seldom come into men's consciousness, and an enormously large proportion of everybody's life is done with the minimum of attention, and is as little ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... for breathing and composing the features to secure artistic effects; they offer academic prizes for every conceivable achievement; their very lamp-posts are designed with taste; a huckster in the street will exhibit dramatic tact and wonderful mechanical dexterity. "Quand il parat un homme de gnie en France," says Madame de Stal, "dans quelque carrire que ce soit, il atteint presque toujours un degr de perfection sans exemple; car il runit l'audace qui fait sortir de la route commune au tact du bon got." And yet in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... (Vom Granite des Riesengebirges, 1813.) and the diabases and amygdaloids in the transition mountains, shall have been carefully studied; when the texture of the masses shall have been subjected to a kind of mechanical analysis, and the hornblendes better distinguished from the pyroxenes,* (* The grunsteins or diabases of the Fichtelgebirge, in Franconia, which belong to the transition-slate, sometimes contain pyroxenes.) and the grunsteins from the dolerites; a great number ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... as she could gain the back stair, she gathered up her heavy white silk and dashed up, rushing along the gallery so blinded by tears under her veil that she would have had a collision if a hand had not been put out as some one drew aside to let her fly past if she wished; but as the mechanical "beg pardon" was exchanged, she knew Fordham's voice and paused. "I was going to look after the wounded Friar," he said, and then he saw her tearful eyes, and she exclaimed, "I could not help it! I could not stay. You would say such things. ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... upon the derivation of our whole knowledge from 'ideas,' leaves reality to the 'primary qualities' without clearly expounding their relation to the secondary. But Berkeley, alarmed by the tendency of the Cartesian doctrines to materialism and mechanical necessity, reduces the 'primary' to the level of the 'secondary,' and proceeds to abolish the whole world of matter. We are thus left with nothing but 'ideas,' and the ideas are naturally 'subjective' and therefore ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... the mind, though pre-eminently palatable, must have tended to be somewhat thin. The elaborate instruction in mythological erudition was devoid of religious value; and indeed of any value, save the training of a purely mechanical memory. Attention was called too much to the form, too little to the substance. Style has its value, but it is after all only a secondary consideration in education. The effect upon literature of this poetical ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... and thus we have the startling fact that, in spite of their efforts at church extension, they had not gained four hundred members in thirty-three years. For this slowness, however, the reasons were purely mechanical; and all the obstacles sprang from the Brethren's connection ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... paper by and large, I was vastly pleased with it. Little crudities of a mechanical sort were observable here and there, but there were not enough of them to amount to anything, and it was good enough Arkansas proof-reading, anyhow, and better than was needed in Arthur's day and realm. As a rule, the grammar was leaky and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... orphan girl snatched from the influences of the poorhouse. Where a specially strong arm was required, the curate himself was at all times to be relied upon. He was not only a hewer of wood, but often a bearer of wood as well as of water. He was, too, an embodied guild of all mechanical trades, and might have been warranted to use skilfully at a pinch ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... There is no intellectual life, no change of day and day. The years have silently buried themselves, with no crown of happy memories. She left her merry home at the Alameda shore of the great bay to be the lonely lady of this distant domain. Her narrow nature has settled into imitative and mechanical devotion, a sad, ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... French guide, while he pointed out all these mechanical marvels of the garden, was anxious to let me see that he had too polite a taste to be pleased with them. At every new knick-knack he would screw down his mouth, shrug up his shoulders, take a pinch of snuff, and exclaim: "Ma foi, Monsieur, ces Hollandais sont ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... of the surroundings, and it grew to irritate him, for the Frenchman's mental wanderings increased with the darkness. What made him rouse one with his awful laughter? These spells of walking insensibility were pleasanter far. At last the big man fell. To Willard's mechanical endeavours to help he spoke sleepily, but with the sanity of a man under ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... Yabsley passed the hot iron over the white fronts. The small black iron ran swiftly over the clean surface, leaving a smooth, shining track behind it. And he watched, with an idler's pleasure, the swift, mechanical movements. ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... new liberties, and new movements. Milton, it need hardly be said, is the master of those who know how to place and displace the stress and accent of the English heroic line in epic poetry. His most majestic hand undid the mechanical bonds of the national line and made it obey the unwritten laws of his genius. His blank verse marches, pauses, lingers, and charges. It feels the strain, it yields, it resists; it is all-expressive. But ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... at his animation, and at the firmness he appeared to possess, and after having well discussed with him all the inconveniences of my plan, and their remedy, we came at last to a very important matter, the mechanical means, so to speak, by which that plan was to be put in force. There was one thing to be provided for, which may appear an exceedingly insignificant matter, but which in truth was of no light importance. When a Bed of justice is held, seats one above another must be provided for those ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Great Britain. They complain not only that the Americans have brought into use a number of new words—the difference and the distance between the two countries might suffice to explain that much—but that these new words are more especially taken from the jargon of parties, the mechanical arts, or the language of trade. They assert, in addition to this, that old English words are often used by the Americans in new acceptations; and lastly, that the inhabitants of the United States frequently ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... New-Thoughtists say. But he had an inquiring mind and a proper will to succeed. While serving his three years in the shop he bought a course in a correspondence school and studied nights, taking up, among other things, the subject of mechanical drafting. When twenty-two years of age he applied for, and got, a position as draftsman in a small company developing a motorcycle. He was ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... the preceding volumes of this series, know, Jack Chadwick and Tom Jesson, his cousin, had won the titles of Boy Inventors through their ingenuity and mechanical genius. Jack's father, Chester Chadwick, was an inventor of note, and unlike the majority of inventors, he had turned his devices to such good account that he had accumulated a substantial fortune and was able to maintain a fine estate, already referred to as High Towers ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... founded by the king of Spain, have considerably distinguished themselves, but without leaving the beaten track pursued by their forefathers; they chiefly display great aptitude in the arts of imitation; and in the purely mechanical arts. ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... merely mechanical organization such as the American statesman seems to have had in mind, formed by parliamentary politicians deliberating in secret, could bind nations and peoples together in moral fellowship, is conceivable ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... went one of those ingenious mechanical contrivances familiarly in vogue at fairs, which are designed to impress upon the victim to whom they are applied, the pleasing conviction that his garment is rent ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which I had vainly applied at Cairo, would doubtless discover the prime necessary in the Wadys, many of the latter being still damp and muddy. Moreover, the crible continue grilles filtrantes, the invention of MM. Huet and Geyler, introduced, we are told, into the mechanical treatment of metals, a principle which greatly economizes fluid. Founded upon the fact that sands of nearly the same size, but of different densities, when mixed in liquid and subjected to rapid vertical oscillation, range themselves by order of weight, the heavier sinking and not allowing ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... difference between the peaceable and the predatory phase of culture, therefore, is a spiritual difference, not a mechanical one. The change in spiritual attitude is the outgrowth of a change in the material facts of the life of the group, and it comes on gradually as the material circumstances favourable to a predatory attitude supervene. The inferior limit of the predatory culture is an industrial limit. Predation ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... for all kinds of special and mechanical duty men; schools to teach gas-defense; buzzer schools; telephone schools; smoke-bomb and hand-grenade courses; and map-reading and sketching schools. Sergeant Earl H. Schleppy, of Hazleton, Penna., who assisted ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... tall and gracefully commanding height which became the English ideal in the last quarter of the century—her portrait appears on every page illustrated by Du Manner. She had a brilliant complexion, a perfect profile; her smile, though perhaps a little mechanical, was the last expression of immutable sweetness, of impeccable self-control; her voice never slipped from the just note of unexaggerated suavity. Consummate as an ornament of the drawing-room, she would ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... a mechanical politeness, curiously at variance with his face and speech, he lifted his hat to the doctor as he turned back to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... he lived in the toy cupboard or on the nursery floor, and no one thought very much about him. He was naturally shy, and being only made of velveteen, some of the more expensive toys quite snubbed him. The mechanical toys were very superior, and looked down upon every one else; they were full of modern ideas, and pretended they were real. The model boat, who had lived through two seasons and lost most of his paint, caught the tone from them ...
— The Velveteen Rabbit • Margery Williams
... appeals to something behind the sense, in the higher grades of acting, the Paris shows were, on the whole, better than Broadway shows. But in the choruses, the dancers lack that finish, that top dressing of mechanical unison required by American taste. Moreover the lighting and colour were poor. The music at the Follies was Victor Herbert of 1911! Old American popular songs seemed to be in vogue. One heard "O Johnny" and "Over There" at every vaudeville house ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... Outside in the May evening it was as black, as softly deep, as plushy as a pansy. She walked swiftly into it as if with destination. But after five or six of the long cross-town blocks her feet began to lag. She stood for a protracted moment outside a drug-store window, watching the mechanical process of a pasteboard man stropping his razor; loitered to read the violent three-sheet outside a Third Avenue cinematograph. In the aura of white light a figure in a sweater and cap nudged up ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... advice, or have you begun to act upon it? Are you contented only with the slow process of mechanical application, or will you make a triumphant effort to abridge your apprenticeship and emerge at once into fame and power? I repeat that you fritter away your talents and your opportunities upon this miserable task-work on a journal. I am ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Perhaps the forefathers of one-fourth of our Anglo-Saxon thegns held the plough, or followed some craft mechanical." ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... metal being pressed on to a wooden carving prepared for the purpose, so that the result would be a raised silver pattern, which, when filled up with pitch or lead, would pass for a sample of repousse work. I need hardly say that a still simpler mechanical form of pressing obtains on cheap ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... standing motionless near the threshold. My guide touched it twice with his staff, and it put itself into a rapid and gliding movement, skimming noiselessly over the floor. Gazing on it, I then saw that it was no living form, but a mechanical automaton. It might be two minutes after it vanished through a doorless opening, half screened by curtains at the other end of the hall, when through the same opening advanced a boy of about twelve years old, with features closely ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... grew into the boy's life and he would rather have owned it than the mechanical steamboat with real brass cannon for which he prayed to God so often, so earnestly, and with such faith. On his seventh birthday he preferred a curious request, which ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... from the palm-oil people began, I would be all right; but until I could touch my salary I had to sail mighty close to the wind. For pretty much all of my capital consisted of my headful of knowledge of the theory and practice of mechanical engineering which had brought me out first of my class at the Stevens Institute—and in that way had got me the offer from the palm-oil people—and because of which I thought that there wasn't anybody quite my equal anywhere as a mechanical engineer. And that was only natural, I suppose, since ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... them, may perhaps admit of explanation, by some process analogous to what takes place in the preparation of the compound of which the ordinary earthenware is manufactured; where, though the ingredients are divided by mechanical attrition only, a sort of chemical action produces, under certain circumstances, a new arrangement of the parts.* And this explanation may, probably, be extended to those nodular concretions, generally considered ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... saloon, passed through the library and the dining-room, and arrived forward, in the machine-room, where the electrical apparatus was established, which supplied not only heat and light but the mechanical power of the Nautilus. ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... man arose and commenced to hitch around the stove with stiff joints, like a mechanical figure. The company broke into a wild chant in a minor key, commencing on a high note and descending the whole gamut, with strange pauses, lifts ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... a breakfast was not borne in upon him with sufficient force to prevent his thinking of something else. Although it was very cold he did not notice the weather, so he did not walk fast. His progress was a mechanical movement, for in fancy he was in Leipsic again, walking down the August Platz. It was a pleasant day dream, one from which Von Barwig did not like to awaken himself. He pictured to himself the joy, the happiness ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... two- or three-roomed flats, and bought good furniture. They demanded more from life, but everything had become dearer, and they still lived from hand to mouth. He could see that the social development had not kept pace with the mechanical; the machines wedged themselves quietly but inexorably in between the workmen and the work, and threw more and more men out of employment. The hours of labor were not greatly shortened. Society did not seem to care to protect the workers, but it ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... proportions. These experiments were made in a large building which was especially built for this object. It contained every facility for his various new designs, and in it he anticipated many advances in electrical science and in mechanical devices, which have made the civilization of our day so remarkable. I recall distinctly as a boy his ingenious approximation to the telephone, and even the recent advances in wireless telegraphy, which has been ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... objects in plaster of Paris were attempted, and finally copies of the human head and figure posed in suspended animation and supported by blocks, &c. In so far as this was accurately done, all this mechanical training of eye and hand was excellent; but it was not enough. And when with an eye trained to the closest mechanical accuracy the author visited the galleries of the Continent and studied the drawings of the old masters, it soon became apparent that either his or their ideas ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... looking to me for light and help, knowing how much I need both myself.... Every now and then some Providential event occurs that wakes us up, and we find that we have been asleep and dreaming, and that what we have been doing that made us fancy ourselves awake, was mechanical. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... saw, would understand. And, if the customer was an observant man, he would notice that her replies at that juncture became somewhat absent, her smile a little mechanical. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... consciousness of a community until it has assumed some external and concrete embodiment, or is recommended by some striking material evidence. In the case of Progress both these conditions were fulfilled (in England) in the period 1820-1850." The most striking evidence was furnished by the mechanical revolution. "Men who were born at the beginning of the century had seen, before they had passed the age of thirty, the rapid development of steam navigation, the illumination of towns and houses by gas, the opening ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... divine gift of the Union. If it does thus value it, it will use diligently and carefully all the abundant resources which lie around it and within it, like an atmosphere—wealth, population, energy, intelligence, mechanical ingenuity, scientific skill, and all the needed materiel of warfare. It is rich in all this, far more so than the South. All this, Providence lays at the feet of the nation. It can do no more. The ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... went to the station with them, and absent-mindedly kissed Jarvis good-bye, which infuriated his victim and nearly sent Bambi into hysterics. As the train pulled out, she leaned from the window and called, "Go home, now, Professor!" and with a mechanical jerk he turned and started off in ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... my eyes off the abyss and fixed on the opposing hill, and as the long curve before me was diminished by successive sharp advances, still my heart was caught half-way in every breath, and whatever it is that moves a man went uncertainly within me, mechanical and half-paralysed. The great height with that narrow unprotected ribbon across it was more than I ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... for every community, the goodness of its products and not the richness of its markets. I would put the world's premium upon fine workmanship of the hand or brain or spirit; and a stiff pressure upon the multiplication of these products by mechanical means, for we have too many common things, and so few fine things. I would inculcate in the educational ideal, first of all, that in every man there is a dream, just as there is a soul, and that to express the dream of the soul in matter is the perfect individual performance. I would impress ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... Europe can not produce parallels to Oxford and Cambridge in opulence, buildings, libraries, professorships, scholarships, and all the external dignity and mechanical apparatus of learning. If there is an inferiority, it is in the persons, not in the places or their constitution. And here I can not help confessing that a desire to please the great, and bring them to the universities, causes a compliance with fashionable manners, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... detail, the most beneficial results cannot be expected without unity of design. Between that kind of cultivation and discipline necessary as a foundation for professional eminence, and that which is required for success in mercantile, mechanical, or agricultural occupation, there is a very natural and obvious distinction. And not only is it desirable that they who will be successful mainly as they shall be conversant with books, who require to ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... zero temperature something would go wrong with the pump valve or the piston leather would wear out, or in a new well the quicksand would work in. Neither myself, foreman nor boy was an expert or had any mechanical knowledge; though continued troubles, much hard work, accompanied by, alas! harder language, was a capital apprenticeship. In bitter cold freezing weather I well remember we once had to pull out the rods and the piping three times in succession before we got the ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... historical account of the organ, is confident that the instrument in use in 1831 was the original pre-Reformation organ, gradually enlarged from time to time with "all the improvements suggested by the progress of musical and mechanical art." Its preservation during the Commonwealth period is possibly due to the personal influence of Oliver Cromwell. About that date (1831) the organ was rebuilt by Elliott and Hill. It was fitted into the old cases, of Renaissance ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... the commissaire, whose face appeared to lose all flexibility of expression the moment the discovery was made, presenting now merely the stern, impassible, mechanical look of an officer on duty, 'these are the identical articles for which I have been searching for the last three days. Will you be good enough to change your dress as quickly as possible, and prepare to accompany me to the office of M. Morelle, magistrate ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... his preponderating reasons was that, although he felt himself competent to the higher duties of the office, there was, for what he conceived "a proper management of the Treasury, a necessity for a mass of mechanical labor connected with details, forms, calculating, etc., which having lost sight of the thread and routine, he could not think of again learning and going through." He was aware that there was "much confusion due to the changes of office and the state of the currency, and thought that ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... once more—half a penknife, a bunch of keys, but not a farthing. Suddenly I dive into my pocket and take the papers out again. It was a mechanical movement, an unconscious nervous twitch. I selected a white unwritten page, and—God knows where I got the notion from—but I made a cornet, closed it carefully, so that it looked as if it were filled with something, and threw it far out on to the pavement. The breeze ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... his head: it was impossible; and he looked again at the dark shore that they were passing, at the shimmering sea, and then at the bronzed backs of the warriors as they paddled on in their drowsy, mechanical way. ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... said to the mockers in a wavering voice, "I will now present to you the concluding item of my entertainment. I will cause this lady to disappear under your very eyes, without the aid of any mechanical contrivance or artificial device." This was the merest showman's patter, for, as a matter of fact, it was not a very wonderful illusion. But as he led his wife forward to present her to the audience the conjurer was wondering whether the ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... his conclusions in twenty-seven propositions, of which the substance is as follows:— There is a reciprocal action and reaction between the planets, the earth and animate nature by means of a constant universal fluid, subject to mechanical laws yet unknown. The animal body is directly affected by the insinuation of this agent into the substance of the nerves. It causes in human bodies properties analogous to those of the magnet, for which reason it is called 'Animal Magnetism'. This magnetism may be communicated ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
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