"Amorphous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of clothes. . . . If certain ermines or furs be placed in a certain position, we style them a judge; and so an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a bishop." In Sartor Resartus Carlyle let himself go. It was willful, uncouth, amorphous, titanic. There was something monstrous in the combination, the hot heart of the Scot married to the transcendental dream of Germany. It was not English, said the reviewers; it was not sense; it was disfigured by obscurity and "mysticism." Nevertheless even the thin-witted and the dry-witted ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the reader's mind. Impressive epithets and phrases abound. His metaphors are frequent and forceful. Mirabeau's face is pictured as "rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled." In describing Daniel Webster, Carlyle speaks of "the tanned complexion, that amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown, the mastiff-mouth, accurately closed." He formed many new compound words after the German fashion, such ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... there exists a marked distinction between those stratified rocks whose beds are amorphous and without subdivision, as many limestones and sandstones, and those which are divided by lines of lamination, as all slates. The last kind of rock is the more frequent in nature, and forms the greater part of all hill scenery; it has, however, been successfully ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... as his repasts. A black doublet, which descended to his knees; large and long breeches; an old patched black cloak; an amorphous hat, very much worn, and the edges ragged; a large neckcloth of coarse cloth, begrimed with snuff; a dirty shirt, which he always wore as long as it lasted, and which the broken elbows of his doublet did not conceal; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... other worlds, or from their deserts—also from aerial regions too indefinite or amorphous to be thought ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... a flood of disease germs that have invaded a body, that paper. There I was, one corpuscle in the big amorphous body of the English community, one of forty-one million such corpuscles and, for all my preoccupations, these potent headlines, this paper ferment, caught me and swung me about. And all over the country that day, millions read as I read, and came round ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... was of vital import for their constitutional development. The Leicestrian period, despite its record of incompetence and failure, had however the distinction of being the period which for good or for evil gave birth to the republic of the United Netherlands, as we know it in history. The curious, amorphous, hydra-headed system of government, which was to subsist for some two centuries, was in its origin the direct result of the confused welter of conflicting forces, which was the legacy of Leicester's rule. ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... four miles further brought us to the foot of Mount Narryer, which we ascended, and procured a valuable round of angles from its summit. This hill has an altitude of 1,688 feet above the sea, and is formed by the eruption of a coarse dark-coloured crystalline trap through a base of amorphous sandstone, the direction of the range of which it forms a part being nearly north and south. Skirting round the north end of this range, we struck east over a stony plain, thinly grassed amongst open wattles, and at five miles again came upon the Murchison some time ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... two kitchen chairs with the straw seats almost gone. The extremely picturesque costume of the centenarian pauper was hanging from a nail, and below it, on the floor, were the shapeless mat-weed coverings that served him for shoes, the whole forming, with his amorphous old hat and knotty stick, a sort ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... mother lye from chinamine is evaporated down and protractedly exhausted with boiling ligroine, whereby conchinamine and a small quantity of certain amorphous bases are dissolved out. Upon cooling the greater part of the amorphous bases precipitates out. The ligroine solution is then first treated with dilute acetic acid, and then with a dilute solution of caustic soda, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... conception of God through human history is presented with skill in concision. He was man-like at first, then an amorphous cloud, then endowed with mighty wings, then jealous, fierce, yet long-suffering and ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... in front of her. Thereupon the tall lady untied the shawl which enveloped the head of the little one, and unbuttoned the cloak which hid her form; until, by the time that the footmen had taken charge of these articles and removed the fur boots, there stood forth from the amorphous chrysalis a charming girl of twelve, dressed in a short muslin frock, white pantaloons, and smart black satin shoes. Around her, white neck she wore a narrow black velvet ribbon, while her head was covered with flaxen curls ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... may show strong signs of "petering out." The ore may present visible metallurgical difficulties which make it unprofitable in any event. A gold ore may contain copper or arsenic, so as to debar cyanidation, where this process is the only hope of sufficiently moderate costs. A lead ore may be an amorphous compound with zinc, and successful concentration or smelting without great penalties may be precluded. A copper ore may carry a great excess of silica and be at the same time unconcentratable, and there may be no base ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... not sure of his substance, though he could evidently experience human sensations with his amorphous body. He did not know whether he could see; yet, he was dodging this way and that, as the beings who occupied this world ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... foraging columns. Again and again came to mind the comparison of the entire colony or army with a single organism; and now the home, the nesting swarm, the focus of central control, seemed like the body of this strange amorphous organism—housing the spirit of the army. One thinks of a column of foragers as a tendril with only the tip sensitive and growing and moving, while the corpuscle-like individual ants are driven in the current of blind instinct to and fro, on their chemical errands. And then this ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... late. This is how you become smart all at once in your New York atmosphere! But pray be seated; and here are cigarettes, if you will. No? Very well; but tell me; has that amorphous gill-slit—oh, no, the branchial lamella—has it behaved itself and proved to be the avenue which shall ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... very distinct from this; there are no shafts or bolts, but a steady blaze which fills the whole firmament with a white quivering light, lasting many seconds of time, and followed by long intervals of amorphous darkness. Such lightning is rarely accompanied by thunder, and rain is not always its concomitant, though it was this sort we now witnessed, and rain-drops ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... who was enjoying his afternoon's holiday at the piano, in the drawing-room, picking out tunes for himself and singing them. He was supremely happy, perched like an amorphous bundle on the high stool, with his head thrown back, his eyes fixed on the opposite cornice, and his lips wide open, sending forth, with all his might, impromptu syllables to a tune of Arne's which had ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... emotional. Carroll works by the pure reason, but this is not so strong a contrast; for, after all, mankind in the main has always regarded reason as a bit of a joke. Lear introduces his unmeaning words and his amorphous creatures not with the pomp of reason, but with the romantic prelude of rich ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... the pre-war Peggy, with her cut-and-dried little social ambitions and her definite projects of attainment; but in another she was not. The pre-war Peggy had swiftly turned into the patriotic English girl who had hounded him into the army. He found himself face to face with an amorphous, characterless sort of Peggy whom he did not know. It was perplexing, baffling. Before he could formulate ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... block of marble which resists every effort. When a sentiment or an idea, having in itself a reason for existence, slips into the crowd, its members soon crystallize and form a sect. The sect is then the first crystallization of every doctrine. From the confused and amorphous state in which it manifests itself to the crowd, every idea is predestined to define itself in the more specific form of the sect, to become later a party, a school, or a church—scientific, political, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... me a touching glance,—or rather, a glance which her amorphous features meant to make touching,—and, waving musk from her handkerchief ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... amorphous figure of a man emerged sidewise from the staircase of the National Bank Building. He looked back up the stairs, shot a glance up and down the street, then he moved like a blur around the corner into the darkening shadows. This was a habit he ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... prose was still undeveloped. Yet we do find in Lodge certain qualities of style that show clearly an advance over the formlessness of some of the stories that had preceded. Though the sentence and paragraph structure is loose and amorphous, the transitions from one subject to another are almost invariably well made, or at least are clearly marked. Phrases such as, "But leaving him so desirous of the journey, to Torismond"[1]; "Leaving her to her new entertained ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... soul of a poem lies not in words but in meaning; and if the author have any skill at all in recording thought through language, he will be able to refine the uncouth mass of spontaneous verbiage which first comes to him as representing his idea, but which in its original amorphous state may fail entirely to suggest the same idea to another brain. He will be able to preserve and perpetuate his idea in a style of language which the world may understand, and in a rhythm which may not offend the reader's sense of propriety with ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... in his condition such folly, however absurd to a man of George Bascombe's endowments, might of the more gifted ephemeros be pardoned if not pitied. Nor will I assert that he was altogether unaware of any admixture of the sad with the ludicrous when he saw the amorphous agglomerate of human shreds and patches kneeling by the bedside of the dying murderer, to pray some comfort into his passing soul. But his "gorge rose at the nonsense and stuff of it," while through Helen ran a cold shudder of disgust at the familiarity and irreverence of the ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... 'Chanticleer'" volume 2 page 319) beds of gypsum and salt, as much as two feet in thickness, left by the evaporation of the spray on the rocks on the windward coast. Beautiful stalactites of selenite, resembling in form those of carbonate of lime, are formed near these beds. Amorphous masses of gypsum, also, occur in caverns in the interior of the island; and at Cross Hill (an old crater) I saw a considerable quantity of salt oozing from a pile of scoriae. In these latter cases, the salt and gypsum appear ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... lava. The shape of the block is a saddleback, and the lay is west-east, curving round to the south. The formation is of the coarse grey granite general throughout the Province, and it is dyked and sliced by quartz veins of the amorphous type, crystals being everywhere rare in Midian (?) The filons and filets, varying in thickness from eight metres to a few lines, are so numerous that the whole surface appears to be quartz tarnished by atmospheric corrosion to a dull, pale-grey yellow; while the fracture, sharp and cutting as glass ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... zemstvos. But there are in the Soviet incomparably more serious, more profound guarantees of the direct and immediate relation between the deputy and the electors. A town-duma or zemstvo member is supported by the amorphous mass of electors, which entrusts its full powers to him for a year and then breaks up. The Soviet electors remain always united by the conditions of their work and their existence; the deputy is ever before their eyes, at any moment they can prepare a mandate to him, ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... water sufficient to make a fluid paste of them, squeeze out the mixture, filter the liquid obtained, and this liquid will contain the cerealine sufficiently pure to be studied in its effects. Its principal properties are: The liquid evaporated at a low temperature produces an amorphous, rough mass nearly colorless, and almost entirely soluble in distilled water; this solution coagulates between 158 deg. and 167 deg. Fah., and the coagulum is insoluble in acids and weak alkalies; the solution is precipitated by all diluted acids, by phosphoric ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... that the Hinduism of to-day is not the Brahmanism of thirty centuries ago. It has been the passion of that faith, from the beginning, to absorb all cults and faiths that have come into contact with it. Hinduism is an amorphous thing; it has been compared to a many-coloured and many-fibred cloth, in which are mixed together Brahmanism, Buddhism, Demonolatry, and Christianity. And all these, utterly regardless of the many contradictions which they bring together, form ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... horizon is yet lost in the dusk; the false dawn is spreading the figments of its illusion; the trees in the distance seem like rain-clouds; and the amorphous shadows of the monasteries on the mountain heights and hilltops all around, have not yet developed into silhouettes. Everything, except the river in the wadi below, is yet asleep. Not even the swallows are astir. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... identical horns, for had he not gone lovingly over every tine of them?—but was this rag of a thing all that was left of the splendid stag he had beheld lying on the heather? However, Mr. Macleay speedily reassured him. He was shown the various processes and stages of the taxidermist's art, the amorphous mass of skin and hair gradually taking shape and substance until it stood forth in all its glory of flaming eye and proud nostril and branching antlers; and he was highly pleased to be told that this head he had got ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... fight to a finish and a good licking for the Boers. Of this larger faction Val Dartie was naturally a member. Radical youth, on the other hand, a small but perhaps more vocal body, was for stopping the war and giving the Boers autonomy. Until Black Week, however, the groups were amorphous, without sharp edges, and argument remained but academic. Jolly was one of those who knew not where he stood. A streak of his grandfather old Jolyon's love of justice prevented, him from seeing one side only. Moreover, in his set of 'the best' there was a 'jumping-Jesus' ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... at the totality of beings we perceive a progressive series of forms expressing a parallel series of qualities and states of consciousness. The portion of this scale we are able to compass extends from the amorphous state[42]—which represents the minimum of consciousness—up to those organic complexities which have allowed of a terrestrial expression being given to the soul of the Saviours of the world. In this glorious hierarchy each ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... valuable instruction from the lips of a man who occupies the post of honor in the chief educational institute of the State; but were regaled with a cataclysm of misinformation, precipitated from an amorphous mind, which seemed to be a compromise between Milton's unimaginable chaos and that "land of darkness, as darkness itself, and where the light was as darkness." That such an address could proceed from the president of ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... amorphous are also found in a particular stratum of dolomite at Bullatotte and Badulla, in which there is a peculiar copper-coloured mica with metallic lustre. Star rubies, the "asteria" of Pliny (so called from their containing a movable six-rayed star), are to be had at Ratnapoora ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... also found, but these are not regarded as essential to the life and growth of plants. They appear to be present because the plant has not the power to reject them. Many of the substances named above, are found deposited either in an amorphous or crystalline form in the substance of the cell wall. In addition to this, crystals of mineral matter, having various shapes and sizes, are often found in the interior of cells. The most common of these interior cell crystals are those composed of calcium oxalate and calcium carbonate. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... This startling discovery was afterwards verified by Professors Friedel and Moissan, who found that the Canyon Diablo Meteorite contained the three varieties of carbon—diamond (transparent and black), graphite and amorphous carbon. Since this revelation the search for diamonds in meteorites has occupied the attention of ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... they grow indefinably shabby, and will grow shabbier until they cease to count at all, when my books will either perish, or, if the world is still poor enough to want them, will have to stand, with Bunyan's, by quite amorphous qualities of temper and energy. With this conviction I cannot be a bellettrist. No doubt I must recognize, as even the Ancient Mariner did, that I must tell my story entertainingly if I am to hold the wedding guest spellbound ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... is too well known to require description. The grains of quartz sand are either sharp cornered or else rounded pieces of stone of quartz, occasionally mixed with grains of other amorphous pieces of silica—such as horn stone, silicious slate, carnelian, etc.; again, with lustrous pieces of mica, or red and white pieces of feldspar. The gravel used for a tar paper roof must be of a special nature and be prepared for the purpose. The size of its grains ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... that he was a handsome boy, for youth is amorphous and the promise of today is not always fulfilled by the morrow. Jerry's features were unformed at ten and, as has already been suggested, made no distinct impression upon my mind. Whatever his early photographs ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... years following, the best that the working class could do in the way of organization was to produce the craft union movement, which, notwithstanding all its failings, was an advance in liveability at least, over the amorphous and confused Knights of Labor. But now, the working class, grown stronger, more experienced and more ideologically developed, has given birth to the C.I.O. movement, with its industrial unionism, trade union democracy, organized political action and generally advanced conception of the workers' ...
— Labor's Martyrs • Vito Marcantonio
... Tewkesbury—to find such magnificence, durability, and vastness, impresses one with a nightmare sense that the old lioness of Empire can scarcely yet be dead. Standing before the colossal, towering, amorphous precipice which formed the background of the scena, we feel as if once more the 'heart-shaking sound of Consul Romanus' might be heard; as if Roman knights and deputies, arisen from the dead, with faces hard and stern ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Gerhardt [Footnote: Liebig's Ann, 1853, 87, 159.] and Loewe [Footnote: Jahresh. f. Chem., 1868, 559.] must be especially noted; they treated gallic acid with phosphorus oxychloride or arsenic acid, and thereby obtained amorphous compounds, exhibiting the reactions characteristic of tanning substances. E. Fischer and Freudenberg, [Footnote: Liebig's Ann., 372, 45.] by treating p-hydroxybenzoic acid in the same way, succeeded in obtaining a didepside, and during the last years practically only these ...
— Synthetic Tannins • Georg Grasser
... able and kindly critic told me that this amorphous first attempt at fiction had flesh and blood but no bones, and I have learned since that in writing a work of imagination as in much more serious enterprises, the first essential is to be aware of your own purpose. ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... worthlessness of rest in that unresting vehicle. Although it was chill, I was obliged to open my window, for the degradation of the air soon became intolerable to one who was awake and using the full supply of life. Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the black, amorphous hills shoot by unweariedly into our wake. They that long for morning have never longed for it more earnestly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... listened. In five minutes Ralston was talking to Paul. Even now, in this strange review of the things that had helped or daunted him in all his days, the self-exiled Solitary, perched alone in his eyrie in the Rocky Mountains, encompassed by amorphous smoke-cloud, whilst the unseen river gnashed on its rocky teeth and howled—even now he felt the controlling magic of the voice and manner, even now he felt the triumph which sprang from the knowledge that this man chose him ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... Lustrous, yellow-brown, amorphous tannin, having the chemical composition C76H52O46. Derived from the bark and fruit of many plants; used as an astringent [contracts the tissues ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... pass the old store-house. It loomed a black, amorphous pile heaved up against the stars, and the man's footsteps dragged as he came to the gaping gates ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... mood," mysticism seems reduced to an emotional development on all fours with emotional development in other directions. It is not peculiar to religious minds because "it has no specific intellectual content." It is amorphous, so to speak. And it may form diverse 'matrimonial alliances' precisely because it does not point to a hidden world of reality, but is merely indicative of tense emotional moods. In the face of nature ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... that town histories, though seldom written in a philosophical spirit and apt to be quite amorphous in structure, are a mine of wealth for the ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... is as much puzzled in his choice as an untravelled Cockney with a Parisian bill of fare. The making of the flaked cocoa is peculiarly interesting, and is, we were informed, peculiar to this establishment. To see how the amorphous mass comes from the mill in long curling ribbons, uniform in thickness and texture, is a sight that provokes astonishment, as much by the rapidity of the operation as by the ease with which it appears to be accomplished, but which has only been arrived at ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... than that. Like the systole and diastole of a slowly beating pulse, the word kept on forming in his mind and welling away in a tide of confused and amorphous scenes; and forming again; and again oozing in presentments of speculations, scenes, surmises, and in profound disturbances of strange emotions. War.... And there kept appearing the face of Otway with the little points of perspiration about his nose. Otway ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... recent, the protagonist of chaos in these things happened to be that rigid but curiously amorphous power which Prussia has wielded for many years to no defined end. The protagonist upon the other side of the arena was that same Romanized Gaul which had ever since the fall of the Empire least lost the continuity with the ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... under the microscope, sliced and polished specimens of these concretions, and of the solid marl-rock, collected in various places between the Colorado and Santa Fe Bajada. In the greater number, Dr. Carpenter finds that the whole substance presents a tolerably uniform amorphous character, but with traces of incipient crystalline metamorphosis; in other specimens he finds microscopically minute rounded concretions of an amorphous substance (resembling in size those in oolitic rocks, but not having a concentric structure), ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... great city as this London, at least in its present amorphous, unorganised state, having grown up, and growing still, any how and any whither, by the accidental necessities of private commerce, private speculation, private luxury—is it not, I say, literally ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... I'm totally amorphous, Mrs. Brenton, a mere lump of old associations. It's good for Mr. Opdyke to have somebody ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... the observed rate of the growth of peat opposed to the conclusion that the number of centuries may not have been four times as great, even though the signs of Man's existence have not yet been traced down to the lowest or amorphous stratum. As to the "kitchen-middens," they correspond in date to the older portion of the peaty record, or to the earliest part of the age of stone as ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... interglobular spaces there is a substance which is called amorphous or structureless, and a filling to be in harmony with this substance should be amorphous or structureless in its composition. The only materials we have which meet these conditions are gutta-percha and tin. It is its structureless character that gives ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... are," she declared. "You've found them both." He mounted to the porch, and shook her extended hand, cushioned with fat, and oddly damp and lifeless. He could see her countenance now—it was plaster white with insignificant features and rose like an amorphous column from a swollen throat, a nose like a dab of putty, eyes obscured by ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... which touches human nature at most points of its circumference, which reinvigorates the consciousness of our own powers by recalling and confirming our own unvalued sensations and perceptions, gives classic shape to our own amorphous imaginings, and adequate utterance to our own stammering conceptions or emotions. The poet's office is to be a Voice, not of one crying in the wilderness to a knot of already magnetized acolytes, but singing amid the throng ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... as greenockite (q.v.), and can be artificially prepared by passing sulphuretted hydrogen through acid solutions of soluble cadmium salts, when it is precipitated as a pale yellow amorphous solid. It is used as a pigment (cadmium yellow), for it retains its colour in an atmosphere containing sulphuretted hydrogen; it melts at a white heat, and on cooling solidifies ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... this loomed another line of vast windmills, and then suddenly the amorphous tumult of the rotating wheels was pierced with a deafening sound. It was a mechanical shrilling of extraordinary intensity that seemed to come simultaneously from ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... pause to lapse without comment—save for an amorphous sort of conversation which he felt to be going on between his eyes and ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... quantity of being. Robust humor and lofty sentiment alternated so strangely in him, that sometimes he seemed like the natural son of Rabelais, and at others he rose up a very twin brother of the Stratford Seer. There was nothing in him amorphous and unconsidered. Whatever he chose to do was always perfectly done. There was a genuine Thackeray flavor in everything he was willing to say or to write. He detected with unfailing skill the good or the vile wherever it existed. He had an unerring eye, a firm understanding, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... Harrisson. If I introot, you shall say I introot." It is the Baron, manifestly. His form—or rather his bulk, for he cannot be said to have a form; he is amorphous—is baronial in the highest degree. His stupendous chest seems to be a huge cavern for the secretion of gutturals, which are discharged as heavy artillery at a hint ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... milk out of a saucer, while Fossette stood wistfully, an amorphous mass of thick ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... it was erected, its purpose, or the people who placed it there, seems as it were to be rescued from the heathen darkness in which it has dwelt, and to be admitted within the community of scientific truth, by being christened a monolith. If it be large and shapeless, it may take rank as an amorphous megalith; and it is on record that the owner of some muirland acres, finding them described in a learned work as "richly megalithic," became suddenly excited by hopes which were quickly extinguished ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... possessed of a most garrulous tendency, and talking indiscriminately with every one about her, careless what reception her addresses met with, and quite indifferent to the many rebuffs she momentarily encountered. To me by what impulse driven Heaven knows this amorphous piece of womanhood seemed determined to attach herself. Whether in the smoky and almost impenetrable recesses of the cabin, or braving the cold and penetrating rain upon deck, it mattered not, she was ever at my side, and not only martyring me by the insufferable annoyance of her ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... of the living protoplasm itself into a molecular mechanism. If there is any truth in the received doctrines of physics, that contrast between living and inert matter, on which Bichat lays so much stress, does not exist. In nature, nothing is at rest, nothing is amorphous; the simplest particle of that which men in their blindness are pleased to call "brute matter" is a vast aggregate of molecular mechanisms performing complicated movements of immense rapidity, and sensitively adjusting themselves to every change in the surrounding world. Living matter differs ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... the bark and isolated an amorphous resin of yellowish color and very bitter taste. It is soluble in alcohol, ether and chloroform, slightly soluble in sulphuret of carbon, insoluble in turpentine or benzin. He believes that it is the active principle of the root, and produces the anthelmintic action already mentioned: ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... soon walking swiftly down the main road of Beldover, a wide street, part shops, part dwelling-houses, utterly formless and sordid, without poverty. Gudrun, new from her life in Chelsea and Sussex, shrank cruelly from this amorphous ugliness of a small colliery town in the Midlands. Yet forward she went, through the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street. She was exposed to every stare, she passed on through ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... occupied a huge, amorphous house some three-quarters of a mile to the west of the campus. It was a construction in wood, with manifold "features" suggestive of the villa, the bungalow, the chateau, the palace; it united all tastes and contravened all conventions. In its upper story was the commodious apartment ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... might say to all the world, 'This is our Yankee Englishman; such limbs we make in Yankee land!' As a logic fencer, or parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight against all the extant world. The tanned complexion; that amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under the precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown; the mastiff mouth accurately closed; I have not traced so much of silent Berserkir rage that I remember of in any man. 'I guess I should not like to be your nigger!' Webster ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... above Jasperson, his proportions seemed even larger than usual. The little dandy in his smug black garments with his diamond stud gleaming in the ivy-bosomed shirt (his rings had been given to Miss Birdie), with his features wilting like the wild pansies in the lapel of his coat, dwindled to an amorphous streak beneath the keen glance of my ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... bottle and shook out what little powder, like finely ground glass, it contained. He greedily absorbed what there was and, petulantly exploring the empty container, flung it into the bushes. A nodding drowsiness overtook him, his head rolled forward, he sank slowly into a bowed amorphous heap. Harry Baggs roused him ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... a comparison. The judge knew the lad outside as the son of a leading merchant of the town. The merchant and his wife were both of old families which had lived in the community for several generations, and whose blood was presumably of the purest strain; yet the boy was sallow, with amorphous features, thin shanks, and stooping shoulders. The youth standing in the judge's office, on the contrary, was straight, shapely, and well-grown. His eye was clear, and he kept it fixed on the old gentleman with a look in which there was nothing of cringing. He ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Europeans," writes Sir Alfred Lyall regarding Hinduism, "can scarcely comprehend an ancient religion, still alive and powerful, which is a mere troubled sea without shore or visible horizon."[62] In these days of opportunist denunciation of creeds, the amorphous state of ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... Rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes. And fancy the most assiduous Potter, but without his wheel; reduced to make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by mere kneading and baking! Even such a Potter were Destiny, with a human soul that would rest and lie at ease, that would not work and spin! Of an idle unrevolving man the kindest Destiny, like the most assiduous Potter without wheel, can bake and knead nothing other ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... current. If the solution is very dilute we obtain no peroxide, or mere traces which disappear again toward the end of the process. The peroxide is deposited at first in small, dark, shining octahedral crystals; subsequently, in an amorphous state. At 110 deg. it evolves oxygen suddenly, and is converted into metallic silver. It dissolves in ammonia with a violent escape of nitrogen. In nitric acid it dissolves without decomposition and with ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... at a literary rather than a dramatic triumph. His chief models were literary dramas. 'Goetz von Berlichingen' had won its way into favor as a book for the reader. The dramatic works of Klinger, Lenz, Wagner and the like, were for the most part too extravagant and amorphous for representation, and Shakspere's day had ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... than chemical affinity. We know that the saliva contains a certain material called a ferment, which is the active agent in bringing about the change. This ferment is not alive, nor does it need any living environment for its action. It can be separated from the saliva in the form of a dry amorphous powder, and in this form can be preserved almost indefinitely, retaining its power to effect the change whenever put under proper conditions. The change of starch into sugar is thus a simple chemical change ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... indestructibility of matter, of gravitation, of the conservation of energy—are but counters of mind exchanged in default of elusive realities. They know that the pressure of research has reduced many of the lesser generalizations and theories to a fluid and amorphous state. "Immutable" laws have been turned into faulty conclusions, hastily drawn and readily abandoned before the advance of new facts. The fixity of the elements in chemistry, the undulatory movement of light, ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... by the action of concentrated sulphuric acid on bromides, since secondary reactions take place, leading to the liberation of free bromine and formation of sulphur dioxide. The usual method employed for the preparation of the gas consists in dropping bromine on to a mixture of amorphous phosphorus and water, when a violent reaction takes place and the gas is rapidly liberated. It can be obtained also, although in a somewhat impure condition, by the direct action of bromine on various saturated hydrocarbons (e.g. paraffin-wax), while an aqueous solution may be obtained by passing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... chart and compass. It led Ralph Peden out into a cloudy June dawning. It was soft, amorphous, uncoloured night when he went out. Slate-coloured clouds were racing along the tops of the hills from the south. The wind blew in fitful gusts and veering flaws among the moorlands, making eddies and back-waters of ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... hear me. The large room, lighted only in one corner, looked weird enough. Around me, and among the medley of pictures and casts and the piles of canvases stacked against the wall, the eye encountered only a series of cinder-gray tints and undetermined outlines casting long amorphous shadows half-way across the ceiling. A draped lay figure leaning against a door seemed to listen to the whistling of the wind outside; a large glass bay opened upon the night. Nothing was alive ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... "the Corn," another youth—a pedestrian, and very different—saluted the Warden. He wore a black jacket, rusty and amorphous. His trousers were too short, and he himself was too short: almost a dwarf. His face was as plain as his gait was undistinguished. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... social duties. Labor, like other elements of society, has often been selfish, narrow, vindictive; but it has also shown itself earnest and constructive. The conservative trades union, at the hour of this writing, stands as a bulwark between that amorphous, inefficient, irresponsible Socialism which has made Russia a lurid warning and Prussia a word of scorn, and that rational social ideal which is founded upon the conviction that society is ultimately an organic spiritual unity, the blending of a thousand diverse interests ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... fissured rock is tunneled and inhabited. The unlikely serrations and ridges with the smoke moving over them are porous, and a fluid life ranges beneath unseen. It is the beginning of Dockland. That the life is in upright beings, each with independent volition and a soul; that it is not an amorphous movement, flowing in bulk through buried pipes, incapable of the idea of height, of rising, it is difficult to believe. It has not been believed. If life, you protest, is really there, has any purpose which is ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... a soft amorphous substance of the same composition as limestone. The main uses of chalk are as a filler in rubber, and as a component of paint and putty. It is also used for polishing. The principal producers of this commodity are England, Denmark, and France, and the chief consumer is ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... a rusty ramshackle diligence awaited them. Their luggage, together with hen-coops, baskets, bundles, packing-cases, were piled on top in an amorphous heap. They took their places inside together with an old priest and a peasant woman in a great flapping cap. The old priest absorbed snuff in great quantities and used a red handkerchief. The closed windows of the vehicle rattled, ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... awake to a light and wholesome world furnished with such solidly comforting facts as soaps and razors and hot and cold saltwater taps; and subsequently one left one's stateroom to see, at the breakfast table, leaden-eyed and flushed of countenance, an amorphous lump of humid flesh in shapeless garments of soiled white duck, the author of that mutter in the dark; who, lounging over a plate of broken food and lifting a coffee cup in the tremulous hand of an alcoholic, looked up with lacklustre gaze, gave a surly nod, and mumbled ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... only two-thirds of what would have been its normal size. Instead of filling the skull completely, it shared the space with a green, amorphous shape. This was ridged somewhat like a brain, but the green shape had still darker nodules and extensions. Lea took her scalpel and gently ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... characters quoted. It may be added that the capillitial threads are always exceedingly delicate, probably tubular, but never filled with lime throughout; the peridium may be almost nude or encrusted with lime, which, where present, is always amorphous, never crystalline; the sporangia when distinct may be either sessile or stipitate, and the stipe in the latter case is often hollow and charged with lime. In capillitium intermediate between Leocarpus and Badhamia, since in the first the capillitium is unequally calcareous, ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... amorphous Sansculottism taking form, ought we not above all things to specify how the Amorphous gets itself a Head? Without metaphor, this Revolution Government continues hitherto in a very anarchic state. Executive Council of Ministers, Six in number, there is; but they, especially since Roland's retreat, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... building up—what? Character, ourselves. But what sort of a thing is it that we are building? Some of us pigsties, in which gross, swinish lusts wallow in filth; some of us shops; some of us laboratories, studies, museums; some of us amorphous structures that cannot be described. But the Christian man is to be building himself up into a temple of God. The aim which should ever burn clear before us, and preside over even our smallest actions, is that which lies in this ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the youth in Budge Street? He took his place in the line of competing children. Far away in the grassy distance were two men holding a stretched string. On one side of him was a tubby boy with a freckled face and an amorphous nose on which the perspiration beaded; on the other a lank, consumptive creature, in Eton collar and red tie and a sprig of sweet William in his buttonhole, a very superior person. Neither of them desired ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... Sansculottism taking form, ought we not above all things to specify how the Amorphous gets itself a Head? Without metaphor, this Revolution Government continues hitherto in a very anarchic state. Executive Council of Ministers, Six in number, there is; but they, especially since Roland's retreat, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... strong a nature to be thwarted by adulation any more than by contemptuous neglect, he might well have become spoilt—so enthusiastic, that were it not for the heavy and prolonged counterbalancing dead weight of public indifference, a huge amorphous mass only of late years moulded into harmony with the keenest minds of the century, we might well be suspicious of so much and long-continued eulogium, and fear the same reversal of judgment towards him on the part of ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... alcohol. On a hunch I dropped in an aluminum alkyl, and then pushed the polymerization along with both ultraviolet and heat. Got a stiff gel out of the pot and drew it into a quarter of a pound of fibers. I only had time to determine that the fibers were amorphous—no time to draw them further to see if they would develop crystallinity. I put them in an open-mouth jar which I later found had been used to store mercury. One evening I took them out and found they had developed crystallinity on standing. Furthermore, the fibrous ends had split, ...
— The Professional Approach • Charles Leonard Harness
... diamond, graphite, amorphous carbon, coke, mineral coal.—Carbon a reducing agent, a decolorizer, disinfectant, ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... are sometimes congealed in cold despair and you think with animosity: "Where then is that celebrated, broad, beautiful Russian soul? So much was and is being said about it, but wherein does its breadth, might and beauty actively manifest itself? And is not our soul broad because it is amorphous? And it is probably owing to its amorphousness that we yield so readily to external pressure, which disfigures ...
— The Shield • Various
... good health and heart of the party. Almost every exploring party on short commons, records some favourite cookery, some dish that their souls loved. In McKinlay's journey, the dish most in vogue was a kind of "amorphous" black-pudding, made of the carefully-saved blood of the bullock, horse, or sheep, as the case might be, boiled with some fat, and seasoned with a little condiment, which being of light carriage, can always be saved for such high occasions. In the present instance, ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... she had always been this royal creature, this woman bright and winning as some warm, rich summer's day. The fire that sleeps in marble never flashes and informs the whole mass so fully; if a pearl—lazy growth and accretion of amorphous life—should fuse and form again in sparkling crystals, the miracle would be less. And with what complete unconsciousness had she stepped from passive to positive existence, and found this new state to be as sweet and strange as any child has found it! ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... defined parts of any kind—without a mouth, nerves, muscles, or distinct organs, and only manifesting its vitality to ordinary observation by thrusting out and retracting from all parts of its surface, long filamentous processes, which serve for arms and legs. Yet this amorphous particle, devoid of everything which, in the higher animals, we call organs, is capable of feeding, growing, and multiplying; of separating from the ocean the small proportion of carbonate of lime which is dissolved in sea-water; ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... but an essayical history, based on research. The deference paid to Mary Austin's The Flock marks the author as civilized. Towne wrote the book; Wentworth supplied the information. Wentworth's own book, America's Sheep Trails, Iowa State College Press, Ames, 1948, is ponderous, amorphous, and in part, only a ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... (himself a dramatist), and others of the minor Caroline poets; but it is far more noticeable in drama, and resulted in the production, by some of the playwrights of the transition period under Charles I. and Charles II., of some of the most amorphous botches in the way of ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Americans of both sexes, as hypocrisy is to a church member or spurious currency to a bank. It is to be remembered that the evils which are pointed out in our commonwealth today are not the evils of a democracy but of an amorphous something which is afraid to be a democracy. Whether the opposition to women's voting be honestly professed or whether it is concealed under chivalrous idolatry, distrust and skepticism are behind it.... When pushed to the wall, objectors to woman suffrage now-a-days take refuge ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... Sacculina—that it was a Sacculina when it might have been a Crustacean. Instead of being a free and independent organism high in structure, original in action, vital with energy, it deteriorated into a torpid and all but amorphous sac confined to perpetual imprisonment and doomed to a living death. "Any new set of conditions," says Ray Lankester, "occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained, seem to lead as a rule ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... enormous and amorphous—like the body of an elemental giant—about each of these books. In the "Titan," especially, the peculiar power of Dreiser's massive, coulter-like impetus is evident. Here we realize how, between animal passion and material ambition, there is little room left in such ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... notorious. Stendhal was capable of writing, in a masterpiece: "By the way I ought to have told you earlier that the Duchess—!" And as for a greater than either Balzac or Stendhal—Dostoievsky—what a hasty, amorphous lump of gold is the sublime, the unapproachable Brothers Karamazov! Any tutor in a college for teaching the whole art of fiction by post in twelve lessons could show where Dostoievsky was clumsy and careless. ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... a prayer is a genuine prayer from a person to a person. To pray to the Universal Spirit, to the Supreme Being of Kant, of Hegel—to a purified, amorphous God, is ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... unusual in Australian life. The idea is in part a survival from earlier years when a host of military officers, Civil Servants, journalists and tourists described in some form the more obvious peculiarities of the colonies: their giant, evergreen forests, strange amorphous animals, aristocratic gold-diggers, ex-convicts in carriages, and general state of topsy-turveydom. There is quite an amazing variety of occasional records of this class in forgotten books, magazines and pamphlets. In at least a score of well-known ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... Bridget, or Biddy, is not a foolish fat scullion to burst out crying for a sentiment. She is of the serviceable, red-handed, broad-and-high- shouldered type; one of those imported female servants who are known in public by their amorphous style of person, their stoop forwards, and a headlong and as it were precipitous walk,—the waist plunging downwards into the rocking pelvis at every heavy footfall. Bridget, constituted for action, not for emotion, was about to deposit a plate heaped with something upon the table, when ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... popular, as being the most readable. When the rumour goes abroad that some notable man has been actually crushed,—been positively driven over by an entire Juggernaut's car of criticism till his literary body be a mere amorphous mass,—then a real success has been achieved, and the Alf of the day has done a great thing; but even the crushing of a poor Lady Carbury, if it be absolute, is effective. Such a review will not make all the world call for the 'Evening Pulpit', but it will cause those who do ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... account. The party of Revolution is the party which under an Irish Parliament would be master of the situation. Leaders will not be lacking. But at present the party must from the necessity of the case be amorphous, and therefore, politically and as a power, practically non-existent. Pass the bill, and then you will see something. A new party, the party of Independence, or, as they will call it, of Freedom, will take shape and formidably influence events. The ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... of molecular death, the germinal essence of all decay. That this organic law should rule in every living structure is a necessity inherent in the actual conditions of the creation. And wherever we look in the realm of physical man, even "from the red outline of beginning Adam" to the amorphous adipocere of the last corpse when fate's black curtain falls on our race, we shall discern death. For death is the other side of life. Life and death are the two hands with which the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... degeneration would be represented by total incapacity to help ourselves;—then we should begin to lose the use of our higher sense-organs;—later on, the brain would shrink to a vanishing pin-point of matter;—still later we should dwindle into mere amorphous sacs, mere blind stomachs. Such would be the physical consequence of that kind of divine love which we so lazily wish for. The longing for perpetual bliss in perpetual peace might well seem a malevolent inspiration from the Lords of Death and Darkness. All life that feels ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... endeavored, from the enormous, amorphous Plum-pudding, more like a Scottish Haggis, which Herr Teufelsdrockh had kneaded for his fellow-mortals, to pick out the choicest Plums, and present them separately on a cover of our own. A laborious, perhaps a thankless ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... chemical behavior of the compound NH3, but which Denham alone had managed to procure. Tommy deduced that it was an allotropic modification of the substance which forms an amalgam with mercury, as metallic tin is an allotrope of the amorphous gray powder which is tin ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... such as pure quicksands, in which the solid matter is so finely divided that it is amorphous and virtually held ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... crowded the liquid as motile threads, are destroyed and disappear. After the action of the air, only fine amorphous granules can be found, unfit for culture as well as for the transmission of any disease whatever. It might be said that the ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... but the amorphous state of Italian politics could explain), in that scratch ministry, of Villari, one of the most devoted, honest and patriotic of living Italians and for years one of my best friends in Italy, secured my support of the ministry until their financial measures came on, and I was ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... generally corresponded with the division of races. Political organization was chiefly in English hands, because the colonial Dutch had not possessed representative government, whereas the English brought their home habits with them. However, down till 1880 parties remained in an amorphous or fluid condition, being largely affected by the influence of individual leaders; and the Dutch section of the electorate was hardly conscious of its strength. In the end of that year, the rising in the Transvaal, and ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... happen. During these days of solitude—and this, too, even before Matilda had gone—a queer new something had begun to stir within her, almost as though threatening an eruption. It seemed a force, or spirit, rising darkly from hitherto unknown spaces of her being. It frightened her, with its amorphous, menacing strangeness. She tried to keep it down. She tried to keep her mental eyes away from it. And so, during all these days, she had no idea what the ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... with life while we scrutinise the amorphous block; and yet there is little there more tangible than some such form as fancy loves to image ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... was already, looming up grey and amorphous, patched with snow. It had a grey, heaped, sordid look in the November light. She had imagined Boulogne gay and brilliant. Whereas it was more grey and dismal than England. But not that magical, mystic, ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... write hexameters in English on an entirely new plan, of which the result is that they lose all likeness to any hexameters previously encountered on the slopes of Parnassus or anywhere else and become something so blind and staggering and dreadfully amorphous that the whole mind of the reader rises up in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... to capture. They drift slowly upon their way, and the swift monoplane could intercept their leisurely course. It is likely enough that they would dissolve in the heavier layers of the atmosphere, and that some small heap of amorphous jelly might be all that I should bring to earth with me. And yet something there would surely be by which I could substantiate my story. Yes, I will go, even if I run a risk by doing so. These purple horrors would not seem to be numerous. It is probable that I shall not ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was their fear, when, after hours spent in fruitless wandering, they stood holding each other's hands, crouching and cowering together in the midst of that amorphous darkness! ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... a Little Brother of the Cosmic Urge, is compelled by what his verse is to stride vigorously across rooms as if they were vast desert places, in spite of what his toes are. He strode magnificently, triumphantly, to the window and flung the shade up and looked out at the amorphous mist creeping in across the roofs. The crawling fog must have suggested his great, gray Dread, for presently he turned away with a shudder and sank upon a ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... from civilization and flung into the arms of Nature the most terrible thing is the sense of the amorphous, the feeling that there is no structure in this world where houses are not and laws are not and streets are not, no power to intervene between oneself and injury, no thread to cling to. The idea of a Providence to such a person is ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... methods are empirical. That is true only so far as chemistry is concerned. Did you ever realize that practically all industrial chemistry is colloidal in its nature? Hard rubber, celluloid, glass, soap, paper, and lots of others, all have to deal with amorphous substances, as to which comparatively little has been really settled. My methods are similar to those followed by Luther Burbank. He plants an acre, and when this is in bloom he inspects it. He has a sharp eye, and can pick out of thousands a single plant that has promise of what ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... following second seance saw a light in room, not referable to any outside influence. Was an amorphous body which glowed pallidly and moved about wall over fireplace, gradually coming to stop in a corner, ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the drawer and pulled them out. She had barely reduced them to a single amorphous lump when Mr. Fredericksohn passed ...
— Hex • Laurence Mark Janifer (AKA Larry M. Harris)
... itself, should have performed in the world a unique and never-to-be-forgotten role. It was inevitable that he should have stood out among the men of his time as a strange, bewildering figure. To his very matter-of-fact and much annoyed antagonist, Karl Marx, he was little more than a buffoon, the "amorphous pan-destroyer, who has succeeded in uniting in one person Rodolphe, Monte Cristo, Karl Moor, and Robert Macaire."[11] On the other hand, to his circle of worshipers he was a mental giant, a flaming titan, a Russian Siegfried, holding out to all the ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... could look down into the twelve-hundred-foot V-shaped gash which the river had cut into the dark, crude-looking Archaean rock. How distinctly it looked like a new day in creation where the horizontal, yellowish-gray beds of the Cambrian were laid down upon the dark, amorphous, and twisted older granite! How carefully the level strata had been fitted to the shapeless mass beneath it! It all looked like the work of a master mason; apparently you could put the point of your knife where one ended and the other began. The older ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... the greatest of American poets, or, indeed, of all modern poets; that he is "cosmic," or universal, and that he has put an end forever to puling rhymes and lines chopped up into metrical feet. Whether Whitman's poetry is formally poetry at all or merely the raw material of poetry, the chaotic and amorphous impression which it makes on readers of conservative tastes results from his effort to take up into his verse elements which poetry has usually left out—the ugly, the earthy, and even the disgusting; the "under ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... glue, and root gen- of gennaein, to produce, gignesthai, to become), the ground-substance of bones and tissues, is decomposed by boiling water or on warming with acids into substances named gelatin, glutin or glue. Gelatin forms a white amorphous powder; the commercial product, however, generally forms glassy plates. The decomposition products are generally the same as with the general albumin; it gives the biuret reaction; forms salts with acids and alkalies, but is essentially acid in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... arrange for the singers to be put out of sight altogether. He (and more particularly, she) might be posted behind some sort of screen, diaphanous in respect of the vocalists' view of the conductor, but opaque to the audience. When I think of some of the rather antique and amorphous prime donne of German, Italian and French opera, I know that any scheme which would render them invisible and permit their acting parts to be played by young and gracious figures would meet with my unqualified approval. It would be necessary, of course, to consult them first ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... "In St. Gall, every one can express his opinion frankly"; but the section is unimportant compared with Zurich or Basle.—Neuchatel displays fitful energy, and "is fundamentally characterised by a certain natural inertia."—Geneva, finally, is amorphous. "The bulk of the members of this section make up a slumbrous, irresolute mass of persons who never utter any definite opinions," and perhaps have no definite opinions. Such activities as it displays are the work of a few exceptions. "No section has greater need of a masterful president." ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... had a very good business head, and I presume you are likewise gifted." His face brightened perceptibly as he went on: "While returning from Happenchance with my personal effects, I clipped a really excellent specimen of amorphous diapase from a reef among the hills. The cellular crystallization of the diapase is intensely interesting. It will give me pleasure to show ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish
... there was no final release, since he could not be liberated from himself. Strange and amorphous, she must go yearning on through the trouble, like a warm, glowing cloud blown in the middle of a storm. She felt so rich, in her warm vagueness, that her soul cried out on him, because he harried her and wanted ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... simple, easily measured problem before it. At the very outset the report confesses that an accurate count of the number of prostitutes in Chicago could not be reached. The police lists are obviously incomplete and perhaps corrupt. The whole amorphous field of clandestine vice will, of course, defeat any census. But even public prostitution is so varied that nobody can do better than estimate it roughly. This point is worth keeping in mind, for it lights up the remedies proposed. What the Commission advocates ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... there along this beach are fishermen's huts constructed of tree-stems which are smothered under multitudinous ropes of grass, ropes of all ages and in every stage of decomposition, some fairly fresh, others dissolving once more into amorphous bundles of hay. There is a smack of the stone ages, of primeval lake-dwellings, about these shelters on the deserted shore; two or three large fetichistic stones stand near their entrance; wickerwork objects of ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... op. 61, given to the world September, 1846, is dedicated to Madame A. Veyret. One of three great Polonaises, it is just beginning to be understood, having been derided as amorphous, febrile, of little musical moment, even Liszt declaring that "such pictures possess but little real value to art. ... Deplorable visions which the artist should admit with extreme circumspection within ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... sailed off to receive other guests, and Henry was alone with Miss Marchrose in a nook between a cabinet and a phonograph. Many eyes were upon them. Miss Marchrose, a woman of thirty, with a thin face and an amorphous body draped in two shades of ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... beautiful combinations, you see, were there; but they wanted some little shock to hasten the slow process of crystallisation. Now in our social circle we have continually observed groups of young people floating about in an amorphous and chaotic fashion—good for nothing but dawdling through dances, and flirting, and carelessly separating again; but when you dropped Tita among them, then you would see how rapidly this jellyfish sort of existence was abolished—how the groups got broken up, and how the ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... it is a very often acute and always charming piece of critical work in scholarly and graceful language. More affected and generally inferior in style, but also still on the whole scholarly and graceful in its language, is his Arcadia, an example of the indefinitely constructed amorphous Romances out of which in course of long time the novel was to be evolved. The dwellers in that Arcady are as far removed from the nymphs and swains of Watteau's day as from a primitive Greek population; they behave as no human beings ever did or could behave; ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... in the midst of amorphous darkness, it might be imagined nothing could be done but keep their place, or go groping idly about. Not so, however. Gaspar has no intention of letting the time pass in such an unprofitable manner; instead, he at once resumes speech, and along with ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... section of a piece of Commentry cannel coal shows that this substance consists of a yellowish-brown amorphous mass holding here and there in suspension very different plant organs, such as fragments of Cordaites, leaves, ferns, microspores, macrospores, pollen grains, rootlets, etc., exactly as would have ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... the huge, ugly, misshapen "giants" that stand before the old Palace in Florence, work of the obscure sculptor who thought to outdo Michelangelo by sheer bulk. And the first four of his symphonies, though less utterly banal and pedantic, are still amorphous and fundamentally second-hand. For Mahler never spoke in his own idiom. His style is a mongrel affair. The thematic material is almost entirely derivative and imitative, of an unequaled mediocrity and depressingness. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... quickening into fieriness; he was often a braggart, and could not be trusted to tell the truth where his self-esteem was ever so little concerned. How unutterably the Harvey Rolfe of today despised himself at the age of fifteen or so! Even at that amorphous age, a more loutish, ungainly boy could scarcely have been found. Bashfulness cost him horrid torments, of course exasperating his conceit. He hated girls; he scorned women. Among his school-fellows he made a bad choice of comrades. Though muscular and of tolerable health, he ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... made of the scheme of decoration—black velvet and bugles—on the bodice. Instinctively I felt that a middle-aged, fat, second-hand-clothes-dealing Jewess had built it many years ago for synagogue wear. On the girlish figure it looked preposterous. Preposterous too was her head-gear, an amorphous bonnet trimmed in black, with a cheap ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... vegetarian, will gladly pay five pounds to any psychopathic suggestionist who will extirpate from his subconsciousness the lingering relics of an antipathy to syncopated rhythms which retard his progress towards a complete mastery of the technique of amorphous bombination. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 14th, 1920 • Various
... the carbonate of lime is present in the form of very minute amorphous lumps until near to maturity, when it is dissolved and reappears as bicarbonate of lime deposited ...
— The Myxomycetes of the Miami Valley, Ohio • A. P. Morgan
... along its banks, which resembled clearings, were supposed to be the mission or Indian settlements; but the weather was smoky and unfavorable to far views with the glass. The rock displayed here in the escarpments is a compact amorphous trap, which appears to constitute the mass of the Blue mountains in this latitude; and all the region of country through which we have traveled since leaving the Snake river has been the seat of violent and extensive igneous action. Along the Burnt River valley, the strata ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... but gnomes; surely they are huge, undeveloped embryos of women, with neither head nor trunk. For this light is pitiless. It makes them even more a part of this earth, out of which they seem to have sprung, a strange amorphous growth. The bronzed skins are dyed in the gold as if to match with the hue of the mud; the wet skirts are shreds, gray and brown tatters, not so good in texture as the lichens, and the ragged jerseys seem only bits of the more distant weeds woven into tissues to ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... house, is a composite and barbaric piece of work, a megalithic pile wherein art, retires in favor of amorphous strength. The materials are many and sundry, so much so that we might imagine that we had the work of dissimilar builders before our eyes, if frequent transitions did ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... are composed of certain fundamental and similar elements which are governed by the same rules of life, though at first glance they may appear to be widely different. These are (a) amorphous substances, (b) ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... means of securing the stability of the mass, and is to be regarded as a beneficent appointment, with such special view. That structure compels each mountain to assume the safest contour of which under the given circumstances of upheaval it is capable. If it were all composed of an amorphous mass of stone as at A, Fig. 19, a crack beginning from the top, as at x in A, might gradually extend downwards in the direction x y in B, until the whole mass, indicated by the shade, separated itself and fell. But when the whole mountain ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... this, the military situation in Europe was almost disheartening. Imperial Russia had disappeared and the Germans were preparing to carve up the vast amorphous Russian carcass. Having driven their way through the Balkans to Constantinople they were on the point of opening their boasted direct route from Berlin to Bagdad. England, France and Italy began to feel war-weary. The German submarines threatened ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... was much developed since eight P.M. As I looked, it moved slightly, and as it were by a sort of shiver, as if an electric shock (and why not?) was being administered by a law of nature; it had then no tail, or rather had an odd amorphous look in that region; its eye, for it had one—it was seen in profile—looked to my profane vision like (why not actually?) a huge blaeberry (vaccinium Myrtillus, it is well to be scientific) black ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... the same elements are necessary for the personification of such types or idols. The three elements appear in their proper sequence even in the amorphous phantasms which these types first shadow forth, and which are subsequently perfected and embodied in human form. For the consciousness of the external form always exists in the first vague and nebulous conception of the phantasm which gradually appears and formulates itself in the vivid ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... shadows; would thicken and spread out; would draw together and rise in an irregular spiral column, curling, swaying, poising, as if uncertain what to do next; and at last, all at once making up its mind, (how like a younker or a prodigal!), would go sailing away, straggling away, amorphous, on a puff of wind, leaving the hillside clear again;—till, presently, the ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland |
