"Inorganic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... worshipful and content. I go on and through, flinging the gate wide and formulating the law of the mystery which is a mystery no longer. It is our way. You worship the idea; I believe in the fact. If the stone fall, the wind blow, the grass and green things sprout; if the inorganic be vitalised, and take on sensibility, and perform functions, and die; if there be passions and pains, dreams and ambitions, flickerings of infinity and glimmerings of Godhead—it is for you to be smitten with the wonder of it and to memorialise it in pretty song, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... action of physical laws, and their adaptability to an infinite variety of forms, constitutes the perfection of that code which produces the order of nature. The mere superiority of man over lower forms of organic and inorganic matter does not lift him above physical laws, and the analogy of every grade in nature forbids the presumption that higher forms may exist which are exempt from ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... and frequently by the hand. How dull it would be, thought Henry, if ever the Esperanto people got their way, and the flavour of the richly various speech of the nations was lost in one colourless, absurd and inorganic language, stumblingly spoken and ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... subjects more to my mind. Looking over my father's books one day, I came upon Gregory's 'Handbook of Inorganic Chemistry,' and began reading it. I was fascinated with the book, and studied it morning, noon, and night—in fact, every time when I could snatch a few minutes. I really believe that at one time I could have repeated ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... phosphate or carbonate, enters into the composition of the hard parts, such as bones and shells, of all living animals, it is an interesting physiological fact to find substances harder than the enamel of teeth, and coloured surfaces as well polished as those of a fresh shell, re-formed through inorganic means from dead organic matter—mocking, also, in shape, some of the lower vegetable productions. (1/6. Mr. Horner and Sir David Brewster have described ("Philosophical Transactions" 1836 page 65) a singular "artificial substance resembling shell." It is deposited in fine, ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... I said, but for this book I'd be bones at the bottom of the sea. Yes, ladies and gents, bones, of which there is one hundred and ninety-eight in the full grown human skeleton, composed of four-fifths inorganic and one-fifth ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... silver: its use is to make the supreme sciences and to direct them against disease." He recognized three basic substances, sulphur, mercury and salt, which were the necessary ingredients of all bodies organic or inorganic. They were the basis of the three principles out of which the Archaeus, the spirit of nature, formed all bodies. He made important discoveries in chemistry; zinc, the various compounds of mercury, calomel, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... remarkable one. So likewise to his third Parliament, in similar rebuke for their pedantries and obstinacies. Most rude, chaotic, all these Speeches are; but most earnest-looking. You would say, it was a sincere, helpless man; not used to speak the great inorganic thought of him, but to act it rather! A helplessness of utterance, in such bursting fulness of meaning. He talks much about "births of Providence": All these changes, so many victories and events, were not forethoughts, and theatrical contrivances ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... after his marriage, was engaged in research work. His speciality was molecular physics and he was a particularly brilliant investigator. That research, with all the possibilities that it held of some immense discovery of the laws that govern the constitution of inorganic and progressively, perhaps, of organic, matter, was sufficient to engross his mental energies, to give him a sense of satisfaction in life; but his six hundred pounds a year proved insufficient to satisfy the demands of Marjorie's claim to enjoyment. She was not a mere ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... globe goes, no such cause can be shown—I cannot but believe that Lyell, for others, as for myself, was the chief agent in smoothing the road for Darwin. For consistent uniformitarianism postulates Evolution as much in the organic as in the inorganic world. The origin of a new species by other than ordinary agencies would be a vastly greater "catastrophe" than any of those which Lyell successfully eliminated from ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... "If by Atheism is meant the belief that all that we see in Nature is the result of chance, of a fortuitous concourse of atoms, nothing would be so absurd as Atheism. Nothing can be more evident than that law and order prevail in Nature, that every species of matter, organic or inorganic, is impressed with certain laws, according to which all its properties and movements are regulated.... In denying, therefore, the existence of a personal, intelligent Deity, we do not admit that there is any chance, contingency, or disorder in Nature: we do not deny, but ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... these petrifactions are in truth the fossilised remains of extinct organisms? They may be—as many distinguished naturalists of even the last century maintained—marvellous sports of nature, mysterious "Lusus naturae," or mere rough, inorganic models of the labouring Creator into which He subsequently "breathed the breath of life;" or perhaps "stone-flesh" (caro fossilis) brought into existence, on the dead rocks by the "fertilising air" (aura seminalis), and ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... innumerable combinations of these elements, two general classes may be recognized, organic and inorganic bodies. While it is impossible, owing to the dependence of all organized matter upon inorganic matter, to give an absolute definition, we at once recognize the peculiarities of organic or living bodies ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... young, just emerging, as it were, from nothingness, growing into form, assuming shape, and gathering attributes of fitness for exterior vitality, preparing the way for higher existences than mere inorganic matter. How long this era existed, science has failed to demonstrate, but it passed away, and solid land marked the next era of the earth's progress. It was surrounded by an atmosphere absolutely fatal to animal life; ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... man, in the khaki uniform of a major of yeomanry, remained in his position at the window. The old woman sat with her implacable face, unchanging like a thing insensible and inorganic. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... The spontaneous generation of animals and vegetables, low in the scale of organization, from inorganic elements. (2) That kind of generation in which the parent, whether plant or animal, produces offspring differing in structure or habit from itself, but in which after one or more generations the original ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Blood. Fibrine, Albumen. Inorganic Substances. Isomerism of Fibrine, Albumen, and elements of nutrition. Relation ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... wrong things. If you knew anything of the kinds of food necessary to nourish the human body, you would know that it should combine in proper proportions proteid, fats, carbohydrates and a small percentage of inorganic salts—these are constantly undergoing oxidation and at the same time are liberating energy ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... our conviction that there lives "one spirit in all things," and that the whole cognisable world is constituted, and has been developed, in accordance with one common fundamental law. We emphasise by it, in particular, the essential unity of inorganic and organic nature, the latter having been evolved from the former only at a relatively late period.[2] We cannot draw a sharp line of distinction between these two great divisions of nature, any more than we can recognise an absolute distinction between the animal and the ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... and the deeps My thoughts have strayed, where silence dwells, Where the old world encrypted sleeps,— Myriads of forms, in myriad cells, Of dead and inorganic things, That neither live, nor move, nor grow, Nor any change of atoms know; That have neither legs, nor arms, nor wings, That have neither heads, nor mouths, nor stings, That have neither roots, nor ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... amount of material which has been already assimilated in the microscopic cellular laboratories of our body. Every vital activity is manifested at least through chemical and physical forces. And the elements of the fuel for our engines we receive through plants from the inorganic world. For the plant, as we have seen, stores up as potential energy in its compounds the actual energy of the sun's rays. And thus man lives and thinks by energy, obtained originally from the sun. But man not only consumes food and fuel. The complicated protoplasm is continually ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... to a graduate forest school should include at least one full year in college botany, covering the general morphology, histology, and physiology of plants, one course each in geology, physics, inorganic chemistry, zooelogy, and economics, with mathematics through trigonometry, and a reading knowledge of French or German. Some acquaintance with mechanical drawing is also desirable but not absolutely necessary. Other ...
— The Training of a Forester • Gifford Pinchot
... was probably as much a cosmic or geologic event as were the reactions which produced the different elements and compounds, and demanded the same slow gestation in the womb of time. During what cycles upon cycles the great mother-forces of the universe must have brooded over the inorganic before the organic was brought forth! The archean age, during which the brooding seems to have gone on, was probably as long as all the ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... of nearly all inorganic appurtenances, what was left of the Surgeon slightly shook itself, to see whether anything more could be spared ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... frequently asserted that silica has a structural function sui generis in the plant skeleton, having a relationship to the cellulosic constituents of the plant, distinct from that of the inorganic ash components with which it is associated. It should be noted that the matter has been specifically investigated in two directions. In Berl. Ber. 5, 568 (A. Ladenburg), and again in 11, 822 (W. Lange), appear two papers 'On the ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... importance in fiction, unless it is organic substance, that is to say, substance in which the pulse of life is beating. Inorganic fiction has been our curse in the past, and bids fair to remain so, unless we exercise much greater artistic discrimination than we display ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... long, swift day in his berth with a book under the convenient electric light. He was safe there from the acquaintances which constantly formed themselves only to fall into disintegration, and cling to him afterwards as inorganic particles of weather-guessing, and smoking-room gossip about ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... interacts with this material frame of things, and while here exerts guidance and control on the energy which already here exists; for although they alter the quantity of energy no whit, and though they merely utilize available energy like any other machine, live things are able to direct inorganic terrestrial energy along new and special paths, so as to achieve results without which such living agency could not have occurred." Does it for an instant seem that a great scientist's theoretical speculations of the laws of the universe and of organic life ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... idea of an international code, overriding the will of nations and the authority of sovereigns, had not dawned upon philosophy. Between the old order that was changing and the new that was unborn, Europe had an inorganic ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... normal salt, Ca3(PO4)2, is the most important. It is the principal inorganic constituent of bones, and hence of the "bone-ash" of commerce (see PHOSPHORUS); it occurs with fluorides in the mineral apatite (q.v.); and the concretions known as coprolites (q.v.) largely consist of this salt. It also constitutes the minerals ornithite, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... ALBUMINOUS SUBSTANCES THAT YEAST, WHEN DEPRIVED OF AIR, FINDS THE MATERIALS FOR ITS DEVELOPMENT." This last assertion of M. Traube's is entirely disproved by those fermentation experiments in which, after suppressing the presence of albuminous substances, the action, nevertheless, went on in a purely inorganic medium, out of contact with air, a fact, of which we shall give irrefutable proofs. [Footnote: Traube's conceptions are governed by a theory of fermentation entirely his own, a hypothetical one, as he admits, of which the following ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... believed to be inert, the mere vehicle or theatre of forces, materialism remained a singularly crude and unsatisfying position. But now that science has shewn all that we call matter—the most solid metals and the most attenuated vapours, the most stable and resisting inorganic bodies, and the unstable tissues of living bodies—to be alike in restless, orderly motion, to be, in fact, motion itself and not the thing moved, to be changeable but indestructible, passing through phases but eternal, there seems less ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... ground. Geology does not teach that species have been evolved from lower species. Geology declares that new forms are new expressions of creative power. All the physical forces that were operating upon our earth in the inorganic period, are in operation now. Why, O why, has it been that the experience and observation of the ages, as well as the record in the rocks, have failed to give, in all the earth, one sensible demonstration in support of the proposition ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... movement on foot which led to many instances of prosperous and intelligent administration. To men who knew what unutterable suffering and wrong was inflicted by bad laws, and who lived in terror of the uneducated and inorganic masses, the idea of reform from above seemed preferable to parliamentary government managed by Newcastle and North, in the interest of the British landlord. The economists are outwardly and avowedly less liberal than Montesquieu, because they are incomparably more impressed by the evils of the ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... throwing into blackest shadow the gullies and hollows, and bringing to his mind, in spite of the weird beauty of the scene, a crushing sense of loneliness—of littleness—as though the vast pile of inorganic desolation which held him was of far greater importance than himself, and all the hopes, plans, and fears of his lifetime. The child had cried itself to sleep again, and he paced up and ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... matter. The nitrogenous end-products and aromatic compounds are urea, uric and hippuric acids, benzoic acid and ethereal sulfates of phenol and cresol. The salts are sulfates, phosphates and chlorides of sodium, potassium, calcium and magnesium. The organic and inorganic matter ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... remains would consist in the formation of ammonia and nitrogenous bases, the action being aided by the presence of air, moisture, and micro-organisms, at the same time, owing to the well known antiseptic properties of salt, the decomposition would go on slowly, allowing time for more sand and inorganic matter to be deposited. In this way the decomposing matter would be gradually protected from the action of the air, and finally the various fatty substances would be found mixed with large amounts of salt, under considerable pressure, and at a somewhat high temperature. From this adipocere, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... until now! A body which knows all the currents of force that traverse the globe; which holds by invisible threads to the ring of Saturn and the belt of Orion! A body from the contemplation of which an archangel could infer the entire inorganic universe as the simplest of corollaries! A throne of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its every atom since the rosary of heaven was strung with ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... movement; so that, on any theory whatever, we are always brought back to the same question: What started the condensation of the ether into the beginnings of a world-system? So whether we consider the life which characterizes organized matter, or the energy which characterizes inorganic matter, we cannot avoid the conclusion, that both must have their source in some Original Power to which we can assign no antecedent. This is the conclusion which has been reached by all philosophic ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... from the rind is yellow, fragrant, slightly bitter; density, 0.856; boiling point 165. The juice which is turbid and pale yellow in color contains 9% citric acid, 3-5% gum and sugar and 2-8/10% inorganic salts. The essence is used to flavor certain pharmaceutical preparations, and is a diffusible stimulant which may be given internally in doses of 3-6 drops on a little sugar. The bitter rind is occasionally used in infusion as a stomachic and stimulant. The juice is most commonly ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... in all this," said Mr. Allison, "is to lead you to the perception of a most important fact. Still let your thoughts rest intently on what I am saying. You are aware of the fact, that material substances, as well inorganic as organic, are constantly giving off into the atmosphere minute particles, which we call odors, and which reveal to us their quality. The rose and nightshade, the hawthorn and cicuta fill the air ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... and oxalate of lime; but there is great difference of opinion as to their use in the economy of the plant, and one of the French philosophers endeavoured to prove that crystals are the possible transition of the inorganic to organic matter. The differences, however, between the highest form of crystal and the lowest form of organic life known, viz., a simple reproductive cell, are so manifold and striking, that the attempt to make crystals the bridge over which inorganic matter ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... substances are of unstable composition and are readily altered by chemical reagents; to this group belong many vegetable and most animal poisons. These, therefore, must be treated differently from the more stable inorganic compounds. With an inorganic poison we may destroy all organic materials mixed with it, trusting to find the poison still recognisable after this process. Not so with an organic substance; that must be separated ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... division of society into clans.—Marriage laws depend on the conception that these clans descend from certain plants, animals, or inorganic objects. There was the belief in human descent from animals and kinship ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... the former. The naturalist accumulated facts and multiplied names, but he did not go triumphantly from generalization to generalization after the fashion of the chemist or physicist. It is easy to see, therefore, how it came about that the inorganic sciences were regarded as the true scientific bed-rock. It was scarcely suspected that the biological sciences might perhaps after all be TRUER than the experimental, in spite of the difference in practical value in favour of the latter. ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... Vertebres". In these works he up holds the doctrine that all species, including man, are descended from other species. He first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition. Lamarck seems to have been chiefly led to his conclusion on the gradual change of species, by the difficulty of distinguishing species and varieties, by the almost perfect gradation of forms in ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... and thinks it proves that the inorganic atom of matter is indestructible—that it persists forever. Why should we not admit—and ultimately prove—that the atom of organic force called a soul is indestructible and ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... of the tides, in the ocean currents, in the winds, in the distribution of rain, in the distribution of heat, and so forth. But not to dwell upon these, let us, for the fuller elucidation of this truth in relation to the inorganic world, consider what would be the consequences of some extensive cosmical catastrophe—say the subsidence of Central America. The immediate results of the disturbance would themselves be sufficiently complex. Besides the numberless dislocations of strata, the ejections of igneous matter, the ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... with his own active tendencies. An inanimate being is, of course, continuous with its surroundings; but the environing circumstances do not, save metaphorically, constitute an environment. For the inorganic being is not concerned in the influences which affect it. On the other hand, some things which are remote in space and time from a living creature, especially a human creature, may form his environment ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... a fourth year to perfecting my system of organic communication, and made some advance toward developing life in inorganic matter. From this latter attainment it would be but a step to perpetuate life, and I should thus restore immortality to man. But the shark family having threatened to revolt, I left off my investigations for some months, and organized a military force, with which I massacred the malcontents ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... so far, mind has not been shown to be a secretion of brain. Nevertheless, all these sciences are beating against the limits which separate them, and new suggestions of connection between natural life and its inorganic environment are continually discovered. The sciences are boring towards each other, and the dividing strata are wearing thin; so that it seems reasonable to expect that, with the growth of knowledge, an unbroken way upwards may ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... and indeed every chemical Element into every other chemical Element (convertible identity), still the sixty-four (nearly) Chemical Elements now known would remain the real Elements of Organic and Inorganic Compounds, in a sense just as important as that in which they are now so regarded. The now known Elements would still continue to constitute The Crude Natural Alphabet of Matter, and be correspondential with The Crude Natural Alphabet ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... universe, that, in view of the intimate relations of man and the rest of the living world, and between the forces exerted by the latter and all other forces, I can see no reason for doubting that all are co-ordinate terms of nature's great progression, from formless to formed, from the inorganic to the organic, from blind force to conscious intellect and will." Huxley's Evidence of Man's Place in Nature, London, 1864, ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... Chemistry, Inorganic and Organic, for the use of Students. By Charles Meymott Tidy, ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... such as described, and applicable to microscopes, will perhaps enable Ehrenberg to verify the opinions he has lately formed concerning the atmosphere—namely, that it is not less full of organic and inorganic life than the ocean, or any ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... his business was with an Embassy. And Mr Verloc, steady like a rock—a soft kind of rock—marched now along a street which could with every propriety be described as private. In its breadth, emptiness, and extent it had the majesty of inorganic nature, of matter that never dies. The only reminder of mortality was a doctor's brougham arrested in august solitude close to the curbstone. The polished knockers of the doors gleamed as far as the eye could reach, the ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... and dust the desert has its charms. The desert dust is dusty dust, but not dirty dust. Compared with the awful organic dust of New York, London, or Paris, it is inorganic and pure. On those strips of the Libyan and Arabian deserts which lie along the Nile, the desert dust is largely made up of the residuum of royalty, of withered Ptolemies, of arid Pharaohs, for the tombs of queens and kings are counted here by the hundreds, and of their royal progeny ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... the accurate experiments of M. Joule. No less important are Professor Thomson's researches on Solar Heat, contained in his remarkable papers 'On the Mechanical Energy of the Solar System;' his researches on the Conservation of Energy, as applied to organic as well as inorganic processes; and his fine theory of the dissipation of Energy, as given in his paper 'On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy.' To these we may add his complete theory of Diamagnetic Action, his investigations relative to the Secular Cooling ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... physio-psychological observation demonstrates, on the contrary, as I said long ago, that "man is a machine, but he does not function after the fashion of a machine," in the sense that man is a living machine, and not an inorganic machine. ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... of development; and to the economy involved in the welding of physiological processes for the phenomenon of physiological memory, wherein we see reflected, as it were, in the development of the organism, the association of inorganic restraints occurring in nature which at some previous period impressed itself upon the plastic organism. We may picture the seedling at Upsala, swayed by organic memory and the inherited tendency to an economical preparation ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... the next chapter, I am to enter upon a different branch of my subject, passing roughly speaking, from the organic to inorganic—from the living to the dead—I will here give a few particulars, recently received, which may interest the entomologist. In the month of August, 1898, I conducted the members of our county Naturalists’ Union from Woodhall Spa to Tumby, through a varied tract of country. The following ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... same time study the other living bodies which everyday induction shows us to be more or less like our own. What are the distinctive characteristics of these new realities? Each of them possesses a genuine individuality to a far greater degree than inorganic objects; whilst the latter are hardly limited at all except in relation to the needs of the former, and so do not constitute beings in themselves, the former evidence a powerful internal unity which is only further emphasised by their prodigious complication, and form wholes with ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... been compelled, often sorely against its will, to recognise the operation of secondary causes in events where ignorance beheld an immediate intervention of a higher power? And when we know that living things are formed of the same elements as the inorganic world, that they act and react upon it, bound by a thousand ties of natural piety, is it probable, nay is it possible, that they, and they alone, should have no order in their seeming disorder, no unity in their seeming multiplicity, should suffer no explanation by the discovery ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... part very slight, but also because I believe that a searching study of the higher and more complex religions should be postponed till we have acquired an accurate knowledge of the lower and simpler. For a similar reason the study of inorganic chemistry naturally precedes the study of organic chemistry, because inorganic compounds are much simpler and therefore more easily analysed and investigated than organic compounds. So with the chemistry ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... at the bottom of it. The Scientist acknowledges no mind beyond that of man; he seeks the impulse to life within itself, and can therefore only track it through the descending scale of being into the region of inorganic atoms and blind force. The believer refers that impulse to a conscious external First Cause, and is content to live surrounded by its mystery, entrenched within the facts of his own existence, guided (i.e., drawn upwards) ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... stand as the symbol of the inorganic, the mineral kingdom, with its wonderful crystals; the cylinder as the type of vegetable life, suggesting the roots, stems, and branches, with their rounded sides, and forming a beautiful connection between ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the following theses, which are involved in Vogt's pyknotic theory, as indispensable for a truly monistic view of substance, and one that covers the whole field of organic and inorganic nature:— ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... earth: other tastes may prison men in narrow walls, in the depths of the earth, or between the planks of a ship; his glance has only two boundaries—the blue sky above, the firm earth below. His is almost the rapture of creation; for whatever his edict demands from organic or inorganic nature, springs up beneath his hand. Even the townsman's heart is refreshed by the green blade and the golden ear, the quietly pasturing cow and the frisking colt, the shade of the woods and the perfume of the fields; but far stronger, higher, nobler is the enjoyment of the man who, walking over ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... nor distilled water are available, and there is doubt as to the purity of the water that is being used, it should be boiled and then let stand to cool and settle. Boiling not only destroys and renders harmless any organic germs that may be present, but also precipitates and eliminates much of its inorganic salts. ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... development of sanitation; but that the diseases of gambling and usury, of luxury and tyranny should become endemic, and produce horrible consequences was beyond the scope of nineteenth-century thought. And so, as if it were some inorganic process, practically unhindered by the creative will of man, the growth of the swarming unhappy cities that mark the twenty-first century ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... one particular thing; although that one phenomenon, far from being a type of all natural phenomena, is eminently peculiar; its laws bearing scarcely any resemblance to those of any other phenomenon, whether of inorganic ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... and why sickness is a purely domestic product. The restitution of natural health to mankind demands only, but demands absolutely, the constant diffusion in copious and continuous floods of atmospheric oxygen, of the nerve-poisoning carbonic acid of combustion (organic and inorganic), and of the blood-poisoning bacteria ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... species,—that is, the augmentation of the slight differences characteristic of varieties into the greater differences characteristic of species and genera, including the admirable adaptations of each being to its complex organic and inorganic conditions of life,—will form the main subject of my second work. We shall therein see that all organic beings, without exception, tend to increase at so high a ratio, that no district, no station, not even the whole surface ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... lands in a shadowless vortex, than a great blaze erupted from the northern lands, and it rose almost instantly to its estimated height of five miles. It was a terrible sight to behold, for any flame is a captivating display of inorganic life, but a pillar of flame several miles high is more than just an enlarged specimen, for it plays host to a great horde of phantasmal apparitions that wrestle ferociously with one another. As the flame shot upwards it cast a great light down on everything that rivaled the illumination of midday. ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... beneath, the powers of thought to conceive either of an undifferentiated unity, or of a chaos of differences without some kind of relation. Descending to particulars, we may bring Comte as a witness against himself; for while he declares that the sciences which deal with the inorganic world are mainly analytic in their tendencies, he at the same time maintains that the sciences of Biology and, still more, of Sociology and Morals, are synthetic, since they deal with objects in which the ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... page. Dr Knaggs says salt added to cooking vegetables converts organic salts into inorganic. I cannot follow that. What organic salts are so converted? One or ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... hydrogen, which constitute the great bulk of all cereal crops (both grain and straw), are supplied in abundance from the soil and atmosphere (or perhaps, to speak more correctly, from the latter), and we have only to supply those inorganic substances, which, however numerous, form but a small part of the whole weight of the crop. With the view of testing this theory, and hoping that I might be able to find out what were the elements which built up ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... outward changes of nature are regular and periodic, while others, without law or method, are apparently adapted by their diversity to draw out the unlimited capacities and varieties of life; so that as inorganic nature approaches a regulated confusion, the more it tends to bring forth that perfect order, of which fragments appear in the incomplete system of actual ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... repeated, conscious beings, instead of unconscious instruments, are the agents employed, and the secret thoughts and purposes of such agents are very likely to vitiate the result, and open a field of doubt which does not exist in the investigation of the inorganic world. ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... and decay; he could not eradicate that root of all evil, the association of consciousness with a mechanism requiring to be constantly stoked with a particular sort of fuel which exists only in limited quantities. If God could arrange for life to be maintained on a diet of inorganic substances—if he could enable animals, like plants, to go direct to minerals and gases for their sustenance, instead of having it, so to speak, half-digested in the vegetable kingdom—or even if, under the present system, he could make fecundity, in any given species, ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... were published more than two years before either Mayer printed his brief but celebrated essay on the Forces of Inorganic Nature, or Mr. Joule published his first famous experiments on the Mechanical Value of Heat. They illustrate the fact that before any great scientific principle receives distinct enunciation by individuals, it dwells more or less clearly in the general scientific mind. ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... Nature, for darkness, dreariness, immethodic platitude, anything comparable to him. He writes big Books wanting in almost every quality; and does not even give an INDEX to them. He has made of Friedrich's History a wide-spread, inorganic, trackless matter; dismal to your mind, and barren as a continent of Brandenburg sand!—Enough, he could do no other: I have striven to forgive him. Let the reader now forgive me; and think sometimes what ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... her own sake than in her relation to man, and scenery became no longer mere background, but the actual object of the picture. Animals, and even men, whether bathing in the river, lying under trees, or hunting in the forest, were nothing but accessories; inorganic Nature was the essential element. The greatest Dutch masters did not turn their attention to the extraordinary and stupendous, the splendour of the high Alps or their horrible crevasses, or sunny Italian mountains reflected in their lakes or tropical ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... dying. Under the green foliage and blossoming fruit-trees of To-day, there lie, rotting slower or faster, the forests of all other Years and Days. Some have rotted fast, plants of annual growth, and are long since quite gone to inorganic mould; others are like the aloe, growths that last a thousand or three thousand years.' Ste. Beuve, in his 'Nouveaux Lundis' (iv. 295), has a similar remark: 'Pour un petit nombre d'arbres qui s'elevent de quelques pieds au-dessus de terre et ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... the laboratory of the leaf, the place where certain inorganic, lifeless substances such as water, lime, sulphur, potash, and phosphorus are transformed and converted into living and organic vegetable matter, and from which this is sent forth to build up every part of the tree from deepest root ...
— Arbor Day Leaves • N.H. Egleston
... In other words, nature can, knows what she wishes, and wishes. Now all beings, in a greater or less degree according to their perfection or imperfection, feel this triple condition of being able, knowing, and wishing. Every being can, knows, and wishes, even inorganic matter (here already is the world as will and representation of Schopenhauer), and God is only absolute power, absolute knowledge, and absolute will. This is why all creative things gravitate to God and desire to return to Him as to their origin, and as the perfection of what ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... Central Asia," says I. J. Schmidt, "the earth and its interior, as well as the encompassing atmosphere, are filled with Spiritual Beings, which exercise an influence, partly beneficent, partly malignant, on the whole of organic and inorganic nature.... Especially are Deserts and other wild or uninhabited tracts, or regions in which the influences of nature are displayed on a gigantic and terrible scale, regarded as the chief abode or rendezvous ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... open new regions of activity for a generation of investigators. Moreover they have promoted such investigations by furnishing new instruments of research. Now in some respects there is an analogy between geology and history. The new geologist aims to describe the inorganic earth dynamically in terms of natural law, using chemistry, physics, mathematics, and even botany and zoology so far as they relate to paleontology. But he does not insist that the relative importance of physical or chemical factors shall be determined before he applies ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... water charged with mineral salts from the soil, and the leaves absorb the sunbeams from the air. So it looks as if the tree were almost made of matter and spirit, like man; the ether with its vibrations, on the one hand, and the earth with its inorganic compounds, on the other—earth salts and sunlight. The sturdy oak, the gigantic sequoia, are each equally finely organized in these parts that take hold upon nature. We call certain plants gross feeders, and in a sense they are; but all are delicate feeders in their mechanism of absorption ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... affected by light and air are of organic origin, such as gallstone, Indian yellow, and the yellow dye-wood lakes; the red and purple lakes of cochineal; indigo; and sap green. To these may be added the semi-organic Prussian blue; and the inorganic ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... facts, and have become facts of conscious sensibility. Goodness, badness, and obligation must be realised somewhere in order really to exist; and the first step in ethical philosophy is to see that no merely inorganic 'nature of things' can realize them. Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... undisturbed by the ravages of these useful insects. That is, the limited partnership of Oxygen, Hydrogen, & Co., under which they agreed to carry on the operations of sheep, fox, or fish, having terminated by the death of the animal, the partners make immediate use of their liberty and go off in inorganic form in search of new engagements, leaving sulphur, phosphorus, and the other subordinate elements of the animal, to shift for themselves. They were in the employ of a sheep; they will now carry on a man or an oak-tree, a colony of insects, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... invocation to the heavenly host, the Psalmist calls first on the forms of inanimate and inorganic existence. These things, of which he enumerates a few, praise the power of God. The crags and headlands, jarred and worn by the billows they breast; the granite peaks, bald and grey, under light and tempest, with the silent host of rocky boulders, swept, we know not by what convulsions, ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... the universe, I might almost say that between them there is perfect identity, for if we take the universe away, mankind no longer exists, and if we take mankind away, there is no longer an universe; who could realize the idea of the existence of inorganic matter? Now, without that idea, 'nihil est', since the idea is the essence of everything, and since man alone has ideas. Besides, if we abstract the species, we can no longer imagine the existence of matter, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... last chapter considered the forms of stratification so far as they are determined by the arrangement of inorganic matter, we may now turn our attention to the manner in which organic remains are distributed through stratified deposits. We should often be unable to detect any signs of stratification or of successive deposition, if particular kinds of fossils did not occur here ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... those that produced the past changes of the globe, and he carried that idea to what he conceived to be its logical conclusion. To his mind this excluded the thought of catastrophic changes in either inorganic ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Firstly, because the cremation process is open to serious medico-legal objections; secondly, because, by the complete resolution of the body into its elementary and inodorous gases in the cremation furnace, that intervening chemical link between the organic and inorganic worlds, the ammonia, is destroyed, and the economy of nature is thereby dangerously disturbed; thirdly, because the natural tendencies of the people lead them still to the earth, as the most fitting resting-place into which, when ...
— Hygeia, a City of Health • Benjamin Ward Richardson
... the aimless (vestigial, abortive, atrophied, and useless) organs and parts of the body. In all this I worked from a strictly monistic standpoint, and sought to explain all biological phenomena on the mechanical and naturalistic lines that had long been recognised in the study of inorganic nature. Then (1866), as now, being convinced of the unity of nature, the fundamental identity of the agencies at work in the inorganic and the organic worlds, I discarded vitalism, teleology, and all ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... classes of constituents—the Inorganic, which may be called the foundation; and the Organic, which may be considered the superstructure. With the former of these we are principally concerned here. A plant must derive from the soil certain proportions of silica, lime, sulphur, phosphates, alkalies, and other mineral constituents, ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... arts with which, according to their fundamental principle, we have to begin, is architecture. Its task consists in so shaping external inorganic nature that it becomes homogeneous with mind, as an artistic outer world. The material of architecture is matter itself in its immediate externality as a heavy mass subject to mechanical laws, and its forms remain ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... travelled over much of the earth's surface will have met with many "freaks" of nature, exhibiting like appearance of design, in her world of inorganic matter. It was, in fact, one of those formations, of which many are met with in the plateaux-lands of America, known in Spanish phraseology as mesas. This name is given to them in allusion to the flat table-like tops, which distinguish ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... removed from the finest animal intelligence had now developed into thought. Brain and soul strove to grasp what it all meant, and what the revelation was between Nature and herself. Nature was so vast; she was so insignificant; changes in its motionless inorganic life were imperceptible save through the telescopes of years; but she, like the wind, the water, and the clouds, was variable, inconstant. Was there any real relation between the vast, imperturbable earth, its ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is mainly oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon; if we do not keep a sharp look out, we shall have it going the way of the rest of the body, and being declared dead in respect, at any rate, of these inorganic components. Science has not, I believe, settled all the components of protoplasm, but this is neither here nor there; she has settled what it is in great part, and there is no trusting her not to settle the rest at ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... isn't cement, and it isn't fertilizer. It's an inorganic substance. I suggest the microscope, Rick. It will at least give us a clue to its structure, if not ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... the slow changes in the organic and inorganic world in the year 1800 was surely above the standard of his times, and he was right about progression in the main, though you have vastly advanced that doctrine. As to Owen in his 'Aye Aye' paper, ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... they were actually generated. But with our modern appliances, with our greater skill, what might it not be possible to do now if we had the courage? There are chemists toiling away in their laboratories to create the primitive protoplasm from matter which is dead, the organic from the inorganic. I have studied their experiments. I know all that they know. Why shouldn't one work on a larger scale, joining to the knowledge of the old adepts the scientific discovery of the moderns? I don't know what would be the result. It might be very strange and ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... very simple, results from the fact that the ministers who have the appearance of governing really govern the country only to a very limited extent. Strictly limited and circumscribed, their power is exercised principally in speeches which are hardly noticed and in a few inorganic measures. ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... But such schooling as we have been speaking of will drill out only such individualities as are of the unworthy kind, and will throw the strength of the nature into the development of the healthiest features in it. Far more, as things now are, we see men sinking into sameness—an inorganic, unwholesome sameness, in which the higher nature is subdued, and the man is sacrificed to the profession. The circumstances of his life are his world; and he sinks under them, he does not conquer them. If he has to choose between the two, God's uniform is better than the world's. The ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... world, mineral kingdom; unorganized matter, inorganic matter, brute matter, inanimate matter. [Science of the mineral kingdom] mineralogy, geology, geognosy^, geoscopy^; metallurgy, metallography^; lithology; oryctology^, oryctography^. V. turn to dust; mineralize, fossilize. Adj. inorganic, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of Creation." I became more reconciled to the theory it presents towards the close of the book, for obvious reasons. Of course, when, abandoning his positive chain (as he conceives it) of proved progression, after leading the whole universe from inorganic matter up to the "paragon of animals," the climax of development, man, he goes on to say that it is impossible to limit the future progress, or predict the future destinies of this noble human result, he forsakes his own ground of material ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... negative character, a mere mass of rough material, out of which a man might be made. But who should mould that matter? It is extremely difficult to understand how it came about, as difficult almost as to understand how a certain amount of inorganic molecules will sometimes suddenly seem to obey an impulse from within, and become an organism, a yeast plant, or a microscopic animal; but whether or not we succeed in understanding the how and why of the phenomenon, the ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind of natural objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... conditions of the globe we inhabit; to point out the dangers of imprudence and the necessity of caution in all operations which, on a large scale, interfere with the spontaneous arrangements of the organic or the inorganic world; to suggest the possibility and the importance of the restoration of disturbed harmonies and the material improvement of waste and exhausted regions; and, incidentally, to illustrate the doctrine ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... Life—among the Particles of Inorganic Substance, may be found traces of something like Sensation, and response thereto. Writers have not cared to give to this phenomenon the name of "sensation," or "sensibility," as the terms savored too much of "senses," and "sense-organs." ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... first it is a little seed, which soon begins to draw into itself from the earth and the surrounding air matters which in themselves contain no vital properties whatever; it absorbs into its own substance water, an inorganic body; it draws into its substance carbonic acid, an inorganic matter; and ammonia, another inorganic matter, found in the air; and then, by some wonderful chemical process, the details of which chemists do not yet understand, though they are near foreshadowing them, it combines ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... interchangeably. Using the former term in a broad sense—as meaning any substance containing available plant food applied to the soil, we may say that manure is of two kinds: organic, such as stable manure, or decayed vegetable matter; and inorganic, such as potash salts, phosphatic rock and commercial mixed fertilizers. In a general way the term "fertilizer" applies to these inorganic manures, and I shall use it in this ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... inorganic chemicals, miscellaneous consumer goods, fruit, tobacco, construction minerals, electric power machinery and ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... chemistry, that the more complex a substance becomes, the less stable is its constitution, or the sooner is it affected by disturbing influences. Hence organic substances are more readily decomposed than inorganic. How striking, for instance, are the changes easily wrought in a few grains of barley! They contain a kind of starch or fecula; this starch, in the process of malting, becomes converted into a kind of sugar; and from this malt-sugar or transformed starch, may be obtained ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... in inorganic power and their application to industrial enterprise are possibly more far reaching in their effect on the adjustment and relationships of men than they have been at any other time in the last century and a half. ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... bar dulled with swift oxidation; slowly it turned brownish and flaked away, almost entirely consumed. The acid—if that was what the red stuff was—was awesomely powerful, at least with inorganic substances. ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... similarity, if not identity, of the two forces is demonstrated by the fact that while cohesion is exerted between particles of the same body, adhesion is exerted with most force between particles of allied bodies. Generally speaking, organic bodies require organic solvents; inorganic bodies, inorganic solvents. For example, common salt is highly soluble in water, but not in ether, and many fats are soluble in ether, but not in water. So many cases like these will suggest themselves to the chemist ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality. * * * Unless we willfully close our eyes, we may, with our present knowledge, approximately recognize our parentage, nor need we feel ashamed of it. The most humble organism is something much higher than the inorganic dust under our feet; and no one with an unbiased mind can study any living creature, however humble, without being struck with enthusiasm at its marvelous structure and properties."[A] There are people, however, who do ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... soluble in dilute hydrochloric acid, is (with the exception of the alumina it may contain) composed of fertilising material. The substances found in the soluble inorganic matter of soils are lime, magnesia, alumina, silica, phosphoric acid, oxide of iron, oxide of manganese, potash and soda. The insoluble mineral matter is nearly all silica. There is very little clayey matter in any of the soils—not more than about ...
— A start in life • C. F. Dowsett
... it would be possible to arrive at an alphabet of nature, which, once attained, would suffice to spell out and constitute all its infinite combinations. He accepted, without thinking it worth a doubt, the doctrine of appetites and passions and inclinations and dislikes and horrors in inorganic nature. His whole physiology of life and death depends on a doctrine of animal spirits, of which he traces the operations and qualities as if they were as certain as the nerves or the blood, and of which he gives this account—"that ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... fourth volume, in which he treats of social physics, it will not be beside our object to take a glance at the method itself, as applied in the usual field of scientific investigation, to nature, as it is called—to inorganic matter, to vegetable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... poet, as poet. The nightingale, the skylark, the cuckoo, move one sort of interest in an ornithologist, and a very different sort in a Shelley or a Wordsworth. The hoary and stupendous formations of the inorganic world, the thousand tribes of insects, the great universe of plants, from those whose size and form and hue make us afraid as if they were deadly monsters, down to 'the meanest flower that blows,' all these are clothed with one set of attributes by scientific ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... relies, for its demonstration, upon human impressibility. Impressibility in its general sense, or the power of being affected by external agents, is proportional to the development of life. Inorganic matter is affected only mechanically or chemically—vegetation is powerfully affected by causes which would have no perceptible influence on stones or metals, and animals are affected by remote objects, by sounds, by the voice, and by other influences which do ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... of restoring inorganic substances to the soil, may be better understood by examining ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... form in course of time vast deposits of solid materials. Ehrenberg has shown that the harbor of Wismar, on the Prussian coast of the Baltic, is filling, not in consequence of the accumulation of inorganic sediments, but by the rapid increase and decay of innumerable animalcules. To what extent such deposits may accumulate has also been shown by Ehrenberg, who ascertained, many years ago, that the city of Berlin rests upon a deposit of about eighteen feet ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... opponents of the evolution doctrine in zoology was Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), a very able and enthusiastic student of nature. One of its most eminent expounders and defenders was Huxley. Some have sought to extend the theory of natural development over the field of inorganic as well as living things, and to trace all existences ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... lofty-souled, the pure-hearted, who passed from counting-house to laboratory, and studied Sanscrit for recreation, moriturus te saluto. And thou, too, Markus, with thy boy's body, and thy old man's look, and thy encyclopaedic, inorganic mind; and thou, O Gans, with thy too organic Hegelian hocus-pocus. Yes, the Rabbis were right, and the baptismal font had us at last; but surely God counts the will to do, and is more pleased with great-hearted dreams than with the deeds of the white-hearted burghers of virtue, whose goodness ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... varying according to the views of the theorist on phylogeny. Let us not forget that the cell or cells which accidentally acquired the attributes of life, had accidentally to shape themselves from dead materials into something of a character wholly unknown in the inorganic world. If one seriously considers the matter it is—so it seems to me—utterly impossible to subscribe to the accidental theory of which the immanent god—the blind god of Bergson—is a mere variant. One must agree with ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... had pursued culture at a still more pretentious institute until they were eighteen. All could 'play the piano;' all declared—and believed—that they 'knew French.' Beatrice had 'done' Political Economy; Fanny had 'been through' Inorganic Chemistry and Botany. The truth was, of course, that their minds, characters, propensities had remained absolutely proof against such educational influence as had been brought to bear upon them. That they used a finer accent than their ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... we flatter ourselves have originated in our own times. Thus our modern doctrines of evolution and development were taught in their schools. In fact, they carried them much farther than we are disposed to do, extending them even to inorganic or mineral things. The fundamental principle of alchemy was the natural process of development of metalline bodies. "When common people," says Al-Khazini, writing in the twelfth century, "hear from natural philosophers that gold is a body ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... it seemed to be for him the centre of the creation, and he made us all share his belief. Indeed, he convinced us. Running back from it in an almost infinite series was the many-ordered life adhering at last and scarcely distinguishable from the inorganic matter to which it clung. Forward from it again ran the series not less long and complicated which fulfilled itself at last in the brain and soul of man. What he held in his hand was a central link. His ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... absorbed, both in the laboratory and field experiments are small—from 0.7 to 1.3 per cent. The absorption is without doubt chiefly due to the organic matter of the peats, and in all the specimens on which these trials were made, the proportion of inorganic matter is large. The results therefore become a better expression of the power of peat, in general, to absorb ammonia, if we reckon them on the organic matter alone. Calculated in this way, the organic matter of the Beaver Pond peat (which ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... nature of matter, and the fact that what is one person's body to-day, may be a part of another's to-morrow—that matter is constantly being converted and reconverted—that the universal material is used to form bodies of animals, plants, men, or else dwell in chemical gases, or combinations in inorganic things—in view of these accepted truths the "resurrection of the body" seems a pitiful invention of the minds of a primitive and ignorant people, and not a high spiritual teaching. In fact, there ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... its neighbors against the danger of being uprooted by the wind, and against the sun, which is liable to dry up the rich soil around the roots. This soil is different from the soil on the open lawn. It consists of an accumulation of decayed leaves mixed with inorganic matter, forming, together, a rich composition known as humus. The trees also aid each other in forming a close canopy that prevents the rapid evaporation of ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... Temple Protestant. On the way is passed the entrance to the Botanic Gardens, with the Museum of Mineralogy and Natural History. The great interest of the museum consists in the well-arranged collection of specimens illustrating the organic and inorganic products of this part of the Alps. The birds and ores are well represented. Near the gate leading out to La Tronche is the church of St. Laurent, 11th cent. The crypt, 6th cent., is supported on twenty-four slender marble columns from 4 ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... formed. Their origin has been a questionable topic; they were thought to be formed from the detritus of coral reefs, but Professor EHRENBERG has recently announced, as the result of his microscopical researches, that chalk is composed partly of inorganic particles and partly of shells of inconceivable minuteness, a cubic inch of the substance containing about ten millions ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... "those bodies which underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them." Hence it has been inferred that "the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom." Not even does the moon shine every night, but ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... parts and the whole, that the Earth may be more affected than we think by what goes on in the Universe at large. If there are higher levels of being among the stars, it may well be that the successive rises to higher levels on this Earth—from inorganic to organic, from organic to mental, and from the mental to the spiritual—have come about through this interaction between the parts and the whole. Conditions on this Earth may be more affected than we are aware of by ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... Dr. Julius Robert Meyer, an obscure physician in Heilbronn, published a paper in Liebig's "Annalen," entitled "The Force of Inorganic Nature." Not merely the mechanical theory of heat, but the entire doctrine of the conservation of energy was clearly formulated. It is true that he was anticipated in a measure by Mohr, and that Helmholtz more exhaustively demonstrated ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... said, "I don't know who you are, nor where you come from. But I'll give a civil answer to a civil question. As for this Cecil, I don't know anything about him. As for where this asphalt come from, I don't know, and nobody knows. Some say it's inorganic, some say is from vegetable deposits of a long time ago, some say it's fish. The chemists are still scrapping about it. Nobody knows. Now, is there ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... its crystallized cycle of matter, now rapidly evolves into states, though material, yet entirely different. Its previous arc, from Libra to Capricorn, has been amid inorganic matter. It is now rushing with lightning speed upon its weird, toilsome, upward, journey through purely organic forms, from vegetable to animal; and, as all organic forms have their primary origin in water, so ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... will read it without respect and interest, has this one capital defect - that there is imperfect sympathy between the author and the subject, between the critic and the personality under criticism. Hence an inorganic, if not an incoherent, presentation of both the poems and the man. Of HOLY WILLIE'S PRAYER, Principal Shairp remarks that "those who have loved most what was best in Burns's poetry must have regretted that it was ever written." To the JOLLY BEGGARS, so far as my memory serves ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE are such as to exercise an influence which is exactly comparable to that of artificial selection. By Conditions of Existence I mean two things—there are conditions which are furnished by the physical, the inorganic world, and there are conditions of existence which are furnished by the organic world. There is, in the first place, CLIMATE; under that head I include only temperature and the varied amount of moisture of particular places. In the next place there is what ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... listened to this query with outward courtesy, but inwardly his gorge rose. "I see one gain in your new position," he answered, lightly. "Matter is no longer the dead, inorganic, 'godless thing' which the old-time theologians declared it to be. Matter, so far from being some inert lump, is permeated with life—is life itself. So far as we now know, all the visible and tangible universe is resolvable into terms of force—that is to say, chemical process. ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... sometimes spoken of in its twofold aspect, the organic and the inorganic. All organic things, whether plants, animals or men, have souls [Footnote ref 1]. Brahman desiring to be many created fire (tejas), water (ap) and earth (k@siti). Then the self-existent Brahman entered into these three, and it is by their combination ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... living creature or the organism, and as a mechanist he passed quite lightly over the concept or organismic behavior. His basic anti-Aristotelianism prevented his appreciating the biologically oriented thought of Aristotle. Instead, Boyle talked about the inorganic world, of water, of metals and elements, of physical properties. He ignored that inner drive which Spinoza called the conatus; or the seeds of Paracelsus or van Helmont; or the persistence over a time course of any "essence" or "form." Since ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... see the effect of that new thought? Treated as slaves, as things and animals, the many had learnt to consider themselves as things and animals. And so they had become 'a mass,' that is, a mere heap of inorganic units, each of which has no spring of life in itself as distinguished from a whole, a people, which has one bond, uniting each to all. The 'masses' of the French had fallen into that state, before the Revolution ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... of individuality the greatest mistake in training children is still that of treating the "child" as an abstract conception, as an inorganic or personal material to be formed and transformed by the hands of those who are educating him. He is beaten, and it is thought that the whole effect of the blow stops at the moment when the child is prevented from being bad. He has, it is ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key |
