"Inverse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be remarked in general, although the rule is liable to exceptions, that the dimensions of a crater are in an inverse ratio to the elevation of the mountain. Daubeney, op. Cit., p. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Martin," did issue from the neckcloth of Sir Bingo, but they were not much attended to; for it had not escaped the observation of the quicksighted gentry at the Well, that the Baronet's feelings towards the noble Earl were in the inverse ratio of those displayed by Lady Binks, and that, though ashamed to testify, or perhaps incapable of feeling, any anxious degree of jealousy, his temper had been for some time considerably upon the fret; a circumstance concerning ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... contrapuntist. A teacher of music wins much greater consideration, if he himself plays concertos and composes pretty things, and if he can calculate and give vent to his genius in double and triple fugues, and in inverse and retrograde canons. You cannot even accompany your pupils with the violin or flute, which is ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... been thus served, a second round is poured out, but in inverse order, for the host this time drinks first, and the guests last. On special occasions, a first reception, for instance, the ruddy liquor is a third time handed round; nay, a fourth cup is sometimes added. But all these put together do not come up to one-fourth of what a ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... true that the value of old scientific periodicals is, other things being equal, in the inverse ratio of their age, for the obvious reason that what is most valuable in the earlier volumes of a series is drained off into the standard works with which the intelligent practitioner is supposed to be familiar. But no extended record of facts grows too old to be useful, provided only that we have ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and their ambitions, in comparison with a society where mind and morals had the glorious license of Olympians and could follow the unobstructed paths of inclination in realms controlled only by fancy! Napoleon's greeting was laconic, "Vous etes un homme." This flattered Goethe, who called it the inverse "ecce homo," and felt its allusion to his citizenship, not in Germany, but in the world. The nineteenth-century Caesar then urged the great writer to carry out an already-formed design and compose a drama on the life of his own great prototype; such a work, he was sure, would be worthier ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... "As far as humanly possible. The element of error is always present. I've checked and re-checked my calculations. I've augmented the vacuum tubes by installing three super-dimensional inverse power tubes." He clasped the girl's arm. "The street is no place to talk. Let's go to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... special addition to our apprehensions or our measures of precaution. I will go beyond this, and say that religions have very frequently exercised a decidedly demoralizing influence. One may say generally that duties towards God and duties towards humanity are in inverse ratio. ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... our parting. I have my mercantile enterprise in a forward state of readiness for a start over the plains. My caravan will not be a large one, about six or seven waggons with less than a score of men; but the goods I take are valuable in an inverse ratio to their bulk— designed for the 'ricos' of your country. I intend taking departure from the frontier town of Van Buren, in the State of Arkansas, and shall go by a new route lately discovered by one of our prairie traders, that leads part way along the Canadian river, by you called 'Rio ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... admiration of him, I would willingly secure more exaltation and a broader clasping of truth. Still, it is not possible to have so much beauty without a certain portion of truth, the position of the Utilitarians being true in the inverse. But I think as I did of 'uses' and 'responsibilities,' and do hold that the poet is a preacher and must look ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... can bended be, that we might step With goodly strides ahead; or forearms joined Unto the sturdy uppers, or serving hands On either side were given, that we might do Life's own demands. All such interpretation Is aft-for-fore with inverse reasoning, Since naught is born in body so that we May use the same, but birth engenders use: No seeing ere the lights of eyes were born, No speaking ere the tongue created was; But origin of tongue came long before Discourse ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... birds moreover differs in the form of the trajectory in space; in the inclination of the plane in which the wings beat; in the role of each of the two alternating (and in an inverse sense) movements that the wings execute; as also in the facility with which the air is decomposed during these different movements. As the wings of a fly are adorned with a brilliant array of colors, we can follow the trajectory or figure that each wing ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... the, for that day, wonderful proposition that, with the law of inverse squares, the attraction by the separate particles of a sphere of uniform density (or one composed of concentric spherical shells, each of uniform density) acts as if the whole mass were collected at the centre, he was able to ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... some strange anomaly in human nature, it would seem as if, in many cases, the apprehension of danger is in the inverse proportion of the amount of evil to be dreaded, or of the probability of its happening. Thus, the good people at Saint Peter and Saint Paul, who have but very little more reason to expect the intrusion of enemies, than if they dwelt in the regions of the North ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... sacred fires they tended next, And muttered low each funeral text; And priestly singers who rehearse The Saman(352) sang their holy verse. Forth from the town in litters came, Or chariots, many a royal dame, And honoured so the funeral ground, With aged followers ringed around. With steps in inverse order bent,(353) The priests in sad procession went Around the monarch's burning pyre Who well had nursed each sacred fire: With Queen Kausalya and the rest, Their tender hearts with woe distressed. The voice of women, shrill and clear ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... what he felt in those hours, he could not himself have revealed, for a man's emotion is usually in inverse proportion to its expression, and Myles Standish was essentially a man of action and not of words; but God only knows how these strong inarticulate natures suffer in the agony that divides bone from marrow, and yet leaves the ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... account for any of us to talk of essential human needs, of attaining security, if we run the risk of another World War in ten or twenty or fifty years. That is just plain common sense. Wars grow in size, in death and destruction, and in the inevitability of engulfing all Nations, in inverse ratio to the shrinking size of the world as a result of the conquest of the air. I shudder to think of what will happen to humanity, including ourselves, if this war ends in an inconclusive peace, and another war breaks out when the babies ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... begins, my thoughts wander in an irregular and somewhat confused manner. As they are gradually subjected to the associations to which they successively give rise, they are transformed into more vivid images, a vividness which is always in inverse proportion to the attention. This gradually produces the state which has been described by Maury and others as hypnagogic hallucination; that is, the images seem to be real, although the subject is still partly awake, and the voluntary exercise of thought is lost from time to ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... or Bond Street masher makes the physiological mistake of undervaluing the innate sense of decency inherent in every woman. Gentle courtesy and manners impress a courtesan by reason of the novelty. The inverse is often useful in dealing with a ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... 'getting up in years?' On the other hand, if (declining to state any odious circumstantialities,) she were to reply,—'No matter, children, for my precise years, which are disagreeable remembrances; I confess generally to being a lady of a certain age,'—here, in the inverse order, given the valuation of the age, we should yet be at a loss for the absolute years numerically: would a 'certain age,' mean that 'mamma' was a million, be the same more or less, or perhaps not much ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... best have been found in an association with the very worst.' Whenever the Tories have deviated from their tenets, they have enlarged their views and exceeded their promises. The Whigs have always taken an inverse course. Whenever they have come into power, they have previously been obliged to slight those matters, and to temporise with those duties, which they had not the courage either to follow ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... (1) Rip's domestic life; (2) his adventure in the mountain; (3) his return to the village. Three compositions would be better than a single one on the whole story, because too great condensation usually detracts from the value, and because the excellence of a school composition is usually in inverse proportion to its length. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... remedies, with new-school remedies, or she can let him die without remedies because she doesn't believe in the reality of disease. She is quite willing to legislate for his stomach, his mind, his soul, her teachableness, it goes without saying, being generally in inverse proportion to her knowledge; for the arrogance of science is humility compared with ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... been keenly expectant, for its greatest heiress and its three most beautiful girls were to come forth from the seclusion in which they were supposed to have been cultivating their minds, into the great world of balls, musicales, and teas, where their success would be in inverse ratio ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... by creating more liberty, more fraternity, more justice than the world had ever seen. Now, while mankind laboured at this task of spiritualization, inferior powers—I was going to say infernal powers—plotted an inverse experience for mankind. What would happen if the mechanical forces, which science had brought to a state of readiness for the service of man, should themselves take possession of man in order to make his nature material as their own? What ...
— The Meaning of the War - Life & Matter in Conflict • Henri Bergson
... that, therefore, it is a mere chance whether or not organs which are of importance to organisms are likewise of importance as guides to classification; and, in point of fact, that the general tendency in this matter is towards an inverse instead of a direct proportion. More often than not, the greater the value of a structure for the purpose of indicating natural affinities, the less is its value to the ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... France, this proportion had been wanting for many centuries; it had even given way to the inverse proportion. If, towards the middle of the eighteenth century, two sum-totals of the budget, material and moral, had been calculated, assets on one side and liabilities on ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... self-sacrificing are necessarily the first to die and where the less courageous, the less generous, the weak, the ailing, in a word the less desirable, alone possess some chance of escaping the carnage, for over twelve months a sort of monstrous inverse selection has been in operation, one which seems to be deliberately seeking the downfall of the human race. And we wonder uneasily what the state of the world will be after the great trial and what will be left of it and what will be the future of this stunted race, shorn of all the best ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Turgenev loved him for the same reason that Hamlet loved Horatio. Amid all the vain babble of the other characters, Solomin stands out salient, the man who will eventually save Russia without knowing it. His power of will is in inverse proportion to his fluency of speech. The typical Russian, as portrayed by Turgenev, says much, and does little; Solomin lives a life of cheerful, reticent activity. As the revolution is not at hand, the best thing to do in the interim is to accomplish something useful. He has learned how to ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... supported.[264] The ingenious M. Muret, again, had found a Swiss parish in which the mean life was the highest and the fecundity smallest known. He piously conjectures that it may be a law of God that 'the force of life in each country should be in the inverse ratio of its fecundity.' He needs not betake himself to a miracle, says Malthus.[265] The case is simply that in a small and healthy village, where people had become aware of the importance of the 'preventive check,' the young people put off marriage ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... His conscience stood in inverse relation to the vigor of his body. When he was well, his too darkly stained past life troubled him little; but when he was unmanned by weakness, he was incapable of fighting the ghastly demon that forced upon his memory in painful ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was the inverse of his master's. To Thorpe it had suddenly become a very little thing in contrast to the great, sweet elemental truth that the dream girl had enunciated. To Collins the affair was miles vaster than the widest scope of his ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... during the rotation; lastly, the box shall be tied to a cord and I will whirl the whole thing round like a sling. With this contrivance, it will be quite easy to obtain any rate of speed that I wish, any variety of inverse movements that I consider likely to make my captives lose their bearings. I can whirl my sling first in one direction and then in another, turn and turn about; I can slacken or increase the pace; if I like, I can make it describe figures of eight, combined with ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... connected view of history, rekindled all my enthusiasm; which the sixth (or concluding) volume did not materially abate. In a merely logical point of view, the only leading conception for which I am indebted to him is that of the Inverse Deductive Method, as the one chiefly applicable to the complicated subjects of History and Statistics: a process differing from the more common form of the deductive method in this—that instead of arriving at its conclusions ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... attributable to my thorough knowledge of their characters. I have generally found that high appreciation and intimate acquaintance are in inverse ratios. As for Clinton Allston, were he my father's son, instead of his nephew. I imagine my flattering estimate of him would be substantially the same. Estelle, do you ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... people's minds in favour of Rome. The fervent Romanists have always this point in their favour, that they are ready to believe. And they have a desire for the conversion of men which is honest in an exactly inverse ratio to the dishonesty of the means which they employ to produce it. Father Barham was ready to sacrifice anything personal to himself in the good cause,—his time, his health, his money when he had any, and his ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... used in the teaching of length, then to placing the plane geometric insets, and so gradually worked through all the earlier sensory stimuli which the teacher had passed over." Thus we see that the older child chooses the objects in inverse order, proceeding almost methodically from the most difficult to ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... elaborate preparations all the while, stretching and retracting her claws, squirming her whalebone body flatter and flatter, her tail assuming majestic proportions, while her ears disappeared in inverse ratio. ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... with various formalities, are treated by their lords as existences on sufferance. And even more. The fact that they are ruled, governed, and owned they must acknowledge and confess as a favour of heaven! On the other hand, there are those rulers themselves whose greatness is in inverse proportion to their number. ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... intellectual and moral absurdities of which the more robust common sense of other nations would be incapable. The advanced German doctrinaire is the "wisest fool in Christendom." The depth of his learning is generally in the inverse ratio to the ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... he mused, "does it pay Society to reward its individuals in inverse ratio to their usefulness?" He took out his pocket notebook and wrote: "Society itself suffers for rewarding that low order of cunning called business sense with the ultimate control of all other useful talents." He closed his notebook ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... considerations were of little importance, the first was of great weight. According to all probability, it was too soon for any serious attack. Without being beautiful, she pleased much and many; a second obstacle, since sensibility in women is almost always developed in inverse ratio to their success. She had brains; she was wonderfully ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... was limited to persuasion and example. Tartar women have their powers of locomotion unimpaired. Viceroy Chang denounced the fashion as tending to sap the vigour of China's mothers; and he is reported to have suggested a tax on small feet—in inverse proportion to their size, of course. The leader in this movement, which bids fair to become ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... ellipse and if the sun were at one of the foci of that ellipse, the intensity of the attractive force must vary inversely as the square of the planet's distance. If the law had any other expression than the inverse square of the distance, then the orbit which the planet must follow would not be an ellipse; or if an ellipse, it would, at all events, not have the sun in the focus. Hence he was able to show from Kepler's laws alone that the force which guided the planets was an attractive ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... sunshine, and she wondered what any one could see to complain of in such a pleasant state of things. She loved Scythrop, she hardly knew why; indeed she was not always sure that she loved him at all: she felt her fondness increase or diminish in an inverse ratio to his. When she had manoeuvred him into a fever of passionate love, she often felt and always assumed indifference: if she found that her coldness was contagious, and that Scythrop either was, or pretended ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... exposure. Up to the time of the explanation of the puzzle on board the departing vessel (on the road to Windsor, at the Premier's reception, in the cell of the Police, in the presence of the Magistrate-whose crack of a totally inverse decision upon their case, when he becomes acquainted with the titles and station of these imputedly peccant, refreshes them), they hold debates over the mysterious contrarieties of a people professing in one street what they confound in the next, and practising by day a demureness that yells ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to," Orloff replied. "I hate to think how many communications we sent home from our own office, and the others must have done the same. But Earth was a long way off. The Station bosses were close. Inverse square law of ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... from the curious fact, that the half of the numbers which compose this progression represents, in inverse order, the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... law of inverse variation of extension and intension must of course be confined to the inter-relations of a series of terms of which each can be predicated of the other until we arrive at the bottom of the scale. It is not meant to apply to the extension and intension of the same term. The increase of population ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... the immense superiority which the occasional rhymes, carelessly thrown on paper by men of this class, possess over the elaborate productions of almost all the professed authors. The reigning taste was so bad, that the success of a writer was in inverse proportion to his labour, and to his desire of excellence. An exception must be made for Butler, who had as much wit and learning as Cowley, and who knew, what Cowley never knew, how to use them. A great command of good homely English distinguishes him still more from the other writers ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... applied to the two parties voting together the electors would certainly not be influenced only by the merit of the candidates. They might record their honest preferences as regards the candidates of their own party, but they would naturally place the candidates of the opposing party in inverse order of merit. The candidates most in general favour would be those who represented neither party. Suppose there are three candidates for a single seat, two representing large parties of 49 per cent, each, and the third a small party of 2 per cent. The electors of the large ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... security even upon so little, the conflict of speculative reason regarding the important questions of God, immortality, and freedom, would have been either decided long ago, or would very soon be brought to a conclusion. But, in general, the uprightness of the defence stands in an inverse ratio to the goodness of the cause; and perhaps more honesty and fairness are shown by those who deny than by those who ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... he were too busy problamatin' the exact altitude projected in an inverse direction by th' square root of th' new engine when operated at a million times inside of a few seconds, but he didn't say nothin' t' me. I were busy underneath th' ship, fixin' bolts when he tole me t' find yo'. I wouldn't be s'prised if he had ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... them. No fact of religious experience is more striking than this, that the higher men rise in real goodness—the nearer they come to God, the more keen-eyed and distressed are they to detect evil in themselves. Their sense of sin seems to be in a sort of inverse ratio to their freedom from its power. And we meet with a similar fact in the natural life. The finer and more exalted the sentiment of purity and honor, the more sensitive will one be to the slightest ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... principal. She enters the school-room makes a few criticisms, asks a blessing at the table; occasionally a misdemeanor is reported to her, when the offender is cited to the august presence, and duly reprimanded, not according to the quality of the offense, but, in an inverse proportion, to the quality of the offender. Her teachers do the mental drudgery of the institution. Their life is about as varied and pleasant as that of a churn-dog; that is, if the dog were kept churning all day. The balancing of accounts ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... floating down with the current the rivermen caught and arranged to the best possible advantage about the improvised piers. A good riverman understands the correlation of forces represented by saw-logs and water-pressure. He knows how to look for the key-log in breaking jams; and by the inverse reasoning, when need arises he can form a jam as expertly as Koosy-oonek himself—that bad little god who brings about the disagreeable and undesired—"who hides our pipes, steals our last match, and brings rain on the just when they want to ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... great compositions may be pointed to in the work of the Renaissance painters, and such examples will be cited; but the major portion of the art by which these exceptions were surrounded offers the same proportion of good to bad as the inverse ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... is known by experience, that the losses in physical forces in the course of a battle seldom present a great difference between victor and vanquished respectively, often none at all, sometimes even one bearing an inverse relation to the result, and that the most decisive losses on the side of the vanquished only commence with the retreat, that is, those which the conqueror does not share with him. The weak remains of battalions already in disorder are ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... rarest must be Rats like us, Who let the cat out of the bag. Yet still these Tyros in the cause Deserve, I own, no small applause; And they're by us received and treated With all due honors—only seated In the inverse scale of their reward, The merely promised next my Lord; Small pensions then, and so on, down, Rat after rat, they graduate Thro' job, red ribbon and silk gown, To Chancellorship and Marquisate. This serves to ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... dark question to his own judgment, and not much illuminated by any of the masters in casuistry whom he has consulted on the occasion. On the one hand it seems generally agreed that a promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made; for which reason it is that we see many persons break promises without scruple that are made to a whole nation, who keep their faith religiously in all private engagements, breaches of promise towards the stronger party being ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... ater).—More grey, and very graceful. All these four will gladly come to a window in winter for a little fat hung to a string, and will put themselves into wonderful inverse positions. ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... too great a flow of blood towards the brain produces a stupefaction of the mind. Analogous or inverse effects might evidently be produced by a subtle, invisible, imponderable fluid, by a sort of nervous fluid, or magnetic fluid (if this term be preferred), circulating through our organs. And the ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... the colored man solemnly, "dis trip am wuss dan any ob de udders. It suah am. Good land a' massy! T' t'ink ob being projected transmigatorially in de obverse tangent ob de parallelism circumdelegated on de inverse side ob a duodecimo. It's too altogether imparipinated fo' dis chile! I'se afraid dat's what I is! I'se too much afraid t' go," and Washington started to run from the shop, as if he feared that the big projectile would ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... quantity of nonsense about, regarding this thing. For my part, I don't credit half of it. I believe in Malthus,—a great deal more than Malthus did himself. The prosperity of a country is often measured by its population; but quite likely it should be taken in inverse ratio. I certainly do not see why the mere multiplication of the species is so indicative of prosperity. Mobs are not so altogether lovely that one should desire their indefinite increase. A village ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... she contributes little or nothing to the common income in no way embarrasses an American wife; her pretensions are usually in an inverse proportion to her personal means. A man I knew some years ago deliberately chose his bride from an impecunious family (in the hope that her simple surroundings had inculcated homely taste), and announced to an incredulous circle ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... biography is properly a work of partnership, to which public credit is awarded too often in an inverse proportion to the labours expended. One group of historians, labouring in the obscurest depths, dig and prepare the ground, searching and sifting the documentary soil with infinite labour and over an area immensely ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... the agency of light. Animals, on the contrary, derive their nourishment either directly or indirectly from plants. They get rid of the superfluous hydrogen and carbon, and accumulate nitrogen. The relations of plants and animals to the atmosphere are therefore inverse. The plant withdraws water and carbonic acid from the atmosphere, the animal contributes both to it. Respiration—that is, the absorption of oxygen and the exhalation of carbonic acid—is the specially animal function of animals, and constitutes ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... our imaginative writers—poets and romancers, but especially the latter—has been out of all proportion great. We give the place of honour, as is their due, to the singers rather than to the story-tellers, the more readily since the popular taste, it cannot be denied, chooses its favourites in inverse order as ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... Heaven, comes into view; at first as a point of intense brilliancy round which nine circles are revolving. These represent the Angelic hierarchies, and their places with regard to the central point are in inverse order to that of the spheres which they move. Beatrice takes occasion from them to instruct Dante upon some points relating to the creation and functions of the angels, and incidentally, upon the creation of form and matter, and ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... come in with spirits attuned, ready to wait patiently and observe silently. The law of these materializations seems to be this: the forces of the psychic are proportional to the harmoniousness of the circle and in inverse proportion to the light. Accepting this law as proved by our illustrious fellow-experimenters abroad, are you ready to try again along the ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... weary of wandering over the world, and of finding every petty race wedded to its own opinions; claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all others to be in error, and raising disputes whose violence, acerbity and virulence are in inverse ratio to the importance of the disputed matter. A peculiarly active and acute observation taught him that many of these jarring families, especially those of the same blood, are par in the intellectual processes of perception and reflection; that in the business of the visible ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... house-carrying, unsanguineous animal." Equally efficacious might be the modern definition of the same creature as a "terrestrial, air-breathing, gastropodous mollusk." The degree of efficiency of such prescriptions is naturally in inverse proportion to the patient's mental culture. An average Southern negro, for example, affected with indigestion, might derive some therapeutic advantage from snail diet, but would be more likely to be benefited by the mental stimulus ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... dog seems to follow a law of comparative anatomy, that its bulk shall be in an inverse proportion of that of the lungs. The latter are necessarily capacious; for they need a large supply of arterial blood, in order to answer to their rapid expenditure when the utmost exertion of strength and speed is required. The liver is, therefore, restricted in its size and growth. Nevertheless, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... the omnipresent Spirit; for him there is no distance inverse to the square. Only one reason, therefore, can motivate Babaji in maintaining his physical form from century to century: the desire to furnish humanity with a concrete example of its own possibilities. Were man never ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... such as Ingres would have loved, from the sage-brush, and cactus? "Well," she told herself, "Moore wrote 'Lalla Rookh' in a back room in London, among the chimney-pots and soot. Maybe the proportion is inverse. But, Mr. Harold Vickers of Ash Fork, Arizona, your little book is, to say the ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... I said dryly, "that undertakers' assistants are jovial young men. A man's sense of humor seems to be in inverse proportion to the gravity of ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... be to a less stone as a two year old calf is to a yearling; or it must be to a larger stone than itself, as a two year old calf is to an ox. Here the scholar sees that there must be two statements, one in the rule of three direct and one in the rule of three inverse, to obtain precisely the thing required; yet the untutored Irishman, without suspecting the necessity of this operose process, arrives at the solution of the problem by some short cut of his own, as he clearly evinces by the propriety of ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... the comparative simplicity of the instincts in the higher animals are remarkable in contrast with those of the lower animals. Cuvier maintained that instinct and intelligence stand in an inverse ratio to each other; and some have thought that the intellectual faculties of the higher animals have been gradually developed from their instincts. But Pouchet, in an interesting essay (2. 'L'Instinct chez les Insectes,' 'Revue des Deux Mondes,' Feb. 1870, p. 690.), ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... their dislike and disapproval of the English system of education, are to be added, the distinguished names of Cowley, Addison, and Cowper; while, among the cases which, like those of Milton and Dryden, practically demonstrate the sort of inverse ratio that may exist between college honours and genius, must not be forgotten those of Swift, Goldsmith, and Churchill, to every one of whom some mark of incompetency was affixed by the respective universities, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... attention: on the one hand, facile attention shows the reign of habit. The solid acquisitions are those with which attention is at home, and which are therefore more or less habitual. But, on the other hand, it is equally true that attention is in inverse ratio to habit. We need to attend least to these functions which are most habitual, and we have to attend most to those which are novel and only half acquired. We get new acquisitions mainly, ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... esprit-de-corps, patriotism, humanity, are names for qualities that we prize more or less highly in proportion as they come more or less close to our own happiness; and the scale of our preferences is in the inverse ratio of the number of those who benefit by the given act. If it affects the whole of humanity or of our country, our approval is less warmly stirred than if it were an act specially devoted to our own exclusive advantage. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... people, we shall have to be very careful indeed to make ends meet. To return to Rotherwood is utterly out of the question, and with the price of everything doubled and trebled, and our income in the inverse ratio, it is impossible to keep up ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... of the Loire carries barks almost as far as Croisic. If they want to lie by a little, or to refresh the crew, they come to Pirial along the coast; from Pirial they find another inverse current, which carries them to the Isle-Dumal, ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... hell upon my father, but can I help it? They don't see either that my game is not the light-hearted scoffer; that I am not (as they call me) a careless infidel. I believe as much as they do, only generally in the inverse ratio: I am, I think, as honest as they can be in what I hold. I have not come hastily to my views. I reserve (as I told them) many points until I acquire fuller information, and do not think I am thus justly to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fall to sleep at once, but drop off successively: first the sight, then the smell, the taste, the hearing and lastly the touch. The sleep ended, they awake in an inverse order, touch, hearing, taste, smell, ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... myself in the recollection of that which had just happened; but this was neither my turn of mind nor the inclination of my heart. The facility with which I forget past evils, however recent they may be, is astonishing. The remembrance of them becomes feeble, and, sooner or later, effaced, in the inverse proportion to the greater degree of fear with which the approach of them inspires me. My cruel imagination, incessantly tormented by the apprehension of evils still at a distance, diverts my attention, and prevents me from recollecting ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... and weight would be perfect. Suppose the impossible, that the shortest man was the heaviest, the tallest the lightest, and that the whole order needed to be exactly reversed; then we should say that the correlation was perfectly inverse or negative. Suppose the shift from height order to weight order mixed the men indiscriminately, so that you could not tell anything from a man's position in the height order as to what his position ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... largest scale, depends"—an abstract proposition which cannot be too carefully studied in connection with the present state of public morality in China, and the general welfare of the people. Dr Legge, however, whose logical are apparently in an inverse ratio to his linguistic powers, rushes wildly into the concrete, and declares that every falsehood told in China may be traced to the example of Confucius himself. He acknowledges that "many sayings might be quoted from ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... talked with any observing habitue of the place, contains a great many queer, spurious people, smuggled in somehow by indirect influence, when royal command is not the least effectual: a surprizing number of seedy, poverty-stricken young men, and, in an inverse ratio, women who have any thing more than the clothes they wear: yet, by mere dint of difficulty, by the simple circumstance of making admission to this assembly a matter of closeting, canvassing, balloting, black-balling, and so forth, people of much ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... agitated by the legs from below the scene, and not managed by cords from above, as at the Marionette Theatre. Their audiences, as I said, are always interesting, and comprise: first, boys ragged and dirty in inverse ratio to their size; then weak little girls, supporting immense weight of babies; then Austrian soldiers, with long coats and short pipes; lumbering Dalmat sailors; a transient Greek or Turk; Venetian loafers, pale-faced, statuesque, with the ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... was a reason for his extreme frugality; he feared that if he ate and drank like other people he might lose his phenomenal thinness, which was of inestimable value to him in a professional point of view. If he should be so unfortunate as to gain flesh, his attractions would diminish in an inverse ratio, so he starved himself almost to death, and was constantly seen anxiously examining the buckle of his belt, to make sure that he had not increased in girth since his last meal. Voluntary Tantalus, he scarcely allowed himself enough ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... and volatile in its free state, was alternately the agent and reagent of attraction. Because attraction between agent(s) and reagent(s) at all instants varied, with inverse proportion of increase and decrease, with incessant circular extension and radial reentrance. Because the controlled contemplation of the fluctuation of attraction produced, if desired, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... a constant source of astonishment to us grandfathers. We were half starved, we were exceedingly dirty, we were systematically bullied, and we were flogged and caned as though the master's pleasure was in inverse ratio to ours. The inscription on the threshold should have ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... Commentary to have; and, therefore, it was impossible for it to be obedient. That to the Latin it would have been impossible, as is said, is evident by such an argument as this: each thing which proceeds by an inverse order is laborious, and consequently is bitter, and not sweet; even as to sleep by day and to wake by night, and to go backwards and not forwards. For the subject to command the sovereign, is to proceed in the inverse ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... physiologically it's exactly what one would have expected from the nature of memory. And yet it never occurred to me. Set up the train of thought in the order in which it originally presented itself, and the links may readily restore themselves in successive series. Try to trace it backward in the inverse order, and the process is very much more difficult and involved.—Well, we'll try things just so with you, Una. We'll begin by reconstructing your first life as far as we can from the very outset, with the aid of these stray hints ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... with his own letters, while Louis laughed at the enunciation of this inverse ratio; and then took up the note again, to wonder at the tone of anxiety and distress, so unlike James. He went to call on Lady Conway, and was better satisfied to find that James had written in a lively strain to ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 6th of October Sheridan faced about and began moving down the valley, the infantry leading in the inverse order of its advance, and the cavalry bringing up the rear in one long line that reached from mountain to mountain, busied in burning as it marched the mills, the barns, and everything edible by man ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... great hissing locomotive, with its parabolic headlight and its coal-laden tender, came the baggage, mail, and express cars; then the passenger coaches, in which the social condition of the occupants seemed to be in inverse ratio to their distance from the engine. First came emigrants, "honest miners," "cow-boys," and laborers; Irishmen, Germans, Welshmen, Mennonites from Russia, quaint of garb and speech, and Chinamen. Then came long cars full of people of better station, and last the great ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... is certain, that in every spirituous fermentation there is a portion of the sweet matter which remains undecomposed and in its original state. Lavoisier found that it was 4.940; that is, nearly 5 parts in 100. It may possibly be the same in a weaker liquor; which would increase the loss, in the inverse ratio of the density of the liquor. Such are the causes to which I attribute the great superiority of Lavoisier's products; and from those observations I thought I could establish the fabrication ...
— The Art of Making Whiskey • Anthony Boucherie
... of static induction are proportional in intensity to the force of the battery and the length of the wire, whilst an inverse relation is true as regards the length of the conductor ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... inverse of dramatic talent," said Abbe Arnauld to Diderot; "the proper thing is to transform one's self into all the characters, and you transform all the characters into yourself." The criticism did Diderot wrong: ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Those who now rule form an aristocracy in an inverse sense, contrary to the law, and yet more contrary to nature.[3321] For, by a violent inversion, the lower grades in the graduated scale of civilization and culture now are found uppermost, while the superior grades are found at the uniform. The Constitution having suppressed inequality, this ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... excluded. Platonism was not only carried to its full development, but in the end it supplanted Peripateticism, and through the New Academy left a permanent impress on Christianity. The philosophical method of Plato was the inverse of that of Aristotle. Its starting-point was universals, the very existence of which was a matter of faith, and from these it descended to particulars, or details. Aristotle, on the contrary, rose from particulars to universals, advancing to them ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... who were chatting and gesticulating on the piazza of the great hotel, and planning, amid jest and laughter, their future campaigns. Their work seemed like play, while the play around them seemed like work. Indeed, most people on the Avenue seemed to be happy in inverse ratio to their ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... undoubtedly serve in many cases to afford light to enable the animal to see by, and in the Lampyridae it would seem that the degree of luminosity is related to the development of the vision. In that family, according to the Rev. H.S. Gorham, the eyes are developed, as a rule, in inverse proportion to the luminosity. Where there is an ample supply of this kind of light the eyes are small, but where the light is insignificant the eyes are large by way of compensation. And moreover, where both eyes and light are small, then the antennae ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... those of the Scotch Pine live for three, of the Spruce Fir, Yew, etc., for eight or ten, of the Pinsapo even eighteen. As a general rule the Conifers with short leaves keep them on for several years, those with long ones for fewer, the length of the leaf being somewhat in the inverse ratio to the length of its life; but this is not an invariable criterion, as other circumstances also have to be taken ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... clearer air. At length it seemed to me as if the flood were beginning to subside. The old landmarks, by whose disappearance I had measured its advance, here a crag, there a brave pine tree, now began, in the inverse order, to make their reappearance into daylight. I judged all danger of the fog was over. This was not Noah's flood; it was but a morning spring, and would now drift out seaward whence it came. So, mightily relieved, and a good deal exhilarated by the sight, ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lack. Mark Twain could be humorous at the death of his dearest friend, but in such a way as to put a blessing into the heart of the bereaved. Humor in music has the same possibilities. But its quantity has a serious effect on its quality, "inverse ratio" is a good formula to adopt here. Comedy has its part, but wit never. Strauss is at his best in these lower rooms, but his comedy reminds us more of the physical fun of Lever rather than "comedy in the Meredithian sense" as Mason suggests. ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... cases, it is advisable to emphasise a character by the ironical expedient of inverse proportion. Tartufe is so emphasised throughout the first two acts of the play that bears his name. Although he is withheld from the stage until the second scene of the third act, so much is said about him that we are made to feel fully his sinister dominance over the household of Orgon; and ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... instances the species which grow in hot springs have been reserved in order to make their comparison more easy. I shall begin in an inverse order, with those of the springs of Pugha in Tibet, which attain a temperature of 174 degrees. Two Confervae only occur in the specimens which have been preserved, viz., an Oscillatoria allied ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... with a white flag to ask that the fire should be stopped. Thereupon Erasmus' men, to whom news of Yule's evacuation was a complete surprise, filed down the mountain, and approached, not without caution. There was soon no room for doubt; Dundee had fallen, and Erasmus' prize was large in inverse proportion to the share he had taken in capturing it. No sooner was the absence of the British soldiers established beyond a doubt, than the burghers made haste to sack the camp and town. In a short time every tent, except those of the hospitals, ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... up around them fields of vibration, and act and react upon one another in a manner closely analogous to the action and reaction of magnets upon one another, producing the phenomena of attraction and repulsion. In this respect, however, the analogy appears to be inverse, repulsion being produced where, from the magnetic analogy, one would expect to find ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... faculties are distinct, not in degree but in kind, if we may possess the one in perfection without that fact implying that we possess the other also. Still more will this be the case if the two faculties tend to increase in an inverse ratio. Yet this is the distinction between the instinctive and the intellectual parts ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... change. In the pure air of his country living he was liberated from the unsatisfactory wranglings, the bitter jealousies, and vexatious interference of his London patrons, whose self-sufficiency and spiritual pride were, like those of many amateur theologians at the present day, in inverse ratio to their knowledge and ability. He had the satisfaction of seeing a son grow up to be worthy of his father. To that son we are indebted for the very interesting biography of Thomas Scott, a biography in which filial piety has not tempted the writer to lose sight of good ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... two together," I answered, with my eye on our subject, "and taking into consideration the lady's face and manner, I should incline to suspect that she was the daughter of a poor parson, with the usual large family in inverse proportion to his means. That she unexpectedly made a good match with a very wealthy manufacturer who had raised himself; and that she was puffed up accordingly ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... thoughts weren't his. Self-pity hadn't made him a Winner—why was he feeling it now? Anvhar was his universe—how could he even imagine it as a tag-end planet at the outer limb of creation? What had come over him and induced this inverse thinking? ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... business, he was ever looking to something beyond it, and to change of place and pursuit as the means of improving his fortunes. This at last, as has been seen, led him off to the West in the ardent hope of becoming in time a wealthy farmer. In an inverse ratio to the hopeful elevation of spirits with which Parker set out upon his journey was the sorrowful depression experienced by his wife. But Rachel kept meekly and patiently her feelings to herself. It was her duty, she felt, to go with ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... seen, is in inverse ratio to the quality of the educational service. If we take the three Irish Boards of National, Intermediate, and Technical Education, the total cost of administration and inspection is L120,000 per annum; the similar charge on Scotland ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... action become the masters of the productive industry of entire nations. The small operators will be reduced to the position of mere agents working for the mercantile coalition. We shall then see the reappearance of feudalism in an inverse order, founded on mercantile leagues and answering to the baronial ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... automatic flow of thought is often singularly favored by the fact of listening to a weak continuous discourse, with just enough ideas in it to keep the (conscious) mind busy. The induced current of thought is often rapid and brilliant in inverse ratio to the ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... bar before which the proprietor of slaves is likely to be arraigned, is the bar of public opinion; and the influence which that knowledge will have upon his conduct is exactly in the inverse ratio to its need; for the hardened brute, upon whom its influence is most wanted, is the very person who, if he can escape lynching, is indifferent to public opinion. No Southerner can be affronted, if I say that he is not more Christian, kind-hearted, and mild-tempered than his fellow-man ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... wild animals of the same species; they, also, sometimes breed at an earlier age. The case would hardly have deserved further notice, had not some authors lately attempted to show that fertility increases and decreases in an inverse ratio with the amount of food. This strange doctrine has apparently arisen from individual animals when supplied with an inordinate quantity of food, and from plants of many kinds when grown on excessively rich soil, as on a dunghill, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... reader, and require him to make an effort of his own to understand them. This makes their public extremely small, and causes their fame to be more remarkable for its length than for its breadth. And, in general, it may be said that the possibility of a man's fame lasting a long time, stands in almost inverse ratio with the chance that it will be early in making its appearance; so that, as regards length of fame, the above order of precedence may be reversed. But, then, the poet and the composer will come in the ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... themselves why there is no revolt against the dogmas of mathematics though there is one against the dogmas of religion. It is not that the mathematical dogmas are more comprehensible. The law of inverse squares is as incomprehensible to the common man as the Athanasian creed. It is not that science is free from legends, witchcraft, miracles, biographic boostings of quacks as heroes and saints, and of barren scoundrels ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... of the human mind has been her chief object. Throughout Christendom, whatever advance has been made in knowledge, in freedom, in wealth, and in the arts of life, has been made in spite of her, and has everywhere been in inverse proportion to her power. The loveliest and most fertile provinces of Europe have, under her rule, been sunk in poverty, in political servitude, and in intellectual torpor, while Protestant countries, once proverbial for sterility and barbarism, have been turned by skill and industry ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... force and originality traverses two phases of opinion before his substantive rank in the great order of merit is definitely fixed: he is either depressed or exalted unduly. He may be neglected or cheapened by his own generation, and praised to the sides by posterity; or his fame may undergo the inverse treatment, until he settles down to his proper level. Byron's reputation has passed through sharper vicissitudes than have befallen most of his compeers; for though no poet has ever shot up in ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... save that sometimes a parrot, and sometimes a canary bird, ventures to utter a timid note. When it is finished, the gentlemen hurry to their occupation, and the quiet ladies mount the stairs, some to the first, some to the second, and some to the third stories, in an inverse proportion to the number of dollars paid, and ensconce themselves in their respective chambers. As to what they do there it is not very easy to say, but I believe they clear-starch a little, and iron a little, and sit in a rocking-chair, ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... acquired by actual possession. The charter-claims were elaborated with the most wearisome prolixity at the time; but so were the English claims to New Amsterdam a century earlier. Conquest gave the true title in each case; the importance of a claim is often in inverse order to the length at which it is set forth in a diplomatic document. The west was gained by: (1) the westward movement of the backwoodsmen during the Revolution; (2) the final success of the Continental armies in the east; (3) the skill of our diplomats at Paris; failure on any one ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... Mr. Southey will scarcely, we think, deny that his success has almost always borne an inverse proportion to the degree in which his undertakings have required a logical head. His poems, taken in the mass, stand far higher than his prose works. His official Odes, indeed, among which the Vision of Judgement must be classed, are, for ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this phantastic standing apart from the contest, these phantastic attacks on it lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... of this country, where wealth has made the least progress, the character of the people supports itself the best amongst the lower classes; and the inverse progress of that character, and of the acquisition of wealth, is sufficiently striking to be noticed by one who is neither a very near, nor a very ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... amiable one, he was much resembled by that eminent man the late Sir George Jessel, whose civility to a barrister was always in inverse ratio to the barrister's practice; and whose friendly zeal in helping young and nervous practitioners over the stiles of legal difficulty was only equalled by the fiery enthusiasm with which he thrust ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Intricacies, agitating to behold. Concerning which we have again to remark how these huge Spectres of Diplomacy, now filling Friedrich's world, came mostly in result to Nothing;—shaping themselves wholly, for or against, in exact proportion, direct or inverse, to the actual Quantity of Battle and effective Performance that happened to be found in Friedrich himself. Diplomatic Spectralities, wide Fatamorganas of hope, and hideous big Bugbears blotting out the sun: of these, few ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... which showed no target because so many other contributors had preceded the stage driver. In fact, it was not a world for a lady with a train, though Eleanor saw some trollopy immigrant "ladies" emerging from a big tent on a back lot decked with tawdry lace and sporting trains in inverse proportions to the sufficiency of their "h's." Nor was it a perfumed world. She could smell the reek of the whiskey saloons all down the street—eleven of them, there were in a succession of twelve buildings; and ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... sport, for it must be remembered that the poor cock who undergoes all this plucking and mangling is a living bird! It is doubtful whether a thought of the cruelty ever entered the mind of a New Mexican. If so, it must have been a New Mexican woman; for the humanity of these is in an inverse ratio to that of their lords. For the women it may be urged that the sport is a custom of the country; and what country is without its cruel sports? Is it rational or consistent to weep over the sufferings of Chanticleer, while we ride gaily upon the heels ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... In an inverse order, romanticism consists in putting literature into our life, in taking the latest literary fashion for our rule of action. This is not only a proof of want of taste; it is a most dangerous mistake. The romanticists, who had so many wrong ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... contemplate two figures, and recognize a correspondence between certain points in the one figure and certain points in the other, is one of the most powerful and fertile methods hitherto known in science. Thus in pure geometry the theories of similar, reciprocal and inverse figures have led to many extensions of the science. It is sometimes spoken of as the method or ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... combustion, must be neglected. In making capacity tests with coal fuel, no difference has been noted in the rates of combustion for a given draft suction measured by a water column at high and low altitudes, and this would make it appear that the correct height to use is more nearly that obtained by the inverse ratio of the barometric readings than by the inverse ratio of the squares of the barometric readings. If the assumption is made that the value falls midway between the two formulae, the error in using a stack figured in the ordinary way by making ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... and, on the other hand, as the augmentation of the population of Virginia is to that of the whole population of the country. Thus, if the increase of the population of the lesser country be to that of the greater in an exact inverse ratio of the proportion between the new and the old numbers of all the representatives, the number of representatives of Virginia will remain stationary; and if the increase of the Virginian population be to that of the whole Union in a feebler ratio than the new number of representatives ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... sensible object to which it can be related, this word or this idea is unmeaning, and void of sense; it were better for man that the idea was banished from his mind, struck out of his language: this principle is only the converse of the axiom of ARISTOTLE,—"if the direct be evident, the inverse must be so likewise." How has it happened, that the profound LOCKE, who, to the great mortification of the metaphysicians, has placed this principle of ARISTOTLE in the clearest point of view? how is it, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... of children has conspicuously decreased, the care and attention given them has increased in inverse proportion. The woman with six children or more turned over the younger children to the older ones, so that her burden, though heavy, was much less than it may seem. Further, though she loved and cared for them, she knew far less of hygiene than ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... pursuit. This wasn't the first time Jason had to move just one jump ahead of the authorities—but it was the first time he had let someone else lead him by the hand while he did it. He had to smile at his own automatic agreement. He had been a loner for so many years that he found a certain inverse pleasure in ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... and dress for some half-past eight dinner, or some ten o'clock "at home;" and present yourself in spotless attire, with every hair arranged to perfection. How great the difference! The enjoyment seems in the inverse ratio of the preparation. These figures, got up with such finish and precision, appear but half alive. They have frozen each other by their primness; and your faculties feel the numbing effects of the atmosphere ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... promises of thaumaturgy. Insolent vaunt of Paracelsus, that he would restore the original rose or violet out of the ashes settling from its combustion—that is now rivalled in this modern achievement. The traces of each successive handwriting, regularly effaced, as had been imagined, have, in the inverse order, been regularly called back: the footsteps of the game pursued, wolf or stag, in each several chase, have been unlinked, and hunted back through all their doubles; and, as the chorus of the Athenian stage unwove through the antistrophe every step that had been mystically woven through ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... drawn on the piece of tile, the performer in placing it on the ground to be trodden upon, puts his thumb on the drawing, and thereby gets an inverse print of it on the ball of his thumb. The tile is powdered and the hand held palm upwards over it. When turning the assistant's hand palm downwards, the conjuror does so with his fingers at the back of ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... improved by confining the professor of it to that single study. But, although the art itself is advanced by this concentration of mind in its service, the individual who is confined to it goes back. The advantage of the community is nearly in an inverse ratio with his own. ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... which he himself effected in the little institute of Wuerzburg with the scantiest means—a new proof of the maxim enunciated by me, and hitherto never confuted, that "the scientific results of an institute are in inverse proportion to its size." (See "The Aim ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... beginning with his Inland Voyage, and the letters afterwards published as Across the Plains, is valuable in the inverse ratio to its embellishment. Sidney Colvin suggested to him that in the letters Across the Plains the lights were turned down. But, in truth, the light is daylight. The letters have a freshness that midnight oil could not have improved, and this fugitive sketch is of ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... Moreover, Christophe used to find in his speeches about the free man—besides a materialism which was not much to his taste—a pedantic severity and a despotism of thought, a secret cult of force, an inverse militarism, all of which did not sound very different from what he heard every ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... seize the front line before Asiago, where A, passing through, would secure the support line, and allow D Company in turn, passing through them, to explore the southernmost limits of the town, and join hands with the Bucks. The withdrawal was to be in inverse order—i.e., C and B were to hold the captured positions until the other two Companies had been safely ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... it possess an initial velocity of 1,200 yards per second; calculations prove that to be sufficient. In proportion as we recede from the earth the action of gravitation diminishes in the inverse ratio of the square of the distance; that is to say, at three times a given distance the action is nine times less. Consequently, the weight of a shot will decrease, and will become reduced to zero at the instant that the attraction of the ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... the analytical difficulties are too groat. Solutions, however, have been obtained in special cases (see A. Konig in M. von Rohr's Die Bilderzeugung, p. 373; K. Schwarzschild, Gottingen. Akad. Abhandl., 1905, 4, Nos. 2 and 3). At the present time constructors almost always employ the inverse method: they compose a system from certain, often quite personal experiences, and test, by the trigonometrical calculation of the paths of several rays, whether the system gives the desired reproduction (examples are given in A. Gleichen, Lehrbuch der geometrischen Optik, Leipzig ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia |
