"Mechanical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... history of our literature in the fifteenth century. He was born in Kent in the year 1422. He was not merely a printer, he was also a literary man; and, when he devoted himself to printing, he took to it as an art, and not as a mere mechanical device. Caxton in early life was a mercer in the city of London; and in the course of his business, which was a thriving one, he had to make frequent journeys to the Low Countries. Here he saw the printing-press ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... significantly smaller percentage of Negroes than the Army and Air Force. A similar disparity existed in assignment procedures. The commission found that both services failed to match the record of the civilian economy in the use of Negroes in technical, mechanical, administrative, clerical, and craft fields. It suspected that the services' recruiting and testing methods intensified these differences and wondered whether they might not operate to exclude Negroes ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... little town. We'd hide somewhere, a long way off, in the north or in the south. I shall be changed by that time, and she will, too, in America. The doctors shall make me some sort of wart on my face—what's the use of their being so mechanical!—or else I'll put out one eye, let my beard grow a yard, and I shall turn gray, fretting for Russia. I dare say they won't recognize us. And if they do, let them send us to Siberia. I don't care. It will show it's our fate. We'll work on the land here, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... its proportions. They were all dressed in white robes, they seemed to have arisen that moment from their seats, and they were regarding Graham steadfastly. At the end of the table he perceived the glitter of some mechanical appliances. ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... mathematically formulated natural laws, presupposes that nature is deprived of all inner life [2] and all qualitative distinctions, that all that exists is compounded of uniformly acting parts, and that all that takes place is conceived as motion. With this Hobbes's programme of a mechanical science of nature is fulfilled. The heavens and the earth are made subject to the same law of gravitation. How far Newton himself adhered to the narrow meaning of mechanism (motion from pressure and impulse), is evident ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... that in this case special importance is attached to shoes with high heels, and the subject considers that the pressure of such shoes is for mechanical reasons most favorable for procuring ejaculation. Nearly all heterosexual shoe-fetichists seem, however, to be equally attracted by high heels. Restif de la Bretonne frequently referred to this point, and he gave a number of reasons for the attractiveness ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... chattered overhead. Little animals rustled now and then in the thickets, fish leaped in the river, but there was no sound to indicate that man was near. They were not nervous nor restless. Inured to danger, waiting had become almost a mechanical act, and they were able to lie perfectly still, however ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... phraseology of the country rectory recurred to Lady Meadowcroft—"our poorer brethren," and so forth. "Oh, of course," she answered, with the mechanical acquiescence such women always give to moral platitudes. "One must do one's best for the poor, I know—for conscience' sake and all that; it's our duty, and we all try hard to do it. But they're so terribly ungrateful! Don't you ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... The mechanical mixture would be complete; as it would probably be put, the white race would have absorbed the black. There would be no inferior race to domineer over; there would be no superior race to oppress those who differed from them in racial ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... over its external surface, or by the oar-like movement of certain portions of its frame especially adapted to the purpose. In other animals, the weight of the body rests directly upon the ground, and has, therefore, to be lifted from place to place by more powerful mechanical contrivances. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... should be to help the free peoples of the world, through their own efforts, to produce more food, more clothing, more materials for housing, and more mechanical power to ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... mechanical progressions of parallel motion in this way, Hucbald in another place gives an account of a so-called "roving" organum, in which, while parallel progressions of fourths and fifths still are found, there are also ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... creeping things. They were shut in by the hand of God. The scripture passes silently over all horrors that filled the earth as man and beast were destroyed. We may imagine them trying by strength to get out of reach of the rising waters, but no mental culture or mechanical skill or physical culture, neither tears and entreaties could deliver man from the destruction which God had determined because of sin. It was seven months before the Ark rested on Ararat and more than five more before the ransomed ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... had been opened, and he had no thought but for his distress whilst, in mechanical fashion, he performed the rites and made the customary gestures. Since his return from Rome three years previously, he had been living in the very worst anguish that can fall on man. At the outset, in order to recover his lost faith, he had essayed a first experiment: he had ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... would never pass that way again—and each one wondered sometimes if he would be claimed by that Mechanical Death which none of ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... is infused by mechanical means. Sacraments and the like have a magical or miraculous potency. The Homeric hymn to Demeter insists only on ritual purity as the condition of salvation, and we hear that people trusted to the mystic baptism to wash out all their previous ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... business, and guarded its property, while the regular clergy illustrated the necessity of personal piety and self-denial. Monasticism at its best was a monitor standing beside the Church and constantly warning it against permitting the Christian life to sink into mere mechanical and passive acceptance of its ceremonies as all-sufficient for salvation. It supplied the element of personal responsibility and spiritual ambition upon which Protestantism ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... sense, sir—ha, ha! Yonder it is, removed from over the way, new white-washed posts, and red lattice—fat man in his doublet at the door—Ned himself, sir—worth a thousand pounds, they say—better singeing pigs' faces than trimming courtiers—but ours is the less mechanical vocation.—Farewell, sir; hope your custom. "So saying, he at length permitted Nigel to depart, whose ears, so long tormented with continued babble, tingled when it had ceased, as if a bell had been rung close to them for the ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... to overcome difficulties," says Smiles. "If there were no difficulties, there would be no success. In this necessity for exertion we find the chief source of human advancement,—the advancement of individuals as of nations. It has led to most of the mechanical inventions and improvements of ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... of Popular Mechanics Handbooks is to supply a growing demand for high-class, up-to-date and accurate text-books, suitable for home study as well as for class use, on all mechanical subjects. ...
— Mission Furniture - How to Make It, Part I • H. H. Windsor
... of this book have performed a valuable service, one which will tend to facilitate and aid very much the development of military training in this country. In addition to the purely mechanical details of training the book presents in a very effective and simple manner the tactical use of ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... distinct break between the crisp, official atmosphere of Berlin—where the war hurts least and the mechanical appearance of success is strong—and the sentiment of the rank and file of people whose suffering, as the war continued, became a more and ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... was an Irish bricklayer; he wrote an "Earl of Essex." ["Having a natural inclination for the Muses," says his biographer, "he pursued his devotions to them even during the labours of his more mechanical avocations, and composing a line of brick and a line of verse alternately, his wall and poems rose up in growth together." His tragedy of the "Earl of Essex" came out at Covent Garden in 1753, and met with considerable success. He died in ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... the moral truth: the minister's black veil, emblem of the secret of every human heart; the print of a hand on the heroine's cheek in "The Birthmark," a sign of earthly imperfection which only death can eradicate; the mechanical butterfly in "The Artist of the Beautiful," for which the artist no longer cares, when once he has embodied his thought. Zenobia in "The Blithedale Romance" has every day a hot-house flower sent down from a Boston conservatory and wears it in ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... the meaner, and the dog to be eaten before the lion. Nay, I should think, my lords, that men of birth and quality will leave the practice, when it begins to be vilified, and come so low as to barber-surgeons and butchers, and such base mechanical persons. And for the greatness of this presence, in which I take much comfort, both as I consider it in itself, and much more in respect it is by his Majesty's direction, I will supply the meanness of the particular cause, by handling of ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... denominated the enterprising, the hardy, the mechanical, and working period, commencing with the opening of the country to emigrant settlers, the age of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures, of harbors, cities, canals, and railroads, when the landscapes of the forest ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... eaten up,—not only raw, but alive. Simply the circumstance of his having held on to the harpoon. Had he dropped that weapon on falling, it would never have been grasped by him again. Fortunately, he had the presence of mind to hold on to it; or perhaps the tenacity was merely mechanical. Whatever may have been the reason, he did hold on. Fortunately, also, he was gliding down on the side opposite to that on ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... volume further into the canvas before the spectacle of this ungodly opulence; a large Bible on a funereal trestle-like stand, and the primmest and barest of writing-tables, before which she was standing as at a sacrificial altar. With an almost mechanical movement she closed her portfolio as her husband entered, and also shut the lid of a small box with a slight snap. This suggested exclusion of him from her previous occupation, whatever it might have been, caused a faint shadow ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... ii., p 199.) will find a long article on Aerostation in Rees' Cyclopaedia; but his inquiry reminds me of a conversation I had with the late Sir Anthony Carlisle, about a year before his death. He wished to consult me on the subject of flying by mechanical means, and that I should assist him in some of his arrangements. He had devoted many years of his life to the consideration of this subject, and made numerous experiments at great cost, which induced him to believe in the possibility ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various
... presented still fails to move the critic, he must shift from the scientific analysis to those qualities governing the artist subjectively. He is lacking in "temperament," and without temperament who in art has a chance? With years in the schools and a technique of mechanical perfection he lacks the divine fire and leaves us cold. It is for the critic to say this, and herein he becomes a ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... a clever lad, with a geni of a mechanical turn, who made punch-bowls of leather, and legs for cripples of the same commodity, that were lighter and easier to wear than either legs of cork or timber. His name was Geordie Sooplejoint, a modest, douce, and well-behaved young man—caring ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... purity of maiden-fame, now hung unbound and dishevelled over her face, and almost concealed her features. On receiving this hint from the attendant, the unfortunate young woman, with a hasty, trembling, and apparently mechanical compliance, shaded back from her face her luxuriant locks, and showed to the whole court, excepting one individual, a countenance, which, though pale and emaciated, was so lovely amid its agony, that it called forth a universal murmur of compassion and ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... for this it was a wholly mechanical din. Human brains directed operations, human hands carried them out, but the sound of the human voice was, for the most part, lacking. The diggers were a sombre, preoccupied race, little given to lip-work. Even the "shepherds," ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... for the key and studied it sombrely. The act was mechanical, a bit of sparring for time: his anger was searching about for a new vent. He was a just man, and he did not care to start any thunder which was not based upon fairness. He had no wish to go foraging in ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... sufficient witness to Maggie's youth and inexperience that she was enraptured by this event. It was not only that she had never seen a cuckoo-clock before; she had, for that matter, never heard of the existence of such a thing. It gave her greater happiness than any bare mechanical discovery could have done. The bird seemed to have come to her, in the friendliest way, to remove some of the chilly passivity of the house. Her greatest fear since her arrival had been that this was a house "in which nothing was ever ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... eat, and had a little cup of superb black coffee without charge to finish his meal. Brilliant piano music swept the rooms whenever any guest cared to send the waiter with a five-cent piece to the old mechanical piano, and sprightly conversation, carried on from table to table, gave the place that tone that Monsieur Montiverte considered to be its most valuable asset. Monsieur himself was a dried-up little rat of a man, grizzled, and as brown as a walnut. ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... could not disguise the resentment which he felt at being thus directly held up to the scorn, as well as the censure, of the assembled inhabitants of the little world in which he lived. His brow grew red, his lip grew pale, he set his teeth, he clenched his hand, and then with mechanical readiness grasped the weapon of which the clergyman had given so hideous a character; and at length, as the preacher heightened the colouring of his invective, he felt his rage become so ungovernable, ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... abide by the issue of the contest. What a spectacle to the world! After years of military devastation, with tens of thousands dead on her battle-fields, with the flower of her children slain, with her wealth destroyed, her commerce swept away, her agricultural and mechanical pursuits almost ruined, the South yielded. The North, victorious and strong, could not forget what she owed to liberty and human rights. We may well swear now that as long as liberty is ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... on the dance floor. He held her close, and hummed and chatted. And through the alcoholic haze saw she was a stiff-smiled, stiff-bodied, mechanical ...
— The First One • Herbert D. Kastle
... Geology; Mr. W. T. Blanford, the head of the Indian Geological Survey, is sure to do honour to his subject; in Section D, Biology, Professor Moseley, a man of thoroughly Darwinian type of mind, will preside; in F, Economic Science, Sir Richard Temple will be a host in himself; while in G, Mechanical Science, Sir F J. Bramwell is sure to be vigorous and original; finally, in the new section H, Anthropology, Dr. E. B. Tylor is the very man that ought to have been selected. Lord Aberdare, we regret to say, has been compelled to retire from the presidency of the Geographical Section; ...
— The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters • Clara Rayleigh
... associated with that great public safeguard—the Press; secondly, because he knew from some slight practical experience, what the duties of correctors of the press were, and how their duties were usually discharged; and he could testify, and did testify, that they were not mechanical, that they were not mere matters of manipulation and routine; but that they required from those who performed them much natural intelligence, much super-added cultivation, readiness of reference, quickness of resource, an excellent memory, and a clear understanding. He most gratefully ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... of the beak's being a mechanical tool which chiefly regulates the form of a bird's face, as opposed to a four-footed animal's. If the question of food were the only one, we might wonder why there were not more four-footed creatures living on seeds ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... simple incident seemed, told just thus! Homer was always telling [101] things after this manner. And one might think there had been no effort in it: that here was but the almost mechanical transcript of a time, naturally, intrinsically, poetic, a time in which one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or, the sailors pulled down their boat without making a picture in "the great style," against a sky charged with marvels. Must not the mere prose of ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... His mind obsessed, Jimmie Dale's physical acts were almost wholly mechanical. It was perhaps fifteen minutes since he had discovered the loss of the letter, and he was walking now through the heart of the Bowery. Exactly how he had got there he could not have told; he had only a vague realisation that, following an intuitive sense of direction, he ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... equivalents combined in a like manner and exhibiting similar properties; thus acetic and trichloracetic acids, aldehyde and chloral, marsh gas and chloroform are pairs of compounds referable to the same type. He also postulated, with Regnault, the existence of "molecular or mechanical types" containing substances which, although having the same number of equivalents, are essentially different in characters. His unitary conceptions may be summarized: every chemical compound forms a complete whole, and cannot therefore consist of two parts; and its chemical ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... dug up the ground in an open space near it, to form a garden, which he had begun to rail in. "The fellow seems determined to make himself at home, as if he expected to live here for years to come. A low-born fellow has mechanical talents such as I don't possess; they certainly give him an advantage over me, under the circumstances in which we are placed, but I must see what I can do for myself. My cave has only hitherto afforded me shelter, but should the wind blow ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... of it is not an inheritance of thine, and let all thy deeds be done in the name of God." 18. R. Simeon said, "Be careful in reading the Shema and the Amidah; and when thou prayest, consider not thy prayer as a fixed (mechanical) task, but as (an appeal for) mercy and grace before the All-present, as it is said, 'For he is gracious and full of mercy, slow to anger, and abounding in loving-kindness, and repenteth him of the evil'; and be not wicked ...
— Pirke Avot - Sayings of the Jewish Fathers • Traditional Text
... of existing beings. This throws such Natural Sciences as Botany, Zoology, Mineralogy, Geology, etc., out of his range. He also excludes the domain of practical Knowledge, comprising what is included under the terms, the Applied Sciences, the Arts, the Mechanical Sciences, etc. A Classification, far more detailed and comprehensive in its scope than anything yet published, is in preparation by Professor P. H. Vander Weyde, of the Cooper Institute—advanced sheets of which, so far as it is elaborated, have been kindly ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... alacrity, discipline, and strength of counsels, should march against a foe. When his position is otherwise, he should avoid defensive operations.[21] The king should provide himself with power of wealth, power of allies, power of foresters, power of paid soldiery, and power of the mechanical and trading classes, O puissant one.[22] Among all these, power of allies and power of wealth are superior to the rest. The power of classes and that of the standing army are equal. The power of spies is regarded by the king as equal in efficacy to either of the above, on many occasions, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... forcing himself into a sort of mechanical regularity of life which helped him through the day. Gianluca needed him still, though less than formerly, and as long as he could be of use, and could control his face and voice, he would stay in Muro. Since Veronica ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... manufactories to resort to when they are in want of work; no unaccustomed departments of mechanical or agricultural labour are open to receive them, to stimulate their ingenuity and reward their industry. When they know how to ply the hoe, pick the coffee-berry, and tend the sugar-mills, they have learned almost all the industry of the island can teach them. If, ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... wheel; those too small for the fields begged food in the streets of the town. Little Poland was virtually a fief of Joe Hilliard's. Men, women, and elves looked up to him as to a benevolent feudal lord, and the naturalized males voted Joe Hilliard's party ticket with mechanical precision. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... who himself suffers from the same uncertainty. Non me tua fervida terrent Dicta; ... Dii me terrent, et Jupiter hostis.[20] Two kinds of dilettanti, says Goethe, there are in poetry: he who neglects the indispensable mechanical part, and thinks he has done enough if he shows spirituality and feeling; and he who seeks to arrive at poetry merely by mechanism, in which he can acquire an artisan's readiness, and is without soul and matter. And he adds, that the first does most harm to art, and the ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... the night before; wondered that I should ever have attributed those shocking cries to one of whom I now conceived as of a saint, spectral of mien, wasted with maceration, bound up in the practices of a mechanical devotion, and dwelling in a great isolation of soul with her incongruous relatives; and as I leaned on the balustrade of the gallery and looked down into the bright close of pomegranates and at the gaily dressed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... receiver and stood a moment in thought. Iron Skull was now Jim's superintendent and right hand. His mechanical and electrical engineers were gone, too, leaving only cubs who had never seen a flood. Benson came running down the trail ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... through hardship and labor, to summits of the highest joy that can be known to human heart and brain. Then, puzzled and disturbed by his sense of the responsibility of his solitude, Ivan would perform by day his mechanical duties, and then hurry away, at evening, to labor undisturbed through the strange northern twilights, at ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... order that they might have more cool and accurate opportunity to form a judgment upon the whole, and transmit their orders, without being disturbed by any thoughts of personal safety. Even so, brave barbarian, in the art of embroidery, (marvel not that we are a proficient in that mechanical process, since it is patronized by Minerva, whose studies we affect to follow,) we reserve to ourselves the superintendence of the entire web, and commit to our maidens and others the execution of particular parts. Thus, in the same manner, thou, valiant ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... save Oppenheim's or Solomon's money but because it is a demonstration that we are dependent upon some community on the other side of the world, that their damage is our damage, and that we have an interest in preventing it. It teaches us, as only some such simple and mechanical means can teach, the ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... son, his physician, his personal servant, and even Miss Stackpole. Mrs. Touchett did not figure in the list, and this was an obstacle the less to Isabel's finding her host alone. He sat in a complicated mechanical chair, at the open window of his room, looking westward over the park and the river, with his newspapers and letters piled up beside him, his toilet freshly and minutely made, and his smooth, speculative face ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... Pharaohs, the human race had looked for a means by which the dead might be preserved against the ravages of time. Great had been the art of the Egyptians in the embalming of their deceased, a practice which was later lost to humanity of the ensuing mechanical age, never to be rediscovered. But even the embalming of the Egyptians—so Professor Jameson had argued—would be futile in the face of millions of years, the dissolution of the corpses being just as eventual as immediate cremation ...
— The Jameson Satellite • Neil Ronald Jones
... which it is used by Professor Huxley. But the latter goes on to avow his belief that the human body, like every other living body, is a machine, all the operations of which will sooner or later be explained on physical principles, insomuch that we shall eventually arrive at a mechanical equivalent of consciousness, even as we have already arrived at a mechanical equivalent of heat. He considers that with the same propriety with which the amount of heat which a pound weight produces by falling through the distance of a foot, may be called ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... first book of this series I have described the mechanical part of moving pictures, how they are made and prepared for projection on the screen. To briefly sum it up, I might say that the pictures, or negatives, are taken on a continuous strip of celluloid film in a specially prepared camera, which takes ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... and God." The words are the very soul of St Paul, as it conveys the Spirit's oracle to us here. St Paul dreads exceedingly for the Philippians the incursion of "error and misunderstanding"; the advent of a mechanical rigorism of rule and ordinance, and (as we shall see in later pages) the subtle poison also of the specious antinomian lie. How does he apply the antidote? In the form of an appeal to them to be sure ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... Miss Falconer? You were born in the States? You are going to Italy—and then home again?" The questions came in a reassuringly mechanical fashion; the man was doing his duty, ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... at his son, who was showing signs of returning animation; but it evoked no sympathy before us, whatever he might have felt, for he only frowned as, in a shivering mechanical way, we two wretched boys seized an oar apiece, sat down on the wet ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... repeated Herbert, like a rather blase child confronted with a new mechanical toy; 'did I really say that? well, honestly, it wasn't bad; it's what one would expect on that hypothesis. You see, we are only different, as it were, in our differences. Once the foot's over the threshold, it's nine points of the law! But I don't remember ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... satisfactory and economical service and a long life, any range or mechanical device must be kept clean. This applies to the gas range as well, and we therefore wish to emphasize that the little attention required is very ...
— Fowler's Household Helps • A. L. Fowler
... More from mechanical instinct than from any actual purpose of mind—for he did not, at the first instant, fully comprehend her meaning—Sergius followed the motion of her hand, and gazed at the wall above his head; then passed his fingers along until he touched the empty nail—then ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... texts of lost authors, including Menander. We will give a few specimens of the private letters and documents, which will show how extremely modern the ancient Egyptians were, and how little difference there actually is between our civilization and theirs, except in the-matter of mechanical invention. They had no locomotives and telephones; otherwise they were the same. We resemble them much more than we resemble our mediaeval ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... found behind the grocery. Large, high windows throw a flood of light into the mixing room. The oven is of a modern type, large, easily controlled and economical. Five men work at the baking and a boy wraps bread in waxed paper with a mechanical device which automatically folds and seals. The three delivery wagons bear the cooperative motto, "Each for All, and All for Each." They are used in the morning for the delivery of baked goods and in the afternoon for the delivery of groceries. It keeps three boys busy all day covering the territory ...
— Consumers' Cooperative Societies in New York State • The Consumers' League of New York
... child. He's always in his mother's pocket She coddles him too much." It came back to me afterwards, too—the manner in which he spoke these words. They were not petulant; they expressed rather a sudden coldness, a kind of mechanical submission. We went a few steps further, and then he stopped short and called the boy, ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... melancholy and a little touched by suspicion; not exactly the manner of a lady, and, at the same time, not the manner of a woman in the humblest rank of life. The voice, little as I had yet heard of it, had something curiously still and mechanical in its tones, and the utterance was remarkably rapid. She held a small bag in her hand: and her dress—bonnet, shawl, and gown all of white—was, so far as I could guess, certainly not composed of very delicate or very expensive ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... could enjoy, the pleasure of having the best new novels read to her as they came out. Discovering this, Arthur volunteered to relieve Miss Haldane, at intervals, in the office of reader. He was clever at mechanical contrivances of all sorts, and he introduced improvements in Mrs. Carbury's couch, and in the means of conveying her from the bedchamber to the drawing-room, which alleviated the poor lady's sufferings and brightened her gloomy ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... new movement was shared by many different nations. From every standpoint it has been of infinitely greater moment than anything hitherto seen. Not in one but in many different peoples there has been extraordinary growth in wealth, in population, in power of organization, and in mastery over mechanical activity and natural resources. All of this has been accompanied and signalized by an immense outburst of energy and restless initiative. The result is as ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... facade. It would be impossible to imagine anything more fresh or charming than this apparition at such a moment. Leaning upon the balustrade, the young woman rested her face upon a hand which was as white as a lily, and her finger smoothed with a mechanical caress the ringlets of chestnut hair that lay upon her forehead, while her large brown eyes gazed into the depths of the clouds from which the lightning was flashing, and with which they vied in brilliancy. A poet would have said it was Miranda ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... beneath the rule of the hammer, the chisel, the loom, and have been promptly vulcanized. Is not Vulcan, with his hideousness and his strength, the emblem of this strong and hideous nation—sublime in its mechanical intelligence, patient in its season, and once in a century terrible, inflammable as gunpowder, and ripe with brandy for the madness of revolution, with wits enough, in fine, to take fire at a captious word, which signifies to it always: ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... and of eras, or definite and completed periods of time. As man is begotten, born, developed to maturity and then is brought downward to the grave, so in the case of races and nations and the clearly defined epochs into which the history of man divides itself. There is no mechanical system of "progress," no cumulative wisdom and power that in the end will inevitably lead to earthly perfection and triumph. For every individual there is the possibility of spiritual evolution within the time allotted that ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... called from its form. The mechanical appliance, a wheel, with several handles for turning it, by which power is increased, and also transmitted from the steersman on deck to the tiller below, in order to steer ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... in the manner of Mrs. Kukor, the kitchen was filled with the fruity aroma of stewing prunes, and Johnnie, with several saucers of bright-hued beads before him, was busy at his stringing—a task which, being mechanical, could be performed without conscious effort. And he was so engrossed over his saucers that Barber had to speak to him twice before the boy started up from his chair, letting the beads impaled on his long ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... writer than myself add to the elegant and forcible narrative of Robertson? So adieu to my vision. I awake, like John Bunyan, 'and behold it is a dream.' Well enough that I awake without a sciatica, which would have probably rewarded my slumbers had I profaned Queen Mary's bed by using it as a mechanical resource to ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... deafening; the appearance of the man, whose expression was one of settled rage but whose actions were of the coldest regularity, was most bewildering, partially obscured as it was by the flying billets of wood; the mechanical attempts of Miss Gould to rise from the soap-box, invariably checked by a fierce brandishing of the stick just taken from the lessening pile, were at once startling and fascinating, inasmuch as she was methodically waved ...
— A Philanthropist • Josephine Daskam
... her wrist, full of fine pure blood,—gauged herself coolly, her lease of life, her power of endurance,—measured it out against the work waiting for her. The work would be long, she knew. She would be old before it was finished, quite an old woman, hard, mechanical, worn out. But the day would be so bright, when it came, it would atone for all: the day would be bright, the home warm again; it would hold all that life ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... presentation of the life of Christ, or a formal directory of moral conduct. The data are supplied, but these data require to be interpreted and unified so as to form a system of Ethics. The authority to which Christian Ethics appeals is not an external oracle which imposes its dictates in a mechanical way. It is an authority embodied in intelligible forms, and appealing to the rational faculties of man. Christian Ethics, though deduced from scripture, is not a cut and dry code of rules prescribed by God which man must blindly ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... Godwin's Political Justice; but it is not beyond the mark to affirm that after his time such abstract systems were on the defensive. Therein, with all his faults, he had given Burke the clue to those truths he so profoundly saw—the sense of the State as more than a mechanical contrivance, the high regard for prescription, the sense of law as the voice of past wisdom. He was, said Burke, "the greatest genius which has enlightened this age"; and Burke had every reason to utter that noble panegyric. But Montesquieu ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... the first few nights which had succeeded her husband's death. But since the inquest she had no longer been haunted by that scene—the double scene of the hands, the pretty little hands, engaged in that simple, almost mechanical, action of pouring the contents of one bottle into another, and the vision of the man on the wall looking down, slantwise, through the window, and uttering that queer, long-drawn-out whistle of ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... to birds, lo! an astounding thing has happened. That there were flying reptiles in the fossil ages we know, and there are flying beasts in our own. But the wings of these are simple mechanical alterations, which the imagination of a child, ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... been formed for the purpose of studying conditions and introducing improved methods in preparing the soil and rotating crops. More of the food supply of the South is to be raised at home; better homes and farm buildings are being erected, and better machinery is being used. The invention of a mechanical cotton picker, which has been accomplished, should reduce materially the cost of ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... thorough breaking up of the food into the smallest particles, and insalivation means the mixing of the small particles with the saliva. The mechanical work is done with the jaws and tongue, and the chemical work is performed by the saliva. When the mechanical work is done thoroughly the chemical work is also thorough, and the test for thoroughness is loss of taste. Masticate the food until all taste has disappeared, and ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... idiotic as then, but still vaguely persistent in his thought, he remained for some moments in this attitude. Then rising and taking advantage of the moonlight that flooded the desk, he set himself to mend the broken lock with a large mechanical clasp-knife he produced from his pocket, and the aid of his workmanlike thumb and finger. Presently he began to whistle softly, at first a little artificially and with relapses of reflective silence. The lock of the desk restored, he secured into position again that part of the door-lock ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... the surest monuments of history, as well as muniments of individual distinction, there should be given to them, besides intrinsic value and durability of material, the utmost grace of design, with the highest finish in mechanical execution. All this is necessary to give the greater or adventitious value; as in the present instance, the medal is to be, at once, an historical record and a reward of distinguished merit. The credit of the donor thus becomes even ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... railways. She could trust to her superbly organised military system, more perfect than that of any other state, just because no other state has ever regarded war as the final aim and the highest form of state action. She commanded unequalled resources in all the mechanical apparatus of war; she had spared no pains to build up her armament works, which had, indeed, supplied a great part of the world; she had developed all the scientific industries in such a way that their factories could be rapidly ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... in connection with Art, be wonderfully improved, and to this in time came the consideration that the human Will, with all its mighty power and deep secrets, could be disciplined and directed, or controlled with as great care as the memory or the mechanical faculty. In a certain sense the three are one, and the reader who will take the pains, which are, I trust, not very great, to master the details of this book, will readily grasp it as a whole, and understand that its contents form a system of education, yet ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... only of her father. After hearing what Aubert told her, the malady of Master Zacharius took fantastic proportions in her mind; and it seemed to her as if his existence, so dear to her, having become purely mechanical, no longer moved on ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... Stuart's 'Anecdotes of the Steam Engine,' there has been no such bit of delicious mechanical gossip as this little book of Mr. Bernan.... For six months or more every year, we must depend much more on the resources of science and the practical arts for our health and comfort, than on the natural climate: in ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.11.17 • Various
... determined, and it can be considered as only relatively finished on any one side. Education is impossible to him who is born an idiot, since the want of the power of generalizing and of ideality of conscious personality leaves to such an unfortunate only the possibility of a mechanical training. ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... double entendre, Slawkenbergius's Tale; nothing to match that painfully elaborate piece of low comedy, the consultation of philosophers and its episode of Phutatorius's mishap with the hot chestnut; no such persistent resort, in short, to those mechanical methods of mirth-making upon which Sterne, throughout a great part of the fourth volume, almost exclusively relies. The humour of the fifth is, to a far larger extent, of the creative and dramatic order; the ever-delightful collision of intellectual incongruities in the persons of the two brothers ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... either he never knew or has forgotten. And there is something about it, about the nature of stated times, as about all things conventional and mechanical and precise, that peculiarly ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... doubtful aspects. The device is becoming so popular that it will probably prevail; and as it prevails, it may have the indirect beneficial result of diminishing the number of regular elections; but at bottom it is a clumsy and mechanical device for the selection of party candidates. It is merely one of the many means generated by American political practice for cheapening the ballot. The way to make votes important and effective is not to increase ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... of this the pirate captain, as might have been expected, performed a prominent part. His great physical strength enabled him to act with a degree of vigour that rendered his aid most valuable. He wrought with the energy of a huge mechanical power, and with a quick promptitude of perception and a ready change of action which is denied to mere, mechanism. He tore down the bulk-heads that rendered it difficult to get at the place where the fire was; he hurled bucket after bucket of ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... a great part of every one's life which is mechanical, instinctive, and all but involuntary. Habits and emotions and passing impulses very seldom come into men's consciousness, and an enormously large proportion of everybody's life is done with the minimum of attention, and is as little ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... for breathing and composing the features to secure artistic effects; they offer academic prizes for every conceivable achievement; their very lamp-posts are designed with taste; a huckster in the street will exhibit dramatic tact and wonderful mechanical dexterity. "Quand il parat un homme de gnie en France," says Madame de Stal, "dans quelque carrire que ce soit, il atteint presque toujours un degr de perfection sans exemple; car il runit l'audace qui fait sortir de la route commune au tact du bon got." And yet in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... (Vom Granite des Riesengebirges, 1813.) and the diabases and amygdaloids in the transition mountains, shall have been carefully studied; when the texture of the masses shall have been subjected to a kind of mechanical analysis, and the hornblendes better distinguished from the pyroxenes,* (* The grunsteins or diabases of the Fichtelgebirge, in Franconia, which belong to the transition-slate, sometimes contain pyroxenes.) and the grunsteins from the dolerites; a great number ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... as she could gain the back stair, she gathered up her heavy white silk and dashed up, rushing along the gallery so blinded by tears under her veil that she would have had a collision if a hand had not been put out as some one drew aside to let her fly past if she wished; but as the mechanical "beg pardon" was exchanged, she knew Fordham's voice and paused. "I was going to look after the wounded Friar," he said, and then he saw her tearful eyes, and she exclaimed, "I could not help it! I could not stay. You would say such things. ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... upon the derivation of our whole knowledge from 'ideas,' leaves reality to the 'primary qualities' without clearly expounding their relation to the secondary. But Berkeley, alarmed by the tendency of the Cartesian doctrines to materialism and mechanical necessity, reduces the 'primary' to the level of the 'secondary,' and proceeds to abolish the whole world of matter. We are thus left with nothing but 'ideas,' and the ideas are naturally 'subjective' and therefore ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... the mind, though pre-eminently palatable, must have tended to be somewhat thin. The elaborate instruction in mythological erudition was devoid of religious value; and indeed of any value, save the training of a purely mechanical memory. Attention was called too much to the form, too little to the substance. Style has its value, but it is after all only a secondary consideration in education. The effect upon literature of this poetical ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... and thus we have the startling fact that, in spite of their efforts at church extension, they had not gained four hundred members in thirty-three years. For this slowness, however, the reasons were purely mechanical; and all the obstacles sprang from the Brethren's connection ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... paper by and large, I was vastly pleased with it. Little crudities of a mechanical sort were observable here and there, but there were not enough of them to amount to anything, and it was good enough Arkansas proof-reading, anyhow, and better than was needed in Arthur's day and realm. As a rule, the grammar was leaky and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... orphan girl snatched from the influences of the poorhouse. Where a specially strong arm was required, the curate himself was at all times to be relied upon. He was not only a hewer of wood, but often a bearer of wood as well as of water. He was, too, an embodied guild of all mechanical trades, and might have been warranted to use skilfully at a pinch ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... necessary equipment and data they would need to deal with the problems they would face. Like all patrol ships, the Lancet was equipped with automatic launching, navigation and drive mechanisms; no crew other than the three doctors was required, and in the event of mechanical failures, maintenance ships were on ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... There is no intellectual life, no change of day and day. The years have silently buried themselves, with no crown of happy memories. She left her merry home at the Alameda shore of the great bay to be the lonely lady of this distant domain. Her narrow nature has settled into imitative and mechanical devotion, a sad, ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... French guide, while he pointed out all these mechanical marvels of the garden, was anxious to let me see that he had too polite a taste to be pleased with them. At every new knick-knack he would screw down his mouth, shrug up his shoulders, take a pinch of snuff, and exclaim: "Ma foi, Monsieur, ces Hollandais sont ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... of the surroundings, and it grew to irritate him, for the Frenchman's mental wanderings increased with the darkness. What made him rouse one with his awful laughter? These spells of walking insensibility were pleasanter far. At last the big man fell. To Willard's mechanical endeavours to help he spoke sleepily, but with the sanity of a man under ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... Yabsley passed the hot iron over the white fronts. The small black iron ran swiftly over the clean surface, leaving a smooth, shining track behind it. And he watched, with an idler's pleasure, the swift, mechanical movements. ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... new liberties, and new movements. Milton, it need hardly be said, is the master of those who know how to place and displace the stress and accent of the English heroic line in epic poetry. His most majestic hand undid the mechanical bonds of the national line and made it obey the unwritten laws of his genius. His blank verse marches, pauses, lingers, and charges. It feels the strain, it yields, it resists; it is all-expressive. But ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... the mechanical reply, "to endow a bed in some hospital. And there is no escape, no hope unless we drag the shameful secret from him. Bit by bit and drop by drop, and then I shall die and you and ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... at his animation, and at the firmness he appeared to possess, and after having well discussed with him all the inconveniences of my plan, and their remedy, we came at last to a very important matter, the mechanical means, so to speak, by which that plan was to be put in force. There was one thing to be provided for, which may appear an exceedingly insignificant matter, but which in truth was of no light importance. When a Bed of justice is held, seats one above another must be provided for those ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Great Britain. They complain not only that the Americans have brought into use a number of new words—the difference and the distance between the two countries might suffice to explain that much—but that these new words are more especially taken from the jargon of parties, the mechanical arts, or the language of trade. They assert, in addition to this, that old English words are often used by the Americans in new acceptations; and lastly, that the inhabitants of the United States frequently ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... New-Thoughtists say. But he had an inquiring mind and a proper will to succeed. While serving his three years in the shop he bought a course in a correspondence school and studied nights, taking up, among other things, the subject of mechanical drafting. When twenty-two years of age he applied for, and got, a position as draftsman in a small company developing a motorcycle. He was ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... the preceding volumes of this series, know, Jack Chadwick and Tom Jesson, his cousin, had won the titles of Boy Inventors through their ingenuity and mechanical genius. Jack's father, Chester Chadwick, was an inventor of note, and unlike the majority of inventors, he had turned his devices to such good account that he had accumulated a substantial fortune and was able to maintain a fine estate, already referred to as High Towers ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... founded by the king of Spain, have considerably distinguished themselves, but without leaving the beaten track pursued by their forefathers; they chiefly display great aptitude in the arts of imitation; and in the purely mechanical arts. ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... merely mechanical organization such as the American statesman seems to have had in mind, formed by parliamentary politicians deliberating in secret, could bind nations and peoples together in moral fellowship, is conceivable ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... went one of those ingenious mechanical contrivances familiarly in vogue at fairs, which are designed to impress upon the victim to whom they are applied, the pleasing conviction that his garment is rent ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which I had vainly applied at Cairo, would doubtless discover the prime necessary in the Wadys, many of the latter being still damp and muddy. Moreover, the crible continue grilles filtrantes, the invention of MM. Huet and Geyler, introduced, we are told, into the mechanical treatment of metals, a principle which greatly economizes fluid. Founded upon the fact that sands of nearly the same size, but of different densities, when mixed in liquid and subjected to rapid vertical oscillation, range themselves by order of weight, the heavier sinking and not allowing ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... difference between the peaceable and the predatory phase of culture, therefore, is a spiritual difference, not a mechanical one. The change in spiritual attitude is the outgrowth of a change in the material facts of the life of the group, and it comes on gradually as the material circumstances favourable to a predatory attitude supervene. The inferior limit of the predatory culture is an industrial limit. Predation ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... for all kinds of special and mechanical duty men; schools to teach gas-defense; buzzer schools; telephone schools; smoke-bomb and hand-grenade courses; and map-reading and sketching schools. Sergeant Earl H. Schleppy, of Hazleton, Penna., who assisted ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... tall and gracefully commanding height which became the English ideal in the last quarter of the century—her portrait appears on every page illustrated by Du Manner. She had a brilliant complexion, a perfect profile; her smile, though perhaps a little mechanical, was the last expression of immutable sweetness, of impeccable self-control; her voice never slipped from the just note of unexaggerated suavity. Consummate as an ornament of the drawing-room, she would ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... a mechanical politeness, curiously at variance with his face and speech, he lifted his hat to the doctor as he turned back to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... he lived in the toy cupboard or on the nursery floor, and no one thought very much about him. He was naturally shy, and being only made of velveteen, some of the more expensive toys quite snubbed him. The mechanical toys were very superior, and looked down upon every one else; they were full of modern ideas, and pretended they were real. The model boat, who had lived through two seasons and lost most of his paint, caught the tone from them ...
— The Velveteen Rabbit • Margery Williams
... appeals to something behind the sense, in the higher grades of acting, the Paris shows were, on the whole, better than Broadway shows. But in the choruses, the dancers lack that finish, that top dressing of mechanical unison required by American taste. Moreover the lighting and colour were poor. The music at the Follies was Victor Herbert of 1911! Old American popular songs seemed to be in vogue. One heard "O Johnny" and "Over There" at every vaudeville house ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... Outside in the May evening it was as black, as softly deep, as plushy as a pansy. She walked swiftly into it as if with destination. But after five or six of the long cross-town blocks her feet began to lag. She stood for a protracted moment outside a drug-store window, watching the mechanical process of a pasteboard man stropping his razor; loitered to read the violent three-sheet outside a Third Avenue cinematograph. In the aura of white light a figure in a sweater and cap nudged up ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... advice, or have you begun to act upon it? Are you contented only with the slow process of mechanical application, or will you make a triumphant effort to abridge your apprenticeship and emerge at once into fame and power? I repeat that you fritter away your talents and your opportunities upon this miserable task-work on a journal. I am ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Perhaps the forefathers of one-fourth of our Anglo-Saxon thegns held the plough, or followed some craft mechanical." ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... metal being pressed on to a wooden carving prepared for the purpose, so that the result would be a raised silver pattern, which, when filled up with pitch or lead, would pass for a sample of repousse work. I need hardly say that a still simpler mechanical form of pressing obtains on cheap ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... standing motionless near the threshold. My guide touched it twice with his staff, and it put itself into a rapid and gliding movement, skimming noiselessly over the floor. Gazing on it, I then saw that it was no living form, but a mechanical automaton. It might be two minutes after it vanished through a doorless opening, half screened by curtains at the other end of the hall, when through the same opening advanced a boy of about twelve years old, with features closely ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... grew into the boy's life and he would rather have owned it than the mechanical steamboat with real brass cannon for which he prayed to God so often, so earnestly, and with such faith. On his seventh birthday he preferred a curious request, which ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... from the palm-oil people began, I would be all right; but until I could touch my salary I had to sail mighty close to the wind. For pretty much all of my capital consisted of my headful of knowledge of the theory and practice of mechanical engineering which had brought me out first of my class at the Stevens Institute—and in that way had got me the offer from the palm-oil people—and because of which I thought that there wasn't anybody quite my equal anywhere as a mechanical engineer. And that was only natural, I suppose, since ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... them, may perhaps admit of explanation, by some process analogous to what takes place in the preparation of the compound of which the ordinary earthenware is manufactured; where, though the ingredients are divided by mechanical attrition only, a sort of chemical action produces, under certain circumstances, a new arrangement of the parts.* And this explanation may, probably, be extended to those nodular concretions, generally considered ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... saloon, passed through the library and the dining-room, and arrived forward, in the machine-room, where the electrical apparatus was established, which supplied not only heat and light but the mechanical power of the Nautilus. ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... man arose and commenced to hitch around the stove with stiff joints, like a mechanical figure. The company broke into a wild chant in a minor key, commencing on a high note and descending the whole gamut, with strange pauses, lifts ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... a breakfast was not borne in upon him with sufficient force to prevent his thinking of something else. Although it was very cold he did not notice the weather, so he did not walk fast. His progress was a mechanical movement, for in fancy he was in Leipsic again, walking down the August Platz. It was a pleasant day dream, one from which Von Barwig did not like to awaken himself. He pictured to himself the joy, the happiness ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... two- or three-roomed flats, and bought good furniture. They demanded more from life, but everything had become dearer, and they still lived from hand to mouth. He could see that the social development had not kept pace with the mechanical; the machines wedged themselves quietly but inexorably in between the workmen and the work, and threw more and more men out of employment. The hours of labor were not greatly shortened. Society did not seem to care to protect the workers, but it ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... proportions. These experiments were made in a large building which was especially built for this object. It contained every facility for his various new designs, and in it he anticipated many advances in electrical science and in mechanical devices, which have made the civilization of our day so remarkable. I recall distinctly as a boy his ingenious approximation to the telephone, and even the recent advances in wireless telegraphy, which has been ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... objects in plaster of Paris were attempted, and finally copies of the human head and figure posed in suspended animation and supported by blocks, &c. In so far as this was accurately done, all this mechanical training of eye and hand was excellent; but it was not enough. And when with an eye trained to the closest mechanical accuracy the author visited the galleries of the Continent and studied the drawings of the old masters, it soon became apparent that either his or their ideas ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... looking to me for light and help, knowing how much I need both myself.... Every now and then some Providential event occurs that wakes us up, and we find that we have been asleep and dreaming, and that what we have been doing that made us fancy ourselves awake, was mechanical. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... saw, would understand. And, if the customer was an observant man, he would notice that her replies at that juncture became somewhat absent, her smile a little mechanical. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... consciousness of a community until it has assumed some external and concrete embodiment, or is recommended by some striking material evidence. In the case of Progress both these conditions were fulfilled (in England) in the period 1820-1850." The most striking evidence was furnished by the mechanical revolution. "Men who were born at the beginning of the century had seen, before they had passed the age of thirty, the rapid development of steam navigation, the illumination of towns and houses by gas, the opening ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... divine gift of the Union. If it does thus value it, it will use diligently and carefully all the abundant resources which lie around it and within it, like an atmosphere—wealth, population, energy, intelligence, mechanical ingenuity, scientific skill, and all the needed materiel of warfare. It is rich in all this, far more so than the South. All this, Providence lays at the feet of the nation. It can do no more. The ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... went to the station with them, and absent-mindedly kissed Jarvis good-bye, which infuriated his victim and nearly sent Bambi into hysterics. As the train pulled out, she leaned from the window and called, "Go home, now, Professor!" and with a mechanical jerk he turned and started off in ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... my eyes off the abyss and fixed on the opposing hill, and as the long curve before me was diminished by successive sharp advances, still my heart was caught half-way in every breath, and whatever it is that moves a man went uncertainly within me, mechanical and half-paralysed. The great height with that narrow unprotected ribbon across it was more than I ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... for every community, the goodness of its products and not the richness of its markets. I would put the world's premium upon fine workmanship of the hand or brain or spirit; and a stiff pressure upon the multiplication of these products by mechanical means, for we have too many common things, and so few fine things. I would inculcate in the educational ideal, first of all, that in every man there is a dream, just as there is a soul, and that to express the dream of the soul in matter is the perfect individual performance. I would impress ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... Europe can not produce parallels to Oxford and Cambridge in opulence, buildings, libraries, professorships, scholarships, and all the external dignity and mechanical apparatus of learning. If there is an inferiority, it is in the persons, not in the places or their constitution. And here I can not help confessing that a desire to please the great, and bring them to the universities, causes a compliance with fashionable manners, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... detail, the most beneficial results cannot be expected without unity of design. Between that kind of cultivation and discipline necessary as a foundation for professional eminence, and that which is required for success in mercantile, mechanical, or agricultural occupation, there is a very natural and obvious distinction. And not only is it desirable that they who will be successful mainly as they shall be conversant with books, who require to ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... zero temperature something would go wrong with the pump valve or the piston leather would wear out, or in a new well the quicksand would work in. Neither myself, foreman nor boy was an expert or had any mechanical knowledge; though continued troubles, much hard work, accompanied by, alas! harder language, was a capital apprenticeship. In bitter cold freezing weather I well remember we once had to pull out the rods and the piping three times in succession before we got the ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... historical account of the organ, is confident that the instrument in use in 1831 was the original pre-Reformation organ, gradually enlarged from time to time with "all the improvements suggested by the progress of musical and mechanical art." Its preservation during the Commonwealth period is possibly due to the personal influence of Oliver Cromwell. About that date (1831) the organ was rebuilt by Elliott and Hill. It was fitted into the old cases, of Renaissance ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... the commissaire, whose face appeared to lose all flexibility of expression the moment the discovery was made, presenting now merely the stern, impassible, mechanical look of an officer on duty, 'these are the identical articles for which I have been searching for the last three days. Will you be good enough to change your dress as quickly as possible, and prepare to accompany me to the office of M. Morelle, magistrate ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... his preponderating reasons was that, although he felt himself competent to the higher duties of the office, there was, for what he conceived "a proper management of the Treasury, a necessity for a mass of mechanical labor connected with details, forms, calculating, etc., which having lost sight of the thread and routine, he could not think of again learning and going through." He was aware that there was "much confusion due to the changes of office and the state of the currency, and thought that ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... once more—half a penknife, a bunch of keys, but not a farthing. Suddenly I dive into my pocket and take the papers out again. It was a mechanical movement, an unconscious nervous twitch. I selected a white unwritten page, and—God knows where I got the notion from—but I made a cornet, closed it carefully, so that it looked as if it were filled with something, and threw it far out on to the pavement. The breeze ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... his head: it was impossible; and he looked again at the dark shore that they were passing, at the shimmering sea, and then at the bronzed backs of the warriors as they paddled on in their drowsy, mechanical way. ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... Holmes. The padrone protests—non, monsieur, non, cela vous derange—that he only wanted me to translate the words, he does not want to disturb me. Nevertheless, we go. I feel I have the honour of mechanical ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... said to the mockers in a wavering voice, "I will now present to you the concluding item of my entertainment. I will cause this lady to disappear under your very eyes, without the aid of any mechanical contrivance or artificial device." This was the merest showman's patter, for, as a matter of fact, it was not a very wonderful illusion. But as he led his wife forward to present her to the audience the conjurer was wondering whether the ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... his conclusions in twenty-seven propositions, of which the substance is as follows:— There is a reciprocal action and reaction between the planets, the earth and animate nature by means of a constant universal fluid, subject to mechanical laws yet unknown. The animal body is directly affected by the insinuation of this agent into the substance of the nerves. It causes in human bodies properties analogous to those of the magnet, for which reason it is called 'Animal Magnetism'. This magnetism may be communicated ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus |
