"Transmutation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... variety of enmity to the letterpress, and marked at random with dates twenty years earlier than his own day. But this was not the cause of Jude's amazement. He learnt for the first time that there was no law of transmutation, as in his innocence he had supposed (there was, in some degree, but the grammarian did not recognize it), but that every word in both Latin and Greek was to be individually committed to memory at the cost of ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... narrow sense of the word, alchemy is the pretended art of making gold and silver, or transmuting the base metals into the noble ones. The idea of such transmutation probably arose among the Alexandrian Greeks in the early centuries of the Christian era; thence it passed to the Arabs, by whom it was transmitted to western Europe, and its realization was a leading aim ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... The transmutation of the struggles of mankind from the physical to the spiritual, the solution of national and international problems, the solution of all the riddles of life that demand an answer or man's conquest, cannot be done by man alone. It is our task also and to the great ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... great names included in the foregoing essays, I am at this moment drawn instinctively only to two among them all—to William Blake and to Paul Verlaine; and this is an indication to me that what my own soul requires is not philosophy or psychology or wit or sublimity, but a certain delicate transmutation of the little casual things that cross my way, and a certain faint, low, sweet music, rumouring from indistinguishable horizons, and bringing me vague rare thoughts, cool and quiet and deep and magical, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... insist, in these days of destructive criticism, on the absolute necessity of accepting the Gospel statements as to the life of Jesus as the only possible method of knowing Him. But then, beyond that acceptance of the record must come the application and appropriation of it, and the transmutation of a historical fact into a personal experience. We may take an illustration from any of the Scriptural truths about Jesus:—For instance, Scripture declares Him to be our Redeemer. One man believes Him to be ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... case there is cause for great thankfulness. Moreover, assuming the transmutation, no impiety can be implied. It was as usual and as indicated as were papyrus and the stylus. It is common to-day for a poet, before spreading his own wings, to contemplate those of another. Inspiration ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... in all Boston seemed less likely to become a man in the next or any subsequent incarnation. There are Bostonian persons of the female kind who could with readiness be conceived as turning into men without any sea-change or especially startling biological transmutation. But Isabel was not one of them. Small and dainty, she was of the gold-and-white, essentially feminine type. She lived alone with her parents in the solid old-fashioned house on the north side of the Common, almost under ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... others covered with the rusty scum which denoted the presence of the powerful mineral, upon whose agency we relied for performing that strange piece of natural magic which may almost be called the transmutation ...
— The Ground-Ash • Mary Russell Mitford
... which we must suppose occupied by the water. In that case, we should find the original interstices filled with the substances which had composed the strata, and we should find the water translated into the places of those bodies; here would be properly a transmutation, but no consolidation of the strata, such as we are here to look for, and such as we actually find among those strata. It may be very easy for our author to form those explanations of natural phenomena; ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... book, that he began to settle down seriously to the great work of his life—the investigation of the origin of the species, of plants and animals. Briefly, it may be stated here that he seems to have been first led to ponder over the question of the transmutation of species, by facts that had come under his notice during the South American part of the voyage in the Beagle—such as the discovery of the fossil remains of huge animals akin to, but yet very distinct from, the living armadillos of the same regions; the manner in which closely allied ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... inactivity; may there not? And there is no such restlessness as the restlessness of compulsory idleness. That is the main idea that is in the Psalmist's mind. He knows little about retribution, he knows still less about transmutation into a glorious likeness to that which is most glorious and divine. But he conceives a great, dim, lonely land, wherein are prisoned and penned all the lives that have been foamed away vainly on earth, and are now settled into a dreary monotony and a restless idleness. As one of the other ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... objects to the evolution theory, on the ground that "species, genera, families, &c., exist as thoughts, individuals as facts,"[288] and he offers the dilemma, "If species do not exist at all, as the supporters of the transmutation theory maintain, how can they vary? and if individuals alone exist, how can the differences which may be observed among them prove the ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... The object of The Alchemist is to ridicule the belief in the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life. The alchemist is "Subtle," a mere quack; and "sir Epicure Mammon" is the chief dupe, who supplies money, etc., for the "transmutation of metal." "Abel Drugger" a tobacconist, and "Dapper" a lawyer's clerk, are two other dupes. "Captain Face," alias "Jeremy," the house-servant of "Lovewit," and "Dol Common" are his allies. The whole thing is blown up by the unexpected return ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... nation becoming a practical one. The curious thing is that Christianity, which is essentially a contemplative, unmilitant, unpatriotic, unambitious force, decidedly oriental in type, should have become, by a mysterious transmutation, the religion of active, inventive, conquering nations. I have no doubt that the essence of Christianity lies in a contemplative simplicity, and that it is in strong opposition to what is commonly called civilisation. It ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... whose curiosity may lead him to consult the authorities collected by Cudworth (pp. 185-188), will find in the doctrine of Anaximander a rude anticipation of the modern theories of "spontaneous generation" and "the transmutation of species." In the fragments of Anaximander that remain we find no recognition of an ordering Mind, and his philosophy is the dawn ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Theosophists generally. From a long familiarity with the stars, in conjunction with the inevitable creative and anthropomorphic sensibility of youth, I began to think that this reincarnation did not occur on the earth, but had its stages of transmutation placed elsewhere. In short, I amused myself incessantly with placing the poets in one star, the novelists in another, the scientists in a third, the mechanicians in a fourth, and in each I imagined a Utopia. A very little mature thought and ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... late Washington preached to his overseers the value of fertilization; in one case, when looking for a new overseer, he said the man must be, "above all, Midas like, one who can convert everything he touches into manure, as the first transmutation towards gold;—in a word one who can bring worn out and gullied Lands into good tilth in the shortest time." Equally emphatic was his urging of constant ploughing and grubbing, and he even invented a deep soil plough, which he used till he found a better one ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... the fourth a law was made to forbid all men thenceforth to multiply gold, or use any craft of multiplication. Of which law Mr. Boyle, when he was warm with the hope of transmutation, procured a repeal. ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... the Doctor, Mrs. Pringle, followed by Miss Mally Glencairn and Miss Isabella Tod, also debouched from the gate, and the assembled females remarked, with no less instinct, the transmutation which she had undergone. She was dressed in a dark blue cloth pelisse, trimmed with a dyed fur, which, as she told Miss Mally, "looked quite as well as sable, without costing a third of the money." A most matronly muff, that, without being of sable, was of an excellent quality, contained her ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... the second great characteristic of early childhood. These are the channels through which the world around comes into the life of the child. The sights and sounds of the physical realm, when carried beyond the portals of the senses, under the marvelous transmutation of God's touch, become ideas. The process, in so far as its secret has been revealed, will not be discussed at this point, but rather the relation of these impressions ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... hands did not only restore all the antiquated pieces of false wit, but enriched the world with inventions of their own. It is to this age that we owe the production of anagrams, which is nothing else but a transmutation of one word into another, or the turning of the same set of letters into different words; which may change night into day, or black into white, if chance, who is the goddess that presides over these ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... meaning of this word "revolution," and how does revolution differ from reform? Revolution means transmutation, and a revolution is, accordingly, accomplished whenever, by whatever means, with or without shock or violence, an entirely new principle is substituted for what is already in effect. A reform, on the other hand, is effected ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... always be glad of this year with the Corystons. How much longer will this rich, leisurely, aristocratic class with all its still surviving power and privileges exist among us? It is something that obviously is in process of transmutation and decay; though in a country like England the process will be a very slow one. Personally I greatly prefer this landlord stratum to the top stratum of the trading and manufacturing world. There are buried seeds in it, often of rare and splendid kinds, ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... accepting a miracle, M. Renan has indeed got into a sorry plight, and Mr. Rogers, in controverting him, has not greatly helped the matter. By stirring M. Renan's bemuddled pool, Mr. Rogers has only bemuddled it the more. Neither of these excellent writers seems to suspect that transmutation of species, the geologic development of the earth, and other like phenomena do not present features conflicting with ordinary experience. Sir Charles Lyell and Mr. Darwin would be greatly astonished to be told that their ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... the direct, secret, and incommunicable knowledge of God received in contemplation" (Dom John Chapman). The revelation sought for was not so much a dogmatic revelation as a revelation of the processes of "transmutation" of Rebirth, of Apotheosis or "Deification." Its aim was dynamic rather than static. But while the followers of the Gnosis, both Christian and Hellenistic, would have agreed that the direct knowledge of God is incommunicable to others, they undoubtedly seem to have ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... that chemistry is not sufficiently advanced to justify all of these deductions; that, until chemists have settled the lately raised question of the transmutation of elements, no theory can be sure. It is also held that until they have explained, without room for doubt, the reasons for the presence of some lines, and the absence of others, of any element in a stellar spectrum; why the arc-spectrum of each element differs ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several palaeontologists—for instance, by Agassiz, Pictet, and Sedgwick, as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection. For the development by this means of a group of forms, all ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... did the Carmagnoles ultimately become; but France ran a fearful risk in being obliged to rely on them when the process of their transmutation ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... nothing to do with coinage, while the great quantities that were then produced by the chemists—or as we should now-a-days call them alchemists—may be said to have taken them out of the category of the precious metals. This power of transmutation of metals was not universal, but it was so widely possessed that enormous quantities were made. In fact the production of the wished-for metals may be regarded as one of the industrial enterprises of those ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... carried Phryxus to Colchis is by some supposed to have been the name of the ship in which he embarked. The fleece of gold is thought to represent the immense treasures he bore away from Thebes. The alchemists of the fifteenth century were firmly convinced that the Golden Fleece was a treatise on the transmutation of metals, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... I devoted my whole time to arranging my huge pile of notes, to observing, and to experimenting in relation to the transmutation of species. During the voyage of the "Beagle" I had been deeply impressed by discovering in the Pampean formation great fossil animals covered with armour like that on the existing armadillos; secondly, by the manner in which closely allied ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... of his dying friend Marcellus; the opening scene of Act III, between Pelleas, Melisande, and Yniold. Numerous passages that are either not essential to the development of the action, or that do not invite musical transmutation, have been curtailed or omitted, with the result that the movement of the drama has been compressed and accelerated throughout. In outlining very briefly the action of the play (which should be read in the original ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... and voice had laid about her, she felt slowly coming into her, like a tide from a great ocean, the strength to go forward. She lay still, watching the candle-flame, hovering above the wick which tied it to the candle, reaching up, reaching up, never for a moment flagging in that transmutation of the dead matter below it, into something shining ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... transformation of the varieties. This assumption of a transformation or metamorphosis of species is, however, indispensable, and the theory of descent is very properly called also the "metamorphosis hypothesis," or "doctrine of transmutation;" as well as Lamarckism, after Jean Lamarck, who first founded it ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... talk of your transmutation by and by," said the dame, "and find you clothes withal, and money besides; for it will take a good deal to carry the thing ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... consent, if it can be shown that the Pterichthys which once lived and moved on this ancient globe of ours ever either rose or sunk into the Pterichthys of Mr. Dinkel, freely and fully to confess, not only the possibility, but also the actuality, of the transmutation of both species and genera. I am first, however, prepared to demonstrate, before any competent jury of Palaeontologists in the world, that not a single plate or scale of Mr. Dinkel's restoration represents those of the fish which he professed to restore; that the same judgment ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... enjoyed profound tranquillity, internal and external, and our annalists find leisure to advert to various circumstances of domestic history. They mention a corporation formed for the transmutation of iron into copper by the method of one Medley an alchemist, of which the learned but credulous sir Thomas Smith, secretary of state, was a principal promoter, and in which both Leicester and Burleigh embarked ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... and exhalations, wherewith Heraclitus said, the Stoics proved, Cicero maintained, they were cherished and alimented. There would likewise be in such a world no manner of symbolization, alteration, nor transmutation amongst the elements; for the one will not esteem itself obliged to the other, as having borrowed nothing at all from it. Earth then will not become water, water will not be changed into air, of air will ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... and obligation in regard to it is not less intense than that which led men to sing psalms and utter praises on board the storm-bound "Mayflower." The most English of all English attributes has, by a strange transmutation, become the leading element in the character of the Africo-American. The same mixed motive of religious duty toward posterity and devotion to political liberty which peopled the bleak hills of New England and the fertile lands of Canaan with peoples fleeing from bondage and oppression, ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... world which was subtly concealed in the poison growth of Prussianism. As he himself here puts it in one of his speeches: "From each successive visit to Germany for twenty-five years I came away more appalled by the sinister transmutation Prussianism had wrought amongst the people and by the portentous menace I recognized in it for the entire world. It had given to Germany unparalleled prosperity, beneficent and advanced social legislation, and not a few other things ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... informed was an old miser whose passion for accumulating wealth reduced him into almost as unfortunate a state as Midas, who, according to the fable, having obtained the long-desired power of turning every thing he touched to gold, was starved by the immediate transmutation of all food into that metal the instant it touched his lips. The late possessor of the house I am speaking of, when he was about fifty years old, turned away every servant but an old woman, who if she was not honest, was at least too weak to be able to put any dishonesty in practice. ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... hopes as far as any who are likely to apply; and your interest would be strengthened by the opportunity of placing some good friend in Selkirkshire, besides converting the Minstrel of the Clan into a Baron,—a transmutation worthy of so powerful and kind a chief. But if your Grace thinks I ought to drop thoughts of this preferment, I am bound to say, that I think myself as well provided for by my friends and the public as I have the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... out with being symbol and pantomime and with having utility only as an exponent of the facts and qualities symbolised; but it presently suffered the transmutation which commonly passes over symbolical facts in human intercourse. Manners presently came, in popular apprehension, to be possessed of a substantial utility in themselves; they acquired a sacramental character, in great measure independent of the ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... philosophy of action of the strong and the pride of the strong in their own strength. Now at last I knew Nietzsche. I knew the rightness of the books, the relation of high thinking to high-conduct, the transmutation of midnight thought into action in the high place on the poop of a coal- carrier in the year nineteen-thirteen, my woman beside me, my ancestors behind me, my slant-eyed servitors under me, the beasts beneath me and beneath the heel of ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... and other things; as well as by the following recipe which he gave for the production of a pot of mice: "Press a dirty shirt into the orifice of a vessel containing a little corn, after about twenty-one days the ferment proceeding from the dirty shirt, modified by the odour of the corn, effects a transmutation of the wheat into mice." The crowning point in this recipe, however, lay in the fact that he asserted that he had himself witnessed the fact, and, as an interesting and corroborative detail, he added that the mice were born full-grown. See 'Louis Pasteur: His Life and Labours.' By ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... le temps, with the terminus all but in prospect, Talk of eternal ties and marriages made in heaven. Ah, did we really accept with a perfect heart the illusion! Ah, did we really believe that the Present indeed is the Only! Or through all transmutation, all shock and convulsion of passion, Feel we could carry undimmed, unextinguished, the light of our knowledge! But for his funeral train which the bridegroom sees in the distance, Would he so joyfully, think you, fall in ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... the Divine Comedy exist in English that a new one might well seem needless. But most of these translations are in verse, and the intellectual temper of our time is impatient of a transmutation in which substance is sacrificed for form's sake, and the new form is itself different from the original. The conditions of verse in different languages vary so widely as to make any versified translation ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... soul; the whole universe proceeding according to an order which is just as much above God's knowledge as above ours. Now, the best geologists assure us that there is no evidence in support of the transmutation of species. Mr. Darwin's theory of the formation of species by natural selection is this: In the struggle for life, the strongest and best adapted animal lives, the rest die. This animal transmits to its offspring its own superior qualities; so a higher animal is gradually developed. ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... conscious of the misgiving and the re-assurance, as often as the absence and the re-union occur? Is there even the most trustful of wives, whose husband is on the other side of the globe, that is wholly undisturbed by the transmutation of the idol in her mind? When the husband is returning, and her hungry heart is feasting on the anticipation of his appearance, she ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... that country and in this: but the great Burke remains unanswerable; 'The Age of Chivalry is gone,' and could not but go, having now produced the still more indomitable Age of Hunger. Altars enough, of the Dubois-Rohan sort, changing to the Gobel-and-Talleyrand sort, are faring by rapid transmutation to, shall we say, the right Proprietor of them? French Game and French Game-Preservers did alight on the Cliffs of Dover, with cries of distress. Who will say that the end of much is not come? A set of mortals has risen, who believe that Truth is not a printed ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Hero's being put into a Pudding, and convey'd away in a Tinker's Budget; which is design'd by our Author to prove, if it is understood literally, That the greatest Men are subject to Misfortunes. But it is thought by Dr. B—tly to be all Mythology, and to contain the Doctrine of the Transmutation of Metals, and is design'd to shew, that all Matter is the same, tho' very differently Modified. He tells me, he intends to publish a distinct Treatise of this Canto; and I don't question, but he'll manage the Dispute ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... heads that water the spiritual fields of his philosophy and the seeds from which they are sown (if indeed his whole philosophy is but one spiritual garden). His experiments, social and economic, are a part of its cultivation and for the harvest—and its transmutation, he trusts to moments of inspiration—"only what is thought, said, and done at a ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... weather-beaten farmhouse. The exterior was of marble, so dazzingly white that it seemed as though the whole structure might melt away in the sunshine, like those humbler ones which Mr. Gathergold, in his young play-days, before his fingers were gifted with the touch of transmutation, had been accustomed to build of snow. It had a richly ornamented portico, supported by tall pillars, beneath which was a lofty door, studded with silver knobs, and made of a kind of variegated wood that had been brought from beyond the sea. The windows, from the ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... elements or letters of the alphabet, that they are not even syllables. The way in which the so-called elements are built up out of molecules corresponding in their configuration to the regular solids, and the explanations of their transmutation into one another based on the geometrical construction of these figures, is apt to strike the average reader as fantastic, but one of the most distinguished living mathematicians and physicists has stated that he is struck ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... has no relation to other features of the story; it is consequently of value in, and per se, only, and cannot be regarded as valid evidence for the source of the legend as a whole. In the process of transmutation from Ritual to Romance, the kernel, the Grail legend proper, may be said to have formed for itself a shell composed of accretions of widely differing provenance. It is the legitimate task of criticism to analyse such accretions, ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... kind of centre of the operations of the Munster fairies. When a child is stolen by the "good people," Lough Guir is conjectured to be the place of its unearthly transmutation from the human to the fairy state. And beneath its waters lie enchanted, the grand old castle of the Desmonds, the great earl himself, his beautiful young countess, and all the retinue that surrounded ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... inmost self aloof and immune. She had dreamed that some inward irreproachability of thought, some light-hearted tact of open conduct, might leave still untainted that deeper core of thought and feeling which she had long thought of as conscience, while some deceiving and sophistical transmutation of values whispered to her adroitly that in some way all good might be bad, and that all bad might ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... the employment of this form; an idea which suggests itself all the more forcibly when we find him, a few years later, setting about the composition of a conventional lament in this mode on a young college acquaintance, and producing, through his power of alchemical transmutation, one of the greatest works of art in ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... by Klotsch,[329] and Weber[330] gives other instances in Prunus and Paeonia. Corresponding alterations may be met with in cultivated tulips, in the cowslip and other plants. In most of the above cases the transmutation has been perfect, but in quite an equal number of cases a portion only of the carpel is thus changed, generally the style or the stigma; thus Baillon describes the stigmas of Ricinus communis as having been in one instance antheriferous.[331] Moggridge figures a flower of ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... progress in the transmutation of nitrous air, in these circumstances, less remarkable. For when it has been brought to the state last mentioned, the agitation of it in fresh water almost instantly takes off that peculiar kind of inflammability, so that it extinguishes a candle, ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... precede the thing. On the part of the agent—that is simply first, which is first included in his intention; but that is relatively first, with which his operation begins—and this because the intention is prior to the operation. On the part of the matter—that is first which exists first in the transmutation of the matter. Now in the Incarnation the order depending on the agent must be particularly considered, because, as Augustine says (Ep. ad Volusianum cxxxvii), "in such things the whole reason of the deed is the power of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... to see that letter-head, but aren't you afraid to enter into competition with Mr. Tumulty, who has now, I see, bought the old Shepard mansion and will settle in Washington. How do they do it with the high cost of living what it is? ... The transmutation of brass into gold is becoming ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... records his belief in "a continuous creative operation," "a constantly operating secondary creational law," through which species are successively produced; and he emits faint, but not indistinct, glimmerings of a transmutation theory of his own;[1] so that he is equally exposed to all the philosophical objections advanced by Agassiz, and to most of those urged by the other American ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... you make me mad? Am not I Christopher Slie, old Slies sonne of Burton-heath, by byrth a Pedler, by education a Cardmaker, by transmutation a Beare-heard, and now by present profession a Tinker. Aske Marrian Hacket the fat Alewife of Wincot, if shee know me not: if she say I am not xiiii.d. on the score for sheere Ale, score me vp for the lyingst knaue in Christen dome. What I am not bestraught: here's- 3.Man. Oh ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... science of education is very crude and impractical. Much of it is materialistic, and does not recognize the self-activity of mind; but makes it out to be a correlation of physical energies—derived from the transmutation of food by the process of digestion, and then by the brain ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... converting Broadway into a street of shops is greater than ever. There is scarcely a block in the whole extent of this fine street of which some part is not in a state of transmutation. The City Hotel has given place to a row of ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... with her sailing-power is another branch of the equipment of a screw-ship, which requires the most earnest, patient, and intelligent consideration. Prepared to endure all the wear and tear of a sail-ship, she should at the same time be ready for transmutation into a steam-ship; namely, when, for any urgent service, her best powers of steaming are required, she should be able to divest herself speedily of yards and top-masts, and, the special service completed, resume all her perfection ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving Philosophers who were remodeling the world with words, and making card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with unbelieving Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this wonderful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable time—and has ever since—to be known by its fruits of indifference to every natural subject ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... had so much dreaded. To be sure, my hands were a little sore, and I felt nearly as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks; but I had wrought and been useful, and had yet enjoyed the day fully as much as usual. It was no small matter, too, that the evening, converted by a rare transmutation into the delicious "blink of rest," which Burns so truthfully describes, was all my own. I was as light of heart next morning as any of my fellow-workmen. There had been a smart frost during the night, and the rime lay white on the grass as we passed onwards through ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... stumbled and fell and crept through the snow that was wet with thaw, or across it when the night's frost still crusted it beyond the weight of a man, searching for one more squirrel, striving to achieve one more transmutation of furry leap and scolding chatter into the lifts and tugs of a man's body that would hoist the boat over the rim of shore-ice and slide it ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... probably it proved of use to him when he had to discuss in the "Origin of Species" the principles of a natural classification. From September, 1854, and during the four ensuing years, Darwin devoted himself to observing and experimenting in relation to the transmutation of species, and in arranging a huge pile of notes upon the subject. As early as October, 1838, it had occurred to him as probable, or at least possible, that amid the struggle for existence which everywhere goes ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... present from the very beginning as the condition of becoming conscious of anything, yet remains in constant change. Impressions pour in through the senses, enter the Whole that is already present; they drop their content into that Whole by means of the senses, and the miracle of transmutation, ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... 1721, a philosopher from Lower Germany shall come, first to Amsterdam in Holland, and afterwards to London. He will bring with him a world of curiosities, and among them a pretended secret for the transmutation of metals. Under the umbrage of this mighty secret he shall pass upon the world for some time; but at length he shall be detected, and proved to be nothing but an empiric and a cheat, and so forced to sneak off, ...
— Dickory Cronke - The Dumb Philosopher, or, Great Britain's Wonder • Daniel Defoe
... to table, but was so occupied with her grief for the blighted roses that she did not even notice the wonderful transmutation of her china bowl. Perhaps this was all the better; for Marygold was accustomed to take pleasure in looking at the queer figures, and strange trees and houses, that were painted on the circumference of the bowl; and these ornaments were now entirely lost ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... tradition sung down in a ballad, an anachronism of the heart, cherished through long rude lifetimes for the beauty and poetry of it—when you consider, beauty and poetry can be thought of in this. Here was no Court aiding the transmutation of the middle class, no King spending money; here were no picturesque contacts of Royalty and the people, no pageantry, no blazonry of the past, nothing to lift the heart but an occasional telegram from the monarch expressing, upon an event of ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Great Britain; for insuring and increasing children's fortunes; for insuring masters and mistresses against losses from the carelessness or misconduct of servants; for insuring against thefts and robberies; for extracting silver from lead; for the transmutation of silver into malleable fine metal; for buying and fitting out ships to suppress pirates; for a wheel for perpetual motion, and—with which project, perhaps, we may close our list of specimens—"for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... belief in those hidden natural forces and secret virtues of privileged objects, which formed the nucleus of mediaeval scientific research. The field is a fertile one for the imagination and possesses a strange attraction for certain minds. There are men alive in our own time to whom the transmutation of metals does not seem an impossibility, nor the brewing of the elixir of life a matter to be scoffed at as a matter of course. The world is full of people who, in their inmost selves, put faith in the latent qualities of precious stones and amulets, who believe their fortunes, their happiness, ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... the same thing. Beyond doubt that queer mixture of a man—missionary, fanatic, quack, what you will—had made diamonds as far back as the year 1280. He owned to having stumbled across the Recipe accidentally. Like other alchemists of his time, the transmutation of metals was his aim, and the crystallization of part of his graphite crucible was quite a matter of chance; but it occurred most surely; and he analyzed the why and wherefore, and wrote down the method of working in a place where he says it would last for all time ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... readers who are not inclined to criticism, and might shirk an elaborate argument. It is difficult, accordingly, to select from him a series of propositions that would give a general idea of the complete transmutation of morality which he demands. So far as I can make out, there is only one point in which he still agrees with the old traditional morality, and that point seems to cause him no little difficulty. No thinker can afford to question the binding nature of the law of Truth, least of all a thinker ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... beginning grew into a familiar spirit of kindred form with their own, and though regarded as the subordinate and wife of the sun, was reverenced as the superior and husband of the earth. With the transmission of this myth began its transmutation. From the moon being a man, it became a man's abode: with some it was the world whence human spirits came; with others it was the final home whither human spirits returned. Then it grew into a penal colony, to which ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... naturalists have left speculations on the origin of species to such dreamers as the author of the 'Vestiges', by whose well-intentioned efforts the Lamarckian theory received its final condemnation in the minds of all sound thinkers. Notwithstanding this silence, however, the transmutation theory, as it has been called, has been a "skeleton in the closet" to many an honest zoologist and botanist who had a soul above the mere naming of dried plants and skins. Surely, has such an one thought, nature ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... just dealt with. In radio-active elements, such as uranium for example, the element is breaking down; in what we call radio-activity we have a manifestation of the spontaneous change of elements. What is really taking place is a transmutation of one element into another, from a heavier to a lighter. The element uranium spontaneously becomes radium, and radium passes through a number of other stages until it, in turn, becomes lead. Each ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... and subsistence. After the war they still held the land and subsistence. The laborer was hired and the subsistence "advanced" to him while the crop was growing. The fall of the Freedmen's Bureau hindered the transmutation of this system into a modern wage system, and allowed the laborers to be cheated by high interest charges on the subsistence advanced and actual cheating often ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... Tao-teh-king, and been impressed by his tranquil elevation above the petty ills and concerns of life and the flesh. Her father, like all the ruling class, regarded Taoism—which had, indeed, degenerated into a mass of nonsense about the transmutation of base metals into gold and the elixir of life—with contempt. But this seemed to her no depreciation of the Greatly Eminent One or his philosophy of ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... researches, that their doctrine was no merely chemical phantasy, but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements and to man himself; and that they sought to fashion gold out of common metals merely as part of an universal transmutation of all things into some divine and imperishable substance; and this enabled me to make my little book a fanciful reverie over the transmutation of life into art, and a cry of measureless desire for a world made wholly ...
— Rosa Alchemica • W. B. Yeats
... languages—or languages separately constructed by the Deity, and by as many separate acts of inspiration communicated to these several nations—and that their resemblance to the fossil form, Latin, is to be attributed to special design? Yet the evidence of the natural transmutation of species, is, in one respect, much stronger than that of the natural transmutation of languages—in respect, namely, of there being a vastly greater number of cases all bearing testimony to ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... clothe the ethereal with earthly attributes, and so make it grossly perceptible." This observation has a still greater value when applied to Hawthorne himself. And out of this questioning belief and transmutation of superstition into truth—for such is more exactly his method—proceeds also that quality of value and rarity and awe-enriched significance, with which he irradiates real life until it is sublimed to a delicate cloud-image of the ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... of those creatures charged with the disappearance of corpses, to see them busy at their work of disintegration, to follow in detail the process of transmutation that makes the ruins of what has lived return apace into life's treasure house: these are things that long haunted my mind. I regretfully left the mole lying in the dust of the road. I had to go, after a glance at the corpse and its harvesters. It was not the place for philosophizing over a ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... consequence of this hypothesis, that all living beings have arisen from a single stock. With respect to the origin of this primitive stock, or stocks, the doctrine of the origin of species is obviously not necessarily concerned. The transmutation hypothesis, for example, is perfectly consistent either with the conception of a special creation of the primitive germ, or with the supposition of its having arisen, as a modification of ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... facts that whatever may be presented to the imagination is transformed into a real object in the dream itself, so that it might be called a dream within a dream, and in the last instance the transmutation passes through three images and consecutive objects. This transmutation not only consists in the transition from our waking thoughts to the image of our dreams, but it takes place in the act of dreaming; such is the power of the faculty of perception, in which we find the first origin ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... with good reason congratulate ourselves on this result of our investigations? Instead of the vision we were threatened with, of mind losing itself in matter, our eyes are gladdened with that of the converse operation, of the transmutation of matter into mind. And on no account is this metamorphosis to be mistaken for annihilation of matter, whose stolid grossness has vanished, not in order to give place to empty nominalism or to a thin mist of mere mental perceptions existing only in virtue of being perceived, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... with a torch leading two souls bound together by iron concealed in flower-wreaths, until, alas! life seems ordinary enough to be symbolized by tin,—of the tin-wedding entering into the refiner's fire, and, by sure transmutation, rising from the baser metal to the paler, but purer silver,—of the subtile alchemy of years, which, in human ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... urged by questions, developed his theories. He believed in the absolute equality of men before God, in the transmutation of souls: and the resurrection of the flesh seemed to him the utmost absurdity. He quite thought that there were future rewards and penalties, but he had too much faith in the goodness of God to suppose that the expiation ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... suddenly and in full perfection, remain substantially unchanged during the term of their existence, and pass away in full perfection. Other species take their places apparently by substitution, not by transmutation." ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... the idea of transmutation of species, suggesting that by changes in habitat, climate, and manner of living one species may, in the course of generations, be transformed into ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... may be made in this way to the wealth of English poetry. A few exquisite pieces in Latin literature, the Catullian Ille mi par, for example, a few in our own, such as Jonson's Drink to me only with thine eyes, are translations. Possibly the miracle of such poetic transmutation may be repeated for me; possibly an English song may come to birth by my means also. With this hope in view, the translator is strongly tempted to engraft upon his versions elegances in the spirit of his native language, or to use the motives of the original for ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... hope to make plain in the course of this excursion, the alchemists regarded the discovery of the Philosopher's Stone and the transmutation of "base" metals into gold as the consummation of the proof of the doctrines of mystical theology as applied to chemical phenomena, and it was as such that they so ardently sought to achieve the magnum opus, as this transmutation was called. Of course, it would be useless to deny ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... of India rubber is as old as the rubber industry, one result of which has been an unceasing effort to discover a practical substitute. Never was the secret of the transmutation of metals sought more persistently by ancient philosophers than the secret of an artificial rubber has been by modern chemists, but, thus far, the one search has been hardly more successful than the other. One discovery has been made, however, by which our rubber supplies ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... exuberant vivacity of the imagination in the fifteenth century account for the florid work of this time. Something too is left of mediaeval fancy; the details borrowed from the antique undergo fantastic transmutation at the hands of men accustomed to the vehement emotion of the romantic ages. Whatever the Renaissance took from antique art, it was at first unable to assimilate either the moderation of the Greeks or ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... over the transmutation of metals. As for magic, necromancy, pyromancy, geomancy, coscinomancy, and all the other mancies—there was then a whole literature about them. And the witch-burning inquisitors like Sprenger, Bodin, ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Chalcondyles (l. v.) and Ducas (c. 23) exhibit the rude lineament of the Ottoman policy, and the transmutation of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... the episcopal church on Sundays, and sat where he could see Mysie—sat longing and thirsting ever till the music returned. Yet the music he never heard; he watched only its transmutation into form, never taking his eyes off Mysie's face. Reflected thence in a metamorphosed echo, he followed all its changes. Never was one powerless to produce it more strangely responsive to its influence. She had no voice; she had never ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... "Transmutation," remarked Prescott, "was, as you know, finally declared to be a scientific absurdity in the eighteenth century. But I may say that it is no longer so regarded. I do not ask you to believe anything until you have seen; all I ask is that you maintain the same open mind which the most ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... grown old among furnaces and crucibles and retorts; wearing their lives away in a search after perpetual youth, and their substance in that which sooner and more surely than "riotous living" impoverisheth a man—the transmutation of the baser metals into gold—you fall a whistling maybe—or beg leave to suggest the word fudge. If so, take my word for it, like a pretty woman with the small-pox, the probability is, you are very much ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... many serious reformers against the injustice and degradation now involved by our system of prostitution is so profound that some have declared themselves ready to accept any revolution of ideas which would bring about a more wholesome transmutation of moral values. "Better indeed were a saturnalia of free men and women," exclaims Edward Carpenter (Love's Coming of Age, p. 62), "than the spectacle which, as it is, our great ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... 'Alchemy, transmutation of metals, and the like have been set aside by true science,' remarked the taller officer. 'Even old Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich, who is ever ready to plead the cause of the ancients, can find nothing to say in favour of it. From Trismegistus downwards ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... member in the system inseparably connected with this money management. It consists in the means of drawing out at discretion portions of the confiscated lands for sale, and carrying on a process of continual transmutation of paper into land and land into paper. When we follow this process in its effects, we may conceive something of the intensity of the force with which this system must operate. By this means the spirit of money-jobbing and speculation goes into the mass of land itself, and incorporates with ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... period. The construction of St. Peter's itself involved more destruction of classical monuments than all the appropriations of previous and subsequent Vandals put together. Much has been lost on account of this extraordinary transmutation and reconsecration, whose loss we can never cease to deplore; but we must not forget at the same time that much has been conserved which would otherwise have wasted away under the slow ravages of time, been consigned to the lime-kiln, or disappeared ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... magic and the transmutation of metals. There was always something fascinating to me in the old books of alchemy. I have felt that the poetry of science lost its wings when the last powder of projection had been cast into the crucible, and the fire of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... warm eulogy. The opinions and the attachments of Paul Foley were at first those of his family. But be, like Harley, became, merely from the vehemence of his Whiggism, an ally of the Tories, and might, perhaps, like Harley, have been completely metamorphosed into a Tory, if the process of transmutation had not been interrupted by death. Foley's abilities were highly respectable, and had been improved by education. He was so wealthy that it was unnecessary for him to follow the law as a profession; but he had studied it carefully as a science. His morals were without ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... very far. But they apparently felt no interest in the poets, orators, and historians of antiquity. In the study of Aristotle, and in metaphysical philosophy, they were proficients. Medicine, also, they cultivated with success. They delved in Alchemy in the search for the transmutation of metals. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... though it should be demonstrated to his entire conviction that Christ did not raise Lazarus from the dead, and that Mahomet did turn the hill Safa into gold, instead of prudently confining himself to boasting that he could have effected the transmutation if he had thought proper. But for the purpose which Hume had in view, it was necessary to establish, not merely the doubtfulness, but the absolute falsehood of the miracular testimony on which, in his opinion, 'our ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... said my good master, "that by these names are distinguished the philosopher's stone in its different states. But I have doubts about the possibility of a transmutation of metals." ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... action. His masters tell him that the world is coy, must be approached cautiously, and with something substantial in the hand. The old bird will not be caught with chaff. He does not yet understand the process of accumulation and transmutation. The fate of the Danaides is his, and he draws long with a bottomless bucket. But at last his incompetency can no further be concealed. Then he either submits to the suggestions of despair and oblivion or bravely begins his work. The exhilaration and satisfaction ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... helium lies in the clue it has afforded to the constitution of matter and the transmutation of the elements. Radium and other radioactive substances, such as uranium, spontaneously emit negatively charged particles of extremely small mass (electrons), and also positively charged particles of much greater mass, known as alpha particles. Rutherford and Geiger actually ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... Canterbury Cathedral, beneath a representation of the miracle of Cana, is the legend,—"Lympha dat historiam, vinum notat allegoriam." But if the earthly is there only for the sake of this heavenly transmutation,—if the miracle, and the miracle alone, shows God's purpose accomplished,—then all things must be miraculous, for all else may be safely ignored. Henceforth, nothing is of itself profane, for the profane is only that wherein the higher and truer sense has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Monday, Esther Van Guilder returned her friend's call, in response to an urgent invitation, despatched by mail. Louise Latimer's great bare room was incapable of transmutation into a cosy nest of a boudoir. There was too much of its heavy raw silk furniture—too much of its vast, sarcophagus-like bed—too much of its upholsterer's elegance, regardless of cost—and taste. An enlargement ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... pictured the human soul in its various phases. We see plainly through iron plates many inches in thickness, and look directly into the human body. Our food and precious stones are made in the laboratory, and a syndicate of scientists has recently been formed for the transmutation of the baser metals into gold. When man can produce food, clothing, and all the precious metals at will; when he can see what is occurring at a distance without the necessity of lugging about a cumbersome ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... ducks, could all be the modified descendants of a common ancestor; or, still further, whether mammalia, birds, reptiles, and fishes, could all have had a common origin;—these questions had hardly come up for discussion at all, for it was felt that, while the very first step along the road of "transmutation of species" (as it was then called) had not been made, it was quite useless to speculate as to how far it might be possible to travel in the same direction, or where the road ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... see, but which as the soul's eternal lighthouse gleams, glows, beckons in the blackest night of human anguish. In boyhood, desiring to please his invalid and slowly dying mother, he had purchased and hung up opposite her bed, an illuminated copy of her favorite text; and now, by some subtle transmutation in the conservation of spiritual energy, each golden letter of that Bible text seemed emblazoned on the dusty wall of the court-room: "God is our refuge and strength, a very ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... signifies bad. Thus they say, Erawha eeno, good greeting, as the Otaheitans say, Ehoa eeno, or my good friend. Taboo, or tafoo, Any thing not to be touched, as being forbid. This is an example that shews the transmutation of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... it reduces some to a liquid state and hardens others; how it can consume almost all bodies, or convert them into ashes and smoke; and finally, how from these ashes, by the mere intensity of its action, it forms glass: for as this transmutation of ashes into glass appeared to me as wonderful as any other in nature, I took a special pleasure in describing it. I was not, however, disposed, from these circumstances, to conclude that this world had been created in the manner I described; for it is much more likely that God made it ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... composition itself, I may say that it is full of life, indeed, spirited in every respect, in movement and in boldness of harmonic and melodic conception. The Tarantelle is a translation from Italian into Polish, a transmutation of Rossini into Chopin, a Neapolitan scene painted with opaque colours, the south without its transparent sky, balmy air, and general brightness. That this composition was inspired by impressions received from Rossini's Tarantella, and not from impressions received in Italy (of which, as has already ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... long run that Lincoln's credit and the popular confidence that supported it were as valuable both to his creditors and himself as if the sums which stood over his signature had been gold coin in a solvent bank. But this transmutation was not attained until he had passed through a very furnace of financial embarrassment. Berry proved a worthless partner, and the business a sorry failure. Seeing this, Lincoln and Berry sold out again on credit—to the Trent brothers, who soon ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... the philosopher's stone, chanced upon this infernal synthesis and fusion. For him, no doubt, it proved a philosopher's stone in earnest, for the Borgia always extended a generous hand to those who could assist their damnable activities. Transmutation—so a skilled friend assures me—is now proved to be a fact, and another generation will be able perhaps to make gold, if the desire for that accursed mineral continues ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... republic, the mines are to be a democratic republic, every great industry is to be a democratic republic within the State; our community is to become a conflict of inter-woven governments of workers, incapable of progressive changes of method or of extension or transmutation of function, the whole being of a man is to lie within his industrial specialisation, and, upon lines of causation not made clear, wages are to go on rising and hours of work are to go on falling.... There ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... way, she another; they accordingly make a kind of reality which can assimilate her romance. Dickens was saved from trying to write two books at once by the fact that one completely satisfied him. It expressed the exciting, amazing, exhilarating world he lived in himself, with its consistent transmutation of all values, and he knew ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... inclined to think that the "new light which was rising in his mind{8}" had not yet attained any effective degree of steadiness or brightness. I think so because in his Pocket Book under the date 1837 he wrote, "In July opened first note-book on 'transmutation of species.' Had been greatly struck from about month of previous March{9} on character of South American fossils, and species on Galapagos Archipelago. These facts origin (especially latter), of all my views." But ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... objected to the crudely materialistic theories of the real presence which were then prevalent. He protested against the statement that the transmutation of the elements takes place "vere et sensualiter," and that "portiunculae" of the body of Christ lie upon the altar. "The mouth," he said, "receives the sacrament, the inner man the true ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... superstition did not stand in the way, clothed in pharisaical assumption and political power, experiments might be made on human beings and animals sufficient to settle most positively all doubt as to transmutation of species by the semi-creative power from the invisible world, combined ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... sultan, when the metals in the furnace were all melted, to find them converted into a mass of solid gold, which proved, on assay, to be of the purest quality. Every one was questioned as to what he had cast into the furnace, when there appeared no reason to suppose the transmutation could have been effected by such an accidental mixture of metals. At length it was remarked, that a dervish, accompanying the barber's son, had cast in a lump of ore, and immediately disappeared. Upon this the sultan summoned the youth to his presence, and ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... was here before we were all mad about music, and so he enchanted us with his violin. But Italy knows him as an expert in the plastic arts, and Germany admires in him a master in chemical science. In France, where he was supposed to possess the secret of the transmutation of metals, the police for two years sought and failed to find any normal source of his opulence. A lady of forty-five once swallowed a whole bottle of his elixir. Nobody recognized her, for she had become a girl of ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... no record of the commonplaces of our voyage thereafter. It only remains for me to say that I arrived in England broken in health and bankrupt in fortune. Brande left no money. His formula for the transmutation of metals is unintelligible to me. I can make no use ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... less, Lincoln saw at a glance that if he could infuse into Seward's words his own more robust qualities, the result—'would be a richer product than had ever issued from his own qualities as hitherto he had known them. He effected this transmutation and in doing so raised his style to a new range of effectiveness. The great Lincoln of literature appeared in the first inaugural and particularly in that noble passage which was the work of Lincoln and Seward together. In a way it ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... time, while he may not ungratefully rejoice with Sophocles at being "set free from service to a band of madmen," that ripening of his nature which comes most fruitfully of a generous exercise of its powers will have instinctively taught him that secret of the transmutation of the passions which is one of the most precious rewards of experience. It is quite possible for a lifelong passion for fair women to become insensibly and unregretfully transmuted into a passion for first editions, and you may become quite sincerely content that a younger fellow catch ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... companionship come to him of a still higher order than his own. Thus one creates his own world. He need not abjectly feel that he must accept sorrow, trial, defeat, and disaster at the moment, because compensation somewhere awaits him. The law of transmutation supersedes the law of compensation. One may bring to bear, at the moment, the potent force that transforms all: that changes dullness into radiance, trial into joy, depression into exaltation. And how? Simply by ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... it may be remarked, is not necessarily incompatible with the conception of reincarnation, on which theory the final resurrection or transmutation of the body would terminate the series of successive lives and deaths, thus bringing the individual out of the circle of generation, which is the circle of Karma. I may, perhaps, have the opportunity of considering this ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... varying with their respective ages, but they had never made a full avowal that his being rested on any tangible physical basis. Rather had they fallen into the way of considering him as a disembodied intelligence, whose sole function was to direct the transmutation of values and credits and resources and opportunities into the creature comforts demanded by the state of life unto which it had please Providence to call them; and their dismay was now such as might occur at the Mint if the great stamp were suddenly and of its own accord to cease its ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... limited; and we find it revolving, in consequence, in an irregular, ever-returning cycle. But Infinite resource did not need to travel in a circle, and so we find no return or doublings in its course. It has appeared to me, that an argument against the transmutation of species, were any such needed, might be founded on those inherent peculiarities of structure that are ascertained thus to pervade the entire texture of the framework of animals. If we find one building differing from another merely in external ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... to be amusing. For instance, if I were to tell you that the Princess and the Baron rode out together daily to inspect the cannon, it is either a piece of politics or scandal, as I turn my phrase. I am the alchemist that makes the transmutation. They have been everywhere together since you left,' she continued, brightening as she saw Otto darken; 'that is a poor snippet of malicious gossip - and they were everywhere cheered - and with that addition ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... creed is formulated in precise and dogmatic language, it invariably loses something of its pristine beauty in the process of transmutation. Hence the Positivist philosophy of Comte, though embodying noble aspirations, has had but a limited influence. Again, the poetry of Robert Browning, though less frankly altruistic than that of Cowper or Wordsworth, is inherently ethical, and reveals strong ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... resulted in the production of a "clear yellow oil" which was presently proved to be liquid chlorine. Now chlorine, in its pure state, had previously been known (except in a forgotten experiment of Northmore's) only as a gas. Its transmutation into liquid form was therefore regarded as a very startling phenomenon. But the clew thus gained, other gases were subjected to similar conditions by Davy, and particularly by Faraday, with the result that ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... a hope, not to say a certainty, of verifying the golden visions of the alchymists. Dr. Girtanner, of Gottingen, not long ago adventured the following prophecy: "In the nineteenth century the transmutation of metals will be generally known and practised. Every chemist and every artist will make gold; kitchen utensils will be of silver, and even gold, which will contribute more than anything else to prolong life, poisoned ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... he has abandoned his former views as to the persistency of species, and has adopted Darwin's theory of transmutation and development by variation and natural relation, and must say, after carefully reading his book, that he has not given any geological proofs of the correctness of Darwin's opinions, but, like that distinguished writer, he is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of Johnson's amusement. For this love of experimental philosophy, sir John Hawkins thinks an apology necessary. He tells us, with great gravity, that curiosity was the only object in view; not an intention to grow suddenly rich by the philosopher's stone, or the transmutation of metals. To enlarge this circle, Johnson, once more, had recourse to a literary club. This was at the Turk's head, in Gerard street, Soho, on every Tuesday evening through the year. The members were, besides himself, the right honourable ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... autobiographical dream-play, "Toward Damascus"—all of which were finished between May, 1897, and some time in the latter part of 1898. And back of these again lay that period of mental crisis, when, at Paris, in 1895 and 1896, he strove to make gold by the transmutation of baser metals, while at the same time his spirit was travelling through all the seven hells in its search for the heaven promised by the ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg |
