"Infinitesimal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... announced that the train was snowbound was weeping and shivering by turns. It was cold—so cold that the snow which came sweeping and swirling with the wind was like granite-dust; it clicked, clicked, clicked against the glass—a bombardment of untold billions of infinitesimal projectiles fighting to break in. In the edge of the forest it was probably forty degrees below zero. Within the coaches there still remained some little warmth. The burning lamps radiated it and the presence of many people ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... falls to wreck, and behold! we know not anything and have no way of learning. But the fact that the universe is intelligible, that we can follow its forces, trace its laws, and make a map of it, finding the infinite even in the infinitesimal, shows that the mind of man is akin to the Mind that made it. Also, there are two aspects of the nature of man which lift him above the brute and bespeak his divine heredity. They are reason and conscience, ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... to sit with their heads bare in our churches, while women must wear bonnets, is based on this ancient custom of the Nazarine. But as fashion is gradually reducing the bonnet to an infinitesimal fraction it will probably in the near future be dispensed with altogether. A lady in England made the experiment of going to the established church without her bonnet, but it created such an agitation ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... everybody. Go where you will, and particularly to the seat of government, and letters will follow you. Whoever is in the service of government bears a part of the functions of it, though it be but an infinitesimal part. Mr. H. Conner, the Saginaw sub-agent, in a letter of this date, reports the Saginaws at one thousand four hundred and forty-three souls, and the Swan Creek and Black River Chippewas at one hundred and ninety-eight. One of the most ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... of the misty layers. It was not because my hand got moist, for it did not. No evaporation was going on there, nor any condensation either. Nor did noticeable bubbles form because there was no motion in the mass which might have caused the infinitesimal droplets to collide and to coalesce into something ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... and his eyes sought his hostess. But Miss Theodosia's eyes were cheerfully following the infinitesimal stitches with which she was rimming an infinitesimal round hole in the bit of linen ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... great and infinitely small, which used to throw a cloud of mystery over the 'higher' branches of Mathematics, have been finally dissipated by the discovery that the 'infinite' is readily definable in purely ordinal terms and that the 'infinitesimal' does not really enter into the misnamed 'Infinitesimal Calculus' at all. Arithmetic and the theory of serial order have been shown to be the sufficient basis of the whole science which, as Plato long ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... young Crossjay's instant quietude, after struggling in his grasp, when Clara laid her hand on the boy: and from that infinitesimal circumstance he deduced the boy's perception of a differing between himself and his bride, and a transfer of Crossjay's allegiance from him to her. She shone; she had the gift of female beauty; the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... superficially molten by the friction; but so much of its speed would be rubbed out of it, that on striking the earth it might bury itself only a few feet or yards in the soil, so that it could be dug out. The number of those which thus reach the earth is comparatively infinitesimal. Nearly all get ground up and dissipated by the atmosphere; and fortunate it is for us that they are so. This bombardment of the exposed face of the moon must ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... the whole, that it possesses one-tenth of the soul-forming properties claimed for it in the advertisement—which I take to be a generous estimate—its effect upon the world at large still remains infinitesimal." ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... our life is a matter of indifference. A portion might be termed satisfaction, and a minute balance, an infinitesimal part, termed—if there is ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... life. Besides an equally strong desire for specifics, and a determined opposition to compound medicines, Boyle, who was born the year of Bacon's death, and inherited the mantle of the great philosopher, manifests a strong belief in the power of the infinitesimal dose. Neither Bacon nor Boyle, however, were medical men by profession. But Sydenham followed them, according to Dr. Russell, in their tendency towards specifics. It is almost needless to mention Jenner's victory ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... of Phoebe rang in the ears of the big doctor as he bent over Mother Bab's sightless eyes and began the tedious operation. His hands moved skilfully, with infinite precision, cutting to the infinitesimal ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... effort of my superior usefulness; there was no time to lose. I am nothing but a genius, encased in such human form as would best serve its purpose; an atom of the vast creative Being beyond the Universe, loaned for an infinitesimal part of time to the excrescence calling itself The United States of North America, on the dot called Earth. Now the part is played, and I am to be withdrawn. That my human heart is torn with insupportable anguish, matters not at all. I leave ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... no satisfactory line of distinction between the two, except that the one is a mere aggregation of the other. A germinal mass is only made up of germinal points—those considered as the least of any given whole—however infinitesimal they may be in theoretical statement. If any germinal point in germinal matter, therefore, be a bioplast, then every germinal point, to the extent of making up its entire mass, must be a bioplast; and the distinction between the two becomes merely verbal, and without generic signification. ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... acquaintance with Paris. In the daytime he haunted the libraries and picture galleries. He had become an omnivorous reader, and the world of possibilities that were opened to him in this seat of culture and learning fairly appalled him when he contemplated the very infinitesimal crumb of the sum total of human knowledge that a single individual might hope to acquire even after a lifetime of study and research; but he learned what he could by day, and threw himself into a search for relaxation and amusement at night. Nor did he find Paris a whit ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... you there," he replied; "you are getting your own infinitesimal world confused with the real overwhelming majority; you haven't an idea how it feels and, in particular, of what it thinks of you, smoking and gambling and damning your fate. It may be largely envy—personally I am convinced it is—but they have ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... frequently happens. There has been some peculiar combination of the movement of the steamer on the swell of the sea, with the position of the screw at that moment—a convergence of a hundred conditions—some almost infinitesimal, but necessary, and which convergence is not likely to take place in a million revolutions of the screw—that has brought an irresistible strain upon the shaft—one that would have wrenched it off, had the diameter been twice what ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... consolation for the tedium of her existence. Perhaps he had tried too much to be sympathetic; but who again would not have tried? He had given her nothing to go upon. What had he ever given her beyond some infinitesimal portion of his valuable time, at the most some luminous hour of insight, or perhaps a little superfluous piece of good advice that was of no possible use to himself? For these things she had given herself—given herself away. How ludicrously pathetic some women are! You do them some kindness ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... of Shorty startled Krell and Selden. Surprise showed in their faces as they paused for an infinitesimal ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... electric potential should be maintained between opposite faces of a very thin and highly conducting sheet of metal, the intervening distance between the opposed surfaces being so extremely small, and the electrical resistance quite infinitesimal. A homogeneous sheet of metal has become by the unequal action of light, molecularly speaking, heterogeneous. The two opposed surfaces are thrown into opposite kinds of electric condition, the result of which is as if a certain thickness of the sheet, electrically speaking, were made zinc-like, ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... for years made enormous profits out of beet-root and the production of sugar therewith connected. Our system of taxation favored the exportation of sugar, and it was so framed that the tax on beets yielded but an infinitesimal revenue to the treasury of the Empire, the premium on the exportation of sugar being large enough to almost swallow ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... is named Gabriel Jean Anne Victor Benjamin George Ferdinand Charles Edward Rusticoli, Comte de la Palferine. The Rusticolis came to France with Catherine de Medici, having been ousted about that time from their infinitesimal Tuscan sovereignty. They are distantly related to the house of Este, and connected by marriage to the Guises. On the day of Saint-Bartholomew they slew a goodly number of Protestants, and Charles IX. bestowed the hand of the heiress of the Comte de la Palferine ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... infinitesimal second, I was astonished at the deathly stillness of everything. Then the roar of a thousand voices nearly deafened me, the seat seemed to hurl me violently into the air, for another brief instant I shot through space. Then my hands clutched some ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... a word, because they live more than we. Let us envy them, if at all, because they have more than we to give to God and men, and answer with a fuller and more eager impulse to the breath of inspiration, and can throw a less infinitesimal weight into the ...
— Strong Souls - A Sermon • Charles Beard
... schoolboy s gt^2/2. If Kepler and Newton could take liberties with the sun and moon, an obscure person in a remote wilderness like La Fayette Square could take liberties with Congress, and venture to multiply half its attraction into the square of its time. He had only to find a value, even infinitesimal, for its attraction at any given time. A historical formula that should satisfy the conditions of the stellar universe weighed heavily on his mind; but a trifling matter like this was one in which he could look for no help ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Samstag, even in her lovely pink night-dress, a crone with pain, and the cables out dreadfully in her neck, began by infinitesimal processes to swing herself gently to the side of the bed, unrelaxed inch by unrelaxed inch, softly and with ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... scholars, foreign as well as native, who coveted them was numerous. Every library now has its quota of humbler copies of the classics, often on paper, in the Roman or the more cursive Italic hand, not written by a professional scribe. Often these are of infinitesimal value, transcripts of extant copies of no greater age; but there is always the possibility that they may be a competent scholar's own careful apograph of some ancient MS. which a Poggio had unearthed at St. Gall, and which has since vanished. A glance at the apparatus criticus ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... he crossed an arroyo. The canteen, slung over his shoulder, struck a sharp point of rock that started one of the seams. The leak was infinitesimal. The felt cover of the canteen absorbed the drip, which evaporated. When he arrived at the water-hole, that was dry. His canteen felt strangely light. He could not remember having used so much water. He changed his plan. He struck straight from ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... royalty, that we may shun the living and conversing with kings. Nor do they ever name any of those great personages who have intermeddled in civil affairs, but only to scoff at them and abolish their glory. Thus they say that Epaminondas had something of good, but that infinitesimal, or [Greek omitted], for that is the very word they use. They moreover call him iron-hearted, and ask what ailed him that he went marching his army through all Peloponnesus, and why he did not rather keep himself quiet ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... not cast more than inquiring glances at his trencher; for it is always what is not done that a man sees. If one chair-round escapes dusting, it is that chair-round which he particularly notices. In his mind then are two ideas: one is of the whole long day, the other of that infinitesimal undone duty. The remark visible on his countenance is this: "The whole day, and no time to dust ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... the speed of light. The young man's mental revolution was over and done with in a second's time; the pause was infinitesimal. Almost as she finished her last remark, Mr. Carstairs's daughter turned from the rail and took a step forward upon the deck, as though to jog her host toward that promised tour of the yacht which had ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... of the changed law, scarcely any benefit appears to have been obtained, beyond the meager concession that the heavy payments demanded, for an English patent may be made in installments instead of lump sums. Against this infinitesimal concession had to be set a number of disabilities which did not formerly exist, such as compulsory licenses, which disinclined the capitalist to invest in inventions, attempts to assimilate the provisional specification to the complete, or to restrict the latter within the terms of the former, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... knowing and philosophical, and—Havelock Ellish, Martin, dear," she admonished him, pending a minute operation with an infinitesimal hairpin. "It isn't your lay a bit. Just concentrate your mind on one thing, and that's being ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... lowest terms, a certain interest can be communicated by the art of narrative; a sense of human kinship stirred; and a kind of monotonous fitness, comparable to the words and air of Sandy's Mull, preserved among the infinitesimal occurrences recorded. Some people work, in this manner, with even a strong touch. Mr. Trollope's inimitable clergymen naturally arise to the mind in this connection. But even Mr. Trollope[16] does not confine himself to chronicling small beer. Mr. Crawley's collision ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... intellects and plunged into the problem of creating an encephalograph that would record the infinitesimal irregularities that were superimposed upon the great waves. Their operation became large; they bought the old structure on top of the hill and moved in, bag and baggage. They cohabited but did not live together for almost a year; Paul Brennan finally pointed out that Organized Society ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... the first four lines, the loveliest feet became clear upon the black pedestal; and ever as I sang, it was as if a veil were being lifted up from before the form, but an invisible veil, so that the statue appeared to grow before me, not so much by evolution, as by infinitesimal degrees of added height. And, while I sang, I did not feel that I stood by a statue, as indeed it appeared to be, but that a real woman-soul was revealing itself by successive stages of imbodiment, ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... admire the natural advantages of the place chosen by his captors for the meeting. Rolling hills surrounded the little pocket on all sides, and here and there a red scoria butte thrust its ugly height out of the plain. The chances of discovery were infinitesimal. ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... because of the larger body of pigment present. A pale shade of even a very fast color like indigo will fade with comparative rapidity. The fugitive character of many of the coal tar colors is, in my opinion, rendered more marked, because, owing to their intense coloring power, there is often such an infinitesimal amount of coloring matter on the dyed fiber. Hence it is that in the Gobelin tapestries pale shades on wool are frequently obtained by the use of more or less unchangeable metallic oxides and other mineral colors, to the exclusion of even ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... just because end-games can be calculated to a nicety, there being no moves of which the consequences cannot be foreseen, that we note in contemporary master play a tendency to simplify the middle-game by exchanging pieces, as soon as there is an infinitesimal advantage in the pawn position (compare the ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... truth, as it is intended to be; but it needs no penetration to see here a man whose sympathies with all kinds of those "come-outers" who then multiplied exceedingly in his neighborhood, would be infinitesimal. He had not, however, yet engaged with this problem so closely as he was to do. So far one would discern only that fatalistic and pessimistic trait indicated by "The Scarlet Letter" and found in "The House of the Seven Gables" ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... waned. For the waning life, there was no interval of waxing. Slowly, steadily, by infinitesimal degrees, Leo Frazer was sinking down into the Valley of the Shadow. Once the head surgeon had stepped behind the screens and bent over the bed. Only Ethel had seen the brief contraction of his brows; but no one of them was deceived by his cheery words of parting. ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... sole is the exposure of all canker, and as this can be done with equal certainty with the aid of the hot iron, there can be no necessity for performing it. The pain of cauterizing cankered tissue, which is a necessary operation, is infinitesimal (canker largely destroying sensation), compared with the pain produced in the totally unnecessary process of tearing healthy horn from ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... quite unique in the Latin Quarter. There was a tiny gas range, a convenience not often enjoyed as gas was a luxury not as a rule afforded in Bohemia. The floor was of octagonal, terra cotta tiles and there was a high mullioned window over the infinitesimal sink. Long-handled copper skillets and stew pans were ranged along the walls, suspended from hooks; and a strangely colored china press filled with an odd assortment of dishes was ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... Surfaces is especially interesting with relation to the Winter Journey and the tragedy of the Polar Party. The general tend of friction set up by a sledge-runner upon snow of ordinary temperature may be called true sliding friction: it is probable that the runners melt to an infinitesimal degree the millions of crystal points over which they glide: the sledge is running upon water. Crystals in such temperatures are larger and softer than those encountered in low temperatures. It is now that halos may be seen in the snow, almost ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... frail?" But Calvin intensely aggravates whatever there is of difficulty: for he supposes God to have created the most precious thing on earth in unstable equilibrium, so as to tipple over irrecoverably at the first infinitesimal touch, and with it wreck for ever the spiritual hopes of all Adam's posterity. Surely all nature proclaims, that if God planted any spiritual nature at all in man, it was in stable equilibrium, able to ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... in the front of the fashion (had anybody cared!), certain artful Glasgow mantua-makers, and her own inherent taste, had arrayed her to great advantage. Her accoutrement was, indeed, a cause of heart- burning, and almost of scandal, in that infinitesimal kirk company. Mrs. Hob had said her say at Cauldstaneslap. "Daft-like!" she had pronounced it. "A jaiket that'll no meet! Whaur's the sense of a jaiket that'll no button upon you, if it should come to be weet? What do ye ca' thir things? Demmy brokens, d'ye ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... madam," the man assured her, and turned the knife point toward her, with the infinitesimal wedge of cheese reposing on its blade. Jennie tried to keep her hand steady as she delicately picked it off, nibbled as she had seen that other woman do it, her head on one side, before it shook a slow negative. ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... life of a soul, of the life mortal and the life immortal. Who can tell what we have in mind when we talk of life? No one, for we cannot tell ourselves. We speak of life one moment with a certain matter in mind, possibly the state of our garden; in the infinitesimal fraction of a second additional cells of our brain come into activity, additional areas are excited, and our ideas scale the walls of the garden and scatter over the face of the earth. If we attempt to explain, the very process implies the generation ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... from the trail, feeling his way, and leaned his back against a huge birch-tree. The ragged, ancient, sweet-smelling bark felt familiar and friendly to his touch. Here he stood, sniffing the still air with discrimination, testing with initiated ears every faint forest breathing. The infinitesimal and incessant stir of growth and change and readjustment was vaguely audible to his fine sense, making a rhythmic background against which the slightest unusual sound, even to the squeak of a wood-mouse, or the falling ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... to hers, and his eyes to her eyes. Most persons called her eyes golden, but to him they were just yellow. They had an infinitesimal cast, to which nobody ever referred. They were voluptuous eyes. He examined her face. She was still young; but the fine impressive imprint of existence was upon her features, and the insipid freshness had departed. She blinked, acquiescent. Her ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... deeper into error by the complicated imperfections of their own science. But he who loves greatly possesses in his intuition the capacities of all instruments of observation which man has invented and applied to his use. The lenses of his eyes can magnify the infinitesimal detail to the dimensions of common things, and bring objects to his vision from immeasurable distances; the labyrinth of his ear can choose and distinguish amidst the harmonies and the discords of the world, muffling in its tortuous ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... when local politics were concerned, had no regard whatever for those of the nation at large, except as they involved Fairbridge. Fairbridge, to its own understanding, was a nucleus, an ultimatum. It was an example of the triumph of the infinitesimal. It saw itself through a microscope and loomed up gigantic. Fairbridge was like an insect, born with the conviction that it was an elephant. There was at once something ludicrous, and magnificent, and terrible about it. It had ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the centre. Unfortunately, however, this is an optical impossibility and the field is always spherical in shape. Some makers succeed in giving a larger central area that is in focus at one time than others, and although this may theoretically cause an infinitesimal sacrifice of other qualities, it should always be sought for. Successive zones and the entire peripheral ring should come into focus with the alteration of the fine adjustment. This simultaneous sharpness of the entire circle is an indication of the perfect centering of the whole of the ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... lovely as the bride in the Canticles. "Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee." She was killingly dressed in the rural-simplicity style. All her robes and sashes were of purest white; and a knot of field-daisies and grasses, with French dew-drops on them, twinkled in an infinitesimal bonnet on her little head, and her hair was all creped into a filmy golden aureole round her face. In short, dear reader, she was a perfectly got-up angel, and wanted only some tulle clouds and an opening heaven to have gone up at once, as similar angels ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... amazement at the sight before me. The fine meadow-grass was bowed down with its weight of treasure, as if a strong wind had laid it low, and every stem strung its whole length with minute crystals. Purple-flowering grasses turned the infinitesimal gems that adorned every angle into richest amethysts, and looked like jeweled sprays fit for the queen of fairies. Every spider's web was glorified into a net of pearls of many sizes, all threatening, if touched, to ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... fire-eating declarations, soon fled to the Legation Quarter and besought an asylum. His men held out until two in the afternoon, when their resistance collapsed and the cease-fire sounded. The number of casualties on both sides was infinitesimal, and thus after eleven days' farce the Manchu dynasty found itself worse off than ever before. It is necessary, however, not to lose sight of the main problem in China, which is the establishment of a united government and a cessation of ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... way. Madness, and a watching demon that whispered of substance, and sought to guide his wanderings in the night. Hodder clung to the shell of reality, to the tiny panorama of the visible and the finite, to the infinitesimal gropings that lay recorded before him on the printed page. Let him examine these first, let him discover—despite the price—what warrant the mind of man (the only light now vouchsafed to him in his darkness) gave him to speculate and to hope concerning the existence ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... into the bottom I make the acquaintance of the tiny black gnats that one of our whiskey- bereaved friends at Tacoma had warned me against. One's head is constantly enveloped in a black cloud of these little wretches. They are of infinitesimal proportions, and get into a person's ears, eyes, and nostrils, and if one so far forgets himself as to open his mouth, they swarm in as though they think it the "pearly gates ajar," and this their last chance of effecting an entrance. Mingled with them, and apparently on the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... here appears in all its glory. This strange phenomenon has long puzzled philosophers, and they are still divided. It is generally considered to be produced by a continuous zone of infinitesimal asteroids. The majority place this zone beyond the orbit of the earth, and concentric with the sun. But Rev. George Jones, of Philadelphia, who has spent several years in observing this light, including eight months in Quito, considers it geocentric, and possibly situated between the earth ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... "There is an infinitesimal influence of sympathy between mind and matter, which permeates all beings, and pervades all the delicate niches and interstices of human intelligence. This sympathetic influence working upon the affined ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... so. Shakespeare knew that crime was not so simple in its consequences, or Providence so paternal. He was contented to take the truth from life; and the effect upon the mind of the most correct theory of what life ought to be, compared to the effect of the life itself, is infinitesimal in comparison. ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... happy that men should have been found in your reign able to know all the arts and to transmit them to posterity. Everything is here, from the way of making a pin to that of casting and of aiming your cannon; from the infinitesimal to the infinite. Thank God for having given birth in your kingdom to men who have thus served the whole world. Other nations are obliged to buy the "Encyclopaedia," or to imitate it. Take all I have, if you like, but give me back ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... Society. Along with Sir John Herschel and George Peacock he laboured to raise the standard of mathematical instruction in England, and especially endeavoured to supersede the Newtonian by the Leibnitzian notation in the infinitesimal calculus. Babbage's attention seems to have been very early drawn to the number and importance of the errors introduced into astronomical and other calculations through inaccuracies in the computation of tables. He contributed to the Royal Society ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... involved in the conception of time or motion, like the infinitesimal in space, were a source of perplexity to the mind of the Greek, who was driven to find a point of view above or beyond them. They had sprung up in the decline of the Eleatic philosophy and were ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... occur in ordinary plants might not be further exhibited by means of visible mechanical response, thus fully removing the distinction commonly assumed to exist between the 'sensitive' and supposed 'non-sensitive.' Dr. Bose invented 'special apparatus of extreme delicacy,' which detected infinitesimal tremors, and showed that ordinary plants, usually regarded as insensitive, gave motile responses, which had hitherto passed unnoticed. His later investigation shows that "all plants, even the trees, are fully alive to changes of ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... back parlor. Give you plenty of room, when the folding doors were open, for lights and effects. If there was a ceiling trap, it must be in the rooms above. I went into—into the rooms"—here Rosalie paused an infinitesimal second as though making a mental shift—"into the room above. Just over the alcove library is a small sittin'-room. The—a bedroom opens off it—but has nothing to do with the case. It's one of those new-fangled bare floor rooms. Right over the cabinet space was a big rug. I pulled ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... scheme which is certainly being organized, and which is spreading its fatal branches in all directions, should ever succeed, it could not but result in the most frightful despotism ever contemplated by men. Ireland in such an event would be the infinitesimal part of a chaotic system worthy of ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... why it should be made the best of. I don't know (I think I have observed, my name is Bull) that a Parisian of the lowest order is particularly delicate, or that his nature is remarkable for an infinitesimal infusion of ferocity; but, I do know, my potent, grave, and common counselling Signors, that he is forced, when at this work, to submit himself to a thoroughly good system, and to make an Englishman very heartily ashamed ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... showy, decorative cousin the arrow-head, this wee-blossomed plant, whose misty white panicles rise with compensating generosity the world around, bears only perfect, regular flowers. Twelve infinitesimal drops of nectar, secreted in a fleshy ring around the center, are eagerly sought by flies. As the anthers point obliquely outward and away from the stigmas, an incoming fly, bearing pollen on his under side, usually alights ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... brain, nerve, muscle, material, machinery and capital depends for its movement and remuneration upon but two sources of income—circulation and advertisements—the unit measurements of which are infinitesimal—for the most part represented by wholesale prices; from one-half a cent to two cents per copy for the daily newspaper, and in like proportion for the weeklies and monthlies; and by from one-tenth of a cent to one cent per line per thousand of circulation for advertising space. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... with himself, it has so chanced that the same waters that cured Mr. Currie's liver have destroyed Captain Higginbotham's. An English homoeopathic physician, then staying at the Spa, has attended the captain hither, and declares that he will restore him by infinitesimal doses of the same chemical properties that were found in the waters which diseased him. Can there be ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... term may be allowed) one from the other; reflecting the various characters of their inhabitants by such fine varieties of effect in the furniture-features generally common to all, as are often, like the infinitesimal varieties of eyes, noses, and mouths, too intricately minute to be traceable. Now, the parlor of Mr. Thorpe's house was neat, clean, comfortably and sensibly furnished. It was of the average size. It had the ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... doing this thing, of effecting this creation, this separation from himself such that will in the creature shall be possible—I imagine, I say, the difficulty of such creation so great, that for it God must begin inconceivably far back in the infinitesimal regions of beginnings—not to say before anything in the least resembling man, but eternal miles beyond the last farthest-pushed discovery in protoplasm—to set in motion that division from himself which in its grand ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... ceased the incessant twist, twist of the shining steel among the white cotton meshes. She might put down the needles and lace into the spool-box long enough to open oysters, or wrap up fruit and candy, or count out wood and coal into infinitesimal portions, or do her housework; but the knitting was snatched with avidity at the first spare moment, and the worn, white, blue-marked fingers, half enclosed in kid-glove stalls for protection, would writhe and twist in and ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... on their own ground. 'We will not,' says he, 'give in to the absurdity of attempting to counteract a disease by a medicine that produces the same disease; but something good may be learned from your infinitesimal system. To that system you owe the fact that you are now at large: if you had given doses like ours of such medicines, you would have been in the hands of the turnkey or the mad-doctor long ago. Your cures have been effected by your giving so little as not to interrupt nature in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... accompanied by throat ailments, more or less serious, occurs with startling frequency, and no other reason is assigned for it than the irresponsible, indefinite one that the voice broke down under training. Of the infinitesimal number of successful students—that is to say, of those who, having completed their studies, come before the public as professional singers—so few escape the common lot that it would almost appear as ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... in eliminating crime. The merely intellectual training received in these institutions has little salutary influence upon conduct. Nothing can be mope deplorable than that sectarian bickerings, respecting infinitesimal points in the sanctions of morality, should result in the children of England receiving hardly any moral instruction whatever. Conduct, as the late Mr. Matthew Arnold has so often told us, is three fourths of life. What are we to ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... They saw it. A really handsome affair, and so placed at one end of the room that it looked a part of it. "Come here." They came. The reverse side of the screen was dotted with hooks, and on each hook hung a pot, a pan, a ladle, a spoon. And there was the tiny gas range, the infinitesimal ice chest, the miniature sink. The whole would have been lost in one corner of ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... lightly touched upon the greatness of the Universe, in the cosmos of which our earth is but an infinitesimal speck. Even our sun, round which a system of worlds revolve and which appears so mighty and majestic to us, is but an atom, a very small one, in the infinitude of matter and as a cog, would not be missed in the ratchet wheel which fits ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... institutions, and literatures. Man, the evolving savage, as Tylor, Lubbock, and others have proved for us, slowly putting off his brute aspect derived from his early ape-like ancestors, learned by infinitesimal degrees the use of fire, the mode of manufacturing stone hatchets and flint arrowheads, the earliest beginnings of the art of pottery. With drill or flint he became the Prometheus to his own small heap of sticks and dry leaves among the tertiary forests. By his nightly camp-fire ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... being in a foreign country, because he moves among people most of whom have an affection for England almost as deep as his own, while all are courteous enough to respect his prejudices. This class is large in actual numbers, no doubt, but in proportion to the whole American people it is infinitesimal, and would be a mere featherweight in the scale at any moment of crisis. Its voice is clearly audible in literature and even in journalism, but at the polls it would be as a whisper to the thunder of Niagara. The ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... verses which I try to be as severe about as possible, with no success, at all, worth speaking of! You will take my corrections (infinitesimal, this time) for what they are worth, and continue to send me what you write, will ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... surprised at the insignificant amount of crime existing in comparison with the extraordinary scope of criminal opportunity. To be sure, the number of crimes actually detected is infinitesimal as contrasted with those committed, but even so the conviction constantly grows that the world is astonishingly honest when one considers the unlikelihood that any specific prospective offence will be discovered. How few ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... custom of well-to-do Leipzigers, Schiller sought refuge from the incipient summer heat of the city by taking rooms in the suburban village (such it was then) of Gohlis. Here, in a little second-story chamber, which was provided with an infinitesimal bed-room, he lived some four months,—happy months, in the main, even If the famous 'Song to Joy', which local tradition ascribes to this time and place, was in fact written a little later in Dresden. Various friends were at hand. Besides Huber there was Goeschen, with whom ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... I felt free and happy; I sank into the state of bliss in which the soul is conscious of no desire. Surely this is better than the strife and the sordid cares of the camp; surely one may walk apart and enjoy the fruits of tranquillity? Our consciousness can admit but an infinitesimal part of that which is: let us then fill it to the brim with the joy of beauty, with the harmony of being at rest. Then I remembered the things which lay beyond my peaks and my moonlight: a vision of prisons and shambles, of battlefields and slums, passed before ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... description, paraded for years past for our sympathy, can be only applied to an infinitesimal number of the millions in China who smoke opium. It is a well-known fact that should a Chinese suffering from the extreme emaciation of disease be also in the habit of using the opium-pipe, it is the pipe and not the disease that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred will be wrongly blamed as the ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... presence of the other. He had a good memory and he remembered that a scarcely perceptible change had taken place in the manner or conversation of the one who heard the other's name. It even seemed to him that at such moments Maria Consuelo had shown an infinitesimal resentment, whereas Spicca had faintly exhibited something more like impatience. If this were true, it argued that Spicca was more friendly to Maria Consuelo than she was to him. Yet on this particular evening Spicca had spoken somewhat bitterly of her—but then, Spicca was always bitter. His last ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... the question of contraband. Orders were very precise on the subject; the Cabinet had limitless power since the opening of the war; if there was any smuggling it was infinitesimal, and, as to foodstuffs, Switzerland regretted she could not import more for her own needs. The Government had established a monopoly and forbidden re-exportation, but supplies were not up to the normal. The route by the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Richard the next morning, as he took up the curved pitch tool and moistened it, no longer with emery, but with fine moistened rouge; "and if I am successful in slightly graduating off the sides here, and flattening them in an infinitesimal degree, we shall have a good ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... was over-swayed. He yielded and ladled out in the old-fashioned way, on the point of a knife-blade, what he believed to be the right amount. Henry immediately sank into a heavy sleep. He died before morning. His chance of life had been infinitesimal, and his death was not necessarily due to the drug, but Samuel Clemens, unsparing in his self-blame, all his days carried the burden ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of combustion from coal gas (which are steam and carbonic acid mixed with an infinitesimal quantity of sulphur) are, proportionately, far less injurious to animal life than the products from an equal illuminating power derived from either oil or candles. They are, however, it is certain, destructive to germ life; and therefore, if ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 • Various
... because it rotates in an electro-magnetic medium. It would possess elasticity, compressibility, inertia, and, further, would possess a certain amount of mass. That mass might be infinitely small, but nevertheless it would possess mass of an infinitesimal order. ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... calling out of the figures, with the rhythmic shuffle of feet, with the hum of the pulses, with the leaping of blood to cheek and heart till the dancers whirled as leaves circling towards the eddies of a whirlpool. The dancing Mrs. Dax split her favors into infinitesimal fragments, for each measure of which her long list of waiting gallants stood ready to pick a quarrel if need be. Her dancing, in the splendor of its spontaneity, had something of the surge of the west wind sweeping over a field of grain. Sometimes she waved back her partner and alone ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... mountainside, and one could not see around that. We had emerged out of the straggling outposts of the forest high above the plain, and to our right the whole panorama lay snoozing in haze. The path by which we had turned our backs on Monty and Kagig went winding away and away below, here and there an infinitesimal thin line of slightly lighter color, but more often suggested by the contour of the hills. Our Zeitoonli in their zeal to return to their leader had been evidently cutting corners. If the smudge of smoke to the right front overhung Marash, then ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... vex the Chancellor, she had not stopped to study from every side the question she had raised. So far, she had merely succeeded in irritating him, and she owed him much more than a pin prick. Such infinitesimal wounds she had contrived to give the man in abundance, during her twenty-two years at the Rhaetian Court; but now, if she hurt him at all, she would like the stab to be ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... then? And from where did he see? Why has he only now sprung out of the earth? And how could he see? Is it possible? Hm..." continued Raskolnikov, turning cold and shivering, "and the jewel case Nikolay found behind the door—was that possible? A clue? You miss an infinitesimal line and you can build it into a pyramid of evidence! A fly flew by and saw it! Is it possible?" He felt with sudden loathing how weak, how physically weak he had become. "I ought to have known it," he thought with a bitter smile. "And how dared ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... then, the suspense of all action from the world, was infinitesimal. But it seemed long to Cally. And she thought she could never forgive her father if he turned away, leaving this slight ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... she rocked; and only her youthful healthiness brought her down to grass and flowers. She had once or twice received the electrical stimulus, to feel and be as lightning, from a seizure of facts in infinitesimal doses, guesses caught off maternal evasions or the circuitous explanation of matters touching sex in here and there a newspaper, harder to repress completely than sewer-gas in great cities: and her mother had seen, with an apprehensive pang of anguish, how ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bring the country face to face with the facts as they are. The cabinet will fall amid a general outcry, there will be a few riots, but we shall have peace ... and peace, as you, monsieur, were saying a moment ago, peace without dishonour, at the price of an infinitesimal sacrifice of self-esteem, which will ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... the slow procession of the ages, man was developed on this planet, the change worked by his appearance was at first slight. Further ages passed, while he groped and struggled by infinitesimal degrees upward through the lower grades of savagery; for the general law is that life which is advanced and complex, whatever its nature, changes more quickly than simpler and less advanced forms. The life of savages changes and ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... equability of temper; his exceeding gentleness, kindness, forbearance, lovingness, charity; his loyalty: to friends, to convictions, to promises, half-promises, infinitesimal fractions and shadows of promises; (There was a requirement of him which I considered an atrocity, an injustice, an outrage; I wanted to implore him to repudiate it; Fred Grant said, "Save your labor, I know him; he is in doubt as to whether he made that half-promise or not—and, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... able to see us? I doubted it. The pinpoint of the Planetara's infinitesimal bulk ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... progress seemed infinitesimal, and yet it was real. In a while we had gained sea room; in a while more we were fairly under sailing way, and the cliffs had begun to drop from our quarter. With one accord we looked back. Percy Darrow waved his hand in ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... full, that it would require, as the rabbis say of a certain pedigree in the Book of Chronicles, four hundred camel loads of commentaries to expound the difficulties in their text; others so empty, that nothing can approximate so nearly to the notion of an infinitesimal quantity as ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... as soon as we pass from printed matter to life itself, as soon as we throw a glance at society, we are struck by the infinitesimal part played by the Government. Balzac already has remarked how millions of peasants spend the whole of their lives without knowing anything about the State, save the heavy taxes they are compelled to pay. Every day millions of transactions are made without Government ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... afterwards come forth a third-part owner of the important Stick-in-the-Mud claim, which at one time was paying 12 per cent per month. It must be understood that the Stick-in-the-Mud claim was an almost infinitesimal portion of soil in the Great Kimberley mine. It was but the sixteenth part of an original sub-division. But from the centre of the great basin, or rather bowl, which forms the mine, there ran up two wires to the high ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... he could not, for a single glimpse of that sea in all its fury would have terrified him beyond control. In sheer despair he would have given up the infinitesimal claim he had for salvation and welcomed death from the smothering tons, now so bravely ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... seems as if it had passed into space and bounded back upon you as an echo from the blank wall that shuts in the world of thought. Yet no possible connection exists between the two channels by which the thought or the fact arrived. Let me give an infinitesimal illustration. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... did not exist, save as an incident of the past. Through the curtain of smoke which oozed upward through his mustache at regular intervals, his eyes gleamed alert, interested, concentrated upon a problem compared to which Willy was only an infinitesimal insect. ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... find that both these anatomists do not agree, Hunter stating that its usual seat is just in front of the bulb, while Home regrets, as it were, to be obliged to differ from "his immortal friend," and avers its seat to be an infinitesimal degree behind the bulb. Sir A. Cooper again, though arguing that the most usual situation of stricture is that mentioned by Hunter, names, as next in order of frequency, strictures of the membranous and prostatic parts of the urethra. Does ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... the patter of little feet on the polished floor. Margaret-Mary in a diminutive blue dressing gown and infinitesimal slippers, with her curls brushed tidily up from the back of her neck and skewered with a hairpin, came over and laid her hand on his knee. "Dus a 'itte 'tory?" she asked ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... all the great discoveries, made! How like the egotism of the infinitesimal mind of the human race that ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... principal organ of the Spanish-Filipino population, El Comercio, which, with varying vicissitudes, has continued down to the present. While rigorously censored, both politically and religiously, and accessible to only an infinitesimal portion of the people, they still performed the service of letting a few rays of light into the Cimmerian intellectual gloom of the time ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... Slowly he tore the letter in two, the halves into quarters, the quarters into infinitesimal squares. He took a pinch of them and extended his arm, dropping the particles of paper upon the current of the wind. They rose, fell, eddied, swam, and rose again, finally to fall on the roofs below. Again and again he repeated this act, till not a single ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... before nobler ones displaced them. As a Christian gentleman he knew what he ought to do without cavil and without delay, and he rose to follow the benignant justice of his conscience. Into this obedience, however, there entered an hesitation of a second of time, and that infinitesimal period was sufficient for his ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... The two human atoms, lost in this immensity, felt themselves invaded by the universal tremor, oblivious to all that but a short time before had constituted their lives. They forgot the presence of the city on the other side of the mountain; the existence of humanity, of which they were infinitesimal parts.... Completely alone, penetrating each other through their pupils! Thus, thus forever! There was a crackling sound in the dark, like dry branches creaking before ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... has been omitted. It is then seen that unless the pressures at an angle of 60 deg. with the horizontal are sufficient to produce frictional resistance of a very large amount, the balls will roll and instantly break the arch action suggested by the author. Consequently, an almost infinitesimal settlement of the "centering" may cause the complete destruction of an ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... all the earnestness of his nature and his very young fears was strenuously resolved to watch himself narrowly in his intercourse with his too fascinating relative; little recking how infinitesimal is the power of a man's free-will upon the conduct ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... slightly as he struck the match. In a moment she had caught back her own poise; she watched sidelong, noting with an odd precision exactly how he looked, how his brown skin glistened a little in the sun, so close to her that she could see the infinitesimal criss-cross of lines upon the backs of his hands and the stronger seams upon his reddened neck. She saw the glisten of a few grey hairs in the dark thick patch above his ear; she could see the texture of his lip as it pouted beneath the sideways ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... last drop of gasoline was gone. But the motor had served its purpose. It had run manfully on an almost infinitesimal consumption of gasoline for eight days. It had not missed an explosion save when its wiring was ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... that are included can scarcely be distinguished by logical definitions from some that are excluded; but so far am I from considering this a defect, that I deem it a necessary result of the impalpable infinitesimal graduation by which the fully-formed parable glides down into the brief detached metaphorical aphorism, in the words of the Lord Jesus during the period ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... gave him at once the price which he required for his works. The influence of this system was not always satisfactory. The Middlemen or Dealers, who stood between the artist and the final possessor of the works, were not generous. They higgled about prices, and the sums which they gave were almost infinitesimal compared with the value of Patrick Nasmyth's pictures ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... through his superb waiting-room, he entered his consulting sanctum, and seated himself in the chimney corner beside an infinitesimal fire. He was even more thoughtful than usual. The scene which he had just witnessed at the Count de Chalusse's house recurred to his mind, and he turned it over and over again in his brain, striving to find some way by which he might derive an advantage ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... attacks. But while large doses of alcohol are, of course, more obviously injurious, it would be absurd to imagine that lesser quantities are entirely without influence in the same direction. It has, indeed, been shown by Dr. Ridge, that even infinitesimal quantities of alcohol, such as one part in 5,000, cause a more rapid multiplication of the bacillus subtilis and other bacilli of decomposition, while, by the same quantities, the growth of both animal and vegetable protoplasm is retarded. Hence there can be no longer any question that ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... their industry to profitable account, and they are in very many cases too slow in producing visible results for an age so impatient as ours. The over-civilization of the nineteenth century cannot wait for wealth to be amassed by infinitesimal gains, and we are in haste to SPECULATE upon the powers of nature, as we do upon objects of bargain and sale in our trafficking one with another. But there are still some cases where the little we know of a life, whose ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... became slower for a more concentrated brooding upon this slanderous old man who took advantage of his position to poison his daughter's mind against the only one of her suitors who cared in the highest way. And upon this there came an infinitesimal consolation in the midst of anguish, for he thought of what Herbert had told him about Mr. Newland Sanders's poems to Julia, and he had a strong conviction that one time or another Mr. Atwater must ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... good people who so contrive that such signatures as "Shakespeare," "Homer," or "St. Paul," appear to be written here and there to parts of their inferior work, manage to justify the proceeding in their conscience; but it is uncommonly like hallmarking pewter on the strength of an infinitesimal tinge of silver therein. The point becomes at once clear if we imagine some obscure painter quoting the style of Raphael and fragments of his designs, and acknowledging his indebtedness by appending the master's signature. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... hull and the small spaceship were 20 miles apart. An infinitesimal radar-bowl moved on the little ship. Tight-beam waves flickered invisibly between the two craft. The ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... this is simply the folly and bad taste of a certain, and only a certain, perversion of mediaeval sentiment, the crowning instance of which is found in Guy of Warwick. Hartmann himself was no such simpleton; and (with only an infinitesimal change of a famous sentence) we may be sure that as he was a good lover so he made a good end ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... chain by which the cone hung, and the thing sank an infinitesimal amount as he struck it. A circle of glowing red appeared about him, and a tongue of flame, released from the chaos within, flickered up towards him. An intense pain assailed him at the knees, and he could smell the singeing of his hands. He raised himself to ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... would make the portion to be parted with less by one third than the portion to be retained. Half a pound of salt butter would reduce itself to a quarter of a pound. Portions of meat would become infinitesimal. When standing with viands before her, she had not free will over her hands. She could not bring herself to part with victuals, though she might ruin herself by retaining them. Therefore, by the order of the master, were the servants placed on ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... quite too heavy for the twig delicacy below; undisturbed by the mare's hoofs or the creaking of saddle leather, he let us pass, absorbed in his world of tranquil turtledoves. The mist had thickened to a white, infinitesimal rain-dust, and in it the trees began to look strange, as though they had lost one another. The world seemed inhabited only by quick, soundless wraiths ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... maiden appeared. She was a pretty baby—at least, all the women-kind said so, from Mrs. Jessop down to Jael, who left our poor house to its own devices, and trod stately in Mrs. Halifax's, exhibiting to all beholders the mass of white draperies with the infinitesimal human morsel inside them, which she vehemently declared was the very image ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... success that one step more brought him to it. He was certain that he was very close to the secret. He saw that sulphur had a mysterious power over India-rubber when a union could be effected between the two substances. True, there was an infinitesimal quantity of sulphur in his mail-bags, and they had melted in the shade; but the surface of his cloth, powdered with the sulphur and dried in the sun, bore the sun's heat. Here was a mystery. The problem was, how to produce in a mass of India-rubber the ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... good is your money to you?" insisted Shirley. "You are able to spend only an infinitesimal part of it. You cannot even give it away, for nobody ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... however all-sufficient for myself, is an infinitesimal point, an atom subject in all things to the Law of Storms called Life. I feel, I know that Fate is. But I cannot know what is or what is not fated to befall me. Therefore in the pursuit of perfection as an individual lies my highest, and indeed my only duty, the 'I' being duly blended with ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... on a mission mad enough to measure up with the antics of the frantic citizens of Jerusalem. It will not be even a glorious defeat. You will be swallowed up in an immense calamity too tremendous to offer publicity to so infinitesimal a detail as the death of one Philadelphus Maccabaeus. Agrippa has deserted the city and when a Herod lets go of his own, his own is not worth the holding. The city is torn between factions as implacable as the sea and the land. The conservatives ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... least were so appropriated as to better enable them to pay the large general tax for the aggregate sum. No one hears any complaint regarding the sum necessary to support the General Government, except by those in remote districts, who have but an infinitesimal interest involved, but an imaginary part of the sum to pay, and who, producing but little, and having nothing to do, assume the right to manage the affairs of those who really have something at stake. The American people are willing ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... bit of vivid blue, shot from a tall pine, jeering shrilly at Butch; out on the lake, a trout leaped above the water for an infinitesimal second, its shining scales gleaming in the sunshine. From the cook-tent, where old Hinky-Dink grumbled at the frying pan, the appetizing odor of frying fish assailed the football captain, softening ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... our health, at this season of the year, requires that we should be kept in a state of irritation, and so the mosquitoes are Nature's prophetic remedy for some disease; or whether we are made for the mosquitoes, not they for us. It is possible, just possible, that the infinitesimal doses of poison which they infuse into us are a homoeopathic safeguard against pestilence; but medicine never was administered in a ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... animals show, unmistakably, that they are, in a measure, fully conscious of certain phenomena in the economy of nature, and while I am not prepared to state that any element of worship enters into their regard, I yet believe that an infinitesimal increase in the development of their psychical beings would, undoubtedly, lead some of them to a natural religion such as our ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... can keep the money," he grinned, wrenching from her fingers the plain gold band he had given her mother as a wedding ring, as well as another, bigger, broader, showier, and set with two infinitesimal white ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... she slid out of her chair and crossed to the door; even in action her broad, squat figure infinitesimal to the room's proportions. When she opened the door the dignity of great halls lay in waiting. She crossed the wide vista to a closed door, a replica of her own, and knocked, waited, turned the crystal knob, knocked, ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... William became engaged, and suddenly poured out everything to his love, but for the present he and Harold were content to go through life never saying anything about themselves to anybody. In fact, they hardly ever thought of Henrietta. She would have been astonished if she had known what an infinitesimal difference ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... no means sublime. A heap of sand will involve infinity as surely as a universe of suns and planets. Any object is infinitely divisible and, when we press the thought, can contain as many worlds with as many winged monsters and ideal republics as can the satellites of Sirius. But the infinitesimal does not move us aesthetically; it can only awaken an amused curiosity. The difference cannot lie in the import of the idea, which is objectively the same in both cases. It lies in the different immediate effect of the crude images which give ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... of life has its Zodiac, its orbit of life and destiny. It may be infinitesimal, or vast beyond conception, each in its own peculiar plane. So we see that, the whole visible universe is one vast organism, the medium of expression for the invisible, real universe— the soul and God, the great central Sun, the eternal ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... Perspective-plane, supposed to be perfectly level and to extend from the base line to the horizon. Of this we shall speak further on. In nature it is not really level, but partakes in extended views of the rotundity of the earth, though in small areas such as ponds the roundness is infinitesimal. ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... the equator and the poles, that any slight changes which may have resulted from such geological causes could have had only an infinitesimal effect upon the. general ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly |
