"Inversion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... art and power with which the superstition of the enemy invested them. These oppressed yet dreaded fugitives obtained, naturally enough, the character of the German spirits called Kobold, from which the English goblin and the Scottish bogle, by some inversion and alteration ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... such as the common Pecten. We find the same essential parts in each, composed of analogous elements. The eye of the Pecten presents a retina, a cornea, a lens of cellular structure like our own. There is even that peculiar inversion of retinal elements which is not met with, in general, in the retina of the invertebrates. Now, the origin of molluscs may be a debated question, but, whatever opinion we hold, all are agreed that molluscs and vertebrates ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... preparations were, they were not visible to the watchful diplomatic agents who maintained the relations of the Government with the tribesmen. So extraordinary is the inversion of ideas and motives among those people that it may be said that those who know them best, know them least, and the more logical the mind of the student the less he is able to understand of the subject. In any case among these ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... in history is announced by the angel chiefly as the reason for Joseph's going on with his marriage. Surely that strange inversion of the apparent importance of the two things speaks for the historical reliableness of the narrative. The purpose in hand is mainly to remove his hesitation and point his course, and he is to take ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... ever since, the women of the Earth have done their utmost to impress indelibly upon my mind—the lesson that woman is but a less lovable, more petulant, more deeply and incurably spoilt child. Your mother's reproach is an exact inversion of the truth. No one could have acted with more utter unselfishness, more devoted kindness, more exquisite delicacy than you have shown in this miserable matter. I could not have believed that even you could have put aside your own feelings so completely, could have recognised so promptly that I ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... antithesis of our own. What we regard intuitively in one way from our standpoint, they as intuitively observe in a diametrically opposite manner from theirs. To speak backwards, write backwards, read backwards, is but the a b c of their contrariety. The inversion extends deeper than mere modes of expression, down into the very matter of thought. Ideas of ours which we deemed innate find in them no home, while methods which strike us as preposterously unnatural appear to be their birthright. ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... the test in such a way that the shortcomings now to be noticed bear not upon Mr. Longfellow's own style of work so much as upon the method itself with which they are necessarily implicated. These defects are, first, the too frequent use of syntactic inversion, and secondly, the too manifest preference extended to words of Romanic ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... the same problem to all; it is the replies alone that vary, and the nature of these replies is determined by the knowledge at our disposal. The difference is not in nature but in man. The answers given by primitive man to these eternal questions are a complete inversion of those of his better informed descendants. The conception of natural force, of mechanical necessity, is as yet unborn, and the primitive thinker everywhere assumes the operation of personal beings as responsible for all that ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... an apparently plausible, but really fallacious inversion of the Pantheistic view of the Universe, I repeat that the latter is the precise opposite of Atheism. So far from tolerating any doubt as to the being of God, it denies that there is anything else. For all objects of sense and thought, including individual consciousness, ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... wakefulness appeared to him as so many uneventful and inactive intervals of arrest occurring in an existence of intense and vivid interest which was wholly passed in the hypnotic state. Not that to me there is any such inversion of natural conditions. On the contrary, the priceless insights and illuminations I have acquired by means of my dreams have gone far to elucidate for me many difficulties and enigmas of life, and even of religion, which might otherwise have remained dark to me, and to throw ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... effect their deliverance and to leave the road clear? I very much fear that logic has carried your deductions beyond the bounds of reality. Rationally speaking, my dear sir, nothing could be more accurate than your inferences; and yet we must forgo the theory of the strange inversion which you suggest. None of the Bramble-bees with whom I have experimented behaves after that fashion. I know nothing personal about Odynerus rubicola, who appears to be a stranger in my district; but, as ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... chaplets of flowers on their heads and necklaces of black figs around their necks. It is recorded, among the South Sea Islands, that a traveller once witnessed such a sacrifice as this memorized in the classic Greek festival. Then, by a queer but common inversion of idea, this baleful but sacred individual is fetched back into the community, as the outcast, hidden in Lady Wood, was brought back into Combe Martin, being beaten and reviled, and yet keeping his sacred character as a being set apart from the rest of men. His mask and traditional dress, his ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... it is that people should have to go to America again, after coming to Europe! It seems to me an inversion of the order of nature. I think America is a sort of "United" States of Probation, out of which all wise people, being once delivered, and having obtained entrance into this better world, should never be expected to return (sentence irremediably ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... it is generally designated. Nevertheless, as it is united with the body from which it emanates by an invisible vascular plexus, it can, at will, draw to itself, by a sort of aspiration, the greater part of the living forces which animate the latter. One sees, then, by a singular inversion, life withdrawn from the body, which then exhibits a cadaverous rigidity, and transfers itself entirely to the phantom, which acquires consistency—sometimes even to the point of struggling with persons before whom it materializes. It is but exceptionally ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... spinifex fires, and the traveller in these wilds may be always sure that the natives are in the neighbourhood when he can see the smokes, but it by no means follows that because there are smokes there must be water. An inversion of the terms would be far more correct, and you might safely declare that because there is water there are sure to be smokes, and because there are smokes there are sure to be fires and because there are fires there are sure to be natives, ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... the militant followers of and participators in a militant God. We can appreciate and admire the greatness of Christ, this gentle being upon whose nobility the theologians trade. But submission is the remotest quality of all from our God, and a moribund figure is the completest inversion of his likeness as we know him. A Christianity which shows, for its daily symbol, Christ risen and trampling victoriously upon a broken cross, would be far more in the ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... seems to be an inversion of la Trenise, except that in nineteen cases out of twenty, the waistcoat, tip, camellia and wristbands, seem to undergo intense mental torture; for if there be such a thing as "poetry of motion," pastorale must be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 9, 1841 • Various
... journey to the throne, by Venice, Padua, Ferrara, Mantua, Turin, over Mont Cenis, by Lyons, to French [137] soil, still building confidently on the prestige of his early manhood. Seeing him at last, all were conscious in a moment of the inversion of their hopes. Had the old witchcrafts of Poland, the old devilries of his race, laid visible hold on the hopeful young man, that he must now take purely satiric estimate of so great an opportunity, with a programme which looked like formal irony on ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... rather an elaborate one. After the subject has been carried through the first time, the subject is introduced in a new form, in inversion (measure 43, alto), all ascending passages in the original being now imitated in downward directions and by the same interval. This taken as a new subject affords ground for much additional development, and later on ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... And Mr. Buckle begins with making Personality acephalous, and ends-with appending its corpse to Society, to be galvanized into seemings of life. And if you follow him through his book, you find this inversion constantly maintained,—and find, moreover, that it is chiefly this revolutionary audacity which makes his propositions so startling and his pages ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the possibility of another interpretation of the last line, though I think the one just given is correct, "I need the world of men; it is a natural law." Now it is just possible that we could interpret "need" in another sense, with an inversion; "the world of men needs me, and I must go to do my share." This would make the man perhaps nobler, but surely not so natural; indeed it would sound like a priggish excuse to leave his mistress. I have never quite surrendered to ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... Corson, in his chapter on "Browning's Obscurity," has done his best to smooth the path of the reader by explaining, and so removing from his way, those grammatical obstructions, habits of word inversion and baffling ellipses that stand as a lion in the path to so many of the poet's untried readers. This chapter is exceedingly well wrought out, and, once carefully studied, with the illustrations given, can hardly fail ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... may think perhaps, that Marius, who, Epicurean as he was, had his visionary [117] aptitudes, by an inversion of one of Plato's peculiarities with which he was of course familiar, must have descended, by foresight, upon a later age than his own, and anticipated Christian poetry and art as they came to ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... The inversion of the organs shown by Vertebrates as compared with Invertebrates is due to the reversed position of the embryo relatively ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... of the Rabbi who protested against the Bath-Kol, the God of Reason and Love. As clearly as for the nineteenth-century Martineau, "the seat of authority in Religion" has passed to the human conscience. God Himself appeals to it in that inversion of the Sodom story, the story of Jonah, whose teaching is far greater and more wonderful than its fish. And this Abrahamic tradition of free thought is continued by Moses, who boldly comes between Jehovah and the people He designs to destroy. "Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, saying, ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... assembled, Mr Benson followed, unmarshalled and unattended. When he had closed the pulpit-door, and knelt in prayer for an instant or two, he gave out a psalm from the dear old Scottish paraphrase, with its primitive inversion of the simple perfect Bible words; and a kind of precentor stood up, and, having sounded the note on a pitch-pipe, sang a couple of lines by way of indicating the tune; then all the congregation stood up, and sang aloud, Mr Bradshaw's great bass voice being half a note in advance of the others, ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... man once indulges himself in murder, he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking; and from that to incivility and procrastination.' One laughs at this whimsical inversion; but I don't think one laughs very heartily; and certainly one does not find, as in really deep humour, that the paradox is pregnant with further meaning, and the laugh a prelude to a more melancholy smile. Many of the best things ever said are couched in a similar form: the old remark that ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... and classified in any sphere of investigation, and these are found uniformly to reveal the same Law or Principle, it is assumed that all similar Phenomena are invariably governed by this Principle or Law, which, in reality deduced or derived, is, by this inversion of terms, said to be induced from the observed Facts. The Law so established has thenceforth two distinct functions: I, all the Facts of subsequent Observation, by the primitive Method of observation, are ranged under the Law ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... in 8vo., as Heber's fragment appears to have been; but then the initials of the author are given as N.B., whereas in my fragment they stand B.N., a usual inversion with Nicholas Breton; the brief address "To the Reader" is also subscribed B.N.; and then begins the body of the work, thus headed: "Crosse and Pile, or, Crossing of Proverbs." It ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.04.06 • Various
... their feet any thing of pure iron; but in their heads is iron mixed with clay, in their breasts is each mixed with brass, in their loins is also each mixed with silver, and in their feet is each mixed with gold: by this inversion they are changed from men (homines) into graven images of men, in which inwardly nothing coheres; for what was highest, is made lowest, thus what was the head is become the heel, and vice versa. They appear to us ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... the Declaration of Rights, there is an inversion of ideas in the first article, liberty being placed before equality, from which it in reality springs. This defect is not to be wondered at; the science of the rights of man is a new science: it was invented yesterday by the Americans, to-day the French are perfecting it, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... about the inversion of objects by the astronomical telescope. It is singular that any difficulty should be felt about so simple a matter, yet I have seen in the writings of more than one distinguished astronomer, wholly incorrect ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... that asceticism is an absolute inversion of the Divine order, since it seeks life through death instead of finding death through life. No degree of mortification can ever bring us to sanctification. We are to "put off the old man with his deeds." But how? By "putting ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... looked so extravagantly coarse contrasted with sorrowing mothers and blooming daughters who were there—with the apparitions of the coquette, the young beauty, and the mature woman delicately bred—that the inversion of all experience and likelihood which the scene of shadows presented, was heightened to its utmost. Surely, ghosts all. Surely, the long unreal ride some progress of disease that had brought him to ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... texts of Scripture, and drop one in now and then, such as, 'All flesh is grass.' 'Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' 'He that marrieth not doth well, but he that marrieth doth better.' To be sure, there is a slight inversion of text here, but then it ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Colonel Elliot takes the inversion of parts as a proof of modern pilfering and deliberate change to hide the theft; at least he mentions them, and the "prettier verses," with a note of exclamation (!). {73a} But there are, we repeat, similar inversions in the English and in Herd's old copy, and nobody ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... ask why had I come to the moon seeing we had scarcely touched our own planet yet, but he did not trouble me at that time to proceed to an explanation, being too anxious to pursue the details of this mad inversion of ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... degree in which it lives up to or falls short of that standard. Judged by this, surely the fairest, the only fair, rule, Japan has every reason to be considered a moral country. Those shocking crimes which appear to be the outcome of either the aberration or the inversion of the sexual instincts are almost unknown there. Nor do I consider that the public estimate of prostitution on the whole makes for immorality. If an evil exist, and prostitution is undoubtedly an evil, it is surely better to regulate it than to affect to be oblivious of it. The Japanese ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... given,—bass at five shillings a bottle, champagne (nee gooseberry) at five pounds, Cape smoke at two shillings per two fingers,—and, at a given signal, there was an inarticulate roar from dusty throats, an inversion of tumblers over thirsty mouths, and a second inversion over the ground to show that all the contents ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... wife, which, in turn, might have been mollified in some degree amid the peaceful duties of home;—a state of things that has existed in many families, which have, nevertheless, enjoyed a fair share of domestic happiness in spite of this inversion of the natural relations of their heads. But Mrs. Wilde had brought into her husband's house that deadliest foe of domestic peace, an elderly, ill-tempered, suspicious female relative, serving in the capacity of confidante. This curse was embodied in the person of a much older ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... among our rulers. But to suppose that this great revolution can be accomplished by a temporary army, that this army will be subsisted by State supplies and that taxation alone is adequate to our wants is in my opinion absurd, and as unreasonable as to expect an inversion of the order of nature to accommodate itself to our views. If it were necessary it could be easily proved to any person of a moderate understanding that an annual army or any army raised on the spur of the occasion ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... is told us be true, namely that the Presbyter Laurentius has been groping for fatal riches among human corpses. An odious inversion of his functions, that he who should preach peace to the living has been robbing the dead, and that hands which have been touched with the oil of consecration should have been grasping at unholy gains, instead of distributing his own honestly acquired substance to the poor. If after diligent examination ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... is the finest inversion of immortality conceivable. It is even better than his serious apostrophe to the great heirs of glory, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... right. Those who now rule form an aristocracy in an inverse sense, contrary to the law, and yet more contrary to nature.[3321] For, by a violent inversion, the lower grades in the graduated scale of civilization and culture now are found uppermost, while the superior grades are found at the uniform. The Constitution having suppressed inequality, this has again ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... acquaintance with the mythology of other nations, were made to furnish him with the materials for hastily applying one solution to all the early Jewish histories, which he failed to invalidate by the application of the historic method just described. By an inversion of the argument of the early Christian apologists, he pretended that the early history preserved among the Hebrews was borrowed from the heathens, instead of claiming that the heathen mythology was a trace of Hebrew ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... edition of this volume was published in 1899, following "Sexual Inversion," which now forms Volume II. The second edition, issued by the present publishers and substantially identical with the first edition, appeared in the following year. Ten years have elapsed since then and this new edition will be found to reflect the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... themselves upon a presumed refinement of judging. Poverty of language is the primary cause of the use which we make of the word, Imagination; but the word, Taste, has been stretched to the sense which it bears in modern Europe by habits of self-conceit, inducing that inversion in the order of things whereby a passive faculty is made paramount among the faculties conversant with the fine arts. Proportion and congruity, the requisite knowledge being supposed, are subjects upon which taste may be trusted; it is competent to this office—for in its ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... and heavenly life. It was our selfishness and passion that drove us asunder. Thus it is, dear Rose, that my thoughts have been wandering about in the maze of life that entangles me. In my isolation I have time enough for mental inversion—for self-exploration—for idle fancies, if you will. And so I have lifted the veil for you; uncovered my inner life; taken you into the sanctuary over whose threshold no foot but my ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... himself into a cab and drove to all the hotels in Grenada" (he overlooked the police station), and, failing to find Margot, becomes mad. He goes about ejaculating "Mad, mad!" than which nothing could be more eloquent of his complete mental inversion. In his paroxysms the Countess di Morno persuades him to "lead her to the altar," but on the way (with a certain indelicacy they go to church in the same conveyance) she lets slip a little secret. So Di Sorno jumps out of the carriage, "hurling the crowd apart," and, ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... simple truth; and the lawyer, being (by some strange inversion of professional excellence) honest at the bottom, was deeply pained at having such words used, as to, for, about, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... origin; perhaps an inversion of bel cece, "beautiful chick (pea)," or from Fr. chiche beau, with same meaning), the term in Italy from the 17th century onwards for a dangler about women. The cicisbeo was the professed gallant of a married woman, who attended her at all public entertainments, it being ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... profitably with a man aware of one's peculiar habits. And another advantage from such an arrangement is, that one gets any little alteration or repair executed on the spot. To hear is to obey, and by an inversion of Pope's rule— ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... attributes, as Saadia, Bahya, Ibn Daud and others did before him, he treats exhaustively of the divine attributes in the first book, whereas the proof of the existence of God does not appear until the second book. This inversion of the logical order is deliberate. Maimonides's method is directed ad hominem. The Jews for whom he wrote his "Guide" did not doubt the existence of God. But a great many of them had an inadequate idea of his spiritual nature. And apparently the Bible countenanced their anthropomorphism. Hence ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... pleaded for him, and became drowned in criminal blushes that forced her to defend herself with a determination not to believe the dreadful story, though she continued mitigating the wickedness of it; as if, by a singular inversion of the fact, her clear good sense excused, and it was her heart that condemned him. She dwelt fondly on an image of the 'gallant and handsome Colonel Richard Beauchamp,' conjured up in her mind from the fervour of Mrs. Lespel when speaking ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... inversion of the usual process of proposing and acting a comedy of sham coyness occurs only in the case of the poor girls, the wealthy ones being betrothed by their parents in infancy; but it would be interesting to learn the origin of this quaint ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... confirmatory of his inferences from the experiments on rabbits. The instances given are—an os uteri torn off; extensive laceration of the uterus and rectum in labour; four uteri extirpated on account of chronic inversion, (p. 13.) One of these last under his own care. It was removed by a wire, and came off in 11 days, without one bad symptom, (p. 14.) Rupture and laceration of the abdominal coverings, four fingers' breadth, the bowels hanging out, (p. 14.) Two spleens removed; ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... of your levity hits the nail on the head sometimes," said Carne, "though the blow cannot be a very heavy one. Nature has not fashioned me for enjoyment, and therefore affords me very little. But some little I do expect in the great inversion coming, in the upset of the scoundrels who have fattened on my flesh, and stolen my land, to make country gentlemen—if it were possible—of themselves. It will take a large chimney to burn their title-deeds, for the robbery has lasted for a century. But I hold the great Emperor's ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... interesting and most honorable pursuits in which a man can engage. Ambition to serve is always noble. Desire for the honors and emoluments of public office, however, may crowd out the desire to render public service. Such a substitution of selfish for patriotic considerations, such an inversion of the proper order of interests in a man's mind, is the vice of political ambition. The ambitious politician seeks office, not because he seeks to promote measures which he believes to be for the public good; not because ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... satisfied before the conclusion of the second stanza. A further step towards the provision of closer unity between the separate stanzas was the chanso redonda, which was composed of coblas estrampas, the rime order of the second stanza being an inversion of the rime order of the first; the tendency reaches its highest point in the sestina, which retained the characteristic of the chanso redonda, namely, that the last rime of one stanza should correspond with the first rime ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... astronomical telescope ordinarily in use, it is seen upside down. This is, however, a matter of very small moment in dealing with celestial objects; for, as they are usually round, it is really not of much consequence which part we regard as top and which as bottom. Such an inversion would, of course, be most inconvenient when viewing terrestrial objects. In order to observe the latter we therefore employ what is called a terrestrial telescope, which is merely a refractor with some extra lenses added in the eye portion for the purpose ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... velocity became very high, Mrs. Watchett had walked across the room, travelling, as it seemed to me, like a rocket. As I returned, I passed again across that minute when she traversed the laboratory. But now her every motion appeared to be the exact inversion of her previous ones. The door at the lower end opened, and she glided quietly up the laboratory, back foremost, and disappeared behind the door by which she had previously entered. Just before ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the contrary, her credentials will be sought in her doctrine. The Protesting Church will say, I have the right to stand separate, because I stand; and from my holy teaching I deduce my title to teach. Jus est ibi summum docendi, ubi est fons purissimus doctrinae. That inversion of the Protestant plea with Rome is even now valid with many; and, when it becomes universally current, then the principles, or great beginnings of the controversy, will be transplanted from the locus, or centre, where Phil. places them, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... cupric reduction value about 50 p.ct. that of an equal weight of dextrose. As an extreme hydrolytic treatment the products were dissolved in 70 p.ct. H{2}SO{4}, allowed to stand 24 hours, then considerably diluted (to 3 p.ct. H{2}SO{4}) and boiled to complete the inversion. The yields of glucose, calculated from the ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... reinvestment. The purpose of these calculations does not lie in the application of amortization to administrative finance. It is nevertheless one of the touchstones in the valuation of certain mines or mining investments. That is, by a sort of inversion such calculations can be made to serve as a means to expose the amount of risk,—to furnish a yardstick for measuring the amount of risk in the very speculations of extension in depth and price of metals which attach to a mine. ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... "Principle of Beauty" and the "Memory of Great Men." Parallel with these things is Dante's passion of reverence for the old historic places—provinces, cities, rivers and valleys of his native Italy. Even when he lifts up his voice to curse them, as he curses his own Firenze, it is but an inversion of the same mood. The cities where men dwelt then took to themselves living personalities; and Dante, who in love and hate was Italian of the Italians, was left indifferent by none of these. How strange to modern ears this thrill of recognition, when ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... and stouts, as it gives a peculiarly sweet and full flavour to the beer, to which, no doubt, the popularity of this class of beverage is largely due. Invert sugar is prepared by the action either of acid or of yeast on cane sugar. The chemical equation representing the conversion (or inversion) of cane sugar is:— ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... dearest—and since, I have been reading your third act which is perfectly noble and worthy of you both in the conception and expression, and carries the reader on triumphantly ... to speak for one reader. It seems to me too that the language is freer—there is less inversion and more breadth of rhythm. It just strikes me so for the first impression. At any rate the interest grows and grows. You have a secret about Domizia, I guess—which will not be told till the last perhaps. And that poor, noble Luria, who will be equal to the leap ... as it is ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... and whencesoever the material or suggestion borrowed, he came by a very admirable instrument for the telling of stories. Those touches of archaism that are so frequent with him, the slightly unusual phrasing, or unexpected inversion of the order of words, show a mind alert in its expression, and give the sting of novelty even to the commonplaces of narrative or conversation. A nimble literary tact will work its will on the phrases of current small-talk, remoulding them nearer ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... under his breath. He pulled down the outer screen that was fighting directly against the radio frequency, energy for energy, and allowed the beam to strike squarely on the second screen, the inversion field that shunted the major portion of the energy impacting against it through 90 degrees into ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... of yellow-red, lighter vase in yellow-green, and darker vase of green, with slight addition of black. Vary by inversion of the colors in ground and ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... of the sub-fields that demand observation, is shown by an entry in the Psychological Index: "1202. Benedict, F.G. "Studies in Body—Temperature." 1. Influence of the Inversion of the Daily Routine; the Temperature of ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... witnessed, but the chronic form, of which we more particularly speak, is more rare. We have seen three cases of the latter, and, no doubt, might have found many more if our opportunities of studying canine pathology were equal to those of the English writers. The inversion of the eyelids upon the globe is accompanied with pain and irritation, swelling and inflammation, both of the lids and eye, which ultimately renders the dog almost useless, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... sources of Corrupt Readings, is Transposition, or the arbitrary inversion of the order of the sacred words,—generally in the subordinate clauses of a sentence. The extent to which this prevails in Codexes of the type of B[Symbol: Aleph]CD passes belief. It is not merely the occasional writing of [Greek: tauta panta] for [Greek: ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... in the present day the great object of Christianity should be, not to change the lives of men, but to prevent them from changing their opinions; that would be a singular inversion of the purposes for which CHRIST ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... simply and well. When he quoted the officer's remark to the cab driver, with the German inversion, the colonel chuckled. ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... explained the inversion by which a bailee's right of action against third persons was supposed to stand on his responsibility over, although in truth it was the foundation of that responsibility, and arose simply from his possession. The step was ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... other countries, the revenue, following the natural course and order of things, arises out of their commerce. Here, by a mischievous inversion of that order, the whole foreign maritime trade, whether English, French, Dutch, or Danish, arises from the revenues; and these are carried out of the country without producing anything to compensate ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... have it; all really nice people have it. I have been refreshing myself with Irish Memories since dinner. Do you remember what is said of Martin Ross? 'The large conventional jest had but small power over her; it was the trivial absurdity, the inversion of the expected the sublimity getting a little above itself and failing to realise that it had taken that fatal step over the border—those were the things that felled her, and laid her, wherever she ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... two forms and the sole nourishment of the predatory insect in its adult phase, is for the larva of the same insect an object of insurmountable disgust, and probably a poison. The transfiguration of the chrysalis surprises me less than this inversion of the appetite. What change occurs in the stomach of the insect that the adult should passionately seek that which the larva refuses under peril of death? It is no question of organic debility unable to support a diet too substantial, too hard, or too highly ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... pace, this seems very like the virtual "slow" movement. A mood of rapt, almost melancholy absorption prevails, with rare flashes of joyous utterance, where the Allegro enters as if to break the thrall of meditation. A very striking inversion of the theme now appears. The gradual growth of phrases in melodious instalments is a trait of Franck (as it is of Richard Strauss). The rough motto at each turn ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... manque, of a man who would be a genius were it not for the excess of his qualities. Would he continue to appear a genius, then he must continue to display that excess which—so he wished them to believe—alone prevented his brilliant achievements. It was all a curious, vicious inversion. "You could do great things if you didn't drink," crooned the fools. "See how I drink," Gourlay seemed to answer; "that is why I don't do great things. But, mind you, I could do them were it not for this." Thus ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... London, where all were waiting to turn their thumbs down on the figure of the native Potts, he had received a letter from his mother's birthplace. It was inscribed: "Egregio Signor Pozzi." He was saved. By the simple inversion of the first two words, the substitution of z's for t's, without so fortunately making any difference in the sound, and the retention of that i, all London knew him now to be ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that with which they came in contact now. What is that subtle, mocking change that comes over even the inanimate things that we have not seen since we were happy, and now meet again in grief? It is like a horrible inversion of the golden touch given to Midas. To Gore, during those days, the darkness fell upon every fresh thing to which he went back. The impression was so strong on him as he turned over the manuscript, that he shuddered. What was ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... famous philosophy. We may if we like, with Berkeley, resolve objects of sense into sensations; but the change is one of name only, and nothing is gained and something is lost by such a resolution or confusion of them. For we have not really made a single step towards idealism, and any arbitrary inversion of our ordinary modes of speech is disturbing to the mind. The youthful metaphysician is delighted at his marvellous discovery that nothing is, and that what we see or feel is our sensation only: for a day ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... hystericus. Hysteric suffocation is the perception of a globe rolling round in the abdomen, and ascending to the stomach and throat, and there inducing strangulation. It consists of an ineffectual inversion of the motions of the oesophagus, and other parts of the alimentary canal; nothing being rejected ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... all this, but it seemed part of the general inversion of the new age. He bowed condescendingly to his first introduction. It was evident that subtle distinctions of class prevailed even in this assembly, that only to a small proportion of the guests, to an inner group, did ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... simplifications effected by Esperanto, but these will not fail to strike the learner after a very brief acquaintance with the language. But attention ought to be drawn to one more particularly clever device—the form of asking questions. An Esperanto statement is converted into a question without any inversion of subject and verb or any change at all, except the addition of the interrogative particle cxu. In this Esperanto agrees with Japanese. But whereas Japanese adds its particle ka at the end of the sentence, the Esperanto ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... words as produced this effect, they added the habit of frequently omitting the usual particles, and of conveying their meaning in short and contracted phrases. The only artifices they used were those of inversion and transition."[7] It is difficult to give examples to those unacquainted with the language, but the following extract may serve to indicate our meaning: it is taken ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... the women, and the women bind themselves in their vows to accept the same rules as the men. Yet in these rules there are many things which cannot possibly be carried out by women, either as superiors or in the lower orders. In many places we may even behold an inversion of the natural order of things, whereby the abbesses and nuns have authority over the clergy, and even over those who are themselves in charge of the people. The more power such women exercise over men, the more easily can they lead ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... but when not in good spirits he becomes as dull as if her majesty had frowned on him. Rose was a man of wit, and a scholar; yet he has undoubtedly turned the ease and animation of his original into inversion and insipidity. And Wiffen, though elegant and even poetical, did an unfortunate thing for Tasso, when he gave an additional line and a number of paraphrastic thoughts to a stanza already tending to the superfluous. Fairfax himself, who, upon the whole, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... a strange inversion of facts. The proposal to relieve Kars by way of Redoutkale and Kutais originated, not with Capt. Burton, but with the Turkish Seraskier, who recommended for this purpose the employment of Vivian's Turkish Contingent and part of Beatson's Horse ("his Bashi-bazuks"), ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... some fixedness at a point on the other side of the room. The platitude brought him, by some process of inversion, the vision of a drawing-room in Addison gardens, occupied by his mother and sisters, engaged with whatever may be Kensington's substitutes at the moment for the spinet and the tambour frame; and he had a disturbed sense that ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... are expressed by as many different characters. This is not all: the arrangement of all these monosyllables appears to be under no general rule; so that to know the language after having learnt the words, we must learn every particular phrase: the least inversion would make you unintelligible to three parts ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... especially, in these break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start of a lazy world; to conquer death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually in strange qualms, before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion. Therefore, while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes, are already up and about their occupations, content to have swallowed their sleep by wholesale; we chose to linger a-bed, and digest our dreams. It is the very time to recombine the wandering images, which ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... perhaps be urged that the objects enumerated in the preceding number ought to be provided for by the State governments, under the direction of the Union. But this would be, in reality, an inversion of the primary principle of our political association, as it would in practice transfer the care of the common defense from the federal head to the individual members: a project oppressive to some States, dangerous to all, and baneful to ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... This letter does not say who the enemies were or in which direction they advanced. Perhaps "Bikhisi" may be regarded as the present "'Abbaseh" (by inversion of the guttural), which is fifteen miles southwest of Damascus, near the main road to the town of Jabesh, whence ...
— Egyptian Literature
... for shelter behind the bolder petticoats; particularly the stablemen. The footmen, being more accustomed to ladies' society, are less embarrassed by their own hands, and by the exigencies of chivalry. This inversion of the usual attitude of the sexes, will, no doubt, be set more than right when we have retired. The moment has arrived. I quit father's arm—for the first time in my life I am honestly sorry to drop it—and go ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... silk mills, 70.5 per cent.; in the flax-spinning mills, 70.5 per cent. of all operatives are of the female sex. These numbers suffice to prove the crowding out of adult males. But you have only to go into the nearest mill to see the fact confirmed. Hence follows of necessity that inversion of the existing social order which, being forced upon them, has the most ruinous consequences for the workers. The employment of women at once breaks up the family; for when the wife spends twelve or thirteen hours every day in the mill, and the husband works the same length ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... 1770) Notice how all nature is personified and assumes human attributes. In the opening stanzas impetuous haste is stirring, the first two lines have a marked rising rhythm. Notice the quieting effect of the metrical inversion at the beginning of 17, 18, and 19 and of the break in 25 after ach and how the whole poem ends with a note ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... curious inversion. It is a fact of common observance that in this lower middle class there is no pretense of leisure on the part of the head of the household. Through force of circumstances it has fallen into disuse. But the middle-class wife still carries ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... 'excitement' of it. There are but two plain indicative sentences in the two stanzas—(1) 'Honest labour wears a lovely face' (used as a refrain), and (2) 'Then he that patiently want's burden bears no burden bears, but is a king, a king!' (heightened emotionally by inversion and double repetition). Mark throughout how broken is the utterance; antithetical question answered by exclamations: both doubled and made more antithetical in the second stanza: with cunning reduplicated inversions to follow, and each stanza ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... clinging beauty, but the girl of the broad back and the strong limb, who could collect wood and carry water, who would be the much considered and much sought after female in such a community. Even in the animal world, there is the same inversion in values, according as the external conditions vary. The lion, while ruling over every other creature in his primitive wilds, by right of his untamable ferocity, size, and rapacity, is yet bound to become a prey to destruction and extermination ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... there is silence; 4. After all transpositions; for example: To live, one must work. Here the preposition to takes the value of its natural antecedent, work; that is to say, six degrees, since by inversion it precedes it, and the gesture of the sentence bears wholly on the preposition; 5. Before and after incidental phrases; 6. Wherever we wish to ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... existence of a fetichism directed to the nates, impelling him to the most disgusting acts, which he has several times performed. A similar case, but on a homosexual basis, will be found recorded as Case 20 in my work on Sexual Inversion.[65] ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... was a very ingenious and laborious composer, who carried the art of canonic imitation to a much finer point than had been reached before his time. He is generally credited with having composed a motette in thirty-six parts having almost all the devices later known as augmentation, diminution, inversion, retrograde, crab, etc. The thirty-six parts here mentioned, however, were not fully written out. Only six parts were written, the remainder being developed from these on the principle of a round, the successive ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... a notable inversion of old ideas; before the change the ecclesiastical authority had been civil, but because of the change the civil authority became ecclesiastical. If theocracy means the rule of the church or the sovereignty of the clergy in the state, then the ancient constitution ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... very talented. But Emily was theatrical, except in funny parts, Christy was lifeless, and Kitty Lacy had not taken the trouble to learn the lines properly and broke down at least once in every long speech, thereby justifying the popular inversion of her name to Lazy Kitty, a pseudonym which some college wag had fastened upon her early in her ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... have nothing to fear; if they have nothing to lose, they have nothing to lament; and if they have done nothing to be ashamed of, they have every thing to hope for. . . . SENTENTIOUSNESS, let us inform 'S.' of Cambridge, and antitheses, do not consist of short sentences and inversion of words merely; and even the most felicitous examples in each case often sacrifice the sound to the sense. Here is an instance which is unobjectionable: 'I knew the old miser well. He amassed a fortune by raising hemp; and if he had had his deserts, would have died ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... concubinage as a preventive, which, though scandalous in itself, might serve to prevent greater scandals." In districts it became customary to require a new parish priest to take a concubine.[494] "This was the inversion which the popular opinion had undergone in four centuries."[495] "The principles of the church led irrevocably to the conclusion, paradoxical as it may seem, that he who was guilty of immorality, knowing it to be wrong, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... of 1660 was such a revolution. Complete and instantaneous inversion of the position of the two parties in the nation, it occasioned much individual hardship. But this was only the fortune of war, the necessary consequence of party ascendancy. The Restoration was much more than a triumph of the ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... the reason for this inversion of arrangements, and she was silent a little while; ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... stems a brushy appearance. About the upper portion of the stem, and especially upon the extreme top, are numerous white, wiry hairs, 6 in. or more long, and gathered sometimes into locks. To this character, the plant owes it name Old-Man Cactus; but, by a curious inversion of what obtains in the human kind, old plants are less conspicuous by their white hairs than the younger ones. Some years ago, there were three fine stems of this Cactus among the cultivated plants at Kew, the highest of which ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... system are very good; but Dr. Herz has endeavored to simplify it still further, and with this object in view has experimented on several arrangements. For example, to obtain inversion a contact was simply placed on each side of the vibrating plate. Although the movements of this latter are not, as we know, of the nature of ordinary sonorous vibrations, it was thought that they might ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... been punished with stripes, imprisonment, or death. Nay, more, masters actually changed places with their slaves and waited on them at table; and not till the serf had done eating and drinking was the board cleared and dinner set for his master. So far was this inversion of ranks carried, that each household became for a time a mimic republic in which the high offices of state were discharged by the slaves, who gave their orders and laid down the law as if they were indeed invested with all the dignity of the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... those do who say that all the hell there is terminates with the emergence of the soul from the body. This might be so, if all sins discords and retributions were bodily. But, plainly, they are not. A mental chaos or inversion of order is as possible as a physical one. Hell is anywhere or nowhere, at any time or at no time, accordingly as the soul carries or does not carry its conditions. We are not to say of the sinner that he goes ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... case of the Stanza structure and the Antistrophic structure there are various modifications and elaborations—duplication, inversion, interruption, etc.: these it will be sufficient to explain in connection with the examples ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... had laid down his knife and fork, and was staring at his son in amazement, not being sufficiently quick of brain to form a probable guess as to what could have caused so strange an inversion of the paternal and filial relations as this proposition of his son to pay ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... Zangwill, in his symbolic play, The War-God, has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his symbolic personages, and, in passages ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... all reduction to order that may be depended on. This notion underlies the traditional debate between naturalism and supernaturalism.... This unhappy misconception of the relation of the natural to the supernatural has practically led the great body of uncritical thinkers into the grotesque inversion of all reason—the more law and order, the less God."—Zion's ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... to be placed in the concurrence of the two sorts of evidence, not only does not diminish in any thing like the same proportion, but is not necessarily much diminished at all. Nothing more results than a disturbance in the order of precedency of the two processes, sometimes amounting to its actual inversion: insomuch that instead of deducing our conclusions by reasoning, and verifying them by observation, we in some cases begin by obtaining them provisionally from specific experience, and afterward connect them with the principles of human ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... as transient for the higher Radiates is permanent for these; and when the little sphere moving about by means of its vibratile cilia has elongated a little, attached itself by the lower end to some surface, while the inversion of the upper end has formed the mouth and digestive cavity, and the expansion of its margin has made the tentacles, the very simple story of the fresh-water Hydra is told. But the last page in the development of these lower Radiates is but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... while the styles of George Meredith and of Henry James show how difficult it is for a subtle intellect to move freely within the limitations of English prose. Indeed, "it is a remarkable fact," as Sainte Beuve noticed, "and an inversion of what is true of other languages that, in French, prose has always had the precedence over poetry." Repeated attempts, however, have been made to capture our language, and to transport it into aristocratic atmospheres; and of these attempts the first is associated ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... link between the two countries is found in the fact that in this period there was erected in Egypt the building which came to be looked on as the parallel to the Cretan Labyrinth, and which, with a curious inversion of the actual facts, was long supposed to be the original from which the Cretan Labyrinth was derived. The pyramid of Amenemhat III., the greatest King of the great Twelfth Dynasty, and indeed one ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... earth is round is used like a noun as the subject of has been proved. The conjunction that [Footnote: "That was originally the neuter demonstrative pronoun, used to point to the fact stated in an independent sentence; as, It was good; he saw that. By an inversion of the order this became, He saw that (namely) it was good, and so passed into the form He saw that it was good, where that has been transferred to the accessory clause, and has become a mere sign of grammatical subordination."—C. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... comforts—even she, so chaste and exalted, hath now to attend to the comforts of others, that are to her far inferior in rank. Behold, O Pandava, my plight. It is what I do not deserve. You are alive, yet behold this inversion of order that time hath brought. She who had the whole Earth to the verge of the sea under her control, is now under the control of Sudeshna and living in fear of her. She who had dependants to walk both before and behind her, alas, now herself ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... This is the case with Hungary, Russia, the Danubian Principalities, North America, etc. Artificial fertilizers, guano in particular, indeed substitute the offal of men and beasts; but many farmers can not obtain the same in sufficient quantity; it is too dear; at any rate, it is an inversion of nature to import manure from great distances, while it is allowed ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... would be no reason to complain; but in translating Homer he seems to have thought it necessary to use a different style from that of his original work. Almost every sentence is stiffened by some clumsy inversion; stately phrases are used when simpler ones were at hand, and would have rendered the meaning of the original better. The entire version has the appearance of being hammered out with great labor, and as a whole it is cold and constrained; scarce any thing seems spontaneous; ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... is so complete that evil moves him no more than good. There have been writers of eccentric or perverse morality who have been so much irritated by the preaching of virtue that they have lent their genius to the recommendation of vice. This inversion of moral fervour is perhaps the source of most that is vaguely called "immoral" in imaginative literature. But Edgar Poe is as innocent of immorality as he is of morality. No more innocuous flowers than his ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... passion for inverting the names of things. You must not, if you want such a thing, say one pot of raspberry jam. You say, instead, jam, raspberry, pot, one. It is odd that in the few cases in which such inversion is really desirable the authorities refuse to practise it. Horse Transport, Base, would be intelligible after thought. Base Horse Transport, till you get accustomed to it, seems a gratuitous insult to a number ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... judgeship which had become vacant by the resignation of Sir Anthony Cleasby. A notorious journalist asserted that the promise had been made on consideration of his writing in the papers on behalf of the Indian Government. The statement is only worth notice as an ingenious inversion of the truth. So far from requiring any external impulse to write on Lytton's behalf, Fitzjames could hardly refrain from writing when its expediency was doubtful. When the occasion for a word in season offered itself, hardly any threats or promises could have induced him to keep ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... gave a grand entertainment to certain distinguished persons of both sexes at Wittenberg. To render the scene more splendid, he contrived to exhibit a memorable inversion of the seasons. As the company approached the doctor's house, they were surprised to find, though there was a heavy snow through the neighbouring fields, that Faustus's court and garden bore not the least marks ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... common-sense, the mental soundness, the humane instinct and the sympathy with nature, which give fertility and wholeness to the political philosophy of men like Burke, are absent in Machiavelli. In spite of its vigor, his system implies an inversion of the ruling laws of health in the body politic. In spite of its logical cogency, it is inconclusive by reason of defective premises. Incomparable as an essay in pathological anatomy, it throws no light upon the working of a normal social ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... six and a half pairs of eyes, and one undeniable fact; and on the other we have—what is it?—prejudice, common-sense, the inertia of opinion. Never were there seven more honest-seeming witnesses; never was there a more undeniable fact than the inversion of Gottfried Plattner's anatomical structure, and—never was there a more preposterous story than the one they have to tell! The most preposterous part of the story is the worthy Gottfried's contribution ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... custom to decry Sevcik as a teacher, to dwell on his absolutely mechanical character of instruction—and not without justice. First of all Sevcik laid all the stress on the left hand and not on the bow—an absolute inversion of a fundamental principle. Eldering had taken great pains with my bow technic, for he himself was a pupil of Hubay, who had studied with Vieuxtemps and had his tradition. But Sevcik's teaching as regards the use of the bow was very poor; his pupils—take Kubelik with all his ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... says that sometimes the glowing fire in the grate stares at you from behind its bars, as if it could read pictures in you, you cannot help laughing. If he had given you the protasis, "You gaze into the fire as if you could read pictures in it," even you could have invented the inversion. Topsy-turveydom is, I repeat, no laughing matter. It is an art—and must be studied. When Besant's School of Literature is ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... of Antinous must indicate the agony of death through which he passed into the company of the undying. Against this interpretation is the fact that we have no precise authority for the symbolism of the torches, except only the common inversion of the life-brand by the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... almost pure solution of sulphate of copper having a slow motion from top to bottom. This renewal of the liquid is so much the more necessary in that the saturated solution of sulphate of copper has a density of 1.166, and the sulphate of zinc one of 1.445, There would occur, then, a mixture through inversion of densities if the solution were allowed to reach a too great amount of saturation, did not the siphon prevent such a phenomenon by sucking up the liquid into the part where the mixture tends to take place. The chemical action that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... rising into excellence and importance at a time when poetry was on the decline, acquired such superiority that verse, instead of being its mistress, became its handmaid. The first occasion of this inversion was in the year 1594, when Rinuccini, a Florentine poet, associated himself with three musicians to compose a mythological drama. This and several other pieces by the same author met with a brilliant reception. Poetry, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... account both for those sexual differences of mind which distinguish men and women in all races, and for those which distinguish them in each race, or each society. An interesting subordinate inquiry may be, how far such mental differences are inverted in cases where there is inversion of social and domestic relations; as among those Khasi Hill-tribes, whose women have so far the upper hand that they turn off their husbands in a summary ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... strange inversion of time. Here winter was, cold streets, steely snow, garbage frozen to stone.... And in Europe was sane June. Purple flower of the heather in Ulster, and white flower of the bogs, and in the little bays of ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... the proportion of women to men who could hear was 34 to 17. The converse is true of children, for at a distance of 20 meters and more the percentage of boys was 49.9 and girls 43.2. The reason for this inversion of the relation lies in the harmful influences of manual labor and other noisy occupations of men. These comparisons may be of importance when the question is raised as to how much more a witness may have heard than one ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... so far as they have accepted or reflected the moral convictions; but it is an illusion to suppose that they have generated it. They represent the dialect and the imagery by which moral truths have been conveyed to minds at certain stages of thought; but it is a complete inversion of the truth to suppose that the morality sprang out of them. From this point of view we must of necessity treat the great ethical questions independently. We cannot form a real alliance with thinkers radically opposed to us. Divines tell us that we reject the one possible basis of ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... consider that strange inversion of idolatry which is the motive of Guy Fawkes Day and which annually animates the by-streets with the sound of processionals and of recessionals—a certain popular version of "Lest we forget" their unvaried theme; the more I hear the cries of derision raised by the makers of this likeness ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... work, but which relates a separate incident that occurred some years after the conclusion of the principal narrative, introduces us to the death-bed of Ivan III., at whose court the whole of the subsequent scenes occur; and is calculated from this inversion of time, and the recurrence of similar names, and even of the same persons, to create little confusion in the mind of the reader who is ignorant of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... of this high class (Royal Highnesses, &c.) are said to 'entertain' visitors, but that is an inversion of the actual fact; their object is to be entertained. And quite right too. Nothing can surely be more delightful than to have one's house full of friends at will, and then be able to turn them out at a moment's notice (as a life-boat gets rid of superfluous ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... contempt on the lip of Atta-Kulla-Kulla the council did not immediately acquiesce in his view, and thus for a time flattered the hope of the ada-wehi that they were resting in suspension on the details of this choice argument. There was an illogical inversion of values in the experience of the tribe, and while they could not now accept the worthless figments of long ago, it was not vouchsafed to them to enjoy the substantial merits of the new order of things. Reason, powder, diplomacy, had brought ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... whole universe. But philosophers are either revolutionists or apologists, and some of them, like M. Bergson, are revolutionists in the interests of apologetics. Their art is to create some surprising inversion of things, some system of the universe contrary to common apprehension, or to defend some such inverted system, propounded by poets long ago, and perhaps consecrated by religion. It would not require a great man to say ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... of all hypocrites are these bears: hypocrites by inversion; hypocrites in the simulation of things dark instead of bright; souls that thrive, less upon depression, than the fiction of depression; professors of the wicked art of manufacturing depressions; ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... of Professor Bjerknes all the phenomena of magnetic induction can be reproduced directly and perfectly, but the phenomena of magnetic action are not so exactly reproduced, that is to say, they are subject to a sort of inversion. Thus when two bodies are pulsating together and in the same phase (i. e., both expanding and both contracting at the same time), they mutually attract each other: but if they are pulsating in opposite phases, repulsion is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various |
