"Oscillating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of force around a wire conveying an electric current. 2. The effect upon other circularly vibrating bodies within that field of force corresponding to the action and reaction of electric currents upon one another. 3. The effect on pulsating and oscillating bodies similarly immersed, illustrating the mutual effects upon one another of magnets and electric currents. The first of these effects is one of induction, and, from what has been said from an earlier part of this article, it will be understood that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... pressure, and of various diameters. Of machines worked by water pressure the author proposes to refer only to two which appear to him in every respect the most practical and advantageous. One is the piston machine of M. Albert Schmid, engineer at Zurich. The cylinder is oscillating, and the distribution is effected, without an eccentric, by the relative motion of two spherical surfaces fitted one against the other, and having the axis of oscillation for a common axis. The convex surface, which ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... take it up again in his arms. To add to his troubles, also, he had dropped his sculling pole during a lurch of his floating platform, so he had nothing now wherewith to propel it either towards the island or back to the shore, the raft wickedly oscillating midway in the water between the two, like Mahomet's coffin 'twixt ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... left to the tyranny of authority and tradition. With few insignificant exceptions, girls have been educated either to be drudges, or toys, beneath man; or a sort of angels above him; the highest ideal aimed at oscillating between Claerchen and Beatrice. The possibility that the ideal of womanhood lies neither in the fair saint, nor in the fair sinner; that the female type of character is neither better nor worse than the male, but only weaker; that women are meant neither to be men's guides nor their playthings, ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... western slope of the Iranian Plateau north of the Cossaeans.* Many of them—as, for instance, the Lullume—had been civilized by the Chaldaeans almost from time immemorial; the most southern among them were perpetually oscillating between the respective areas of influence of Babylon and Nineveh, according as one or other of these cities was in the ascendant, but at this particular moment they acknowledged Assyrian sway. Were they ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... horseshoe is in the circuit, it is a magnet, and it pulls its clapper toward it with enormous power. When it is out of the circuit, the next second, it is not a magnet, and it lets the clapper go. The clapper, oscillating to and fro, imparts a rotatory motion to a fly-wheel, which transmits it to the drivers on the rails. Such are our motors. They are no novelty, for trial ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... had gone more than half-way. He did not want to wake Marya Dmitrievna, he lightly pressed Lisa's hand and said, "I think we are friends now, aren't we?" She nodded, he stopped his horse, and the coach rolled away, lightly swaying and oscillating up and down; Lavretsky turned homeward at a walking pace. The witchery of the summer night enfolded him; all around him seemed suddenly so strange—and at the same time so long known; so sweetly familiar. Everywhere near ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... of the doorway and down the oscillating bamboo stairs, and when, an hour later, the Major went to the little dock where the Manhattan lay he found the two boys working over her, sweating and complaining in loud voices against the inefficiency of modern motor ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... retain in the lenses of a telescope, levelled by hand, a spark of light so minute and faint as to be invisible to the unaided eye in the midst of the surrounding darkness, and the difficulty is enhanced when the attempt is made from the deck of a small vessel oscillating though ever so gently on the ridges of a long, low-running swell, and for the life of me I could not again find the feeble glimmer that had seemed to swim athwart the instrument, try as ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... to interview Nadar on the Place Saint Pierre at Montmartre, above which his captive balloon the "Neptune" was oscillating in the September breeze. He was much the same man as I had seen at the Crystal Palace a few years previously, tall, red-haired, and red-shirted. He had begun life as a caricaturist and humorous writer, but by way of buttering his bread had set up in business as a photographer, ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... portion of the paper. But I could not refrain from darting a look at my fellow-traveller. To my horror I perceived that the paper he was reading was the same as the one I had; and that the page between which and myself his eyes were uncomfortably oscillating was the very page on which the ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... the great victory, mankind will conclude that the heaviest cost in proportion to prewar population and treasure was paid by the nations that first felt the shock of war, Belgium, Serbia, Poland and France. All four were the battle-grounds of huge armies, oscillating in a bloody frenzy over once fertile fields ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... chambers the phosphorescent light from enormous radiators beats incessantly through and through the slowly, oscillating, vibrating, revolving soul matter. And here the process of individualization is achieved. A soul, or many souls, are separated from the great tide, by flashing, under the bombardment of the phosphorescent blaze into shining forms. They assume a shape outlined ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... fluctuates up and down, and the air and the wind around it do the same; for they accompany it, both when it rushes to those parts of the earth, and when to these. And as in respiration the flowing breath is continually breathed out and drawn in, so there the wind, oscillating with the liquid, causes certain vehement and irresistible winds both as it enters and goes out. When, therefore, the water rushing in descends to the place which we call the lower region, it flows through the earth into the streams there and fills ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... that dragging, interminable time which I now lived through, that complete despair, where you rest quite finally on bedrock and have nothing to dread in the way of further tumbles, must be a much happier state than the dreadful one of oscillating between hope and fear. For a leaden-footed eternity, it seemed to me, I oscillated, longing for, yet dreading, the signs that Cookie's powerful dope had begun to work upon our guards—for might not the first symptoms be quite different from ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... reached the middle of the Wimerra, but then the hollow deepened, and the water rose to the middle of the wheels. The bullocks were in danger of losing their footing, and dragging with them the oscillating vehicle. Ayrton devoted himself to his task courageously. He jumped into the water, and hanging on by the bullocks' horns, dragged them ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... the snake from her body and held it by the tail high above her. The hideous creature stretched up its head towards the roof of the cavern, which it was just able to reach. It then began to move its head backwards and forwards, with a slow, oscillating motion, as if looking for something At the same moment, the witch began to walk round and round the cavern, coming nearer to the centre every circuit; while the head of the snake described the same path over the roof that she did over the floor. for she held it up still. ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... faded. Love—and this ridiculous George vowed he was in love—love is a mental see-saw. The nicely- balanced mind is set suddenly oscillating: now up, commandingly above the world, intoxicated with the rush and the elevation; now down to depths made horribly deep by contrast, wretchedly jarred by ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... on either side. The bottom is formed of three very large stems of bamboo, and a sort of wickerwork extends from these upward to the supporting canes, which are about six feet from side to side, and may in crossing just be grasped by the hands. The bridge has a peculiar oscillating motion, which increases so much at the centre, together with an up-and-down movement, that, with a sight of the fiercely rushing water beneath, the traveler's head is apt to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... maneuver was initiated, that gigantic movement by the flank, surrounding and enmeshing us by a series of forced marches conducted in the most admirable order through Champagne and the Ardennes. While the French were stumbling aimlessly about the country, oscillating uncertainly between one place and another, the Prussians were making their twenty miles a day and more, gradually contracting their immense circle of beaters upon the band of men whom they held within their toils, and driving their prey onward ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... except where sides were already fixed. Americanism would have been bad form in the liberal Edinburgh Review; it would have seemed eccentric even for a Scotchman, and Reeve was a Saxon of Saxons. To an American this attitude of oscillating reserve seemed more eccentric than the reckless hostility of Brougham or Carlyle, and more mischievous, for he never could be sure what preposterous ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Hamoud, turning his limpid eyes toward her face which was veiled by swaying fringes of the awning. She unclenched her fists; her body slowly relaxed; and a look of incredulity appeared in her eyes, as she returned from afar to this oscillating world of steamy heat, throbbing with aboriginal song, impregnated with the smell of putrefying foliage and of sweat. From under the feet of the machilla carriers a cloud of mauve butterflies rose like flowers to strew themselves over ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... harmonica to his lips, holding it in hollowed hands. His oscillating breath jarred from the metal reeds the doleful strains of Home, Sweet Home, muffled by the hollow of his hands into ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... the spot where they should look. Even lifeless figures, as vessels and stools—let them be drawn ever so correctly—lose all effect so soon as they lack the resting upon their centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming and oscillating appearance. The Raphael in the Dresden gallery[672] (the only great affecting picture which I have seen) is the quietest and most passionless piece you can imagine; a couple of saints who worship the Virgin ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... domestic articles is considered a luxury. With even these slight accompaniments and plenty of fatigue, one is apt to fall asleep and make the best of it, whether upon the stone floor of a bungalow or in an upright position in the oscillating cars. Lahore is the capital of the Punjab, being one of the most ancient and famous cities of the country, and was flourishing and populous at the time of Alexander's invasion. Here are the headquarters of a large division of British troops, the red coats besprinkling every street ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... now, oscillating from side to side. The hole seemed to travel in a wavering loop, dipping lower, swinging up ...
— Gambler's World • John Keith Laumer
... slab, causing a sudden emeute in the camp. "Order! order! order!" was sounded from every tongue. "You mustn't be afeard, Captain," said one of the party. "This is perfectly South Carolinian-just the oscillating of the champagne; ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... mathematicians. This was the phenomenon of Arago's rotating disc. It was briefly as follows: If a copper disc be rotated above a magnet, the needle tends to follow the plate in its rotation; or, if a copper plate be placed at rest above or below an oscillating magnet, it tends to check its oscillations and bring the needle quickly to rest. Faraday investigated these phenomena and soon discovered that a copper disc rotated below two magnet poles had electric currents generated in it, which flowed radially through the disc between its circumference ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... invited to dine with the Emperor, it was necessary to enter a modern carriage with two steps. He did not dare to put his foot on the frail things, which he feared would break under his weight; and the oscillating movement of the body of the carriage made him terribly ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... tea or coffee boiler, the base, D, so constructed and adapted, relatively to the other parts, that an oscillating motion will be imparted to the vessel by process of ebullition, substantially as shown ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... a time crossed the river, the sun half an hour high; I watched the twelfth-month sea-gulls—I saw them high in the air, floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies, I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow, I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... a glorious success." However glorious, it was dearly bought; and a few more such victories would be ruin. The governor presently achieved a success more solid and less costly. The wavering mood of the north-western tribes, always oscillating between the French and the English, had caused him incessant anxiety; and he had lost no time in using the defeat of Phips to confirm them in alliance with Canada. Courtemanche was sent up the Ottawa to carry news of the French triumph, ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... showing Pedersen that he knew something about it. "Break system relay—operator can overhear any interference while transmitting—transformation by a single throw of a six-point switch which tunes the oscillating and open circuits to resonance. Very clever—very efficient. By the way, Pedersen, are you the only person aboard ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... seen in Fig. 9 is a gin which goes by the name of the "single-acting Macarthy gin," so called because it has only one oscillating blade for removing the fibre from the seed. The back of the machine is shown in the figure. This process at the best is a brutal one, especially when certain gins are employed, but the one figured here is considered to do little damage to the fibre ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... our friend the poetical young gentleman was in ecstasies—not of disgust, but admiration. 'Heavens!' cried the poetical young gentleman, 'how grand; how great!' We ventured deferentially to inquire upon whom these epithets were bestowed: our humble thoughts oscillating between the police officer who found the criminal, and the lock-keeper who found the head. 'Upon whom!' exclaimed the poetical young gentleman in a frenzy of poetry, 'Upon whom should they be bestowed but upon the murderer!'—and thereupon ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... of each oscillating link of the straight-line linkage was thus reduced to one-fourth instead of one-half the beam length, and the entire mechanism could be constructed so that it would not extend beyond the end of the working beam. This arrangement soon came to be known as Watt's "parallel ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... know—I know it, because I live among the population of Lancashire, and I doubt not the same may be said of the population of this city and county—that just above the level of the 1,100,000 there is at least an equal number who are ever oscillating between independence and pauperism, who, with a heroism which is not the less heroic because it is secret and unrecorded, are doing their very utmost to maintain an honourable and independent position before their fellow men? While Irish labour, notwithstanding ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... why he had not been successful in private practice. He was like somebody trying to protect a raw surface from heat and cold; so cursed with diffidence, and so sensitive about his boyish appearance that he chose to shut himself up in an oscillating wooden coop on the sea. The long run to Australia had exactly suited him. A rough life and the pounding of bad weather had fewer terrors for him than an office in town, with constant ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... his life. Savage art is beheld in his childish scratchings and barbarous glimmerings; Indian, Egyptian, and Assyrian art in his boyish rigidity and crude fixedness of idea and purpose; Mediaeval, or pre-Raffaelle art is seen in his youthful timid darings, his unripe fancies oscillating between earth and heaven; there where we expect truth, we see conceit; there where we want little, much is given—now a blank eyed riddle,—dark with excess of self,—now a giant thought—vast but repulsive,—and now angel visitors startling us with wisdom ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemmed Manhattan? River and sunset and scallop-edged waves of flood-tide? The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter? ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... did not do. Once out of the inlet, they went about and headed northward, up the coast, and we remained watching them until Mr. Trevor became a mere oscillating ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... waves made the masts tremble with their violence — I tried to look around and below me. The sea was literally raging beneath, and great masses of livid-looking foam were dashing be- tween the masts, which were oscillating terrifically. It was still dark, and I could only faintly distinguish two figures in the stern, whom, by the sound of their voices, that I caught occasionally above the tumult, I made out to be ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... realized, for the succeeding number is in a widely divorced key. But it must have pressed hard the philistines. And this prelude, the twenty-third, is fashioned out of the most volatile stuff. Aerial, imponderable, and like a sun-shot spider web oscillating in the breeze of summer, its hues change at every puff. It is in extended harmonics and must be delivered with spirituality. The horny hand of the toilsome pianist would shatter the delicate, swinging fantasy of the poet. Kullak points out a variant in the fourteenth bar, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... fed back to the same brain-spots. Not once, but multifold, like the vibration of a reed or violin string. The circuit that accepts signals, amplifies them, returns them to the same set of terminals, and causes them to be repeated several hundred times per millisecond without actually ringing or oscillating is the real research secret of the machine. My father's secret ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... a breath of hesitation between giving the alarm and following Alice silently and alone, he chose the latter. He was a swift runner and light footed. With a few bounds he reached the little gate, which was still oscillating on its hinges, darted through and away, straining every muscle in desperate pursuit, gaining rapidly in the race, which bore eastward along the course twice before chosen by Alice in leaving ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... but a small mark,—the opening of the embrasures, a small part of the carriage, and now and then a head or arm raised above the parapet,—the ratio of exposed surfaces being not less than twenty to one. In the vessel the guns are fired from an oscillating deck, and the balls go at random; in the fort the guns are fired from an immoveable platform, and the balls reach their object with unerring aim. There is always more or less motion in the water, so that the ship's guns, though accurately pointed at one moment, ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... untwined the snake from her body, and held it by the tail, high above her. The hideous creature stretched up its head towards the roof of the cavern, which it was just able to reach. It then began to move its head backwards and forwards, with a slow oscillating motion, as if looking for something. At the same moment, the witch began to walk round and round the cavern, coming nearer to the centre every circuit; while the head of the snake described the same path over the roof that she did over the floor, for she held it up still. And still it ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... preliminary to the entrance of the mind into a superior condition, such as whirling, twisting, and reeling, we all took a part. Henry, for that was the name of the youth who was so zealous in his aspersions, united awkwardly and derisively in these exercises. Amid so many arms, legs, and bodies, revolving, oscillating, staggering, and tripping, it is not remarkable that a few should be thrown prostrate (not violently, however) upon the floor. One evening, in a boy's meeting at a time of great excitement, when the spirits of some of our companions were reported to be in spiritual ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... had exchanged bows with little Molineux, seated himself in an armchair near the bookshelves. He looked at the card-players, listened to the conversations, and went to the doorway every now and then to watch the oscillating bouquet of flowers formed by the circling heads of the dancers in the moulinet. The expression of his face was that of a true philosopher. The men were dreadful,—all, that is, except du Tillet, who had acquired the manners of the great world, little La Billardiere, ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... down toward the bows at an angle of about 36 degrees. She was standing, so to speak, on her head. Our bow was fast upon the bottom of the sea—our stern was still oscillating up and down like a mighty pendulum. The manometer showed a ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... by the retina at the distance of a foot, would, if slightly changed in character, be amply sufficient to provoke vision. Nothing could more forcibly illustrate that special relationship supposed by Melloni and others to subsist between the optic nerve and the oscillating periods of luminous bodies. The optic nerve responds, as it were, to the waves with which it is in consonance, while it refuses to be excited by others of almost infinitely greater energy, whose periods of recurrence are not in unison ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... But neither the doctrines of the Stoics nor the science and able reasoning of the jurists were lights and guides within the reach and for the use of the populace, who remained a prey to the vices and miseries of servitude or public disorders, oscillating between the wearisomeness of barren ignorance and the corruptiveness of a life of adventure. All the causes of decay were at this time spreading throughout Roman society; not a single preservative or regenerative principle of national life was in ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... and was even related to them through his wife'. He, and many other white people thirty years before, saw a Jossakeed, or medium, crawl into such a lodge as Kohl describes, beating his tambour. 'The entire case began gradually trembling, shaking, and oscillating slowly amidst great noise. . . . It bent back and forwards, up and down, like the mast of a vessel in a storm. I could not understand how those movements could be produced by a man inside, as we could not have caused them from the exterior.' Two voices, 'both entirely different,' ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... 1860. USNM 192872; 1951. A hand-crank operated the winnowing mill for separating grain from chaff and beans from hulls. A four-blade, wooden fan, shaped like a paddle wheel, blows a draft below oscillating screens. The chaff is blown off from the threshed grain, and the grain or beans fall from the screens into the path of the draft. The screens catch any straw left after threshing. Gift of Arden Wilson, ...
— Agricultural Implements and Machines in the Collection of the National Museum of History and Technology • John T. Schlebecker
... animals, a more or less permanent monogamy has on the whole tended to prevail. That is a fact of great significance in its implications. For we have to realize that we are here in the presence of a natural fact. Sexual relationships, in human as in animal societies, follow a natural law, oscillating on each side of the norm, and there is no place for the theory that that law was imposed artificially. If all artificial "laws" could be abolished the natural order of the sexual relationships would continue to subsist substantially as at present. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... from his oscillating head, through his set teeth, in one malign monotone. As he quoted the preacher he mechanically drew his revolver. There was no bravado in this; he might lie, but he did not know how to sham; did not know, ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... that characterized most of the doings of his shipmates, and in following the bent of his own joyous nature, in the hours of solitude and in the dark night, when no one saw him, his mind ever reverted to the one engrossing subject, like the oscillating needle to ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... suggested type is shown with the body normally in a horizontal position, and the planes in a neutral position, as represented in position 1. When sufficient speed had been attained both planes are turned to the same angle, as in position 2, and flight is initiated without the abnormal oscillating motion of the body. ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... it out when I was sitting on the garden seat near by, learning Latin irregular verbs. I saw the minute preposterous round birds going and coming, and I found something so absurdly amiable and confiding about them—they sat balancing and oscillating on a standard rose and cheeped at me to go and then dived nestward and gave away their secret out of sheer impatience—that I could not bring myself to explore further, and kept the matter altogether secret from the enthusiasm of Mr. Siddons. ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... silently and with difficulty; for the car was oscillating so greatly that they were obliged to hold on, by its side, not to be thrown out. The descent was less rapid than it had been, but was ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... to save our precious beverage, I pulled out watch and compass to notice duration and direction of the shock. It was undulatory, very violent, and oscillating from S.S.W. to N.N.E. The duration was exactly four minutes two seconds. The earthquake began at 5.20 P.M. and ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... time down to the present the Government has followed a wavering policy, oscillating between complete tolerance and active persecution. It must, however, be said that the persecution has never been of a very searching kind. In persecution, as in all other manifestations, the Russian Church directs its attention chiefly ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... entered, "as if he half expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley's pigtail sticking out into the hall," were unhesitatingly erased by the Reader, as, from his point of view, not necessarily to the purpose. Then, after the goblin incident of the disused bell slowly oscillating until it and all the other bells in the house rang loudly for a while—afterwards becoming in turn just as suddenly hushed—we got to the clanking approach, from the sub-basement of the old building, of the noise that at length ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... of her beak wide agape, between which the fledgling thrusts its head, almost out of sight, and so keeps it for more than a minute. Finally, withdrawing it, up again goes the head of the mother, with neck craned out, and oscillating from side to side in a second spell of speech-making. These curious actions are repeated several times, the entire performance lasting for a period of nearly a quarter of an hour. When it ends, possibly from the food supply having become exhausted, the mother bird leaves the little glutton ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... movement, or oscillating motion, is obtained by employing a pendulum; in a movable timepiece we make use of an equally-poised wheel of some weight on a pivoted axle, which device we term a balance; the vibrations or oscillations being obtained by applying a coiled spring, which was first called a "pendulum ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... little regard for the external dignity of the court, but they strongly insisted on its discipline. Many of them sat with their feet on the desk, chewing tobacco, and whittling a stick. During a trial one of the counsel referred to his opponent as an "oscillating Tarquin." The judge ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... Mrs. Wolfstein's eager delight in it, Lady Manby's broad amusement, Robin Pierce's carefully-controlled indignation, Mr. Bry's sardonic and always cold gratification, Lady Cardington's surprised, half-tragic wonder—she was oscillating between two courses, one a course of reserve, of stern self-control and abnegation, the other a course of defiance, of reckless indulgence of the strong temper that dwelt within her, and that occasionally showed itself for a moment, as it had on ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... from the peculiar oscillating or swinging movements that the plant exhibits. The most marked movement is a swaying from side to side, combined with a rotary motion of the free ends of the filaments, which are often twisted together like the strands of a rope. If the filaments are entirely free, they ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... brilliant light. The dark lines of troops could be seen almost as clearly as by day. Their positions were distinctly marked, however, by the flashes from the rifles, coming thick and fast, making them look, as they moved along, bending and oscillating, like rolling waves of flame, throwing off fiery spray. When my brigade had moved far around upon the left, and had taken position, obliquing toward the enemy's rear, it suddenly opened. The Federal line ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... that even the problem of COADAPTATION IN STERILE ANIMALS can thus be satisfactorily explained. If the determinants are oscillating upwards and downwards in continual fluctuation, and varying more pronouncedly now in one direction now in the other, useful variations of every determinant will continually present themselves anew, and may, in the course of generations, be combined with one another in various ways. But there ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... body. On the other hand, it will be regarded by multitudes as the casual caprice of an individual—a caprice of vanity by those who do not know Lord Carlisle's personal qualities, a caprice of patriotic benevolence by those who do. According to the construction of the case as thus indicated, oscillating between a question of profound revolution moving subterraneously amongst us, and a purely personal question, such a discussion would ascend to the philosophic level, or sink to the level of gossip. The other direction of the public surprise points ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... without principle; one section thrust aside by Europe, and vegetating in filth with longing eyes directed towards the Messiah's ass or other member of the long-eared fraternity; the other occupied with fingering state securities and the pages of a cyclopaedia, and constantly oscillating between wealth and bankruptcy, oppression and tolerance. Their own science is dead among Jews, and the intellectual concerns of European nations do not appeal to them, because, faithless to themselves, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... south wind blows, it is a study to see three or four of these air-kings at the head of the valley far up toward the mountain, balancing and oscillating upon the strong current; now quite stationary, except for a slight tremulous motion like the poise of a rope-dancer, then rising and falling in long undulations, and seeming to resign themselves passively to the wind; or, again, sailing high ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... rushing recklessly on to the attack,—or even keeping up the swimming pace by which it had hitherto been making its approach,—on arriving within some half-score fathoms of Snowball's face, it gradually slackened speed, until its brown, fan-like fins, gently oscillating along its sides seemed no longer to propel its body ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... collected by Professor GARNER. It is not too much to say that those touching cris de coeur redolent of the jungle, the lagoon and the hinterland, will appeal with irresistible force to all lovers of sincere and passionate emotion. The Chimpanzee's "swing song" on page 42 is a marvel of oscillating melody. ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... conventionally-named simple substances are really simple. Each yields a spectrum having lines varying in number from two to eighty or more, every one of which implies the intercepting of ethereal undulations of a certain order by something oscillating in unison or in harmony with them. Were iron absolutely elementary, it is not conceivable that its atom could intercept ethereal undulations of eighty different orders. Though it does not follow that its molecule ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... stoppage, Harry began to experience some of the difficulties that beset him in the task which he had undertaken. Despite the utmost care in lowering, the rope would persist in oscillating, very gently, it is true, but still sufficient to render it necessary to pause until the oscillation had ceased before attempting to take the measurement; also the torsion of the rope set up a slow revolving ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... begged them to hasten and to get in anywhere they could. A moment afterwards they jumped into the carriage, and the train rolled with a slight oscillating motion out of the station into the open country. Dim masses of trees, interrupted by spires and roofs, were painted upon a huge orange sky that somehow reminded ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... stages, but also fearing and fleeing them because they know his secrets, pry into his plans, watch his rise with envy, and look forward to his fall with pleasure. From this relationship springs his dual, indeterminate character, oscillating between love of distinction and hatred of those who have already achieved it. He says himself that he is an aristocrat, and has learned the secrets of good company. He is polished on the outside and coarse within. He knows already how to wear the frock-coat with ease, ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... remained in this position seven minutes and ate a meal during the interval. There were two clowns at the Cirque Franconi who duplicated this feat, and the program called their dinner "Un dejouner en tete-a-tete." Some other persons perform wonderful feats of a similar nature on an oscillating trapeze, and many similar performances have been witnessed by the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... is poor and perfectly bare. No beautiful painted saints, no pictures on the walls or on the roof, no hanging lamp oscillating at the end of a long, straight cord. In a corner of the choir, a wick was burning in a glass filled with oil. Round wooden pillars hold up the roof, the blue paint of which has been freshened recently. The bright light of the fields, filtering through the green foliage which covers ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert |
