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Substratum

noun
(pl. substrata)
1.
A surface on which an organism grows or is attached.  Synonym: substrate.
2.
Any stratum or layer lying underneath another.  Synonym: substrate.
3.
An indigenous language that contributes features to the language of an invading people who impose their language on the indigenous population.  Synonym: substrate.






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"Substratum" Quotes from Famous Books



... they run with a kind of materiality; and the probability is that the progress of science, by connecting the phenomena of magnetism with the luminiferous ether, will prove these 'lines of force,' as Faraday loved to call them, to represent a condition of this mysterious substratum of ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall

... hanging loose together with gaps and interruptions; whereas these are all coherent, clear-cut, and written in a style that gives superior polish and setting to every scene and anecdote. That they are compiled upon a solid substratum of truth need not be questioned; nevertheless some of them seem to differ only in degree from the realistic novel of the very latest type, such as Zola's Debacle, which contains a very strong and pervading ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... hardships and privations, how little of his dangers even are met upon the battle field. Tame as stories of barrack life must seem when we are thrilling with the great events for which that life furnishes the substratum, it is worth our while, for the sake of this lesson, to give them also their page upon the record, to spread these neutral tints in due proportion upon the broad canvas. It is partly for this reason that I turn ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... midst of Irving's mock-heroics, he always preserves a substratum of good sense. An instance of this is the address of the redoubtable wooden-legged governor, on his departure at the head of his warriors ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner

... and twenty feet high. The third is three hundred and sixty feet long, thirty feet broad in front of the edifice, and nineteen feet high. The upper one is formed upon the back half of the middle platform, of which last Mr. Stephens observes that "this great terrace was not entirely artificial. The substratum was a natural rock, and showed that advantage had been taken of a natural elevation as far as it went, and by this means some portion of the immense labor of constructing the terrace had been saved." [Footnote: Incidents of ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan

... printing an autobiography, exposing a thousand assailable points in his life and character, the temptation was irresistible, and the whole population of Grub Street enlisted in a crusade against him.[12] Fortunately, beneath the crust of insolence and vanity, there was a substratum of genuine power in the Laureate's make, which rendered him not only a match for these, but for even a greater than these, the author of the "Dunciad." Pope's antipathy for the truculent actor ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... interested in examining the ancient occult sciences of India. It is generally held by the ancient philosophers that the macrocosm is similar to the microcosm in having a Sthula Sariram and a Suksma Sariram. The visible universe is the Sthula Sariram of Viswam; the ancient philosophers held that as a substratum for this visible universe, there is another universe— perhaps we may call it the universe of Astral Light—the real universe of Noumena, the soul as it were of this visible universe. It is darkly hinted in certain passages of the Veda and the Upanishads that this hidden universe of ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... applause of the student of those times. The colonial regime gave solid and enduring character to the Mexican people. It gave them traditions, history, refinement, which are a priceless heritage for them, and it builded beautiful cities and raised up valuable institutions which are the substratum of their civilisation. The wonderful vitality and extent of Spanish influence and character which flowed from these centres—Mexico, Peru, and others—over thousands of miles of rugged Cordillera and through impassable forests, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... the region of those broad principles and large axioms which the wise Romans, the world's lawgivers, always recognized as above all special enactments. We have come to that solid substratum acknowledged by Grotius in his great Treatise: "Necessity itself which reduces things to the mere right of Nature." The old rules which were enough for our guidance in quiet times, have become as meaningless "as moonlight on the dial of the day." We have followed precedents ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... the crowd into momentary sympathy with its rulers. Yet this was but an underlying element in the instinctive delight of the people in the outward forms of their religion. Odo's late experiences had wakened him to the influences acting on that obscure substratum of human life that still seemed, to most men of his rank, of no more account than the brick lining of their marble-coated palaces. As he watched the mounting excitement of the throng, and pictured ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... having laid a very decided foundation upon which to build a tabernacle of joviality, and the nectar adding its exhilarating power in erecting a substratum for the fine work of the festival, it became necessary to top off with spicy speeches, which might indeed be compared to a compound of salt and cream very liberally mixed. From among his guests and great folks Citizen Peabody ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton

... strictly chained down to the real: it is only when want is satisfied that it develops without hinderance. But it is also the proof of an internal liberty, because it reveals to us a force which, independent of an external substratum, sets itself in motion, and has sufficient energy to remove from itself the solicitations of nature. The reality of things is effected by things, the appearance of things is the work of man, and a soul that takes pleasure in ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... — N. substantiality, hypostasis; person, being, thing, object, article, item; something, a being, an existence; creature, body, substance, flesh and blood, stuff , substratum; matter &c. 316; corporeity[obs3], element, essential nature, groundwork, materiality, substantialness, vital part. [Totality of existences], world &c. 318; plenum. Adj. substantive, substantial; hypostatic; personal, bodily, tangible &c. (material) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... result, accomplishing, (what neither the schools nor the churches and their clergy have hitherto accomplish'd, and without which this nation will no more stand, permanently, soundly, than a house will stand without a substratum,) a religious and moral character beneath the political and productive and intellectual bases of the States. For know you not, dear, earnest reader, that the people of our land may all read and write, and may all possess the right to ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... began cowardly, and now we're going on cowardly, and darn't attack them. Well; when we've been whipped often enough, then we shall learn the trade." Now all this—and I heard much of such a nature—could not be called boasting. But yet with it all there was a substratum of confidence. I have heard Northern gentlemen complaining of the President, complaining of all his ministers, one after another, complaining of the contractors who were robbing the army, of the commanders who did ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope

... substratum in moral righteousness, underlying all that is right. Such is its wonderful latitude and longitude that, in order to carry it out, it sometimes becomes necessary to tilt a nation into a sea of blood ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various

... venture, rather than be content to live by patient and continued labor. This, however, is the condition of all new countries; it will pass away as population becomes more dense. And, meantime California has gifts of nature which form a solid substratum upon which will, in a few years, be built up a community productive far beyond the average of wealthy or productive communities. This is my conclusion after seeing all parts of this State more in detail than perhaps any one man has taken ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff

... our own native, was at length made intelligible to our Barwan guide, and he shaped his course accordingly. He took us through scrubs, having in the centre those holes where water usually lodges for some time after rain, where some substratum of clay happens to be retentive enough to impede the common absorption. But the water in these holes had been recently drunk, and the mud trampled into hard clay by the hoofs of cattle. Thus it is, that the aborigines first become sensible of the approach of the ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell

... Speciosity, Falsehood, Dilettantism; with this one serious Veracity in it: Mammonism! Dig down where you will, through the Parliament-floor or elsewhere, how infallibly do you, at spade's depth below the service, come upon this universal Liars-rock substratum! Much else is ornamental; true on barrel-heads, in pulpits, hustings, Parliamentary benches; but this is forever true and truest: "Money does bring money's worth; Put money in your purse." Here, if nowhere else, is the human soul still in thorough earnest; sincere with a prophet's sincerity: ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... to open the door was not resisted for one moment, and forth rushed a cloud of dust and feathers, a quacking waggling substratum of ducks, and a screaming flapping rabble of chickens, behind whom, when the mist cleared, were seen, looking as if they had been tarred and feathered, various black and grey figures, which developed ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... less; and because, as we have already said, it proceeds in every instance from mental deficiencies and moral defects, from insincerity and dissimulation, and from an effeminate proneness to use up in speaking the energy we should turn to doing and apply to life and conduct. Without a substratum of sincerity, no man can speak right on, but runs astray into a kind of phraseology which bears the same relation to elegant language that the hollyhock does ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate

... came down with pleurisy and Peckham suddenly found himself at the head of affairs. Hillerton had no partner; no one but Peckham could take his place. And in Peckham's moral constitution was a substratum of unshakable fidelity upon which the astute Hillerton had built. Cursing his own unimpeachable sense of duty, Peckham could see but one straw of hope to clutch at. It ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller

... selects for notice three works—the 'Drapier's Letters,' 'Gulliver's Travels,' and the 'Tale of a Tub.' With respect to the first, as it is a necessity of Mr. S. to be forever wrong in his substratum of facts, he adopts the old erroneous account of Wood's contract as to the copper coinage, and of the imaginary wrong which it inflicted on Ireland. Of all Swift's villainies for the sake of popularity, ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... of the North, and sank, never again to appear on the surface of Scandinavian mythology. If the two religions come anywhere in contact, it is at their base, for underlying both there existed a strange substratum of Tree and Serpent Worship; on this the two structures seem to have been raised, though they afterwards diverged into forms ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller

... alluded, first invokes his muse, and then brings his smaller events gradually out upon his stage, so did Miss Grantly with sacred fervour ask her mother's aid, and then prepare her list of all those articles of underclothing which must be the substratum for the visible magnificence of her trousseau. Money was no object. We all know what that means; and frequently understand, when the words are used, that a blaze of splendour is to be attained at the cheapest possible price. But, in this instance, money was no object;—such ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope

... Peregrine Maitland and Attorney-General Robinson it was a veritable thorn in the flesh. There was abundant occasion for criticism, and it was seldom, if ever, that Collins resorted to pure invention for the purpose of attacking the innumerable abuses of the time. There was always a sufficient substratum of truth in his accusations to render it inexpedient to prosecute him for libel. The punishment of what was false would have involved the public exposure of what was true. The official party realized the force of the laureate's ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... between Russia and Turkey. It is distant thirty-five miles from Kars and eighty-four miles from Tiflis. The plain on which it is situated is perfectly level and very peculiar. It has a stratum of alluvial soil for the depth of one foot six inches on the surface, and then a substratum of fine uniform lava, ten to fifteen feet thick, supposed to have issued from Mount Alagos (13,450 feet), an extinct volcano thirty miles from Alexandropol. The depth of the earth allows the growth of grain, but entirely prevents ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... foreign lands; by what stages and in what length of time those who had not emigrated rose out of native barbarism into that degree of culture to which the most ancient monuments bore testimony. No efforts of imagination were needful for the satisfaction of their curiosity: the old substratum of indigenous traditions was rich enough, did they but take the trouble to work it out systematically, and to eliminate its most incongruous elements. The priests of Heliopolis took this work in ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... psychotic phenomenon, but rather endeavor to investigate mental life, be it normal or abnormal, from the biologic point of view. We are being constantly confronted with the undeniable fact that whatever may be the physical substratum of mental disorder, it does not aid us in understanding the peculiar expression which a given psychosis chooses to assume. Why it is that one paretic greets us with the exalted mien of his grandiose delirium, while another spreads about him the gloom of a depressive delirium—the ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... on which all the three writers are agreed: we have the same substratum of facts, namely, THE TOMB FOUND ALREADY EMPTY WHEN THE WOMEN REACHED IT, a confused and contradictory report of an angel or angels seen within it, and the subsequent reappearance of Christ. Not one of the three writers affords us the slightest clue ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler

... civilisation. His hopes in this respect were centred in the more strongly pronounced Slav type characteristic of the Russian peasant class. In the natural detestation of the Russian serf for his cruel oppressor the nobleman, he believed he could trace a substratum of simple- minded brotherly love, and that instinct which leads animals to hate the men who hunt them. In support of this idea he cited the childish, almost demoniac delight of the Russian people in fire, a quality on which Rostopschin ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... we left it at the camp, and we made our beds apparently dry. But I did not sleep well. I could not help thinking that it was not safe to sleep in a bed with a substratum of wet mattress, and I worried Euphemia a little by asking her several times if she felt ...
— Rudder Grange • Frank R. Stockton

... is not true that "the original substratum or material is in every instance alike," nor that the "primordial cell is in every instance the same," whether of the "lichen or the man;"[21] nor as others allege, "that chemical reagents detect no differences between them." Chemical reagents are very clumsy instruments for the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... Bergson, with the upholders of parallelism. It is a purely metaphysical hypothesis unwarrantable in his opinion as a dogma. He distinguishes between correspondence—which he of course admits—and parallelism, to which he is opposed. We never think without a certain substratum of cerebral activity, but what the relation is precisely, between brain and consciousness, is one for long and patient research: it cannot be determined a priori and asserted dogmatically. Until such investigation has been carried out, it behoves us to be undogmatic and not to ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... one able critic has ventured to prophesy that Schumann's greatest claim to immortality would yet be found in such works as the settings of "Ich grolle nicht" and the "Dichterliebe" series—a perverted estimate, perhaps, but with a large substratum of truth. The duration of Schumann's song-time was short, the greater part of his Lieder having been written in 1840. After this he gave himself up to oratorio, symphony, ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris

... extent by Papuan and possibly Papuo-Melanesian influence, both physical and cultural. He has marshalled his data with great skill, and has dissected out, as it were, the physical and cultural elements of the Negrito substratum. It only remains for other observers to study Negritos in other parts of New Guinea to see how far these claims can be substantiated. It is evident therefore that, apart from the valuable detailed information which Mr. Williamson ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson

... been sacrificed; and that chaste beauty which emerges from a perfectly harmonious distribution of parts, embellished by surface decoration only when the limbs and members of the building demand emphasis, may be sought for everywhere in vain. The substratum is a box, a barn, an inverted bottle; built up of rubble, brick, and concrete; clothed with learned details, which have been borrowed from the pseudo-science of the humanist. There is nothing here of divine Greek candour, of dominant Roman vigour, of Gothic vitality, of fanciful invention ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... as one of the greatest cities of the East Mediterranean lands. Planted amid the hills near the mouth of the river Cayster, it was excellently fitted to become a great mart, and was the commercial centre for the whole country on the Roman side of Mount Taurus. The substratum of the population was Asiatic, but the progress and enterprise of the city belonged to the Greeks. There, as in the Florence of the Medici, we find commercial astuteness joined with intense delight in graceful ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan

... suppose that the substratum of limestone in all the country for many miles in the vicinity is perforated with these tremendous shafts; as those which are seen in the cave are only such as happened to be in the course of the tunnels composing the Mammoth Cave. It is not improbable that there are many others on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... They lay hold not on the reality of things but on the relation which things have to our pleasures and pains, to the satisfaction of wants and the welfare of the body. They are important only for the life of the body, which is but a fixed substratum for a higher life. Experience thus has a definitely material character; it has to do with physical things in relation to the body. In contrast, reason, or science, lays hold of the immaterial, the ideal, the spiritual. There is something ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... any separate or distinct existence. Every passion of the soul; every configuration of matter, however different and various, inhere in the same substance, and preserve in themselves their characters of distinction, without communicating them to that subject, in which they inhere. The same substratum, if I may so speak, supports the most different modifications, without any difference in itself; and varies them, without any variation. Neither time, nor place, nor all the diversity of nature are able to produce any ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume

... A.M., and at 7 A.M. we were on the march. For the two hours after starting, the surface was tolerable and then changed for the worse; the remainder of the day's work being principally over a hard crust, which was just too brittle to bear the weight of a man, letting him through to a soft substratum, six or eight inches deep in the snow. Only those who have travelled in country like this can properly realize ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... exceptional cases when they allow us a glimpse into the heart and reins, they expect us to take a narrow interest in a peculiarly organized individual, and are wanting in every kind of background. However the psychological side in our drama is, with extraordinary art, reduced to a mere substratum, out of which an entirely new figure of tragedy develops, which combines in a wonderful fashion the deepest tragic shudder with the gentle transports of a hope that is not extinguished even in the blackest ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various

... remarked here, that the Roman villa at Northleigh, in Oxfordshire, examined and described by Mr. Hakewill, abounded with beautiful pavements. The substratum of one of these, which had been broken, was investigated, when it was found that the natural soil had been removed to a depth of near seven feet, and the space filled up with materials which bear a near resemblance to those ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... other—self-sacrificing, altruistic. These distinctions read very nicely, but they mean very little. There is no distinct line of demarkation between the two varieties of love, and one merges imperceptibly into the other. Most, if not all, of our apparently altruistic actions and feelings have an egotistic substratum; and the quality of the love depends upon the lover. In other words, there are not two separate, distinct varieties of love, but there are separate, distinct varieties of men. A fine and noble man will love finely and nobly; ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... Maisonette dans les Bois," "Victor, ou l'Enfant de la Foret,"—and many others of the same date and style so much discredited nowadays. And I thought that what caused the discredit now, accounted for their vogue formerly; that they had a substratum of truth under a mass of absurdity; that these stories of brigands in their traditional haunts, forests, caverns and subterranean passages, charmed by their likelihood the readers of those times to whom an attack on a coach by highwaymen with blackened faces was as natural ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre

... I was still awake and critical. You know there is a substratum of your mind which is critical, when you are dreaming, standing looking on outside you, ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson

... statesmen must consist,—qualities which experience alone can give,—excited considerable attention by their bold eloquence and hardy logic. They were suited to the time. But John Ardworth had that solidity of understanding which betokens more than talent, and which is the usual substratum of genius. He would not depend alone on the precarious and often unhonoured toils of polemical literature for that distinction on which he had fixed his steadfast heart. Patiently he plodded on through the formal drudgeries of his new profession, lighting ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... indomitable strength. In, however, all these forms of religion, whether inherently false from the beginning, or so overlaid in some after stage by the fictitious and the untrue as to have their original substratum of truth covered up by error and fable, there is such a want of coherency between the theistic and human elements, that we always find them undergoing a process of separation. We see the human element ever laying hold on the popular mind, and there manifesting itself in the ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... have been beneath all his coldness a substratum of warm and strong feeling. He possessed to a rare degree the power of making friends and of giving sympathy to his fellow-beings. The man who can command the affection of others, and enter into their emotions, must know how to feel himself. It ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... English gentleman. 'But now,' she added commiseratingly, 'ruined; ruined in his health and in his prospects.' A lady inquired if it was the verdict that had thus affected him. Lady Wathin's answer was reported over moral, or substratum, London: 'He is the victim of a fatal passion for his wife; and would take her back to-morrow were she to solicit his forgiveness.' Morality had something to say against this active marital charity, attributable, it was to be feared, to weakness of character on the part of the husband. Still Mrs. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... sober, discreet, self-seeking, decorous epicureanism and the rest, are not precisely the virtues that will save a people. There are certain old foundation virtues of another kind, which are the only safe substratum for national or personal salvation. These are courage—hard, muscular, manly courage—fortitude, patience, obedience to discipline, self-denial, self-sacrifice, veracity of purpose, and such like. These rough old virtues must lie at the base of all right ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... of commutators and direct the current, sometimes by one set of nerves, sometimes by others. The nervous system is like a tool held in the hand: it is a vehicle for action, we are told, and not a substratum for cognition. I cannot here say with what ingenuity, with what powerful logic, and with what close continuity of ideas M. Bergson develops his system, nor with what address ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... there was no difficulty in believing in the existence of consciousness apart from material organism; though he could not readily conceive of pure mind, or pure spirit, apart from some kind of substantial envelope or substratum. Many of the views suggested in "Man's Place in the Universe" as to man's spiritual progress hereafter, the reason or ultimate purpose for which he was brought into existence, were enlarged upon, later, in "The ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... transformations; cest lhomme invisible et impalpable de mme possible sans cesser dtre substantiel; cest le monde des esprits entrant sans absurdit dans la domaine des hypothses scientifiques; cest la possibilit pour le matrialiste de croire la vie doutre tombe, sans renoncer au substratum matriel quil croit ncessaire au ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton

... the horn of plenty filled to overflowing, prize flowers, fruit and vegetables everywhere. For the soil hereabouts, if indeed soil it can be called, and the climate of Bourron, possess very rare and specific qualities. On this light, dry sand, or dust covering a substratum of rock, vegetation springs up all but unbidden, and when once above ground literally takes care of itself. As to climate, its excellence may be summed up in the epithet, anti-asthmatic. Although we ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... of taste, that is of the subjective finality of nature by the judgment. But nothing can be known or disclosed to the object by means of this concept, which is indeterminate in itself and not adapted for knowledge. Its determining reason is perhaps situated in "the suprasensible substratum of humanity." Thus beauty becomes a symbol of morality. "The subjective principle alone, that is, the indeterminate idea of the suprasensible in us, can be indicated as the sole key to reveal this faculty, which remains ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce

... the Far East of Asia, and as we shall see, also even across the Pacific to America. Although in the different localities a great number of most varied ingredients enter into its composition, in most places where the dragon occurs the substratum of its anatomy consists of a serpent or a crocodile, usually with the scales of a fish for covering, and the feet and wings, and sometimes also the head, of an eagle, falcon, or hawk, and the forelimbs and sometimes the head of a lion. An association of anatomical features of so unnatural and ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... he might have taken Hilland into his confidence, he had, in terms substantially the same as those given, imagined his explanation, and he smiled as he portrayed to himself his friend's jocular response, which would have nevertheless its substratum of true sympathy. "Hilland would say," he thought, "'That is just like you, Graham. You can't smoke a cigar or make love to a girl without analyzing and philosophizing and arranging all the wisdom of Solomon in favor of your course. Now I would make love to a ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe

... notice now the facts submitted to us. First, at the base of the various departments of nature, we see a mass of apparently lifeless matter. Out of this crude substratum of the outward world we observe a vast variety of organized forms produced by a variously named but unknown Power. They spring in regular methods, in determinate shapes, exist on successive stages of rank, with more or ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... must ascend to the cold altitude of fifteen thousand feet, and then descend to the hot Valley of the Amazon, we were obliged to carry both woolen and cotton garments, besides rubber ponchos to shield them from the rain by day, and to form the first substratum of our bed at night. Two suits were needed in our long travel afoot through the forest; one kept dry for the nightly bivouac, the other for day service. At the close of each day's journey we doffed every thread of our wearing apparel, and donned the reserved suit, for we were daily drenched ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... the crow flies. When the Devon commission made its inquiry, the population upon this estate amounted to about 50,000. It contains mountain land, and the mountains are particularly wet, because, unlike the mountains in other parts of the country, the substratum is a stiff retentive clay. At that time there was not a spot of mountain or bog upon Lord Hertfort's estate that was not let by the acre. About one-third of the land is of first-rate quality; there are 15,000 or 16,000 acres of mountain, ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin

... in China, any more than despotism in New England. Bad men, somehow or other, must be coerced and punished. The more prevalent is depravity, so much the more necessary is despotic vigor: it will be so to the end of time. It is all nonsense to dream of liberty with a substratum of folly and vice. Unless evils can be remedied by the public itself, giving power to the laws which the people create, then physical force, hard and cold tyranny, must inevitably take the place. No country will long endure anarchy; and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord

... like process in Northern France, where Celt and Teuton combined in nearly equal numbers, with, as in our case, a limited local infusion of the Norse. The result cannot, however, be identical, the French lacking our Anglo-Saxon substratum, with its valuable traditions and habitudes of political thought. The balance between impulse and conservatism has never been, in this country, long or seriously disturbed, and is probably as sound now as a hundred years ago. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... of it: Liszt does not mention it, Hiller and Franchomme told me they never heard of it, and notwithstanding Karasowski's contrary statement there is nothing to be found about it in Sowinski's Musiciens polonais. Still, the story may have a substratum of truth, to arrive at which it has only to be shorn of its poetical accessories and exaggerations, of which, however, there is little ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... defined in virtue of its having life. Between the living body thus defined and the Soul or Vital principle, a marked distinction must be drawn. The body cannot be said to 'subsist in' something else; rather must we say that it is the matter or substratum in which something else subsists. And what we mean by the soul is just this substance in the sense of the form or specific character that subsists in the natural body which is potentially living. In other words, the Soul is substance as realisation, only, however, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... Vaygats Island and the southern part of Novaya Zemlya (to 73 deg. N.L.) of limestone and beds of schist[88] which slope towards the sea with a steep escarpment three to fifteen metres high, but form, besides, the substratum of a level plain, full of small collections of water which is quite free of snow in summer. North of 73 deg. again the west coast of the Kara Sea is occupied by mountains, which near Matotschkin are very high, and distributed ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... vices, nor ought he to be. We hold life, liberty, and property in this country upon a system of oaths; oaths founded on a religious belief of some sort. And that system which would strike away the great substratum, destroy the safe possession of life, liberty, and property, destroy all the institutions of civil society, cannot and will not be considered as entitled to the protection of a court of equity. It has been said, on the other ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... Pliny has a story which looks like a ghost story; but it is all moonshine—a mere simulacrum.] as to reject all counterparts or affinities from other modes of the supernatural. The Christian ghost is too awful a presence, and with too large a substratum of the real, the impassioned, the human, for our present purposes. We deal chiefly with the wilder and more rial forms of superstition; not so far off from fleshly nature as the purely allegoric—not so near as the penal, the ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... the Carlovingian Empire,—a portion of the work as important, as it is in a great measure new, to the English reader. Not the least valuable part of the book will be Sir Francis Palgrave's account of the nature and character of the Continental Chronicles, which form the substratum of his work, but which, existing only in the great collections of Duchesne, Bouquet, Pertz, &c., are generally very imperfectly ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various

... Such is the substratum for this content considered on the subjective side. Here the content is that Being in which is no difference, no schism; Being which abides in itself, the universal; and thought is the form for ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various

... part to this remaining functional disposition in the central nervous tracts concerned. And so, while on the psychical or subjective side we are unable to find anything permanent in memory, on the physical or objective side we do find such a permanent substratum. ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully

... this illicit love, and out of it, gross as it looks, alone arises the possibility of the "Vita Nuova;" arises the possibility of the romantic and semi-religious love of the Middle Ages. Or, rather, let us say that this mere loose love of the albas and Wachtlieder and "Flamenca," is the substratum, nay, is the very flesh and blood, of the spiritual passion to which, in later days, we ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee

... Saints contain an immense quantity of material of first rate importance for the historian of the Celtic church. Underneath the later concoction of fable is a solid substratum of fact which no serious student can ignore. Even where the narrative is otherwise plainly myth or fiction it sheds many a useful sidelight on ancient manners, customs and laws as well as on the curious and often intricate operations of the ...
— The Life of St. Mochuda of Lismore • Saint Mochuda

... of the Roman code. Ethnology shows us that the Romans and the Hindoos sprang from the same original stock, and there is indeed a striking resemblance between what appear to have been their original customs. Even now, Hindoo jurisprudence has a substratum of forethought and sound judgment, but irrational imitation has engrafted in it an immense apparatus of cruel absurdities. From these corruptions the Romans were protected by their code. It was compiled while the ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

... thus immersed in ignorance, destitute of rational ideas and of a solid substratum of thought, they can never experience those pleasures and enjoyments which flow from the exercise of the understanding, and which correspond to the dignity of a rational ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew

... and Plato son of Ariston, both natives of Athens, entertain the same opinion concerning the universe; for they suppose three principles, God, matter, and the idea. God is the universal understanding; matter is that which is the first substratum, accommodated for the generation and corruption of beings; the idea is an incorporeal essence, existing in the cogitations and apprehensions of God; for God is the soul and mind of ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... Back's Expedition, by Dr. Richardson. He says, "The subsoil north of latitude 56 degs. is perpetually frozen, the thaw on the coast not penetrating above three feet, and at Bear Lake, in latitude 64 degs., not more than twenty inches. The frozen substratum does not of itself destroy vegetation, for forests flourish on the surface, at ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... most important characters of the times. Its author has bequeathed us the records of his heart, the very reflection of his energetic mind; and his quaint but happy narrative clears up numerous disputed points, throws light into many of the dark corners of history, and lays bare the hidden substratum of events which gave birth to, and supported the visible ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross

... little misunderstanding of the morning, ending as it had done in making the aunt, an essentially just woman, blame herself for hasty judgment, had drawn her and her elder niece closer together than had yet been the case. And no doubt there was a substratum of resemblance in their natures, deeper and more real than the curious capricious likeness which had struck Marmaduke so oddly—which was indeed perhaps but a casual coming to the surface ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth

... others also, or know that we have it in our power to experience them. But a fixed law of connection, making the sensations occur together, does not, say these philosophers, necessarily require what is called a substratum to support them. The conception of a substratum is but one of many possible forms in which that connection presents itself to our imagination; a mode of, as it were, realizing the idea. If there ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... the vast drama or play of the universe, according to which "quality" is prepotent, and marks the thing or being with its "signature." They constitute in their eternal nature what Boehme calls The Three Principles that underlie all reality of every order. The first principle is the substratum or essence of these first three "qualities," the nature-tendencies at the level of forces, which he generally calls the fire-principle, i.e. the dark fire, before the "flash" has come. The second principle is the substratum or essence ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... gaps in my own limited experiences of that enigmatical being who was half divine (though, I think, rather wicked or at any rate unmoral in her way) and yet all woman. It is true that it showed her in lights very different from and higher than those in which she had presented herself to me. Yet the substratum of her character was the same, or rather of her characters, for of these she seemed to have several in a single body, being, as she said of herself to me, "not One but Many and not ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... O Soul, art the reflection of the Supreme Being, who possesses the power of illusion and is the substratum of all, while He, the adorable, shines forth as Himself the original; the one moon in the sky is seen manifold in water and the like; therefore there is a difference between thee and Brahman as between ...
— The Tattva-Muktavali • Purnananda Chakravartin

... or partially documentary, would be adopted under the sanction of the Apostles, who were as in all things, so especially in this, the appointed and divinely-guided overseers of the whole Church. This common substratum of Apostolic teachings—never formally adopted by all, but subject to all the varieties of diction and arrangement, addition and omission, incident to transmission through many individual minds, and into many different localities—I ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... is the marsh land that lies at the roots of the sandstone heights that culminate in Hind Head, Leith Hill, and the Devil's Jumps. As already said, the great mass of Bagshot sand lies upon a substratum of clay. The sand drinks in every drop of rain that falls on the surface. This percolates through it till it reaches the clay, which refuses to absorb it, or let it sink through to other beds. Thereupon the accumulated water breaks forth ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould

... observable in the picture of the Transfiguration by Raphael. The heat of candles on altars is supposed to have been the cause of this not uncommon defect; but heat, if considerable, would rather produce the contrary appearance. It would seem that the layer of paint, with its substratum, slightly operates to prevent the wood from contracting or becoming concave on that side; it might therefore be concluded that a similar protection at the back, by equalizing the conditions, would tend to keep the wood flat. The oak panel on which the picture by Van Eyck ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... psychology and physiology, Dr. Max Dessoir, of Berlin, following, indeed, M. Taine, has arrived, as we saw, at somewhat similar conclusions. 'This fully conscious life of the spirit,' in which we moderns now live, 'seems to rest upon a substratum of reflex action of a hallucinatory type.' Our actual modern condition is not 'fundamental,' and 'hallucination represents, at least in its nascent condition, the main ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang

... relations and conditions of life. The connexion between religions faith and political practice is, in truth, far closer than is generally thought. Public opinion has not ripened into a knowledge that religious error is the intangible but real substratum of all political injustice. Though the 'schoolmaster' has done much, there still remain and hold some away among us, many honest and energetic assertors of 'the rights of man,' who have to learn that a people in the ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell

... attributes of an external substance which is the cause of sensations. But the same epistemological principle readily reduces these also to dependence on mind, for, like the secondary qualities, their content is given only in perception. Hylas is then driven to defend a general material substratum, which is the cause of ideas, but to which none of the definite content of these ideas can be attributed. In short, he has put all the content of knowledge on the one side, and admitted its inseparability from the perceiving spirit, and left the being of things ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... Cossack circle. The law of the forest afforded an education in itself. The intimate relationship of Russian family life, from the highest to the lowest, was constantly laid bare before me with all its romance and mediaeval trappings and its sordid substratum of violence and superstition. In fact, I became so interested in this work that it was with the greatest regret that I relinquished it for a more ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward

... a hard fruit proposition. Try spineless cactus, the fruits of which are delicious. Blasting would help if there is a moist substratum below the hardpan and might enable you to grow many fruits. If your land is hard and dry all the way down, blasting would not help you unless you can get irrigation. Presumably your rainfall is too small for fruit unless you strike ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson

... expedition, undertaken by Jason and fifty of the most celebrated heroes of Greece. The Argonauts recovered the fleece by the help of the celebrated sorceress Medea, daughter of Aeetes, who fell desperately in love with the gallant but faithless Jason. In the story of the voyage of the Argo, a substratum of truth probably exists, though overlaid by a mass of fiction. The ram which carried Phryxus to Colchis is by some supposed to have been the name of the ship in which he embarked. The fleece of gold is thought to represent the immense treasures ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... nations of the West, the Greeks and the Romans. They greatly increased the heritage by their own spiritual achievements, and so produced a much more complex and diversified civilization, which has served as the substratum for the further development of the better part of mankind. Even the classic nations had to step aside as soon as their historical mission was fulfilled. They left the field free for the younger nations, with greater capability of living, which at that time had barely worked their ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow

... called "basic lines." These held their ground persistently in the spectra of two or more metals after all possible "impurities" had been eliminated, and were therefore held to attest the presence of a common substratum of matter in a simpler state of aggregation than any with ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... which the bride's mother is supposed to give her on this occasion, in which the desire imputed to the caste to make money out of their daughters is satirised. They are no doubt libellous as being a gross exaggeration, but may contain some substratum of truth. The gist of them is as follows: "Girl, if you are my daughter, heed what I say. I will make you many sweetmeats and speak words of wisdom. Always treat your husband better than his parents. ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... there is no certainty of Man being a remote blood cousin of the monkey, it is at least certain that, in his structure, he is an animal closely related to the monkey, provided with canine teeth, carnivorous, formerly cannibal and, therefore, a hunter and bellicose. Hence there is in him a steady substratum of brutality and ferocity, and of violent and destructive instincts, to which must be added, if he is French, gaiety, laughter, and a strange propensity to gambol and act insanely in the havoc he makes; we shall see him at work.—In the second place, at the outset, his condition casts him naked ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... which form the substance or substratum of the greatest books are not primarily the products of pure thought; they have a far deeper origin, and their immense power of enlightenment and enrichment lies in the depth of their rootage in the unconscious life of the race. ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... on Jamestown Island is a circular unlined pit, 14 feet in top diameter, excavated 7 feet into a sandy substratum, and corresponding in general character to known 17th-and 18th-century ice pits in England. This pit which lies 250 feet east of the Visitor Center may have served a spacious house which once stood nearby. It may be assumed that the missing surface structure was circular, ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter

... authorities are there given, as belonging to the 'large mass of critics' who recognise that the Ignatian Epistles 'can only be considered later and spurious compositions.' Of these Bleek (already cited in a previous note) expresses no definite opinion. Gfroerer declares that the substratum (Grundlage) of the seven Epistles is genuine, though 'it appears as if later hands had introduced interpolations into both recensions' (he is speaking of the Long Recension and the Vossian). Harless avows that he must 'decidedly reject with the most considerable critics ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot

... Druidism—invites the attention of the antiquary, on the north-west point of Cefyn-bryn. We may here remark that this district, especially the coast, offers a rich harvest to the geologist. The general substratum of the peninsula is limestone and marble, bounded to the north by an immense iron and coalfield. The limestone stratum is continually "cropping out" in the interior, and of course it can be worked at a trifling expense. This may account for the general healthiness of the district. Though rain in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various



Words linked to "Substratum" :   surface, indigenous language, stratum



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