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Plastic   Listen
noun
plastic  n.  A substance composed predominantly of a synthetic organic high polymer capable of being cast or molded; many varieties of plastic are used to produce articles of commerce (after 1900). (MW10 gives origin of word as 1905)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Plastic" Quotes from Famous Books



... which all effective education is based. They recognized that in the plastic days of childhood and youth ideals and character and efficiency could best be developed, and that education was not the work of a moment, but a gradual, ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent

... written verse but must have felt the pain of erasing some happy line, some striking stanza, which, however excellent in itself, did not exactly suit the place for which it was destined. How curiously does an author mould and remould the plastic verse in order to fit in the favourite thought; and when he finds that he cannot introduce it, as Corporal Trim says, any how, with what reluctance does he at last reject the intractable, but still cherished offspring of his brain! Mr. Tennyson manages this ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... unhelpful, because of the mass of unanalysed and scarcely suspected assumptions upon which it rested. The facts were ignored that trade is a bye-product and not an essential factor in social life, that property is a plastic and fluctuating convention, that value is capable of impersonal treatment only in the case of the most generalised requirements. Wealth was measured by the standards of exchange. Society was regarded as a practically ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... was all himself again, glad, hopeful, expectant, with the sense of being once more under a roof, touched by a woman's hand. Then he looked keenly into the face before him—such a strange face! He was tempted to cry out in terror; but the mind is plastic in early youth: he had learned the lesson that now his protests and shrieks availed naught. A strange face, of a copper hue, with lank black hair hanging straight on both sides, a high nose, a wide, flat, thin-lipped mouth, and great, dark, soft eyes amidst many wrinkles. He ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock

... youth includes travelling for six years in foreign countries under private tutors, studying human history, ethnic, social, political, industrial, aesthetic, religious; gems of poetry; the elements of geometry; mechanics; art, plastic, and graphic; reading Confucius, Sakya-muni, Themistocles, Socrates, Julius Caesar, Paul, Mahommed, Charlemagne, Alfred, Gregory VII., St. Bernard, St. Francis, Savonarola, Luther, Queen Elizabeth, Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Homer, Virgil, ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale

... moment's escape. In the case of a murderer who has been apprehended, tried, condemned and executed, the whole of the tragedy and its sequel would be, not only lived over in imagination but repeated automatically, in fact, and worked out in full detail in the plastic matter of the astral region. Probably few people have the imagination to comprehend what the murderer feels of apprehension and fear at his trial when his life is in the balance; or what he suffers while hiding from justice and making futile efforts to escape ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers

... young,' he thought, thrilling. And youth was plastic—he, the sculptor, could surely mould her. Besides, was she not Sir Asher's daughter? She must surely have inherited some of his love for Palestine and his people. It was this Philistine set that had spoiled her. Julius, ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... when we are young, but if we have already passed the youthful plastic period the time to start to control our habits is right now, as we will never ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont

... attractive, aristocratic-looking girl, Shirley Rossmore had no serious claims to academic beauty. Her features were irregular, and the firm and rather thin mouth lines disturbed the harmony indispensable to plastic beauty. Yet there was in her face something far more appealing—soul and character. The face of the merely beautiful woman expresses nothing, promises nothing. It presents absolutely no key to the soul within, and often there is no soul within to have ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein

... evangelisation. But opposed as he was to prevailing influences, he was yet a man of his time. We can hardly fancy the John Wesley whom we know living in any other century than his own. Spending the most plastic, perhaps also the most reflective period of his life in a chief centre of theological activity, he was not unimpressed by the storm of argument which was at that time going on around him. It was uncongenial ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... a cloud of rapidly-moving, evanescent forms, has already been described; we have now to note how it is affected when the human mind formulates a definite, purposeful thought or wish. The effect produced is of the most striking nature. The thought seizes upon the plastic essence, and moulds it instantly into a living being of appropriate form—a being which when once thus created is in no way under the control of its creator, but lives out a life of its own, the length of which ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater

... late, the long, hot day declining. There had been nine hours of fighting. "Nine hours—ninety hours—ninety minutes?" thought Edward. "Time's plastic like everything else. Double it, fold it back on itself, stretch it out, do anything with it—" He took the cartridges from a trunk of a man, crept on to a soldier shot through the hip. The latter clutched him with a blackened hand. "Has Marse ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... alluded to the flash song of Jerry Juniper, I may, perhaps, be allowed to make a few observations upon this branch of versification. It is somewhat curious, with a dialect so racy, idiomatic, and plastic as our own cant, that its metrical capabilities should have been so little essayed. The French have numerous chansons d'argot, ranging from the time of Charles Bourdigne and Villon down to that of Vidocq and Victor Hugo, the last ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... patrons, the Burgomaster Tulp. Of the masters who have striven pre-eminently after truth he is, beyond all question, one of the greatest that ever lived. In order to succeed in this aim, he acquired a correctness of drawing, a kind of modelling which imparts an almost plastic effect to his animals, an extraordinary execution of detail in the most solid impasto, and a truth of colouring which harmonises astonishingly with the time of day. In his landscapes, which generally consist of a few willows in the foreground, and of a wide view over meadows, the most delicate ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies

... kind of French centralisation in the world of fashion has been established, which has over-ridden and obliterated all the dress boundaries of civilised nations. All the upper and middle classes of Christendom centre themselves to one focus of taste and merge into one plastic commonwealth, to be shaped and moulded virtually by a common tailor. Their coats, vests, pantaloons, boots and shoes are made substantially after the same pattern. For a while, hats stood out with some show ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt

... volumes before us. I will not call the labours of the biographer final. So great a character will challenge reconstruction. In the coming time some sympathetic spirit, with the requisite strength, knowledge, and solvent power, will, I doubt not, render these materials plastic, give them more perfect organic form, and send through them, with less of interruption, the currents of Faraday's life. 'He was too good a man,' writes his present biographer, 'for me to estimate rightly, and too great a philosopher for me to understand ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... largely to her growing up. The sight of his work and his methods; the occasional talks she overheard between him and his scientific comrades; the tones of irony and denial in the atmosphere about him; his antagonisms, his bitternesses, worked strongly upon her still plastic nature. Moreover she felt to her heart's core that he was unsuccessful; there were appointments he should have had, but had failed to get, and it was the religious party, the "clerical crew" of Convocation, ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... dwelt in the seventh century before our era on the banks of Tigris and Euphrates flourished in literature as well as in the plastic arts, and had an alphabet of its own. The Assyrians sometimes wrote with a sharp reed, for a pen, upon skins, wooden tablets, or papyrus brought from Egypt. In this case they used cursive letters of a Phoenician character. But when they wished to preserve their written documents, they employed ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous

... clearly it is in some sense true that the child's whole nature, its modicum of plasticity included, is handed on from its parents. Our business in this chapter, however, is on the whole to put out of our thoughts this plastic side of the inherited life-force. The more or less rigid, definite, systematized characters—these form the hereditary factor, the race. Now none of these are ever quite fixed. A certain measure of plasticity has to be counted in as part of their ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett

... and speed of limb to escape it. In other words, increase of brain and sense-power and increase of speed were the primary requisites. The clumsy early Condylarthra failed to meet the tests, and perished; the other branches of the race were more plastic, and, under the pressure of a formidable enemy, were gradually moulded into the horse, the deer, the ox, the ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... Saunderson's face had been capable of expressing more than displeasure, it would have done so, but he was of no plastic build, mind or body, and "displeasure" was the nearest he could get to ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant

... capacity for, and love of, liquid refreshment. Perhaps the archdeacon thought that the West was a sort of kindergarten, where children like The Babe are given, at small expense, object-lessons and exercises peculiarly adapted to young and plastic minds. In Central America certain tribes living by the seaboard throw their children into the surf, wherein they sink or learn to swim, as the ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell

... confirm the first impression she had made; then her dark, troubled gaze and the sullen droop of her mouth returned to give the lie to what he could but feel to be a possible misjudgment. In the end, he concluded wisely enough that, like the most of us, she was probably but plastic matter for the mark of circumstance—that her development would be, after all, according to the events she was called upon to face. The possibility that Destiny, which is temperament, should have already selected her as one of those who come into their spiritual heritage only through ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... resembling starch-gum (or dextrine, as it is called) in its properties, which is very easily converted into sugar. The starch of barley approaches in many properties to cellulose, and is, therefore, less digestible. Oats are particularly rich in plastic substances; Scotch oats are richer than those grown in England or in Germany. This kind of grain contains in its ashes, after deduction of the silica of the husks, very nearly the same ingredients as ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... led back from Babylon to the Black Sea shore; the ancestresses of many a man who conquered the East in Alexander's host, and fought with Porus in the far Punjab. And were these women mere dolls? These men mere gladiators? Were they not the parents of philosophy, science, poetry, the plastic arts? We talk of education now. Are we more educated than were the ancient Greeks? Do we know anything about education, physical, intellectual, or aesthetic, and I may say moral likewise— religious education, of course, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... good citizen must begin at the cradle, and be continued through the plastic period of boyhood and carried forward by his parents, until the youth crosses his native threshold to act his part and assume his responsibilities in the broader field of his ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.

... of the characteristics of the Andalusian. His lyrical genius is not only at odds with that of Southern Spain, but also with his own inclination for the plastic arts, says Blanco Garcia. "How could a Seville poet, a lover of pictorial and sculptural marvels, so withdraw from the outer form as to embrace the pure idea, with that melancholy subjectivism as common in the gloomy regions ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

... in all the graces of sex—histrionic, plastic, many-faceted—Berenice debated for the fraction of a minute what she should do and say. She did not love the Lieutenant as he loved her by any means, and somehow this discovery concerning her mother ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... impulse to do. But now he came forth from all reserves, and offered himself to whomever the chances of the way offered to him, with a ready sensibility that made its way through every barrier that even English exclusiveness, in whatever rank of life, could set up. The plastic character of Middleton was perhaps a variety of American nature only presenting itself under an individual form; he could throw off the man of our day, and put on a ruder nature, but then it was with a certain fineness, that made this only [a] distinction between it and ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... alteration of elasticity, a third state, geometrically defined and describable as a period of fluidity, corresponding to the possibility of a continuous deformation under the constant action of the same strain. This particular condition is only realized with very malleable or plastic bodies; and it may even be regarded as characteristic of such bodies, since its absence is noticeable in all non-malleable or fragile bodies, which break without being deformed. It is already known that the period of altered elasticity for hard or tempered steel is much less than for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various

... he'd seen one, the time he'd asked the tech what its name was. The tech had been picking some of them and putting them into plastic bags, and the faint spark of MacNeil's dim curiosity had been brought to feebly ...
— Cum Grano Salis • Gordon Randall Garrett

... of these poets, among whom Vida, with his 'Christiad' and Sannazaro, with his three books, 'De partu Virginis' hold the first place. Sannazaro (b. 1458, d. 1530) is impressive by the steady and powerful flow of his verse, in which Christian and pagan elements are mingled without scruple, by the plastic vigor of his description, and by the perfection of his workmanship. He could venture to introduce Virgil's fourth Eclogue into his song of the shepherds at the manger without fearing a comparison. In treating of the unseen world, he sometimes gives proofs of a ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... the righteousness of the kingdom is "poor in spirit." Then the next is a little deeper, "they that mourn." Because now you must get plastic, you must get broken, you must get like the metal in the fire, which the Master can mould; and so, it is not enough to see your unrighteousness, but deeply to feel it, deeply to regret it, deeply to mourn over it, to own it not a little thing that sin has come into your life. ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson

... fictile world; and man is the most fingent plastic of creatures. A world not fixable; not fathomable! An unfathomable Somewhat, which is Not we; which we can work with, and live amidst,—and model, miraculously in our miraculous Being, and name World.—But if the very Rocks and Rivers ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... among Italians or Frenchmen they were received with tumultuous welcome. They spoke the language of the people; and in the vulgar speech of the people—rugged, plastic, and reckless of grammar—the message came as glad tidings of great joy. When they tried the same method in Germany, we are told, they signally failed. The gift of tongues, alas! had ceased. That, at any rate, was denied, even ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... its mature and final stage. This adult form was regarded not merely as the goal actually reached through successive stages of growth. It was conceived as the end aimed at, and achieved through the force of some vital or ideal principle shaping the plastic material and directing the process of growth. In short, evolution implied ideal ends controlling physical means. Yet we find with Spencer, as prevailingly also with others in the study of the natural sciences, the ideas of end and of cause looked at askance. They ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... mid this dance Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: 165 Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent, Try thee and ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... herself he seemed "infinitely handsomer and more attractive" than when, sixteen years previously, she had first seen him. On the whole therefore she was well pleased with his new passion for clay, and could wish for him loads of the plastic stuff in which to riot. Afterwards, in his days of sorrow in London, when he compared the colour of his life to that of a snow-cloud, it seemed to him as if one minute of these months at Rome would yield him gold enough to make the brightness ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... spring-time of civilizations, seems to grow abundant as a nation gets older, individuality fades, and education spreads; that is, his brain had extraordinary receptive powers, and no great creativeness. Quickly acquiring any kind of knowledge he saw around him, and having a plastic adaptability more common in woman than in man, he changed colour like a chameleon as the society he found himself in assumed a higher and more artificial tone. He had not many original ideas, and yet there was scarcely an idea to which, under proper training, ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... sculpture in clay may be summed up under the word "Plastic," and all of those in stone, under the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... and beauty by the electro-magnetic Aether. Then in the very centre of the Universe there dwells that Supreme Being whom we call God, who is at once the one real fountain and source of all the light and life of the Universe itself. For it is His universal Spirit that moulds and fashions the plastic matter into the many forms which it assumes, and uses the various modes of motion, as heat, light, electricity and magnetism, as instruments to build up and erect in all their beauty and harmony the innumerable systems ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper

... and groove suture proposed by Professor Pancoast, and recommended by Professor Gross, is said to be specially suitable for such plastic operations. It is very complicated, as it requires one edge to be bevelled to a wedge shape, the other being grooved to include the wedge, thus opposing four raw surfaces, which are retained in contact by being transfixed by ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... casting the slabs, and while they are in a plastic state, mouldings (if required) or other ornaments, having a suitable key, are inserted in the plastic surface, which is finished off to them (Figs. 7, 8, and 10). The slabs may also be cast with ornaments, etc., complete at one operation (Fig. 11), but it is more economical to have ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 • Various

... Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world compelling there All new successions to the forms ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... thoughts: an influence capable either of forwarding or hindering its work. The ancient Greeks were well acquainted with this fact when they assisted Nature to create beautiful forms by placing in the mother's room statues of rare plastic perfection, and removing from her sight every suggestion of ugliness. More than this; certain intense emotions of the pregnant woman are capable of momentarily effacing the image of the model which the builder ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... bigotry. His body was almost forgotten, while the philanthropists were trying to decide what to do with his soul. Few of the reverend gentlemen "would be content unless they could seize him when his young nature was plastic and try to imprint on immortal clay the trade-mark of ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... stage is that of catalepsy, certainly not a healthy condition to be in. Its grand feature is a plastic immobility by which the subject maintains all the attitudes given to his body and limbs, but with this peculiarity, that the limbs and features act in unison. Join the hands of the patient as if in devout ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens

... madnesses, the one refusing feeling to the organs of feeling, the other lodging a pure spirit in a bug, somebody thought of a middle path. It was instinct. And what is instinct? Oh, oh, it is a substantial form; it is a plastic form; it is I do not know what! it is instinct. I shall be of your opinion so long as you will call the majority of things, "I do not know what"; so long as your philosophy begins and ends with "I do not know what", ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire

... cowed,—we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... between life and death, turning an exquisite shade of purple and black as each new coughing fit seized him. This not unusual phenomenon impressed its vivid seal upon the plastic wax of his unfledged memories with extraordinary precision. In after life, for a long while, he was quite unable to gaze at an ordinary muscat grape or a coal-scuttle without either biting his comforter right ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward

... Puritans; that their rule of life cut them off from an enjoyment of the dramatic literature of their race, then just closing its most splendid epoch; that they had little poetry or music and no architecture and plastic art. But we must never forget that to men of their creed the Sunday sermons and the week-day "lectures" served as oratory, poetry, and drama. These outpourings of the mind and heart of their spiritual leaders were the very stuff of human passion ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... she lay in the utility bed, the squeaking of the springs became the sound of turning wheels. The plastic walls and ceiling of the eightieth-floor apartment turned to billowing canvas, and the thunder of the passing jets transformed itself into the drumming ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch

... operating persistently. Herein lies its importance. It is a stable force. It never sleeps. This natural environment, this physical basis of history, is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem—shifting, plastic, progressive, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... the little lax figure among the pillows. Then she took the rug from him and covered the child, with quick, capable movements of her beautiful worn hands. Raven, watching her, felt a clutch at his throat. Surely there was nothing in the known world of plastic action so wonderful as these movements of mothers' hands in their work of easing a child. With a last quick touch on the rug, drawing it slightly away from the baby cheek, she returned to her chair, and Raven again ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... out the fairy tale is to rob human beings of their childhood, that transition period in which breadth and richness are given to human life so that it may be full and plastic enough to permit the creation of those exacting efficiencies which increasing knowledge and responsibility compel. We cannot omit the adventures of fairyland from our educational program. They are too well adapted to the restless, active, ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready

... fears: the pot-maker knows quite well how matters stand. She takes good care not to close the top with the plastic earth which supplied her with the walls. At some distance from the tip of the nipple, the clay ceases to play its part and makes way for fibrous particles, for tiny scraps of undigested fodder, which, arranged one above the other with a certain order, form a sort of thatched roof over the egg. ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... will hardly now be popular. It involves too much mutilation and too much transformation. When it has done its work little is left but bone and muscular tissue, and these are so transfused with foreign substances that a form moulded from plastic matter or sculptured from stone could almost as truly be considered that of the lamented dead as this. Moreover, indefinite preservation of the dead is not desirable, and is not desired. The uses to which the Egyptian Pharaohs and their humbler subjects have been put in these days of indelicacy ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various

... held out to endure, there would be real beaten biscuits for the judge's Sunday morning breakfast. And so, having risen with the dawn or a little later, Aunt Dilsey, wielding a maul-headed tool of whittled wood, would pound the dough with rhythmic strokes until it was as plastic as sculptor's modeling clay and as light as eiderdown, full of tiny hills and hollows, in which small yeasty bubbles rose and spread and burst like foam globules on the flanks of gentle wavelets. Then, with her ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... with a start how unchanging and conventionalized is the face of the living man and woman of these parts, handsome, but motionless as pure form. There is also an underlying meanness, secretive, cruel. It is all part of the beauty, the pure, plastic beauty. The body also of the Christus is stiff and conventionalized, yet curiously beautiful in proportion, and in the static tension which makes it unified into one clear thing. There is no movement, no possible movement. The being is fixed, finally. The whole body is locked in one knowledge, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence

... daughter of an industrious dyer in purple, the calm, refreshing charm of divine women? I at least am neither foolish nor unjust enough to do so. The degree of beauty Althea possesses would entirely satisfy me for the Arachne. But when I imagine a plastic work faithful to the model of yesterday evening—though I have seen a great deal with my own eyes, and am always ready to defer to riper judgment—I would think, while looking at it: This statue came to the artist from the stage, but never from Nature. Such would be my view, and I am not one ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... his pace at the 17th floor as two other mechs turned in ahead of him. They were obviously butchers or meat-cutters; where the right hand should have been on each of them there stuck out a wicked, foot-long knife. As they approached the foot of the stairs they stopped to slip the knives into the plastic sheaths that were bolted to their chestplates. Jon followed them down the ramp into ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison

... and purplous cheeks whose velvet smoothness is like the Venus flower, half in bloom, that new-born flesh which palpitates softly with desire and voluptuousness, that hand which you press so delicately, those round thighs, those plastic buttocks, that voice sweet and touching,—what comparison can be made between all this and pronounced features, rough beard, hard breast, hairy body, and the strong disagreeable voice of man? Juvenal has wonderfully expended all his bile in ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... the defects of his predecessors, succeeded, by virtue of his "plastic energy and power of harmonious modulation" in recreating the measure. He found it "monotonous, monosyllabic, and divided into five feet of tolerably regular alternate short and long [i. e., unstressed and stressed]. He left it various in form and structure, sometimes ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum

... for good, was the indispensable antecedent to any general and energetic endeavour to modify the conditions that surround him. The omnipotence of early instruction, of laws, of the method of social order, over the infinitely plastic impulses of the human creature—this was the maxim which brought men of such widely different temperament and leanings to the common enterprise. Everybody can see what wide and deep-reaching bearings such a doctrine possessed; how it raised all the questions connected with psychology and the formation ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... craters there has been much discussion. Some have considered them to be evidence of violent volcanic action in the dim past; others, again, as the result of the impact of meteorites upon the lunar surface, when the moon was still in a plastic condition; while a third theory holds that they were formed by the bursting of huge bubbles during the escape into space of gases from the interior. The question is, indeed, a very difficult one. Though volcanic action, such as would result ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage

... circumstance that inflammation may attack these in any situation and produce the same effect, is the permanent or organic stricture. Of this disease the forms are as various as the situations are, for as certainly as it may reasonably be supposed that the plastic lymph, effused in an inflamed state of the urethra from any cause, does not give rise to stricture of any special or particular form, exclusive of all others; so as certainly may it be inferred that, in a structurally uniform canal, inflammation points to no one particular place ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise

... most accomplished of historians and critics, Oulibischeff, sums up the place of Cherubini in musical art in these words: "If on the one hand Gluck's calm and plastic grandeur, and on the other the tender and voluptuous charm of the melodies of Piccini and Zacchini, had suited the circumstances of a state of society sunk in luxury and nourished with classical ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris

... it is for a parent or teacher to ruin a child's constructive ability, to change a naturally, positive creative mind to a negative, non-producing one, by chilling the child's enthusiasm, by projecting into his plastic mind the idea that he is stupid, dull, lazy, a "blockhead" and good-for-nothing; that he will never amount to anything; that it is foolish for him to try to be much, because he has not the ability or physical stamina to enable him to accomplish what many others ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... chemistry. It is now found that only a small number of substances ever enter into the composition of animal bodies.20 The food of man consists of nitrogenized and non nitrogenized substances. The latter are the elements of respiration; the former alone compose the plastic elements of nutrition, and they are few in number and comparatively limited in extent. "All life depends on a relatively small quantity of matter. Over and over again, as the modeller fashions his clay, are plant and animal formed out of the same material." The ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... shapes our thoughts for us;—the waves of conversation roll them as the surf rolls the pebbles on the shore. Let me modify the image a little. I rough out my thoughts in talk as an artist models in clay. Spoken language is so plastic,—you can pat and coax, and spread and shave, and rub out, and fill up, and stick on so easily when you work that soft material, that there is nothing like it for modelling. Out of it come the shapes which you turn into marble or bronze in your immortal books, if you happen to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... issued a rocket pistol and a plastic water tube. Chief Slichow emphasized that the keepers of rations could hardly, in an emergency, give even the appearance of favoring themselves in regard to food. They would go without. Kolin maintained a standard expression as the ...
— The Talkative Tree • Horace Brown Fyfe

... the hammer is a gracious bearded figure, clad in Gaulish dress, and he carries also a cup. His plastic type is derived from that of the Alexandrian Serapis, ruler of the underworld, and that of Hades-Pluto.[82] His emblems, especially that of the hammer, are also those of the Pluto of the Etruscans, with whom the Celts had been in contact.[83] He is thus a Celtic Dispater, an underworld ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch

... a revolutionary plastic which Mr. Swift had developed, possessed amazing insulating properties against both heat and radiation. One of its secret ingredients came from certain plants found only in Far Eastern waters. Mr. Swift hoped to transplant ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton

... goods (plastic, furniture, batteries, textiles, soap, cigarettes, flour), agricultural products; oil refining, aluminum, steel, lead, cement; ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... that fellow's throat! Let her be happy, if she could keep her lover from him! And suddenly, he stopped in his tracks, for there on a sandwich-board just in front of him were the words: "Daphne Wing. Pantheon. Daphne Wing. Plastic Danseuse. Poetry of Motion. To-day at ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... was the exact opposite of Zhukovsky, being the first to grasp the real significance of the mood of the ancient classical poets, and to appropriate not only their views on life and enjoyment, but even their plastic and thoroughly artistic mode of expression. While Zhukovsky removed poetry from earth and rendered it ethereal, Batiushkoff fixed it to earth and gave it a body, demonstrating all the entrancing charm of tangible reality. Yet, in language, point of ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... much? Haven't you spoiled anything?" "Oh, I don't think so," he replied; "when I have a work that demands a particular tension of the mind, I am in a state of extraordinary nervous excitement; images are clearer, my senses are more alert, and for the form, why, the style is plastic, and steadily becomes better in proportion as the tension becomes stronger." She sighed, and added: "You are exhausting yourself and you will ruin your health. Just look at S. He spent two years in writing one ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps

... vehicles by which the pigment is made fluent and plastic are quite as important in their effects. They not only have to do with the business of drying, owing to the substances used as dryers, but they may have to do with the chemical action of one pigment ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst

... hollows and slopes, that carry at once the air of vegetative dilatation and expansion:—Or, was there even a time when these immense masses of calcareous matter were thrown into fermentation by some adventitious moisture, were raised and leavened into such shapes by some plastic power; and so made to swell and heave their broad backs into the sky, so much above the less animated clay of ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... actions only are wanting, And to awake the glad harp, only a welcoming ear. Happy bards of a happy world! Your life-teeming accents Flew round from mouth unto mouth, gladdening every race. With the devotion with which the gods were received, each one welcomed That which the genius for him, plastic and breathing, then formed. With the glow of the song were inflamed the listener's senses, And with the listener's sense, nourished the singer the glow— Nourished and cleansed it,—fortunate one! for whom in the voices Of the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... artist's eye. A vigorous bust of his godfather was his acknowledged masterpiece, so far, in the modelling line, which he preferred to brush or pencil. But first and foremost, literature claimed him: poetry, essays, and the despised novel—truest and most plastic medium for interpreting man to man and race to race: the most entirely obvious medium, thought Roy, for promoting the cause ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... development theory, of a demi-man. Or it might have been that of an old Irish gentleman, gentle in truth;—in the formative stage of society it is the monster that leaves traces of himself, as in an old geologic period the huge reptile left his tracks in the plastic earth, which afterward hardened ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... could willingly have pursued the argument in relation to all the subtler results of civilization. As before we showed that the law of progress to which the organic and inorganic worlds conform, is also conformed to by Language, the plastic arts, Music, &c.; so might we here show that the cause which we have hitherto found to determine progress holds in these cases also. Instances might be given proving how, in Science, an advance of one ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... ages of the filmic cosmos, the Jurassic Period of pictures, so to speak, this little group of pathfinders tracking under the chieftainship of Mr. Lobel into almost uncharted wilds of artistic endeavor had dabbled in slap-stick one reelers featuring the plastic pie and the treacherous seltzer siphon, also the trick staircase, the educated mustache and the ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb

... world or with spiritual relations? Keep bugbears to frighten more timid and credulous persons. But only see how he uses the world, and plays his scheme, and foils his adversary and twists and bends his plastic morality, all because he is not troubled with scruples, and has no ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin

... inherent qualities in the matter which it draws round it. Only thought-forms of this third class can usefully be illustrated, for to represent those of the first or second class would be merely to draw portraits or landscapes. In those types we have the plastic mental or astral matter moulded in imitation of forms belonging to the physical plane; in this third group we have a glimpse of the forms natural to the astral or mental planes. Yet this very fact, which makes ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant

... by some abnormal mode of cerebral activity, the trance-speaker won strange sympathies from his auditors. Certain faculties in Clifton had reached an expansion not permitted to the healthy man. A plastic power came from him and took the impress of other minds. Old experiences groped out of forgotten corners and haunted the discourse. At one time it seemed as if all that was potential in the culture of the medium ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... The change that had come to his old pupil was marked enough. Strickland's mind dwelt on the old laird. Was that the personality, not of one, but of two, of the whole line, perhaps, developing all the time, step by step with what seemed the plastic, otherwise, free time of youth, appearing always in due season, when its hour struck? Would Alexander, with minor differences, repeat his father? How of the mother? Would the father drown the mother? In the enormous all-one, ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston

... in alimentary diet only the plastic part of reconstruction of used-up corporal matter, it might be advantageous to ingest but one albumin the composition of which is very similar to our own. By virtue of the law of least effort such a one in ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various

... required in perfect riveting is that the metal of the rivet while hot and plastic shall be made to flow into all the irregularities of the rivet holes in the boiler sheets; that the surplus metal be formed into heads as large as need be, and that the pressure used to produce these results should ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various

... in external things and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike, and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours, modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was realised in such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex example, and a flower or a child a simple example, of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type both in life ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde

... esteem; but he bears upon him the scars of his twelve years' conflict; of the mean sorrows through which he has passed; and of the cheap indulgences he has sought relief and help from. There is nothing plastic in his nature now. His manners and habits are completely formed; and in them any further success can make little favorable change, whatever it may effect for his mind or genius." ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving

... owner of Woodbine Lodge with every enticement she could offer; but he saw not her charms; felt not the strong attractions with which she sought to win his admiration. Far away his thoughts were wandering, and in the dim distance Fancy was busy with half-defined shapes, which her plastic hand, with rapid touches, moulded into forms that seemed instinct with a purer life, and to glow with a more ravishing beauty than any thing yet seen in the actual he had made his own. And as these forms became more and more vividly pictured in his imagination, the pace of ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur

... on a man. I have mentioned his dark locks—they were brushed sideways above a white and sufficiently expansive forehead; his cheek had a rather hectic freshness; his features might have done well on canvas, but indifferently in marble: they were plastic; character had set a stamp upon each; expression re-cast them at her pleasure, and strange metamorphoses she wrought, giving him now the mien of a morose bull, and anon that of an arch and mischievous girl; more frequently, the two semblances were blent, ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell

... native heath of London; but—hardly the garment of good writing. Good writing is only the perfect clothing of mood—the just right form. Shakespeare's form, you will say, was extraordinarily loose, wide, plastic; but then his spirit was ever changing its mood—a true chameleon. And as to the form of Mr. Shaw—who was once compared with Shakespeare—why! there is none. And yet, what form could so perfectly express Mr. Shaw's glorious crusade against stupidity, his wonderfully sincere ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy

... specimen of a young woman from the United States with whom I became acquainted. Even after I had seen a good deal of her work, I could not feel wholly attracted by her talent, which sometimes expressed itself rather in a pictorial than a plastic form, and had a fondness for emotional effects. But she was a true artist, and a true woman, and I have never, in any woman, encountered a will like hers. She was uninterruptedly busy. Although, now that the time of her departure was so near, a few boxes were ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... has always an interest in improving his condition, is it not futile to forbid him to re-make his world as beat he can? Why prematurely claim to have reached finality, when unexpected novelties may shatter any system before it is even completed? Our world is plastic, it is most 'really' what we can make of it, and the process of our making is not ended. Whether a decree of Fate has fixed any ultimate limits to our efforts we have no means of knowing, and no occasion to assume. ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray

... been drawn to the classical nobility from which Berlioz's art so spontaneously springs. It is not fully acknowledged that he was, of all nineteenth-century musicians, the one who had in the highest degree the sense of plastic beauty. Nor do people always recognise that he was a writer of sweet and flowing melodies. Weingartner expressed the surprise he felt when, imbued with current prejudice against Berlioz's lack of melodic invention, he opened, by chance, the score of the overture of Benvenuto and found in that ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland

... the East, I had fallen into a holy lethargy and calm contemplation of the everlasting substances, more especially of yours and mine. Greatness in repose, most people say, is the highest aim of plastic art. And so, without any distinct purpose and without any unseemly effort, I thought out and bodied forth our everlasting substances in this dignified style. I looked back and saw how gentle sleep overcame us in the midst of our embrace. Now and then one of us would open an ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... before he replaced it, he drew the back of his soft leather glove across his dripping forehead. The unconventional action touched her keenly. She was sensitively subject to outward impressions, and "the plastic" had long been her delight, ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... time were not neglected. When she was at school, the father wrote her regularly, and did not allow one of her letters to wait a day for its affectionate answer. He corrected her spelling and her grammar, instilled sound truths into her mind, and formed her habits. From this plastic clay, with inexpressible love and patient toil, he ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed

... effort, for a husband. And as she listened to his tale of "I done this" and "I done that" and "I will do this and that" she thought how she, a woman of tact and judgment and refinement, might take into her hands this thing and, in a sense, make it plastic clay, and use its elements of life, and power, and energy, and unscrupulousness, and nerve, and egotism, and mountain courage, and almost make a man like ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt

... third theory supposes that the worship of stones was derived from the unskilfulness of the primitive sculptors, who, unable to frame, by their meagre principles of plastic art, a true image of the God whom they adored, were content to substitute in its place a rude or scarcely polished stone. Hence the Greeks, according to Pausanias, originally used unhewn stones to represent their deities, thirty of which that historian says he saw ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey

... indirect division). On the other hand, the egg-substance of the female germ-cell, which is assimilated by the chromosomes, and which is turned into their substance by the process of organic chemistry, loses its specific plastic vital energy completely. It is in the same way that food eaten by the adult has absolutely no effect on his qualitative organic structure. We may eat ever so many beef-steaks without acquiring any of the characteristics of an ox. And the ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton

... soaring, chastely white structure of silicoid plastic, dazzling in the hot morning sun. It crossed Allen's mind fleetingly that everything built nowadays would long outlast the builders. That seemed right, but he didn't ...
— DP • Arthur Dekker Savage

... a daze, hoping against hope, he saw a thread hanging from the crevice between door and frame. He pulled at it, and drew out a tiny strip of scandium, the new compressible metal that had become fashionable for engagement rings. Plastic, all but invisible, it could be compressed to the thickness of a sheet of paper: it was the token of secret lovers, and Kay had given Ruth a ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... England. Shells, Nummulites, Fish and Reptiles of the Bracklesham Beds and Bagshot Sands. Plants of Alum Bay and Bournemouth. Lower Eocene of England. London Clay Fossils. Woolwich and Reading Beds formerly called "Plastic Clay." Fluviatile Beds underlying Deep-sea Strata. Thanet Sands. Upper Eocene Strata of France. Gypseous Series of Montmartre and Extinct Quadrupeds. Fossil Footprints in Paris Gypsum. Imperfection of the Record. Calcaire Silicieux. Gres de Beauchamp. Calcaire Grossier. Miliolite Limestone. ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... waiting in the concourse surged through the gate leading to Track Seven, three boys in the royal-blue uniforms of the Space Cadet Corps slowly picked up their plastic space bags and joined the mass ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell

... powers of judgment as she had, and long habit of always giving way, had helped to convert Mrs. Lake's naturally weak will and unselfish disposition into a sort of mental pulp, plastic to any pressure from without. To men she invariably yielded; and, poor specimen of a man as the Cheap Jack was, she had no fibre of personal judgment or decision in the strength of which to oppose his assertions, and every instant she became more and more convinced that wares ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... tape off six months from now in Johannesburg on Terra, they could look in the cargo holds of the ship that had brought it across five hundred light-years of space. Ingots of gold and platinum and gadolinium. Furs and biochemicals and brandy. Perfumes that defied synthetic imitation; hardwoods no plastic could copy. Spices. And the steel coffer full of sunstones. Almost all luxury goods, the only really ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper

... influences cannot be exaggerated. Their part in the formation of character is greater than that of all others, because they touch the powers and faculties of the child during those years in which it is most plastic. Neither the school nor the university can ever entirely counteract the effect of the home. The whole period of childhood is one in which the soul is under tutelage, and in which more is done for it by others than by itself. It can no more select its own environment than it ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... life. He has been in England already (1743-17—?); he is a great unknown. Nobody can accuse him of anything dishonest or dishonorable. When he was here before we were all mad about music, and so he enchanted us with his violin. But Italy knows him as an expert in the plastic arts, and Germany admires in him a master in chemical science. In France, where he was supposed to possess the secret of the transmutation of metals, the police for two years sought and failed to find any normal source of his opulence. A lady of forty-five ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne

... poet; S.L. Rapoport, one of the first and profoundest of Jewish historians, and Nahman Krochmal, the saintly philosopher. Into this circle of "shining ones" Levinsohn was introduced, and each and all left an impression, some greater, some less, upon his plastic soul. It was there and then, in the congenial company of friends of about his own age, that Levinsohn determined to devote himself to improving the educational system of his people and began to plan his work on Learning in Israel (Te'udah be-Yisrael), which procured for ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin

... heels, or, as is not infrequently the case, are standing or hung on nothing, as though they were graven of some bewitched magnetic stone. Here for the first time is seen, in the sculptured figures of the three great portals, the plastic forms which were to add so greatly to the Gothic architecture: male and female saints, Evangelists, and Apostles in great array, all somewhat more than life-size. Only one adverse impression is cast: that of petrifaction. The figures, almost without ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun

... been confined, burst into an uproar; and, having vented itself at first in opprobrious words, laughs, hisses, and gestures, betook itself at last to certain missile weapons; which, though from their plastic nature they threatened neither the loss of life or of limb, were however sufficiently dreadful to a well-dressed lady. Molly had too much spirit to bear this treatment tamely. Having therefore—but hold, as we are diffident of our own abilities, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... a gobble, and wagged his tail, as if the feat must surely please his new masters; that he had long had the benefit of civilized cooking, and knew a gentleman by his toggery; that, moreover, he was of a teachable, plastic nature, and was meant to lie down in due time upon the hearth rug before the fire, in any gentleman's sitting room in the land. It may be true. I believe all this myself, and a good deal more, about him; and I take renewed hope also for this great republic—which is the hope of the world!—that ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... the literary Renaissance, French but transfigured by Italy, middle-north of the plains but looking southward to the Mediterranean, came to one soul and concentrated upon it, as the plastic expression of the same influence concentrated in Goujon. Very central in time, half soldier, half priest, all student; traveller and almost adventurer, a pilgrim throughout of the Idea, everything about him is symbolic ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc

... were winged creatures, the forms derived immediately from Phoenicia, ultimately from Babylonia; they appear only in the great public cult, probably did not enter into the religious life of the people at large, and there is no evidence that they ever received divine worship.[2012] The Hebrews had no plastic art of their own, seem to have had small disposition in their earlier history to make images, and later such forms were excluded by the antagonism of the prophets to foreign cults and by refined ideas of the deity.[2013] The absence of images in the Zoroastrian cult may ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... have endeavoured to establish be disputed or not, the absolute correspondence between the Moral and the Physical is, at any rate, the essential ground of the Plastic arts; which could not else exist, since through Form alone they have to convey, not only thought and emotion, but distinct and permanent character. For our own part, we cannot but consider their success in this as having ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston

... least developed, and in some respects still the least important part of the real self: that whole man of impulse, thought and desire, which it is the business of religion to capture and domesticate for God. That whole man is an animal-spirit, a living, growing, plastic unit; moving towards a racial future yet unperceived by us, and carrying with him a racial past which conditions at every moment his choices, impulses and acts. Only the most rigid self-examination will disclose to us the ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... affected by sporadic apparitions of riotous religious monomaniacs called Santones (vide p. 189). These conditions, therefore, favoured the nefarious work of the cunning Tagalog and Panay refugees, who found plenty of plastic material in the Negros inhabitants for the fruitful dissemination of the wildest and most fantastic notions anent the horrors awaiting them in the new Anglo-Saxon domination. They found no sympathy with the native ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... in an inflamed tissue are first those of congestion, distention of the blood vessels, and exudation of the fluid of the blood into the surrounding fibers, with, however, a more nearly complete stagnation of the blood; fibrin, or lymph, a plastic substance, is thrown out as well, and the cells, which we have seen to be living organisms in themselves, no longer carried in the current of the blood, migrate from the vessels and, finding proper nutriment, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... conclusions. All the facts presented to us in the natural world tend to show that none of the variations produced in the fixed forms of animal life, when seen in its most plastic condition under domestication, give any promise of a true transmutation of species; first, from the difficulty of accumulating and fixing variations within the same species; secondly, from the fact ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... while developing the scenes and music of Young Siegfried, that I had only increased the necessity for a clearer presentation of the whole story to the senses. I now see that, in order to become intelligible on the stage, I must work out the whole myth in plastic style. It was not this consideration alone which impelled me to my new plan, but especially the overpowering impressiveness of the subject-matter which I thus acquire for presentation, and which supplies me with a wealth of material for artistic fashioning which it would be a sin to leave ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... of oratory, we repeat, is expressing mental phenomena by the play of the physical organs. It is the translation, the plastic form, the language of human nature. But man, the image of God, presents himself to us in three phases: the sensitive, intellectual and moral. Man feels, thinks and loves. He is en rapport with the physical world, with the ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... what any of us know, from the reels, and the latest development from the box when you're ready to start out. Oh, yes, I almost forgot. The paper we use is a digestible plastic, so make a meal off all orders and confidential communications you receive. The box always contains a supply for your reports or requests for specific information ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans

... the beginning of this century referring to a century earlier and a promiscuous date upon one chapel, can carry but little weight. I shall assume, therefore, henceforward, that we have here groups designed in a plastic material by Tabachetti, and reproduced in wood by the best local wood-sculptor available, with the exception of a few figures cut ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler

... for Sir Charles, and he was not afraid to say so. But his liberty of appreciation owed something also to the circumstances of his education. The fact that he had never been at a public school—thus missing, in the plastic years of a sensitive boyhood, the influences which make most strongly for conventionality of outlook among men of a certain class—made it easier for him than it might otherwise have been to examine literary questions with his own eyes, and not through ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn

... my face, but could not distinguish by sight that it was there. A few pale, phosphorescent gleams, that seemed to be wandering in the air, I was convinced were only the remembrances of the optic nerve,—eidolons of the retina; but they seemed to some extent plastic to my thoughts, and ready to become the subjective creations of the brain, outlined in the dark. I could conceive then how the brain, excited by fear, or stimulated by emotion, might multiply these phantasms, moulding ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... You are in the plastic period of your lives, with the world before you, and the mightier world within to mould as you will; and you can be almost anything you like, I do not mean in regard to externals, or intellectual capacities, for these are only partially in our control, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... trying to do or effect something, an attitude that involves anticipatory forecasts which stimulate their present responses. The anticipated result, however, is rather a subsequent action than the production of a specific change in things. Consequently play is free, plastic. Where some definite external outcome is wanted, the end has to be held to with some persistence, which increases as the contemplated result is complex and requires a fairly long series of intermediate adaptations. When the intended act is another activity, it is not necessary to look far ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... iron horse performs its work, it gradually wears out its pistons, its rods, its wheels, its boiler-tubes, all of which have to be made good from time to time. The founder and the smith repair it, supply it, so to speak, with 'plastic food,' the food that becomes embodied with the whole and forms part of it. But, though it have just come from the engine-shop, it is still inert. To acquire the power of movement it must receive ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... fete appeared as Joan of Arc, armed cap-a-pie, riding a snow-white stallion. Romney, the portrait-painter, spending a week-end with Sir Henry, was struck with the picturesque beauty of the child and painted her as Diana. Romney was impressed with the plastic beauty of the girl, her downcast eyes, her silent ways, her responsive manner, and he begged Sir Harry to allow her to go to London and sit for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... green bowl held in the hands of the clustered hills; shallow, circular, as though, while plastic still, the thumb of God had run round its rim, shaping it. Around it the peaks crowded, craning their lofty heads to ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... crocks were turned out in the following manner: The potter's wheel was rotated about sixty turns a minute, and the clay, in a plastic state, was put in the cup-shaped top, and the hands used to force the clay up the side wall. When the crock was formed in as even a manner as it could be by hand, the blade described was used to ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay

... earth, and is slowly elaborated into an independent concept. As many words in ancient languages have an undefined meaning, and lend themselves to various purposes according to the various intentions of the speakers, the names of the gods also share in this elastic and plastic character of ancient speech. There are passages where Parganya means cloud, there are passages where it means rain. There are passages where Parganya takes the place which elsewhere is filled by Dyaus, the sky, or by Indra, the active god of the atmosphere. This may seem very wrong ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller

... Wycke in throwing off on her partner's trump and swooping down on the last trick with her right bower? Melicent would have thought it beneath her to more than look her contempt as Mrs. Van Wycke rose with a triumphant laugh to take her place at a higher table, dragging the plastic Bloomdale with her. But she did mutter ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin

... why he still lived, breathed: a suit. A yellow, plastic, water-tight suit, with an orange-on-black shield on the left breast pocket, and a clear bubble-helmet. He felt weight on his back and examined it: two air tanks and their regulator, a radio, and ...
— Cully • Jack Egan

... said Eglamore; "farewell, poor clay so plastic the least touch remodels you! I had a part in shaping you so bestial; our age, too, had a part—our bright and cruel day, wherein you were set too high. Yet for me it would perhaps have proved as easy to have made a learned recluse of you, Alessandro, or a ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell

... statuette in coloured wax, modeled with much taste and spirit by some novice hand. But the phenomenon, even thus reduced by a rational explanation, did not cease to excite my surprise. How, and by whom, had the Lady of the Cosmography been enabled to assume plastic existence? That was what remained for ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France

... felt himself dwarfed by the hauteur of certain of her glances, by the imposing expression of a face that was wholly aristocratic, by a sort of pride which women know how to express in slight motions, turns of the head, and slow gestures, effects less plastic and less studied than we think. The false situation in which Beatrix had placed herself compelled her to watch her own behavior, and to keep herself imposing without being ridiculously so. Women of the ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... is not a usable substitute for a patch bud cutter. It seems to do very well. The patches are small, but as an aid in tieing them in I prepared short strips of painter's masking tape with a thin coat of a plastic grafting wax on one side. In the center of each piece of tape is a hole just large enough for the bud to show through. The tape is pressed on over the bud patch, after which the usual binding ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various

... problems which remain perpetually interesting are those which deal with the influence of environment on races, and that of races on environment. What happens when the people are plastic and their circumstances rigid? What when the people are rigid and unyielding, and their surroundings fluent and unabiding? And does character depend on what is outside, or does the dominant quality of a race remain, as some vainly think, for ever? These are puzzling questions, ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts

... and gently with his uncle, struggling to win the old man's consent to his departure. But Spicer South's brain was no longer plastic. What had been good enough for the past was good enough for the future. He sought to take the most tolerant view, and to believe that Samson was acting on conviction and not on an ingrate's impulse, but that was the best he could do, and he added to himself that Samson's was an abnormal ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... book invited him to consult the wants of the Norwich festival and to write in the cantata style. In the first act, however, there is little to praise outside of the settings of the two Anacreonic odes and the song to the shell. There is much striving, but a paucity of plastic ideas. What might have been an unconstrained lyrical outpouring, the prologue, mere thundering in the index, because of the composer's mistaken impression that it ought to be tragic, and in the "Ercles vein." When the rites begin and a swelling paean is expected, there ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... dislikes, sympathies and antipathies, tastes and feelings, in common with all human nature. The sooner he perceives this fact, and adapts himself accordingly, the easier will be his journey among the several races of the interior. The more plastic his nature, the more prosperous will be ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... statement; and, naturally, more than all the rest, you come to me that way. But as a child—who knows why?" he relinquished the answer with an opened palm. "And young like that, perhaps ten, I love you more sharply, more unutterably, than at any other age. What is it I love? Not your adorable plastic body, not that. ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer

... heaven, and nothing more vain than the disputes of so-called sages. These were the true models for Varro, a man full of old Roman indignation at the pitiful times and full of old Roman humour, by no means destitute withal of plastic talent but as to everything which presented the appearance not of palpable fact but of idea or even of system, utterly stupid, and perhaps the most unphilosophical among the unphilosophical Romans.(23) But Varro was no slavish pupil. The impulse and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... the same fanciful vein. We now know that there can be no cavities more than a few miles below the crust of a planet, simply because, under the enormous pressures which would exist, the most solid matter would be perfectly plastic. But while Whewell's general objection to the theory that Jupiter or Saturn is in the same condition as our earth thus acquires new force, the particular explanation which he gave of the planet's small density is open to precisely ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... was neatly bound in thin, tough, plastic tangle-cord, swathed from chin to boot-bottoms, my arms imprisoned, my feet caught. And tangle-cord is about as easy to get out of as a spider's web is for ...
— The Hunted Heroes • Robert Silverberg

... figures became plastic and tilted at each other menacingly; the woman seized something and threw it; ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... James Melville, whose plastic nature and gentle spirit retained through life the impressions then made, supplements in his Diary the notices in Bannatyne's Memorials, and, in a passage which has been often quoted, gives a very fresh and vivid sketch of the old reformer. "Bot of all the benefites ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell

... me of any plastic young botanist who would come in all there glory and no pay, though I think pay may be got if the concern is properly worked. How ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... reproduction are that, through the rightly directed wills of the father and mother, preceding and during antenatal life, the child's form or body, character of mind and purity of soul are formed and established. That in its plastic state, during antenatal life, like clay in the hands of the potter, it can be molded into absolutely any form of body and soul the parents ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols

... didactic and the allegorical; but here, also, the same power of personification comes to his aid, and as, in the one case, he finds a soul for his bodies, so, in the other, he finds a body for his souls. As the ancient poets, and others who have been developed through a plastic sentiment for Art, introduce loftier spirits, related to the gods,—such as nymphs, dryads, and hamadryads,—in the place of rocks, fountains, and trees: so the author transforms these objects into peasants, and countrifies [verbauert] the universe in the most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various

... considerable freedom from old army tradition; many of its officers are ex-civil engineers and so forth; Headquarters is a little shy of technical direction; and all this in a service that is still necessarily experimental and plastic is to the good. There is little doubt that, given a release from prejudice, bad associations and the equestrian tradition, British technical intelligence and energy can do just as well as the French. Our problem with our army is not to create intelligence, ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells

... the country fifty thousand reverend gentlemen of every tincture of religious opinion who might ply him with their various theories, yet few of these would be contented unless they could seize him while his young nature was plastic, and try to imprint on immortal clay the trade-mark of ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins

... curls of Sennacherib's hair, just like a modern coachman's wig, this work of primaeval art was already hoary with the rime of ages. When Memphian artists were busy in the morning twilight of time with the towering coiffure of Ramses or Sesostris, this far more ancient relic of plastic handicraft was lying, already fossil and forgotten, beneath the concreted floor of a cave in the Dordogne. If we were to divide the period for which we possess authentic records of man's abode upon ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... and happy thoughts build up the body in vigour and grace. The body is a delicate and plastic instrument, which responds readily to the thoughts by which it is impressed, and habits of thought will produce their own effects, good ...
— As a Man Thinketh • James Allen

... high modelling, in some cases being almost detached from the door. The effect is curious and interesting rather than strictly beautiful, on the whole; but in detail many of the figures display rare power of plastic skill, proportion, and action. They are, at any rate, very individual: there are no other doors at all like them. They are the work of ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... Paper: "Munich, 22 July, 1840.—Much is at present said in the public papers respecting the imitations of medals, reliefs, etc., by means of a galvanic deposition of copper. This art, called Galvano plastic, first discovered by Professor Jacobi of St. Petersburg, and brought to greater perfection by Mr. Spencer, of Liverpool, and by Professor Von Kebel, of Munich, may justly be classed as one of the most useful of modern inventions; and, from its great importance, its employment in ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton

... The roar became a whining hum. Then for Madeline sound ceased to be anything—she could not hear. The wind was now heavy, imponderable, no longer a swift, plastic thing, but solid, like an on-rushing wall. It bore down upon Madeline with such resistless weight that she could not move. The green of desert plants along the road merged in two shapeless fences, sliding at her from the distance. Objects ahead began to ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey



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