"Discontinuity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have been. But there are species of insects in which some generations are winged and others wingless; a winged mother gives birth to wingless offspring, and a wingless parent to young with well-developed wings. Such discontinuity in the life-story of a single generation forces us to recognise the possibility of similar sudden mutations in the course of that age-long process of evolution to which the facts of insect growth, and indeed of all ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... is distasteful. One does not like to think of himself as a chance hit of the irrational physical elements; neither does he feel at ease with the thought that he is the result of any break or discontinuity in natural law. He likes to see himself as vitally and inevitably related to the physical order as is the fruit to the tree that bore it, or the child to the mother that carried it in her womb, and yet, if only mechanical and chemical ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... now acts unconsciously and without power of introspection, and that, do what he will, he can rarely or never draw a sharp dividing line whereat anything shall be said to begin, though none less certain that there has been a continuity in discontinuity, and a discontinuity in continuity between it and certain other past things; moreover, that his opponents postulated so much beginning of the microscope as that there should be a dew drop, even as our evolutionists start with a sense of touch, of which ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... N. disjunction, disconnection, disunity, disunion, disassociation, disengagement; discontinuity &c 70; abjunction^; cataclasm^; inconnection^; abstraction, abstractedness; isolation; insularity, insulation; oasis; island; separateness &c adj.; severalty; disjecta membra [Lat.]; dispersion &c 73; apportionment &c 786. separation; parting &c v.; circumcision; detachment, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to the oddity of the contrast between that and the flashy passages with which it is interlarded. From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step. You laugh and are surprised that any one should turn round and travestie himself: the drollery is in the utter discontinuity of ideas and feelings. He makes virtue serve as a foil to vice; dandyism is (for want of any other) a variety of genius. A classical intoxication is followed by the splashing of soda-water, by frothy effusions of ordinary bile. After the lightning and the hurricane, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
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