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More "Fortuitous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... who directed the enterprise—all had contributed to soften down his first painful impression. Having once promised secrecy to M. de Cinq-Mars, he considered himself as in a position to accept in detail all the secondary disclosures; and since the fortuitous event which had compromised him with the conspirators at the house of Marion de Lorme, he considered himself united to them by honor, and engaged to an inviolable secrecy. Since that time he had seen ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... one figurative expression, the mask of night; and every one reading this speech with the context, must have felt the peculiar propriety of its simplicity, though perhaps without examining the cause of an omission which certainly is not fortuitous. The reason lies in the situation and in the feeling of the moment; where confusion, and anxiety, and earnest self-defence predominate, the excitability and play of the imagination would be checked and ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... they allowed, towards midnight, to depart, at which hour he issued secretly from the castle. At this moment the pages of the gentleman and all his people were having a right jovial supper in honour of the fortuitous wedding of their master. Now, arriving at the height of the festivities, in the middle of the intoxication and joyous huzzahs, he was assailed with jeers, jokes, and laughter that turned him sick when he came into his room. The poor servant wished to speak, but the ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... either deny these facts or admit that they must have had an intellectual and spiritual cause of the psychic order, and I recommend sceptics who do not desire to be convinced, to deny them outright; to treat them as illusions and cases of a fortuitous coincidence of circumstances. They will find this easier. Uncompromising deniers of facts, rebels against evidence, may be all the more positive, and may declare that the writers of these extraordinary narratives are persons fond of a joke, ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... in the maple cabinet had been every one bought from a different dealer. The figures on the mantelpiece were Old Chelsea, of a quality that would have excited the envy of a Bernal or a Bonn, and had only fallen to the proud possessors by a sequence of fortuitous circumstances, the history of which was almost as thrilling as the story of Boehmer's diamond-necklace. The curtains in the drawing-room had draped the portieres of the lovely Lady Blessington, and had been bought for a song by Valentine Hawkehurst, after passing through the hands of brokers ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... so small," I said, "from elements of thought so fortuitous, with prospects so unpromising, the Anglo-Catholic party suddenly became a power in the National Church, and an object of alarm to her rulers and friends. Its originators would have found it difficult ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... These figures speak for themselves. They need no further explanation. Mrs. Butler, the zealous champion of the poorest and most wretched of her sex in England, says on the subject of prostitution: "Fortuitous circumstances, the death of a father, of a mother, lack of work, insufficient wages, misery, false promises, snares, have led them to sin." Instructive also is the information given by K. Schneidt[117] on the causes, that lead the Berlin bar-maids so often into the arms ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... wanting must be sought by fortuitous and unguided excursions and gleaned as industry should ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... horseback, who had with him some friends, and thirty slaves armed with swords. Milo's attendants were nearly ten times as numerous. It is not supposed by Asconius that either of the two men expected the meeting, which may be presumed to have been fortuitous. Milo and Clodius passed each other without words or blows—scowling, no doubt; but the two gladiators who were at the end of the file of Milo's men began to quarrel with certain of the followers of Clodius. Clodius interfered, and was stabbed in ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... he abruptly, "I'll tell you what I think—or imagine. I believe last night's phenomena were controlled, not fortuitous or the result of natural forces. In other words, some man turned off the juice in this city; and turned it on again. How he did it, I do not know; but he did it very completely. It was not a question of wiring alone. Even dry-cell batteries ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... careful man with money—a reputed miser, in fact. And that he did hoard up money, and loved it for itself, must be confessed. When he had lost a cash-box he kept in the mill, containing money and other valuables, it had been a great trouble to Uncle Jabez. But through a fortuitous train of circumstances Ruth Fielding had recovered the cash-box for him, with its contents untouched. It was really because he considered himself in her debt for this act, and that he prided himself upon paying his debts, that Jabez Potter had come to agree that ...
— Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall - or Solving the Campus Mystery • Alice B. Emerson
... and unauthentic scene of war, an atom of a fortuitous host, each one of the host glancing at me with inscrutable eyes which seem to show in passing—if they show anything at all—a faint hint of reproach, the interruption of war by the page of a familiar book, and the sudden ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... know; the one magic word of the desert lands: water. For San Juan, standing midway between the railroad and the more tempting lands beyond the mountains, had found birth because here was a mud-hole for cradle; down under the sand were fortuitous layers of impervious clay cupping ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... There was a fortuitous delicacy in this distribution, the woman being placed farthest from the social and physical dirtiness of Atzerott, and nearest the unblanched and ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... anticipation, and then in reality, it became henceforth her prime object of interest; and during the ten days of their stay at Hartfield it was not to be expected—she did not herself expect—that any thing beyond occasional, fortuitous assistance could be afforded by her to the lovers. They might advance rapidly if they would, however; they must advance somehow or other whether they would or no. She hardly wished to have more leisure for them. There ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... little encouragement from his companions. The important point about him is that he is not a natural product at all, but the outcome of an artificial drilling of the mind. In a word, he is the embodiment of the education system, uncorrected by fortuitous influences and conditions. Everybody knows that gracefulness is not acquired by means of stilted lessons in deportment, but that it consists of natural muscular movement untrammelled by self-consciousness or artifice. The same law of nature applies to the working ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... in about 39 deg. 29' south; and from the lunar observations of the preceding day, brought on by log, (for unfortunately I had no time keeper,) it should lie in longitude 147 deg. 25' east. It is, however, to be observed, that a fortuitous compensation of errors can alone render a dead reckoning correct in the way of such tides as we had experienced during ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... obliged to regard this interchange of functions among the characters in the English May-pageants as fortuitous, notwithstanding the coincidence of the May King sometimes appearing on horseback in Germany, and notwithstanding our conviction that Kuhn is right in maintaining that the May King, the Hobby-Horse, and the Dragon-Slayer are symbols of one mythical ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... throne. Their sole crime was their religion; and for this crime they had been discarded. In great perturbation men began to look round for help; and soon all eyes were fixed on one whom a rare concurrence both of personal qualities and of fortuitous circumstances pointed out as ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... all one is struck by the fortuitous, one might almost say, unnatural, character of the Hapsburg empire. While the union of Castile and Aragon, bringing together neighboring peoples and filling a political need, was the source of real strength, the subsequent accretions of Italian and Burgundian territories rather detracted ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... he answered. His idea of the advantage of consuming smoke was confined to the question of its paying as a simple operation in itself. The consequent cleanliness and improvement in the atmosphere had not entered into his calculations. Any such result might be a fortuitous benefit, but was not of sufficient importance to make any effort in that direction expedient on its own account. "Coal was burned," he said, "in the founderies at something less than two dollars a ton; while that was the case, it could not answer the ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... fortuitous circumstance of the charge against D——, our Governor, who professed a smiling ignorance of all the circumstances of the case, had been relieved of his only formidable rival, and he prepared to do the honors of Capiz ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... but pure mucus is ejected. Nevertheless, when thoroughly aroused, the reptile is enabled to constantly hurl a secretion, since both rage and hunger swell the glands to enormous size, and stimulate to extraordinary activity—a fortuitous circumstance to which many an unfortunate is doubtless indebted for his life. The removal of a fang, however, affects its gland to a degree that it becomes almost inoperative, until such a time as a new tooth is grown, and again calls it into action, which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... that it streamed by connatural result and emanation from God, the infinite and eternal Mind, as the light issues from the sun; so that there was no instant of duration assignable of God's eternal existence in which the world did not also coexist. Others held a fortuitous concourse of atoms—but all seem jointly to explode a creation, still beating upon this ground, that the producing something out of nothing is impossible and incomprehensible; incomprehensible, indeed, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... We certainly need one here to help us with our work—and I'm sure that your work is important, too. But I'm afraid we have no ideas at all about finding another telepath. Finding little Charlie was purely fortuitous—purely, Mr. ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... may often say something better. But there is no reason why the general reader should not thoroughly enjoy it. Certainly it ought to be more generously recognised than it is. So many persons at present think of it as merely accidental and fortuitous, as if there was no mind in it, as if all the excellent things loosely described as errata, all the curios felicitates of the setter-up of texts, were casual blunders. Such a view reminds one of the way in which the last- century critics used to speak of Shakspere —the ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... "Naturally! A fortuitous function of the nerve centres of our brain, like the unforeseen chemical action due to new mixtures and similar also to a charge of electricity, caused by friction or the unexpected proximity of some substance, similar to all phenomena caused by the infinite and fruitful ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... fiery signs, Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius, an event which occurs only every 800 years. After discussing a great variety of topics, but little connected with his subject, and in a style of absurd jocularity, he attacks the opinions of the Epicureans, that the star was a fortuitous concourse of atoms, in the following remarkable paragraph, which is a good specimen of the work:—"When I was a youth with plenty of idle time on my hands, I was much taken with the vanity, of which some grown men are not ashamed, of making anagrams by transposing the letters ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... so until quite lately) to hold to the individual or accidental theory of a military unity achieved by fortuitous victories, to which the constant agitations of a whole people for hundreds of years, were in no sense conducive. Another fact that must also be acknowledged is, that this theory once firmly established, any remorse for the mysterious ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... and therefore conspicuous, 60 spotted and inconspicuous, 24 were soon picked off by crows, but only one of these was spotted. This was not the proportion that there should have been if the mortality had been fortuitous. There is no doubt that it often pays an animal to be like its habitual surroundings, like a little piece of scenery if the animal is not moving. It is safe to say that in process of time wide departures from the safest coloration will be wiped ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... of our deliberations bear some analogy to actual warfare, we may certainly give way to a kind of aesthetic satisfaction in that our own occupation has some parallel in real life, but we must never fashion our principles in accordance with such fortuitous circumstances. ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... could pen three consecutive sentences with a connected meaning: chaos is felt to be natural to ancient literature: no search is made for sense, and the Latin or Greek book is looked upon as a more or less fortuitous concourse of words;' when Dr. Rouse can assert, 'The public schoolboy at nineteen is unable to read a simple Latin or Greek book with ease, or to express a simple series of thoughts without atrocious blunders: he has learnt from his classics neither accuracy nor love of beauty and ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... By a chance, fortuitous but not improbable in the close borough of legal circles, a good deal of information came to Soames' ear anent this line of policy, the working partner in his firm, Bustard, happening to sit next at dinner at Walmisley's, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... collapsed. Not slowly, not with warning, not dramatically or with trumpets. They came together as silently and naturally as two waves close a trough in the ocean, but without disturbance or upheaval. They fell into an embrace, into a coalescence as inevitable as the well they obliterated was fortuitous. They closed like the jaws of a trap somehow above malevolence, leaving only the top of the ladder projecting upward from the smooth and ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... attribute designated as caution had evaporated from her system. She proceeded toward the Subway mechanically, the result of habit. Casually she noted two taxicabs standing near the Subway entrance. That she noted them at all was due to the fact that Subway entrances were not fortuitous hunting grounds for taxicabs. Only the unusual would have attracted her in her present condition of mind. It takes time and patience to weave a good web—observe any spider—time in finding a suitable place for it; patience in the ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... Louise tried to believe that it was all going to be as plain sailing as this fortuitous beginning, but she was aware of a nervous fluttering in her throat while she waited, and she knew that she positively dreaded hearing Seabeck gallop up behind her on the frozen trail. "Why will people do things ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... upon all the probabilities in his favour; he will not listen to any arguments in opposition to his wishes; he knows he is unreasonable, he persists in continuing so; he does not connect any idea of exertion with hope; his hope usually rests upon the exertions of others, or upon some fortuitous circumstances. A man of a strong mind, reasons before he hopes; he takes in, at one quick, comprehensive glance, all that is to be seen both for and against him; he is, from experience, disposed to depend much upon his own exertions, if they can turn the balance in his favour; he hopes, he ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... which are encountered by the Osmia, when, pressed by the necessities of spawning, she searches for a dwelling, are often fortuitous and incapable of modification; and in order to give each set of larvae the necessary space "she lays at will a male or a female egg, according to the conditions ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... looking for you, Theresa. Your vanity shall not be tickled by any such misapprehension. Our meeting is wholly fortuitous. I broke with the life academic and I had to go somewhere. To be honest, I came into the Klondike because I thought it the place you were least ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... least permissible to examine the evidence which led many separate people to the same false conclusion. 'Mavis Clare' and Marie Corelli own the same initials, and until the fact that this was a mere fortuitous chance was made clear by Miss Corelli herself it seemed natural to suppose that an identity was coyly hinted at. 'Mavis Clare' is a novelist, and so is Miss Corelli. 'Mavis Clare' is mignonne and fair, 'is pretty, and knows how to dress besides,' ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... for nine days. Similar cases of incest with a daughter are reported of many ancient kings. It seems unlikely that such reports are without foundation, and perhaps equally improbable that they refer to mere fortuitous outbursts of unnatural lust. We may suspect that they are based on a practice actually observed for a definite reason in certain special circumstances. Now in countries where the royal blood was traced through women only, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the drifting, falling flakes. No shape was to be seen, no sound but that of the wind to be heard. It was like the dream of a delirious child after reading the ancient theory of the existence of the world by the rushing together of fortuitous atoms. Wan and thick, tumultuous, innumerable to millions of angels, an interminable tempest of intermingling and indistinguishable vortices, it stretched on and on, a boundless hell of cold and shapelessness—white ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... think it one of the hardest things to account for that I have yet met with in the phenomena of meteors, and I am induced to think that it must be some collection of matter formed in the aether, as it were, by some fortuitous concourse of atoms, and that the earth met with it as it passed along in its orb, then but newly formed, and before it had conceived any great impetus of descent towards the sun. For the direction of it was exactly opposite to ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... sense of the fitness of things. There was no reason why she should admit her into the circle of her intimates merely because the two had been thrown together by the exigencies of an attack of scarlet fever. Such a fortuitous relation would be severed in the shortest possible time, completely and irremediably severed. Trust Lila Allan, president of the junior literary society, to manage that. Meanwhile she intended to leave the girl severely alone. Think ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... entertaining classes of writing—biography, memoirs, familiar letters, and that assemblage of literary anecdotes, which the French have taught us to distinguish by the termination Ana. It was a strange and fortuitous concurrence, that one so prone to talk, and who talked so well, should be brought into such close contact and confidence with one so zealous and so able to record. Dr. Johnson was a man of extraordinary powers; but Mr. Boswell had qualities, in their own way, almost as rare. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... cuts, each of which becomes, in its fixity, endlessly decomposable. Perceiving, in an organism, only parts external to parts, the understanding has the choice between two systems of explanation only: either to regard the infinitely complex (and thereby infinitely well-contrived) organization as a fortuitous concatenation of atoms, or to relate it to the incomprehensible influence of an external force that has grouped its elements together. But this complexity is the work of the understanding; this incomprehensibility is also its work. Let us try to see, no longer with the eyes of the intellect alone, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... more apt appreciation of the spaces at his disposal. The Siena plaque, like the marble relief of the dance of Salome at Lille, to which it is analogous, has a series of arches vanishing into perspective. They are not fortuitous buildings, but are used by the sculptor to subdivide and multiply the incidents. They give depth to the scene, adding a sense of the beyond. The Lille relief has a wonderful background, full of hidden things, reminding one of ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... idle speculations and go ahead and save his life if it wasn't already too late. Thereupon the doctor opened up the wound and extracted a section of a fine needle. The other half was found sticking in the window sill where a careless seamstress had fixed it. The spider had been a fortuitous arrival. The man made one of the ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... the English common law,—as I looked back over my long interest in the position of woman, I felt that my greatest drawback had been the want of such an example. Every practical experiment that the world recorded had been made under such peculiar circumstances, or from such a fortuitous height, that it was at ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... spirit". Now neither the Cobra nor the Cerastes is actually a water serpent. Their achievements in the myths therefore have no possible relationship with the natural habits of the real snakes. They are purely arbitrary attributes which they have acquired as the result of a peculiar and fortuitous series of historical incidents. ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... never ceased to plot for his deliverance. Weeks passed without any fruitful event occurring in the life of the prisoner, yet help was to come to him from a source from which he could never have expected it. But before that fortuitous result was destined to take place—in fact, as preliminary to its achievement—he was destined to be an actor in the most remarkable scene that ever has been recorded in the annals of prison life, and in one of the strangest duels of ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... Nebraska was, in popular judgment, stronger than the case of Colorado. The population was larger, and being devoted to agriculture, was naturally regarded as more stable than that of Colorado, which was based principally upon the somewhat fortuitous discovery of mines of the precious metals. But there was an admitted political embarrassment in regard to both Territories, the principal debate on which occurred when the bill admitting Nebraska was under ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... full of contingent facts which were, and might not have been. Napoleon himself, on St. Helena, enumerated six circumstances which might have checked his prodigious career. He related, notably, that on taking a bath at Auxonne, in 1786, he only escaped death by the fortuitous presence of a sandbank. If Bonaparte had died, then we may admit that another general would have arisen, and might have become dictator. But what would have become of the Imperial epic and its consequences without the man of genius who led our victorious armies into all the capitals ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... to elect him first consul for life. I took it for granted that the spanish proverb of "tell me with whom you are, and I will tell you what you are," was not to be applied in this instance, on account of the company in which the Consular application, by a mere fortuitous ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... trouble to write an overture for it, the one originally composed for the opera having been lost soon after the first production. The overture which leads us into the opera nowadays is all very well in its way and a striking example of how a piece of music may benefit from fortuitous circumstances. Persons with fantastic imaginations have rhapsodized on its appositeness, and professed to hear in it the whispered plottings of the lovers and the merry raillery of Rosina, contrasted with the futile ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... an after-thought, suggested by some fortuitous or fancied coincidence, that appropriateness of which is by no means ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.04.06 • Various
... somewhat relaxed in the holidays. On the day of Uncle Bobby's visit, by a fortuitous circumstance, Miss Sallie was five miles away, superintending a new incubator house at the school farm. The Dowager and Miss Wadsworth and Miss Jellings were scheduled for a reception in the village, and the other teachers were all away for the holidays. ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... men and in money, on the land and on the water. Availing himself of fortuitous advantages, he is aiming with his undivided force a deadly blow at our growing prosperity, perhaps at our national existence. He has avowed his purpose of trampling on the usages of civilized warfare, and given earnests ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Madison • James Madison
... children were in bed, when she was brushing her hair . . . oh, probably she'd find as you so often did, when you went after the cause of some unexpected little feeling, that it came from a meaningless fortuitous association of ideas, like Elly's hatred of grape-jelly because she had once taken some bitter medicine ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... reason why nobody as yet (except Mary Anerley and Flamborough folk) seems even to have tried to assign fair importance to Robin Lyth's share in this glorious encounter. It is now too late to strive against the tide of fortuitous clamor, whose deposit is called history. Enough that this Englishman came up, with fifty more behind him, and carried all before him, as he was bound ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... which he considers the basis of all philosophy—"If it isn't common sense, it isn't philosophy"—he has the gift of expounding in a language which is piercingly individual. It strips his village of trivial local color and reduces it to the simplest terms—making it out a more or less fortuitous congregation of human beings of whom some work and some play, some behave themselves and some do not, some consequently prosper and some fail, some are happy and some are miserable. His village ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... either a chaos or a fortuitous aggregation and dispersion of atoms; or else it is builded in order and harmony and ruled by Wisdom. If then it is the former, why should one wish to tarry in a hap-hazard disordered mass? Why should I be concerned except to know how soon I may cease to be? Why ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Fortuitous circumstances constitute the moulds that shape the majority of human lives, and the hasty impress of an accident is too often regarded as the relentless decree of all-ordaining fate; while to the philosophic anthropologist it might furnish matter for curious speculation whether, if Attila ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... Lat. accidere, to happen), a word of widely variant meanings, usually something fortuitous and unexpected; a happening out of the ordinary course of things. In the law of tort, it is defined as "an occurrence which is due neither to design nor to negligence''; in equity, as "such an unforeseen event, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to this fortuitous intervention that when Dr. Hooper called a couple of days after to see his patient he was able to certify to a remarkable change for the better in her. All the distressing symptoms had disappeared; the pain in her side had died away; the complexion was clearer. He therefore ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... rivers are made by daily attrition; for if they had been made as ditches and furrows are, by earth dug out and heaped on each side, there would certainly have been seen everywhere great banks of earth. But we plainly see that this is only fortuitous; forasmuch as they often run through plains, and the river banks are no more than level with the adjacent fields; besides, whence could there be had water at the beginning of the world to fill these channels? If you say, ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... be due to the ancestry of the individual—that is, they must be matters of heredity in the ordinary sense, coupled with the fortuitous variations which accompany heredity throughout ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... of the general constituents of plants, it has been already stated that the older chemists and vegetable physiologists, misled by the small quantity of ash found in them, entertained the opinion that mineral matters were purely fortuitous components of vegetables, and were present merely because they had been dissolved and absorbed along with the humus, which was then supposed to enter the roots in solution, and to form the chief food of the plant. This supposition, which could only be sustained ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... quite a fortuitous occurrence," the doctor went on. "I have often had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Rossitur's family in church in the little church at Queechy Run and that enabled me to recognise your cousin, as soon as I saw him in the wagon. Perhaps, Miss a you may have ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Sexton, you would have had huntsman, whippers-in, dog-feeders, and stoppers of earths; the old squire, full of foolish opinions and fermented liquids, and a young gentleman, of gloves, waistcoats, and pantaloons: and how many generations might it be before the fortuitous concourse of noodles would produce such a man as Professor Lee,[123] one of the Prebendaries of Bristol, and by far the most eminent Oriental scholar ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... tiger!" murmured Perenna, who could not remove his eyes from that double imprint. "The teeth of the tiger! The teeth that had already left their mark on Inspector Verot's piece of chocolate! What a coincidence! It can hardly be fortuitous. Must we not take it as certain that the same person bit into this apple and into that cake of chocolate which Inspector Verot brought to the police office as an ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... believe himself poisoned. The real poison which his mother gave him was in the fatal counsels of the courtiers whom she placed about him,—men who led him to waste his intellectual as well as his physical vigor, thus bringing on a malady which was purely fortuitous and not constitutional. Under these harrowing circumstances, Charles IX. displayed a gloomy majesty of demeanor which was not unbecoming to a king. The solemnity of his secret thoughts was reflected on his ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... often pervert the finest Schemes that can be laid by Human Wisdom. The Race is not always to the Swift, nor the Battle to the Strong. Nothing less than infinite Wisdom can have an absolute Command over Fortune; the highest Degree of it which Man can possess, is by no means equal to fortuitous Events, and to such Contingencies as may rise in the Prosecution of our Affairs. Nay, it very often happens, that Prudence, which has always in it a great Mixture of Caution, hinders a Man from being so fortunate as he might possibly have been without it. A Person who only ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... a partiality for it. Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape. Indeed, he is summoned without his choice by fortuitous circumstances from non-existence into life . . . what for? He tries to find out the meaning and object of his existence; he is told nothing, or he is told absurdities; he knocks and it is not opened to him; death ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... comfortably to bed together. The morning came; fancy the surprise of this interesting pair when they awoke and discovered their situation. Fancy the manner, too, in which Cruikshank has depicted them, to which words cannot do justice. It is needless to state that this fortuitous and temporary union was followed by one more lasting and sentimental, and that these two worthy persons were married, and lived happily ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... upon, so that it were spiced with danger and promised adventure. He had some slight preference for ballooning, this being his sixteenth ascent, including the time when the balloon burst, and the occupants of the car came rattling down from a height of three thousand feet, and were saved only by the fortuitous draping of the half emptied balloon, which prevented all ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... pair of creaking stairs he pointed to an open door and said: "In this garret Addison wrote his 'Campaign.'" Gerald Griffin, however, had yet to experience all the hardships which were endured by Goldsmith before his landlady threatened eviction, and by Addison before he received the fortuitous visit of Henry Boyle, Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer. He wrote prose and poetry for which he was often glad to get sufficient money wherewith to purchase a cup of coffee and a crust of bread. He studied Spanish, and when he had ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... forehead and the cheek-bones, just a shade high, and the clearly pencilled brows and the clean modelling of the straight young chin, there was a certain openness and firmness, a fortuitous blending of form and proportion that would have made the head a perfect model for a coin, a wonderful study in pastels. Looking at her, an artist would have fancied her a bold and charming and boyish-looking little girl, fifteen years ago, with that Greek ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... It was a time of great industrial depression, and as is usual in such cases a large number of the electors held the party in power responsible for business adversity (as in turn they credit it with any more or less fortuitous prosperity). The Republican candidate Hayes, after a long contest in Congress, was declared elected by a margin of one electoral vote. His opponent, Tilden had received a quarter of a million more votes in the country as ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... logically and historically justified in employing the word "accidental" as the word which serves most properly to convey the meaning that they intend—namely, variations due to causes accidental to the struggle for existence. Similarly, when it is said that variations are "spontaneous," or even "fortuitous," nothing further is meant than that we do not know the causes which lead to them, and that, so far as the principle of selection is concerned, it is immaterial what these causes may be. Or, to revert to our former illustration, the various weights of different ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... was the ultra-respectable Abram S. Hewitt, a millionaire capitalist. The Republican party nominated a verbose, pushful, self-glorifying young man, who, by a combination of fortuitous circumstances, later attained the position of President of the United States. This was Theodore Roosevelt, the scion of a moderately rich New York family, and a remarkable character whose pugnacious disposition, indifference ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... which could repay his hospitality; and whose solitary possession Castagno thought cheaply purchased by the guilt of the betrayer and murderer; it was in this process, the deduction of watchful intelligence, not by fortuitous discovery, that the first impulse was given to European art. Many a plank had yawned in the sun before Van Eyck's; but he alone saw through the rent, as through an opening portal, the lofty perspective of triumph widening its rapid wedge;—many a spot of opaque ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... prosperous fellow, happened to be visiting him at the time. By a still more remarkable conjunction of events, he at once shared in his former colonel's admiration of the dark-eyed Southern girl. She was very shy, distant, and observant at first, for this fortuitous captain was a Northerner. But the atmosphere of the two cottages was not in the least conducive to coolness and reserve. The wood fires that crackled on the hearth, or something else, thawed perceptibly the spirited girl. Moreover, there were walks, drives, ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... body of Hathor on earth. Side by side with its human gods and prophetic statues, each nome proudly advanced one or more sacred animals, one or more magic trees. Each family, and almost every individual, also possessed gods and fetishes, which had been pointed out for their worship by some fortuitous meeting with an animal or an object; by a dream, or by sudden intuition. They had a place in some corner of the house, or a niche in its walls; lamps were continually kept burning before them, and small daily ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... imagination:—(a) All those which include images of a sexual character. It is unnecessary to illustrate this. The visions of monks and nuns are often, as we might expect, unconsciously tinged with a morbid element of this kind. (b) Those which depend on mere verbal resemblances or other fortuitous correspondences. Nordau shows that the diseased brain is very ready to follow these false trains of association. (c) Those which are connected with the sense of smell, which seems to be morbidly developed in this kind of degeneracy. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... us are prone to consider this war as a fortuitous event, which might, indeed, have been staved off, but which, having disturbed for a time the easy movement of our insular life, will die away and leave us free to continue our progress on the same lines as before. But this ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... definitely to lay aside all hope of producing further poetry, and, indeed, to become possessed of the delusion that he had for ever lost all power of doing so. It is an interesting fact, well known in his own literary circle, that his taking up poetry afresh was the result of a fortuitous occurrence. After one of his most serious illnesses, and in the hope of drawing off his attention from himself, and from the gloomy forebodings which in an invalid's mind usually gather about his own too absorbing personality, a friend prevailed ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... He was now sixty-two. He had come in to find the controlling interest almost entirely in the hands of the Fortune branch of the firm, and in his thirty-four years of association, indeed in the first twenty, he had, by fortuitous circumstances, and by force of his decisive personality, achieved what amounted to sole and single control. Coming in as a young man of force and character, he had added to these qualities, by marriage, a useful sum of money (to which was attached a widow) and proceeded to deal decisively ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... possibility of such wonderful resemblances being produced by the accumulation of fortuitous variations, but if the reader will call to mind the large amount of variability that has been shown to exist in all organisms, the exceptional power of rapid increase possessed by insects, and the tremendous struggle for existence always going on, the difficulty will vanish, especially ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... terrible spirit in distress. It was long before Rodriguez dare touch the handle again. Could it have been the bell? He felt the iron handle and the iron chain that went up from it. How could it have been the bell! The bell had not sounded: he had not pulled hard enough: that scream was fortuitous. The night on that rocky ledge had jangled his nerves. He pulled again and more firmly. The answering scream was more terrible. Rodriguez could doubt no longer, as he sprang back from the bell-handle, that with the chain he had pulled he ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... break down in the race, who in averagely prosperous circumstances might have lived pleasantly and reputably. But the deeper we plunge into nature, the deeper we explore life, the more immutable we find the grip of law. What could appear to be a more fortuitous spectacle of collision and confusion than a great ocean breaker thundering landwards, with a wrack of flying spray and tossing crests? Yet every smallest motion of every particle is the working put of laws which go far back into the dark aeons of creation. Given the precise conditions of wind and ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that to admit any such constant operation of any such unknown natural cause is to deny the purely Darwinian theory which relies upon the survival of the fittest by means of minute fortuitous ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... away down the current, running freely. To these the crews were not required to pay any attention. With luck, a few of the individual timbers would float ten, even twenty, miles before some chance eddy or fortuitous obstruction would bring them to rest. Such eddies and obstructions, however, drew a constant toll from the ranks of the free-moving logs, so that always the volume of timbers floating with the current diminished, and always the number of logs caught and stranded along the sides ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... that which they owe to chance; Priestley seemed to wish to ascribe all his merit to fortuitous circumstances, remarking, with unexampled candour, how many times he had profited by them, without knowing it, how many times he was in possession of new substances without having perceived them; and he never dissimulated the erroneous views which sometimes ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... but the family. Furthermore, the resemblance of the Japanese administrative system, both central and local, to certain European systems is not the result of imitation, or borrowing, or adaptation. Such resemblance is merely an odd and fortuitous resemblance. When the statesmen who overthrew the Tokugawa regime in 1868, and abolished the feudal system in 1871, were called upon to provide the nation with a new equipment of administrative machinery, they did not go to Europe for their models. They simply harked back for ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... its pottery was compared with the painted pottery of the West, and a number of resemblances were found, especially with the pottery of the Lower Danube basin and that of Anau, in Turkestan. Some authors claim that such resemblances are fortuitous and believe that the older layers of this culture are to be found in the eastern part of its distribution and only the later layers in the west. It is, they say, these later stages which show the strongest resemblances ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... cases where state courts declared state laws in conflict with the United States Constitution, and the Fourteenth Amendment therefore acted as a protective bulwark in state as well as nation. In brief, then, the legal position of the big industrial organizations was almost impregnable because of the fortuitous circumstance that the words of a part of the Constitution might be held to mean something which probably did not enter the minds of the Congress or the state legislatures which placed the words in ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... not obvious why the author objects to "chance" or "external conditions making a woodpecker." He allows that variation is ultimately referable to conditions and that the nature of the connexion is unknown, i.e. that the result is fortuitous. It is not clear in the original to how much of the passage the two ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... unwrought elements of content—and that, even now, in the present darkness and madness of all thought on the great question of the social condition, it is not impossible that man, the individual, under certain unusual and highly fortuitous conditions, may ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... diversity of contradictory statements, we may perhaps be excused if we suspend our judgment of their respective merits, and prefer to look upon this partisan name as one with whose original import not a score of persons in France besides its fortuitous inventor may have been acquainted, and which may have had nothing to recommend it to those who so readily adopted it, save novelty and the recognized need of some more convenient name than "Lutherans," "Christaudins," or the awkward circumlocution, "those of the religion." Be this as ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... as he had until then believed, a series of fortuitous and independent circumstances. No, it was manifestly the effect of an adverse will pursuing a definite object with prodigious ability and incredible boldness, attacking him, Lupin, in the recesses of his safest retreats and baffling him with blows so severe and so unexpected ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... Another fortuitous gift to Jamaica, so far as human intention is concerned, was the invaluable donation of the Guinea grass. Toward a century ago some African birds were brought as a present to a gentleman in the west of the island. Some grass seeds had been brought along for their feed; and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... excellent; but there is too large a lack of true consecution of topics, of accuracy of expression, and of really natural method of handling the subjects. We say this with no unkindly feeling toward the attempt or the author, but because, though no matter by how fortuitous circumstances, it comes to us as in this country the first effort toward a certain new style of books and subjects, and certain more rational teaching; and we hold it, as being the privilege of teachers whose ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... she was almost alone. She could have fled, but felt herself fixed to the ground, and with desperate efforts endeavored to conceal her excitement. He approaches nearer; with glistening eye she watches and hopes some fortuitous circumstances may call him aside. Their glance meets; she blushes and trembles, Father ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... both discoverable and intelligible. This was a very marked advance upon both of the ideas, by one or other of which men had previously been content to explain to themselves the course of circumstances in the world; either the inscrutable decrees of an inhuman providence, or the fortuitous vagaries of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... are animating the bodies of to-day. The doctrine of pre-existence is not a fable, yet to have lived two lives belongs only to a chosen few, or those whom a fortuitous circumstance has blest. ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... announced. "I understand it had its beginnings in a horse trade. Back in other days, a horse trade was often tinged with fraud and chicanery. This one has ended in a great good; really, it's the most fortuitous happening in my brief career as a minister of the Gospel. It has given me a quick and hearty contact with all the people where I am to work. It goes to show that a great good can spring from lowly origins. The Saviour of men, you know, was from lowly ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... The fortuitous accident that had put Hot Rod in operation ahead of schedule had also stepped many plans months ahead. No violence had actually been planned until the weapon had been thoroughly tested; but now things looked ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... as a King of Italy; hence his incorporation of Parma and Genoa with France; and hence his donation of Piombino and Lucca to his brother-in-law, Bacchiochi!" Nowhere in history have I read of men of sense being so easily led astray as in our times, by confounding fortuitous events with consequences resulting from ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... patronymic derived form his mother Leah, and levi the official priest. If it were practicable to find a convincing derivation of levi in its later use from the appellative meaning of the root, then one might believe the coincidence to be merley fortuitous, but it is impossible to do so. the solution therefore has been suggested that the violent dissolution of the tribe in the period of the judges led the individual Levites, who now were landless, ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... assert itself. That such a progressive material system as an organism was possible, and at some remote period was initiated, is matter of knowledge; whether or not the initiatory living configuration was rare and fortuitous, or the probable result of the general action of physical laws acting among innumerable chances, must remain ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... to swamp the Court which received the approval of four-fifths of the House of Representatives cannot be lightly dismissed as an aberration. Was it due to a fortuitous coalescence of local grievances, or was there a general underlying cause? That Marshall's principles of constitutional law did not entirely accord with the political and economic life of the nation at this period must be admitted. The Chief Justice ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... [IRC] Fortuitous typo for 'hint', now in wide intentional use among players of {initgame}. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... geological epochs. Successive growth and decay is a central part of God's original plan, as appears from the very structure of living bodies and the whole order of the globe. Death, therefore, which furthermore actually reigned on earth unknown ages before the existence of man, could not have been a fortuitous after clap of human sin. And so the foregoing theory of a general resurrection as the restoration of God's broken plan to its completeness falls ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... objectiveness, non ego; extraneousness &c. 57; accident; appearance, phenomenon &c. 448. Adj. derived from without; objective; extrinsic, extrinsical[obs3]; extraneous &c. (foreign) 57; modal, adventitious; ascititious[obs3], adscititious[obs3]; incidental, accidental, nonessential; contingent, fortuitous. implanted, ingrafted[obs3]; inculcated, infused. outward, apparent &c. (external) 220. Adv. extrinsically ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... a matter so fortuitous that Mr. Hammond could not accept Ruth's version of the loss without some doubt, in any case. And then, her suddenly finding in the only good scenario submitted to him by any of his company, one that she believed was plagiarized from her lost story, seemed to put a cap on the whole matter. ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... unpremeditated, adventurous, that she could hardly believe that she had played her part in such a reckless drama. Of all the few hours of her life with Charles, the portion that most insisted in coming back to memory was their fortuitous encounter on the previous Saturday, and those bitter reprimands with which he had begun the attack, as it might be called, which had piqued her ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... fairly venture to assert now that if Charles had pushed on he would, for the time at least, have restored the throne of England to the house of Stuart. We may doubt, and doubt with reason, whether any fortuitous succession of events could have confirmed the Stuart hold upon the English crown; but we can scarcely doubt that the hold would have been for the time established, that the Old Pretender would have been King James ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... though the fortuitous combination of circumstances hinted at by Captain Leicester was not to be; for before long it became evident that the schooner, notwithstanding the freshening breeze and the increasing sea, was slowly but steadily gaining on the barque. But "a stern chase ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... diverted from the mournful idea on which it had so long brooded. He was a man well skilled in his profession, but had read and thought very little on matters unconnected with it. He had no idea that the marks had any particular signification, or were anything else but common and fortuitous ones. That I became at all acquainted with their nature was owing to a ludicrous circumstance ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... of yielding to it the book closes. The Fifth Book examines the origin and formation of the solar system, which it treats not as eternal after the manner of the Stoics, but as having had a definite beginning, and as being destined to a natural and inevitable decay. He applies his principle of "Fortuitous Concurrence" to this part of his subject with signal power, but the faultiness of his method interferes with the effect of his argument. The finest part of the book, and perhaps of the whole poem, is his account of the "origin of species," and the progress of ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... here attempt to give a general sketch of these causes, and of the manner in which they operated to mould and stamp the poetry of the country at the period of which I have to treat; independently of incidental and fortuitous causes, for which there is no accounting, but which, after all, have often the greatest share in determining the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... as much indebted to a fortuitous concurrence of circumstances, for the characters they sustain in this world, as to their personal qualities. The same truth is applicable to the reputations of ships. The properties of a vessel, like those of an individual, may have ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... pastors and people by the exhibition of what is good. This is what we might expect of our religious musical foundations, which are justifying the standing condemnation of utilitarian economists so long as the stipendiaries are content indolently to follow the fortuitous traditions of the books that lie in the choir, supplemented by the penny-a-sheet music of the common shops. In the Universities, too, it should be impossible for an undergraduate not to gain acquaintance with good ecclesiastical music, and this is not ensured by an occasional ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... apparition of Mrs. Donne, with a dead child, to Dr. Donne, in Paris, as recorded by Walton. As Donne was a poet, very fond of his wife, and very anxious about her health, this case is not evidential, and may be dismissed for 'a fortuitous ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... limited only by necessity; the resemblance of the Mpongwe rite to that of the Jews, though remarkable, is purely accidental. 2. The division of tribes into separate families and frequently into the number twelve; but this again appears fortuitous; almost all the West African people have some such division, and they range upwards from three, as amongst the Kru-men, the Gallas, the Wakwafi,and the Wanyika.[FN11] 3. Exogamy or the rigid interdiction of marriage between clans and families nearly ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... neither sets in order nor chooses anything, and has neither will nor understanding. Now, I maintain that the universe bears the character and stamp of a cause infinitely powerful and industrious; and, at the same time, that chance—that is, the fortuitous concourse of causes void of reason—cannot have ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... law by which the universe can be accounted for. But if there is no universal law, there is only chance. Hence it is clear that what we are asked to believe is that ancient Greek speculation was after all not far from the truth, that through a fortuitous (accidental) concourse of atoms the world came into being, and that by chance combinations of elements the great ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... this work, to consider in what manner the advancement of Europe in civilization has taken place, to ascertain how far its progress has been fortuitous, and how far ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... to follow him to Sanditon as soon as possible; and, healthy as all the Heywoods undeniably were, he foresaw that every one of them would be benefitted by the sea. He held it indeed as certain that no person, however upheld for the present by fortuitous aids of exercise and spirit in a semblance of health, could be really in a state of secure and permanent health without spending at least six weeks by the sea every year. The sea air and sea-bathing together were nearly infallible; one or ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... disorderly, or, rather, indeed, are more likely to be the former than the latter. For necessarily the rarer rises above the denser; the stronger compels the weaker; that which is pushed hardest runs fastest. And even though, among organic forms, orderly and disorderly had been, by the purely fortuitous concurrence of atoms, originally produced in equal numbers, the former would be sure in the course of ages to become the more numerous, and that in proportion to the orderliness of their composition, and to their consequent suitableness for the reception and maintenance ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... sprang from an artistic family, and after three months' training at South Kensington in 1857, he began to draw on wood for "Fun" at about the same time as Mr. W. S. Gilbert—the autumn of 1861. His connection with Punch was fortuitous. Being sent by Dr. James Macaulay, the editor of the "Leisure Hour," to Mr. Swain for some blocks on which to make his drawings for that magazine, he was smartly captured by the vigilant engraver for ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... considers the universe eternal, but not its form. This was the system of Epicurus and most of the ancient philosophers and poets, who imagined the world either to be produced by fortuitous concourse of atoms existing from all eternity, or to have sprung out of the chaotic form which ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... he said, between such a belief and the acceptance of the theory of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. And, in a letter to the Times justifying this assertion, he told how forty years before he had asked Liebig, when walking with him in the country, whether he believed that the grass {45} and flowers they saw around them "grew by mere chemical forces." "No," he answered, ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... ambiguity, reserved to themselves an evasion or subterfuge, whatever might be the event. To this are owing the prognostics with regard to futurity, which men fancied they should find in the entrails of beasts, in the flight and singing of birds, in the aspect of the planets, in fortuitous accidents, and in the caprice of chance; those dreadful prodigies that filled a whole nation with terror, and which, it was believed, nothing could expiate but mournful ceremonies, and even sometimes the effusion of human blood: in fine, those black inventions of magic, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... same time as Colleville, who has been mentioned already as his intimate friend. In opposition to the well-regulated, gloomy household of Thuillier, social nature had provided that of Colleville; and if it is impossible not to remark that this fortuitous contrast was scarcely moral, we must add that, before deciding that point, it would be well to wait for the end of this drama, unfortunately too true, for which the ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... lines have any resemblance to those of former writers; he picks up no hemistichs, he copies no favourite expressions; he seems to have laid up no stores of thought or diction, but to owe all to the fortuitous suggestions of the present moment. Yet I have reason to believe that, when once he had formed a new design, he then laboured it with very patient industry; and that he composed with great labour and frequent revisions. His verses are formed by no certain model; he is ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... this North German tale bears to the first part of "All Baba" is striking, and is certainly not merely fortuitous; the fundamental outline of the latter is readily recognisable in the legend of The Dummburg, notwithstanding differences in the details. In both the hero is a poor woodcutter, or faggot-maker; for the band of robbers a monk is substituted in the German legend, and for the "open, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... continue your searches. It will be reputable to my work, and suitable to your professorship, to have something of yours in the notes. As you have given no directions about your name, I shall therefore put it. I wish your brother would take the same trouble. A commentary must arise from the fortuitous discoveries of many men in devious walks of literature. Some of your remarks are on plays already printed: but I purpose to add an Appendix of Notes, so ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... use Voltaire's phrase—is he who can laugh much at these things now. As Goldsmith himself would have agreed, the jests of one age are not the jests of another. But it is a little curious that, by one of those freaks of circumstance, or "fortuitous concourses," there is to-day generally included among the very works of Goldsmith above referred to something which, in the opinion of many, is conjectured to have been really the production of the ingenious ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... impossible for me to believe that fortuitous variation—variation all around the circle—could have resulted in the evolution of man. There must have been a predetermined tendency to variation in certain directions. To introduce chance into the world is to introduce chaos. No more would ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... in the studio, and had his plate at table, like one of the family. This arrangement was favorable to many a stolen five minutes with Margaret, in the hall or on the staircase. In these fortuitous moments he breathed an atmosphere that sustained him in his task of dispelling Mr. Slocum's recurrent fits of despondency. Margaret had her duties, too, at this period, and the forenoons were sacred ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... take me for an ogre. Hence, by way of justification, I purpose explaining to you what led up to it. I think it needless to account for the nature and origin of the reports which circulated originally, as also why you were connected with them. There was, however, one circumstance, a purely fortuitous one, and which need not now be mentioned, which aroused my suspicions. From these reports and accidental circumstances, the same conclusion became evolved for me. I make this statement in all sincerity, for it was ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... sir," answered the Colonel, with the air of a modest millionaire explaining his success; "a lot most excellently situated on the same square with the opera house, and only two squares from the board of trade. I consider the purchase a most fortuitous one. It is my intention to erect a small building upon it at once, and open a modest book and stationery store. During past years I have met with many pecuniary reverses, and I now find it necessary to engage in some commercial occupation that will ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... evil communications corrupting good manners. I may say that I regard with anxiety a too great freedom, what I may call an unrestrained intercourse, between members of the two churches—that is, indeed, if I am justified in describing as a church that which I have heard stigmatised as 'a fortuitous concourse of atheistic atoms'!" ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... not merely fortuitous. For, however abhorrent such a notion may be to those yet wedded to Victorian ideals, we were, even before the war, undoubtedly passing through great changes in our philosophy of life. Just as a plant keeps on conforming to its environment, so our beliefs and ideals ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... wonderful invention of the telescope is but a poor imitation of the eye, and does not begin to equal it in marvelous design. Who would say that the telescope might have been constructed by chance, or the fortuitous concurrence of atoms, or by natural selection, or any other attempted method of blotting out the great intelligent Designer of the universe? It not only "seems absurd in the highest degree," but certainly is, and is ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... connection. What would Englishmen have felt, how would Englishmen have acted, had two or three individuals, strangers to their country, despicable in point of birth or talents, and considerable only from fortuitous elevation to offices which they were unfit to fill, ventured to insult their national character—to accuse of treason every man who dared to complain of his sufferings or his privations, or assumed the courage to exercise the ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous
... world lost so much that it greatly needed. I knew that there were others, like Chandler, Gales, Greeley, Ritchie, Prentice, and Kendall, who were more read and heeded, but I was consoled by the charitable reflection that entirely by reason of fortuitous circumstance they were known and I was not. Then to me life was a song with my generously self-admired newspaper as the chorus. There came rude awakenings, of course, from those blissful dreams as the shock of editorial conflict gradually taught me that journalism was one ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... difference between Eastern and Mountain time, the dinner for two in the private dining-room of the Inter-Mountain synchronized very fairly with the threshing out of college reminiscences by the two young men whose apparently fortuitous meeting on the veranda of the far-away North Shore club-house one of them, at least, was ascribing to the good offices of ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... to consider this war as a fortuitous event, which might, indeed, have been staved off, but which, having disturbed for a time the easy movement of our insular life, will die away and leave us free to continue our progress on the same lines as before. But this faith is hardly more than ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... were somewhat relaxed in the holidays. On the day of Uncle Bobby's visit, by a fortuitous circumstance, Miss Sallie was five miles away, superintending a new incubator house at the school farm. The Dowager and Miss Wadsworth and Miss Jellings were scheduled for a reception in the village, and the other teachers ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... origin and formation of the solar system, which it treats not as eternal after the manner of the Stoics, but as having had a definite beginning, and as being destined to a natural and inevitable decay. He applies his principle of "Fortuitous Concurrence" to this part of his subject with signal power, but the faultiness of his method interferes with the effect of his argument. The finest part of the book, and perhaps of the whole poem, is his account of the "origin of species," ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... incorporation of Parma and Genoa with France; and hence his donation of Piombino and Lucca to his brother-in-law, Bacchiochi!" Nowhere in history have I read of men of sense being so easily led astray as in our times, by confounding fortuitous events with consequences resulting from preconcerted plans and ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... long ago, bring no answering emotion to his heart? Who, after all, had ever so worshipped him? And must he now really lose her? Might it not be that he had been made the victim of some conspiracy, aided by fortuitous elements? ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... tide of a Homer. Elfonzo and Ambulinia soon repaired to the scene, and fortunately for them both the house was so crowded that they took their seats together in the music department, which was not in view of the auditory. This fortuitous circumstances added more the bliss of the Major than a thousand such exhibitions would have done. He forgot that he was man; music had lost its charms for him; whenever he attempted to carry his part, the string of the instrument would break, the bow became ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... the way of strength and hope. We have built up, moreover, a great system of government, which has stood through a long age as in many respects a model for those who seek to set liberty upon foundations that will endure against fortuitous change, against storm and accident. Our life contains every great thing, and contains ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... but it was not likely. As the hours passed, and the man neither returned nor answered Stonor's frequent shouts, the policeman began to wonder if an accident could have occurred to him. But he had certainly been alive and well within a half-hour of their arrival, and it seemed too fortuitous a circumstance that anything should have happened just at that juncture. A more probable explanation was that the man had seen them coming, and had reasons of his own for wishing to keep out of the way. After all, Stonor had no precise ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... right to exercise his rights of citizenship; for, many of the most useful and valuable of our voters, of both races, are "non-property-holding" voters. The fact of holding property is frequently predicated on conditions altogether fortuitous—a reverse of the wheel of fortune, a large or expensive family—a drought or flood, as well as many other contingencies all play conspicuous parts in preventing good and true citizens from accumulating property, even to the extent of an humble homestead; while fire, cyclone and flood often ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... the new art demands a more subtle construction than this, something that appeals less to the eye and more to the soul. This "concealed construction" may arise from an apparently fortuitous selection of forms on the canvas. Their external lack of cohesion is their internal harmony. This haphazard arrangement of forms may be the future of artistic harmony. Their fundamental relationship will finally be able ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... "Messianic" Eclogue, the fourth, which was addressed to Pollio during his consulship. By its fortuitous resemblance to the prophetic literature of the Bible, it came at one time to be the best known poem in Latin, and elevated its author to the position of an arch-magician in the medieval world. Indeed, this poem was largely influential ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... due to the ancestry of the individual—that is, they must be matters of heredity in the ordinary sense, coupled with the fortuitous variations which accompany heredity ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... message, but they seemed to him, in contrast with the still deeper and far more perfect union, which was being brought about in Christ, of men of all nationalities and belonging to mutually hostile races, to be little better than the fortuitous union of a pile of stones huddled together on the roadside. Measured against the architecture of the Church, as Paul saw it in his lofty idealism, the aggregations of men in the world do not deserve the name of buildings. His point of view is the exact opposite of that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... a muffled scream came from the cavernous mouth of the dark hole beyond the sacrificial altar through which the priestess had entered the temple. Without even a thought for his own safety, or the possibility for escape which this rapid series of fortuitous circumstances had thrust upon him, Tarzan of the Apes answered the call of the woman in danger. With a little bound he was at the gaping entrance to the subterranean chamber, and a moment later was ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... action, or of fitness to survive The notions of one Time and of one Space as single continuous receptacles; the distinction between thoughts and things, matter and mind between permanent subjects and changing attributes; the conception of classes with sub classes within them; the separation of fortuitous from regularly caused connections; surely all these were once definite conquests made at historic dates by our ancestors in their attempt to get the chaos of their crude individual experiences into a more shareable and manageable ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... mistress-of-the-house till a call ended, to stop to try to think it out. Later on, tonight, after the children were in bed, when she was brushing her hair . . . oh, probably she'd find as you so often did, when you went after the cause of some unexpected little feeling, that it came from a meaningless fortuitous association of ideas, like Elly's hatred of grape-jelly because she had once taken some ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... them those that are of the profoundest interest to our spiritual life—which, so far as we can see, must remain insoluble to the human intellect unless its powers become of quite a different order from what they are now. Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a fortuitous concourse of atoms? Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good and evil of importance ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... of things! Intellectual nations are advancing in an eternal circle of events and passions which succeed each other, and the last is necessarily connected with its antecedent; the solitary force of some fortuitous incident only can interrupt this concatenated ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... and to observe strict chastity for nine days. Similar cases of incest with a daughter are reported of many ancient kings. It seems unlikely that such reports are without foundation, and perhaps equally improbable that they refer to mere fortuitous outbursts of unnatural lust. We may suspect that they are based on a practice actually observed for a definite reason in certain special circumstances. Now in countries where the royal blood was traced through women only, and where consequently the king held office merely in virtue of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... done," he answered, giving back the Marquis look for look and scowl for scowl. "You deem it so because I am the secretary to the Marquis de Bellecour and she is the daughter of that same Marquis. But these are no more than the fortuitous circumstances in which we chance to find ourselves. That she is a woman must take rank before the fact that she is your daughter, and that I am a man must take rank before the fact that I am your secretary. Not, then, ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... that McClellan's great need was not the reinforcements for which he so constantly clamored, but decision and energy of character. Had he possessed these qualities he could have won for himself, from the fortuitous order which fell into his hands, a wreath of unfading laurel, and perhaps have saved almost countless lives of his fellow-countrymen. As it was, if he had only advanced his army a little faster, the twelve thousand Union soldiers, surrendered by the incompetent and pusillanimous Gen. Miles, ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... the landing she could still be heard giving vent to her feelings. Helene sat a long time plunged in the stupor which the information, supplied by this woman with such fortuitous seasonableness, had brought upon her. She now knew the place of assignation. It was a room, with pink decorations, in that old tumbledown house! She once more pictured to herself the staircase oozing with damp, ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... through our schools without ever dreaming that an ancient writer could pen three consecutive sentences with a connected meaning: chaos is felt to be natural to ancient literature: no search is made for sense, and the Latin or Greek book is looked upon as a more or less fortuitous concourse of words;' when Dr. Rouse can assert, 'The public schoolboy at nineteen is unable to read a simple Latin or Greek book with ease, or to express a simple series of thoughts without atrocious blunders: he has learnt from his classics neither accuracy ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... and marriage had been so sudden, unpremeditated, adventurous, that she could hardly believe that she had played her part in such a reckless drama. Of all the few hours of her life with Charles, the portion that most insisted in coming back to memory was their fortuitous encounter on the previous Saturday, and those bitter reprimands with which he had begun the attack, as it might be called, which had piqued her ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... rise to a suspicion, where these stains have, perhaps, been occasioned by the spilling of some liquid on the surface of the paper? and would it not be rash and unjust to raise an accusation from such a fact? There would indeed be great temerity in drawing such a conclusion from a fortuitous circumstance; but the inference which may be drawn from the place occupied by these stains on the surface of the paper, from the more or less significant words found in those places, would not permit an accusation to be so lightly ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... this singular commission were, to fix a money rental for all lands, free and unfree, in Clare and Connaught; to assess the taxation fairly due to the crown also in money; and to substitute generally the English law of succession for the ancient customs of Tanistry and gavelkind. In Clare, from fortuitous causes, the settlement they arrived at was never wholly reversed; in Connaught, the inhuman severity of Bingham rendered it odious from the first, and the successes of Hugh Roe O'Donnell, a few years later, were hailed by the people of that province ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... reasons directly connected with this desirable country property that he sought audience of his aunt immediately upon his return home. She was not to be found anywhere downstairs, and since his impatience did not welcome the idea of waiting for a fortuitous opportunity to chat with her in private, he took the stairs three at a time and rapped eagerly on the ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... head. The divergency even of a second may amount to millions of miles if you only have your lines long enough. The Projectile had certainly gone off its direct course; whatever the cause, the fact was undoubted. It was a great pity. The daring attempt must end in a failure due altogether to a fortuitous accident, against which no human foresight could have possibly taken precaution. Unless in case of the occurrence of some other most improbable accident, reaching the Moon was evidently now impossible. To failure, therefore, our travellers had ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... amazing has been the South Sea Drift. Blind, fortuitous, precarious as no other drift has been, nevertheless the islands in that waste of ocean have received drift after drift of the races. Down from the mainland of Asia poured an Aryan drift that built civilisations in Ceylon, Java, ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... often surprised out of long years of prejudice, and even of dislike and suspicion, by some fortuitous incident, which might have chanced to two who had every impulse towards each other, not such antagonisms as lay between Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and this Huguenot refugee. She had every cue to hate hum. Each moment of her ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 210 ff.) And as regards originality in the treatment of a purely scientific subject, a good deal depends on the meaning we attach to the term. If we understand by it striking conclusions drawn from theoretic premises, (as in Knox's "Races of Man,") clever generalizations from fortuitous analogies and coincidences insufficiently weighed, (as in Pococke's "India in Greece,") or, to take a philologic example, speculations suggestive of thought, it may be, but too insecurely based on positive data, (as in Rapp's "Physiologie der Sprache,") we shall vainly seek for such originality ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... then it would appear, plain as the writing on the wall, that some extraordinary transformation has come over the scene as soon as man appeared, and that an element utterly irreconcilable with all that has appeared previously manifests itself in him, not as an accident or a fortuitous occurrence, but as an essential, nay, as the essential law ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... be made in Genetics, work of a different kind was required. To learn the laws of Heredity and Variation there is no other way than that which Darwin himself followed, the direct examination of the phenomena. A beginning could be made by collecting fortuitous observations of this class, which have often thrown a suggestive light, but such evidence can be at best but superficial and some more penetrating instrument of research is required. This can only be provided by actual ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... must admit in each case that anything in the vaguest way approaching a proof was lacking. Just before he closed the deal with the lumber company that had taken over his timber tract a forest fire had broken out. Luck and a fortuitous shifting of the wind had saved ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... to send larger and purer streams of knowledge to the soul, has been unanswerably proved by an accumulation of unquestionable testimony. Most persons, however, allow the senses to remain uneducated, except as they may be cultivated by fortuitous circumstances. Eyes have they, but they see not; ears have they, but they hear not; neither do they understand. It is not impossible, nor perhaps improbable, that he who has these two senses properly cultivated will derive more unalloyed pleasure in spending a brief hour ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... that is to say, of Democritus, I could write of natural philosophy in as plain a style as Amafanius. For what is the great difficulty when you have put an end to all efficient causes, in speaking of the fortuitous concourse of corpuscules, for this is the name he gives to atoms. You know our system of natural philosophy, which depends upon the two principles, the efficient cause, and the subject matter out of which the efficient cause forms and produces what ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... and the cheek-bones, just a shade high, and the clearly pencilled brows and the clean modelling of the straight young chin, there was a certain openness and firmness, a fortuitous blending of form and proportion that would have made the head a perfect model for a coin, a wonderful study in pastels. Looking at her, an artist would have fancied her a bold and charming and boyish-looking little girl, fifteen years ago, ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... that there was an end of our fortuitous intercourse, and that he should be just as chatty and familiar with any man who might happen to be in the same carriage with him between Boulogne and Paris. I watched him hand his wife into a basket phaeton, smooth her dress, arrange ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... Burmans believe in dreams, omens, and unlucky days; observe the flight and feeding of fowls, the howl of dogs, and the aspect of the stars; they regard the lines in the hand, the knots in trees, and a thousand other fortuitous circumstances, and by these allow their actions ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... was to be fought. With that I think the court should be content. It has been necessary for Colonel Grant to explain to the court his own presence at Monsanto at midnight on the 28th. It would have been better, perhaps, had he simply stated that it was fortuitous, although I can understand that the court might have hesitated to accept such a statement. That, however, is really all that concerns the matter. Colonel Grant happened to be there. That is all that the court need remember. Let me add the assurance that it would not in the least assist the court ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... to her sex, a striking example of what a quiet country girl can accomplish without money or fortuitous circumstances. ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... the principal hotel, he there witnessed, through one of those fortuitous occurrences which are sometimes the mask of fate, a sufficiently indifferent performance by native jugglers, the chief of whom was exceedingly lean and so dirty as to suggest that he was remote from godliness. During the course of the conjuring this personage held the doctor by a certain ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... he made a fortuitous expedition to Frankfort-on-the-Main—an expedition partly prompted by the outbreak of cholera at Berlin at the time, and partly by the portent of a dream (he was credulous in such matters) which at the beginning of the year had intimated his death. Here, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... remarked as peculiar to Editors of the class in which I venture to enrol you, is the happy combination of fortuitous circumstances which usually put you in possession of the works which you have the goodness to bring into public notice. One walks on the sea-shore, and a wave casts on land a small cylindrical trunk or casket, containing a manuscript much damaged with sea-water, which is with difficulty ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... for a while after she had left him, forming his plans. He was grateful to her for a tact which had not transgressed beyond the limits of unspoken thought during their brief interview, but he was more pleased with the fortuitous absence of Phil and Musard at that period of his investigations. He welcomed the opportunity of working unquestioned, because he was not prepared to disclose the statements of Nepcote and Hazel Rath to any of the inmates of the moat-house ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... persecution of the powers, and an accusation of guilt directed against him for some neglect or deficiency in his relation to them. Hence by a perfectly logical and natural sequence there arose the belief in other-world or supernatural powers, whether purely fortuitous and magical or more distinctly rational and personal; there arose the sense of Sin, or of offence against these powers; there arose a complex ritual of Expiation—whether by personal sacrifice and suffering or by the sacrifice of victims. There arose too a whole catalogue ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... which swell the rivers, after fertilizing the country; the thousands of fountains which start from the same source, and which water animal and vegetable kind; all these things seem no more the effect of a fortuitous cause and of a declension of atoms, than the retina which receives the rays of light, the crystalline lens which refracts them, the incus, the malleus, the stapes, the tympanic membrane of the ear, which receives the sounds, ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... gathering on the steps? It was fortuitous, like everything destined to confound us. There stood Lady Jocelyn with Andrew, fretting his pate. Harry leant against a pillar, Miss Carrington, Mrs. Shorne, and Mrs. Melville, supported by Mr. George Uplift, held watchfully by. Juliana, with ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the ladder of promotion; and during the time which he remained in that situation, what chance had he of making an independence, and proposing for the hand of Isabel Revel? But now that, by a chain of circumstances peculiarly fortuitous, he was in command of an East Indiaman, returning home after having beat off a vessel of equal if not superior force, and preserved a cargo of immense value, he felt confident that he not only would be confirmed ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... Gulf, and prevents the effects of the heavy southerly seas from being felt in it. There is, perhaps, no gulf, whether it is entered by the eastern or western passage, the navigation of which is so easy as that of St. Vincent, and so clear of dangers, that it can only be by the most fortuitous circumstances, or the most culpable neglect, that any accident can befal a ship in its ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... I have not forgotten anything unintentionally, these are the principal opinions concerning the soul. I have omitted Democritus, a very great man indeed, but one who deduces the soul from the fortuitous concourse of small, light, and round substances; for, if you believe men of his school, there is nothing which a crowd of atoms cannot effect. Which of these opinions is true, some God must determine. It is an important question for ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... that the dependent and affectionate man opposite her was the one who had filled her with fear and resentment such a short time ago. She found herself actually laughing aloud once at the absurdity of it all. Had her dread of him been fortuitous, his tyranny a mere sham? Had he really liked her all the time, and had she been a sensitive fool? She would have thought so, indeed, but for the memory of the perplexed and distracted face of her ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... they really do. The qualities of the mind do, in reality, establish the truest superiority over one another: yet should not these so far elevate our pride as to inflate us with contempt, and make us look down on our fellow-creatures as on animals of an inferior order; but that the fortuitous accident of birth, the acquisition of wealth, with some outward ornaments of dress, should inspire men with an insolence capable of treating the rest of mankind with disdain, is so preposterous that nothing less than daily experience ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... may be interpreted, there are in it coincidences with ascertained facts so marked that they cannot possibly be fortuitous. They prove therefore that Moses was in possession of some accurate information on the subject on which he ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... profound delight to menace, distress, and anger; they have the ode of the queen, the song of abundance, the psalms of grief, and, lastly, the long and mysterious war-cries the adolescent princesses send forth during the combats and massacres that precede the nuptial flight. May this be a fortuitous music that fails to attain their inward silence? In any event they seem not the least disturbed at the noises we make near the hive; but they regard these perhaps as not of their world, and possessed of no interest for them. It is possible that we on our side hear only a fractional ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... courts declared state laws in conflict with the United States Constitution, and the Fourteenth Amendment therefore acted as a protective bulwark in state as well as nation. In brief, then, the legal position of the big industrial organizations was almost impregnable because of the fortuitous circumstance that the words of a part of the Constitution might be held to mean something which probably did not enter the minds of the Congress or the state legislatures which placed ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... 'Why, Mr. President, according to Military Science it is our duty to guard against every possible or supposable contingency that may arise. For example, if under any circumstances, however fortuitous, the Enemy, by any chance or freak, should, in a last resort, get in behind Washington, in his efforts to capture the city, why, there the fort is to ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... artificially produced in plastic material. In this way a utensil may acquire ornamental characters long before the workman has learned to take pleasure in such details or has conceived an idea beyond that of simple utility. This may be called unconscious embellishment. In this fortuitous fashion a ribbed variety of fruit shell would give rise to a ribbed vessel in clay; one covered with spines would suggest a noded vessel, etc. When taste came to be exercised upon such objects these features would be retained and copied for the ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... these: Five or six years ago, I knew a little of Alan Walcott. I had made his acquaintance in a fortuitous way, and he once did me a good turn by coming forward as a witness in ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Egyptians of all ranks, who made them offerings of figs, grapes, cucumbers, vegetables and water. The most famous of them all, the Sycamore of the South, used to be regarded as the living body of Hathor on earth. Each family possessed gods and fetishes, which had been pointed out by some fortuitous meeting with an animal or an object; perhaps by a dream and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... do in the way of coming upon a solution of the problem of life, neither society nor the school has any special warrant for exultation. These defectives did not just happen. The law of life is neither fortuitous nor capricious. On the contrary, like begets like, and the law is immutable. With lavish hand, society provides the pound of cure but gives only superficial consideration to the ounce of prevention. The title of education will ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... M. le Marquis de Firmin-Latour, you understand, Sir, are destined by Nature first and by fortuitous circumstances afterwards to become the clients of men of ability like myself. I knew that sooner or later the elegant young soldier would be forced to seek the advice of someone wiser than himself, for indeed his present situation ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... one word more—either for you, or any other readers who may be startled at what I have been saying, as to the peculiar stress laid by the Founder of our religion on right dealing with wealth. Let them be assured that it is with no fortuitous choice among the attributes or powers of evil, that "Mammon" is assigned for the direct adversary of the Master whom they are bound to serve. You cannot, by any artifice of reconciliation, be God's soldier, and his. Nor while the desire of gain is within your heart, ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... last gasp, and had mentally resigned themselves to death, when there came a tremendous shock, throwing the two lads off their feet only just in time to avoid the final thrusts from the two pirates, to which fortuitous circumstance they owed their lives. As they lay on the deck, struggling to regain their footing, they were trampled on and knocked over again by a swarm of men who were rushing in over the port bulwarks. It was the Tiger's crew, who ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Brunt's romance and Godwin's tale a century earlier are too striking to be fortuitous, and, indeed, there is no question that Brunt used Godwin as one of his chief sources. An earlier Robinson Crusoe, an idyllic Gulliver's Travels, Godwin's The Man in the Moone helped to establish in English literature the vogue of the traveler's ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... no means assert that they have found a law by which the universe can be accounted for. But if there is no universal law, there is only chance. Hence it is clear that what we are asked to believe is that ancient Greek speculation was after all not far from the truth, that through a fortuitous (accidental) concourse of atoms the world came into being, and that by chance combinations of elements the great variety ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... go back to the Memoires, partly in compliment to the master of all mid-nineteenth-century critics, but more because of their almost fortuitous good luck in ushering Manon into the world. There is something in them of both their successors, Cleveland and the Doyen, but it may be admitted that they are less unreadable than the first, and less trivial than the second. The ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... for every man. We are born with different equipments, but if we have a gift, be very sure it is not fortuitous. We have earned it. It should make us the finer workman. But all work is good. The handle of ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... that it is not entirely fortuitous that this added impulse is given to our work just at this time. We all feel that the present is a moment when the very foundations of our ethical life—both as individuals and as groups—have received a rude shock. At such a time—more than ever—we need to understand and to ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... Hall was the ultra-respectable Abram S. Hewitt, a millionaire capitalist. The Republican party nominated a verbose, pushful, self-glorifying young man, who, by a combination of fortuitous circumstances, later attained the position of President of the United States. This was Theodore Roosevelt, the scion of a moderately rich New York family, and a remarkable character whose pugnacious disposition, indifference to political conventionalities, capacity ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... common law,—as I looked back over my long interest in the position of woman, I felt that my greatest drawback had been the want of such an example. Every practical experiment that the world recorded had been made under such peculiar circumstances, or from such a fortuitous height, that it was at ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... strive for beauty of form, and would be ashamed of the fortuitous scaffolding that satisfies the British story-tellers. A eulogist of Dickens, Mr. George Gissing, has recently remarked acutely that "Daudet has a great advantage in his mastery of construction. Where, as in 'Fromont and Risler,' he constructs too well, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... inscrutable instincts and results of habit! A circumstance, apparently fortuitous and accidental, placed him in the midst of an Indian family, the female owner of which loved him with the most disinterested tenderness, and lavished upon him all the affectionate sentiments of a mother towards a son. Had the die of his lot been cast otherwise, all the inhabitants of the village ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... say—"These things do not happen,"—because it is indisputable that they do happen. That combination which comprises a dark night, a highwayman armed and hatted to the teeth, and myself, may be a purely fortuitous one, but will such a criticism bring any comfort to the highwayman? And the concourse of three benevolent millionaires with the person to whom poverty can do no more is so pleasant and possible that I marvel it does not occur more frequently. I am prepared to believe on the ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... gust of wind, after which Dee sat pondering deeply on the matter, but unable to come to any satisfactory conclusion. He never suspected for one moment what in this evil and matter-of-fact generation would have occurred even to the most credulous—to wit, that either insanity or fanaticism, aided by fortuitous events, if we may so speak, was the cause of this delusion, at least to the unhappy woman now the object of Dee's most abstruse speculations. His thoughts, however, would often recur to his quondam associate, Kelly, and, if in the neighbourhood, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... suggestion became so insistent that I went further and began to wonder whether I was not in fact reading a "story-form" of some already triumphant film. Certainly the resemblance is almost too pronounced to be fortuitous; from the sensational branding scene, through cowboy stunts, to the up-town playhouse, where a repentant and wife-seeking hero recognises his mark upon the shoulder of the leading lady—and so to reconciliation, slow fade-out, and the announcement of Next Week's ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... concern ourselves. The larva of Sitaris is then in conditions exceptionally favourable for growth; but, in spite of appearances, there is no reason for admiring the marvellous foresight and extraordinary sureness of instinct; nearly everything depends on a fortuitous circumstance, a chance. This becomes very evident if we study another related beetle; it is called the Sitaris colletis, and lives at the expense of the hymenopterous Colletes, as its relative at the expense of the Anthophora. ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... and its processes were sometimes discussed, and some thought that "time" was the ultimate cause of all, others that all these had sprung forth by their own nature (svabhava), others that everything had come forth in accordance with an inexorable destiny or a fortuitous concourse of accidental happenings, or through matter combinations in general. References to diverse kinds of heresies are found in Buddhist literature also, but no detailed accounts of these views are known. Of the Upani@sad type of materialists the two schools ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... the result of organization maintain the doctrine of spontaneous generation; that is, the production of life without any agency other than the recognized forces of nature being brought about simply by a fortuitous combination of atoms. Although this doctrine cannot be said to be inconsistent with the theory of life presented, yet it is by no means a legitimate or necessary result of it; and observation ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... responsibility of each, the exact measure of their guilt; but I do not myself believe that the Countess was a prime mover, or, indeed, more than an accessory. She was drawn into it, perhaps involved, how or why we cannot know, but possibly by fortuitous circumstances that put an unavoidable pressure upon her; a consenting party, but under protest. That is my view ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... marks of electrical action in the cases cited, and since we know something of the subtlety of the agent; that it may be "amassed, condensed and rarefied," that it is not loose and wandering, and the mere plaything of fortuitous forces, as the atmosphere is supposed to be; but, on the contrary, has close and most sympathetic adjustment with the earth-force; and that it is the invisible hand that holds and manages the grosser atmospheric matter; since we ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... years, including the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, of Charles V., and of Philip II., is, in a way, one of unmatched splendor. Spain had not like England by slow degrees expanded into great proportions, but through strange and perfectly fortuitous circumstances, she had, from a proud obscurity, suddenly leaped into a position of commanding power and magnificence. Fortune threw into her lap the greatest prize she ever had to bestow, and at the same time gave her two sovereigns of exceptional qualities and ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... universe a finite and determinate quantity of matter, gifted with a definite number of properties, and susceptible of modification, but not of progress; in which certain productive forces act by the fortuitous agglomeration of circumstances not to be predicated or foreseen; or through the necessary succession of causes and effects,—of events inevitable and independent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... situation of the hero winning his magic reward by saving some person or animal from choking appearing in Roumania and the Philippines, and in connection, too, with incidents from the "Magic Ring" cycle. The resemblance can hardly be fortuitous. ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... a widow; she suffered much from rheumatism; she was slowly going blind; she was deemed unlucky and avoided. For more than once of late years she had in important crises predicted disaster, and this prophecy, by fortuitous circumstances, had been fulfilled; thus those to whom a deceitful hope is preferable to a warning of trouble sought by fleeing the oracle to elude the misfortune. Being esteemed a witch, and associated with dark dealings and prone to catastrophe, she lived in peculiar ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... by an extension of the circle of influence which a people exerts through its traders, its deep-sea fishermen, its picturesque marauders and more respectable missionaries, and earlier still by a widening of its mere geographical horizon through fortuitous or systematic exploration. The Northmen visited the coasts of Britain and France first as pirates, then as settlers. Norman and Breton fishermen were drawing in their nets on the Grand Bank of Newfoundland thirty years before Cartier sailed up the St. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... After the fortuitous meeting of those men had come irresistible attraction and communion, moral, intellectual and scientific—friendship to the full meaning of ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... against the imputation, colonel," said Devers, to all appearances much injured at such injustice. "The wagon rarely, if ever, goes to town on Monday, and that Private Paine should have gone with it is equally fortuitous." ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... figures. As Metak walked quickly across the pavement with the girl at his side, Bertha Kircher could only guess at the man's intentions. She could see no way in which to escape and so she went docilely with him, hoping against hope that some fortuitous circumstance might eventually arise that would give her the coveted ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... basis of the possibility of experience itself, and consequently prove their existence a priori. For whence could our experience itself acquire certainty, if all the rules on which it depends were themselves empirical, and consequently fortuitous? No one, therefore, can admit the validity of the use of such rules as first principles. But, for the present, we may content ourselves with having established the fact, that we do possess and exercise a faculty of pure a ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... with him. This pressure, coming collectively the next day, had compelled him to close his doors, though he had not really expected to up to the last moment. His call for the sixty-thousand-dollar check at the time had been purely fortuitous. He needed the money, of course, but it was due him, and his clerks were all very busy. He merely asked for and took it personally to save time. Stener knew if it had been refused him he would have brought suit. The matter of depositing city loan certificates in the sinking-fund, ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... exhibition of what is good. This is what we might expect of our religious musical foundations, which are justifying the standing condemnation of utilitarian economists so long as the stipendiaries are content indolently to follow the fortuitous traditions of the books that lie in the choir, supplemented by the penny-a-sheet music of the common shops. In the Universities, too, it should be impossible for an undergraduate not to gain acquaintance with good ecclesiastical music, and this is not ensured by an occasional rare performance ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... through swinging doors to the dining-room. Again, embracing Lanyard, his glance seemed devoid of any sort of intelligible expression; and if its object needed all his self-possession in that moment, it was to dissemble relief rather than dismay. An accent of the fortuitous distinguished this second encounter too persuasively to excuse further misgivings. What the adventurer himself hadn't known till within the last ten minutes, that he was coming to Troyon's, Roddy couldn't possibly have anticipated; ergo, whatever the detective's business, ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... that had so quickly taught him the secret of the ax-swing. He knew that each of the things he saw, no matter how trivial, was either premeditated or the product of chance. If premeditated, he tried to find out its reason for being. If fortuitous, he wished to know the fact, and always attempted to figure out the possibility ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... had felt that it would be. But he could not afford to take any risks. Having found nothing in Swing's warbags save his friend's personal belongings, Racey slid the knife up his sleeve and went downstairs to breakfast. On the way he stopped a moment at a fortuitous knothole in the board wall. When he passed on his way the knife was no ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... comparatively recent,—but the eternal existence of Matter and Motion; and attempts to account for the origin of the world and of the races by which it is peopled, either by ascribing it, with Epicurus, to a fortuitous concourse of atoms, or, with more modern Speculatists, to a law of progressive development. This has been called the Epicurean Hypothesis, because Epicurus, while nominally admitting the existence of God, denied the creation ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... to pour in! Was ever marriage so fortuitous! The Coles' farm joined that of the Days and the union between the two only children would cement the friendship between the families. The fact that Uncle Bart was a joiner, Cephas a painter, and Abel Day a mason and bricklayer made the alliance ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... position to review the general tenour of Leonardos writings, I may perhaps be permitted to add a word as to my own estimate of the value of their contents. I have already shown that it is due to nothing but a fortuitous succession of unfortunate circumstances, that we should not, long since, have known Leonardo, not merely as a Painter, but as an Author, a Philosopher, and a Naturalist. There can be no doubt that in more ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... many thousands of gold-seekers and emigrants came in the days of California's gold excitement. Every mile has some story of pioneer bravery or heroism, of hairbreadth escape from hostile Indians or fortuitous deliverance from storm or disaster. It was over this route the pilgrims came who sought in Utah a land of freedom where they might follow their own peculiar conceptions of religion and duty, untrammeled and uninterfered with by hostile onlookers and disbelievers. Here came the home-seekers ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... Sovereign will always exert himself to repair fortuitous disasters, and will allow those who have paid their taxes punctually in prosperity, considerable liberty in times of barbaric invasion. On this ground, and on account of the incursions of the Suevi, the King grants for this year, the fifteenth Indiction[820], ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... German tale bears to the first part of "All Baba" is striking, and is certainly not merely fortuitous; the fundamental outline of the latter is readily recognisable in the legend of The Dummburg, notwithstanding differences in the details. In both the hero is a poor woodcutter, or faggot-maker; for the band of robbers a monk is substituted in ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... doing, and marry a neighbouring estate, or a covetable title, with some conception of the responsibilities they undertake. But even among these, their season in the confused metropolis creates licentious and fortuitous temptation before unknown; and in the lower middle orders, an entirely new kingdom of discomfort and disgrace has been preached to them in the doctrines of unbridled pleasure which are merely an apology for their peculiar forms of illbreeding. It is quite curious how ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... intelligence alone they owe their regeneration, but to certain sublime doctrines—originated in causes quite extrinsical from human nature—which, having found their way to them through a concourse of favourable and apparently fortuitous circumstances, were more or less readily admitted, as notions gained from without, and by degrees ingrafted, under various modifications, on their own ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... in the "Descent of Man" the manner of formation of the wondrous ball-and-socket ornaments, and I will swear to the truth of this case. (243/3. See "Descent of Man," II., page 141. Darwin says that no one will attribute the shading of the "eyes" on the wings of the Argus pheasant to the "fortuitous concourse of atoms of colouring-matter." He goes on to say that the development of the ball-and-socket effect by means of Natural Selection seems at first as incredible as that "one of Raphael's Madonnas should have been formed by the selection of chance ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... go by a law which does not recognize the loftiest in him, a man feels to be a mockery of him. There lies little more satisfaction in such a condition of things than if the whole were the fortuitous result of ever conflicting, never combining forces. Wherever individual and various necessity, choice, and prayer, come in, there must be the present God, able and ready to fit circumstances to the varying need of the thinking, willing being he has created. Machinery will not do here—perfect ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... often say something better. But there is no reason why the general reader should not thoroughly enjoy it. Certainly it ought to be more generously recognised than it is. So many persons at present think of it as merely accidental and fortuitous, as if there was no mind in it, as if all the excellent things loosely described as errata, all the curios felicitates of the setter-up of texts, were casual blunders. Such a view reminds one of the way in which the last- century critics used to speak of Shakspere ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... I had never seen, yet knew that I should recognize when found. My quest was not aimless and fortuitous; it had a definite method. I turned from one street into another without hesitation and threaded a maze of intricate passages, devoid of the fear of losing ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... the clearest symptom of the weakness of their empire and of the small power wielded by their King of kings. In contrast alike with its predecessors and successors the Arsacid dominion was peculiarly a chance formation—a state which had come into existence through fortuitous external circumstances, and had no firm foundation within itself, or any ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the picture writings these days of the week are placed respectively north, south, east, and west, and that in the Maya language the quarters of the indiction still bear the names of the cardinal points, hinting the reason of their adoption.[74-1] This cannot be fortuitous. Again, the division of the year into four seasons—a division as devoid of foundation in nature as that of the ancient Aryans into three, and unknown among many tribes, yet obtained in very early times among Algonkins, Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Aztecs, Muyscas, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... business was to eschew idle speculations and go ahead and save his life if it wasn't already too late. Thereupon the doctor opened up the wound and extracted a section of a fine needle. The other half was found sticking in the window sill where a careless seamstress had fixed it. The spider had been a fortuitous arrival. The man made one of the ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... before. Here grotto within grotto safe defies The sunbeam. There imbossed and fretted wild, The growing wonder takes a thousand shapes Capricious, in which fancy seeks in vain The likeness of some object seen before. Thus nature works as if to mock at art, And in defiance of her rival powers; By these fortuitous and random strokes Performing such inimitable feats, As she with all her rules can never reach. Less worthy of applause though more admired, Because a novelty, the work of man, Imperial mistress of the fur-clad ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... These fortuitous happenings and incidents are nothing compared with one consideration which makes me the happiest man in the world. It is not that I made a lucky venture in stocks and acquired more millions than all of my ancestors ever possessed. That is something, of course, but I had enough money ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... the man who had frustrated it. Payment of Mr Simpson's annuity was resisted, and the poor mathematician was in great straits for those necessaries of life, which, necessary as they may be, are often with a great portion of the human family very fortuitous. Ask not on what legal pretexts Sir John had been successful in inflicting this revenge. Such pretexts are "thick as blackberries." Facilis est descensus—No rich suitor ever sought long for admission into the Court of Chancery, however difficult even he may have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... extraneousness &c 57; accident; appearance, phenomenon &c 448. Adj. derived from without; objective; extrinsic, extrinsical^; extraneous &c (foreign) 57; modal, adventitious; ascititious^, adscititious^; incidental, accidental, nonessential; contingent, fortuitous. implanted, ingrafted^; inculcated, infused. outward, apparent &c (external) 220. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... property, have taken two principal directions, the first a juridical, the second a political one. The axiom, res nullius cedit primo occupanti (compare L. 3, Digest, XLI, 1), explains only the smallest part of the relations of property, and that only because of a very fortuitous circumstance. According to Hobbes (Leviathan, 24), property has its origin in the recognition of it by the power of the state, by the autorite publique, the gouvernement (Bossuet, Politique tiree de l'Ecriture, Sainte, L. 3, 4), or as Montesquieu (Esprit des Lois XXVI., 15) more ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... equally little encouragement from his companions. The important point about him is that he is not a natural product at all, but the outcome of an artificial drilling of the mind. In a word, he is the embodiment of the education system, uncorrected by fortuitous influences and conditions. Everybody knows that gracefulness is not acquired by means of stilted lessons in deportment, but that it consists of natural muscular movement untrammelled by self-consciousness or ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... theory is a very plausible one; it is one of the best cosmogonies that the wit of man has ever framed. It is a revival of the old atheistic hypothesis,—the Epicurean doctrine of the formation of the universe by a fortuitous concourse of atoms,—with all the modifications and improvements that were rendered necessary by the discoveries of modern science. We call it an atheistic theory, because, though the writer supposes that primitive matter was first endowed by divine power with its mysterious ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... the other hand, while admiring the bright object ever in his mind, feared venturing a disclosure, which, in his position and prospects, his conscience whispered to him would be considered presumptuous. Thus matters rested, until a fortuitous circumstance broke the spell that bound these two young hearts, and disclosed to each the transitory ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... his charity, no poor cripple to seek his sympathy; she was almost alone. She could have fled, but felt herself fixed to the ground, and with desperate efforts endeavored to conceal her excitement. He approaches nearer; with glistening eye she watches and hopes some fortuitous circumstances may call him aside. Their glance meets; she blushes and trembles, Father Francis ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... the ratio et institutio Studiorum Societatis Jesu of Claudius Aquaviva, and, following that, they distinguish two courses of teaching, a higher and a lower. The lower included nothing but an external knowledge of the Latin language, and some fortuitous knowledge of History, of Antiquities, and of Mythology. The memory was cultivated as a means of keeping down free activity of thought and clearness of judgment. The higher course comprehended Dialectics, Rhetoric, Physics, ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... been; to make his name famous; and confirm the English in their mad method of fighting, like Baresarks or Janizaries rather than strategic human creatures. [See, in Busching's Magazin, xvi. 169 ("Your illustrious 'Column,' at Fontenoy? It was fortuitous, I say; done like janizaries;" and so forth), a Criticism ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... supreme and peculiar obligation of her being. Though she was less fine than Jenny, who in her studious way was a girl of much character, she was by no means as superficial as she appeared, and might in time, aided by fortuitous circumstances, make a strong and capable woman. Her faults, after all, were due in a large measure to a training which had consistently magnified in her mind the space which she would ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... intimation could not be accidental—-it could not be fortuitous, the resemblance of that half-seen but beautiful female hand with one which his lips had once touched, and, while they touched it, had internally sworn allegiance to the lovely owner. Had further proof been wanting, there was ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... going to relate the fortuitous circumstance which led Murat to the moat of Pizzo, then we will leave it to fatalists to draw from this strange story whatever philosophical deduction may please them. We, as humble annalists, can only vouch for ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... trampled grass-banks, the lean dogs prowling in refuse-heaps, the reflection of a crooked gas-lamp in a stagnant loop of the river; and he asked himself how it was possible to put any sense of moral beauty into lives bounded forever by the low horizon of the factory. There is a fortuitous ugliness that has life and hope in it: the ugliness of overcrowded city streets, of the rush and drive of packed activities; but this out-spread meanness of the suburban working colony, uncircumscribed by any pressure of surrounding ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... owing to this fortuitous intervention that when Dr. Hooper called a couple of days after to see his patient he was able to certify to a remarkable change for the better in her. All the distressing symptoms had disappeared; the pain in her side had died ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... decaying specimens, they too will be infected; he will see that too close crowding renders the prospect for good fruit doubtful; and, by natural transition of thought, will be glad that his boys and girls are not shut in to the fortuitous associations of hall- way and street. The area of land purchased will depend largely on the desires and purse of the buyer; but about one acre appears to satisfy the majority of people. This amount is not so great ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... races, also that he was dealing not with all societies but all that had any permanence. He argues that the promiscuous horde, where and when it is found, is to be explained as an abnormal case of retrogression due to a fortuitous scarcity of females resulting in polyandry, and he opposes to the theory of its predominance the potency of sexual jealousy which might serve as only another name for the patriarchal power. On the whole the better opinion is certainly with Maine. His theory, at any rate, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... picture in black and white. It wandered into the gallery of Sir George's Pro-Consulship in South Australia. At the entrance to Spencer's Gulf lies an island, on which a fortuitous little colony had established itself. The colonists were mostly escaped convicts, from the penal settlements of Australia and Van Diemen's Land, or sailors who had deserted their ships. The men killed the seals which frequented the island, trading ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... future. We know that from the Past, stretching back into infinity, we have ourselves made the Present,—and according to Divine law we also know that from this Present, stretching forward into infinity, we shall ourselves evolve all that is yet To Come. There is no power, no deity, no chance, no 'fortuitous concurrence of atoms' in what is simply a figure of the Universal Mathematics. Nothing can be 'forgiven' under the eternal law of Compensation,— nothing need be 'prayed for,' since everything is designed to accomplish ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... necessity and fortuitous circumstance seemed to make advisable another Southern effort in Parliament. The cotton loan, though fairly strong again because of Confederate governmental aid, was in fact a failure in its expected result of public support for the South; ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... of a Saviour was almost coeval with the world; and during the long succession of ages which had since elapsed, and the infinite diversity of events, so perplexing to the human eye and so apparently fortuitous, the love of God was pursuing its high purpose. The frequent intimations given to the ancient patriarchs, and to the prophets of Israel, proved that the eternal Ruler of the universe was producing, by a vast series of preparatory means, the last and best days of time, when ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... the only plausible reason of this deviation. However slight it might have been, it had sufficed to modify the course of the projectile. It was a fatality. The bold attempt had miscarried by a fortuitous circumstance; and unless by some exceptional event, they could now never ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... subterfuge, whatever might be the event. To this are owing the prognostics with regard to futurity, which men fancied they should find in the entrails of beasts, in the flight and singing of birds, in the aspect of the planets, in fortuitous accidents, and in the caprice of chance; those dreadful prodigies that filled a whole nation with terror, and which, it was believed, nothing could expiate but mournful ceremonies, and even sometimes the effusion of human blood: in fine, those ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... and corrupted again into it. His infinite is nothing else but matter." "Whence," says Cudworth, "we conclude that Anaximander's infinite was nothing else but an infinite chaos of matter, in which were actually or potentially contained all manner of qualities, by the fortuitous secretion and segregation of which he supposed infinite worlds to be successively generated and corrupted. So that we may easily guess whence Leucippus and Democritus had their infinite worlds, and perceive how near akin these two Atheistic hypotheses were."[421] The reader, whose curiosity ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... consultation, making fine promises to the Sieur Avenelles, whom with the greatest difficulty they allowed, towards midnight, to depart, at which hour he issued secretly from the castle. At this moment the pages of the gentleman and all his people were having a right jovial supper in honour of the fortuitous wedding of their master. Now, arriving at the height of the festivities, in the middle of the intoxication and joyous huzzahs, he was assailed with jeers, jokes, and laughter that turned him sick when he came into his room. The poor servant wished to speak, but the advocate ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... name on the boat as Roger Johnston, which was true so far as it went, and he signed this same name at the hotel where he put up till morning. The place was an entirely unknown one to him and he was unknown to it. Both fortuitous facts, he thought, in the light of his own perplexity as to the position in which he really stood towards ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... crime was their religion; and for this crime they had been discarded. In great perturbation men began to look round for help; and soon all eyes were fixed on one whom a rare concurrence both of personal qualities and of fortuitous circumstances pointed out ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
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