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More "Invention" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Florentine court are Mrs. Behn's own invention; but the device by which Curtius ensnares Frederick is not unlike Vendice and Hippolito's trapping of the lecherous old Duke in The Revenger's Tragedy (4to, 1607), albeit the saturnine Tourneur gives the whole scene a far more terrible ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... seventy men for a distance of nine and a half miles, the speed being about five miles an hour. Clumsy and slow as it was, this was a very marked advance on anything that had previously been accomplished. But the engineer's genius for invention was not balanced by adequate business capacity, and he lacked the means of perfecting and forwarding his devices; they had to wait. He went to Peru in 1817, and suffered heavy losses through the war of independence. At this time he was nearly drowned ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... appears to be a cane, is incendiary, and ought to be suppressed. There ought to be a law passed to suppress a fish-pole that passes in polite society for a cane, and in such a moment as ye think not is pulled out to catch fish. There is nothing square about it, and the invention of that blasted stem winding fish-pole is doing more to ruin this country than all the political parties can overcome. If there was a law to compel the owners of those wailking-sticks to put a sign on their canes, "This is a fish-pole," there would be less canes taken on these ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... also been very highly commended by the government inspectors, and his invention has attracted wide notice because it has placed within reach of the local weavers an apparatus which is an immense saving in labor and will secure its operators at least three times the results and compensations for the same expenditure ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... were to comfort Mrs. Bargrave in her affliction, and to ask her forgiveness for the breach of friendship, and with a pious discourse to encourage her. So that, after all, to suppose that Mrs. Bargrave could hatch such an invention as this from Friday noon till Saturday noon, supposing that she knew of Mrs. Veal's death the very first moment, without jumbling circumstances, and without any interest too; she must be more witty, fortunate, and wicked too, than any indifferent ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... hear of his inventing a treadmill chariot, which carried the horse on board the vehicle, but the horse once ran away and attained such a velocity in the streets of Stockholm that people declared the whole thing was a diabolical invention, and in deference to popular clamor Swedenborg discontinued his experiments along ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... and going out, before sleep, and in rising, in walking, and in standing still." He testifies, in his tenth catechesis, (n. 19,) that the holy wood of the cross kept at Jerusalem, had, in the few years since its invention by St. Helena, already filled the whole world, being carried everywhere by those who, full of devotion, cut of littie chips, (p. 146.) We learn from Rufin, (Hist. b. 1, c. 10,) that the holy cross was covered by St. Helena ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy." Thus wrote Shakespeare, and as the centuries roll by, and the marvels of invention and scientific research are unfolded, this truth of the immortal bard becomes the more and more evident to thinking ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... Rayson chuckled. "I believe these 'Hunters' are an invention of his uncle's. No, that young man didn't come in. His father is too smart for that. We won't see that young man again, unless we can have him brought in for this bit of work he ...
— The Best Made Plans • Everett B. Cole
... were mostly copied from France, except that purely Italian invention, the cavaliere servente, who was in great vogue. But there were everywhere in the cities coteries of fine ladies, called preziose, who were formed upon the French precieuses ridiculed by Moliere, and were, I suppose, ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... man for regulating his actions toward his fellow-mortals, the greatest are these—the code of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table, the Constitution of the United States and the unwritten rules of the New York Fire Department. The Round Table methods are no longer practicable since the invention of street cars and breach-of-promise suits, and our Constitution is being found more and more unconstitutional every day, so the code of our firemen must be considered in the lead, with the Golden Rule and Jeffries's new punch ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... desolation, and the elegancies of life were necessarily neglected. The invaders clothed themselves in a rude and fantastic manner. It is not unlikely that the Britons may have adopted some of their costume. From the Saxon females, we are told, came the invention of dividing, curling, and turning the hair over the back of the head. Ancient writers also add that their garments were ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... of carbon furnishes an abundance of sulphurous acid, but has hitherto been attended with danger. This, however, has recently been overcome by the invention of a new burner by Mr. Ckiandi Bey. The general arrangement of this new apparatus is shown in Figs. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various
... jenny—whence came the whole system of Lancashire cotton factories which drained a countryside of peasants and caused a deterioration of physique from which as yet there has been no recovery. Here was an invention which was to effect a tremendous saving of labour and be of sweeping benefit to mankind. Exploited without knowledge, scruple, or humanity, it also caused untold misery and grievous national harm. Read, mark, and ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... suddenly, at the end of February, the rheumatism came back into his shoulder and right arm and he could hardly hold the pen. He conceived the idea of dictating into a phonograph, and wrote Howells to test this invention and find out as to terms for three months, with cylinders enough to carry one hundred ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... a necessity, for she still was ignorant whether Hermas was yet alive, or whether Phoebicius had killed him in consequence of her betrayal. Perhaps all that Stephanus told her of his son's journey of investigation was an invention of Paulus to spare the sick man, and accustom him gradually to the loss of his child; and yet she was only too willing to believe that Hermas still lived, and she quitted the neighborhood of the cave as late as possible, and filled the sick man's ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... any other has in recent years restored the study of the sense of smell from a by-path to its proper position as a highway for investigation is without doubt Professor Zwaardemaker, of Utrecht. The invention of his first olfactometer in 1888 and the appearance in 1895 of his great work Die Physiologie des Geruchs have served to give the physiology of the sense of smell an assured status and to open the way anew for much fruitful ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and some in another; now one loses its beneficent effect like a medicine long used or a garment outgrown; another waxes in power, reinforced by a new geographic factor which has been released from dormancy by the expansion of the known world, or the progress of invention and ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... unreliability of the object image, it would seem very unsafe to use it as the link between percept and symbol. Much better to connect the symbol directly with the experience and let it gain its meaning from that. As to its value in constructive work in arts, literature, drama, and invention, the testimony of some experts in each field bears witness that it is not a necessary accompaniment of success. The musician need not hear, mentally, all the harmonies, changes, intervals; he may think them in terms of notes, ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... take the flour off the cars and, with practically no handling, convert it into bread at the rate of 750,000 lbs. a day. This struck me as a peculiarly American contribution to big business methods; but on expressing this opinion I was immediately corrected. This form of bakery was a British invention, which has been in use for some time on our lines. The Americans owed their possession of the bakery to the courtesy of the British Government, who had postponed their own order and allowed the Americans to fill theirs four months ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... the ground (some of the commentators think) because he had sinned in the same way; and if Foscolo's opinion could be established—that the incident of the book is invention—their conclusion would receive curious collateral evidence, the circumstance of the perusal of the romance in company with a lady being likely enough to have occurred to Dante. But the same probability applies in the case of the lovers. The reading of such books was equally the taste of their ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... husbandry; but Abel brought milk, and the first-fruits of his flocks: but God was more delighted with the latter oblation,[6] when he was honored with what grew naturally of its own accord, than he was with what was the invention of a covetous man, and gotten by forcing the ground; whence it was that Cain was very angry that Abel was preferred by God before him; and he slew his brother, and hid his dead body, thinking to escape discovery. ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... final w, and pausing between each repetition—wow! wow! wow!—you will find that the sound is not at all unlike the tolling of a funeral bell; and therefore the word is most probably an onomatopoetic invention of the fool's own." ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... West Branch possessed a long-bladed sickle, a homemade rake, a homemade hay fork, and a grain shovel.[25] All of these items were made of wood and were of the crudest sort.[26] As time went on, he added a few tools of his own invention, but these, and his sturdy curved-handled axe, constituted the essential instruments of the ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... "There We sat," she cries, "when my papa was mayor." Not quite correct in what she now relates, She alters persons, and she forges dates; And finding memory's weaker help decay'd, She boldly calls invention to her aid. Touch'd by the pity he had felt before, For her Sir Denys oped the Alms-house door: "With all her faults," he said, "the woman knew How to distinguish—had a manner too; And, as they say she is allied to some In decent station—let the creature come." Here ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... people need and then supply that want. An invention to make the smoke go the wrong way in a chimney might be a very ingenious thing, but it would be of no use to humanity. The patent office at Washington is full of wonderful devices, ingenious mechanism; not one in hundreds is of earthly use to the inventor or to the world, and yet how many ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... attempt to be jovial too soon, as when he addressed Greeley by the name of "Horace" almost on first sight. His devices for putting men on the familiar footing lacked originality. The frequency with which he called upon a tall visitor to measure up against him reveals the poverty of his social invention. He applied this device with equal thoughtlessness to the stately Sumner, who protested, and to a nobody who ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... instances in which he paid funeral honors, to distinguished Romans slain in battle. The intense hostility of the Romans to Carthage may have led to an unfair estimate of the great general's character, and to the invention or exaggeration of reports to ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... does without hard study," replied Addison. "But any one can afford to study if by doing so some splendid new invention ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... along the shores. The advance of the science of warfare in recent times has left these little fortifications but sorry defences against modern ironclads; but they have since been replaced by some of those improvements in defence which have accompanied the invention ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... Tanait or some Rabbi said or commanded. But he did not contradict anything either by word or deed—not even by thought. He did everything that was commanded, thinking to himself: "There is no harm in it. Maybe it's only a human invention, but again it may be God's command—why should I anger Him against me." Thus, acting diplomatically with the people and with God, he was not afraid of anything, and he was happy. He would have been completely happy ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... "As Willard Sargent he had made a distinguished name for himself among the teachers of Greek in this country. He was a professor at an early age, his bent toward scholarship being opposite to mine, which was along the lines of invention. My brother was a hard, cruel man, beneath a polished exterior. Cynicism was as natural to him as breathing. He married a young and beautiful woman, who had been married before, and who had a little daughter—a mere baby, Willard's wife soon died, a ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... &c. they have good Mills upon the Runs and Creeks: besides Hand-Mills, Wind-Mills, and the Indian Invention of pounding Hommony in Mortars burnt in the Stump of a Tree, with a Log for a Pestle hanging at the End of a Pole, fix'd like ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... consciousness?' He concedes that matter is inconceivable apart from mind, but that mind is not inconceivable apart from matter. He concedes that the conception of universal and necessary law is an ideal. It is an invention of the mind's own devising. It is not a physical fact. In brief, taking agnostic naturalism just as it seemed disposed a generation ago to present itself, it now appears as if it had been turned exactly inside out. Instead of the physical ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... of the English decimated the nobles, and divided their possessions; the erection of communes introduced an element of democratic liberty into the bosom of feudal monarchy; the invention of firearms equalized the villain and the noble on the field of battle; printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post was organized so as to bring the same information to the door of the poor man's cottage and to the gate of ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... progress and prosperity depend upon our ability to equal, if not surpass, other nations in the enlargement and advance of science, industry, and commerce. To invention we must turn as one of the most powerful aids to the accomplishment of such a result. The attention of the Congress is directed to the report of the Commissioner of Patents, in which will be found ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... at Longchamps that the Parisian spring fashions are first exhibited, and busy are the modistes for many weeks previously in putting their powers of invention to the test, in order to bring out novelties, facsimiles of which are, the ensuing week, forwarded to England, Italy, Germany, Holland, and Russia. The coachmakers, saddlers, and horse-dealers, are also put in requisition for this epoch; and, though the exhibition is no longer ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... in the country, apart from intellectual interests, is apt to gormandise; and the Maverings always sat down to a luxurious table, which was most abundant and tempting at the meal they called tea, when the invention of the Portuguese man-cook was taxed to supply the demands of appetites at once eager and fastidious. They prolonged the meal as much as possible in winter, and Dan used to like to get home just in time for ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... discovery that the most drastic way of making war was to concentrate every effort on the enemy's armed forces. In dealing with the theory of war in general a caveat has already been entered against the too common assumption that this method was an invention of Napoleon's or Frederick's, or that it was a foreign importation at all. In the view at least of our own military historians the idea was born in our Civil Wars with Cromwell and the New Model Army. It was the ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... in his boyish savageness, clouted Jerry over the head, right side and left, and tied him as few whites men's dogs have ever been tied. For, in his way, Lamai was a genius. He had never seen the thing done with any dog, yet he devised, on the spur of the moment, the invention of tying Jerry with a stick. The stick was of bamboo, four feet long. One end he tied shortly to Jerry's neck, the other end, just as shortly to a tree. All that Jerry's teeth could reach was the stick, and dry and seasoned bamboo can ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... it is an idle invention of my brain—but think it for a moment the speech of a true diviner, and what wouldst ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... justice to state here that the English invention of preserving meat in air-tight canisters had only recently been attempted in Sydney; and it was then to be regarded merely as an experiment to try whether a new and important article of colonial export could not be produced. Since then, further experience in the process has enabled the ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... kind there can be nothing of that interesting variety observed in a natural forest, and which is manifestly wanting even in woods planted with direct reference to the attainment of these natural appearances. "It is curious to see," as Gilpin remarks, "with what richness of invention, if I may so speak, Nature mixes and intermixes her trees, and shapes them into such a wonderful variety of groups and beautiful forms. Art may admire and attempt to plant and to form combinations like hers; but whoever observes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... was quite to his taste; for he would go straight off to the lingerie and entertain Mlle. Marceline and Constance and Felicite (who all three adored him) with comic songs and break-downs of his own invention, and imitations of everybody in the school. He was a born histrion—a kind of French Arthur Roberts—but very beautiful to the female eye, and also always dear to the female heart—a ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Europeans, the savages were subject to but few maladies, and these they cured by natural remedies, the indigenous medicinal plants, abstemious diet, and vapour baths of their own invention forming the basis of all prescriptions. Of persons skilled in the medical art, there was no scarcity, every cabin generally containing several. But not always satisfied with natural remedies, the ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... against the truth-of-art in Botticelli, or in the fine thinking of Ruskin against the fine soundings of Kipling, or in the wide expanse of Titian against the narrow-expanse of Carpaccio, or in some such distinction that Pope sees between what he calls Homer's "invention" and Virgil's "judgment"—apparently an inspired imagination against an artistic care, a sense of the difference, perhaps, between Dr. Bushnell's Knowing God and knowing about God. A more vivid explanation or illustration may be found ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... The invention of REVIEWS, in the form which they have at length gradually assumed, could not have existed but in the most polished ages of literature: for without a constant supply of authors, and a refined spirit of criticism, they could not excite a perpetual ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... unravelling or in constructing a tangled chain of circumstantial evidence. In a third, ("The Black Cat") he appears at first to aim at rivalling the fantastic horrors of Hoffman, but you soon observe that the wild and horrible invention in which he deals, is strictly in the service of an abstract idea which it is there to illustrate. His analytic observation has led him, he thinks, to detect in men's minds an absolute spirit of "perversity," prompting them to do the very opposite of what reason and mankind pronounce to be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... addition to the Invisible College, and a delightful discovery for Hartlib; and he took to Hartlib at once, as every one else did. What occupied him especially at the moment was a machine for double writing, i.e. for making two copies of any writing at once. He hoped to obtain a patent for this invention from Parliament; and such a patent, for seventeen years, he did obtain in March 1647-8. While the thing was in progress, however, Hartlib was his chief confidant. This appears from a tract of his, of 26 pages, published Jan. 8, 1647-8, and entitled "The Advice of W. P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... at this time and began to be the resting-place for England's illustrious dead. The invention of gunpowder, which was to make iron-clad knights a romantic tradition, also belongs to this period, which saw too, the conquest of Scotland; and the magic stone supposed to have been Jacob's pillow at Bethel, and ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... had any marked effect upon English commerce. As the fairs of the middle ages, with the tedious and hazardous journeys they involved, gradually gave place to a more convenient system of trade, the 15th century brought the invention of printing, and led the Way to the modern development of advertising. The Americans, to whom the elaboration of newspaper advertising is primarily due, had but just founded the first English-speaking ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... schoolroom at Combray, incarnates that virtue, for it seems impossible, that any thought of charity can ever have found expression in her vulgar and energetic face. By a fine stroke of the painter's invention she is tumbling all the treasures of the earth at her feet, but exactly as if she were treading grapes in a wine-press to extract their juice, or, still more, as if she had climbed on a heap of sacks to raise herself higher; and she is holding out her flaming heart to God, or shall we say 'handing' ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... election, he will secure that. If Natalie attempts exposure, he will claim it to be a blackmail invention of political enemies. Ha! Money! Yes, the golden arguments of concrete power. He will use it in floods of ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... am to fill up this letter is not easy to divine. I have consented that Gray shall give an account of our situation and proceedings; (164) and have left myself at the mercy of my own' invention—a most terrible resource, and which I shall avoid applying to if I can possibly help it. I had prepared the ingredients for a description of a ball, and was just ready to serve it up to you, but he has plucked ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... nothing, for fear of offending the Great Government whose representative is involved in the not too pleasant transaction. One of our great inland cities had no water nearer than the river, several miles away. A foreign official with a machine of foreign invention digged deep into the earth and found pure, clear water. Then he thought, "If there is ater here for me, why not for all this great city of many tens of thousands?" Which was a worthy thought, and he saw for himself great gains in bringing ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... been proved, of the accused) of the crime of the person arraigned. And they complacently attributed to conscious guilt the ravings produced by an excruciating torture—that equally inhuman and irrational invention of judicial cruelty; confidently boasting that they were careful to sentence no person without previous confession ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... form of refined conduct, was not favorable to these qualities. As lyrical expression lost in directness and spontaneity it was natural that more and more attention should be paid to form. The external qualities of verse were industriously cultivated. Great ingenuity was expended upon the invention of intricate and elaborate forms. Beginning at the end of the eleventh century, the poetry of the Troubadours had by the middle of the twelfth become a highly artificial and studied product. It was then ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... Then with sudden vigour, "Oh, 'tis a lie," he cried, "a fresh invention of that lying brain to ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... flowers of the field, and had given no thought to food, or where or how we were to get it. We supposed vaguely that when we grew hungry we should stop at some inn and eat; but Sir Somerled had a surprise in the shape of an American invention called a refrigerator basket, nickel-lined, with an ice compartment walled in with asbestos or something scientific. He said that it had been a present, and he'd promised to bring it with him on this Scottish trip, which it appears he was ordered to take as a rest cure. On the ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... from his art, which is what we all see that this Hermagoras was very little able to do. And so that, indeed, appears to us to be the proper materials of rhetoric, which we have said appeared to be such to Aristotle. VII. And these are the divisions of it, as numerous writers have laid them down: Invention; Arrangement; Elocution; Memory; Delivery. Invention, is the conceiving of topics either true or probable, which may make one's cause appear probable; Arrangement, is the distribution of the topics which have been thus conceived with regular order; Elocution, is the adaptation of suitable words and ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... a house. Safer than a jerry-built house," Captain March assured her cheeringly. "Look at these!" and he pointed out again all the features of his invention that made the automatic stability of ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... was a Russian man in every respect; he loved Russian viands, he loved Russian songs, but the accordion, "a factory invention," he detested; he loved to watch the maidens in their choral songs, the women in their dances. In his youth, it was said, he had sung rollickingly and danced with agility. He loved to steam himself in the bath,—and steamed himself so energetically ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... from Greece and final expatriation (1811-1816), including the whole period of his social glory—though not yet of his solid fame—he was lured into liaisons of all sorts and shades. Some, now acknowledged as innocent, were blared abroad by tongues less skilled in pure invention than in distorting truth. On others, as commonplaces of a temperament "all meridian," it were waste of time to dwell. Byron rarely put aside a pleasure in his path; but his passions were seldom unaccompanied by affectionate emotions, genuine while they lasted. ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... before the catastrophe which is coming at the end of our century as the goal of the progress of our era, and yet we must get used to facing it. For twenty years past every resource of science has been exhausted in the invention of engines of destruction, and soon a few charges of cannon will suffice to annihilate a whole army. No longer a few thousands of poor devils, who were paid a price for their blood, are kept under arms, but whole ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... her that she was practically forced at last to get out. It does not follow necessarily that any of these actions were wrong, even if we consider that the so-called legal rights of Mexico and Spain were set aside by the strong hand; for law is simply an invention of mankind to secure justice, and when justice, the natural rights of the greater number, is prevented by the legal, not the natural, rights of a few, the latter may be set aside, as it is at every election, ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... which we distinguish the forms and distances of objects was not understood until Berkeley published his "New Theory of Vision." Few persons are aware of the opposition of bigotry, stolidity, and authority against which the brilliant advances of scientific discovery and mechanical invention and social improvement have been forced to contend, and in despite of which they have slowly won their way. Excommunications, dungeons, fires, sneers, polite persecution, bitter neglect, tell the story, from the time the Athenians banned Anaxagoras for calling the sun a mass of fire, to ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the Stanhope press and the ink-distributing roller were not as yet in general use in small provincial printing establishments. Even at Angouleme, so closely connected through its paper-mills with the art of typography in Paris, the only machinery in use was the primitive wooden invention to which the language owes a figure of speech—"the press groans" was no mere rhetorical expression in those days. Leather ink-balls were still used in old-fashioned printing houses; the pressman dabbed the ink by hand on the characters, ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... great and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of a Newton, Bacon, or Locke; and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion. Hence the common remark of his officers, of the advantage he derived from councils of war, where, hearing all suggestions, he selected whatever was best; and certainly ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... designs for these works his rich and bold gift of invention and the power of his imagination proved their full value, and even his older fellow-artists followed him with sincere admiration when, in spite of his darkened eyes, he brought before them distinctly, and often even with the charcoal or wax tablet ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... long ago it was; from 1440 to 1460 he toiled at his invention. He was a versatile man, being not only skilled in polishing precious stones but also at making mirrors. The making of mirrors was a new trade in Germany for outside the borders of Venice, where ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... invention of Satan is one of the most painful, subtle, and crafty that I have known him to possess; I should therefore like to warn you, my father, of it, in order that, if Satan should tempt you herein, you may have some light, and be aware ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... his house—did she want to swallow frogs and live things?—and he filled up all the glasses. Hypocrites might talk as much as they pleased; the juice of the grape was a mighty good thing and a famous invention! ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... that Humphrey had only the hand-saw and ax, and that he had to cut down the tree; and then to saw it into plank, it must be acknowledged that it required great patience and perseverance even to make a wheelbarrow; but Humphrey was not only persevering, but was full of invention. He had built up a hen-house with fir-poles, and made the nests for the hens to lay and hatch in, and they now had between forty and fifty chickens running about. He had also divided the pigsty, so that the sow might be kept apart from ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... theological capacity, when thou gavest ghostly counsels to dying felons, and didst record the guilty pangs of Sabbath breakers. How will the noble arts of John Overton's** painting and sculpture now languish? where rich invention, proper expression, correct design, divine attitudes, and artful contrast, heightened with the beauties of Clar. Obscur., embellished thy celebrated pieces, to the delight and astonishment of the judicious multitude! Adieu, persuasive ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... Large volumes have been written on paste jewels, especially on antique pastes. Contrary to a prevailing belief, the paste gem is not a recent invention. People frequently say when told that their gems are false, "But it is a very old piece, it must be genuine." The great age of a jewel should rather lead to suspicion that it was not genuine than give confidence that a true gem was assured. The Egyptians ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... to tell you. After seeing my invention duly catalogued and placed, I gave myself up to pondering the scene about me. As I dwelt upon that shining pageant of arts, and moving concourse of nations, and reflected that here was the pride of the world glorying in a glass house, a sense of the fragility of worldly grandeur profoundly ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... built a hut to cover his head was no fool," thought he. "He was a sensible man, with some experience of atmospheric changes. What would have become of us in this emergency had we not a roof over our heads? We should be greatly to be pitied. The invention of that Triboccus was quite as useful as that of the steam-engine; what a pity his ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... to be undeceived, and to understand that the kingdom of China was not so inaccessible as the Portuguese had represented it. Then I wrote to your Majesty the aforesaid letter, asserting that the ill-report concerning the mandarins of China was rather an invention of the Portuguese than a true report. Later on, my belief in this truth was confirmed by certain persons, both religious and laymen, who have gone to China from these islands. When these persons arrived there the Chinese arrested ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... Union, to the legislatures of none did this efficient and peaceable remedy, as it is called, suggest itself. The discovery of this important feature in our Constitution was reserved to the present day. To the statesmen of South Carolina belongs the invention, and upon the citizens of that State will, unfortunately, fall the evils of reducing ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... something would catch his ear as he was dawdling among the waggons on a market-day, and he would immediately run and repeat it at the miller's. By the time he had reached the pot-house he would hear his own invention, already well amplified and nicely embellished, circulating from mouth to mouth as an absolute fact. Whereupon he would dash off with this enlarged edition of it to the castle, stopping, however, to tell it to every living soul he met on the way with all the variations which struck him ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... I am unable to believe that, had Smith's doctrine been conscious invention, it would have lent sufficient power to carry him through persecutions in which his life hung in the balance, and his cause appeared to be lost, or that the class of earnest men who constituted the rank and file of his early following would have been so long deceived ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... listened intently and eagerly, judging there was distinct danger in the air (which, however, she had not wanted Mrs. Luna to tell her, having perceived it for herself the night before); and she saw that poor Adeline was fabricating fearfully, that the "rebuff" was altogether an invention. Mr. Ransom was evidently preoccupied with Verena, but he had not needed Mrs. Luna's cruelty to make him so. So Olive maintained an attitude of great reserve; she did not take upon herself to announce that her own ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... is similar to Picking Grapes, and calls for as many kisses as there are feet in depth to be dug. In competition games where forfeits are sold there is no limit to the devices for indirect love expressions except the fertility and ingenuity in invention of the young people, and every one knows that in this particular regard their resources are well nigh inexhaustible. London Bridge is made use of to satisfy the hugging impulse. The game is played as follows. Two leaders agree upon two objects, for ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... from the narratives of these barbarians, because, having no letters, they could not preserve such details as they give from so remote an antiquity. The answer is that, to supply the want of letters, these barbarians had a curious invention which was very good and accurate. This was that from one to the other, from fathers to sons, they handed down past events, repeating the story of them many times, just as lessons are repeated from a professor's chair, making the hearers say these historical lessons over and over ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... subject of the following history. The distresses which they waded through were some of them so exquisite, and the incidents which produced these so extraordinary, that they seemed to require not only the utmost malice, but the utmost invention, which superstition hath ever attributed to Fortune: though whether any such being interfered in the case, or, indeed, whether there be any such being in the universe, is a matter which I by no means presume to determine ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... have in them all the blood and battle-ax the stoutest nerve can crave, all the incidents of love, self-sacrifice, and gentle invention the tenderest heart can need. Yes, certainly: Read books that come to stay—the kind of books you would like to be ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought and, although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation. ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... knew such a brain, or such invention!' exclaimed Towler; 'the people and the places, and the things he talks about is enough to make a man's hair stand ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... and these, for reasons which seemed good to himself, he usually considered it necessary to bring over to the homestead as soon as possible after they came to his knowledge. Indeed, our boys basely slandered him, by crediting him with the invention of sundry small fictions as an excuse for coming over to our house. Nevertheless, he was always a welcome guest with each one and all of the family, and with none more than with ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... by no means a natural course of proceeding, but, on the contrary, an invention entirely due to the subtlety of the schools, to attempt to draw from a mere idea a proof of the existence of an object corresponding to it. Such a course would never have been pursued, were it not for that need of reason which requires it to suppose the existence of a necessary being ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... public life and pass the remainder of my days in peace and in the enjoyment of all those out-of-door sports which were always so congenial to me. But events "over which I had no control" soon defeated that scheme. That, like all the other plans of my own invention, came to naught. The ranch was sold, and I got out of it, as I always tried to do, about as much as I had ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... Oxford (see p. 319), and of the chapel of King's College, Cambridge (see p. 355). Art in this direction could go no farther. The new conditions in which the following age was to move were indicated by the discovery of America and the invention of printing. New objects of knowledge presented themselves, and a new mode of spreading knowledge was at hand. In the reign of Edward IV., Caxton, the earliest English printer, set up his press at Westminster, and the king and his nobles ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... been dreading that question as one which could not be answered with complete frankness. I don't enjoy lying. Not that my moral sense revolts, but because I am lazy. Lying calls for deliberate efforts of invention. ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... only by patience and care, At last, that he brought his invention to bear. In youth 'twas projected, but years stole away, And ere 'twas complete he was wrinkled and gray; But success is secure, unless energy fails; And at length he ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... English, after having seen several of their ships sunk, finally sheered off with all the sail they could carry. Barrere, the reporter and oracle of the committee of public safety, even outstripped Bon Saint Andre in the strength of lying and power of invention: he amused the national convention with an account of the victory of the republican fleet, far more fabulous than the commissioner's. Some of his statements, gross and unfounded as they were, have even been adopted by historians; especially by those who give credit ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Mr. Stalworth says they are stamped with her own name, every one; breezy, and freshly delicious. For that very reason, of course, people will not believe, when they see the name in print, that it is a real name. It is so much easier to believe in little tricks of invention, than in things that simply come to pass by a wonderful, beautiful determination, because they belong so. They think the poem is a trick of invention, too. They think that of almost everything that they see in print. Their incredulity is marvelously credulous! There is ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... undertake a reconstruction, calculated to provide more fully for its constituent interests and develop its latent possibilities. There now obtains, within limits that tend steadily to expand, what Bagehot calls "government by discussion," that is, the regulation of action by the invention, selection, and trial of the best means. This substitution of rational procedure for custom is an irreversible and germinal process. Let me quote Bagehot's ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Blondeau was employed by the Commonwealth to coin their money. After the Restoration, November 3rd, 1662, he received letters of denization, and a grant for being engineer of the Mint in the Tower of London, and for using his new invention for coining gold and silver with the mill and press, with the fee of L100 per ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... lad himself. And so," said he to the boy, with a great show of severity, "this is all that your work for two weeks has brought out. Mr. Congdon here, Clarence's father, says your invention ain't worth anything. What do you say to that? Your work ain't much of a mine, after ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... a century before Carnot expounded his general proposition. There were no such deductions from principles to application as occur in the story of electricity to justify our attribution of the steam engine to the scientific impulse. Nor does this particular invention seem to have been directly due to the new possibilities of reducing, shaping, and casting iron, afforded by the substitution of coal for wood in iron works; through the greater temperature afforded by a coal fire. In China coal has been used in the reduction ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... has already been said, has been deliberately invented, "still each word may not be unfitly compared to an invention; it has its own place, mode, and circumstances of devisal, its preparation in the previous habits of speech, its influence in determining the after progress of speech development; but every language in the gross is an institution, on which ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... muscular force, whether in man or beast, sinks continually in its value in the world of human toil; while intellectual power, virility, and activity, and that culture which leads to the mastery of the inanimate forces of nature, to the invention of machinery, and to that delicate manipulative skill often required in guiding it, becomes ever of greater and greater importance to the race. Already today we tremble on the verge of a discovery, which may come tomorrow or the next day, when, through the attainment of a simple and cheap ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... individual to the same place where its parents stand, and thus always builds the offspring into a machine like the parent, it makes it possible for the successive generations to advance. Heredity is thus like the power of memory, or better still, like the invention of printing in the development of civilization. It is a record of past achievements. By means of printing each age is enabled to benefit by the discoveries of the previous age, and without it the development of ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... about such an inhuman invention which rushed through space with a man's exterior and left his interior to bump its ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... time Mr. Howe was engaged in perfecting his invention of what is known as the Howe truss bridge. After securing his patent Mr. Howe contracted to build the superstructure of the bridge across the Connecticut river, at Springfield, for the Western Railroad ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... footmark indicates the spot to have been at one time the scene of the inauguration of the kings or chiefs of the region; and the basin was in all probability one of those primitive mortars which were in use for grinding corn long before the invention of the quern. Dun Add is one of the oldest sites in Scotland. It has the hoary ruins of a nameless fort, and a well which is traditionally said to ebb and flow with the tide. It was here that the Dalriadic Scots first settled; ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... indulged in what they described as the "mystification" of their acquaintances by these semi-forgeries. Like theirs, Villemarque's work had usually an historical or legendary basis, but it is impossible to say how much of it is original matter of folk-song and how much his own invention, unless we compare his versions with those furnished by M. Luzel in his Guerziou Breiz-Izel (1868), which, however, only contains a few of the originals of the tales given in the Barzaz-Breiz, and those not ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... above all other considerations, the cause of the growth of liberty in the Netherlands. The Reformation opened the minds of men to that intellectual freedom without which political enfranchisement is a worthless privilege. The invention of printing opened a thousand channels to the flow of erudition and talent, and sent them out from the reservoirs of individual possession to fertilize the whole domain of human nature. War, which seems to be an instinct of man, and which particular instances of heroism often ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... the memory that Master Baine had urged the existence of some such document, that in fact he had gone so far as to have made oath of this very circumstance now urged by Sir Oliver; and she remembered that the matter had been brushed aside as an invention of the justice's to answer the charge of laxity in the performance of his duty, particularly as the only co-witness he could cite was Sir Andrew Flack, the parson, since deceased. Sir Oliver's voice drew ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... be so pitiful that a wretched, brainless dog, when placed in a position like this, should be able to scramble out, while I, with the power of thinking given to me, with reason and some invention, ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... gospels and their childish tales, and commanded Christian men only to believe what the Bible tells us about our Lord's childhood; for that is enough for us, and that will help us better than any magical stories and childish fairy tales of man's invention, to believe rightly that God was made man, ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... The noble lad tries to open the door for the captive eagle; but in vain. At least he will make what use he can of his wisdom. He asks him for advice about the new ship he is building, and has a simple practical letter in return, and over and above probably the two valuable pamphlets, 'Of the Invention of Ships,' and 'Observations on the Navy and Sea Service'; which the Prince will never see. In 1611 he asks Raleigh's advice about the foolish double marriage with the Prince and Princess of Savoy, and receives for answer two plain-spoken discourses as full ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... it was no wonder that I frequently found my way to Wilmot House alone. There I often stayed the whole day long, romping with Dolly at games of our own invention, and many the time I was sent home after dark by Mrs. Manners with Jim, the groom. About once in the week Mr. and Mrs. Manners would bring Dorothy over for dinner or tea at the Hall. She grew quickly—so quickly that I scarce realized—into ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... I'm only asking you to complete your own invention, and when it's completed I'll help you ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... one-half of what I suffered during fifteen months' captivity, the world would consider it as the invention of a novel. But Mr. Robinson knows what I endured, and how patiently, how correctly I suited my mind to the strict propriety of wedded life; he knows that my duty as a wife was exemplary, my chastity inviolate; he knows that neither poverty nor obscurity, neither the tauntings ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... ii. pp. 154-158) gives a most interesting account of the use and fabrication of intoxicating beverages by the Chinese. "The invention of wine or spirits in China," he says, "is generally ascribed to a certain I TI, who lived in the time of the Emperor Yue. According to others, the inventor of wine was TU K'ANG." One may refer also to Dr. Macgowan's paper On the "Mutton Wine" ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... in his "Theism or Atheism," clearly states: "We know that man does not discover God, he invents him, and an invention is properly discarded when a better instrument is forthcoming. To-day, the hypothesis of God stands in just the same relation to the better life of to-day as the fire drill of the savage does to the modern method of obtaining a light. The belief in God may continue awhile in virtue of the ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... dyed with the juice of coloured berries and seaweed. The head-flatteners, or boards used by the Milanos to alter the natural shape of their infants' heads, specially attracted our attention, and I felt it difficult to decide whether the invention aimed at increasing the child's ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... after another, in the locks of the cabinets and cupboards now closed against her? Was there chance enough that any one of them might fit to justify her in venturing on the experiment? If the locks at St. Crux were as old-fashioned as the furniture—if there were no protective niceties of modern invention to contend against—there was chance enough beyond all question. Who could say whether the very key in her hand might not be the lost duplicate of one of the keys on the admiral's bunch? In the dearth of all other means of finding the way to her end, the risk was worth running. A flash of ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... the best minds of his time. But he never accepted ideas from others without the most generous acknowledgment, and did not, as so many men do, proceed, after assimilating another man's thought, to imagine that it was his own invention. This intellectual candour, involving a rare modesty and absence of affectation, was one of ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... difficulty; we could in this way put money in our purse and experience the glorious emotion awakened by the spirit of independence. With our own money, earned in the sweat of our brows—it was pretty hot work melting the solder out of the old cans and moulding it in little pig-leads of our own invention,—we could do as we pleased and no questions asked. Oh, it was a joy past words,—the kindling of the furnace fires, the adjusting of the cans, the watching for the first movement of the melting solder! ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... these cravings occasionally interfered with the practice of his favorite vocation. In order that he might enjoy long periods of manual inactivity it devolved upon him at intervals to devote his reluctant energies to gainful labor. When driven to it by necessity, which is said to be the mother of invention and which certainly is the full sister to appetite, Red Hoss worked. He ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... propriety in their dealings with one another and with the Russian authorities were at times very arduous. On one occasion, the main functionaries of the Russian army having been assembled with great difficulty to see the test of a new American invention in artillery, it was found that the inventor's rival had stolen some essential part of the gun, and the whole thing was a ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... discovery is, one hesitates in deciding whether it is not more injurious than useful. It seems to have introduced into the world, as I said above, an element of infinite inequality. Guttenberg makes large profits by this invention, and perfects the invention by the profits, until all other copyists are ruined. As for the public—the consumer—it gains but little, for Guttenberg takes care to lower the price of books only just so much as is necessary ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... Lord Kilmarnock answered, "No, my Lord, I do not think it can be an invention, because, while I was a prisoner at Inverness, I was told by several officers that there was such an order, signed 'George Murray,' and that it was in the Duke of Cumberland's custody." To this statement, (which was wholly erroneous) ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... at the Royal Institution, Brunel's Block Machinery at Portsmouth, with a set of magnificent models of this admirable invention, which were lent to the Society by the Navy Board. They consist of eight separate machines, which work in succession, so as to begin and finish off a two-sheaved block four inches in length. These were put by Messrs. Maudsley and Field's men (who made them) ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... them. She nodded her head and went back into the room, smiling to herself, while the twins pursued their mysterious course towards the shrubberies. She thought she would not bathe after all; but she dressed quickly and went down into the garden, a little curious to learn what new invention the children were busying ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... galleries and the floor of the chapel were paved with tiles containing pictures of subjects taken out of the Bible. In the garden was the first 'grotto' the potter ever made, and very proud he was of it, and still more so of the invention by which, at a signal from the host, one of the attendants would touch a spring, and streams of water poured over the guests. It is difficult to imagine the grave constable, occupied as he was with religious ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... with the libraries of the Chinese than with their artillery. They were astonished at the sight of the elegant books printed rapidly upon a pliant, silky paper by means of wooden blocks. The first edition of the classical works printed in China appeared in 958, five hundred years before the invention of Gutenberg. The missionaries had, doubtless, often been busied in their convents with the laborious work of copying manuscript books, and the simple Chinese method of printing must have particularly attracted their attention. Many other marvellous productions ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... the old press, which moved by a secret spring, had been pushed aside, and discovered, built in the wall, a large and deep iron chest, the lid of which, being open, displayed the wondrous mechanism of one of those Florentine locks of the sixteenth century, which, better than any modern invention, set all picklocks at defiance; and, moreover, according to the notions of that age, are supplied with a thick lining of asbestos cloth, suspended by gold wire at a distance from the sides of the chest, for ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... whirling round to Lilla, "is something better, in humor, in tragedy, in dignity, in richness of invention, in everything." ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... From a half to three-quarters of an inch is the proper thickness. Avoid thrusting the fork into the meat, by which you release the juice. There is a description of gridiron in which the bars are grooved to catch the juice of the meat, but a much better invention is the upright gridiron, which is attached to the front of the grate, and has a pan at the bottom to catch the gravy. Kidneys, rashers, &c., dressed in this manner will ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... should lead to a petition for the removal of another cause of complaint. Believe only the accounts which reach you from governors, and others officially connected with your colonies; and treat any statements in opposition to their accounts as the invention of demagogues, whom you should hang if you could catch them, and thus ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... the Declaration of Independence; and their fruits can never be eradicated but by the dissolution of the Union. The calculators of the value of the Union, who would palm upon you, in the place of this sublime invention, a mere cluster of sovereign, confederated states, do but sow the wind to ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... from the Church of England, he had doubtless been much amazed. Though saturated with religious feeling, the man was wholly ignorant of religious history in so far as it affected his own country. To him all saints not mentioned in Scripture were an abomination and invention of Rome. Had he been informed that the venerable missionary saints of his mother land were in no case Romish, another vast surprise must ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... I began at once. Zora is a quaint name, is it not? It was my invention. She isn't a right down swell to-day, but I have ordered six dresses for her from Van Klopen; such swell gets up! You know Van Klopen, don't you, the best man-milliner in Paris. Such taste! such ideas! ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... it be true, that truth existed before the invention of oaths, and that truth would still be spoken, even if all oaths were abolished, then the Quakers say, that oaths are not so necessary as some have imagined, because they have but a secondary effect ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... of an earnest but mistaken striving after the true colonial fertility of invention and readiness of resource, I put on record the following. The Fiend once evolved from the obscurest depths of his inner consciousness a truly fearful and alarming plan. In this gentleman's somewhat feeble intellect ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... by point his minute accuracy to all that is known of ancient Carthage, his faithfulness to every indication which can serve for his guidance, his patience in grouping rather than his daring in the invention of action and details), that is not the question. 'I care little enough for archaeology! If the colour is not uniform, if the details are out of keeping, if the manners do not spring from the religion and the actions from the passions, if the characters are not consistent, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... reader considers the invention of a cousin too great a liberty to take in fiction, I venture to remind him that "'Tis sixty years since"; and that I should have the highest authority in literature even for much greater liberties taken with annals so far ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... establish her own innocence. She had therefore hastily scratched her name on the top of a sheet already containing her husband's handwriting and had told Peabody that the signatures had been written by herself. That the sheet had been written in the officer's presence she declared to be a pure invention on his part to secure her conviction. She told her extremely illogical story with a certain winsome naivete which carried an air of semi-probability with it. From her deportment on the stand one ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... Iberville's life, one could have looked through the window of a low stone house in Notre Dame Street, Montreal, one could have seen a priest joyously playing a violin; though even in Europe, Maggini and Stradivarius were but little known, and the instrument itself was often called an invention of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of the Florentine Republic (p. 130). His panegyric of the Venetian constitution (pp. 139-41) illustrates his plan for combining the advantages of the three species and obviating their respective evils. In fact he declares for that Utopia of the sixteenth century—the Governo Misto—a political invention which fascinated the imagination of Italian statesmen much in the same way as the theory of perpetual motion attracted scientific minds in the last century.[2] What follows is an elaborate scheme for applying the principles of the Governo Misto to the existing state ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... where Mr. Stevens, with his characteristic sarcasm, described the whole story of the President's speech as a malignant invention of Mr. Johnson's enemies, the hope of preventing a permanent breach between him and the Republican majority was even then not entirely extinct. On the 26th of February, Sherman made a long and carefully prepared speech in the Senate, advocating ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... journalism alive—journalism, which is born of the moment, serves the moment, and, as a rule, dies with the moment—is—again the Stevensonian secret!—charm. Diderot, the prince of journalists, is the great instance of it in literature; the phrase "sous le charme" is of his own invention. But Mr. Wells has not a particle of charm, and the reason of the difference is not far to seek. Diderot wrote for a world of friends—"C'est pour moi et pour mes amis que je lis, que je reflechis, que j'ecris"—Mr. Wells for a world of enemies ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... again. Fatigue that must not yield, and the in-roads of the cold sleep, at length affected her brain, and her imagination began to take its own way with her. She thought herself condemned to one of those awful dust-towers, for she had read Prideaux, specially devilish invention of the Persians, in which by the constant stirring of the dust so that it filled the air, the lungs of the culprit were at length absolutely choked up. Dead of the dust, she revived to the snow: it was fearfully white, for it was all dead faces; she crushed and waded ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts and designs—the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... think, almost as dear to me. I refer to the meeting of the society for the encouragement of national industry, when I presented the irrorator, an instrument of my own invention, which is neither more nor less than a forcing pump filled ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... gallery, hung with pictures, affirmed to be the portraits of kings, who, if they ever flourished at all, lived several hundred years before the invention of painting in oil colours, served as a sort of guard-chamber, or vestibule, to the apartments which the adventurous Charles Edward now occupied in the palace of his ancestors. Officers, both in the Highland and Lowland garb, passed and repassed in haste, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... in bones and brain I had I need not mention; It seemed to me such pangs must be Old Satan's own invention; Albeit I Was sure I'd die, The doctor reassured me— And, true enough, With his vile stuff, He ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... is that there is no mystery. That was an invention of Jack to arouse my curiosity and interest. James is not a Thug. He solemnly assures me that in all his wanderings he has never ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... night of which we write Mrs Twitter happened to have a "few friends" to tea. And let no one suppose that Mrs Twitter's few friends were to be put off with afternoon tea—that miserable invention of modern times—nor with a sham meal of sweet warm water and thin bread and butter. By no means. We have said that Samuel Twitter was rich, and Mrs Twitter, conscious of her husband's riches, ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... first taught by the stork, which may be observed to inject water into its bowels by means of its long beak." The British Medical Journal, reviewing the newly published Storia della Farmacia, says that Frederigo Kernot describes in it the invention of the enema apparatus, which he looks upon as an epoch in pharmacy as important as the discovery of America in the history of human civilization. The glory of the invention of this instrument, so beneficial to suffering ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... spring, had been pushed aside, and discovered, built in the wall, a large and deep iron chest, the lid of which, being open, displayed the wondrous mechanism of one of those Florentine locks of the sixteenth century, which, better than any modern invention, set all picklocks at defiance; and, moreover, according to the notions of that age, are supplied with a thick lining of asbestos cloth, suspended by gold wire at a distance from the sides of the chest, for the purpose of rendering incombustible the articles contained in it. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... report against thy life, [Half-Chorus II. Whispered words with falsehood rife, Wise Odysseus bringing near Shrewdly gaineth many an ear: Since invention against thee Findeth hearing speedily, Tallying with the moment's birth; And with loudly waxing mirth Heaping insult on thy grief, Each who hears it glories more Than the tongue that told before. Every slander ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... Corn, &c. they have good Mills upon the Runs and Creeks: besides Hand-Mills, Wind-Mills, and the Indian Invention of pounding Hommony in Mortars burnt in the Stump of a Tree, with a Log for a Pestle hanging at the End of a Pole, fix'd like the ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... weight in the community. There is no home-encouragement of varied agriculture,—for the wants of a slave population are few in number and limited in kind; none of inland trade, for that is developed only by communities where education induces refinement, where facility of communication stimulates invention and variety of enterprise, where newspapers make every man's improvement in tools, machinery, or culture of the soil an incitement to all, and bring all the thinkers of the world to teach in the cheap university of the people. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... underhand way he contrived to favor and foment the disturbance. He took care that the orders of the Government should not be too quickly carried out, and he gave more than a tacit encouragement to the common rumor that the King in his heart was hostile to the new tax, that the tax was wholly an invention of Walpole's, and that resistance to such a measure would not be unwelcome to the Sovereign, and would lead to the dismissal of the minister. Walpole was not long in finding out the treachery of the Duke of Roxburgh. To adopt a homely phrase, he "took the bull by the horns" ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... fearlessness, which has ruined wiser plans than ever were moulded in his brain. Rumor hints broadly at a sudden fit of depression, not unnatural in one notoriously addicted to the use of stimulants; but this is, probably, the ill-natured invention of an enemy. ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... had the good fortune to discover a second attack on a coach, far less picturesque, as a matter of fact, than the one to which he owed his fame, but which he undertook to work up like a master, and did it so well, by dint of disguises, forged letters, surprised confidences, the invention of imaginary persons, and other melodramatic tricks, that he succeeded in producing at the Criminal Court at Evreux seven prisoners against whom the evidence was so well concocted that five at least were in danger of losing their heads. ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... things the Bishop passed lightly, while exaggerating others. Some things, again, were entirely of his own invention; and if from the depths of her tomb the Duchess could have heard all that M. de Meaux said about her, she never would have borne me such malice, nor would her grief at leaving life and fortune have troubled ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... boys would spend in idleness or purposeless pastime in learning the telegrapher's code. Later on this knowledge gave him work which enabled him to gain experience as a telegraph operator, which in turn led to his invention of the quadruplex telegraph. But the invention was temporarily a failure, although later on a great success. Sorely reduced in circumstances, he was one day tramping the streets of New York without ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... guttered wheels in a conduit, and driven by immense engines, conveniently located in adjacent stations or "power-houses." The cars carried a readily manipulated "grip-lever," or steel hand, which reached down through a slot into a conduit and "gripped" the moving cable. This invention solved the problem of hauling heavily laden street-cars up and down steep grades. About the same time he also heard, in a roundabout way, that the Chicago City Railway, of which Schryhart and Merrill were the ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... are given up to practise, my afternoons to teaching. Of these practise hours, at least one hour is given to technic, scales, arpeggios, octaves, chords—and Bach! I believe in taking one selection of Bach, say a Two-voiced Invention, and perfecting it, playing it in various ways—transposing it into all keys and polishing it to the highest degree possible. The B flat Invention is a useful one for this treatment. So with etudes; instead of playing at so many, is it not better to perfect a few and bring them up to the highest ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... assumed its usual expression of diabolical malignity, whilst, at the same time, he gave a look so piercing at Darby, as if suspecting that the curse, from its peculiar character, was at least partially his own invention,—that the latter, who stood like a criminal, looking towards the floor, felt precisely what was going forward in the other's mind, and knew that he had nothing else for it but to look him steadily ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... reasonably imagined, that others may have the same design; but as it is not credible that they can obtain the same materials, it must be expected they will supply from invention the want of intelligence; and that under the title of "The Life of Savage," they will publish only a novel, filled with romantick adventures, and imaginary amours. You may therefore, perhaps, gratify the lovers of truth ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... king, if not the father, of bibliomaniacs; his immortal work reveals to us that long before the invention of printing men were tormented and enraptured by those very same desires, envies, jealousies, greeds, enthusiasms, and passions which possess and control bibliomaniacs at the present time. That vanity was sometimes the controlling passion ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... power Rhoda grew in ingenuity, and failure in any one particular only stimulated her genius of invention the more. Did she spill paste, mucilage, water on her gingham aprons, and wipe anything and everything on them that came in her way, Rhoda dressed her in daintier ones of white cambric, with a ruffle at the neck ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and of the Sunday-school, the almost miraculous growth of the Christian Endeavour movement, the beginnings of the vice crusade, the renewed injection of moral conceptions and rages into party politics (the "crime" of 1873!), the furious preaching of baroque Utopias, the invention of muckraking, the mad, glad war of extermination upon the Mormons, the hysteria over the Breckenridge-Pollard case and other like causes, the enormous multiplication of moral and religious associations, the spread of zooephilia, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... first they struck me as wonderful," said the girl. "They were such a novel invention that I went to see them from pure curiosity. But, afterward, the subjects presented in the pictures bored me. The drama pictures were cheap and common, the comedy scenes worse; so I kept ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... immense, but the result was failure. "Sunt lacrimae rerum," and tears were never shed over a greater waste of ingenuity and heroic toil, if indeed a fine example of fruitless devotion is to be called waste. With apologies to the Esperantists, it must be said that the invention of a universal language, of any but the narrowest compass, seems impossible, for language, in any real sense, is not made but grows. It is dangerous, however, to dogmatise on possibilities. Misled, ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... that an iron of unprecedentedly good qualities was attainable from common pig; and second, that the cost of its manufacture would not exceed that of Bessemer steel. Nevertheless, owing to lack of funds properly to push the invention against the jealous opposition which it encountered, the enterprise came to a halt until quite recently, when its merits found a champion in Gustav Lindenthal, C.E., member of this club, who is now the general manager of the Chapin Pneumatic Iron Co., and under whose direction this new quality ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... Schwartzmann's plans," she said quietly. "He would ruin you; seize your ship; steal for himself the glory of your invention. Would you go back and deliver yourself ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... Simp Wolley and Bud Briskett, who had tried to get his invention, as told in the preceding volume, "The Moving Picture Girls," but they were in jail, as far as he knew. Clearly there was some mystery here, but it was not to be ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... burthen: only, if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honourable survey, and your honour to your heart's content; which I wish may always answer ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... dispose of you? The invention of a statuary is exhausted, and Sir William is yet unprovided with a monument. America is anxious to bestow her funeral favors upon you, and wishes to do it in a manner that shall distinguish you from all the deceased heroes of the last war. The ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... But it harmonized finely with the Greek ideal—the notion that patriotism is even a woman's first duty, and her life not worth living except in subservience to her husband. There is good reason to believe[327] that this story was a pure invention of Xenophon and deliberately intended to be an object lesson to women regarding the ideal they ought to live up to. The whole of the book in which it appears—[Greek: Kyrou paideia]—is what the Germans call a Tendenzroman—a historic ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... my daughter, it would have countenanced no such invention; for the town held its charter from the Viscounts of Beziers and Albi, and might consume only such corn and wine as ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... coffee, the smell alone is enough to—to—whoever invented hot coffee was a genius! The chord of the ninth and the diminished seventh were ordinary discoveries; any musician was bound to stumble across them sooner or later. But this," and he poured the ground coffee into the pot, "is a positive invention of genius!" ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... but admire the hardihood of invention which devised such slight means to realize the mathematical conception that if electricity is to convey all the delicacies of sound which distinguish articulate speech, the strength of its current must vary continuously as nearly as may be in simple proportion ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... at the very least, to carry them out of the everyday six-and-eightpenny world, or the whizz of an Excalibur to startle their drowsy imaginations into life. The beauties and the wonders of the universe died for them some centuries ago; they went out with Friar Bacon and the invention of gunpowder. Praised be Apollo! this is not our case. There is a snatch of poetry, to our apprehension, in almost everything. We have detected it pushing its petals forth from the curls of a barrister's wig, and scented its fragrance ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... attempted various other pieces, which were indeed on too grand a scale for so narrow a stage. Although this presumption spoiled and finally quite destroyed what we performed, such childish pleasures and employments nevertheless exercised and advanced in many ways my power of invention and representation, my fancy, and a certain technical skill, to a degree which in any other way could not perhaps have been secured in so short a time, in so confined a space, and at so ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... a race practically without musical instruments,—for the drum and rattle were used only to accentuate rhythm,—they are representative of the period when the human voice was the sole means of musical expression,—a period which antedated the invention of instruments by an immeasurable time. They prove, therefore, that musical form was not developed, as has sometimes been stated, by the use of instruments, but that it took its rise in a mental necessity similar to that which ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... care of to-morrow; Short and dark as our life may appear We may make it still darker by sorrow, Still shorter by folly and fear! Half our troubles are half our invention, And often from blessings conferred Have we shrunk, in the wild apprehension ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... the report was a mistaken one, and that Montgomery barely received the assurance that he would be placed in the hands of the king alone. "There have been only too many acts of perfidy in France, without the invention of others," says this historian. "If there were any infractions of the capitulation, they were in the case of some other gentlemen and soldiers, who were maltreated ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... heed this piece of news, any more than the slight flush on his sister's face as she delivered it; he was wondering whether what Bully Tom said was mere invention to frighten him, or whether there was ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... to be a good spirit, her discourse was so heavenly. Her two great errands were to comfort Mrs. Bargrave in her affliction, and to ask her forgiveness for the breach of friendship, and with a pious discourse to encourage her. So that, after all, to suppose that Mrs. Bargrave could hatch such an invention as this from Friday noon till Saturday noon, supposing that she knew of Mrs. Veal's death the very first moment, without jumbling circumstances, and without any interest too; she must be more witty, fortunate, and wicked too, than any indifferent person, I dare say, will allow. I asked Mrs. ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... Italian palace; a life-size doll, with wig of real—perhaps personally real—hair, and dressed from head to foot in the garments of the real poor lady, dead some seventy years ago. I wrote a little tale about it; but the main facts were true, and far surpassed the power of invention. In this case the husband, who had ordered this simulacrum for his solace, taking his daily dose of sentiment in its presence, proceeded, after an interval, to woo and marry his own laundress; and ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... Esq., of Plymouth. The latter as chairman of the Plymouth committee, sent up for inspection an engraving of a plan and section of a slave-ship, in which the bodies of the slaves were seen stowed in the proportion of rather less than one to a ton. This happy invention gave all those who saw it a much better idea, than they could otherwise have had, of the horrors of their transportation, and contributed greatly, as will appear, afterwards, to impress the public in favour ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... Stereotype printing had been first suggested by William Ged, of Edinburgh, in 1735, and was perfected and brought into general use by Tillock, in 1779. The printing machine had been originated by Nicholson, in 1790, and an improved form of it, made of iron, the invention of Earl Stanhope, was in general use in 1806. Thomas Martyn, a compositor of The Times, invented some further modifications, and was aided by the younger Walter. Owing, however, to the violent opposition ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... in the development of the Northwest was the invention and manufacture of grain-planting and harvesting machinery by Cyrus McCormick and others about 1845. This enabled the farmers to increase their operations very much as the Whitney gin had done for the cotton farmers of 1800. Still ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... mute, and seemingly blind; and, if not blind, decrepit this many a day: she keeps her accounts still, however—quite steadily—doing them at nights, carefully, with her bandage off, and through acutest spectacles (the only modern scientific invention she cares about). You must put your ear down ever so close to her lips to hear her speak; and then you will start at what she first whispers, for it will certainly be, 'Why shouldn't that little crossing-sweeper have a feather on its head, as well as your own child?' Then you may ask justice, ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... "Useful Transactions in Philosophy," etc., January and February, 1708/9, which commenced with an article entitled "An Essay on the Invention of Samplers," by Mrs. Arabella Manly (sic). She had a friend, Mrs. Betty ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... the ancient temple has fallen into ruins, but the relics are not excelled in beauty of architecture and sculpture by any remains of Hindu art. Forty columns support the r00f, but no two are alike, and great fertility of invention is manifested in the execution Of the ornaments. The summit of Taragarh hill, overhanging Ajmere, is crowned by a foot, the lofty thick battlements of which run along its brow and enclose the table-land. The walls are 2 m. in circumference, and the fort can only be approached by steep and very ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... impossible; for, in speaking of its evils, I freely recognize that not only would civilization perish without its beneficent aid, but that every step forward in the history of man has been coincident with, and in large part attributable to, a new mechanical invention. ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... from their sockets, staring from a wreath of sea-weed." There is in this last circumstance, horrible enough surely for the wildest German tale ever written, a unique singularity, which removes it beyond the reach of invention. ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... streets (there is but one of much consideration), immensely entertained by the picturesque contrasts. There was more life and amusement here in five minutes, he declared, than in five days of what people called scenery—the present rage for scenery, anyway, being only a fashion and a modern invention. The Friend suspected from this penchant for the city that the Professor must have been brought ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... kinds of osier weaving, brick making, pottery and all kinds of clay or porcelain work; together with many other things that would suggest themselves as time passed and the capacity of the farm was increased by the invention of better machinery and ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... we know that these old British farmers were sufficiently scientific agriculturalists to have invented wheeled ploughs,[23] and to use a variety of manures; various kinds of mast, loam, and chalk in particular. This treatment of the soil was, according to Pliny, a British invention[24] (though the Greeks of Megara had also tried it), and he thinks it worth his while to give a long description of the different clays in use and the methods of their application. That most generally employed was chalk dug out from pits some hundred ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... from the Scheldt and by the winters, it assumes monstrous proportions. When the sky is troubled, as it is to-day, it adds all its own strange caprices to the grandeur of the lines. Imagine then the invention of a Gothic Piranesi, exaggerated by the fancy of the North, wildly illuminated by a stormy day, and standing out in irregular blotches against the scenic background of a sky entirely black or entirely white, and full of tempest. A more original ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... the early morning he wrote or walked. Evenings he devoted to Mrs. Taylor; either writing to her or for her, or else seeing her. On Saturday afternoons they would usually go botanizing, for botany is purely a lovers' invention. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... selections and finding in them much pleasure, as well as improvement in taste and knowledge. With the spread of education and with the great increase of literature among all civilized nations, more especially since the invention of printing and its vast multiplication of books, the making of volumes of selections comprizing what is best in one's own or in many literatures is no longer a mere matter of taste or convenience as with the Greeks, but ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... instance to the point I may mention that when attending as a member of the Representative Assembly at Mysore in 1891, I happened to meet the Dewan and some of his officers in the veranda outside the great hall where our meetings were held, and his attention was attracted to a coffee peeler—the invention of a native who thought this a good opportunity for introducing his machines to the notice of the public, and had some cherry coffee at hand to show how they worked. The Dewan at once inspected the machine, ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... countrymen Sixty Years since, than in writing a work, which, though it may be, in its facts, almost true, and in its delineations perfectly accurate, will yet, in sixty years hence, be regarded, or rather, probably, disregarded, as a mere romance, and the gratuitous invention of a facetious fancy. ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... church yeelded that immersion, or dipping, was lawfull, but in this could countrie not so conveniente. But they could not nor durst not yeeld to him in this, that sprinkling (which all y^e churches of Christ doe for y^e most parte use at this day) was unlawfull, & an humane invention, as y^e same was prest; but they were willing to yeeld to him as far as y^ey could, & to y^e utmost; and were contented to suffer him to practise as he was perswaded; and when he came to minister that ordnance, he might so doe it to any ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... things." [7] Every year from that day to this has deepened the impression made upon the minds of men by the marvelous prospect of harnessing the resources of the universe. The last one hundred and twenty-five years have seen the invention of the locomotive, the steamship, the telegraph, the sewing machine, the camera, the telephone, the gasoline engine, wireless telegraphy and telephony, and the many other applications of electricity. As one by one new areas of power have thus come ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... and dab the whole family once a week? The young'uns might be soused in it every Saturday night, and the nigger might fix the elderly folks with a whitewash brush. Then there wouldn't be no bother a washing your clothes or yourself, which last is an invention of the doctor to make people sick, because it lets in the cold in winter and the heat in summer, when natur' says shut up the porouses and keep 'em out. Besides, when the new invention was tore at the knees ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... I assign, O Brutus, why, as we consist of mind and body, the art of curing and preserving the body should be so much sought after, and the invention of it, as being so useful, should be ascribed to the immortal Gods; but the medicine of the mind should not have been so much the object of inquiry while it was unknown, nor so much attended to and cultivated after its discovery, nor ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... content ourselves with the accidental aristoi produced by the fortuitous concourse of breeders. For I agree with you, that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. Formerly, bodily powers gave place among the aristoi. But since the invention of gunpowder has armed the weak as well as the strong with missile death, bodily strength, like beauty, good humor, politeness, and other accomplishments, has become but an auxiliary ground of distinction. There ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... peculiar dignity, Mr. Bossolton was, it must be confessed, sometimes at a loss to conclude it in a period worthy of the commencement; and this caprice of nature which had endowed him with more words than thoughts (necessity is, indeed, the mother of invention) drove him into a very ingenious method of remedying the deficiency; this was simply the plan of repeating the sense by ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mathematician, place him in the front rank among mathematicians of all time; and yet the services that he rendered to mathematical science were surpassed by his extraordinary capacity for the combination of theory with practice. His powers of invention, of broad generalisation, of originality of thought were almost unbounded. Among the mathematical problems with which he dealt successfully were the theory of numbers, the squaring of the circle and the calculation of chances. To him we owe the conception of the law of the conservation of energy, ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... mother, she reproached herself somewhat for the birth of Putois, and not without reason. Because, after all, Putois was the child of our mother's invention, as Caliban was the poet's invention. Without doubt the faults were not equal, and my mother was more innocent than Shakespeare. However, she was frightened and confused to see her little falsehood grow inordinately, and her slight ...
— Putois - 1907 • Anatole France
... the man to whom the parcel is to be sent is definitely known to be prejudiced against cigarettes, don't send him pipe tobacco or a pipe. There are smokers who hate cigarettes just as there are some people who think that the little paper roll is an invention of the devil. If any one has a boy over there, he—or she—had better overcome any possible personal feeling against the use of cigarettes and send them in preference to ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... partly covered by partiality, and partly borne by prudence. Now all its excellencies are forgot, its faults are now forcibly dragged into day, exaggerated by every artifice of representation. It is despised and rejected of men, and every device and invention of ingenuity or idleness set up in opposition or in preference to it. It is to this humor, and it is to the measures growing out of it, that I set myself (I hope not alone) in the most determined opposition. Never before did we at any time in this country meet upon the theory of our frame ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... analogies becomes to the reader of his works a matter of continual wonder. Strange and curious contrasts and likenesses, both mental and. verbal, which might never once occur even to a mind of more than common eccentricity and invention, seem to have been in his mind with the ordinary flow of thinking. Plenteous and sustained, therefore, as his wit is, it never fails to startle. We have no doubt of his endless resources, and yet each new instance becomes a new marvel. His wit, too, is usually pregnant ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... the States of Holland, without any burden to the people. It was the settling of a certain small seal or stamp to be used in the Provinces ("id autem erat parvi sigilli in Provinciis constitutio"). For the working this invention he had taken into partnership one John van den Brook; and the States of Holland had promised the partners 3000 guilders yearly, equal to about L300 English, for the use of the thing. Not a farthing, however, had they ever received, though the States had benefited so much; and now, as they ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... circumstance which can justify violence is anger. The only circumstance which can justify the taking of human life is anger. And anger may be expressed by a rope or a knife-edge, but not by a roundabout or any other morbid invention of a cold-blooded philosopher such as the electric chair, or the lethal chamber. In the same way, if flogging is to continue as a punishment, it must be inflicted by a man and ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... invented the press. Thus it was that in the preceding ages the warm and animated words of the missionary were necessarily the only organ which Christianity had at command to proclaim its principles; but scarcely did this invention come to second the progress of modern civilisation, than it foresaw the future ally destined to complete the intelligent and social labour which ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... an air of ease and confidence in the answers of Abigail, which illustrates the promptness of invention and assurance of their grounds which the girls manifested on all occasions. They were never at a loss, and challenged scrutiny. Hutchinson gained no advantage, and no one else ever did, in an encounter ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... The discovery of the telescope was very fine in its way; but the invention of the microscope was, after all, a much more sensible affair. We may look at the mountains of the moon, and the spots on the sun, until we have rendered our eyes, for all practical purposes, useless for a month, and yet not bring to light one secret worth knowing, one fact that, as inhabitants ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... the hours That wisdom decks in moral grace, And thine invention's fairy powers, The charm improv'd of nature's face; Propitious come! in silence laid Beneath thy olive's grateful shade, Pour the mild bliss that sooths the tuneful mind, And in thy ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams
... up the shortcomings of the Executive with ceaseless vigilance. To Sir Peregrine Maitland and Attorney-General Robinson it was a veritable thorn in the flesh. There was abundant occasion for criticism, and it was seldom, if ever, that Collins resorted to pure invention for the purpose of attacking the innumerable abuses of the time. There was always a sufficient substratum of truth in his accusations to render it inexpedient to prosecute him for libel. The punishment of ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... He advised them to lie down with their eyes shut in the berth which was now vacated, the occupants being called off to their respective duties, and the assistant-surgeon having retired into the dispensary to concoct a specific against sea-sickness of his own invention, which made him and those he persuaded to ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... set aside for ever. But the notices which I have been considering suggest another reflection. Is the historical position which the writer of this letter takes up at all like the invention of a forger? Would he have thought of placing himself at the moment of time when Ignatius is supposed to have been martyred, but when the report of the circumstances had not yet reached Smyrna? If he had chosen this moment, would he not have ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... war as we had been accustomed to. It was a newer and more deadly game, and I had to watch my splendid army eaten away as waves eat a sandhill. Never once did I get a chance of forcing close action. These new tactics that had come from Phorenice's invention, were beyond my art to meet or understand. We were eight to her one, and our close-packed numbers only made us so much the more easy for slaughter. A panic came, and those who could fled. Myself, I had no wish to go back and earn the axe that waits for the unsuccessful general. I tried to die ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... no machine comes in to take away a man's or woman's power of earning their living, like the spinning-jenny (the old busybody that she is), to knock up all our good old women's livelihood, and send them to their graves before their time. There's an invention of the enemy, if ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... frequently than the pot, and where, in general, no one was at home to take care of the child. Then he would cry; but what nobody knows, that nobody cares for, and he would cry till he was tired, and then he fell asleep; and in sleep one feels neither hunger nor thirst. A capital invention is sleep. ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... and seventy-two pages, to which were added FIFTEEN pages of errata. The pious monk wrote an apology for these inaccuracies, which, if true, proved that his case was indeed a cruel one—clearly proving, moreover, that even if the devil had originally assisted Doctor Faustus and Gutenberg in the invention, his brimstone majesty very soon became sick of his bargain. The monk avers that he wrote the work to circumvent the artifices of Satan, and that the devil, ever on the alert, undertook to circumvent him. For this purpose Satan, in the first place, caused the MS. to be drenched in a kennel, until ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that "progress" which is promised for the future, it is like the necessity for the past, purely an invention of Mr. Parker; if I receive it, I must receive it simply as matter of prophecy. If the necessity has continued so long, then, for aught I know, it may continue for ever; the evil is all too certain,—the ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... my cozen Roger, and Creed: and mighty merry; and by and by to dinner, which was very good and plentifull: (I should have said, and Mr. George Montagu), who come at a very little warning, which was exceeding kind of him. And there, among other things, my Lord had Sir Samuel Morland's late invention for casting up of sums of ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... "it sounds like a wild invention from some story-teller's pen, and I should laugh in your face but for the proofs you have given me. But you must not stay here in this country. It is as much yours as any lucky adventurer's, but your right would be disputed in a hundred ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... him while he was experimenting and perfecting the new projectile. The company couldn't undertake to do that, but I personally financed Mr. Kauffman, having confidence in his ability. He has been six months getting the invention made, tested and ready to submit to government experts, and up to the present it has cost a lot of money. However, it is now considered perfect and Mr. Kauffman has brought it here to-night to exhibit ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... Who shall forget those terrible words of the poor life-weary orphan in the boarding-house? Speaking of Vautrin she says, "His look frightens me as if he put his hand on my dress"; and another epigram from the same book, "Woman's virtue is man's greatest invention." Find me anything in La Rochefoucauld that goes more incisively to the truth of things. One more; here I can give the exact words: "La gloire est le soleil des morts." It would be easy to compile ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... preacher continued, speaking of different improvements, and lastly of the invention of daguerreotypes and photographs. He called the attention of his hearers to this almost miraculous art of indelibly fixing the expression of a countenance, and drew a lesson as to the permanent effect of our daily looks and ...
— The New Minister's Great Opportunity - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... churches, increased in Paris, at one time at least fourfold, the opera-houses, the playhouses, the public shows of all kinds; and even in their state of indigence and distress, no expense was spared for their equipment and decoration. They were made an affair of state. There is no invention of seduction, never wholly wanting in that place, that has not been increased,—brothels, gaming-houses, everything. And there is no doubt, but, when they are settled in a triumphant peace, they will carry all these arts to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... high-seas, or steamboat on the river, the roar of commerce, far more than the work of the husbandman. We are an agricultural people, we of the South and West—and especially we Southerners, with our poverty of invention, our one staple, our otherwise helpless habits, incident to the institution which, however it may be our curse, is still our wealth, and to which, for the present time, we are bound, Ixion-like, by every law of necessity. What does this tariff promise? ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... many groups—even the Low Archipelago—but the island where that dance was indigenous I am sure I've never touched. Compared with any of the hulas, set and fixed in each locality as the rites of Rome, it was sophisticated; it gave an illusion of continuous invention and spontaneity; it was flesh swept by a wind and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... passing Novalesa, reached, after the evening had closed, the small and antient town of Susa, which had formerly guarded this pass of the Alps into Piedmont. The heights which command it had, since the invention of artillery, rendered its fortifications useless; but these romantic heights, seen by moon-light, with the town below, surrounded by its walls and watchtowers, and partially illumined, exhibited an interesting picture to Emily. Here they rested for ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... no kind of game or diversion, has ever given me such enjoyment as lecturing. Only at lectures have I been able to abandon myself entirely to passion, and have understood that inspiration is not an invention of the poets, but exists in real life, and I imagine Hercules after the most piquant of his exploits felt just such voluptuous exhaustion as I experience after ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... and the steam engine. In other words, to convert the business of farming from an agricultural pursuit, where the labor of men and women was the chief factor of production, to a mechanical pursuit, in which the chief element of cost and power were machines, the invention of a single generation. ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... Modern science and invention, civic and economic progress, the growth of humanitarian ideas, and the approach to Christian unity, are all combining to give woman and woman's work a central place in the social order. The vast machinery of government, especially in ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... say a few words in justification of the Historical Romance, in its relation to history. Any one, with no preceding profound study of history, who takes a few well-known historical facts as a foundation for an airy castle of romantic invention and fantastic adventure, may easily write an Historical Romance; for him history is only the nude manikin which he clothes and adorns according to his own taste, and to which he gives the place and position most agreeable to himself. ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... the rest of his time chiefly to cataloguing and copying Tintoret. The catalogue appeared in "Stones of Venice," which was suggested by this visit, and begun by some sketches of architectural detail, and the acquisition of daguerreotypes—a new invention which delighted him immensely, as it had delighted Turner, with trustworthy records of detail which sometimes eluded even his industry ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... seriously, for his tone was so quiet, and matter of fact, that they could scarce credit that he had passed through such an exciting adventure; and the three were so accustomed to hoax each other, that it struck them both as simply an invention on the part of their comrade, so absolutely improbable did ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... the complexity of modern life which enforces moderation. Science has created vast populations and huge industries, and also given the means by which single minds can direct them. Invention gives these gifts, and compels man to use them. Man is as much the slave as the master of the machine, as he turns to the telephone or the telegram. In this fierce turmoil of the modern world he can only keep his judgment intact, ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... thought he, "is about a hundred pounds of high-grade dynamite, or a gallon of nitroglycerin. Better still, a dozen capsules of my own invention, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... disappointed, it is true—hurt, even, at having been deprived of any voice in the matter. She had been looking forward so much to carrying out her pet schemes, to enjoying her friends' admiration of the wonders wrought by her artistic invention. And she had never thought of George, somehow, as likely to have any strikingly original ideas on the subject of decoration, although she liked him ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... the Conquest to the year 1304, tells us expressly, that he did this, not because he could add much to the histories of Bede, William of Newburgh, and Matthew Paris, but "propter minores, quibus non suppetit copia librorum." (25) Before the invention of printing, it was necessary that numerous copies of historical works should be transcribed, for the instruction of those who had not access to libraries. The transcribers frequently added something of their own, and abridged or omitted ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... wonderful Epistle to the Hebrews, when he told the Jews of his time that the Lord was shaking the heavens and the earth, that those things which were shaken might be removed, as things that are made—cosmogonies, systems, theories, prejudices, fashions, of man's invention: while those things which could not be shaken might remain, because they were according to the mind and will of God, eternal as that source from whence they came forth, even the bosom of God ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... personal violence, had not my whole attention been at the moment arrested by a fact of the most startling character. The cloak which I had worn was of a rare description of fur; how rare, how extravagantly costly, I shall not venture to say. Its fashion, too, was of my own fantastic invention; for I was fastidious to an absurd degree of coxcombry, in matters of this frivolous nature. When, therefore, Mr. Preston reached me that which he had picked up upon the floor, and near the folding doors of the apartment, it was with an ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... "under the pretext of dining with some one living in his vicinity I shall go to Leppich and shall remain with him for a long time; it will be a feast to me to become more closely connected with a man whose invention will render military art superfluous, free mankind of its internal destroyer, make of you the arbiter of kings and empires and the benefactor ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... fact. Pray proceed." As he said this Arnold glanced across the table at Natasha, and a swift smile and a flash from her suddenly unveiled eyes told him that she, too, was thinking of how the world's history might have been altered had the Tsar's million been paid for his invention. Then the Princess ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... of Dionysus takes us back, then, into that old Greek life of the vineyards, as we see it on many painted vases, with much there as we should find it now, as we see it in Bennozzo Gozzoli's mediaeval fresco of the Invention of Wine in the Campo Santo at Pisa- -the family of Noah presented among all the circumstances of a Tuscan vineyard, around the press from which the first wine is flowing, a painted idyll, with its vintage colours still opulent ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... all his life into verse and song. When he comes out in the morning, he chants a domestic idyl, in which he narrates in verse the events of his household, and the differences and agreements of himself and his wife, whom I take to be a pure invention. This over, he changes into song everything and every person that passes before him. Nothing that is odd, fantastic, or absurd escapes him, or fails to be chronicled and sarcastically commented on in his verse. So he sits all day long, his mind like a kaleidoscope, changing all the odd ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... conversation I said I wondered where the convicts were going. His mouth twitched with the instinctive irony of our poor, and he said: "I don't s'pose they're goin' on an 'oliday at the seaside with little spades and pails." I was naturally delighted, and, pursuing the same vein of literary invention, I suggested that perhaps dons were taken down to Cambridge chained together like this. And as he lived in Cambridge, and had seen several dons, he was pleased with such a scheme. Then when we had ceased to laugh, we suddenly became quite silent; and the bleak, grey eyes ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... scarcely show the development of anything. What was true at the end of the first year of their partnership seems to be true at the end of the second, third, fourth and fifth. After a time when their grotesque performance was a fixed and settled thing, there was little need for the invention of novelty or for rehearsal. Week after week, month after month, year after year, they reproduced their almost stereotyped entertainment. Here and there, according to the idiosyncrasy of the audience, they introduced some variety. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... said Raven, after his third slice of toast, buttered, he approvingly noted, to the last degree of drippiness, "is poverty of invention. You repeat your climax. Now, this sending for Milly: it's precisely what you did before. That's a mistake ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... is highly probable that in the twenty-five years preceding the panic of 1873, owing to the progress of invention, those industries in the United States employing much machinery were unduly stimulated in comparison with other industries, and that the readjustment was a slow and painful process. After the collapse vast numbers left the manufacturing to enter ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... the click o' the lock; so I fancy the priming had got damp and didn't catch. I was in a great quandary now what to do, for I couldn't concoct in my mind, in the hurry, any good reason for firin' off my piece. But they say necessity's the mother of invention; so just as I was givin' it up and clinchin' my teeth to bide the worst o't and take what should come, a sudden thought came into my head. I stepped out before the rest, seemin' to be awful anxious to be at the savages, tripped my foot ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... the comparatively few games that gives a large amount of activity to a large number of players playing at the same time. The game as here given is the invention of Miss Cora B. Clark and Miss Caroline M. Wollaston of New York City, by whose kind permission the game is here printed. It has proven to be a ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... country, Mr. Grandon, they manage their daughters differently; not always better, perhaps, but they do not leave them unprotected to the world, to beg their bit of bread, maybe. I have put everything in my invention. ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... of new kinds of characters, probably the most popular is his invention of the British soldier in India. He avers that he "loves that very strong man, Thomas Atkins"; but his affection has not blinded him to the faults of the beloved. Mr. Atkins drinks too much, is too careless a gallant in love, has been educated either too much or too little, and has other ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... irrepressible race of at least a hundred and twenty millions, endowed with rare capacities for organization, cohesion, self-sacrifice and perseverance, whom no treaties can bind, no scruples can restrain, no dangers intimidate. At any moment a new invention, a favourable diplomatic combination, would suffice to move them to burst all bounds and resume the military, naval ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the bookstalls of London to find the material which the grasping Sir Richard Phillips required from him. He found, for example, Sir Herbert Croft's volume, Love and Madness, the supposed correspondence of Parson Hackman and Martha Reay, whom he murdered. That correspondence is now known to be an invention of Croft's. Borrow accepted it as genuine, and incorporated the whole of it in his story of ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... children to bed, only to find that her fertility of imagination in the afternoon was to prove her undoing in the evening; for her memory was by no means as reliable as her powers of invention. ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... barely off the sand of the beach when a shot sounded, and the wind of the bullet made his eyes smart. Invention was automatic in his mind. At the noise, he fell forthwith on his face, crashing across a bush, so that his head was up and his pistol in reach of his hand. Thus he lay, not moving, but searching through half-closed eyes the maze of green before ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... beaucheouz idee, I juz take a pencil"—he drew one from his pocket—"check! I check it. So w'en I wead the same book again, then I take notiz I've check that idee and I look to see what I check it faw. 'Ow you like that invention, eh?" ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... variety at all. To me, one of the highest triumphs of the siege is the achievement of MacNalty, a young lieutenant of the Army Service Corps. For nights past he has been working in the station engine shed at an apparatus of his own invention for boiling down horses into soup. After many experiments in process and flavouring, and many disappointments, he has secured an admirable essence of horse. This will sound familiar and commonplace to people who can get a bottle ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... upon this occasion, repeat what is now familiar history—how, by the invention of the cotton-gin, and the consequent enormous increase of the cotton crop, slave labor in the cotton States, and slave breeding in the Northern slave States, became so profitable that the slaveholders were able, for many years, largely to influence, if not control, ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... Major, "have pity. It's not any canvas woman that I want—By Jove!" He caught sight of an invention of Felicien Rops, a pig on the end of a string, leading, or being driven by, a woman who wore nothing but stockings, boots and a hat. "What do ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... say, was done at Belem, Lisbon. The interior is Gothic, unlike all others in the islands; and the piers, lofty and elegant, imitate palm-fronds, a delicate flattery to 'Las Palmas' and a good specimen of local invention. There are a nave and two aisles: four noble transversal columns sustaining the choir-vault adorn the walls. The pulpit and high altar are admirable as the choir; the only eyesores are the diminutive organ and the eleven side-chapels with their caricatures of high art. ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... has been a failure. I took great pains, in constructing it, to secure a pleasant impression. It is not a mere invention, but a compound of the words smile and eyelash. A smile suggests good humor; eyelashes soften the expression and are the only features that never blemish a face. Hence Smilash is a sound that should cheer and propitiate. Yet it exasperates. It is really very ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... said, 'Take her there yourself.' Sommers beckoned to the woman to follow him. He took her to one of the little compartments on the inner corridor, which was lined with strange devices: electrical machines, compressed air valves, steam sprays—all the enginery of the latest invention. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... egg or ovum is a simple cell, as in the case of other animals. When I had explained this pregnant fact and its significance in my History of Creation, it was described in many of the theological journals as a dishonest invention of my own. The fact that the embryos of man and the dog are, at a certain stage of their development, almost indistinguishable was also denied. When we examine the human embryo in the third or fourth week of its development, we find it to be quite different ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... Parliament was passed, confirming the patent to Mr Stead, as though it had been regularly filed within the prescribed period. A second patent was afterwards obtained, but that related more particularly to the form of blocks. The first patent, which had been infringed, was for an invention consisting of a mode of paving with blocks of similar sizes and dimensions, of either a sexagonal, triangular, or square form, so as to make ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... man of about forty, and the epithet of "Red" had been given to him in consequence of the color of his hair. In expression his countenance was by no means unhandsome, being florid and symmetrical, but hard, and with scarcely any trace of feeling. His brows were far asunder, arguing ingenuity and invention, but his eyes, which were small and treacherous, glared—whenever he became excited—with the ferocity of an enraged tiger. His shoulders were broad, his chest deep and square, his arms long and powerful, but his lower ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... constitute its greatest terrors; that a human hand must give motion to the Guillotine as well as to the axe; and that either accustoms a people, already sanguinary, to the sight of blood, I think little is gained by the invention. It was imagined by a Mons. Guillotin, a physician of Paris, and member of the Constituent Assembly. The original design seems not so much to spare pain to the criminal, as obloquy to the executioner. I, however, perceive little ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... to me!" Then Psyche fell down at her feet, and sweeping the floor with her hair, washing the footsteps of the goddess in her tears, besought her mercy, with many prayers:—"By the gladdening rites of harvest, by the lighted lamps and mystic marches of the Marriage and mysterious Invention of thy daughter Proserpine, and by all beside that the holy place of Attica veils in silence, minister, I pray thee, to the sorrowful heart of Psyche! Suffer me to hide myself but for a few days among the heaps of corn, till time have softened the anger of the goddess, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... would have an end. Progression then would cease, Invention have no earnest friend, And ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... yea, and a garden of pleasure in an Island near Puna, where they went to recreate themselves when they would take the air of the sea, which had all kind of garden herbs, flowers, and trees of gold and silver of an invention and ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... has spoiled Tasso's hell and the devil, who transforms Lucifer sometimes into a toad and other times into a pigmy, who makes him repeat the same things a hundred times, who makes him dispute on theology, who, by a serious imitation of Ariosto's comic invention of firearms, represents the devils cannonading in heaven? Neither I nor any man in Italy could take pleasure in those melancholy extravagances; and the marriage of Sin and Death, and the snakes brought ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... to 12 inches wide, 50 feet long, and run at the rate of 10,000 feet a minute. They are even made with the cutting teeth on both edges, so that the log can be sawed both going and coming. This idea was unsuccessful until the invention of the telescopic band-mill, Fig. 35. In this the entire mechanism carrying the wheels on which the band-saw revolves can be moved up and down, so as to bring the point where the saw leaves the upper ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... that nothing is more beautifying than powder. See how exquisitely it lies on the front ringlets, and how airily it is distributed over the entire peruke. Vraiment, I am proud of my invention." ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... "Let anyone," says Dinsmore, "scrutinize the list of names of distinguished men in our annals; names of men eminent in public life from President down; men distinguished in the Church, in the Army, in the Navy, at the Bar, on the Bench, in Medicine and Surgery, in Education, trade, commerce, invention, discovery—in any and all of the arts which add to the freedom, enlightenment, and wealth of the world, and the convenience and comfort of mankind; names which have won luster in every honorable calling—let him scrutinize the list" and he will be astonished to find how large a proportion ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... pressures of the hand, as well as countless nothings, were expected and enacted, in the bi-weekly reports you rendered to those of your friends who followed the case. Whereas for the curate it was possible to simulate immense ardour, without needing either to humble your pride or call invention to your aid: the worship took place from afar. The curate was, moreover, no unworthy object; indeed he was quite attractive, in a lean, ascetic fashion, with his spiritual blue eyes, and the plain gold cross that dangled from his black watch-ribbon—though, it must ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... unrelished fear and excitement that he always caused her, she returned to her seat under the tree, and began to wonder what Festus Derriman's story meant, which, from the earnestness of his tone, did not seem like a pure invention. It suddenly flashed upon her mind that she herself had heard voices in the garden, and that the persons seen by Farmer Derriman, of whose visit and reclamation of his box the miller had told her, might have been Matilda and John Loveday. She further recalled the strange agitation ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages: so that, if the invention of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits; how much more are letters to be magnified, which, as ships, pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... passages, stairways, and galleries (both of pictures and of curios) that were thus enriched, but the boudoirs, retiring-rooms, and more private apartments as well. It was not simply a house of luxury, but of all the comfort that modern invention can furnish. It was said that the money lavished upon one or two of the noble apartments would have built a State-house (though not at Albany), and that the fireplace in the great hall cost as much as an imitation mediaeval church. These ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Iglesias answered; "and, since their invention, my bank holidays. Latterly I got three weeks' holiday in the summer, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... expressions of the same ideas, the transposed expression and the natural one. For we are acquainted with the natural one—the one which we should have chosen instinctively. So it will be enough if the effort of comic invention bears on the other, and on the other alone. No sooner is the second set before us than we spontaneously supply the first. Hence the following general rule: A COMIC EFFECT IS ALWAYS OBTAINABLE BY TRANSPOSING THE NATURE EXPRESSION OF AN ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... a frame-up!" he exclaimed, pulling a little cylinder off the instrument into which he had inserted the telephone receiver. "I thought it might be and I have preserved the voice. This is what is known as the telescribe—a recent invention of Edison which records on a specially prepared phonograph cylinder all that is said—both ways—over ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... hopes you could give me a little time to help me on my gyroscope invention," went on the aged man. "But I suppose it will keep until you come back. It ...
— Tom Swift and his Wizard Camera - or, Thrilling Adventures while taking Moving Pictures • Victor Appleton
... no prank too grimly grotesque for Nature to play in this solitude. O'Neil felt that his own ingenuity was quite unequal to the task of combating this peril. Set against forces so tremendous and arbitrary human invention seemed ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... I have now said, and farther to show the miserable effects of a confined education, I shall here insert a passage which will hardly obtain belief. In hopes to ingratiate myself farther into his majesty's favor, I told him of an invention discovered between three and four hundred years ago, to make a certain powder into a heap, on which the smallest spark of fire falling would kindle the whole in a moment, although it were as big as a mountain, and make it all fly up in the air together with a noise and agitation greater ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... the bright notion was conceived, and made public, that the poison used was a "white powder" of unknown components, which did its work slowly, and killed the victim some time after it had been administered. Thus, by a bold and brazen invention, an impossible falsehood was made ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... himself flat upon the floor, face downward, this time as a necessary preliminary to rising after a manner of his own invention. Mysteriously he became higher in the middle, his body slowly forming first a round and then a pointed arch, with forehead, knees, and elbows touching the floor. A brilliantly executed manoeuvre closed his Gothic period, set ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... of the moon is not a mere poetic invention or a lover's fancy. Mr. Moncure Conway reminds us that glam, in its nominative form glamir, is a poetical name for the moon, to be found in the Prose Edda. It is given in the Glossary as one of the old names for the moon. ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... new and damnable custom. The literal meaning of bidah is "an innovation or invention, anything new;" but the word is commonly used in the sense of "heresy" or "heterodox innovation," anything new being naturally heretical in the eyes ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... good-will; "for I should not like to think, Father Michael, that, when we set out on the last long journey, we are to travel for ever in different ways. Thou may'st tarry awhile, if thou seest fit, in thy purgatory, which is a lodging of thine own invention, and should therefore suit thee, but I trust to continue on, until fairly housed in heaven, miserable and unhappy sinner, ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... "Idle tales, the invention of overheated brains," rejoined Richard. "Trust me, the abbot's rest will not be broken till the day when all shall rise from their tombs; though if ever the dead (supposing such a thing possible) could ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
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