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More "Mechanical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... performed the introduction, she put down her beer from which she had been somewhat thirstily drinking and received Hanson with a perfunctory bow and a brief mechanical smile. "Think of settling here?" ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... lines. In my view, the revolution will follow the same general channels it has taken in Russia, with alterations of detail, of course. Should France overthrow capitalism, for instance, she will at first establish Sovietism, and subsequently combine with us. To foresee the mechanical angles of such ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... back to Paris and placed in Dr. Meuriot's sanatorium, where, after eighteen months of mechanical existence, ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... home?' I asked; and he inclined his head in a gracious bow. 'He is at home, madam, but is not receiving visitors.' I drew out my cards, and said, 'I am sorry to miss seeing him. I hope he is not more unwell than usual to-day?' He bowed again, like a mechanical figure, and said, 'Mr Vanburgh charges me to say, madam, that as he is unable to return visits, he must deprive himself of the pleasure of receiving them while in Waybourne.' I never felt so small ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... that no restoration was to be hoped. And the mother and son—what would become of them? And the father—what would become of him? what further distress was in store?—Public disgrace?—and Fleda bowed her head forward on her clasped hands with the mechanical, vain endeavour to seek rest or shelter from thought. She made nothing of Mr. Thorn's professions; she took only the facts of his letter; the rest her eye had glanced over as if she had no concern ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... over the island, and examined many of them, were of opinion that the stone of which they were made, was different from any they saw on the island, and had much the appearance of being factitious. We could hardly conceive how these islanders, wholly unacquainted with any mechanical power, could raise such stupendous figures, and afterwards place the large cylindric stones before mentioned upon their heads. The only method I can conceive, is by raising the upper end by little and little, supporting it by stones as it is raised, ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... as Epicurus furnished, satisfied himself with the theory of a vast machine fortuitously constructed, and acting by a Law that implied no Legislator; and so composing himself into a Stoical rather than Epicurean severity of Attitude, sat down to contemplate the mechanical drama of the Universe which he was part Actor in; himself and all about him (as in his own sublime description of the Roman Theater) discolored with the lurid reflex of the Curtain suspended between the Spectator and the Sun. Omar, more desperate, ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... from Stothard, Blake used to complain of this mechanical employment as engraver to a fellow-designer, who (he asserted) first borrowed from one that, in his servile capacity, had then to copy that comrade's version of his own inventions—as to motive and composition his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... one, in which were packed all she needed for her fortnight's marriage tour. Her traveling dress lay on the bed—a plain dark silk—her only silk gown except the marriage one. She let Mrs. Ferguson array her in it, and then, with her usual mechanical orderliness, began folding up the shining white draperies and laying them in ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... magnificent garments or of the tender spirit schooled by flawless, immemorial discipline to an absolute decorum. That such glimpses come just preserves her from appearing a mere figure of tapestry, a fine mechanical toy. The Salem which before her arrival seems quaintly formal enough immediately thereafter seems by contrast raw and new, and her beauty glitters like a precious gem in some ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... be induced to go further and attempt the design of a complete decoration as far as dado, field, frieze, and ceiling go; and this would involve all the thought necessary to the mural painter, narrowed down to the exigencies of mechanical repeat. ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... preached to his ungrateful parishioners. I was sorry I couldn't give my man a hint to use his handkerchief at the affecting periods, for the nose can hardly be called a sympathetic feature (unless indeed you blow it), and these nods were becoming rather too mechanical, except when the old gentleman switched off on the argumentative track, as he frequently did. "What think you of that?" he would pause in his reading to inquire. "Isn't that logic? isn't that unanswerable?" In responding to which appeals nobody could have ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... because it is a demonstration that we are dependent upon some community on the other side of the world, that their damage is our damage, and that we have an interest in preventing it. It teaches us, as only some such simple and mechanical means can teach, the lesson of ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... difficulties involved in the mechanical production of wealth compelled even the individualists to work together. The requirements of industrial organization drove them in ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... the final fact, needing and admitting no further explanation. That the Orient has not developed history or science is doubtless true, but the correct explanation of this fact is, in my opinion, that the educational method of the entire Orient has rested on mechanical memorization; during the formative period of the mind the exclusive effort of education has been to develop a memory which acts by arbitrary or fanciful connections and relations. A Japanese boy of Old Japan, for instance, began his ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... the Senora took her seat at the head of the table in a mechanical way, and began, "But—" Felipe, seeing that questions were to follow, interrupted her: "I have just spoken with her. It is impossible for her to come;" and turning to Father Salvierderra, he at once engaged him in conversation, and left ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... behind are fixtures full of white packages containing, as inscriptions testify, Lino, Hd Bk, and Mull. You might imagine to see them that the two were both intent upon nothing but smoothness of textile and rectitude of fold. But to tell the truth, neither is thinking of the mechanical duties in hand. The assistant is dreaming of the delicious time—only four hours off now—when he will resume the tale of his bruises and abrasions. The apprentice is nearer the long long thoughts ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... interested her in the purely mechanical part of what she was doing. "Don't think of who you're doing it before, or of how you're doing it, but only of getting through each step and each note. If your head's full of that, you'll have no room for fright." And she was ready to try again. When she ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... life who understands adequately the difference between formal perception and organic experience, contrasting the futility of detached and deathly proverbs with the utility of nutritious and electrical maxims. A mechanical teacher crowds the ear with mummified precepts and exhortations; an inspired teacher brings surcharged examples and rules into contact with the mind. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... wakeful. Indeed, she felt like a woman to whom an injection of morphia had been administered, as if she never wished to move again. She lay there counting the minutes that made the passing hours, counting them calmly, with an inexorable and almost cold self-possession. The process presently became mechanical, and she was able, at the same time, to dwell upon the events that had followed upon the discovery of the murdered woman by the tent: Androvsky's pulling aside of the door of the tent to find it empty, their short ride to the encampment close by, their rousing up of the sleeping Arabs ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... temperament, for within three days of his arrival the brass-plate on his street-door announced his profession, while a neat little glass-case, on a level with the eye of the passing pedestrian, exhibited specimens of his skill in mechanical dentistry, and afforded instruction and amusement to the boys of the neighbourhood, who criticised the glistening white teeth and impossibly red gums, displayed behind the plate-glass, with a like vigour and freedom of language. Nor did Mr. Sheldon's announcement of his profession ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... officers as forcibly as I could the importance of intercepting the communications of the enemy by blowing up their trains. A mechanical device had been thought of, by which this could be done. The barrel and lock of a gun, in connexion with a dynamite cartridge, were placed under a sleeper, so that when a passing engine pressed the rail ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... fifty four similar experiences; and old men grotesque in a dissolute senility; and sudden bursts of orchestral music, and simpering ballads, and comic refrains and crashing choruses; and lights, lingerie, picture-hats and short skirts; and over all, dominating all, the set, eternal, mechanical, bored smile of ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... lemon, and citron, and a few others. In these cases, the parts of the plant containing the odoriferous principle are put sometimes in a cloth bag, and at others by themselves into a press, and by mere mechanical force it is squeezed out. The press is an iron vessel of immense strength, varying in size from six inches in diameter, and twelve deep, and upwards, to contain one hundred weight or more; it has a small aperture at the bottom to allow ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... required energy to buck and pitch, and he knew that he lacked this energy. So he continued along in sullen resignation until, accepting the hint of his instincts, he closed his eyes. This brought relief, and after a time, his movements becoming ever more mechanical, he found himself adrift upon a peaceful sea of semi-coma, oblivious to all trouble—hunger pangs, thirst, weariness. When he returned to full consciousness, somewhat refreshed and fit for farther distances, he found the sun well down the western sky, the cool ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... western community might well have been written later; it might almost indeed have made a page of his diary after he became President of the United States and during the Whiskey Insurrection in western Pennsylvania. He approved and encouraged Rumsey's mechanical invention for propelling boats against the stream, showing that he had a glimpse of what was to follow after Fitch, Rumsey, and Fulton should have overcome the mighty currents of the Hudson and the Ohio with the steamboat's ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... an art in the sense that painting or music or sculpture is an art. It is nearer the mechanical arts. Nothing is an art that does not involve the imagination and the artistic perceptions. All the essentials of photography are mechanical—the judgment and the experience of the man are only secondary. A photograph can never ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... with a mechanical dead sort of care. John was emotional enough to be badly broken up by the child's looks, but Elizabeth's unresponsiveness at such a time made of it a tragedy which he could not understand; he wanted greetings and discussion, and attentions showered upon him as ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... came to Khartoum in the service of the Austrian Mission, employed as a mason. This man had a natural aptitude for mechanical contrivances, and quickly abandoning the Jesuit Mission, after the completion of the extensive convent at the junction of the two Niles, he and a carpenter of the same nation formed a partnership of hunters and traders, establishing themselves at Sofi on the frontier of Abyssinia. ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... to chant the same words from day to day and from year to year, transforming into a mere mechanical toil the divine gift and duty of prayer, could not answer the ideal of life conceived by a proud and generous soul filled with vast thoughts. Langland, however, was obliged to curb his mind to this work; Placebo and ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... Chronology cry out that the annals of Theology are false, and her record of Time a fable; that the Deluge, for instance, is an old wives' story, and the economy of times and seasons a human fabrication:—when Astronomical and Mechanical Science strut up to the Throne whereon sits the Ancient of Days,—prate to Him, (the first Author of Law,) about the "supremacy of Law,"—and tell Him to His face that His miracles are things impossible:—when Physiology insinuates that Mankind cannot be descended ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... (In fishingcap and oilskin jacket) He employs a mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... bronze inkstand before her, and as she listened she arranged a half dozen pens evenly on the rest. The words she heard and spoke mattered more to her than life or death; her features were livid as those of a corpse, yet her hands went on with their mechanical work—one pen did not project a hair's breadth beyond the other. We lawyers know how common such puerile, commonplace actions are in the supreme moments of life, and how seldom men wring their hands, or use tragic gesture, ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... a leaf and at the same time flicked the ashes from his cigarette with a mechanical finger movement. "You did." He looked briefly up from the page. "That's why you licked the preacher," he assisted, and went back ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... remarked, that, so far as their action has been pernicious, they would operate among ourselves less than in any colony of Great Britain, abundantly less than in the West Indies. The greater variety of employments with which the Maryland or Kentucky negro is familiar, his more frequent proficiency in mechanical pursuits, combined with other circumstances, render him decidedly a more eligible subject for freedom than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... keen eyes of Bull were closely observing. He realised her attitude. Her words and tone were almost mechanical, as though she had schooled herself and rehearsed her lesson. And her voice was not quite steady. He jumped in with the swift impulse of a man whose rivalry could not withstand that sign of a beautiful ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... horrified. They solve the question by the sacrifice of the one or the other. If one considers only the lower and somewhat vulgar aspect of military life it is found to be composed of monotonous obligations clothed in a mechanical procedure of indispensable repetition. If one learns to grasp it in its ensemble and large perspective, it will be found that the days of extreme trial demand prodigies of vigor, spirit, intelligence, and decision! Regarded from this angle and supported in this light, the commonplace things ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... and the execution of these instruments, the utmost stretch of inventive skill and mechanical ingenuity has been put forth. To such perfection have they been carried, that a single second of magnitude or space is rendered a distinctly visible and appreciable quantity. "The arc of a circle," says Sir J. Herschell, ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... Royal College of Surgeons in London tell us of very exquisite anatomical preparations made by him while employed as Minute Dissector to that institution. We are grateful to Mr. Goadby for consecrating his narrow but sure immortality and his excellent mechanical talent to the service of the New World and especially of the State ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... his comparatively clumsy, bloated bulk easy prey, and then be gone. He snapped shut his face-plate under their assault. Sometimes there came different, more powerful wings, and he would duck in mechanical reaction, sensing the wings sweep past, often feeling them as, with sharp pecks and quick thudding blows, they sought to stun him. But the suit was stout; the repulsed attackers could only follow a little, glaring at him with fire-green ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... intelligence was diffused, and a firm ground prepared for common action in mutual sympathy and disinterested zeal. They received powerful aid through the foundation, in 1804, by a young artillery officer named Von Reichenbach, of an Optical and Mechanical Institute at Munich. Here the work of English instrumental artists was for the first time rivalled, and that of English opticians—when Fraunhofer entered the new establishment—far surpassed. The development given to the refracting telescope by this extraordinary ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... actual. George had a helpless invalid mother to support; so, though he loved reading and silent thought above all things, he put to instant use the only convertible worldly talent he possessed, which was a mechanical genius, and shipped at sixteen as a ship-carpenter. He studied navigation in the forecastle, and found in its calm diagrams and tranquil eternal signs food for his thoughtful nature, and a refuge from the brutality ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... comparatively little of this mechanical work now; it was the sense and not the wording which had to be mastered. Thus geography was studied from an atlas and not by the mere parrot-like learning of the names of towns and rivers. In grammar the boys had to show that they understood a rule ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... on us very fast. "We maintain," says Mr Whewell, "that this equality of mechanical action and reaction is one of the principles which do not flow from, but regulate, our experience. A mechanical pressure, not accompanied by an equal and opposite pressure, can no more be given by experience than two unequal right angles. With the supposition of such inequalities, space ceases to be space, form ceases to be form, matter ceases to be matter." And again he says, "That ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... through the library and the dining-room, and arrived forward, in the machine-room where the electrical apparatus was established, which supplied not only heat and light, but the mechanical power of ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... effect. But is this a legitimate process? In dynamics, and in all the mathematical branches of physics, it is; but in some other cases, as in chemistry, it is not; and I then recollected that something not unlike this was pointed out as one of the distinctions between chemical and mechanical phenomena, in the introduction to that favourite of my boyhood, Thompson's System of Chemistry. This distinction at once made my mind clear as to what was perplexing me in respect to the philosophy of politics. I now saw, that a science is either deductive or experimental, according ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... could be found so blind to obvious inferences as to accept natural selection, "or the preservation of favoured machines," as the main means of mechanical modification, we might suppose him to argue much as follows:- "I can quite understand," he would exclaim, "how any one who reflects upon the originally simple form of the earliest jemmies, and observes the developments they ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... and textiles, agricultural products, mechanical goods, phosphates and chemicals, hydrocarbons, ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... a commoner should thwart a lord! Yet not a commoner. A baronet Is fish and flesh. Nine parts plebeian, and Patrician in the tenth. Sir Thomas Clifford! A man, they say, of brains! I abhor brains As I do tools: they're things mechanical. So far are we above our forefathers They to their brains did owe their titles, as Do lawyers, doctors. We to nothing owe them, Which makes ...
— The Hunchback • James Sheridan Knowles
... aptitude for mechanical arts, of Gall No. 19), is decidedly mislocated by Spurzheim. Instead of being placed in the purely intellectual region adjacent to calculation, order, and system, it is carried back and down into the region ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... shaking his head enthusiastically. "And after that we must invent a new dance for her, with colored lights and mechanical snaps and things, and have it patented; and finally she will get her picture on soda-cracker boxes and cigarette advertisements, and have a race-horse named after her, and give testimonials for nerve tonics and soap. Does fame reach ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... therefore, that attention should have been concentrated upon the material and mechanical side of production and distribution. Results there were so tangible, so easily figured. For example, if the speed of a drill or the strokes of a punch press were multiplied, the increase would be easily recognized. The ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... outbursts of joy, and when Marjorie and Kitty saw the way the little girls loved the dollies, they felt more than repaid for the trouble it had been to dress them. The boys, too, were delighted with their gifts. Mr. Maynard had brought real boys' toys for them, such as small tool chests, and mechanical contrivances, not to mention trumpets and drums. And, indeed, the last-named ones needed no mention, for they were at once put to use and spoke ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... him as man, may bring him nearer to that marshal's baton which every recruit should have in his eye, than if I started him at once a raw boy, unable to take care of himself as an ensign, and unfitted, save by mechanical routine, to take care of others, should he live to buy the grade of ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... never to leave the yacht again, R—— and I wore the night away. P—— remained impregnable to the attacks of bugs, fleas, and mosquitoes; and while he told us, in a sonorous language of his own, how profoundly he slept, he sometimes gave mechanical signs of feeling by scratching obstreperously his legs and arms, and slapping himself smartly ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... filled him as he made his greeting in correct Chinese. The long delicate oval of her face showed no emotion at the sound of her native speech and she returned his periods in a slowly chosen mechanical English. Edward Dunsack thought that as he spoke an expression of distaste stamped Gerrit's features. However, he was left in no doubt: "My wife," the other instructed him, "prefers to speak English. That is the only way she has of ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... sat there in silence, with her eyes on the brilliant street, where the signs of his play stared back at her under the flaring lights, she began to think with automatic precision, as though her brain were moved by some mechanical power over which she had no control. Little things crowded into her mind—the face of the doll she had bought for Lucy's stepchild that morning, the words on one of the electric signs on the top of a building they were passing, the leopard ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... succeeded in 683; at this time doubtless the mechanical arts were not very far advanced in Rouen, since the new bishop, wishing to erect a rich mausoleum to his predecessor, sent for workmen ...
— Rouen, It's History and Monuments - A Guide to Strangers • Theodore Licquet
... barrel-shaped, conical, and concave bombs; bombs that were exploded by pulling a string and by pressing a button—all these to be thrown by hand, without mentioning grenades and other larger varieties to be thrown by mechanical means, which would have made a Chinese warrior of Confucius' time or a ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... as a pansy. She walked swiftly into it as if with destination. But after five or six of the long cross-town blocks her feet began to lag. She stood for a protracted moment outside a drug-store window, watching the mechanical process of a pasteboard man stropping his razor; loitered to read the violent three-sheet outside a Third Avenue cinematograph. In the aura of white light a figure in a sweater and cap ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... elusive harmony produced by distant musical chords. What was the secret behind this underwater navigating, whose explanation the whole world had sought in vain? What beings lived inside this strange boat? What mechanical force allowed it to move about ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... worked by centrifugal force, belonging to the firm of Messrs. Cail. He is forty- five years of age, with all his interests so entirely absorbed by his machinery that he seems to have neither a thought nor a care beyond his mechanical calculations. Once let him engage you in conversation, and there is no chance of escape; you have no help for it but to listen as patiently as you can until he has completed the explanation of ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... save the kerbstone of the pavement or the back of a seat on the Embankment, they would utterly fail to have any appreciable effect upon the mass of human misery with which we have to deal. For this reason; the administration of the Casual Wards is mechanical, perfunctory, and formal. Each of the Casuals is to the Officer in Charge merely one Casual the more. There is no attempt whatever to do more than provide for them merely the indispensable requisites of existence. There has never been any attempt ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... under the shade of a grove of trees, and had dug up the ground in an open space near it, to form a garden, which he had begun to rail in. "The fellow seems determined to make himself at home, as if he expected to live here for years to come. A low-born fellow has mechanical talents such as I don't possess; they certainly give him an advantage over me, under the circumstances in which we are placed, but I must see what I can do for myself. My cave has only hitherto afforded ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... meant to do that," he said; but his speech was only mechanical, as though, when he had once made it up, it discharged itself, in a condition where it was no longer valid, in spite of him. Savina replied with a silent smile. Her drawn appearance had gone; she was animated, sparkling, with vitality; even her ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... From a mechanical habit of never refusing any thing, Meiklewham readily took the note, but having looked at it through his spectacles, he continued to hold it in his hand as he remonstrated with his patron.—"This is a' very kindly meant, St. Ronan's—very kindly meant; and I wad be ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... tree care. Trees set in fertile soil with an adequate moisture supply and kept free of livestock and other damage make rapid growth. Trees set in poor, thin or droughty soil do not make much growth if they survive at all. Black walnut is very sensitive to any wounds and, if subject to mechanical or ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... fellow-creatures with a nostril-snuffing putrescence, and a foot-spurning filth, in short, with a conceited dignity that your titled * * * * * * * * or any other of your Scottish lordlings of seven centuries standing, display when they accidentally mix among the many-aproned sons of mechanical life. I remember, in my plough-boy days, I could not conceive it possible that a noble lord could be a fool, or a godly man could be a knave—How ignorant are plough-boys!—Nay, I have since discovered that a godly woman may be ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the early part of the century. It was deep-seated and bitter, and was not only the culmination of a rivalry between the leading nations of the great races of mankind, but a rivalry between two great ideas or policies that grew out in opposite directions from the age of unprecedented mechanical and scientific progress that marked the dawn ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... uniform key for any given song, for the Indians have no mechanical device for determining pitch to create a standard by which to train the ear. This, however, does not affect the song; for, whatever the starting note, the intervals bear the same relation to each other, so that the melody itself suffers no change ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... in making handicrafts distasteful to boys who would have been willing to make a living at trades and agriculture if they had but had the good luck to stop with the common school. But I made no converts. Not one, in a community overrun with educated idlers who were above following their fathers' mechanical trades, yet could find no market for their book-knowledge. The same rail that brought me the letter from the Punjab, brought also a little book published by Messrs. Thacker, Spink & Co., of Calcutta, which interested me, for both its preface and its contents ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... old mechanical bent, the trend of long habit, as she looked out from that low window. How often she had stood there and thought "If only we might have had a child!" And now, by sheer force of habit, she thought it ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... misunderstand or fail to remember, but it was a cruelty to her. She wanted to touch his chest. She knew exactly how his breast was shapen under the waistcoat, and she wanted to touch it. It maddened her to hear his mechanical voice giving orders about the work. She wanted to break through the sham of it, smash the trivial coating of business which covered him with hardness, get at the man again; but she was afraid, and before she could feel one touch of his warmth he was ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... seen a representation of a withered female face wearing the brank or scold's bridle; one of which instruments, as inflexible as iron and ingenuity can make it, for keeping an unruly tongue quiet by mechanical means, hangs up beside it; and almost within the time of living memory, Cicily Pewsill, an inmate of the workhouse, and a notorious scold, was seen wearing this disagreeable head-gear in the streets of Warrington for half-an-hour or more.... Cicily Pewsill's ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... the vessel, that she had become sufficiently buoyant, in consequence of the water that had run out of her, to float of herself. This was far from being the case; but the constant upward pressure from the brig, which, on mechanical principles, tended constantly to bring that craft upright, had the effect to lift the schooner as the latter was gradually relieved from the weight that ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... class of rhetoricians and orators at Rome in the time of Cicero, who were famous for having made the same mistake. They would do every thing by a fixed and almost mechanical rule, by calculation and measurement. Their sentences were measured, their gestures were measured, their tones were measured; and they framed canons of judgment and taste, by which it was pronounced an affront on the intellectual nature ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... between the speculative reasoners of the age before the Revolution, and those since, is this: —the former cultivated metaphysics, without, or neglecting, empirical psychology the latter cultivate a mechanical psychology to the neglect and contempt of metaphysics. Both therefore are almost equi-distant from pure philosophy. Hence the belief in ghosts, witches, sensible replies to prayer, and the like, in Baxter and in a hundred others. ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... to correct or replace the existing model. This research has been carried out by the staff of the Museum's transportation division with the aid of Frank O. Braynard of the American Merchant Marine Institute, Eugene S. Ferguson, curator of mechanical and civil engineering at the Museum, ...
— The Pioneer Steamship Savannah: A Study for a Scale Model - United States National Museum Bulletin 228, 1961, pages 61-80 • Howard I. Chapelle
... of the boys themselves began to show. Three of them were of a real mechanical bent. Jimmy Hill, Joe Little and Louis Deschamps were in a class by themselves when it came to the details of aeroplane engines. Joe Little led them all. One night he gave the boys an explanation of the relation of weight to horsepower in the internal-combustion engine. It was ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... moment he would have fallen, felled like an ox by the power of his own fury. But as soon as he had released Dea Flavia's wrists and she felt herself free to move, she rose from her knees, and with quick, almost mechanical gesture, she rearranged her disordered robe and shook back the heavy masses of her hair. Then she stood quite still, with arms hanging by her side, her head quite erect and her eyes fixed upon that raving monster. When she saw that he had at last regained some semblance ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... sack of flour for his legs were limp and he lacked muscular control, but every dash, every fall, every quick descent drove the sluggish blood through his veins and cleared his brain momentarily. Such moments were fleeting, however; much of the time his mind was a blank, and it was only by a mechanical effort ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... the matter lies deeper; for it can be explained more clearly than appears at first sight. The power of inertia applied to bodies which may be moved by mechanical means only, becomes force of habit when applied to bodies which are moved by motives. The actions which we do out of sheer force of habit occur, as a matter of fact, without any individual separate motive exercised for the particular case; hence we do not really think of them. It was ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... INIGO JONES, the great architect, who built the Banqueting-house at Whitehall, and many other well known edifices, was a cloth-worker; and he himself was also destined originally for a mechanical employment. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... walls. "Another essential basis of mechanical unity in the poem is the construction of the rampart. This takes place in the seventh book. The reason ascribed for the glaring improbability that the Greeks should have left their camp and fleet unfortified during nine years, in the midst ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... every semblance of humanity. The hope of being of assistance to these women, which I had not at first entertained, occurred to me later. This was in the middle of our rounds. We had already worked out several mechanical ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... differential calculus, sir, and then Mr. Merton said that I had better stick to the mechanical application of mathematics instead of going on any farther; that was two ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... it goes on in these strange hives is caught with what one knows to be true fidelity; its dulness, its littleness, its goings and comings, its spite, its reduction of the spiritual to the most purely mechanical. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... rather difficult. Let me see. Gun-cotton is a chemical compound of the elements which I have just named—a chemical compound, you will observe, not a mechanical mixture, like gunpowder. Hence it explodes more rapidly than the latter, and its power is from three ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... shoes; Euterpe abandoning her flute for jazz. She sat at the piano, a red-haired young lady whose familiarity with the piano had bred contempt. Nothing else could have accounted for her treatment of it. Her fingers, tipped with sharp-pointed and glistening nails, clawed the keys with a dreadful mechanical motion. There were stacks of music sheets on counters and shelves and dangling from overhead wires. The girl at the piano never ceased playing. She played ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... It is probably not the true reading; if the true reading, it may only mean a Nettle of extra-stinging quality; but it may also mean an Eastern plant that was used to produce cowage, or cow-itch. "The hairs of the pods of Mucuna pruriens, &c., constitute the substance called cow-itch, a mechanical Anthelmintic."—LINDLEY. This plant is said to have been called the Nettle of India, but I do not find it so ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... mechanics,—involving the relations of earth stresses to rock structures. The mere field mapping and description of faults and joints is useful, but in some cases it is necessary to go a step further and to ascertain the mechanical conditions of their origin in order to interpret them clearly. If, for illustration, there are successive groups of mineralized veins in a mining camp, the later ones cutting the earlier ones, these might be treated as separate structural units. But ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... The mechanical work was soon learned, and the young apprentice found considerable time for reading. He now began that work of self-education which he carried on through his whole life. Already, before he left the academy, he had become acquainted with the works of Charles Dickens, and had secured the great man's ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... stopped. The humming ceased. The spell was broken. We looked at one another, and then we laughed. How we laughed! Officers and men were doubled up with mirth as they watched the acrobatic antics of this mechanical marvel—this Wellsian wonder. ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... things to think about, poor fellow. But when people came into the office, or when he was entering another person's house, he had a purely mechanical habit of moistening his fingers at his lips, and rubbing the lapels of his coat. This was the sole relic of "the exquisite Soeren's" exquisiteness—like one of the rudimentary organs, dwindled through lack of use, which ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... strengthening, though his sense of humour might get the better of them for a moment; and of secular instruction he seems to have received as little from the one set of teachers as from the other. I do not suppose that the mental training at Mr. Ready's was more shallow or more mechanical than that of most other schools of his own or, indeed, of a much later period; but the brilliant abilities of Robert Browning inspired him with a certain contempt for it, as also for the average schoolboy intelligence to which it was apparently adapted. It must ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... him with even more intelligent interest, almost as if she were prepared, it being America, a country, she had heard, of considerable mechanical ingenuity, to find his person bristling with taps ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... forcibly of Pascal, who demonstrated the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid in his boyhood, without the aid of a teacher." We not only are not forcibly reminded of Pascal, but we are not reminded of Pascal at all. The boy who imitates on slabs mechanical lines which he has been taught, and he who originates mathematical problems and theorems, may be as like as my fingers to my fingers, but—alas, that it is forbidden to say—we do not see it. When Mr. Elkins told Abraham he would make a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... by dust that at first he could distinguish only confused lines and undecipherable contours; but the while he was thinking of other things his eyes continually wandered back to it with that mysterious and mechanical persistence which the gaze sometimes has. Singular details began to detach themselves from the confused and obscure whole. His curiosity was roused. When the attention becomes fixed it is like a light; and the tapestry growing gradually less cloudy finally appeared to him in its entirety, ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... assigned by the Emperor, that His Majesty might select a score of them for places in the Hanlin Academy. Here again fortune favoured young Chang; the elegance of his penmanship and his skill in composing [Page 222] mechanical verse were so remarkable that he secured a seat on the literary Olympus ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... made its appearance, and was regarded as a special reserve of power in case of an enemy attack. The numbers of these available were small but other types were more plentiful and included the jam tin, cricket ball, time and friction, match head, and hair brush. Some were ignited by mechanical action and others by match or portfire. Portfires were made by wrapping a piece of khaki drill tightly around a thin strip of pine wood. One of these when once ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... hardship and labor, to summits of the highest joy that can be known to human heart and brain. Then, puzzled and disturbed by his sense of the responsibility of his solitude, Ivan would perform by day his mechanical duties, and then hurry away, at evening, to labor undisturbed through the strange northern twilights, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... ophthalmic disorders by the recitation of ritualistic phrases, together with suitable gestures of the arms and fingers over the affected eyes. Dislocations were said to have been promptly reduced by means of runic enchantments, which were doubtless supplemented by mechanical treatment; while fractured bones of man or beast were alleged to unite readily under the influence of Odinic charms. Wherever the Teutonic races were found, a knowledge of runic remedies appears ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... her. The first measurements were taken, and we drove back to Ninth Street with a lasting memory in my mind of the cold and rigid form of Miss Oliver standing up in Madame's triangular parlor, submitting to the mechanical touches of the modiste with an outward composure, but with a brooding horror in her eyes that ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... and yet she baffled this great chemist and all his assistants. You sometimes hear people say, 'Yes, but he was in his dotage.' He was not. He was in his early prime. He brought to bear all his thirty years' training in exact observation, and all the mechanical and electrical appliances he could devise, ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... fourteenth, resting on tall slender pillars, almost recalling the choir of Le Mans. Whether this change was an improvement or not is a question of taste, but there can be no question as to the wonderful skill, aesthetical and mechanical, with which the change was made, and it is the more striking from the contrast with ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... Visit to the Exposition Structures. Manufactures Building and on Manufactures U.S. Government Building and on the Development of the Republic Fisheries Building and on Fisheries Agricultural Building and on Agriculture Live Stock Exhibit, Dairy and Forestry Buildings Palace of Mechanical Arts and on Machinery Administration Building Electricity Building and on Electricity, the "Golden or Happy Age" Mines and Mining Building and on Minerals Transportation Building and on Railroad, Marine, and Ordinary Road Vehicle Conveyances Palace of Horticulture and on Horticulture ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... corresponding to that painful directness of line and plan, common to towns made by mill-owners for their employees. Even the stars, now pricking their way through the blue, seemed to throw down straight lines of light on Flosston; nothing varied the mechanical exactness, and monotonous squares and angles of streets, buildings, ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... of oars and paddles, proposed by others, the substitution of so simple a thing as the reaction of a stream of water on his vessel. He is building a sea-vessel at this time in England, and she will be ready for an experiment in May. He has suggested a great number of mechanical improvements in a variety of branches, and, upon the whole, is the most original and the greatest mechanical genius I have ever seen. The return of La Peyrouse (whenever that shall happen) will probably add to our knowledge in Geography, Botany, and Natural History. What a field have we ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... sign or signs, in which the planet exerted its chief and most potent activities. For instance, the planet Mars, whose chief constellation is Aries, was described as a great warrior, mighty in battle, fierce in anger, fearless, reckless, and destructive; while the mechanical and constructive qualities were personified as Vulcan, who forged the thunderbolts of Jove, built palaces for the gods, and made many useful and beautiful articles. Then, again, we find that Pallas Athene was the goddess of war and wisdom. She sprang from the head of Zeus. Aries rules the head, ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... say, I came expressly to tell you. I don't mind letting you know," he went on, "that my decision to do this took for me last night and this morning a great deal of thinking of. But here I am." And he indulged in a smile that couldn't, he was well aware, but strike her as mechanical. ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... the very hue of their faces.... The less literary a people the more they believe in dreams; the disappearance of superstition is not due to the cultivation of reason or the spread of knowledge, but purely to the mechanical effect of reading, which so perpetually puts figures and aerial shapes before the mental gaze that in time those that occur naturally are thought no more of than those conjured into existence by a book. It is in far-away country places, where people ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... scene, a black wall of houses stood against a steel-colored, vacant sky, reaching precisely to the middle of the vista. Only a solitary poplar, to the rear of the garden, qualified this sombre monotony of right angles. Ormskirk saw the world as an ugly mechanical drawing, fashioned for utility, meticulously outlined with a ruler. Yet there was a scent of growing ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... would on the contrary ground even an argument to his negation. The phenomena of a material world are subjected to immutable laws; are produced and reproduced in the same invariable succession, and manifest only the blind force of mechanical necessity." ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... in and leaned on my table. Tripp was something in the mechanical department—I think he had something to do with the pictures, for he smelled of photographers' supplies, and his hands were always stained and cut up with acids. He was about twenty-five and looked ...
— Options • O. Henry
... commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of American independence, has proven a great success, and will, no doubt, be of enduring advantage to the country. It has shown the great progress in the arts, sciences, and mechanical skill made in a single century, and demonstrated that we are but little behind older nations in any one branch, while in some we scarcely have a rival. It has served, too, not only to bring peoples and products of skill and labor from all parts of the world together, but in bringing ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... from the pace he went off just now, I should think he'll smash up your precious old car before he goes far. And no loss either," said Alice, who was engaged to a soldier in a cavalry regiment, and therefore disdained all purely mechanical means of locomotion. ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... politicians are men of leisure. They have nothing to do but to ride round their plantations, hunt, attend the races, study politics for the next legislative or congressional campaign, and decide how to use the prodigious mechanical power, of slave representation, which a political Archimedes may effectually wield for the destruction of commerce, or any thing else, involving the ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... evening Tanqueray had not written a word. He could only turn over the pages of his manuscript, in wonder at the mechanical industry that had covered so much paper with such awful quantities of ink. Here and there he recognized a phrase, and then he was aware, very miserably aware, that the thing was his masterpiece. He wondered, and with agony, how on earth he was going to finish it if they came about him ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... to deal with the profounder problems of human life in the same way. It is for you to prove your right to take the lead in the political and social and spiritual development of the country, as well as in its mechanical and material development. To do this you must take hold of these social problems with the same positive faith with which your fathers took hold of the problems of applied science. To the man who believes in his fellow men, who has faith in his country, and in whom the ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... body out of the window. Where sin is loud and loathsome and frenzied, it is hard to keep it still. This whole land is soaked with the abomination. It became so bad in Massachusetts, that the State arose in indignation; and having appointed agents for the sale of alcohol for mechanical and medicinal purposes, prohibited the general traffic under a penalty of five hundred dollars. The popular proprietors of the Revere, Tremont, and Parker Houses were arrested. The grog-shops diminished in number from six thousand ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... saves us from insanity during great grief is that there is usually something to do, and the mind composes itself to the mechanical task of adjusting the details. Hope dared not look forward an inch into the future; that way madness lay. Fortunately, it was plain what must come first,—to keep the whole thing within their own walls, and therefore to make some explanation to Mrs. Meredith, ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... a future coming together. But a bridge is not possible, nor if possible, necessary. There is no doubt that since the New Testament was written there have been great improvements in bridge building, both mechanical and theological; but between equal manhood on one side and race prejudice on the other, "there is a great gulf fixed," and no bridge can span the chasm. The Negro must surrender his manhood or the white man his prejudice. There is no half way. But when ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 10, October, 1889 • Various
... one of those ingenious mechanical contrivances familiarly in vogue at fairs, which are designed to impress upon the victim to whom they are applied, the pleasing conviction that his garment is rent ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... keep their final destination concealed from the chauffeur, and they certainly had not expected to meet any one on the way with whom he would be likely to talk! But why to Newcastle? I asked myself that question so often during the morning that my shooting became purely a mechanical thing. Newcastle,—the Tyne, coals, and shipbuilding! I could think of nothing else in connection ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... note to explain the origin of the saying that thing done on the spur of the moment is done "when the maggot bites." Perhaps the best explanation is that afforded in the following passage from Swift's Discourse on the Mechanical ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... said nervously, as she made mechanical preparations with pot and kettle. "It would only make matters worse if my uncle came ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... and equipment, machinery and mechanical appliances, woven apparel, knit apparel, footwear, toys and ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the season. No author can live by his work and be as empty-headed as an average successful painter. Again, consider our implements of music—our pianofortes, for example. Nobody but an acrobat will voluntarily spend years at such a difficult mechanical puzzle as the keyboard, and so we have to take our impressions of Beethoven's sonatas from acrobats who vie with each other in the rapidity of their prestos, or the staying power of their left wrists. Thoughtful men will not ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... style as easy, and blame that as fatiguing, we consciously or unconsciously assume this desideratum as our standard of judgment. Regarding language as an apparatus of symbols for the conveyance of thought, we may say that, as in a mechanical apparatus, the more simple and the better arranged its parts, the greater will be the effect produced. In either case, whatever force is absorbed by the machine is deducted from the result. A reader or listener has at each moment but a limited ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... command. All that I have written so far is rubbish in comparison with what I should like to write and should write with rapture. It is all the same to me whether I write "The Party" or "The Lights," or a vaudeville or a letter to a friend—it is all dull, spiritless, mechanical, and I get annoyed with critics who attach any importance to "The Lights," for instance. I fancy that I deceive him with my work just as I deceive many people with my face, which looks serious or over-cheerful. I don't like being successful; the subjects which sit in my head ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... concerning it but feared that it would not serve his purpose, as he would have to go from one hundred to eight hundred or a thousand yards from high water-mark for the mud—too far out for a horse to be available. Mechanical difficulties and the cost of getting up the mud proved too great for him—as they have proved too great even down to the present—but he never gave up the idea and from time to time tried experiments with ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... After the mechanical issue and acknowledgment of a few ghastly pleasantries, Lord Pomfret muttered something about "hearing his mother calling" and fled with precipitate irrelevance in the direction of the back stairs, leaving Mrs. Wrangle speechless ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... merely the look or sound of the word itself, is often all that is absolutely necessary for the suggesting another set of ideas to continue the process of thought; and consequently, some metaphysicians have even fancied that all reasoning is but the mechanical use of terms according to a certain form. If persons be not of active imaginations, the only antidote against the propensity to let slip the connotation of names, is the habit of predicating of them the properties connoted; though even the propositions themselves, as may be seen ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... had been sincere, erring only from impulsiveness, she had been double-minded and calculating; and, now that her delusion had been broken down, she had nothing to rest upon. Her whole religious life had been mechanical, deceiving herself more than even others, and all seemed now swept away, except the sense of hypocrisy, and of having cut herself off, for ever, from her innocent child. Her father saw that it was vain to argue with her, and only said, "You ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... reputation and usefulness. Dr. Garnett made the English department especially excellent and, after ten years faithful service, resigned in 1880. The Rev. J.D. Leavitt, his successor, made a departure from the old classic curriculum and organized a department of Mechanical Engineering. After he resigned Prof. W.H. Hopkins acted as principal for a time and introduced military discipline, having secured the detail of an officer from the United States Army as instructor in ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner
... sudden changes of fortune he underwent. His Motto, or old rhymed Prayer, which he would repeat on getting into the saddle for military work,—a rough rhyme of his own composing,—is still preserved. Let us give it, with an English fac-simile, or roughest mechanical pencil-tracing,—by way of glimpse into the heart of a vanished Time and its Man-at-arms: [Rentsch, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... N. Coleridge, and will have an additional interest to many readers as the last monument of her highly-gifted mind. At her earnest request, my name appears with hers on the title-page, but the assistance rendered by me has been, in fact, little more than mechanical. The preface, and the greater part of the notes, are her composition:—the selection and arrangement have been determined almost exclusively by her critical judgment, or from records in her possession. A few slight corrections and unimportant additions are all that have been ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... actual number, and did it cheerfully. It finally became necessary to import Indians from the Navajo Reservation to help with the labor around the car yard and the boiler yard. These could hardly be described as having a mechanical turn of mind, but they were fairly willing workers, and with careful supervision they managed to keep steam up and the wheels turning. The shop foreman, however, was threatened with apoplexy a dozen times a day during ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... keep my general impressions of humanity well defined. I would see one of the clumsy bovine-creatures who worked the launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself asking, trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet the Fox-bear woman's vulpine, shifty face, strangely human in its speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it before in ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... the mechanical clock has been thought by some to be the sundial. Actually these devices represent two different approaches to the problem of time-keeping. True ancestor of the clock is to be found among the highly complex astronomical machines which man has been building ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... thanks!" Betty put the card carefully into her case, shook her new friend warmly by the hand, and went forward. Lady Mary's tired white face had set into an almost mechanical smile, but as her eyes met Betty's they illumined with sudden interest and her hard- ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... of the shallowest infidel to bring forward and exaggerate; and lastly, whether the Scriptures must not be read in that faith which comes from higher sources than history, that is, if they are read to any good and Christian purpose. God forbid that I should become the advocate of mechanical infusions and possessions, superseding the reason and responsible will. The light 'a priori', in which, according to my conviction, the Scriptures must be read and tried, is no other than the earnest, ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... which has bequeathed its vivid impressions to the world. Painting on glass, polishing diamonds, the Carillon, lace, and tapestry, were among the inventions which owed their birth to the Netherlands in these ages, when the faculties of mankind sought so many new channels for mechanical development. The discovery of a new world by Columbus and other eminent navigators gave a fresh and powerful impulse to European talent, by affording an immense reservoir for its reward. The town of Antwerp was, during the ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... factories until she was married for the first time at the age of twenty. She had no children by this marriage. It is stated on good authority that she took preventive measures against conception and if pregnant induced abortion by drugs and mechanical measures. At the end of eight years there was a divorce. Just which one of the partners was at fault is impossible to state, but that there was more than mere incompatibility is evident by the reticence of all concerned. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... a man of science, when he related consciousness to the body, as the sound of a clock when it strikes is related to the machinery of the clock. The scientific analysis of a living body reveals nothing but the action of the mechanical and chemical principles. If you analyze it by fire or by cremation, you get gases and vapors and mineral ash, that is all; the main thing about the live body—its organization, its life—you do not get. Of course science knows this; and to account for this missing something, it ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... I had witnessed there, I recognized now, in appropriate musical form. The foundation of all was a great basal rhythm, given out on something that throbbed like drums, terrible in its persistence and yet beautiful too; and this, I knew, represented the mechanical basis of the world, the processes which science knows as 'laws of motion' and the like, but which really, as I then perceived, might more aptly be described as the more inveterate of Nature's habits. Upon this foundation, which varied, indeed, but by almost imperceptible ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... William Thomson briefly, but very clearly, to point out, and for Clerk-Maxwell more fully to develop, its most important consequences. [The principle of the experiment was then illustrated by the aid of a mechanical model.] ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... of stock and scion, the plant apparently does not have that anxiety which would otherwise lead it to introduce the protective feature of superization, the spreading of a corky layer over the wound surface between stock and scion, thus introducing a mechanical obstacle to union. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... Poet SHAKSPEARE asserts there are more things in Heaven and earth than the Horatian philosophy. I am not a superstitious—and yet this mechanical demon may have seen correctly through the brick wall of Futurity. Have you not a worshipful adorer who might be described as dark, and to whose native land it is a ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... the tomato, in South America, the conditions of the soil, both as regards composition and mechanical condition, of the moisture both in soil and air, and those of temperature and sunlight, are throughout the growing season not only very favorable for rapid growth, but are uniformly and constantly so. Under such conditions there has been developed a plant which, ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... She shook hands, and hoped you were well; hoped you had had a pleasant journey, hoped you would be happy in College, hoped you would like your rooms; but there was a certain mechanical quality in her voice which betrayed the fact that she had said the same thing over and over again on innumerable occasions, would say it twenty times or more this very afternoon, and that your own personal arrival left her ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... ambition of the printers and type-founders to make their books more legible or less taxing on the eyes than manuscript; their readers were accustomed to manuscript and felt no need of such improvements. The mechanical advance in the art of writing brought about by printing was at first regarded as consisting in the greater rapidity and lower cost at which ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... the home as any other than a commercial affair. The tendency is to determine domestic living wholly by economic factors. The literature on the "home" is overwhelmingly economic; its heart is in the kitchen. High efficiency on the physiological, sanitary, culinary, and mechanical sides makes the modern home so convenient that you can lie on a folding bed, press a button to light the grate fire, turn on the lights, start the toaster, and wake the children. Homes are places to hide in at night, to feed the body, arrange the clothes, and start ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... consistently employed a significantly smaller percentage of Negroes than the Army and Air Force. A similar disparity existed in assignment procedures. The commission found that both services failed to match the record of the civilian economy in the use of Negroes in technical, mechanical, administrative, clerical, and craft fields. It suspected that the services' recruiting and testing methods intensified these differences and wondered whether they might not operate to exclude ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... in the Southern States. You see every day in the newspapers that there are four millions of slaves, but of those four millions of slaves some are growing tobacco, some rice, and some sugar; a very large number are employed in domestic servitude, and a large number in factories, mechanical operations, and business in towns; and there remain only about one million negroes, or only one-quarter of the whole number, who are regularly engaged ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... and sheet-tin towered above him; palace pinnacles of lath and plaster speared the sky; the moist salt air, blowing in from the adjacent sea, was enriched with dust and with smells of hot sausages and fried crabs, and was shattered by the bray of bagpipes, the exact and mechanical melodies of steam organs, and the insistent, compelling, never-dying blat of the spieler, the barker and the ballyhoo. Also there were perhaps a hundred thousand other smells and noises, did one care to take the time and trouble ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... glass. If they could make that it would be of such immense importance to them in many ways. It would be of great service for their tableware; they could use it for their electric work, which interested them more than any branch to which their time had been given, among the mechanical arts; with that they could make thermometers and testing instruments; and give their house the air of a modern home, because windows could ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... land well-being had taken the place of misery; learning had grown and spread. The methods of science had been elaborated; the basis of natural philosophy had been laid down; and the way had been paved for all the mechanical inventions of which our own times are so proud. Such were the magic changes accomplished in Europe in less than four hundred years. And the losses which Europe sustained through the loss of its free cities can only be ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... simplest drop of water, in itself, and apart from its mechanical relations to other matter, is really a very complex and a very wonderful thing; not at all likely to be "self-caused." Water is made up, we know, of oxygen and hydrogen—two elementary colourless, formless gases. Now we can easily divide the one drop into two, and, ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... rise to personal relations, neither appropriation nor surrender, neither egoism nor altruism, nor indeed any precisely measured mechanical mixture of the two, will solve the problem. Here the recognition of a common good, a commonwealth in which each person has an equal worth with every other, is the only satisfactory solution. "Be a person, and respect the personality of others," ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... coat, which was thrown over the balustrade, was employed in watering the flowers: a man with movements so mechanical—with a face so rigidly grave in its tawny hues—that he seemed like an automaton made ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... but of what use could my freedom be to me? I knew not which way to go. A mechanical instinct took me back to Rueil. I fancied I would be safer among people who all knew me, and that I might find shelter in our old lodgings. But this last hope was disappointed. Immediately after our arrest, the owner of the building had thrown out every thing it contained, and had ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... another scribe was to leave off.[2] Or the book to be transcribed was dictated to the scribes, as at Tours under Alcuin. Both methods had the advantage of "publishing" a book quickly, but the work was as mechanical as is that of the compositor to-day. Under Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim, subdivision of labour was carried to its extreme limit. One monk cut the parchment, another polished it, the third ruled the lines to guide the scribe. ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... many to be a desirable ornament in the window-garden during the winter months. When neatly and artistically filled with suitable plants, a Wardian Case becomes a thing of beauty. These cases can be easily and cheaply made by any one possessed of ordinary mechanical skill. The base or box should be oblong in shape, at least eight inches deep, and lined inside with zinc or tin-plate, securely soldered to prevent the water and soil from staining the wood. A case made in this manner ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... said he, "that prayer is a mechanical method of getting things; it isn't a substitute for effort and action. Nor do I think that God simply withholds things unless you ask for them, as a dog has to beg for a piece of biscuit. I don't look upon prayer as the mere formulating of a list of requests; and I dislike very much the way some ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... as they passed by said, "Dear me, what a handsome gentleman!" but had the remark been made by a higher class, it would have been qualified into "What a handsome man!" His age was apparently about five-and-thirty—it might have been something more. After a short time he left off his mechanical amusements, and turning round, perceived little Joey at the farther end. Whether from the mere inclination to talk, or that he thought it presuming in our hero to seat himself upon the same bench, ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... fact, a more slippery or guileful egg was never yet devised by nature's unconscious ingenuity. Then, again, the Antarctic chimaera (so called from its very unprepossessing personal appearance) relies rather upon pure deception than upon mechanical means for the security of its eggs. The shell or case in this instance is prolonged at the edge into a kind of broad wing on either side, so that it exactly resembles one of the large flat leaves of the Antarctic fucus in whose midst it lurks. It forms ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... Certain mechanical devices appear to exercise a remarkable influence on some minds, and engineers are blamed for not adopting them, in no very measured terms in some cases. It is not in any way necessary that these devices should have ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... constant supply of relatively superfluous labor-power, but are not strong enough to establish lasting improvement. Every rise of wages above a certain measure causes the employer to look to further improvements in his plant, calculated to substitute will-less, automatic mechanical devices for human hands and human brain. At the start of capitalist production, hardly any but male labor confronted male labor in the labor-market; now sex is played against sex, and, further along the line, age against age. Woman displaces man, and, in her turn, woman is displaced ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... place, reminds us forcibly of Pascal, who demonstrated the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid in his boyhood, without the aid of a teacher." We not only are not forcibly reminded of Pascal, but we are not reminded of Pascal at all. The boy who imitates on slabs mechanical lines which he has been taught, and he who originates mathematical problems and theorems, may be as like as my fingers to my fingers, but—alas, that it is forbidden to say—we do not see it. When Mr. Elkins told Abraham he would make a good pioneer boy, and "'What's a pioneer ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... (1807-1870), German artist and glass-painter, was born at Munich on the 14th of February 1807. By the advice of Gartner, director of the royal porcelain manufactory, he devoted himself to the study of glass-painting, both as a mechanical process and as an art, and in 1828 he was appointed director of the newly-founded royal painted-glass manufactory at Munich. The method which he gradually perfected there was a development of the enamel process adopted ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... character, and sometimes book keeping and dress-making. Most of them are free, but for some special subjects a small payment is required. Drawing seems to be a favourite subject, and in most of these technical schools there are classes for mechanical drawing as well as for some kind of artistic work connected with industry. In addition there are numerous art schools, some of them being devoted to the encouragement of fine art, while in others the object kept in view is the ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... the desert." Lady Esther's father, Earl Charles Stanhope, Viscount Mahon, a peer of England, and a distinguished scholar, invented a printing press, known to fame as the Stanhope press, of which the miserly and mechanical Jerome-Nicholas Sechard expressed a contemptuous opinion to his ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... a Piece of Revenge our little Hero took upon a Play-fellow, which proves, to what an height Mechanical and Experimental Philosophy was arriv'd to in that Age, and may be worth while to be considered ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... We can take our rights as merchants and in other avocations, by investing our capital in them; but we stand back and wait till it is popular for us to become merchants, doctors, lecturers, or practitioners of the mechanic arts. I know girls who have mechanical genius sufficient to become Arkwrights and Fultons, but their mothers would not apprentice them. Which of the women of this Convention have sent their daughters as apprentices to a watchmaker? There is ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of opinion that the stone of which they were made, was different from any they saw on the island, and had much the appearance of being factitious. We could hardly conceive how these islanders, wholly unacquainted with any mechanical power, could raise such stupendous figures, and afterwards place the large cylindric stones before mentioned upon their heads. The only method I can conceive, is by raising the upper end by little and little, supporting it by stones as it is raised, and building ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... rider cannot raise the falling horse 50 Harm is done by the attempt 51 The bearing-rein 54 Mechanical assistance of the jockey to his horse 56 Standing on the stirrups 58 Difference between the gallop and the leap 58 Steeple-chases and hurdle-races unfair on the horse 59 The rider should not attempt to lift his horse at a ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... never left his side, but held his hands while the injured leg was cut off, in three separate operations, without any anaesthetic. Eventually, he completely recovered, and was fitted with an admirable mechanical cork limb in place of the one removed in three detachments; and my sense of evil responsibility was quite removed when I heard that his young wife was delighted to think that he could never enter the bull-ring as a fighter again, and her ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... back to its task out of contradiction as it were; the things I read become mingled with those I have been writing, and something is concocted. I cannot compare this process of the mind to anything save that of a woman to whom the mechanical operation of spinning serves as a running bass to the songs she sings, or the course of ideas she pursues. The phrase Hoc age, often quoted by my father, does not jump with my humour. I cannot nail my mind to one subject of contemplation, and it ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... the other side. The morning looked forbidding enough when she stealthily opened it. The battle between frost and thaw was continuing in mid-air: the trees dripped on the garden-plots, where no vegetables would grow for the dripping, though they were planted year after year with that curious mechanical regularity of country people in the face of hopelessness; the moss which covered the once broad gravel terrace was swamped; and Grace stood irresolute. Then she thought of poor Grammer, and her dreams of the doctor running after her, scalpel in hand, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... as in Italy, the regular musical drama was preceded by mysteries, masks, and religious plays, which introduced short musical parts, as also action, mechanical effects, and dancing. The ballet, however, where dancing was the prominent feature, remained for a long time the favorite amusement of the French court until the advent of Jean Baptiste Lulli. The young Florentine, after having served ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... instruments. All of these tools should have handles of second-growth American hickory of first quality; and several extra handles should be taken along. The list of tools should be completed with a small outfit of pliers, tweezers, files, etc.—the character, of course, depending upon the mechanical ability of the traveller and the scientific instruments he has with him that might ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... the dangers of the theory are obvious. There is the ultimate danger of what can fairly be called superstition, that is to say giving to religion a magical kind of influence over the material side of life. Rites, relics, images tend to become, in irrational minds, invested with an inherent and mechanical sanctity, instead of being the symbols of grace. But it is necessary to risk something; and though the risk of what may be called a sort of idolatry is great, the risk of not arousing the sense of personal religion at ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... every Sunday, and to go through the outward seemings of conformity that my master had power enough to exact from me. Beyond the weekly services in the church he fulfilled scarcely any of the duties of a parish clergyman. He rose about eleven in the morning, and spent his time either in mechanical pursuits or in desultory reading, often of the Greek and Latin classics. In fact, my tutor's mind was so imbued with the dead languages that he was unable to write his own, but had constant recourse to Greek and Latin ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... the darkness of the night, imposing in our numbers, stand we forth, splendid and terrible, in "The Wake of the Coming Ages." And when we look at all the magnificent fabric we call civilization, its incalculable material, its wealth, its amazing mechanical resources, its wonderful scientific discoveries, its many-sided literature, its sleepless and ubiquitous journalism, its lovely art, its abounding charities, its awful fears and sublime hopes, we get a magnificent ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... you to see the verses, and the manuscript being almost illegible I had to copy it; so, in a mechanical mood, I copied the music also. Please let me have them again. I feared they were not worth your ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... land-stewards on the estate of Gilmilnscroft, in the parish of Sorn, and county of Ayr, where he was born on the 6th November 1779. When he was eight years old, his parents removed to Ayr, where, after a short attendance at school, he was apprenticed to a mechanical occupation. His leisure hours were sedulously devoted to reading and mental improvement. In 1799, he was balloted for the Ayrshire Militia; in which he served for three years till the regiment was disbanded on the peace of Amiens. When ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... does it mean? This is unquestionably the fundamental problem with the earnest student of Homer. Let us observe, then, first, that the poet's principle is not to allow a divine intervention to degenerate into a merely external mechanical act; himself full of the spirit of the God, he puts the divine influence inside the individual as well as outside, and thus preserves the latter's freedom in the providential order. The faithful reader will never let these movements of ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... full occupation, isn't it? This world is not tenable on other terms. So while I lie on the sofa and rest in a novel, Robert has a resource in his drawing; and really, with all his feeling and knowledge of art, some of the mechanical trick of it can't ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... not an untried experiment which I propose to make. I send you herewith, a medal of Franklin executed by us here, entirely by this process. The original was a medallion likeness of Franklin in burnt (p. 278) clay. All the rest was a purely mechanical operation, (the work being, in fact, done by a steam engine), except a little retouching, and the impression ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... were everything, Anglo-Indians would grow more and more to look like Hindoos, which is far from being the case. Something in the evil spirit of our time forces people always to pretend to have found some material and mechanical explanation. Bernard Shaw has filled all his last days with affirmations about the divinity of the non-mechanical part of man, the sacred quality in creation and choice. Yet it never seems to have occurred ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... deposits found in the neighbourhood of the springs, as at St Amand. They act like a large poultice applied to the surface of the body, and in addition to the influence of the temperature, they exert a considerable mechanical effect. The pulse is accelerated some 6 to 12 beats a minute, the respiration number rises, and the patient is thrown into a profuse perspiration. They have very great value in gouty and rheumatic conditions and in some of the special troubles ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... trivial superficial men—the class to which the management of empires is for the most part entrusted—to ridicule theories, and, by a mode reasoning which would place any cabin boy far above Sir Isaac Newton, to insist upon the mechanical parts of government, and the routine of ordinary business, as the sole objects entitled to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... superiors in rank regarded them as little more than mechanical instruments for carrying on the business of life, the poor have left behind them few records of their mode of sustenance and of the food which enabled them to follow their daily toil. The anecdotes, whatever they may be worth, of Alfred and the burnt cakes, and ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... increased, so that the joy of her public triumph was barred and seared by intimate pain. Now she could go. Already the carpenters were beginning their nightly work of destruction, metamorphosing the so-lately brilliant stage into a vast unsightly cavern of gaunt timbers, creaking pulleys, noisy mechanical contrivances, gaudy painted surfaces of canvas and paper, piled-up properties, of uncertain lights and draughts many and chill. Careless of all save that determination of going, Poppy moved away. But still the unseen audience clamoured. A fury had taken it, a madness such as will sometimes attack ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... coming to West Salem (with a feeling of guilt in my heart) I had purchased a mechanical piano in the hope that it would cheer her lonely hours, and as this instrument had arrived I unboxed it and set it up in the music room, eager to please the old folks to whom it was an ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... for him to do—any number of mechanical contrivances to go on with, notably the one intended to move a boat without oars, sails, or steam, but they were not church clocks, and for the time being nothing interested him but the old clock whose hands were pointing absurdly as ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... greedily, but evidently without appetite, eating simply from some mechanical motion. I put the food inside my lips, and hungry as I was, chewed my morsel ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... physician, who was a distinguished chemist, instructed them in botany, pointing out the medicinal virtues of the various plants. They were taught to manufacture numerous articles of domestic utility, and the boys became skillful in turning, weaving, basket-making, and other mechanical employments. The Duke of Chartres became a very skillful cabinet-maker, and, aided by his brother, the Duke of Montpensier, manufactured a bureau for a poor woman at St. Leu which was equal to any which could ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... half-way to the Hotel Cluny before she realized where she was going, and cried out to him to turn home. There was an acute irony in this mechanical prolongation of the quest of beauty. She had had enough of it, too much of it; her one longing was to escape, to hide herself away from its ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... peace round him as he stood there, stroking one of the uprights with a kind of mechanical tenderness; the men were silent as they saw the two monks there, and watched to see what they ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... people are looking to me for light and help, knowing how much I need both myself.... Every now and then some Providential event occurs that wakes us up, and we find that we have been asleep and dreaming, and that what we have been doing that made us fancy ourselves awake, was mechanical. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... the door, and, in a mechanical way, I watch my hand go forward, to undo the topmost bolt. It does so, entirely without my volition. Even as I reach up toward the bolt, the door is violently shaken, and I get a sickly whiff of mouldy air, which seems to drive in through the interstices of the doorway. ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... olive-pulp is not yet done with; it is beaten up with water by mechanical agitators moved by water-power, and then the whole discharged into open-air tanks adjoining the crushing house. There the crushed olive kernels sink to the bottom, are gathered up and sold for fuel, fetching about 12 francs per 1,000 kilos, while the debris of the pulp is skimmed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... of mechanical labor, especially those in the building line, are in great demand; and workmen, even very coarse and common workmen, get almost any price they ask. Journeymen mechanics get $2 per day. A carpenter or brick mason wants no other capital, ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... any one, the more successful will that person be considered as a tradesman. A fine workman receives more pay for less work than one who does rougher work, simply because it is the minute parts that bring in the profit. This is so in the mechanical trades; it is so also in farming and yet many seem to be unaware of the fact. How numerous are those who leave out the minutia; mechanics learn a trade in a short time at least well enough to make a living by it. Many farmers have spent their whole lives upon farms and are still ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... mechanical, natural, and artistic. But I grant you, Tom, that was not why I went there. I went there to get out of the ruts of travel and break new ground. Like you, being a little tired of going round in a circle for ever. And it occurs ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... demonstration that we are dependent upon some community on the other side of the world, that their damage is our damage, and that we have an interest in preventing it. It teaches us, as only some such simple and mechanical means can teach, the ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... to me," he snapped, "or better still, you'd better write down what I'm about to say and stick it in your hat where you can find it and consult it when your mind begins wandering again. Those special mechanical devices to reduce fat people are contrived for the benefit of men and lazy women who are too slothful to take exercise or else too besotted in the matter of food indulgence to face the alternative of dieting. They may not do any harm—properly operated, they probably do not—but, at best, I would ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... teeth. Miriam herself had only just discovered it. She speculated as to how long it would take her to deliver them up to Fraulein Pfaff with this notorious stumbling-block removed. She was astonished herself at the mechanical simplicity of the cure. How stupid people must be not to discover these things. Minna's voice went on. She would let her read a page. She began to wonder rather blankly what she was to do to fill up the hour after they had all ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... it is said, to bind the princess Elizabeth apprentice to a button-maker: the duke of Gloucester was to be taught some other mechanical employment. But the former soon died; of grief, as is supposed, for her father's tragical end: the latter was, by Cromwell, sent ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... Sanctis was not the mystical transcendental apperception of the German philosophers, but simply the faculty of poetic synthesis and creation, opposed to the imagination, which reunites details and always has something mechanical about it. Faith and poetry, he used to say, are not dead, but transformed. His criticism of Hegel amounted in many places to the correction of Hegel; and as regards Vico, he is careful to point out, that when, in dealing ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... not fond of being thwarted, least of all by any thing savouring of the democratic principle, and already there was much friction between the Tudor spirit of absolutism and the rough "mechanical" nature with which it was to ally itself in the Netherlands. The economical Elizabeth was not pleased at being overreached in a bargain; and, at a moment when she thought herself doing a magnanimous act, she was vexed at the cavilling with which her generosity ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the original spring. In the analysis there may be no flaw; the ingredients are chemically identical in quality and proportion; but the nameless, inimitable, inscrutable life is wanting: the mixing has been done by a mechanical, not by a creative hand. Haydon says, "The curve of the circle is excess, the straight line is deficiency, the ellipsis is the degree between, and that curve, added to or united with proportion, regulates ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... cabs attuned themselves to the words, the newspaper-boys, crying "Evening Paper, fourth edition," the flower-sellers, the sellers of mechanical toys, revolving purses, performing mice, and other living and dead monstrosities that haunt the vicinity of the Stock Exchange and Bank, all seemed to "cry" the same thing to Bertie, "I must see Aunt Amy. I must, I ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... his story, waved the offer aside impatiently but Mr. Browne, having first called Freddy Malins' attention to a disarray in his dress, filled out and handed him a full glass of lemonade. Freddy Malins' left hand accepted the glass mechanically, his right hand being engaged in the mechanical readjustment of his dress. Mr. Browne, whose face was once more wrinkling with mirth, poured out for himself a glass of whisky while Freddy Malins exploded, before he had well reached the climax of ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... Among them were Coleman, the president of the vigilance committee, Sharon, Flood, Fair, O'Brien, Tevis, Phelan, and James Lick. Lick was a remarkable man, who gave away an immense fortune; building the Lick Observatory, a school of mechanical arts, free public baths, an old ladies' home, and giving a million to the Academy of Science and the ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... If there seemed somewhat mechanical in the number of times which Agnes repeated the "Hail, Mary!"—in the prescribed number of times she rose or bowed or crossed herself or laid her forehead in low humility on the flags of the pavement, it was redeemed by the earnest fervor which inspired ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... to get rid of the fixed idea which filled his mind,—a mechanical instinct, so to say, which was stronger than his will, and drove him incessantly to the wharf where "The Saint Louis" was lying. Sitting on some bags of rice, he spent hour after hour in watching the cargo as it was put on board. Never ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... and Austrian engineers also utilize observation ladders of a less complicated mechanical nature. In use, and with a soldier perched on top of them, they remind one of the toy devices with which we played as children, using the slotted acrobats to do wonderful things atop the "ladders." ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... would have found difficulty in moving that tub, but by some mechanical contrivance it had turned with the ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... comedy of Sally's brothers, and, in spite of Miss Betsy Lavender's foundation in fact, we could consent to lose her much sooner than any other leading character of the book: she seems to us made-up and mechanical. On the contrary, we find Sally Fairthorn, with her rustic beauty and fresh-heartedness, her impulses and blunders, altogether delightful. She is a part of the thoroughly country flavor of the book,—the rides through the woods, the huskings, the raising ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... the weight of the productive labours of her societies, in addition to child-bearing; and allowing more fully that she may be as well able to sustain her share in the intellectual labours of the future as in the more mechanical labours of the past; granting all this, may there not be one aspect of the question left out of consideration which may reverse all conclusions as to the desirability, and the human good to be attained by woman's enlarged freedom and ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... altogether absurd when you reflect that it is in water-colour that English art excels, and that the copyist, the engraver's occupation will soon be gone, beaten away by slightly more mechanical, but more ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... seeing of colour is familiar to the eye, discerns at once what in many is one, what in things dissimilar and different is similar and the same."—Hermes, p. 362. Secondly, with respect to division. Mechanical separations are limited: "But the mind surmounts all power of concretion; and can place in the simplest manner every attribute by itself; convex without concave; colour without superficies; superficies without body; and body without its accidents: as distinctly each one, as though they had ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... important lessons in human life who understands adequately the difference between formal perception and organic experience, contrasting the futility of detached and deathly proverbs with the utility of nutritious and electrical maxims. A mechanical teacher crowds the ear with mummified precepts and exhortations; an inspired teacher brings surcharged examples and rules into contact with the mind. The distinction ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... them from his pocket-book with an unshaken hand. No change of countenance, no tremulous hand, no broken voice, betrayed his apprehension. The one distinguishing mark of his manner was an absent, half-mechanical tone, as of a man whose mind is employed otherwise than in the conversation of the moment. Prompt at calculation always, he was at this crisis engaged in a kind of mental arithmetic. "The chances of defeat, so much; ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... gardener (which, mark you, being interpreted, is gardener for love!), the bedding-out style is good for general effect, and I think it is capable of prettier ingenuities than one often sees employed in its use. I think that, if I ever gardened in this expensive and mechanical style, I should make "arrangements," a la Whistler, with flowers of various shades of the same color. But harmony and gradation of color always give me ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... at work; and magazines, reviews, pamphlets, whole libraries of volumes, were flung like Sibylline leaves on the four winds of heaven. Fiction, the drama, religion, art, literature, moral and mechanical science—all departments of intellect—silently, unseen, yet surely exerted their omnipotent influence for the attainment of one single glorious end—the happiness, rights, freedom of man; all this was under the guidance ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... inevitable that Henry Ford should play this appointed part in the world. Born in Michigan in 1863, the son of an English farmer who had emigrated to Michigan and a Dutch mother, Ford had always demonstrated an interest in things far removed from his farm. Only mechanical devices interested him. He liked getting in the crops, because McCormick harvesters did most of the work; it was only the machinery of the dairy that held him enthralled. He developed destructive tendencies as a boy; he had to take ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... details of this sort, they are still more so to me, because I have neither room nor time in them to say anything about anything as I wish to say it. Then, I have an indescribable impatience of the mere mechanical process. ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... us? a chaos of doubts and chimeras. I do not think that there has ever been a philosopher with a system who did not at the end of his life avow that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to mankind than the inventors of syllogisms: the man who invented the shuttle surpasses with a vengeance the man ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... meekly, and obeyed their orders in a mechanical manner, that showed too plainly that his mind was wandering from the scenes about him. He looked helplessly around, and did not appear to realize the situation in which he was ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... clamoring to be unpacked. After a hurried tea, which I was obliged to have for the sake of Bindon's feelings, I went upstairs, resolved to disinter at all costs, without delay, the rabbit. I felt great anxiety lest in transit the machinery which made the rabbit squeak in a way that surely no rabbit, mechanical or otherwise,—particularly the otherwise, I hoped,—had ever squeaked before, might be impaired; ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... sphere of ritual to that of moral culture. In mystical systems, Christian and Moslem, it has lent itself sometimes to immorality, sometimes to a stagnant, egoistic, and antisocial quietism; but in the main it has tended to avoid or abandon mechanical and mystical features, and confine itself to the conception of sympathetic and intelligent cooeperation with what may be regarded as the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... "you go to bed." And he went up to her, kissed her in the mechanical way of most grown-up sons, and gently urged her in the direction of the stairs. She submitted, still with faint ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... whose case one is frequently unable to decide whether they are deceivers or deceived, "decepti deceptores," as Augustine says. A mysterious mysticism of numbers plays a great role. That which is absurd and mechanical is surrounded with the halo of the sacramental; myths are proved by pious fancies and pietistic considerations with a spiritual sound; miracles, even the most foolish, are believed in and are performed. The ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... to divide the whole into a series of pannelling; by which is produced an extraordinary richness of effect, though the parts, when examined separately, are generally of simple forms and such as will admit of an easy and mechanical execution. The introduction of the four-centred arch enlarged the powers of design, enabled architects in many instances to proportion better the vault to the upright, and even to introduce vaults where they would have been inapplicable in the former ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... sufficient by external imitation of Christ to become {114} conformed to the likeness of Christ? Imagine one without genius and devoid of the artist's training sitting down before Raphael's famous picture of the Transfiguration and attempting to reproduce it. How crude and mechanical and lifeless his work would be! But if such a thing were possible that the spirit of Raphael should enter into the man and obtain the mastery of his mind and eye and hand, it would be entirely possible that he should ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... stream of the Edenic river, 58-u. Plague from remote India sweeps over Asia and Europe unchecked, 811-812. Plan of the Universe emanated from Deity, was of Himself, though not His Very Self, 764-m. Planetary motive force a mechanical law, so considered now, 671-m. Planetary spheres represented by the seven steps of the Mystic Ladder, 851-l. Planets distinguished by a cross and solar or lunar symbols, 505-l. Planets, numbers and motions of the, 233-m. Planets, seven, 10-m. Plato, commentator of Timaeus, wrote ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... this apparatus that Blanchard effected his ascent, for we have seen that the gearing of his vessel was broken by the infuriated Dupont de Chambon. Yet the aeronaut pretends to have been, to some extent, assisted by his mechanical contrivances. The ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... would have liked me to have in my room photographs of ancient buildings or of beautiful places. But at the moment of buying them, and for all that the subject of the picture had an aesthetic value of its own, she would find that vulgarity and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical nature of their reproduction by photography. She attempted by a subterfuge, if not to eliminate altogether their commercial banality, at least to minimise it, to substitute for the bulk of it what was art still, to introduce, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... himself to be in the presence of the King, and knows that the petitions and the promises are for him at least a holy reality. I am perfectly well aware that it is not easy to steer between a more or less mechanical manner and a demonstrative one, and that perhaps of two evils the former is the less. But I am sure it is possible to steer the right line, by using sanctified common-sense, and asking for a little candid counsel from those who hear us, and above all by being what we seek ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... Pablo and I are to commence to-morrow. At first we made but a bad hand of sawing off the slabs, but before we had cut them all we got on pretty well. Pablo don't much like it, and indeed no more do I much, it is such mechanical work, and so tiring; but he does not complain. I do not intend that he shall saw more than two days in a week; that will be sufficient; we shall get ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... home. How was she to play her part in the preparations at hand, where she had always been so welcome and so efficient? All spring and life seemed to be taken out of her, for everything but the dull mechanical picking of berries. However, strength comes ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... suppose, however, from this, that the English nation is incapable of appreciating the highest degree of eminence in the fine arts, or that we are never destined to rise to excellence in any but the mechanical. It is the multitude of subordinate writers of moderate merit who obstruct all the avenues to great distinction, which really occasions the phenomenon. Strange as it may appear, it is a fact abundantly proved by literary history, and which may be verified by every ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... process in arithmetic or grammar; to demonstrate the multiplication-table before daring to use it, or to commit it to memory, if indeed they do not forbid entirely its being committed to memory as too parrot-like and mechanical. To commit blindly to memory precious forms of truth, which the wise and good have hived for the use of the race, is poohed at as old-fogyish. To receive as true anything which the child cannot fathom, and which he has not discovered or demonstrated for himself, is denounced ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... interested in the fine collections which made this newspaper's library before the fire the most valuable on this Coast, if not in the country. He was also much impressed with the many devices for securing speed in typesetting and other mechanical work. The only feature of his swarthy face that impressed one was his brilliant black eyes, which behind his large glasses, seemed to note every detail. He talked very well, but although he made friends among local newspapermen, he was unsuccessful in selling any of his ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... calling him a 'dull fellow.' Boswell: 'I understand he was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not dull in poetry.' Johnson: 'Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.' He then repeated some ludicrous lines, which have escaped my memory, and said, 'Is not that GREAT, like his odes?'. . . 'No, sir, there are but two good stanzas in Gray's poetry, which are in his "Elegy in a Country Churchyard." He ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... as it is certainly the noblest of all arts, so, in the progress of improvement, it necessarily becomes one of the most complicated among them. The state of the mechanical, as well as some other arts, with which it is necessarily connected, determines the degree of perfection to which it is capable of being carried at any particular time. But in order to carry it to this degree of perfection, it is necessary that it should become the sole or principal ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... great portion of the western country, except in large towns, almost every mechanic is almost necessarily a farmer; the population being in but few places sufficiently dense to support that designation of mechanical employments which is common in ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... Thorne, whom he had met the first evening at the Loyal Legion, called him up and asked to see him; and he came to Montague's room that evening, and after chatting awhile about old times, proceeded to unfold a business proposition. It seemed that the Major had a grandson, a young mechanical engineer, who had been labouring for a couple of years at a very important invention, a device for loading coal upon steamships and weighing it automatically in the process. It was a very complicated problem, needless to ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... room on the ground-floor there was a great collection of mechanical toys. Sidi Boubikir explained that the French Commercial Attache had brought a large number to the Sultan's palace, and that my Lord Abd-el-Aziz had rejected the ones before us. With the curious childish ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... primitive beings. Their fetish- like respect for all traditions is absolute; their unconscious horror of all novelty capable of changing the essential conditions of their existence is very deeply rooted. Had democracies possessed the power they wield to-day at the time of the invention of mechanical looms or of the introduction of steam-power and of railways, the realisation of these inventions would have been impossible, or would have been achieved at the cost of revolutions and repeated massacres. It is fortunate for the progress of civilisation ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... young man hung his head and felt his sorrow renewed for the dear friend and companion with whom, until of late, all his pleasures and griefs had been shared. As he sate plunged in his own thoughts, which were mingled up with the mechanical clinking of the blacksmith's forge hard by, the noises of the evening, the talk of the rooks, and the calling of the birds round about—a couple of young men on horseback dashed over the bridge. One of them, with an oath, called ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... as in schools, barracks, on board ship, or in prison, have sexual relations with persons of their own sex. Now Hirschfeld clearly realizes that the mere sexual act is no proof of the direction of the sexual impulse; it may be rendered possible by mechanical irritation (as by the stimulation of a full bladder) and in women without any stimulation at all; such cases can have little psychological significance. Moreover, he seems to admit that some subdivisions of his first class are true inverts. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... indifference apparently to their fate as "sheep going to the shambles." Not a shot was fired from this advancing column, while the shells from our batteries cut swath after swath through their ranks, only to be closed again as if by some mechanical means; colors fall, but rise and float again, men bounding forward and eagerly grasping the fallen staff, indifferent of the fate that awaited them. Officers are in front, with drawn swords flashing in the gleam of the fading sunlight, urging on their men to still greater deeds of prowess, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... a mere mechanical photographic reproduction of the people it describes, but a glowing, vivid portrayal of them, with all the pulsating sympathy of one who understands them, their thoughts and feelings, with all the picturesque fidelity of the artist who appreciates the spiritual ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... learning from him the chief points of distinction between the different tribes of the vegetable world, and many other things of which older people are often ignorant. But acquainted as Michael was with the inhabitants of the garden, they did not afford him his most vivid enjoyment. Mechanical pursuits ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... purpose? I have listened long to Nature's voice, but even the whispers of a spiritual presence which haunted my childhood have died away, and I hear nothing in her but the grinding of the iron wheels of mechanical necessity.' ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... was a sober, diligent and obliging lad and had generally given every satisfaction in his present situation. In case he hadn't a job or wanted another one there were convenient spaces in which to confess the whole of his past—whether he had a liking for animals or the Colonies, mechanical aptitude (if any), down to full list of birth-marks and next-of-kin. William thrust the thing hastily into the stove. But I observed that there was a cloud over him for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... trees, the flowers, the birds, and the green fields. And that then we shall have a world composed of metal machines and human machines. With all of that I do not agree. I think that unless we know more about machines and their use, unless we better understand the mechanical portion of life, we cannot have the time to enjoy the trees, and the birds, and the ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... mere dabbler in anything: in music, for instance, she had studied thorough bass, and studied it well; yet her playing was such as I have already described it. She understood perspective, and could copy an etching, in pen and ink, to a hair's-breadth, yet her drawing was hard and mechanical. She was pretty much at home in Euclid, and thoroughly enjoyed a geometric relation, but had never yet shown her English master the slightest pleasure in an analogy, or the smallest sympathy with any poetry higher ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... hitherto dependent on her niece for one of the few pleasures she could enjoy, the pleasure of having the best new novels read to her as they came out. Discovering this, Arthur volunteered to relieve Miss Haldane, at intervals, in the office of reader. He was clever at mechanical contrivances of all sorts, and he introduced improvements in Mrs. Carbury's couch, and in the means of conveying her from the bedchamber to the drawing-room, which alleviated the poor lady's sufferings and brightened her gloomy life. ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... disadvantage to him in the end. Full of good nature, he was always popular with the boys; was never so industrious as when manufacturing to their order little writing desks, fancy boxes, and other trifling articles not beyond the scope of his mechanical ingenuity—for which he exacted such compensation as he could obtain. In sober truth, like his parent, he was fond of money. The world, he was wont to say, owed him a living, and he prided himself not a little on his skill ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... never fallen. And then, not as the condition to this but as the sequel to it, He will so deal with them, internally and spiritually, that they shall will His will and live His law. There shall be no mechanical compulsion; "their mind," "their hearts," full as ever of personality and volition, shall be the matter acted upon. But there shall be a gracious and prevailing influence, deciding their spiritual action along its one true line; "I will put," "I ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... cleared his voice before speaking, and then he said, very nearly choking the baby in his mechanical attempt to pull a lock of his hair as ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... greater part of the day in complete idleness, and I was told that was intellectual work. My activity in the scholastic and official sphere had required neither mental application nor talent, nor special qualifications, nor creative impulse; it was mechanical. Such intellectual work I put on a lower level than physical toil; I despise it, and I don't think that for one moment it could serve as a justification for an idle, careless life, as it is indeed nothing but a sham, one of ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... would seem strange to us, and should miss many more to which we are accustomed. Every hundred years, and especially a century like the last, marked by an extraordinary advance in wealth, luxury, and refinement of taste, as well as in the mechanical arts which embellish our houses, must produce a great change in their aspect. These changes are always at work; they are going on now, but so silently that we take no note of them. Men soon forget the small objects which they leave behind them as they drift ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... vex, and non-plus its friends. But it will command attention: it will conquer a hearing." Newspapers were generally friendly. "Miss Anthony's woman's rights paper," declared the Troy (New York) Times, "is a realistic, well-edited, instructive journal ... and its beautiful mechanical execution renders its appearance very attractive." The Chicago Workingman's Advocate observed, "We have no doubt it will prove an able ally of the labor reform movement." Nellie Hutchinson of the Cincinnati Commercial, one of the few women journalists, described sympathetically for ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... difficult to avoid using them, unless it has the courage of its convictions to the same extent as George Fox, the Quaker, who encased himself in an entire suit of home-made leather, bearing the impress of his individual mind; and defied a mechanical and degenerate world. The only practical question is whether the manufactures shall be good or bad, well-designed or ill; South Kensington answers, that if training can do it, they shall be ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... the surrounding medium, matter like that of which it is composed, we have the first rudiment of vegetative life. If the mass can do this for a considerable time, and if its absorption of new matter more than replaces that lost by decomposition, and if it is of such a nature as to resist the mechanical or chemical forces to which it is usually exposed, and to retain a tolerably constant form, we term it a living organism. We can conceive an organism to be so constituted, and we can further conceive ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... nature; but when a musician steps out of his way to imitate the crowing of cocks or the roar of the tempest, we regard his achievement merely as a graceful conceit. Art is, therefore, an imitation of nature; but it is an intellectual and not a mechanical imitation; and the performances of the camera and the music-box are not to be classed with those of the violinist's bow or ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... dispute is idle. No relativist who ever actually walked the earth [Footnote: Of course the bugaboo creature called 'the sceptic' in the logic-books, who dogmatically makes the statement that no statement, not even the one he now makes, is true, is a mere mechanical toy—target for the rationalist shooting-gallery— hit him and he turns a summersault—yet he is the only sort of relativist whom my colleagues appear able to imagine to exist.] has denied the regulative character in his ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... I cried, seizing a dessert-knife which was on my bureau. I rushed forward with a mechanical movement upon my little Comte de Toulouse, whom I snatched from the hands of his father, and I was on the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... and religious person, I believe, there must be great contentment in having ready to his hand some honourable exercise, whether that of letters, or of music, or of painting, or of any other liberal or mechanical arts, such as are not blameworthy, but rather useful and helpful to other men; for the reason that after the divine offices the time passes honourably with the delight that is taken in the sweet labours of these pleasant exercises. And to this ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... hill, and as the long curve before me was diminished by successive sharp advances, still my heart was caught half-way in every breath, and whatever it is that moves a man went uncertainly within me, mechanical and half-paralysed. The great height with that narrow unprotected ribbon across it was more ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... are thick and round, not, as usual, flattened into edges, but resembling truncated cones; the cuspidati are not pointed, but broad and flat on the masticating surface, like the neighbouring bicuspides. This may be attributable to mechanical attrition, depending on the nature of the food which the teeth are employed in masticating. The upper does not overlap the under jaw, but the teeth meet at their surfaces. This peculiarity of teeth has been noticed by Blumenbach as a characteristic ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... every really labour-saving—machine is at the same time, and of necessity, profitable. This is the reason why in Freeland the manufacture of machines is necessarily of such enormous and constantly increasing importance. One half of our people are engaged in the manufacture of ingenious mechanical implements, moved by steam, electricity, water, compressed or rarefied air, by means of which the other half multiply their powers of production a hundredfold; and it follows as a natural consequence that among us the employment of machinery has developed a many-sidedness ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... tiresome routine of boarding. She was not afraid at night. The stamp-and-coin man who occupied the first floor, lived with his wife and baby in the rear. The janitress had a room on the floor above hers. Two elderly women workers of ability in the mechanical arts occupied the rear of her floor, and a dear little fat woman of fifty who drew designs for the New England weavers of cotton goods lived in ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... making, than the savage does for the wonders of God's making, which he sees around him in every insect, bird, and flower. The man who walks the streets every day, is the very man who will see least in the streets. The man who works in a factory, repeating a thousand times a day some one dull mechanical operation, or even casting up day after day the accounts of it, is the man who will think least of the real wonderfulness of that factory; of the amount of prudence, skill, and science, which it expresses; of its real value to himself and to his class; of its usefulness to far nations ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... Huntington's voice sounded from his flagship, the Washington. Somehow its gruffness overrode the mechanical quality of the intra-fleet radio transmission. Almost it seemed he was there in the tiny cabin. "Reports have at this moment been received that our attack fleets have been everywhere successful. Our rocket ships have destroyed Tokyo, Addis Ababa, Odessa, Peiping and ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... less familiar with the fact that we have now entrance into the best colleges, both here and abroad. You know how we are educated for every profession, and to what eminence many of us have climbed. You understand fully, that there is not a position in the literary, business, mechanical, or art world in which to-day a woman may not ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... of the seasons were associated with the seeming approach and recession of the sun. This observation, however, could not have been made until man had migrated from the tropical regions, and had reached a stage of mechanical development enabling him to live in subtropical or temperate zones. Even then it is conceivable that a long period must have elapsed before a direct causal relation was felt to exist between the shifting of the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... wind on his right he turned towards the south in the gathering darkness. He could not see two yards ahead. Blindly he plodded along hour after hour. As the time dragged on it seemed to him that he had been walking for ages. His motion became mechanical. He was faint from hunger and his mouth parched with thirst. The bitter wind was reaching to his very vitals in spite of the exertion, and at last he did not feel it much. He stumbled and fell now and again and each time it was more difficult ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... by reason of our supplying them so cheap with every sort of goods, have forgotten the chief part of their ancient mechanical skill, so as not to be well able now, at least for some years, to live independent of us. Formerly, those baskets which the Cheerake made, were so highly esteemed even in South Carolina, the politest of our colonies, for domestic usefulness, beauty, and skilful ...
— Prehistoric Textile Art of Eastern United States • William Henry Holmes
... were forbidden the exercise of any mechanical or laborious employment. All these duties devolved upon the Helots; while their masters spent their time in dancing, ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... in one mottled hand the ruins of a palm-leaf fan, in the other a balled wet handkerchief which released an aroma of camphor upon the banana-burdened air. He bore evidences of inadequate adjustment after a disturbed siesta, but, exercising a mechanical cordiality, preceded himself into the room by a genial half-cough and a hearty, "Well-well-well," as if wishing to indicate a spirit of polite, even ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... woodenly, stony-eyed, and like an automaton whose face had been painted red. And this resemblance to a mechanical figure went so far that he had an automaton's absurd air of being aware of the machinery inside ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... consideration of the possible influence of art on the masses of the people. The inquiry is one of great complexity, involved with that into the uses and dangers of luxury; nor have we as yet data enough to justify us in conjecturing how far the practice of art may be compatible with rude or mechanical employments. But the question, however difficult, lies in the same light as that of the uses of reading or writing; for drawing, so far as it is possible to the multitude, is mainly to be considered as a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge. He who can accurately ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... is quite appropriate, since it gives rise to the knowledge of the four chief ends of human action—viz. religious duty, wealth, pleasure, and final release—and of the means to effect them; and since it helps to effect those ends by itself also, viz. by mere mechanical repetition (apart from any knowledge to which it ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... interior are painted all the mechanical arts, with the several instruments for each and their manner of use among different nations. Alongside, the dignity of such is placed, and their several inventors are named. But on the exterior all the inventors in science, in ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... them for the great part their country was to play; and contact with the Waldensian and Calvinist heresies had stiffened Piedmontese piety into a sombre hatred of schism and a minute observance of the mechanical rules of the faith. Such qualities could be produced only at the expense of intellectual freedom; and if Piedmont could show a few nobles like Massimo d'Azeglio's father, who "made the education of his children his first and gravest thought" ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... of the colonist pioneer, will have been long since forgotten. The modern emigrant to Australia can know them only in part. He is carried to his destination by a public conveyance, at a cost determined by extensive competition. He can have the mechanical labor he may need: he can buy the stock, descended from European flocks and herds, lower than in their native regions. The choice fruit trees, flowers, and plants, which multitudes have combined to collect, he can obtain often at ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... boy looked very handsome, in a black velvet suit with lace ruffles at the wrists and knees, and long white stockings with black slippers. He was clever, too, in assuming the character, and walked with stiff, jerky strides, like a mechanical doll that had just ...
— Marjorie's Maytime • Carolyn Wells
... landscapists; but just as in the botanical engraving the spirit and life of the plant are always lost, so in the technical ship-painting the life of the ship is always lost, without, as far as I can see, attaining, even by this sacrifice, anything like completeness of mechanical delineation. At least, I never saw the ship drawn yet which gave me the slightest idea of the entanglement ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... square uniform buildings were steeped in the rising dawn, they seemed typical of some gigantic modern machine, some engine, some caldron for the supply of a whole people, some colossal belly, bolted and riveted, built up of wood and glass and iron, and endowed with all the elegance and power of some mechanical motive appliance working there with flaring furnaces, and wild, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... impressions of humanity well defined. I would see one of the clumsy bovine-creatures who worked the launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself asking, trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet the Fox-bear woman's vulpine, shifty face, strangely human in its speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... called the "foundation" of justification because it not only marks its beginning, but constitutes the basis upon which all subsequent stages of the process rest. To exclude the mistaken notion that the process of justification is a series of mechanical and disconnected acts, the Council calls faith the "root" of justification, from which the other preparatory acts spring organically, as the trunk of a tree ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... medals are among the surest monuments of history, as well as muniments of individual distinction, there should be given to them, besides intrinsic value and durability of material, the utmost grace of design, with the highest finish in mechanical execution. All this is necessary to give the greater or adventitious value; as in the present instance, the medal is to be, at once, an historical record and a reward of distinguished merit. The credit of the donor thus becomes even more than that of the receiver interested ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... displayed, in which circumstances we have a right to inquire how he came by this idea, whether, for example, he somewhere saw such a machine constructed by another, or whether he was so accurately taught the mechanical sciences, or is endowed with such force of genius, that he was able of himself to invent it, without having elsewhere seen anything like it; for all the ingenuity which is contained in the idea objectively only, or as it were in a picture, must exist at least in its first and ...
— The Principles of Philosophy • Rene Descartes
... the yacht again, R—— and I wore the night away. P—— remained impregnable to the attacks of bugs, fleas, and mosquitoes; and while he told us, in a sonorous language of his own, how profoundly he slept, he sometimes gave mechanical signs of feeling by scratching obstreperously his legs and arms, and slapping himself smartly on ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... intellectuals I met in Madrid," put in Telemachus, "seemed enormously anxious for subways and mechanical progress, seemed to think that existence could be ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... problem in his cabin, and wanted a little light and a little air, so he just dropped his port; but, not to deviate from the spirit of his captain's instructions, he fastened a tackle to it; that he might have mechanical force to close it with should ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... labors and studies while in Europe. In the first decade of the century it had been generally supposed that the X ray, or cathode ray, had been developed and applied to the utmost extent of its capability. It was used in surgery and in mechanical arts, and in many varieties of scientific operations, but no considerable advance in its line of application had been recognized for a quarter of a century. But Roland Clewe had come to believe in the existence of a photic force, somewhat similar to the ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... its magnificent old Gothic Cathedral, and its ancient houses with their peaked roofs and gables, made a little gallery of quaint and interesting views; or how a crowd was gathered inside the cathedral at noon, to see the famous mechanical clock in motion, striking twelve. How, when it struck twelve, a whole army of puppets went through many ingenious evolutions; and, among them, a huge puppet-cock, perched on the top, crowed twelve times, loud and clear. Or how it was wonderful ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... treatment consists in a local application of a desiccant dusting powder, which should be applied five or six times daily. The composition of the powder should be such as to permit of its liberal use, thereby affording mechanical protection to the wound as well as exerting a desiccative effect. Equal parts of boric acid and exsiccated alum serve very well ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... participate. In the end only Justice Black condemned requirement (1), while the Court was evenly divided as to requirement (2). In the course of his opinion for the controlling wing of the Court, Chief Justice Vinson said: "The attempt to apply the term, 'clear and present danger,' as a mechanical test in every case touching First Amendment freedoms, without regard to the context of its application, mistakes the form in which an idea was cast for the substance of the idea * * * the question with which we are here faced is ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... together in the shade of the trees, with their books and work. There were no sounds but such as, in the country, seem to accentuate the quiet, and are aids, not to thought, but to that higher faculty which awakes in the silence, and is to thought what the mechanical instrument ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... alternative to competition as a means of determining the place of the individual in the social system, and that is some form of status, some fixed, mechanical rule, usually a rule of inheritance, which decides the function of the individual without reference to his personal traits, and thus dispenses with any process of comparison. It is possible to conceive of a society organized entirely upon the basis of the inheritance of functions, and ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... testify, Lino, Hd Bk, and Mull. You might imagine to see them that the two were both intent upon nothing but smoothness of textile and rectitude of fold. But to tell the truth, neither is thinking of the mechanical duties in hand. The assistant is dreaming of the delicious time—only four hours off now—when he will resume the tale of his bruises and abrasions. The apprentice is nearer the long long thoughts of boyhood, ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... which are not mechanical; from any in which the mind, not the hand, has been the creating power. I saw you very much interested the other day in the Eddystone lighthouse; did it help you to form no opinion ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... L12,485,032. Assuming a production of L15,000,000 a year, this would exhaust the field in about forty-six years; but it is, of course, quite impossible to predict what the future rate of production will be, for that must depend not only on the progress of mechanical and chemical science, but (as we shall presently see) to some extent also upon administrative and even political conditions. In the five years preceding 1896 the production had increased so fast (at the rate of about a million sterling per annum) that, even under the conditions which existed in ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... another, and that all the senses bear analogy to and illustrate one another, I shall begin with this power in sounds, as the cause of the sublimity from succession is rather more obvious in the sense of hearing. And I shall here, once for all, observe, that an investigation of the natural and mechanical causes of our passions, besides the curiosity of the subject, gives, if they are discovered, a double strength and lustre to any rules we deliver on such matters. When the ear receives any simple sound, it is struck by a single pulse of the air which makes the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... (so great is the mechanical power of habit) there returned to Calderon something of his wonted energy and spirit; a light broke from his sunken eyes; he drew himself up to the full of his stately height: "I thought I had done with courts and with life," said he; "but I will ...
— Calderon The Courtier - A Tale • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a letter from a missionary in China, a former schoolmate, Clarence Robertson, who resigned the position of Assistant Professor of mechanical engineering in Purdue University in order to accept in the largest sense the Master's specific invitation to "Go ye, therefore, and ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... Meanwhile, the artist was feeling his way from the old style caricature, crowded with figures with overhead loops of explanatory text, to designs possessing an artistic unity expressive of an idea plain enough to tell its own story. He had matured both his mechanical resources and his artistic method by the time the campaign of 1884 came on, and he had founded a school which could apply the style to American politics with aptness superior to his own. It was Bernhard Gillam, ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... the old Hottentot in admiration, even Mavovo lifted his dying head and stared. But Hans, whose annoyance had now evaporated, went on in a jog-trot mechanical voice: ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... idle creatures, get you home: Is this a holiday? what! know you not, Being mechanical, you ought not walk Upon a labouring day without the sign Of your profession? Speak, what trade ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... stupor spreading over the faces of butchers and cannibals, we see appearing that of the idiot. It is the revolutionary idiot, in which all conceptions, save two, have vanished, two fixed, rudimentary, and mechanical ideas, one destruction and the other that of public safety. With no others in his empty head, these blend together through an irresistible attraction, and the effect proceeding from their contact may be imagined. "Is there anything else to do?" asks one of these butchers in the deserted ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... simple assertion that he was presenting facts Glanvill went on to make a plea used often nowadays in another connection by defenders of miracles. If the ordinary mind, he said, could not understand "every thing done by Mathematics and Mechanical Artifice,"[9] how much more would even the most knowing of us fail to understand the power of witches. This proposition, the reader can see, was nothing more than a working out of one of the principles of his philosophy. There can be no doubt that he would have taken ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... the counting-house and in the banking office; while the proudest of monarchs will undertake no enterprise requiring large expenditure until he is assured of the support of the keen-eyed, swarthy-visaged men who control the sinews of war. Generations of exclusion from agriculture and the mechanical arts and of devotion to commerce, have developed and inbred in the Jew ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... clothing, semi-finished goods and textiles, agricultural products, mechanical goods, ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... to art what Goethe said of poetry we find that among its votaries there are two kinds of self-half-informed people, "dilettanti," he calls them, "he who neglects the indispensable mechanical part, and he thinks he has done enough if he shows spirituality and feeling, and he who seeks to arrive at poetry merely by mechanism in which he can acquire an artisan's readiness, and ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... Oceans, with the exception of the Seychelles and this little point of rock, are, I believe, composed either of coral or of erupted matter. The volcanic nature of these oceanic islands is evidently an extension of that law, and the effect of those same causes, whether chemical or mechanical, from which it results that a vast majority of the volcanoes now in action stand either near sea-coasts or as islands in the midst ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... observe the stars whenever opportunity offered. It must, of course, be remembered that in those days there were no telescopes. In the absence of optical aid, such as lenses afford the modern observers, astronomers had to rely on mechanical appliances alone to measure the places of the stars. Of such appliances, perhaps the most ingenious was one known before Tycho's time, which we have represented ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... and threes are placed at intervals. Down the middle of each a rapid stream runs in a stone channel, and this gives endless amusement to the children, specially to the boys, who devise many ingenious models and mechanical toys, which are put in motion by water-wheels. But at 7 a.m. a drum beats to summon the children to a school whose buildings would not discredit any school-board at home. Too much Europeanised I thought it, and the children looked very uncomfortable sitting ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... and as cold as death laid its hand on Nanny's heart. It seemed to her that she never again could raise her eyes to his. Fortunately her body went through its mechanical duties. She bent, her hand picked up the picture, and her voice of its ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... shortly he will make machines to fly through the air as fast, and finally faster, than the swiftest birds do now. And I hereby offer a bonus of L1,000 to any person who shall (in consequence of said bonus) within the next two years invent a flying machine, to go by Electrical, Chemical, Mechanical, or any other means, except by gas, a distance of 100 miles, and shall come and stop in front of the Book Arcade, Bourke Street, Melbourne, Australia, as easily and as safely as a carriage stops ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... him, mechanical salt-butter rogue! I will stare him out of his wits; I will awe him with my cudgel; it shall hang like a meteor o'er the cuckold's horns. Master Brook, thou shalt know I will predominate over the peasant, and thou ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... are indispensable for walking; but, then, in these days of new inventions, when the air is invaded by wing, and the earth traversed by wheels, and the depths of the waters by mechanical fins, walking may soon become a lost art! Something like this may have flitted through her mind, but she only answered in a trembling voice, "How do ...
— The Iceberg Express • David Magie Cory
... so grim in spirit, I think I should have found much of my wedding amusing. I remember a lot of ridiculous detail that still declines to be funny in my memory. The officiating clergyman had a cold, and turned his "n's" to "d's," and he made the most mechanical compliment conceivable about the bride's age when the register was signed. Every bride he had ever married had had it, one knew. And two middle-aged spinsters, cousins of Marion's and dressmakers at Barking, stand out. They wore marvellously bright and gay blouses and dim old skirts, and had ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... largely of more brittle wood fibres, which are of no use. The valuable fibres are, however, closely united with the wood and with each other in such an intimate fashion that it is impossible to separate them by any mechanical means. The whole cellular substance of the stem is bound together by some cementing materials which hold it in a compact mass, probably a salt of calcium and pectinic acid. The art of preparing flax is a process of getting rid of the worthless wood fibres and preserving the valuable, ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... certain cases induce contraction or motion in the muscles by direct conduction of a stimulus along a nerve, or by the conduction of a stimulus to a nervous centre, whence it is reflected along another nerve to the muscles. Not only mechanical and electrical, but psychical stimuli "excite the nerves, whether these are ideational, emotional, or volitional. They proceed from the brain, being themselves sometimes induced by external causes, and sometimes originating primarily in the great ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... is under the ownership of men. Rich embroideries from India, rugs of downy softness from Turkey, the muslin of Decca, anciently known as "The Woven Wind," the pottery and majolica ware of P. Pipsen's widow, the cartridges and envelopes of Uncle Sam, Waltham watches, whose finest mechanical work is done by women, and ten thousand other industries found no place in the pavilion. Said United States Commissioner Meeker of Colorado, "Woman's work comprises three-fourths of the exposition; it is scattered ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the Southern politicians are men of leisure. They have nothing to do but to ride round their plantations, hunt, attend the races, study politics for the next legislative or congressional campaign, and decide how to use the prodigious mechanical power, of slave representation, which a political Archimedes may effectually wield for the destruction of commerce, or any thing else, involving the ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... of a large ship are from five to six feet in circumference, it is manifest that some powerful mechanical contrivance is required to raise them over the bulwarks, and put them in an upright position, into their appointed places. Such contrivances, in the form of enormous cranes, are fixed in some of the larger docks; but the most ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... property on the ocean must to so great an extent depend. Although much attention has already been given by Congress to the proper construction and arrangement of steam vessels and all passenger ships, still it is believed that the resources of science and mechanical skill in this direction have not been exhausted. No good reason exists for the marked distinction which appears upon our statutes between the laws for protecting life and property at sea and those for protecting them on land. In most of the States severe penalties are provided to ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... brainless, engaged in the delicate chemical compounding of raw materials that went into the making of their clothing. Here was a nursery, where tiny tots born to the purple were reared to adolescence by unfeeling but efficient mechanical nurses. The mothers of the purple could not be bothered with their offspring until they had reached the age of reason. The whirring machinery of a huge power plant provided much amusement for the feminine members of the party. It was all so massive; throbbing ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... and over the bookcases hung pictures of the Barbizon school. These books and these pictures were the elegant monument of hobbies which their owner had outlived. His present hobby happened to be music. A Steinway grand-piano was prominent in the chamber, and before the ebony instrument stood a mechanical pianoforte-player. ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... go about my work in a mechanical way, and only three things seemed to have much joy for me—my home, parents, ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... slowly and faced him; then bowed in a mechanical way and proceeded to the elevator, into which ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... first-rate goers it certainly was not because the works could decently complain of want of room. In good sooth they were big enough, and perhaps, as the saying is, ugly enough, to be the most correct of all mechanical performers; in Mr Pinch's eyes, however they were smaller than Geneva ware; and when he saw one very bloated watch announced as a repeater, gifted with the uncommon power of striking every quarter of an hour inside the pocket of its happy owner, he almost wished that he were rich enough ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... intolerable that even we ourselves have to go on with the mechanical round of our daily business, and that thousands of our own actions are and must be unaffected by the pain that throbs within us. And so, to restore the harmony between our outward doings and our inward feelings, we storm and shout, and tear our ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... leaf or two on the plant will be affected; at other times a nearly simultaneous movement may be seen in all the leaves. These movements are most energetic when the thermometer marks about 80 deg.. This motion is not due to any external or mechanical irritation. ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... are always changing, while the process of cure remains the same. Only in the case of broken bones are we compelled to let Nature do all the curing, while we may take pride in some progress in the mechanical appliances. ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... for the paper now, though he maintains a close supervision over all parts of it, as well as over the mechanical department of his enterprise. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... the honor you did the company by disguising yourself as a stoker and helping the base-ball team of the Louisiana to win the pennant of the Asiatic Squadron, altogether reconciles us to the loss of a government contract. I have paid a good deal to have you taught mechanical engineering, and I should like to know how soon you expect to give me ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... no desire for jewels. Give her a ring and she will not keep it. Finally, she does not imitate the vulgarity of the hunter. She loves her home and remains there so perfectly tranquil that at times you would believe that she was a mechanical Cat made at Birmingham or Manchester, which is the ne plus ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... file who are ground up in the wheels of the Administration; losing heart and soul, and mind and strength, in the process. Until steam replaces manual power in the working of the Empire, there must always be this percentage must always be the men who are used up, expended, in the mere mechanical routine. For these promotion is far off and the mill-grind of every day very instant. The Secretariats know them only by name; they are not the picked men of the Districts with Divisions and Collectorates awaiting ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... vessel wrecked on the coast of Italy. The Romans must have had very large merchant-vessels to enable them to transport the enormous monoliths from Egypt which they erected in Rome. These vast stones, also, could not have been got on board and brought up the Tiber without considerable mechanical appliances. ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... upon Gray was undoubtedly calculated to give great offence to Walpole: "Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull every where: he was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great: he was a mechanical poet."-E. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Mechanical Inventions.*—As the eighteenth century progressed one form of economic growth seems to have been pressing on the general economic organization. This was the constant expansion of commerce, the steadily increasing demand for ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... over both successors and contemporaries. What they chiefly owed to him, was the proper subordination of beauty in details to the grandeur of simplicity and to unity of effect. He came at a moment when constructive problems had been solved, when mechanical means were perfected, and when the sister arts had reached their highest point. His early training in Lombardy accustomed him to the adoption of clustered piers instead of single columns, to semicircular apses and niches, and to the free ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... afterwards that she was surprised into it, but she would certainly never have recognized in the quiet, rather weary-looking, woman who sat at her uncle's side the Blanche Phillimore whom she had more than once passionately declared that she would sooner die than speak to. She murmured a few mechanical words, and then, suddenly realizing the situation, she glanced a ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... exploration of America and the East, or will point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of printing and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and by gunpowder; and will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance all the instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid the dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and perpetuate the new and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Cascades, where, after a trial by a military commission, nine of them were sentenced to death and duly hanged. I did not see them executed, but was afterward informed that, in the absence of the usual mechanical apparatus used on such occasions, a tree with a convenient limb under which two empty barrels were placed, one on top of the other, furnished a rude but certain substitute. In executing the sentence each Indian in turn was made ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... men worked with a steadier, more mechanical action. No one spoke now. Each man was intent on his work. No one had any strength or breath to waste. The driver on his power changed his weight on weary feet, and whistled and sang at the tired horses. ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... you, sir, in every respect—Christianity was an invertebrate materialism of separation—crude, mechanical separation—less spiritual, less ethical, than almost any of the Oriental faiths. Affirming the brotherhood of man, yet separating us into a heaven and a hell. Christians cowering before a being of divided power, half-god ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... called a barbarity. It will hardly be disputed that children are an important element in society. Without them we should lose the memory of our youth, and all opportunity for the exercise of unselfish and disinterested affection. Life would become arid and mechanical to a degree now scarcely conceivable; chastity and all the human virtues would cease to exist; marriage would be an aimless and absurd transaction; and the brotherhood of man, even in the nominal sense that it now exists, would speedily be abjured. Political economy and sociology neglect to make ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... the Laborers, who do nothing but work—the Soldiers, who do nothing but fight—and the Gentry, who neither work nor fight, but spend their lives in the pleasant duty of continuing their species. The habitations of these insects, as specimens of mechanical ingenuity, are far superior to the houses of the natives, and are really the finest works of architecture to be met with on the African coast. In height, these edifices vary from four to fifteen or twenty feet, and are sometimes ten or twelve feet in diameter at the base. They ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... be effective, would help the cause. He stood almost appalled for a moment, as he said to himself that she would take her up and the girl would be ruined, would force her note and become a screamer. But he quickly dodged this vision, taking refuge in a mechanical appeal to his cousin, of whom he inquired how she liked Miss Verena. Olive made no answer; her head remained averted, she bored the carpet with her conscious eyes. Mrs. Farrinder glanced at her askance, and then said ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... of all subterranean, action, temperatures are continually changing, and therefore masses of rock must be expanding or contracting, with infinite slowness, but with infinite force. This pressure must result in mechanical strain somewhere, both in their own substance, and in that of the rocks surrounding them; and we can form no conception of the result of irresistible pressure, applied so as to rend and raise, with imperceptible slowness of gradation, masses thousands of feet in thickness. We ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... ditch: Both he that was to defend the place, and he that was to assault it, sung the war-song, and danced with the same frightful gesticulations that we had seen used in more serious circumstances, to work themselves up into a degree of that mechanical fury, which, among all uncivilized nations, is the necessary prelude to a battle; for dispassionate courage, a strength of mind that can surmount the sense of danger, without a flow of animal spirits by which it is extinguished, seems to be the prerogative of those who have projects ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
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