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More "Oscillation" Quotes from Famous Books



... and yet very primitive bridge. It was formed of a single, broad and thick plank of the tulip wood. This was forty feet long, and spanned the interval between shore and shore with a slight but very perceptible arch, preventing all oscillation. From the southern extreme of the lake issued a continuation of the rivulet, which, after meandering for, perhaps, thirty yards, finally passed through the "depression" (already described) in the middle of the southern declivity, and tumbling down a sheer precipice of a hundred feet, made its ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... the kettle dreamily. The fire glowed and flashed and sank, and glowed again. Now he could distinctly see a serpent twisting among the embers. The clock ticked in measured unison with the slow oscillation of the flame serpent. The wind blew hard against the panes and sent a sudden ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers

... may be great oscillation in the emotional interest, and the hot places may shift before one almost as rapidly as the sparks that run through burnt-up paper. Then we have the wavering and divided self we heard so much of in the previous ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... deluge lasted for about five minutes, when it ceased as abruptly as it had begun; but even that short time had sufficed to beat the sea down so smooth that the previous violent rolling of the ship was reduced to a gentle, scarcely perceptible oscillation. ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood

... thoughts into clearer phrases, or foisting showy nonsense upon them for his own purposes, or simply laughing at them in his sleeve. But, in a purely literary sense, this ambiguous hovering between two meanings, this oscillation between the ironical and the serious, is always amusing, and sometimes delightful. Some simple-minded people are revolted, even in literature, by the ironical method; and tell the humorist, with an air of moral disapproval, that they never know ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... that velocity we have contended for, ought to keep the tail invariably directed from the axis of the vortex; but, where there are two forces or tendencies, as in this case, analogy would teach us that a certain degree of oscillation is a necessary result. There may, also, be slight and transient changes in the direction of the radial stream. In the hurricane there are short and fitful blasts inclined to the general direction of the wind, which must arise from ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett

... horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank—God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink, rather than the drink to the insanity.... It was the horrible never-ending oscillation between hope and despair, which I could not longer have endured without total loss of reason. In the death of what was my life, then, I received a new, but—O ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill

... he dared not watch too closely what followed. Inured as he thought he was to the tricks of Hyperspace, to acceleration and anti-gravity, the oscillation of that swinging seat, the weird swaying of the half-recumbent figure, did things to his sight and to his sense of balance which seemed perilous in the extreme. But when the groan broke through the hum of Ali's mysterious machine, all of them knew that the Engineer-apprentice ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton

... (1452-1519) delineated, if he did not build, a crank and slider mechanism, also for a sawmill (fig. 2). In the 16th century may be found the conversion of rotary to reciprocating motion (strictly speaking, an oscillation through a small arc of a large circle) and vice versa by use of linkages of rigid members (figs. 3 and 4), although the conversion of rotary to reciprocating motion was at that time more frequently accomplished by cams and intermittent gearing. Nevertheless, ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson

... other, a corked porous vessel that carries a glass tube, c, which dips into a vessel containing either water or methylic alcohol. Three or four gas jets, one of which is shown at E, are arranged around the porous vessel, as close as possible, but in such a way as not to touch it during the oscillation of the beam. These gas jets communicate with a gasometer tilled with hydrogen, the bell of which is so charged as to furnish a jet of sufficient strength. Experience will indicate the best place to give the gas jets, but, in general, it is well to locate them at near the center of the porous ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various

... a skillful spoon and bribed with salt and butter and a sprinkle of parsley. And even as we watch, the golden mass melts together; sighs and quivers, and thickens into wrinkles; bodies itself slowly into form and shape, under crafty oscillation; and is at last dexterously rolled out, a burnished ingot, upon the long platter, with a flourish that bespeaks practice and confidence. The stiff face of the old woman involuntarily relaxes ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... Frenchman, unable longer to endure the awful sight bowed his head upon his hands; another moment, and he was lost to sight in the circle of mist and spray that enveloped the foot of the column; then a strong oscillation began to be visible in the body of the water-spout; it swayed heavily to and fro; the cloud at its apex seemed to stoop, and the whole mass broke and fell, with a noise that might have been heard for miles. The sea, far ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer

... again. But there is now no hope that such arrangements can be permanent; that they can be other than poor temporary makeshifts, which, if they try to fancy and make themselves permanent, will be displaced by new explosions recurring more speedily than last time. In such baleful oscillation, afloat as amid raging bottomless eddies and conflicting sea-currents, not steadfast as on fixed foundations, must European Society continue swaying, now disastrously tumbling, then painfully readjusting itself, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... Kew Observatory confirmed the records of Greenwich, and so did the barometers of other places in the kingdom. Everywhere in Europe also this fact was corroborated, and in some places even a seventh oscillation was recorded. The Greenwich record shows that the air-waves took about thirty-six hours to travel from pole to pole, thus proving that they travelled at about the rate of ordinary sound-waves, which, roughly speaking, travel at the rate of between ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... curious oscillation between believing and seeing are set forth in the most trenchant way in the Book of Job. Job, placed in an agonizing situation, condemned without hope to the death of sinners, and yet conscious of his godliness, demands ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... found, did not manifest sensitiveness to the same metals, some being cured by iron, others by copper, while the greatest number were susceptible to gold. Many interesting facts relating to these cures were noted, such as periods of transition and oscillation in the maladies, and most curious of all, a kind of transference. For example, should a paralysis or a contraction seat itself on the right side, the application of the discs would effect a cure, but the malady ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence

... intended to carry. We construct a ship out of planks, or plates of iron, with reference to certain forces of impact to be sustained, and of inertia to be overcome; or we construct a wall or roof with distinct reference to forces of pressure and oscillation, to be sustained or guarded against; and, therefore, in every case, with especial consideration of the strength of our materials, and the nature of that strength, elastic, tenacious, brittle, and ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... of alarm. Ugh-lomi was pitched a foot in the air, came down again, up again, his stomach was hit violently, and then his knees got a grip of something between them. He found himself clutching with knees, feet, and hands, careering violently with extraordinary oscillation through the air—his axe gone heaven knows whither. "Hold tight," said Mother Instinct, and ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... black, to the other all white; to one all tin, to the other all gold. Was there no possibility of compromise? As she sat between the two, May thought that a discriminating view of Quisante ought to be attainable, not an oscillation from disgust to admiration, but a well-balanced stable judgment which should allow full value to merits and to defects, and sum up the man as a whole. Something of the sort she tried to suggest; neither disputant would hear of it, and Marchmont went off with ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope

... be more sensitive than the marine barometer, falling sooner, and rising earlier: but this is partly in consequence of the marine barometer tube being contracted, to prevent oscillation or "pumping." In the sympiesometer a gas is used, which presses on the confined surface of the liquid with an uniform pressure at an equal state of temperature. The liquid is raised or depressed by an increase or diminution in the ...
— Barometer and Weather Guide • Robert Fitzroy

... country, practically governed as it is now by universal suffrage, every man who does his duty must exercise political functions. And, if the evils which are inseparable from the good of political liberty are to be checked, if the perpetual oscillation of nations between anarchy and despotism is to be replaced by the steady march of self-restraining freedom; it will be because men will gradually bring themselves to deal with political, as they now deal with scientific questions; to be as ashamed of undue haste and partisan prejudice in the ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley

... which no two pyrometers agree; the changeable nature of the atmosphere; the uncertainty as to the true level of the sea; the extreme difficulty of measuring accurately the distance between the point of suspension and the centre of oscillation, and even of finding that centre; also the variety of terrestrial attraction, from which cause the motions of the pendulum are also liable to variation, even in the same latitude. In pursuing his researches, Capt. Kater discovered that the motions of the pendulum are ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 491, May 28, 1831 • Various

... said "Oh! Mrs. Hall! it will crush your chandelier!" (one of Venice glass, very precious)—at which unbelieving remark, probably, the spirits took umbrage, for at once the table ceased ascending, and with a slow oscillation descended very gently on to the carpet. This sort of petty miracle is a frequent experience among the spiritualists, and how it is effected I cannot imagine. There could be no contrivance or machinery in our host's drawing-room, as must be the case imitatively at the Egyptian Hall; none of the ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... a brass frame as shown in Fig. 6. This may be made of wood, although brass is better, as the eddy currents set up in a conductor surrounding a magnet tend to stop oscillation of the magnet. (The core is magnetized when a current flows through the instrument.) The brass frame is wound with magnet wire, the size depending on the number of amperes to be measured. Mine is wound with two layers of No. 14 wire, 10 ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics

... been known to declare that all compasses are liable to swing of their own accord when in clouds, though the real explanation is probably that they themselves have disturbed the needle unduly by a continuous pressure on each side of the rudder-bar in turn, thus causing an oscillation of the rudder and a consequent zigzagged line of flight. The trouble is more serious than it would seem to the layman, as when the compass is out of action, and no other guides are available, one tends to drift round in a large ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott

... ever-increasing doses—a terrible narcotic, one of whose multitudinous effects is that of sending all the patient's thoughts circling around one central idea like planets round the sun. Painful and agonising as had been my suspense,—my oscillation between hope and dread,—during my wanderings with the Lovells, these wanderings had not been without their moments of comfort, for all of which I had been indebted to Sinfi. She would sit with me in an English lane, under a hedge or tree, on a balmy summer evening, or among the ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... knowledge based on the analysis of the idea of Disorder—Two opposed forms of order: the problem of genera and the problem of laws—The idea of "disorder" an oscillation of the intellect between the two kinds of ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... following manner:—'Take a pendulum, vibrating seconds of time, in the latitude of London, in vacuum and at the level of the sea; divide all that part thereof which lies between the axis of suspension and the centre of oscillation into 391,393 equal parts; then will 10,000 of these parts be an imperial inch, 12 whereof make a foot, and 36 whereof make a yard.' All other measures of linear extension are to be computed from this. Thus, 'the foot, the inch, the pole, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various

... institutions of their country have been undergoing in obedience to similarly stern requirements. It did not begin at quite so rudimental a stage of costume as that of the porters and wrestlers presented to us on fans, admirably adapted as that style might be to our summer temperature. In preparing for that oscillation of the thermometer the English are called on for another change, whereas the Orientals may meet it by simply reverting ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various

... the old clock slowly crept along the dial-plate towards four, the hour so relentlessly enforced for interments for half a century by the sexton, who was now about to lay away his own wife in the greedy maw of the grave. The monotonous oscillation of the pendulum, sounding as the stroke of a passing bell, gathered solemnity of tone in the felt hush that rested upon all in the room—a hush as deep as that which rested upon the dead. All eyes, under the cover of stealthily drooping lids, stole glances at old Joseph, whose face ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather

... there—in what is surely the most wonderful spot in the world, the front firing trench, the outer breakwater which holds back the German tide. How strange that this monstrous oscillation of giant forces, setting in from east to west, should find their equilibrium here across this particular meadow of Flanders. 'How far?' I ask. '180 yards,' says my guide. 'Pop!' remarks a third ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle

... life appears in its entirety as an immense wave which, starting from a centre, spreads outwards, and which on almost the whole of its circumference is stopped and converted into oscillation: at one single point the obstacle has been forced, the impulsion has passed freely. It is this freedom that the human form registers. Everywhere but in man, consciousness has had to come to a stand; ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... for essentials, he would lose no chance of a swing through looking for more than the bare necessities. When the physicist describes the pendulum in terms of a formula such as t 2pi[squareroot(l/g)] he exhibits a similar discernment. He has found that the time occupied by an oscillation of any pendulum may be calculated exclusively in terms of its length and the acceleration due to gravity. The monkey's higher proficiency and the formula alike represent a knowledge that is free in the sense that it is contained in terms that require no single fixed context in immediacy. ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... stated by M. Meizel to be the following: Considerably less motive force is necessary than is the case with other exhausters, which require steam engines and all the auxiliary mechanism for the transmission of power. By its quiet and regular action, it prevents oscillation and unsteadiness in the flow of gas in the hydraulic main, as well as in the pipes leading therefrom—a defect which has been found to exist with other exhausters. The bells, being of large area, serve the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various

... swept. At Punta Gorda, in Banda Oriental, I found an alternation of the Pampaean estuary deposit, with a limestone containing some of the same extinct sea-shells; and this shows either a change in the former currents, or more probably an oscillation of level in the bottom of the ancient estuary. Until lately, my reasons for considering the Pampaean formation to be an estuary deposit were, its general appearance, its position at the mouth of the existing great river the Plata, and the presence of so many ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... gentlemen who used to attach an heterogeneal collection of massive seals and keys to one end of a chain, and a small church-clock to the other. The chain then formed a pendulum in front of their small-clothes, and the dignified oscillation of the appendages was considered to distinguish the gentleman. They were also used as auxiliaries in argument; for whenever an hiatus occurred in the discussion, the speaker, by having resort to his watch-chain, could frequently ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... ever occurred before. Take for instance the hackneyed historic example of the austerity of the Commonwealth being followed by the licence of the Restoration. You cannot persuade any moral enthusiast to accept this as a pure oscillation from action to reaction. If he is a Puritan he looks upon the Restoration as a national disaster: if he is an artist he regards it as the salvation of the country from gloom, devil worship and starvation of the affections. The Puritan is ready to try ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw

... French physicist, born in Paris; distinguished for his studies in optics and problems connected with light; demonstrated the rate of the rotation of the globe by the oscillation of a pendulum (1819-1868). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... my coils to the seldom used oscillation frequency which Halsey had told us Anita's transmitter ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings

... always keep smooth; but the agitation of the surfaces where the oil and water meet, is curious; for their specific gravities being not very different, and their friction on each other nothing, the highest side of the water, as the phial descends in its oscillation, having acquired a greater momentum than the lowest side (from its having descended further) would rise the highest on the ascending side of the oscillation, and thence pushes the then uppermost part of the ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... portion of a color-wheel, with center at O, and with equal sectors A and B, in front of which a rod P oscillates to right and left on the same axis as that of the wheel. Let the disc rotate clockwise, and let P be observed in its rightward oscillation. Since the disc moves faster than the rod, the front of the sector A will at some point come up to and pass behind the rod P, say at p^{A}. P now hides a part of A and both are moving in the same direction. Since ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... invention by which he overcame the difficulty completely, consisted in employing a column of mercury as the "bob" of the pendulum. The hot weather, which lengthened the steel rods, raised the column of mercury, and so brought the centre of oscillation higher. If the column of mercury was of the right length, the lengthening or the shortening of the pendulum was exactly counterbalanced, and the variation of the clock, through changes of the temperature, ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton

... toward the snake, which was comparatively quiescent—that portion of its long body which hung between the tree and the first coil that it made round the beauteous form of Nisida alone moving; and this motion was a waving kind of oscillation, like that of a bell-rope which a person holds by the ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... the flank of the Ural chain. It would thus seem that they spread continuously across the whole breadth of Russia in Europe. Though almost everywhere undisturbed, they afford evidence of some terrestrial oscillation between the time of their formation and that of the Silurian rocks on which they rest, for they are found gradually to overlap Upper and Lower ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... louder than that made by the oscillation of a falling leaf came from a point some distance ahead and on his right. So soft indeed was the sound that it cannot be explained how the human ear could be trained to the point of ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis

... across the dust reddened by the sunset glow as the dust of a battlefield is reddened with blood. I felt as if I were stabbed; the red dust seemed to swim round me; I staggered slightly: in another instant I had recovered myself, but the momentary oscillation had terrified my comrades. The seventh and highest, feeling the human pyramid tremble beneath him, involuntarily, unconsciously, opened his arms to save himself. He did not lose his balance, but he let the child fall. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various

... the master of his later studies of men and the means of life, Thomas Carlyle. The religious instinct so conspicuous in him was a heritage from Scotland; thence the combination of shrewd common-sense and romantic sentiment; the oscillation between levity and dignity, from caustic jest to tender earnest; the restlessness, the fervour, the impetuosity—all these are the tokens of a Scotsman of parts, and were highly ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood

... the erect position, there is a constant slight oscillation of the body backward and forward, like the movement of a pendulum; while, in the stooping posture, the muscles on the posterior side of the spinal column are kept in a state of continued tension and contraction, to ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter

... of which appeared as "doctrines" and offered themselves for incorporation with the "faith."[465] The limits of the latter therefore seem to be indefinitely extended, whilst on the other hand tradition, and polemics too in many cases, demanded an adherence to the shortest formula. The oscillation between this brief formula, the contents of which, as a rule, did not suffice, and that fulness, which admitted of no bounds at all, is characteristic of the old Catholic Fathers we have mentioned. In the second place, these fathers felt quite as much need of a rational proof in their ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... chased each other around the control boards, died, were born again. On the screens the three color negatives mixed to purple, shifted through a series of wrong combinations and settled to normal as the stereo-oscillation echoed, convexed insanely, and deepened to hold. Video reception is lousy from five hundred thousand ...
— Measure for a Loner • James Judson Harmon

... must necessarily be a law, internal or external, which governs wages and prices; and since, in the present state of things, wages and prices vary and oscillate continually, we must ask what are the general facts, the causes, which make value vary and oscillate, and within what limits this oscillation ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... imparted to the avuncular pendulum a gentle oscillation, and retiring to cover behind a contiguous rock, lifted up my voice in a long rasping cry whose diminishing final note was drowned in a noise like that of a swearing cat, which emanated from the sack. Instantly that formidable sheep was upon its feet and had taken in the military situation at ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... we had the key to the correspondence between these phenomena and the mind, we should know all the thoughts and wishes of the person to whom the brain belonged—we should see what took place in his soul, as a telegraph operator could read by the oscillation of his needles the meaning of a message which was sent through his instrument. The notion of an equality or parallelism between conscious activity and cerebral activity, was commonly adopted by modern physiology, and it was adopted without discussion ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... cd are at right angles to those in ab there wouldn't be any effect in cd when a current in ab started or stopped. Look at the circuit of the oscillating audion in Fig. 38. If we should turn these coils at right angles to each other we would stop the oscillation. Electrons only influence other electrons ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills

... which had been interrupted by his vibrating diaphragm were conveyed to a distance by a metallic circuit, and there passed through a coil like that of Page, the iron needle would emit a note like that which had caused the oscillation of the transmitting diaphragm. Acting on this knowledge, he ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro

... there was a to and fro motion of the earth in the vicinity of Washington amounting to about four-tenths of an inch at the time of its greatest oscillation. These movements kept up in a constantly decreasing ratio until nearly half ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... there are rivers of mud that flow before the lava, and the lava itself, and from these the several places are filled, according as the overflow from time to time happens to come to each of them. But all these move up and down, as it were, by a certain oscillation existing in the earth. And this oscillation proceeds from such natural cause as this; one of the chasms of the earth is exceedingly large, and perforated through the entire earth, and is that which Homer[43] speaks of, 'very far off, where is the most profound abyss ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato

... in to diminish their surface in reefing them. Thence the necessity of running out on foot-ropes—movable ropes stretched below the yards—of working with one hand while holding on by the other—perilous work for any one who is not used to it. The oscillation from the rolling and pitching of the ship, very much increased by the length of the lever, the flapping of the sails under a stiff breeze, have often sent a man overboard. It was then a truly dangerous operation for Tom ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne

... along behind the moving office fixtures, their goggle eyes cast down in Christian meditation, their horizontal ears flopping solemnly in unison with their measured tread. Ever and anon the leader halts, uprolls the speculative eye, arrests the oscillation of the ears, laying them rigidly back along the neck, exalts the conscious tail, drops the lank jaw, and warbles a psalm of praise that shakes the blind hills from their eternal repose. His companions take up the parable in ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile

... "A slight oscillation of good in the instance of a solitary individual," answered Mr Escot, "by no means affects the solidity of my opinions concerning the general deterioration of the civilised world; which when I can ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock

... emitted by a sound has been often invoked as a proof of the perfect isochronism of the oscillation, and, consequently, as a demonstration a posteriori of the correctness of the early law of Hoocke governing elastic deformations. This law has, however, during some years been frequently disputed. Certain mechanicians ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare

... improved instruments it can be shown that instead of occasional vibrations, with long intermediate periods of rest, we have in reality short intervals of rest with long periods of vibration, or rather perhaps that the crust of the earth is in constant tremor, with more violent oscillation from time to time. ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock

... parents, is that the one balances and rectifies the motions of the other. No one is good but God. No one holds the truth, or can hold it, in one and the same thought, but God. Our human life is often, at best, but an oscillation between the extremes which together make the truth; and it is not a bad thing in a family, that the pendulums of father and mother should differ in movement so far, that when the one is at one extremity of the swing, the other ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald

... within it sounded as if the whole Allied Army were pounding the building. On top of the prison anti-aircraft guns were mounted and when they were discharged, which was continuously and rapidly, they shook the building violently. Indeed an earthquake could scarcely have set up a more agitated oscillation ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney

... intersecting orbits. As yet, however, we have no certain knowledge as to whether changes in the periods at which the stream becomes visible, or the 'retardations' of the phenomena of which I have already spoken, indicate a regular precession of oscillation of the nodes — that is to say, of the points of intersection of the Earth's orbit and of that of the ring; or whether this ring or zone attains so considerable a degree of breadth from the irregular grouping and distances apart of the small bodies, that it requires several days for the ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... of those high-strung men who pay for their periods of religious rapture by hours of melancholy. This oscillation of the spirits in extraordinary men appears to be more or less a law of nature; and this the Widow Gough ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... and spasmodic. There was a clearly perceptible interval—probably several minutes—between the first stirrings of consciousness and the full clarification of my faculties. I began to be aware of the rumble and oscillation of the train without realizing what was meant. Then I opened my eyes and blinked at the lamp, and vaguely noted the yellow oil washing to and fro in the bowl. Then the white square of the "Avis aux Voyageurs" caught my eye in the gloom under the luggage-rack, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various

... be cast upon the mirror, the light being again reflected on to the screen, you will see the spot of light dance up and down, and the more energetically the tuning-fork is bowed the greater is the amplitude of the oscillation of the spot of light. The duration of the time occupied is the same in traversing a longer as in traversing a shorter space, as is the case of the swinging pendulum. The vibrating prongs of the tuning-fork throw the air into vibrations which are conveyed to the ear and produce the sensation ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott

... nothing else than a tuning fork whose motion is kept up electrically in such a way as to last indefinitely, provided that the elements of the pile are renewed gradually, and that from time to time the metallic contact is changed, which causes, at every oscillation, the current to pass from the pile into the magnet, which keeps ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various

... imagination wrought upon from the centre of self. Her lips were neither thin nor compressed—they closed lightly, and were richly curved; but there was a mobility almost tremulous about the upper lip that gave sign of the possibility of such an oscillation of feeling as might cause the whole fabric of her ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... moving her position, the oscillation is resumed in the opposite direction. By means of this alternate motion, interspersed with numerous contacts, a segment of the sheet is obtained, of a very accurate texture. When this is done, the Spider moves a little ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... began to be more lonely and dark, he drew softly nearer, so that when they entered the Bois de Boulogne he found himself riding quite naturally side by side with his master. In fact, we must not dissemble that the oscillation of the tall trees and the reflection of the moon in the dark underwood gave him serious uneasiness. D'Artagnan could not help perceiving that something more than usual was passing in the mind of his lackey and said, "Well, Monsieur ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... SCR-Seventy-three. The equipment obtains its power from a self-excited inductor type alternator. This is propelled by a fixed wooden-blade air fan. In the steam-line casing of the alternator the rotary spark gap, alternator, potential transformer, condenser and oscillation transformer are self-contained. Usually the alternator is mounted on the underside of the fuselage where the propeller spends its force in the form of an air stream. The telegraph sending keys, field and battery switch, ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman

... the direct strain a number of the villagers took up their position to distend the side ropes, and having to get over the outstretched legs of these officious aids, made the affair a very much more nervous proceeding than it would otherwise have been. The lowness of the side-ropes, and the oscillation of the ricketty structure rendered the feat altogether a rather more amusing performance to the looker on than to the actual performer, and I was not to reach the opposite shore. On the arrival of the coolies, they all hung back, and regarded the machine ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight

... to a nearly flat surface, resulting in the condition of topographic old age. The final stage is again the peneplain. This cycle of events is called the erosion cycle or topographic cycle. Uplift may begin again before the surface is reduced to base level; in fact, there is a constant oscillation and contest between erosion and relative uplift ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith

... some of the difficulties that beset him in the task which he had undertaken. Despite the utmost care in lowering, the rope would persist in oscillating, very gently, it is true, but still sufficient to render it necessary to pause until the oscillation had ceased before attempting to take the measurement; also the torsion of the rope set up a slow revolving movement, so that, even when at length the oscillation ceased, it was only with difficulty that the correct measurement was taken and recorded in the book. This difficulty recurred ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood

... Toby's amours running all the way in my head, they had the same effect upon me as if they had been my own—I was in the most perfect state of bounty and good-will; and felt the kindliest harmony vibrating within me, with every oscillation of the chaise alike; so that whether the roads were rough or smooth, it made no difference; every thing I saw or had to do with, touch'd upon some secret spring either of sentiment ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne

... them by its weight, it would drop a few seconds later on to a lower one. The trepidation on our side was intense. At last the graceful body stuck across a bigger tree and swung on it for some minutes. The oscillation slowly ceased, and tree and goat became motionless. There our ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... Parlagreco's theory in a succession of pregnant sentences. "An accurate study, based upon his correspondence in connection with the events of the artist's life and the history of his works, has enabled me to detect in his character a persistent oscillation. Continual contradictions between great and generous ideas upon the one side, and puerile ideas upon the other; between the will and the word, thought and action; an excessive irritability and the highest degree ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... rigidly fixed. Let us suppose that this convex scale is pulled out of shape from the interior, so that it is slightly flattened and as quickly released; it will immediately regain its original convexity owing to the elasticity of the nervures. From this oscillation a ticking sound ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre

... the 29th of September to the 1st of October, there seemed to be a new reign: the Legislative Assembly found themselves on that day face to face with a king who, destitute of authority, ruled over a people destitute of moderation. They felt on their first sitting the oscillation of a power without a counterpoise, that seeks to balance itself by its own wisdom, and changing from insult to repentance, wounds itself with the weapon that has ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... but my mind has certain moments of repose, or rather of oscillation, which I would not for the world disturb. Music, eloquence, friendship, bring and ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... grow a little uneasy. A disagreeable surprise, if my excursion, in which I was to break banks and hearts, and, as you see, heads, should end upon the gallows or the guillotine. I was not clear, in those times of political oscillation, which was the ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... looked back upon these winter months, Piers could distinguish nothing clearly. It was a time of confused and obscure motives, of oscillation, of dreary conflict, of dull suffering. His correspondence with Olga, his meetings with her, had no issue. He made a thousand resolves; a thousand times he lost them. But for the day's work, which kept him in an even tenor for a certain number of hours, he must have ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing

... ship is perceptible, not even the rippling of the water along the hull. Nor is there the slightest movement to be felt; yet, in the estuary of the Neuse, the current is always strong enough, to cause a marked oscillation to any vessel. ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne

... that the great question is now at issue, whether man shall henceforth start forwards with accelerated velocity towards illimitable, and hitherto unconceived improvement, or be condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery, and after every effort remain still at an immeasurable distance from ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus

... Jean has her full share o' a' feelin's belangin' to fallen human natur'," said Mrs Mellis, with a slow horizontal oscillation of the head. "But ye jist come an' see wi' yer ain een, an' syne jeedge for yersel': it 's ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... mysterious stations, dragging furiously its freight of luxury and light and human masks through placid and humble villages and towns, of which it ignored everything save their coloured signals of safety. Ages of oscillation seemed to pass. In traversing the corridors one saw interior after interior full of the signs of wearied humanity: magazines thrown aside, rugs in disorder, hair dishevelled, eyes heavy, cheeks flushed, limbs in the abandoned ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett

... stone tomb with the covering of glass, which was being dragged upward. As it arose it filled closely the whole aperture. When its bottom had reached the level of the floor it stopped, and remained rigid. There was no room for oscillation. It was at once surrounded by a number of black figures, who raised the glass covering and bore it away into the darkness. Then there stepped forward a very tall man, black-bearded, and with head-gear like ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker

... domestication in certain animals induces and occasions a capacity for change which is wanting in wild animals—the introduction of new causes occasioning new effects. For, though a certain degree of variability (normally, in all probability, only oscillation) exists in all organisms, yet domestic ones are exposed to new and different causes of variability, resulting in such striking divergencies as have been observed. Not even in this latter case, however, is it necessary to believe that the variability is indefinite, but only that ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... expected, impossible, amazing reality. When I had deciphered the last word, when I had it borne fully in upon me, the significance of it all, I turned to the one natural effort to answer this Martian communication. I sent out from the battery of our transmitter the longest wave of magnetic oscillation I could emit. The message was simple: "Have received all. Await ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... tendencies at work eternally in the same world produce strain and tension and anguish. The tension occasioned by these opposite forces gives rise to the third "quality," which is a tendency toward movement, oscillation, rotation—what Boehme often calls the wheel of nature, or the wheel of motion, or the wheel of life.[28] This, too, is both outer and inner; a law of the physical world and a tendency of spirit. There is nothing in nature that is not ceaselessly moved, and there is no ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... six months to go wrong in, and then called for that pass-book again. My eye fell upon a paying and deducting and refunding and readjusting of an item itself so shameful that it dared only appear under its initials. Why this oscillation? I asked myself. So we engaged upon another correspondence, and another interview took place, at which I was supported by my subaltern (who could multiply and add), and the bank-man was supported by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various

... with his thick hands on the board in front of him; he looked steadily in Herrick's face, and Herrick as steadily looked upon the table and the pattering fingers; there was a gentle oscillation of the anchored ship, and a big patch of sunlight travelled to and fro between the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... of the draught clevis to the whiffletree bolt to permit the independent oscillation of the whiffletree ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various

... 'engine; this was first constructed with inlet valves in the heads of the pistons, after the Gnome pattern, the exhaust valves being in the heads of the cylinders. The inlet valve in the crown of each piston was mechanically operated in a very ingenious manner by the oscillation of the connecting-rod. The Gyro-Duplex engine superseded this original design, and a small cross-section illustration of this is appended. It is constructed in seven and nine-cylinder sizes, with a ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian

... kinetic and potential energy are complementary to one another, the sum-total of the two combined always remaining the same in any cycle of work, according to the principle of the conservation of energy. We get a good example of this oscillation from kinetic to potential, and vice versa, in the planetary system. When the earth is farthest from the sun, its velocity, and consequently its kinetic energy, is at its lowest point; but there ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper

... and of the form. But this equilibrium remains always an idea that reality can never completely reach. In reality, there will always remain a preponderance of one of these elements over the other, and the highest point to which experience can reach will consist in an oscillation between two principles, when sometimes reality and at others form will have the advantage. Ideal beauty is therefore eternally one and indivisible, because there can only be one single equilibrium; on the contrary, experimental beauty will be eternally double, because in ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... the other official prestige and Court of St. James's. On such minor and personal incidents (so to call them,) often depend the great growths and turns of civilization. This moment of a woman and a queen surely swung the grandest oscillation of modern history's pendulum. Many sayings and doings of that period, from foreign potentates and powers, might well be dropt in oblivion by America—but never this, if I could ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... century; Towards the south the rate decreases. South of Stockholm, until recent years, the sea has gained upon the land, and here in several seaboard towns streets by the shore are still submerged. The rate of oscillation increases also from the coast inland. On the other hand, along the German coast of the Baltic the only historic fluctuations of sea level are those which may be accounted for by variations due to changes in rainfall. In 1730 Celsius explained the changes of level of the Swedish coast ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... on Judaism, Protestant Christianity an advance on Roman Catholic Christianity, and Liberal and Rational Christianity an advance on Church Orthodoxy. But all such advances are subject to reaction and relapse. Reaction differs from relapse in this, that it is an oscillation, not a fall. Reaction is the backward swing of the wave, which will presently return, going farther forward than before. Relapse is the fall of the tide, which leaves the ships aground, and the beach uncovered. Reaction is going back to recover some substantial truth, left behind ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... not a growth but something picked up. Mr Palmer, senior, sometimes recoiled into intolerance and orthodoxy, and bewildered his son who, to use one of his own phrases, 'hardly knew where his father was.' Partly the reaction was due to the oscillation which accompanies serious and independent thought, but mainly it was caused by Mr Palmer's discontent with Frank's appropriation of a sentiment or doctrine of which he was not the lawful owner. Frank, however, was so hearty, so affectionate, and so cheerful, that it was impossible ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford

... rest will obviously assume the shape of a sphere, under the influence of gravitation, and it is a stable form, because any oscillation of the liquid which might be started would gradually die away under the influence of friction, however small. If now we impart to the whole mass of liquid a small speed of rotation about some axis, which may be called the polar axis, in such a way that there are no internal currents and so that ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... paper 'Montgolfier;' his car, suspended below the chafing-dish, and ballasted with combustible materials, caught fire; Olivari fell, and was killed! Mosment rose, at Lille, on a light tray; an oscillation disturbed his equilibrium; Mosment fell, and was killed! Bittorf, at Mannheim, saw his balloon catch fire in the air; and he, too, fell, and was killed! Harris rose in a badly constructed balloon, the valve of which was too large and would not shut; Harris ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne

... L. 3, 4), or as Montesquieu (Esprit des Lois XXVI., 15) more mildly expresses it, in the laws. The application of this principle would, on account of the extreme changeableness of the laws of every state, lead to most extreme insecurity, and to a steady oscillation from one Utopia to another, from one revolution to another, if it were not, at the same time, recognized that each one had a just title to the acquisitions he had made, not because the law, for the time being ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... dense clouds, but not a breath of air was stirring; and the balloon, kept in its place by only a single anchor, experienced not the slightest oscillation. ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne

... In almost all climes the tortoise and the frog are among the precursors and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve the equilibrium ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... till March. It then waited, and after a bit longer began to return, until June. By September it was displaced as much to the north as it had been to the south, and by December it had got back to its original position. It had described, in fact, a small oscillation in the course of the year. The motion affected neighbouring stars in a similar way, and was called an "aberration," or wandering ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... into the back building, and take the whole of the basement for the repairing workshop. Peter Dreyer managed this workshop, and there was no fault to find with his management; he was energetic and vigilant. He was not capable, however, of managing work on a large scale, for his mind was in constant oscillation. In spite of his abilities he ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... relapsed, and really for so long a time that the day inevitably came for a further sounding of their depths. These depths, constantly bridged over by a structure firm enough in spite of its lightness and of its occasional oscillation in the somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interest of their nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a measurement of the abyss. A difference had been made moreover, once for all, by the fact that she had all the while not appeared to feel the need of rebutting his ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James

... for a time, is no proof of the salubrity of diet. The increased strength may not continue, though the diet should be continued. On the contrary, there is a sort of oscillation; the strength just rising, then sinking again. This is what is experienced by the trainers of boxers. A certain time is necessary to get these men into condition; but this condition cannot be maintained for many weeks together, though the process by which it was ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott

... and long-continued researches of the illustrious geometer completely established the perpetual variability of the planetary ellipses. He demonstrated that the extremities of their major axes make the circuit of the heavens; that independent of oscillation, the planes of their orbits undergo displacements by which their intersections with the plane of the terrestrial orbit are each year directed toward different stars. But in the midst of this apparant chaos, there is one element which remains constant, or is merely subject to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... wished to correct was the oscillation and chatter of the leading truck. This was accomplished by a simple centering device in the form of a pair of V-shaped double incline planes (D on fig. 3) situated at the center of the truck frame (A). The lower planes ...
— Introduction of the Locomotive Safety Truck - Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology: Paper 24 • John H. White

... condition, adopting, in short, a modus vivendi which merely gives us the complex impression of life. But imagine these two feelings as INELASTIC and unvarying elements in a really living man, make him oscillate from one to the other; above all, arrange that this oscillation becomes entirely mechanical by adopting the well-known form of some habitual, simple, childish contrivance: then you will get the image we have so far found in all laughable objects, SOMETHING MECHANICAL IN SOMETHING LIVING; in fact, ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson

... were like sapphires. Standing in this dripping grotto, with his feet on the edge of a probably bottomless pool, Gilliatt suddenly became aware in the transparence of that water of the approach of some mystic form. A species of long, ragged band was moving amid the oscillation of the waves. It did not float, but darted about at its own will. It had an object; was advancing somewhere rapidly. The thing had something of the form of a jester's bauble with points, which hung flabby and undulating. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... the Ottoman power in Europe pretty nearly on that basis to which it had again fallen back by 1821. The long interval of time between these two dates involved a memorable flux and reflux of power, and an oscillation between two extremes of panic-striking grandeur, in the ascending scale (insomuch that the Turkish Sultan was supposed to be charged in the Apocalypse with the dissolution of the Christian thrones), and in the descending scale of paralytic dotage tempting its own instant ruin. In speculating ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... of this oscillation? Take the case to which I have previously referred. The finer or coarser sediments that are carried down by the current of the river, will only be carried out a certain distance, and eventually, as we have already seen, on reaching the stiller part of the ocean, will ...
— The Past Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley

... the oscillation of the pendulum has brought us back again for a moment to the age of gayety, and to that very Queen Anne spirit against which the serious and sentimental Thomson began the revolt. There is not only at present a renewed appreciation of what was admirable in the verse of Pope and the prose of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... uncertainty reinforce them. Even hand or arm movements by their motor suggestion may focus the desires of the customers, while unskillful, erratic movements may scatter the attention and lead to an inner oscillation of ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg

... Poems of Devotion, whose merit may not indeed be great, but whose feeling is, I think, genuine. Whatever were his faults, and they were not few, hypocrisy was not one of them. His nature was fierce and honest. He might boast, but he could not pretend. His oscillation between the reformed and the Romish church can hardly have had other cause than a vacillating conviction. It could not have served any prudential end that we can see, to turn catholic in the reign of Elizabeth, while in prison ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... James Clark Ross. These instruments were similar to the ordinary portable barometers, and differed from them only in the mode of their suspension and the necessary contraction of the tubes to prevent oscillation from the motion of the ship. The barometer on shipboard should be suspended on a gimbal frame, which ought not to swing too freely, but rather so as to deaden oscillations by some degree of friction. To the upper portion of the tube in this construction of instrument light is alike accessible either ...
— The Hurricane Guide - Being An Attempt To Connect The Rotary Gale Or Revolving - Storm With Atmospheric Waves. • William Radcliff Birt

... its tinsel and affectation, has to him seemed a gross deformation of the reality, ever since the day when at Ajaccio he attended a performance of "Norma," in which the moon was represented by a round transparent disc, lit from behind by a lantern hanging at the end of a string, whose oscillation revealed by turns first the luminary and then the transparency. This was enough to disgust him for ever with the theatre and the opera, whose motionless choruses, contrasting with the sometimes frantic movement of the music, left ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... control the lives of its adherents, as well as the Catholicism whose influence on her character he found himself beginning to fear. But he wished also that she should be repelled to some extent by the merciless rigidity she would find at Northampton, and thus, after an oscillation or two come to rest in the quiet eclecticism of that middle position which ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson

... stream of the Bievre, once a watering-place for cattle. The sun, now at high noon, massed the trees' shadow close around their trunks. The unbroken surface of the water reflected its rays back in our eyes. The current was barely indicated by the gentle oscillation of a few water-lily leaves. Two big blue dragonflies poised and quivered upon our floats, and not a fish seemed to care ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin

... together motion is apparently destroyed, but in reality there is no destruction. Their atoms are suddenly urged together by the shock; by their own perfect elasticity these atoms recoil; and thus is set up the molecular oscillation which, when communicated to the proper nerves, announces itself ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... one, my worthy friend; for it explains every phenomenon of caloric. Heat is but the motion of atoms, a simple oscillation of the particles of a body. When they apply the brake to a train, the train comes to a stop; but what becomes of the motion which it had previously possessed? It is transformed into heat, and the brake becomes hot. Why do they grease the axles ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne

... Roman custom lately introduced into Carthage, a man was fastened by the waist to a long chain let into the wall. His beard and nails had grown to an immoderate length, and he swayed himself from right to left with that continual oscillation which is characteristic of captive animals. As soon as he recognised Hamilcar ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert

... risen a flat diamond-shaped head with wicked green eyes which came flickering upwards, waving gently from side to side, until a foot or more of glossy scaly neck was visible. Slowly the vicious head came floating up, while at every oscillation a fresh burst of shrieks came ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle

... extravagant, and she walked in the streets as if she wished every one to notice her. It is the walk of the Music-Hall stage, and the trick of it consists chiefly in giving, so to speak, prominence to the shoulders and oscillation to the skirts. In fact, she was one of those ladies who ardently desire that all the world should ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant

... adjourned there has been a fluctuation in the interest on call money from 2 per cent to 30 per cent; and the fluctuation was even greater during the preceding six months. The Secretary of the Treasury had to step in and by wise action put a stop to the most violent period of oscillation. Even worse than such fluctuation is the advance in commercial rates and the uncertainty felt in the sufficiency of credit even at high rates. All commercial interests suffer during each crop period. Excessive rates for call money in New York attract money from the interior banks into the speculative ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... The same is true of all the laws of matter. The ideal law is known because it is a fact. The law is imperative. It must be obeyed without hesitation. Laws of crystallization, laws of proportion in chemical combination,—neither in these nor in any other law of Nature is there any margin left for oscillation of disobedience. Only the primal will of God works in the material world, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... traversing; and with good reason, since the law of self-preservation had now obliged the fugitive Tartars to plunder provisions and to forage wherever they passed. In this respect their condition was a constant oscillation of wretchedness; for sometimes, pressed by grinding famine, they took a circuit of perhaps a hundred miles, in order to strike into a land 5 rich in the comforts of life; but in such a land they were sure to find a crowded ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey

... part or head is lowered to its extreme limit, the machine occupies the least space. In this position, by means of the foot-holder it communicates oscillation to the legs; by means of the single-rubber, it acts upon the feet, ankles, and lower leg; by means of the double-rubber, it acts upon the legs, including the feet, the ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... surface in reefing them. Thence the necessity of running out on foot-ropes—movable ropes stretched below the yards—of working with one hand while holding on by the other—perilous work for any one who is not used to it. The oscillation from the rolling and pitching of the ship, very much increased by the length of the lever, the flapping of the sails under a stiff breeze, have often sent a man overboard. It was then a truly dangerous operation for Tom and ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne

... various objects contained in dwellings; but it was generally admitted that these did not proceed from earthquake shocks, but from atmospheric vibrations. No deviation of the magnetic needle was observed at the Meteorological Institute of Batavia; but a vertical oscillation was apparent, and persons who listened with the ear placed on the ground, even during the most violent detonations, could hear no subterranean noise whatever. It became clear that the sounds came from some volcano burst into activity; but it ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull

... according to him, is a modification of the brain by which it is disposed, or prepared, to set our other organs in motion. The will is necessarily determined by the quality and pleasantness of the ideas which act upon it. Deliberation is the oscillation of the will when moved in different directions by opposing forces; determination is the final prevalence of one force over the other. There is no difference between the man who throws himself out of a window and the man who is thrown out, except that the impulse on the latter comes from something ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... throb started, a feeder valve in the pre-induction energy chamber developed a positive-feedback oscillation that threatened to blow out the whole pre-induction stage unless it was damped. The search for the out-of-phase external field tubes had to be dropped while the more ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett

... drummed with his thick hands on the board in front of him; he looked steadily in Herrick's face, and Herrick as steadily looked upon the table and the pattering fingers; there was a gentle oscillation of the anchored ship, and a big patch of sunlight travelled to and fro between the ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... of knowledge based on the analysis of the idea of Disorder—Two opposed forms of order: the problem of genera and the problem of laws—The idea of "disorder" an oscillation of the intellect between the two kinds ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... room is for an instant filled with light. With light, I say, though you can see nothing. You can see and hear the spark indeed—but that is a mere secondary disturbance we can for the present ignore—I do not mean any secondary disturbance. I mean the true ethereal waves emitted by the electric oscillation going on in the neighborhood of this recoiling dielectric. You pull aside the prong of a tuning fork and let it go; vibration follows and sound is produced. You charge a Leyden jar and let it discharge; vibration follows ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various

... ceased to gaze, with an air of amiable authority, into a world which, as yet, beheld no symptoms of the Indian Mutiny. And yet, gently swinging against the wall, within the black tube, was a voice which recked nothing of Uncle James, of China teapots, or of red velvet curtains. She watched the oscillation of the tube, and at the same moment became conscious of the individuality of the house in which she stood; she heard the soft domestic sounds of regular existence upon staircases and floors above her ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... indeed a new play of the first magnitude. Tarzan was entranced. Soon he discovered that by wriggling his body in just the right way at the proper time he could diminish or accelerate his oscillation, and, being a boy, he chose, naturally, to accelerate. Presently he was swinging far and wide, while below him, the apes of the tribe of Kerchak ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... I had the pleasure of ploughing its rascally waters! The remainder of our voyage was a succession of squalls, calms, contrary winds, sticking on shoals for hours, and being detained on shore, with an accompaniment of pitching, tossing, oscillation and botheration, that baffles all description. However, time brings the greatest miseries to an end; and in the process of time we arrived at Tadousac—loaded our boat deeply with flour—shook hands with our friends—related our adventures—bade them adieu—and again found ourselves scudding down ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne

... what it is to be responsive to every call, solicited by every impulse, yet still, like the magnet, vibrate ever to the north, never so tense, never so aware of the stress and strain of force as when most irremovably fixed upon that goal. The intensity of life is not to be measured by the degree of oscillation. It is at the stillest point that the most tremendous energies meet; and such a point is the intelligence open to infinity. For such stillness I feel myself to be destined, if ever I could attain it. But others, I suppose, like MacCarthy, have a different ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson

... a minority of turbulent demagogues disloyal; and in December, 1880, the rebellion duly broke out, and the Transvaal Republic was proclaimed. What followed we know, war, Laing's Nek, Majuba, and one more violent oscillation of policy in the concession of a virtual independence to ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers

... ascertained that each lunar day, or the interval of twenty-four hours and about fifty-four minutes between two successive meridian passages of our satellite, is marked by a perceptible, though very small, double oscillation of the needle—two progressive movements from east to west, and two returns from west to east.[367] Moreover, the lunar, like the solar influence (as was proved in each case by Sabine's analysis of the Hobarton and Toronto observations), extends to all three ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... much value, and because it is not probable that the writer was influenced by prejudice and preconceived ideas. I shall quote from John Stuart Mill's "System of Logic," page 477: "There is a perpetual oscillation in spiritual truths, and in spiritual doctrines of any significance, even when not truths. Their meaning is almost always in a process either of being lost or of being recovered. Whoever has attended to the history of the more serious convictions ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz

... interrupted by his vibrating diaphragm were conveyed to a distance by a metallic circuit, and there passed through a coil like that of Page, the iron needle would emit a note like that which had caused the oscillation of the transmitting diaphragm. Acting on this knowledge, he ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro

... or dead-beat escapement, combined with a long pendulum terminating in a heavy bob, the force of gravity caused such slight variation that the motion was practically harmonic and had only a very minor effect on the clock. For a long case, you see, has an exceedingly confined arc of oscillation because the swing of the pendulum is so limited. It is this length of pendulum together with its almost harmonic motion which results in the excellent time-keeping done by clocks of the "grandfather" class. The time a pendulum takes to vibrate always depends on its ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett

... would have been the case if the breeze had been abeam or on her quarter—she listed first to port and then to starboard, with the "send" of the sea, as regularly as the swing of a clock's pendulum. Really, the oscillation made it almost as impossible for Fritz to move about as if the ship had been contending with all the powers of the elements in a heavy storm, whereas the skipper said she was only "going easy," with a ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson

... been fully asleep all night, and the sight of that mess, and what it meant, jolted me immediately awake. Something, probably a heavy truck, had started a tiny oscillation in that ball. And the ball had been heavy enough to start the table bouncing with it until, by dancing that table around the room, it had literally torn the clamp off and shaken itself free. What had happened afterward was obvious, ...
— The Big Bounce • Walter S. Tevis

... approximately the future velocity of the aerial locomotive. Let us rather attempt to calculate the probable velocity of a locomotive gliding through the air, without the possibility of running off the rails, without any oscillation, without the least obstacle. Let us fancy such locomotive encountering on its way, in the midst, one of those atmospheric currents which travel at the rate of forty leagues an hour, and following that current; add together these formidable data, and your imagination ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne

... liquid at rest will obviously assume the shape of a sphere, under the influence of gravitation, and it is a stable form, because any oscillation of the liquid which might be started would gradually die away under the influence of friction, however small. If now we impart to the whole mass of liquid a small speed of rotation about some axis, which may be called the polar axis, in such a way ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... condemned to the high roads, or at least to comparatively smooth and level ground, constitutes a severe handicap. Again, when travelling at high speed, and this is essential when pursuing a fast aeroplane, the accurate laying of the weapon is extremely difficult, owing to the oscillation of the vehicle itself, especially if the road surface is in a bad condition. The sighting arrangements are of a wonderfully complete character, as described elsewhere, but the irregular rolling movement arising ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot

... difficulty in descending the stairs; there was practically no oscillation of any kind in this still and windless summer night, and the two came down easily and looked round the ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson

... for it has no trace of inspiration. There is no such thing as mediation. We must not attach too much importance to the Messianic idea, for this would imply a special revelation. The Gospels rest on a very insecure basis. The theses of Paul betray a continued oscillation between the mystic and Jewish conceptions. As a whole, the Bible is not divine, and we should at once discard faith in its authoritative character. The only way by which Christ now acts upon persons is by the force of his example and ideas, just as Moses, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... carries a glass tube, c, which dips into a vessel containing either water or methylic alcohol. Three or four gas jets, one of which is shown at E, are arranged around the porous vessel, as close as possible, but in such a way as not to touch it during the oscillation of the beam. These gas jets communicate with a gasometer tilled with hydrogen, the bell of which is so charged as to furnish a jet of sufficient strength. Experience will indicate the best place to give the gas jets, but, in general, it is well to locate ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various

... wood, suggested to Brunell a plan by which the Thames river could be tunneled. The twitching of a frog's flesh as it touched a certain kind of metal led Galvani to invent the electric battery. The swinging of a spider's web across a garden walk led to the invention of the suspension bridge. The oscillation of a lamp in the temple of Pisa led Galileo to invent the measurement of time by a pendulum. A butterfly's wing suggested the combination of colors. So little things are suggestive of great things ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain

... a French physicist, born in Paris; distinguished for his studies in optics and problems connected with light; demonstrated the rate of the rotation of the globe by the oscillation of a pendulum (1819-1868). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... in ab there wouldn't be any effect in cd when a current in ab started or stopped. Look at the circuit of the oscillating audion in Fig. 38. If we should turn these coils at right angles to each other we would stop the oscillation. Electrons only influence other electrons which ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills

... truth, was one of those high-strung men who pay for their periods of religious rapture by hours of melancholy. This oscillation of the spirits in extraordinary men appears to be more or less a law of nature; and this the Widow Gough ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... the West, when once one has grasped the idea of continental oscillation, or submergence and emergence of the land, of the sequence of the marine and fresh-water deposits in laying down these pages of earth-history, he will know exactly where to look for this wonderful layer-bed of the giant dinosaurs; he will find that, owing to the ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew

... the Spider's moving her position, the oscillation is resumed in the opposite direction. By means of this alternate motion, interspersed with numerous contacts, a segment of the sheet is obtained, of a very accurate texture. When this is done, the Spider moves ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... watering-place for cattle. The sun, now at high noon, massed the trees' shadow close around their trunks. The unbroken surface of the water reflected its rays back in our eyes. The current was barely indicated by the gentle oscillation of a few water-lily leaves. Two big blue dragonflies poised and quivered upon our floats, and not a fish seemed to ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin

... use. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) delineated, if he did not build, a crank and slider mechanism, also for a sawmill (fig. 2). In the 16th century may be found the conversion of rotary to reciprocating motion (strictly speaking, an oscillation through a small arc of a large circle) and vice versa by use of linkages of rigid members (figs. 3 and 4), although the conversion of rotary to reciprocating motion was at that time more frequently accomplished ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson

... raises her left hand with a sign of disapprobation. This position of the hand is described in full as open, raised high, and oscillated from right to left. Several of the Indian signs have the same idea of oscillation of the hand raised, often near the head, to express folly, fool. She clearly says, "What a thing to ask! what a fool you are!" and at the same time makes with the right hand the sign of money. This is made by the extremities of the thumb ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery

... deciphered the last word, when I had it borne fully in upon me, the significance of it all, I turned to the one natural effort to answer this Martian communication. I sent out from the battery of our transmitter the longest wave of magnetic oscillation I could emit. The message was simple: "Have received ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... the early trouble with the foundation of the great tower, there was from the first no intention of making it a belfry. Even before the spire was decided upon, the oscillation of a mass of swaying bells was obviously too dangerous to be seriously considered. A special campanile, as at Chichester, was therefore built at the north-west corner of the close. Its style was evidently similar to that of the cloisters and the chapter house. Multangular in form, an early historian ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White

... aptitudes for their instant comprehension, no racial impulses whatever in harmony with them. But when they have become familiar through study, after a long residence in the Orient, how nervously fascinant the oscillation of the dance, and the singular swing ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn

... who are found fighting now in this camp, now in that. The camps themselves are fairly matched: Rads and Tories—the sexes of politics—are as evenly created as men and women. They are like ten-pound weights standing on either scale of a balance. What, then, determines the oscillation this way or that? Evidently the miserable little half-ounce weight placed sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other. In fine,'tisthe tiny squadron of free-lances that wins general elections, the voters who think or who don't think, or who veer to be with the majority. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... to have been one of the first who observed this significance of the oscillation of the birth-rate, though he expressed it in a somewhat peculiar way, as the social capillarity theory. It is the natural and universal tendency of mankind to ascend, he declared; a high birth-rate and a strong ascensional ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... than is generally paid to him. He is the link between the old classic and the modern way of thinking in verse. You will observe in him an oscillation between the objective poetry of the ancients and the subjective mood of the moderns. His power of pleasingly reproducing the same thought in different language is remarkable, as it is in Pope. Read particularly ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge

... attracted by the oscillation of a brass lamp suspended from the ceiling of the cathedral at Pisa. Galileo was impressed with the regularity of its motion as it swung backwards and forwards, and was led to imagine that the pendulum movement might prove a valuable method for ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard

... aerial bridge, sometimes exceeding 200 feet, caused it—confined as it was only at the extremities—to dip, with an alarming inclination towards the centre; while the motion given it by the passenger created an oscillation frightful to one whose eye glanced down into the dark abyss of waters, that foamed and ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... ceased to enquire of Him. Hence her present vices and misery in contrast with her early troth and safety. Hence the twin evils of the time—on the one hand the nation's trust in heathen powers and silly oscillation between Egypt and Assyria; on the other the gross immoralities to which the Baals had seduced its sons. There was a double prostitution, to gods and to men, so foul that the young prophet uses the rankest facts ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... firmly to the carriage door and the oscillation of the cab caused her to nod violently, but it was not in assent to Christopher's proposition. She appeared to be turning something over ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant

... observations here there was a to and fro motion of the earth in the vicinity of Washington amounting to about four-tenths of an inch at the time of its greatest oscillation. These movements kept up in a constantly decreasing ratio until nearly ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... rooms at the hotel; a dark solitary figure, with bent head, and a heart full of tumultuous hopes and fears. The events of the evening had stirred him as he had not been stirred since those early days of torment, of undignified oscillation between yearning and despair: and now, at last, love unsteadied for the first time the foundations of his pride; brought home to him the cardinal truth that all the beauty and terror of life spring from the inexorable law of duality that links man and woman, ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... are complementary to one another, the sum-total of the two combined always remaining the same in any cycle of work, according to the principle of the conservation of energy. We get a good example of this oscillation from kinetic to potential, and vice versa, in the planetary system. When the earth is farthest from the sun, its velocity, and consequently its kinetic energy, is at its lowest point; but there the potential energy is at its greatest. As the earth turns round in its orbit, however, ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper

... real meaning of that mystery which appears so prominently in the lives of great sceptics, which appears with especial prominence in the life of Charles II. I mean their constant oscillation between atheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is indeed a great and fixed and formidable system, but so is atheism. Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas, more daring than the vision of a palpable day of judgment. For it is the assertion of a universal ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton

... I imparted to the avuncular pendulum a gentle oscillation, and retiring to cover behind a contiguous rock, lifted up my voice in a long rasping cry whose diminishing final note was drowned in a noise like that of a swearing cat, which emanated from the sack. Instantly that formidable sheep was ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... comparison. As for the vaunted promenade—the man who would avail himself thereof, would, probably waltz with grace and comfort to himself on the deck of the Lively Sally in a sea-way: it requires some practice even to stand upright without holding on; the jolting and oscillation are such that I think you take rather more involuntary exercise than on the back of a cantering cover-hack. The pace is not such as to make much amends: from twenty to twenty-five miles an hour is the outside speed even of expresses: and on many lines you ought to calculate ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... time, it was observed of Captain Tonkins that he began to show signs of fatigue, rocking heavily in his seat with every oscillation of the sleigh, and talking thick like a jaded man. These phenomena seeming to require some explanation, the Captain stated that he had been up late the past three nights, and could keep himself awake only by taking occasional draughts of Quigg's brandy. The Captain then ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... roared and flashed on its invisible way under a dome of stars. It shrieked by mysterious stations, dragging furiously its freight of luxury and light and human masks through placid and humble villages and towns, of which it ignored everything save their coloured signals of safety. Ages of oscillation seemed to pass. In traversing the corridors one saw interior after interior full of the signs of wearied humanity: magazines thrown aside, rugs in disorder, hair dishevelled, eyes heavy, cheeks flushed, ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett

... ever since the day when at Ajaccio he attended a performance of "Norma," in which the moon was represented by a round transparent disc, lit from behind by a lantern hanging at the end of a string, whose oscillation revealed by turns first the luminary and then the transparency. This was enough to disgust him for ever with the theatre and the opera, whose motionless choruses, contrasting with the sometimes frantic movement of the music, left him with a ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... was slow and spasmodic. There was a clearly perceptible interval—probably several minutes—between the first stirrings of consciousness and the full clarification of my faculties. I began to be aware of the rumble and oscillation of the train without realizing what was meant. Then I opened my eyes and blinked at the lamp, and vaguely noted the yellow oil washing to and fro in the bowl. Then the white square of the "Avis aux Voyageurs" caught my eye ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various

... smaller islands, indeed, were for a time completely submerged. Before long, however, the sea fell again, and as it did so the observers "found it impossible to resist the impression that the islands were rising bodily out of the water." For no less than three days this strange oscillation of the sea continued to be experienced, the most remarkable ebbs and floods being noticed at Honolulu, on the ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various

... people acquire a see-saw motion of their bodies from one side to the other, as they sit, like the oscillation of a pendulum. By these motions the muscles, which preserve the perpendicularity of the body, are alternately quiescent, and exerted; and are thus less liable to fatigue or exhaustion. This therefore ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... length of this aerial bridge, sometimes exceeding two hundred feet, caused it, confined, as it was, only at the extremities, to dip with an alarming inclination towards the centre, while the motion given to it by the passenger occasioned an oscillation still more frightful, as his eye wandered over the dark abyss of waters that foamed and tumbled many a fathom beneath. Yet these light and fragile fabrics were crossed without fear by the Peruvians, and are still retained by the Spaniards over those streams which, from the depth or impetuosity ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott

... having now ascended as far as possible forward in its swing, and its motion checked by the banking action of the plan it will again swing back, and again carry with it the frame, thus setting up an oscillation, ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***

... of a class of gentlemen who used to attach an heterogeneal collection of massive seals and keys to one end of a chain, and a small church-clock to the other. The chain then formed a pendulum in front of their small-clothes, and the dignified oscillation of the appendages was considered to distinguish the gentleman. They were also used as auxiliaries in argument; for whenever an hiatus occurred in the discussion, the speaker, by having resort to his watch-chain, could frequently confound his adversary by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... that made by the oscillation of a falling leaf came from a point some distance ahead and on his right. So soft indeed was the sound that it cannot be explained how the human ear could be trained to the point of ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis

... more, the table at which they were seated, began to move up and down with a kind of vertical oscillation, and several things in the room began to slide about, by short, apparently purposeless jerks. Everything threatened to assume motion, and turn the library into a domestic chaos. Mrs. Elton declared afterwards that several books were thrown about the room. — But suddenly ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald

... everywhere else, Plato is making war against the philosophers who put words in the place of things, who tear arguments to tatters, who deny predication, and thus make knowledge impossible, to whom ideas and objects of sense have no fixedness, but are in a state of perpetual oscillation and transition. Two great truths seem to be indirectly taught through these fallacies: (1) The uncertainty of language, which allows the same words to be used in different meanings, or with different degrees of meaning: (2) The necessary limitation ...
— Euthydemus • Plato

... seemed to be a new reign: the Legislative Assembly found themselves on that day face to face with a king who, destitute of authority, ruled over a people destitute of moderation. They felt on their first sitting the oscillation of a power without a counterpoise, that seeks to balance itself by its own wisdom, and changing from insult to repentance, wounds itself with the weapon that has ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... are swallowed up by the barns, the still available houses being reserved for officers and departments. Our half-company is led at first to the end of the village, and then—by some misunderstanding among the quartermasters—back to the other end, the one by which we entered. This oscillation takes up time, and the squad, dragged thus from north to south and from south to north, heavily fatigued and irritated by wasted walking, evinces feverish impatience. For it is supremely important to be installed and set free as early as possible if we are to carry out the ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... portion has been taken from the Upaskara of S'ankara Mis'ra on the Vais'e@sika sutras of Ka@nada. It must be noted here that the notion of number according to Vais'e@sika is due to mental relativity or oscillation (apeksabuddhijanya). But this mental relativity can only start when the thing having number is either seen or touched; and it is in this sense that notion of number is said to depend on the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta

... the fight to the audience. A succession of heaves from the back of the crowd had sent a series of long ripples running through it, all the heads swaying rhythmically in the one direction like a wheatfield in a squall. With every impulsion the oscillation increased, those in front trying vainly to steady themselves against the rushes from behind, until suddenly there came a sharp snap, two white stakes with earth clinging to their points flew into the outer ring, and a spray of people, dashed from the solid ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... installation embodying sheer perfection of instrumental control—a system which only those wonder instrument-makers, the Osnomians, could have devised. The new object-compasses were housed in arenak cases after setting, and the housings were then exhausted to the highest attainable vacuum. Oscillation was set up by means of one carefully standardized electrical impulse, instead of by the clumsy finger-touch Seaton had used. The bearings, built of arenak and Osnomian jewels, were as strong as the axles of a truck and yet ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... wildest and most satirical misnomer. Liza had not been too severe on Dash's physical infirmities when she described him as lame on one of his hind legs, for both those members were so effectually out of joint as to render locomotion of the simplest kind a difficulty attended by violent oscillation. This was probably the circumstance that had recommended Dash as the object of Robbie's half-drunken pastime; and after a fruitless half-hour's exercise the tractable little creature, with a woeful expression ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine

... was covered with dense clouds, but not a breath of air was stirring; and the balloon, kept in its place by only a single anchor, experienced not the slightest oscillation. ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne

... Madame," was his reply, in a French sufficiently heavy and stiff-jointed, enforced by a dubious oscillation of the head. ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland

... were then interlaced with branches of hazel and brushwood and upon this the sleepers and rails were laid, the whole being ballasted with sand and other light material. And, in the end it proved a triumph for courage and ingenuity. Though there might be some slight oscillation, heavy trains have been running over this interesting two or three mile stretch for many a long ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine

... he said would have certified little or nothing in it; but that little or nothing was pleasantly uttered, and served perhaps as well as something cleverer to pass a faint electric flash between common mind and mind. The slouch, the hands-in-pocket mood, the toe-and-heel oscillation upon the hearth-rug—those flying signals that self was at home to nobody but himself, had for the time vanished; desire to please had tied up the black dog in his kennel, and let the white one out. By keeping close in the protective shadow of the fashion, he always managed to be well-dressed. ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... turned up from under the newer formations along the flank of the Ural chain. It would thus seem that they spread continuously across the whole breadth of Russia in Europe. Though almost everywhere undisturbed, they afford evidence of some terrestrial oscillation between the time of their formation and that of the Silurian rocks on which they rest, for they are found gradually to overlap ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... most important being the vitascope, which has a revolvable cylinder, blackened with soot, and this being rotated at a certain speed, the stylus, which is attached to the vibrating body, in contact with the cylinder, will show the number per second, as well as the particular character of each oscillation. ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe

... muddy estuary, into which floating carcasses were swept. At Punta Gorda, in Banda Oriental, I found an alternation of the Pampaean estuary deposit, with a limestone containing some of the same extinct sea-shells; and this shows either a change in the former currents, or more probably an oscillation of level in the bottom of the ancient estuary. Until lately, my reasons for considering the Pampaean formation to be an estuary deposit were, its general appearance, its position at the mouth of the existing great river the Plata, and the presence of so many ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... Peter Dreyer managed this workshop, and there was no fault to find with his management; he was energetic and vigilant. He was not capable, however, of managing work on a large scale, for his mind was in constant oscillation. In spite of his abilities he was burning to ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... peculiarly of the ancient race that dwelt in hollow trees ere white men came. In almost all climes the tortoise and the frog are among the precursors and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... or Edinburgh chairmen. You must sit quite in the middle, or run the perpetual chance of capsizing. A little alarming, also, is it to look out on the stone-strewn furrow, over which the mules carry you safely enough; and when you have become reconciled to the oscillation, and have learned to trim the boat in which you have embarked, it is long before your ear becomes accustomed to the stunning sound of a hundred little bells fastened to the mules' heads. "Do take them off," said we, after half an hour's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... At one place, the way is upon long beams introduced into holes made in the rock, like a bridge, and covered up with earth. Brr!—At the thought that a little stone might get loose and roll down the slope of the mountain, or that a too strong oscillation of the beams could precipitate the whole structure into the abyss, and with it him who had ventured upon the perilous path, one feels like fainting more than once during ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch

... permanent; that they can be other than poor temporary makeshifts, which, if they try to fancy and make themselves permanent, will be displaced by new explosions recurring more speedily than last time. In such baleful oscillation, afloat as amid raging bottomless eddies and conflicting sea-currents, not steadfast as on fixed foundations, must European Society continue swaying, now disastrously tumbling, then painfully readjusting itself, at ever shorter intervals,—till once the new rock-basis does come to light, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... higher than political, by showing them that these sources are within them, and that no contrivance of man can permanently emancipate narrow natures and depraved minds. His politics were always those of a poet, circling in the larger orbit of causes and principles, careless of the transitory oscillation of events. ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... "Yes; oscillation means danger. If you're ever in a coach that oscillates much, tell of it at the first station and get it coupled up closer. Coaches when they're too loose are apt to jump, or swing off the rails; and it's quite ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens

... sight of a thousand men crossing the great structure in measured tread, with band playing and colors flying. They did not know that the structure, being a suspension bridge, might have been weakened and possibly destroyed by the force of rhythmic oscillation. Yet the accumulated force in the tramp of a thousand men is no greater than that which lies in the sympathetic vibrations of a musical note. Every metal structure has its note, and it is an old engineering saw that a huge structure like the ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller

... clock slowly crept along the dial-plate towards four, the hour so relentlessly enforced for interments for half a century by the sexton, who was now about to lay away his own wife in the greedy maw of the grave. The monotonous oscillation of the pendulum, sounding as the stroke of a passing bell, gathered solemnity of tone in the felt hush that rested upon all in the room—a hush as deep as that which rested upon the dead. All eyes, under the cover of stealthily drooping ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather

... pushed Hans over the brink. He fell into the car. It swayed into an oscillation with the impact. The balloon sank below our wing level and was gone, with only Hans, muffled shouts ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... to ensure its better protection and in accordance with a Roman custom lately introduced into Carthage, a man was fastened by the waist to a long chain let into the wall. His beard and nails had grown to an immoderate length, and he swayed himself from right to left with that continual oscillation which is characteristic of captive animals. As soon as he recognised Hamilcar he ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert

... has therefore been largely the product of commercial development, it has necessarily been of slow and gradual growth, tentative in its character, and subject to oscillation between the extremes of conflicting interests according to the temporary and varying predominance of each of these interests from time to time. No intelligible grasp of the principles which underlie the history of bankruptcy legislation in England, and no satisfactory ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... confutations let one suffice. According to this system the idea or vibration a from the external object A becomes associable with the idea or vibration m from the external object M, because the oscillation a propagated itself so as to re-produce the oscillation m. But the original impression from M was essentially different from the impression A: unless therefore different causes may produce the same effect, the vibration a could never produce the vibration m: and this ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... iron jar filled with quicksilver and fixed to the end of the pendulum rod. When the rod was lengthened by heat, the quicksilver and the jar which contained it were simultaneously expanded and elevated, and the centre of oscillation was thus continued at the same distance from the ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles

... Father! pardon in me The oscillation of a mind Unsteadfast, and that cannot find Its centre of rest and harmony! For evermore before mine eyes This ghastly phantom flits and flies, And as a madman through a crowd, With frantic gestures and wild cries, It hurries onward, and aloud Repeats its awful prophecies! ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... fat, and sun-tanned man from his willow chair on the veranda behind her. There was a slight palsied oscillation in his head. He leaned forward somewhat on a staff, and as he spoke his entire shapeless and nearly helpless form quaked with the effort. But Mary, for all his advice, raised the glass and swung it slowly from east ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable

... its upheaval. The Red Sea, therefore, is the only area in which we have clear proofs of the recent elevation of a district, which, by our theory (although the barrier-reefs are there not well characterised), has lately subsided. But we have no reason to be surprised at oscillation, of level of this kind having occasionally taken place. There can be scarcely any doubt that Savage, Aurora (Aurora Island is described by Mr. Couthouy ("Remarks," page 58); it lies 120 miles north-east of Tahiti; it is not coloured in the ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin

... ecliptic. The strong evidence afforded by the history of mythology, and geological researches, that some event of this nature has taken place already, affords a strong presumption that this progress is not merely an oscillation, as has been surmised by some late astronomers. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley









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