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More "Tenuity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of these bodies had been well established. They had been observed to pass among the satellites of Jupiter without bringing about any sensible alteration either in the masses or in the orbits of these secondary planets. We had long regarded the wanderers as vapory creations of inconceivable tenuity, and as altogether incapable of doing injury to our substantial globe, even in the event of contact. But contact was not in any degree dreaded; for the elements of all the comets were accurately known. That among them we should look for the agency of the threatened fiery destruction ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... appear to exert himself to quite the pitch needful for victory. The duel already had been long contested and the day was drawing to a close. Presently the sudden transition from daylight to darkness which, owing to the tenuity of the air upon Barsoom, occurs almost without the warning twilight of Earth, would occur. Would the fight never end? Would the game be called a draw after all? What ailed the ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... it was recognized that there were two main kinds of wit. Both fancy and judgment, said Hobbes (Human Nature, X, sect. 4), are usually understood in the term wit; and wit seems to be "a tenuity and agility of spirits," opposed to the sluggishness of spirits assumed to be characteristic of dull people. Sometimes wit was used in this sense to translate the words ingenium or l'esprit. But Hobbes's disciple ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... The grey-trunked trees sprang up straight to a great height and then interwove their pale-grey branches in a long tunnel through which the autumn light fell faintly. I know most trees by name, but I haven't to this day been able to decide what those trees were. They had the tall curve of elms, the tenuity of poplars, the ashen colour of olives under a rainy sky; and they stretched ahead of me for half a mile or more without a break in their arch. If ever I saw an avenue that unmistakably led to something, it was ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... hand, the self-same chemical act which rendered a body competent to intercept the waves of aether, rendering it competent, in the same degree, to generate them. Perfumes were next subjected to examination, and, notwithstanding their extraordinary tenuity, they were found vastly superior, in point of absorptive power, to the body of the air in which they were diffused. We were led thus slowly up to the examination of the most widely diffused and most important of all vapours—the aqueous vapour of our atmosphere, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... appears to be founded upon the extreme tenuity of the particles of fine dust, so minutely divided as to seem ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... la charmante Lucile more distinguish'd than all, He so gayly goes off with the belle of the ball." "Is it true," asked a lady aggressively fat, Who, fierce as a female Leviathan, sat By another that look'd like a needle, all steel And tenuity—"Luvois will marry Lucile?" The needle seem'd jerk'd by a virulent twitch, As though it were bent upon driving a stitch Through somebody's character. "Madam," replied, Interposing, a young man who sat by their side, And was languidly ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... narrow off, we took some of the deposit from the bottom by means of a long straight piece of tubing, in order to bring it under microscopical examination. We found it to consist of a host of long filaments of extreme tenuity, their diameter being about 1/1000th of a millimetre (0.000039 in.); their length varied, in some cases being as much as 1/20th of a millimetre (0.0019 in.). A crowd of these long vibrios were to be seen ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... planets with their secondaries, were all moulded into one mass, and then dilated so as to fill the vast sphere of which the orbit of Uranus forms a circumference, the substance would evidently be in a state of extreme tenuity and diffusion. Immense as the mass of the sun now is, it is but a mere nut at the centre of the grand globe which we are now considering. Expanded to such vast dimensions, we cannot conceive of it as a solid spheroid turning ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... bed, like a man who clings to life, and wishes to economize, as much as possible, that slender tissue of existence, of which the shocks and frictions of this world so quickly wear out the tenuity. D'Artagnan appeared at the door of this chamber, and was saluted by the superintendent with ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... having made a submissive leg [made a submissive bow] and a little admired [gazed at] the number, and understanding countenances of his auditors: let the subject be what it will, he falls presently into a most lamentable complaint of his insufficiency and tenuity [slenderness] that he, poor thing! "hath no acquaintance with above a Muse and a half!" and "that he never drank above six quarts of Helicon!" and you "have put him here upon such a task" (perhaps the business is ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... had his day as well as his way. The so-called Gothic architecture had expressed its uttermost of aspiration and tenuity; and painting had fulfilled its utmost accommodation to the ever more slender wall-spaces and forms which this architecture necessitated. And once again, in the fifteenth century, the time was ripe for a new transition. Art was now ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... progeny to have existed in miniature in the animal originally created; and that these infinitely minute forms are only evolved or distended, as the embryon increases in the womb. This idea, besides its being unsupported by any analogy we are acquainted with, ascribes a greater tenuity to organized matter than we can readily admit; as these included embryons are supposed each of them to consist of the various and complicate parts of animal bodies, they must possess a much greater degree of ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... save where it lay in immediate contact with the snow, charred and shrivelled and sent up a quivering thread of smoke. There was no doubt left to me; the atmosphere of the moon was either pure oxygen or air, and capable therefore—unless its tenuity was excessive—of supporting our alien life. ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... blood. How this happens, our knowledge of the theory of sanguification does not enable us to determine. Perhaps, as the imperfect respiration must cause a deficiency of air, and consequently of oxygen, in the lungs; and as the absorption of oxygen is a cause of solidity in many bodies, this tenuity of the blood may proceed from a deficient absorption of oxygen. However this may be, it is certain that the blood is very much attenuated, though with considerable variations in degree, as it is sometimes found thin on opening a vein, and at a subsequent period is thicker; varying perhaps ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren
... estimation. Now if this light gas passes through the atmosphere, without combining with it, it must compose another atmosphere over the aerial one; which must expand, when the pressure above it is thus taken away, to inconceivable tenuity. ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... of the barracks—so small that I foresaw our nights would not be comfortable. There were five truckle beds ranged against the wall; 'twas clear that each of us would have a bedfellow. The bedding consisted of a hard straw mattress and a single woollen coverlet which, judging by its tenuity, had already seen service with generations of sleepers. Luckily it was early autumn; we should not need to dread the winter cold for some time to come; and I was young and lighthearted enough to flatter myself with the fancy that we should either be released as the sequel ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... our author something substantial in it. Ideas savour most of reality in his mind; or rather his imagination loiters on the edge of each, and a page of his writings recalls to our fancy the stranger on the grate, fluttering in its dusky tenuity, with its ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the roof was remarkably beautiful, long festoons and tufts of ice hanging down, light and brilliant as silver gauze: this ice was supposed to be formed from the abundant vapours of the beginning of winter, and resembled glass blown to the utmost tenuity. It was crystallised, too, in a wonderful manner. Patrin found long bundles of hexahedral tubes, the walls of which were formed of transverse needles: the diameter of these tubes was from two to six lines only, but at the lower extremities ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... honor, almost kneeling at his feet. Cecilia was almost as tender with him as Florence, pleading to her own false heart the fact of his illness as his excuse. There was something of the pallor of the sick-room left with him—a slight tenuity in his hands and brightness in his eye which did him yeoman's service. Had he been quite robust, Cecilia might have felt that she could not justify to herself the peculiar softness of her words. After the first quarter of an hour he was supremely happy. His awkwardness ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... temerarious excitement of his first essay was shot with fear. For he perceived, at first indistinctly, and then suddenly very clearly, that he was surrounded by FACES! that each roll and coil of the seeming cloud-stuff was a face. And such faces! Faces of thin shadow, faces of gaseous tenuity. Faces like those faces that glare with intolerable strangeness upon the sleeper in the evil hours of his dreams. Evil, greedy eyes that were full of a covetous curiosity, faces with knit brows and snarling, smiling lips; their vague hands clutched at Mr. Bessel as he passed, and the rest of their ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... with "vacuum" tubes, he has found that the discharge is also invariably disruptive. This is an important point, as many physicists speak and write of the phenomenon as one of conduction. Air, in every degree of tenuity, refuses to act as a conductor of electricity. These experiments show that the resistance of gaseous media diminishes with the pressure only up to a certain point, beyond which it rapidly increases. Thus, in the case of hydrogen, ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... and Works of Chatterton gave Scott an opportunity to discuss the characteristics of Middle-English poetry, but his general thesis, that the Rowley poems exhibit graces and refinements which are in marked contrast to the tenuity of idea and tautology of expression found in genuine works of the period, is supported by an argument which seems to be based on a characterization of the romances rather than on a close acquaintance with other Middle-English poetry. We notice a similar quality in what Scott says ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... such particles as have little or no cohesion, and which slide easily among each other, and yield to the slightest force, is evident from the ease with which animals breathe it, and move through it. Indeed from its being transparent, and therefore invisible, as well as from its extreme tenuity, and the ease with which bodies move through it, people will scarcely believe that they are living at the bottom of an aerial ocean, like fishes at the bottom of the sea. We become, however, very sensible of it, when it flows rapidly in streams or currents, ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... his day as well as his way. The so-called Gothic architecture had expressed its uttermost of aspiration and tenuity; and painting had fulfilled its utmost accommodation to the ever more slender wall-spaces and forms which this architecture necessitated. And once again, in the fifteenth century, the time was ripe for a new transition. Art was ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... who read this amiable writer go on their way through his pages without discerning this quiver, this ripple, this vibration, of "miching mallecho." On softly-stepping feline feet, the great sleek panther of psychological curiosity glides into very perverse, very dubious paths. The exquisite tenuity and flexibility of his style, light as the flutter of a feather through the air, enable him to wander freely and at large where almost every other writer would trip and stumble in the mud. It is one of the most interesting phenomena in literature, this sly, quiet, half ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... struck at once by the exquisite refinement of mind, the subtleness of association, and the extreme tenuity of the threads of thought, the gossamer filaments yet finally weaving themselves together, and thickening imperceptibly into a strong and expanded web. Mingled with this, and perhaps springing from a similar mental habit, is an occasional dreaminess ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... convince her, she has really fine limbs, without spoiling or distorting them. I expect your directions, ere I proceed to dwindle and fall away with despair; which at present I don't think advisable, because, if she should recant, she may then hate me perhaps in the other extreme for my tenuity. I ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... entirely composed of fibers of pure "spongin." These fibers are so close together as to draw up water by capillary action, and, indeed, a great deal in the value of a sponge depends upon the fineness and tenuity of these fibers. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... established. They had been observed to pass among the satellites of Jupiter without bringing about any sensible alteration either in the masses or in the orbits of these secondary planets. We had long regarded the wanderers as vapory creations of inconceivable tenuity, and as altogether incapable of doing injury to our substantial globe, even in the event of contact. But contact was not in any degree dreaded; for the elements of all the comets were accurately known. That among ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... of the Philosopher's "stone;" and thus we find throughout Europe the Arabic modifications of Greek terms Alchemy, Alembic (Al- ), Chemistry and Elixir; while "Alcohol" (Al-Kohl), originally meaning "extreme tenuity or impalpable state of pulverulent substances," clearly shows the origin of the article. Avicenna, who died in A.H. 428 1036, nearly two hundred years before we read of distillation in Europe, compared the human body with an alembic, the belly ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... numerous progeny to have existed in miniature in the animal originally created; and that these infinitely minute forms are only evolved or distended, as the embryon increases in the womb. This idea, besides its being unsupported by any analogy we are acquainted with, ascribes a greater tenuity to organized matter than we can readily admit; as these included embryons are supposed each of them to consist of the various and complicate parts of animal bodies, they must possess a much greater degree of minuteness than that which was ascribed ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... at the door of the drawing-room, and greeted us most kindly,—a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate, only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill, yet sweet, tenuity of voice. Really, I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... constitution and muscular tenuity; unsound health from whatever cause; indications of former disease; glandular swellings, or other symptoms of scrofula. 2. Chronic cutaneous affections, especially of the scalp. 3. Severe injuries of the bones of the head; convulsions. 4. Impaired vision, from whatever cause; ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... trembling did this poor scarecrow puff. But its efforts, it must be acknowledged, served an excellent purpose, for with each successive whiff the figure lost more and more of its dizzy and perplexing tenuity and seemed to take denser substance. Its very garments, moreover, partook of the magical change, and shone with the gloss of novelty, and glistened with the skilfully embroidered gold that had long ago been rent away, and, half revealed among the smoke, a yellow ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... tragic plot, and sure comprehension of the value of dramatic problems, are not enough in themselves to make a perfect poem. They may go along with various degrees of imperfection in particular respects; faults of diction, either tenuity or extravagance of phrasing may accompany this central imaginative power. Strength of plot is partly independent of style; it bears translation, it can be explained, it is something that can be abstracted from the body of a poem and still make itself impressive. The dramatic value of ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... structure of the finest and roundest (and therefore most nimble) atoms, with which he compared the extremely attenuated dust particles visible in their never-ending {79} dance in a beam of light passed into a darkened room. This structure of exceeding tenuity and nimbleness was the source of the motion characteristic of living creatures, and provided that elastic counteracting force to the inward-pressing nimble air, whereby were produced the phenomena of respiration. Every object, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... temperature and under such circumstances was enabled to hold in solution. The suspended substances will have been all the lighter and finer particles of the upper beds where the disintegration had been extreme; and particularly their mica, which, owing to the tenuity of its plate-shaped crystals, would be most readily carried up by the ascending fluid, and will have ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... conceive I'm an authority In all things ghastly, First for tenuity For stringiness secondly, And sallowness lastly— I say I believe a cadaverous man Who would live as long and as lean as he can Should live entirely on bacchi— On the bacchic ambrosia entirely ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... monument that overhangs them certain of its ponderous memories and regrets. This course is open to you, I mention, but it isn't enjoined, and will doubtless indeed not come up for you at all if it isn't your habit, cherished beyond any other, to spin your impressions to the last tenuity of fineness. Now that I bethink myself I must always have happened to wander here on grey and melancholy days. It remains none the less true that the place contains, thank goodness—or at least thank the grave, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... human race was left to itself, to be guided by the teaching of the Spirit within." (p. 5.)—So very weak an analogy, (where everything is assumed, and nothing proved,) singular to relate, is drawn out into distressing tenuity through no less than ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... they are removed to any other place, sink at once into silence and stupidity. I have discovered, by a long series of observations, that invention and elocution suffer great impediments from dense and impure vapours, and that the tenuity of a defecated air at a proper distance from the surface of the earth, accelerates the fancy, and sets at liberty those intellectual powers which were before shackled by too strong attraction, and unable to expand themselves under the pressure of a gross atmosphere. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... became her the most. To these attractions, add a throat, a bust of the most dazzling whiteness, and the justest proportions; a foot, whose least beauty was its smallness, and a waist narrow—not the narrowness of tenuity or constraint;—but round, gradual, insensibly less in its compression:—and the person of Constance Vernon, in the bloom of ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... roving being extended from the spindles to the wooden clasp, the clasp was closed, and was then drawn along the horizontal frame to a considerable distance from the spindles, by which the threads were lengthened out, and reduced to the proper tenuity; this was done with the spinner's left hand, and his right hand at the same time turned a wheel which caused the spindles to revolve rapidly, and thus the roving was spun into yarn. By returning the clasp to its first situation, and letting ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
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