"Atrophied" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and all the out-buildings were in good repair; however, a recent gale had loosened part of the roof of this one, and Captain Polkington had been mending it. There had not been much to do; the Captain could not do a great deal; his faculties of work—if he ever had any—had atrophied for want of use. Still, he thought he had done a good day's work, and, as a consequence, was important and inclined to be exacting. That is the reason why he had neglected the dinner things; he felt that a man who had done all ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... Martian woman desired to show dislike or contempt she would, in all likelihood, have done it with a sword thrust or a movement of her trigger finger; but as their sentiments are mostly atrophied it would have required a serious injury to have aroused such passions in them. Sola, let me add, was an exception; I never saw her perform a cruel or uncouth act, or fail in uniform kindliness and good nature. She was indeed, as her fellow Martian had said of her, an atavism; ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hesitated. Then another sudden shooting spasm convinced him that no profit or pleasure was to be derived from a continuance of the argument, and he began to shamble slowly across to the door. Bruce Carmyle watched him go with twitching hands. There was a moment when the human man in him, somewhat atrophied from long disuse, stirred him almost to the point of assault; then dignity whispered more prudent counsel in his ear, and Gerald was past the danger-zone and out in the passage. Mr. Carmyle turned to face Sally, as King Arthur on a similar but less ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... of these creatures before they developed bones were of a rudimentary nature, at least such was the condition of the two eyes in front with which they sought for their food upon the ground. But there was a third eye at the back of the head, the atrophied remnant of which is now known as the pineal gland. This, as we know, is now a centre solely of astral vision, but at the epoch of which we are speaking it was the chief centre not only of astral but of physical sight. Referring to reptiles which had become ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... itself) the sanctions of the life beyond the tomb—"religion is the guarantor of justice"[93]—are, nevertheless, wholly ineffective, when the social sense, on account of some physio-psychical anomaly, is atrophied or non-existent. So that religious belief, considered as a regulator of social conduct, is at once superfluous for honorable people and altogether ineffective for those who are not honorable, if indeed it is not capable of increasing ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... at the age of 104 years, she lived here as if forgotten by the world, a quiet madwoman with an ossified brain, with whom insanity might remain stationary for an indefinite length of time without causing death. Old age had come, however, and had gradually atrophied her muscles. Her flesh was as if eaten away by age. The skin only remained on her bones, so that she had to be carried from her chair to her bed, for it had become impossible for her to walk or even to ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... of the pendulum in the opposite direction. The recoil came with the Methodists. But we cannot live wholly in the world of spirit, any more than we ought to live wholly in the world of matter, for our nature is double, and no portion of it should be atrophied. Extreme mysticism is as falsifying of our nature as is extreme worldliness. The stupidity and charlatanism of modern spiritualism is the rebellion of men and women against the materialism of present conception of life. Where natural expression of a need is checked, it breaks ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... there is not, as in the Catasetum, any external change visible in the respective unisexual and bisexual flowers. And yet it would appear from your researches that the ovules of Acropera are in a more highly atrophied condition than occurs in Catasetum, though, as you likewise remark, M. Neumann has never succeeded in fertilising C. tridentatum. If there be not, then, an arrangement of the reproductive structures, such as ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... to him, dressed in all her pretty finery, he loved to look on her, and his dulled eyes glowed with an enthusiasm which had lain atrophied in ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... our weakness and the atrophied state of our stomachs, proved disastrous to a good many. They soon recovered though. Our beds were just shake-downs on cushions and settees, though the officer on watch very generously gave up his ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... day's events he read more leisurely, stopping to watch the spirals with a certain lazy enjoyment. They seemed to grow increasingly larger. They spun themselves about into all kinds of shapes, wavering and illusive, that defied the somewhat atrophied imagination ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... They drank to England. I raised my glass to Italia irredenta—might it soon be redenta. They all sprang to their feet and the circle of dark faces flashed into flame. They keep their souls and emotions, these people. I trust that ours may not become atrophied by self-suppression. ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle
... restrained indignation, of good common sense. The most difficult part of his task was getting Hugo Galland into condition for a creditable appearance in court. In so far as Hugo's meagre intellect, atrophied by education and by luxury, permitted him to be a lawyer at all, he was of that now common type called the corporation lawyer. That is, for him human beings had ceased to exist, and of course human rights, also; the ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... be to desecrate a shrine. But the sordid man sees in this symphony of color nothing else than a promise of fruit. His response is wholly physical, not spiritual at all. His spiritual sense seems atrophied and he can do nothing but estimate the bushels of fruit. He feels no respect for the beauty before him and it is evident that somewhere along the line his spiritual education was neglected. He excites our sympathy and our hope that his children may ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... The atrophied corner of Yorkshire that embraces the lowest reaches of the Humber is terminated by a mere raised causeway leading to the wider patch of ground dominated by Spurn Head lighthouse. This long ridge of sand and shingle is ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... things plain to a generous woman; but usually by the time she has suffered enough to be able to blame those whom it has been her habit to love and respect, and to judge of the wrong they have done her, it is too late to remedy it. Even if her faculties have not atrophied for want of use, all that should have been cultivated lies latent in her; she has nothing to fall back upon, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... fat! I want that kind of individual kept out. I don't trust them. I'm afraid of them. Their minds are atrophied. They are unmoral, possibly even criminal! I don't want them in my room snooping about to see what I have and what I'm doing. I don't want them to sneak in, eaten up with jealousy and envy, and try to damage the eggs of the Silver ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... out of college with my initiative atrophied. I was afraid to do anything. I was afraid I would make a mistake if I did anything; afraid I was not well enough equipped to do the things that suggested themselves; afraid that if I did try to do anything everybody would criticize what I did; afraid ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... reading matter to make the latter palatable, he declares that his painful monthly emission has "the largest circulation of any medical magazine in the world"—thereby indicating that while his mentality may be atrophied, his imagination is intumescent. I have long noticed that journals having large bonafide circulations do little tooting of their own horns on the house-tops—they don't have to. It is a species of journalistic quackery which every thorough-bred publisher regards with contemptuous ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... in both body and mind. In one way he was sorry to leave his comrades and in another he was glad. Alone he would travel faster, and in the wilderness he never feared the loneliness and the silence. A sense, dead or atrophied in the ordinary human being, came out more strongly in him. It seemed to be a sort of divination or prescience, as if messages reached him through the air, like ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... can form thoughts without speaking, you may save the effort of speech. The air has become so thin on Mars that sound will not carry over large portions of it. As a result, we have no organs of hearing, for they have been atrophied from ages of disuse. We use thought as our ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... like lumps. Robins are not like human beings; their muscles are always exercised from the first and so they develop themselves in a natural manner. If you have to fly about to find every meal you eat, your muscles do not become atrophied (atrophied means wasted away through want ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... subjects for this branch of the profession are sadly few; those of the other, for whom hatred is the right treatment, are reckoned by the thousand. Indeed there is some danger of the one feeling being atrophied, while the other ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... restore the forest floor; the place remained visible—a darker, rougher patch on the bronzed carpet of needles beaten smooth by decades of rain and snow. No animal would have trodden that suspicious space. But it was with man she had to deal—a dangerous but reasoning man with few and atrophied instincts—and with no experience in traps; and, therefore, in no dread ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... taken into the latter's households, where they enjoyed luxuries far in excess of their own earning power. It was not that their fathers wasted any affection on them, for as I have explained before, the Hans were so morally atrophied and scientifically developed that love and affection, as we Americans knew them, were unexperienced or suppressed emotions with them. They were replaced by lust and pride of possession. So long as it pleased a father's vanity, and he did not miss the cost, he would keep a son with ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... correctness in the details of prescribed conduct, or again in the details of formulated belief. As the idea of salvation through mechanical obedience develops into a systematised scheme of life, the higher and more spiritual faculties of Man's nature become gradually atrophied by disuse. In other words, the channel of soul growth—the only channel that leads to spiritual health, and therefore to "salvation"—becomes gradually obstructed, with the result that the vital energies of the soul tend either to ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... think; yet not elephantine altogether, since of them that crash amid jungle of atrophied semi-consciousness, strivingly ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... Spirit of Life, O atrophied soul, In trappings of ease is not confined; That touch from Infinite Will 'neath the Whole In Nature's temple, not man's, is shrined! From hovel-shed come out and be strong! Be ye free! Be redeemed from the wrong, Of soul-guilt, I charge you as ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... individual becomes fully developed only with exercise of its functions; that it becomes developed in a somewhat lesser degree with less exercise; and if forcibly precluded from all action, such part will often become atrophied. Every peculiarity, let it be remembered, tends, especially where both parents have it, to be inherited. The less power of flight in the common duck compared with the wild, must be partly attributed to disuse{501} during successive ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... minute, diminutive, petty, slight, inconsiderable, puny, tiny, weazened, undeveloped, dwarfish, runty, wee, stunted, inappreciable, undersized, atrophied; miniature; trivial, insignificant, trifling, frivolous; mean, narrow-minded, illiberal, sordid, ungenerous, contracted; short, limited; piping, feeble, weak; microscopic, infinitesimal, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... develop his heart. He even is told that faith is incompatible with reason, and love with logic. So strong is the emphasis on this that he is led to suspect that indolence is seeking to deify ignorance, and that men whose intellectual faculties have atrophied by their subjection to the emotional now are envious of those who retain the power to think clearly, and would have them also ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... window through which the terrible news had come. Then she dragged herself to it, and making no sound leaned her arms on the sill and listened again, her heart seeming to be in the clutch of icy fingers, her brain atrophied, reeling in a chaos of ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Rosalind—each like a separate knife-thrust; they had plunged her into a mental vacuum in which her brain, atrophied, reeled, paralyzed. She staggered—a man caught her, muttered something about there being too much excitement for a lady, and gruffly ordered others to clear the way that he might lead her out of the jam. She resisted, for ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... fallacy of ancient sayings, that there was nothing in that old epigram about the loneliness of the great. The higher he had risen in the scale of greatness the more insistently and persistently had the world invaded his life, until even his appreciation of solitude had atrophied. ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... every man's written and spoken word will be a law to him; but it is not difficult to imagine a state of society in which there is such universal dependence on the law in all emergencies that the individual conscience will become weakened—pauperised—atrophied—and ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... was all he was. Vast areas of thought, feeling, and conduct, in which the people around him spent so much of their time, were entirely closed to him. He had no personal life at all. That part of him had atrophied from lack of use, like the eyes of the mole and of those sightless fishes men take from the ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... collected every kind of information and statistics about his schemes, and had all the data. His connection with men prominent in official life, of which I was aware, was surprising to me. His conscience seemed to be atrophied, but that may be due to the fact that he was contending with men who never had any to be atrophied. He worked incessantly until 12 or 1 o'clock at night. He took no pride in building up an enterprise. He was after money, and money only. Whether the ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... tell you that it is a hopeless case," said the physician to the Proprietor, who was standing with the Stranger in front of the cage watching the examination. "Both optic nerves are atrophied, and the animal must have received some serious injury, possibly a heavy blow on the forehead." The Proprietor, who has the reputation of being a "good loser," thanked him and gave some directions to the trainer about the care ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... best; but granting a fair frame of mind, one can still "have sight of that immortal sea" which brought us hither from the twelfth century; one can even travel thither and see the children sporting on the shore. Our sense is partially atrophied from disuse, but it is still alive, at least in old people, who alone, as a class, have the time ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... since the fair July night when Richard had left her nearly five years earlier, she had schooled herself into unmurmuring resignation and calm. In the prosecution of such a process there must be loss as well as gain. And Katherine had, in great measure, atrophied impulse, and, in eradicating personal desire, had come near destroying all spontaneity of emotion. She could still give, but the power of receiving was deadened in her. And she had come to be jealous of the quiet which surrounded her. It was her support and solace. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... differentiation) and complexity (or division of labour), which are the direct and inevitable outcome of selection. Finally, I marked off dysteleology as the science of the aimless (vestigial, abortive, atrophied, and useless) organs and parts of the body. In all this I worked from a strictly monistic standpoint, and sought to explain all biological phenomena on the mechanical and naturalistic lines that had long been recognised in the study of ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... etymological or formal group to preserve traces of phonetic laws that have otherwise left no recognizable trace or to preserve a vestige of a morphological process that has long lost its vitality. A careful study of these survivals or atrophied forms is not without value for the reconstruction of the earlier history of a language or for suggestive hints as to ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... to come to my rescue. I'm not exactly crippled, though I haven't used my hand for more than two months, and the muscles are slightly atrophied. The knife slips because I cannot close my hand tightly. But I'll be all right in ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... avatar, and hoarded up its pennies for the annual confiscation. Broadly speaking, it rendered unto Caesar the things that were Caesar's, and unto God the things that were God's—social-economic conditions being so arranged that Caesar's title covered everything except an insignificant by-product of atrophied souls. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... face—and even though he could see it he could not grip it and hold it and convey it to another who has not. Therefore either these feelings must be left altogether unexpressed and, if unexpressed, then soon undeveloped and atrophied, or they must be expressed by the help of images or idols—by the help of something not more actually true than a child's doll is to a child, but yet helpful to our weakness of understanding, as the doll no doubt gratifies and stimulates the motherly ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... the hard-bitten working "earth dogs" who still keep these strains inviolate, and who greatly prefer them to the better-known terriers whose natural activities have been too often atrophied by a system of artificial breeding to show points. Few of these old unregistered breeds would attract the eye of the fancier accustomed to judge a dog parading before him in the show ring. To know their value and to appreciate their sterling good qualities, one ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... has sacrificed the most wonderful part of her endowment, that which when trained gives her vision, sharpens her intuitions, reveals the need and the true course. This superior affectability crushed, leaves her atrophied. ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... swimming, walking, tennis or squash) and her active but wasted brain. A good brain, too; she had easily and with brilliance passed her medical examinations long ago—those of them for which she had had time before she had been interrupted. But now a wasted brain; squandered, atrophied, gone soft with disuse. Could she begin to use it now? Or was she forever held captive, in deep woods, between the ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... would be fitting with old friends. He had determined to be master of the situation, and to turn the moment to the credit of his account—not hers; and it was easy to do it, for love was dead, and the memory of love atrophied. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... from starvation are as follows: There is marked general emaciation; the skin is dry, shrivelled, and covered with a brown, bad-smelling excretion; the muscles soft, atrophied, and free from fat; the liver is small, but the gall-bladder is distended with bile. The heart, lungs, and internal organs are shrivelled and bloodless. The stomach is sometimes quite healthy; in other cases it may be collapsed, empty, ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... doubleness of the flowers and variegation of the leaves are antagonistic states; but so many exceptions to the rule have lately been recorded,[418] that, though general, it cannot be looked at as invariable. {168} Variegation seems generally to result from a feeble or atrophied condition of the plant, and a large proportion of the seedlings raised from parents both of which are variegated usually perish at an early age; hence we may perhaps infer that doubleness, which is the antagonistic state, commonly ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... not much to fear, I think, from the fancy practitioners. The vulgar quackeries drop off, atrophied, one after another. Homoeopathy has long been encysted, and is carried on the body medical as quietly as an old wen. Every year gives you a more reasoning and reasonable people to deal with. See how it is in Literature. The dynasty of British ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... I could see very clearly," Leithen went on, "and that was Hollond's own case. This crowded world of Space was perfectly real to him. How he had got to it I do not know. Perhaps his mind, dwelling constantly on the problem, had unsealed some atrophied cell and restored the old instinct. Anyhow, he was living his daily life with a ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... comma—for, like Browning, we too seem to breathe with this woman's panting breath, our hearts to beat with the very pain and rage of hers, and every pause she comes to in her speech is our pause, so intense is the evocation, so unerring the expression of an impulse which, whether or no it be atrophied in our more hesitant and civilised consciousness, is at any rate ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... woods," which may yet be the slogan of our next emancipation. It is a long path back for some of us and to cover it at a bound has its dangers. The earthworm shrivels in the sudden sun and to leap from the city block to the depths of the woods is to suffer from the "growing pains" of awakening, atrophied senses. The half-way ground is the pasture which once was the forest, which later was man's, and where now nature and human-nature mingle in friendly truce. In the depths of the woods the town draws me toward itself. In the city ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... Jeanne, with her dark haunting eyes and mobile lips, and her slim young figure and her splendid courage. A girl apart from the girls he had known, apart from the women he had known, the women whom he had imagined—and he had not imagined many—his training had atrophied such imaginings of youth. Jeanne. Again her name conjured up visions of the Great Jeanne of Domremy. If only he could ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... survive, and the Jew with brains had to keep them in good training and well sharpened up, or starve. Ages of restriction to the one tool which the law was not able to take from him—his brain—have made that tool singularly competent; ages of compulsory disuse of his hands have atrophied them, and he never uses them now. This history has a very, very commercial look, a most sordid and practical commercial look, the business aspect of a Chinese cheap-labour crusade. Religious prejudices may account for one part of it, but ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... with a laugh, "that Evadne revels in horrors. What would be torture to our quivering nerves, to her atrophied sensibilities is merely ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... so greatly upon the perfection of his senses. His power to reason has relieved them of many of their duties, and so they have, to some extent, atrophied, as have the muscles which move the ears ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... other. For the adult the contrary is true—in many cases, indeed, in consequence of experience and habit, the first moment, wherein the image should be affirmed as a reality, is only virtual, is literally atrophied. We must, however, remark that this applies only partially to the ignorant and even less to ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... live on the printed page. I have endeavoured to delineate his character so that it will be as an open book. And, if I have succeeded in my task, the reader will by now have become aware that he was a young man with the gall of an Army mule. His conscience, if he had ever had one, had become atrophied through long disuse. He had given this sensitive girl the worst fright she had had since a mouse had got into her bedroom at school. He had caused Jno. Peters to totter off to the Rupert Street range making low, bleating noises. And did ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the one-sided development of the muscles, so that those especially of the arms, legs, and back, of the shoulders and chest, which are chiefly called into activity in pushing and pulling, attain an uncommonly vigorous development, while all the rest of the body suffers and is atrophied from want of nourishment. More than all else the stature suffers, being stunted and retarded; nearly all miners are short, except those of Leicestershire and Warwickshire, who work under exceptionally favourable conditions. Further, among boys as well ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... her old beast of an aunt had actually cut her off? That she was living alone like this because there was no one else for her to go to, and that she really hadn't more than enough to keep alive on till the wretched little legacy was paid? The fibres of sympathy were nearly atrophied in him, but he was suffering so intensely that he had a faint glimpse of what other sufferings might mean—and, as she perceived, an almost simultaneous perception of the way in which her particular misfortunes ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... shoulders. Surprisingly, frighteningly light they were, as if filled with cotton. Their limbs were truly skeletal, and curiously I tugged the white robe from the strange insect body as I followed the prince. The thorax, the wasp-waist, the long pendulous abdomen, the atrophied center limbs folded across the wasp-waist—the whole thing was like a great white wasp without wings. As we flung them into an empty chamber, I turned the burden face down, and on the back were two thin wisps of residual wings. Once these ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... experienced woman, yet there was a fearlessness, a frank candor of thought, in Cynthia's character that awed and perplexed Mrs. Devar, in whom the unending struggle to keep afloat in the swift and relentless torrent of social existence had atrophied every sense save that of self-preservation. An open rupture, such as she feared might take place if she asserted her shadowy authority, was not to be dreamed of. What was to be done? Small wonder, then, that she should tackle ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... the said muscular coat, but when constipation has existed for any length of time, the accumulated matter adhering to the walls of the colon renders that organ partially, if not wholly rigid, hence the difficulty of evacuation; consequently, through disuse, the muscles become to a certain extent atrophied, and require stimulation to resume their natural function even after the colon has been cleansed. It is largely owing to the use of this antiseptic "tonic" that the "Cascade Treatment" has been so successful in cases of obstinate constipation, ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... the mind becomes atrophied in a defective body. Quasimodo was barely conscious of a soul cast in his own image, moving blindly within him. The impressions of objects underwent a considerable refraction before reaching his mind. His brain was a peculiar medium; the ideas which passed through it issued forth ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... magnificent white Persian cats purring on either knee, he read and reread the letter summoning him on the morrow to Seabright. He knew who his hostess was—a large lady lately emerged from a corner in lard, dragging with her some assorted relatives of atrophied intellects and a husband whose only mental pleasure depended upon the speed attained by his racing car—the most exacting audience he could dare ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... there now. These men seemed to be wearing greasy fezzes and dark, baggy long underwear with buttons and vestigial lapels. As he approached them, Dewforth saw that the fezzes were actually felt hats with the brims atrophied or rotted away, and the funereal long-johns were the weatherbeaten remains of those suits which are designed for Young Men On The Way Up. As though by tacit agreement of long standing, these men did not look directly at Dewforth as he passed, ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... reptilian times when our jaws were built in five pieces to permit of wide distention in the act of swallowing our prey alive. All over the surface of the body are to be found innumerable little sebaceous glands originally intended to lubricate hairs, which have now atrophied and disappeared. These useless scraps, under various forms of irritation, both external and internal, become inflamed and give rise to pimples, acne, or "a ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... race have little toes that are partly atrophied, and considerably deformed. In many cases one of the joints has undergone ankylosis—that is, the bones have coalesced. It is confidently alleged that this is due to the inheritance of the effects of wearing tight ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... he had supposed final, vanished. Solitude again acted on his disordered nerves; he was once more obsessed, not by religion itself, but by the acts and sins it forbids, by the subject of all its obsecrations and threats. The carnal side, atrophied for months, which had been stirred by the enervation of his pious readings, then brought to a crisis by the English cant, came to the surface. His stimulated senses carried him back to the past and he wallowed in memories of his ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... difficult situations, and the worst kinds of murder are by no means capital offences. It is true that all engagements are not made by the same vital bonds as that of Jenny's and Theophil's, but many are. For a man wilfully to break an engagement means sometimes that the whole love-life in a woman is atrophied, all that made her woman stabbed to ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... antidote for its virulence; and who taught them that the essence of joint pine (Ephedra nevadensis), which looks to have no juice in it of any sort, is efficacious in stomachic disorders. But they so understand and so use. One believes it to be a sort of instinct atrophied by disuse in a complexer civilization. I remember very well when I came first upon a wet meadow of yerba mansa, not knowing its name or use. It looked potent; the cool, shiny leaves, the succulent, pink stems and fruity bloom. A little touch, a hint, a word, and I should have known ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... Ambition increased, his Mental Arithmetic became more and more defective and his Moral Nature was wholly atrophied. ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... the Frenchman took the proffered fingers, for there had been that in the frank avowal of confidence and friendship which smote upon a chord of honor in the man's soul that had not vibrated in response to a chivalrous impulse for so many long years that it had near atrophied from disuse. ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... better than a cool vegetarian diet. I cannot help thinking, though the idea may seem fanciful, that mosquitoes feed on nothing. We know that the ephemerae take no refreshment in the imago state, the mouth being aborted or atrophied in these short-lived creatures; but we also know that they belong to an exceedingly ancient tribe, and possibly, after the earth had ceased to produce their proper nourishment there came in their history a long hungry period, which did not kill them, but lasted until their feeding ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... true! She doubted it and yet—if he loved her—! Here was a woman's revenge, to bait, to charm, to spurn; and then to outwit him! A test of the sincerity of his professions, and of her own feminine art—a dangerous game which she had once before thought of playing, until his cruelty had atrophied ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... toothless, with down-turned corners and lips dry and parchment-like, nevertheless lacked the muscular slackness so usual with age. The lips might have been those of a mummy, save for that impression of rigid firmness they gave. Not that they were atrophied. On the contrary, they seemed tense and set with a muscular and spiritual determination. There, and in the eyes, was the secret of the certitude with which she carried the heavy sacks up the steep steps, with never a false step or overbalance, and ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... elasticity. This softer subject led him to no conclusion, leaving him stranded among misty woods and fields of flowers that had no outlet. He realised, however, clearly that this side of him was not atrophied as he thought. Its unused powers ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... matter, and in living beings the force gradually decreases in power as the years pass, causing loss of health and strength. The chemical composition of bones and tissue alters, joints become stiff, muscles atrophied, and bones brittle. By recharging, as it were, with the vital force, the gland action is intensified, youth and strength is renewed. By repeating the process every ten or fifteen years the same degree of vigor can be maintained indefinitely. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... matches himself against the forces of nature. In the towns he is warmed and fed and clothed so spontaneously and easily that after a time he perforce begins to doubt himself, to wonder whether his powers are not atrophied from disuse. And so, with his naked soul, he fronts the wilderness. It is a test, a measuring of strength, a proving of his essential pluck and resourcefulness and manhood, an assurance of man's highest potency, the ability to endure and to take care of himself. In just so ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... shot into his eyes, arousing a hate in his thought. He heard Tesla ... "life has changed with the industrialization of society. It is no longer a question of who shall run the court. The court is an atrophied institution, a circus surviving in the backyard of history. It's a question of who shall run the factory. Democracy is a thing that touches only politicians. The factory touches people. Democracy cleared the way but it's not a way in itself. It's still the court idea of government. Steam, ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... is a pretty piece of fancy: it is clever: but like mathematics, an explanation of the brain rather than the heart. Something is missing. For Plato, almost always delicate and subtle, is never tender: the reason is, that he was atrophied on the feminine side: he does not consequently understand sex, being himself only half a man: that is, only man and nothing more. But all the really great imaginative men are bi-sexual: they have a large ingredient of woman in their composition, which gives to their divination ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... only animal instincts dominate. Lust is tyrant. Animality destroys all manhood, and lowers to the slush and ooze of degradation every one given over to its control. A man degraded to the gross level of a beast because he prefers the animal to the spiritual—this is Caliban. His mind is atrophied, in part, because lust sins against reason. Caliban is Prospero's slave, but he is lust's slave more—a slavery grinding and ignominious as servitude to Prospero can be. Prospero must always, in ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... characteristic of apes. Anomalies are also found in the lobe, which in some cases adheres too closely to the face, or is of huge size as in the ancient Egyptians; in other cases, the lobe is entirely absent, or is atrophied till the ear assumes a form like that common ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... chronic disease, where the muscles are atrophied and condensed, the following posterior flap method may be used with advantage. It is approved of by Mr. Spence. An incision is made across the front of the leg from the posterior edge of the fibula to the posterior edge of the tibia, or vice versa, according to the limb. The limb ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... stand as they are, whether to engage the separated enemies to windward or to leeward, as occasion may offer, in support of the van. The provisions of 1665 afterwards disappear. In 1740, and even as late as 1781, they are traceable only in certain colorless articles, suggestive of the atrophied organs of a body concerning whose ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... be likened to a beast with weak, almost atrophied legs, but with a great mouth and greater stomach. It moved with painful slowness, crawling over the face of southern Asia, finding little sustenance as it came, leaving none whatever after it left. The beast, only dimly aware of the Grass it ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... distrust of any notion of help from beyond and above, any belief in a reinforcing power which a critical rationalism cannot dissect and explain, has gradually ruled out of court the doctrine of salvation until the preacher's power, both to experience and to transmit it, has atrophied through disuse. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... about what had happened to him in New York. But to leave him, an innocent man, to go to his death because he was too chivalrous to betray his partner in an adventure—this was something that even Bromfield's atrophied conscience revolted at. Clay was standing by him, according to Durand's story. The news of it lifted a weight from his soul. But it left him too under a stronger moral obligation to step out ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... of joint disease, the muscles acting on the joint become atrophied more rapidly than is accounted for by disuse alone, and this is attributed to an interference with the trophic innervation of the muscles reflected from centres in the spinal medulla. It is more ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... on the wall of the fort which stands on the tongue of land between the two streams. On the way J.W. assured himself that if Calcutta seemed without religion, here was more than enough of it to redress the balances. In the throng was a holy man whose upraised arm had been held aloft until it had atrophied, and would never more swing by his side. And yonder another holy one sat in the sand, with a circle of little fires burning close about him. The seeker after he knew not what who made his search while lying on a bed of spikes ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... criticism is all the more necessary because the doctrine of pure passivity is largely a corollary of belief in an unconditioned Absolute. If union with such an Absolute is to be enjoyed, the will must be pulseless, the intellect atrophied, the whole soul inactive: otherwise the introduction of finite thoughts and ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... termites wheeled, and walked over to the nearest spear, trailing the feeble, atrophied legs of their rider as they went. They squatted close to the floor, and the staring eyes examined the spears at close range. Then the owner of the eyes apparently sent out another command; for one of the guards at the door left its post and drew ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... undoubtedly one of the most benighted ever conceived by a European nation. It amounted to nothing less than a consistent checking and deadening of the intelligence of her sons oversea in order that their atrophied senses should fail to detect the true manner in which they were being shorn of their property ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... the tendency which, a few years later, produced Ariel and Caliban, the tendency of imagination to analyse and abstract, to decompose human nature into its constituent factors, and then to construct beings in whom one or more of these factors is absent or atrophied or only incipient. This, of course, is a tendency which produces symbols, allegories, personifications of qualities and abstract ideas; and we are accustomed to think it quite foreign to Shakespeare's genius, which was in the highest degree ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... nurse in her make-up; there was no tenderness in what she did for him. It was not that she had any spirit of getting her own back on Andrew for his tyranny, his impoverishment, his ill-usage of her in the past. She would have given him her last crumb of food if she had thought of it. But a thing atrophied as she was could not think or feel, and so he went without the small tendernesses that would have come to him had Rose, the soft little Englishwoman, lived. She sat up with him night after night patiently. She gave him ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles |
