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Insoluble   Listen
adjective
Insoluble  adj.  
1.
Not soluble; in capable or difficult of being dissolved, as by a liquid; as, chalk is insoluble in water.
2.
Not to be solved or explained; insolvable; as, an insoluble doubt, question, or difficulty.
3.
Strong. "An insoluble wall." (Obs.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Insoluble" Quotes from Famous Books



... planned to do, I later endeavoured to explain to him that in North America persons were almost quite equal to one another—being born so—but at this he told me not to be silly and continued to regard my rise as an insoluble part of the strangeness he everywhere encountered, even after I added that Demosthenes was the son of a cutler, that Cardinal Wolsey's father had been a pork butcher, and that Garfield had worked on a canal-boat. I found him quite hopeless. "Chaps go dotty talkin' ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... as much at sea as you are," Hellen said, feeling them each in turn to make sure it was really they. "It's an insoluble mystery to me." ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell

... An insoluble problem was now presented to successive governors—Sherbrooke, Richmond, Dalhousie, Kempt, Aylmer, Gosford. All in turn addressed themselves to the work of pacification, and all retired baffled by that racial ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... mysterious disappearance of the young woman will either be of easy and simple solution, or else it will prove an insoluble mystery. There will be no half-way work about it. If I can't learn the truth in a short time, I fear ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells

... his office to determine how much can be known in each province of thought; when we must be contented not to know; in what direction inquiry is hopeless, or on the other hand full of promise; where it gathers into coils insoluble by reason, where it is absorbed in mysteries, or runs into the abyss. It will be his care to be familiar with the signs of real and apparent difficulties, with the methods proper to particular subject-matters, what in each particular case are the limits ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... convinced (by reason of my own experiments, supported by those of Lombroso, Morselli, and Bottazzi) that the facts of mediumship exist, it is my purpose to take up definitely the question of identity, which is the final and most elusive part of the problem—it may turn out to be the insoluble part of the problem. ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland

... population must come to live in the cities, and that, therefore, the city will dominate the society of the future. Hence, humanity must solve the problem of the city if social progress is to continue. And the problem is by no means insoluble. Man is not yet adjusted to city life. The city is so new even to civilized man that he has carried into it the habits which he practiced in isolated rural communities. These are the sources of trouble in our cities, and, as we have ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... essential oils were found to be insoluble in this menstruum, and hence such drugs have been given in the form of pill, powder or mixture. Such tinctures are those of assafoetida, benzoin, cannabis indica, cantharides, castor, cubebs, lavender, myrrh, pyrethrum, sumbul, tolu and ginger. ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen

... educated in a "Real-schule" and trained in every laboratory of a modern university. In respect of the great problems of Philosophy, the post-Darwinian generation is, in one sense, exactly where the prae-Darwinian generations were. They remain insoluble. But the present generation has the advantage of being better provided with the means of freeing itself from the tyranny ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley

... shown to have come after the ruder beginnings of religious development instead of before them. Thus came a new impulse to research, and the fruitage was abundant; the older theological interpretation, with its insoluble ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... made the impassable gulf dividing them. The Latins maintained that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father—and the son; the Greeks that it descended from the Father alone. It was the undying controversy concerning the relations and the attributes of the three Members of the Trinity; and the insoluble question was destined to break up Greek and Catholic Church alike into numberless sects and shades of belief or unbelief; and over this Christological controversy, rivers of blood were to flow ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele

... then give up the problem as insoluble; for if reason be insufficient to give authority to the Bible, and criticism fails to discover its truth, how are we to know that ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... other nations. Thanks to the wisdom and independent spirit of our forefathers, this is not the case. Each State having sole charge of its local interests and domestic affairs, the problem, which to others has been insoluble, to us is made easy. Rapid, safe, and easy communication between the Atlantic and the Pacific will give cointelligence, unity of interest, and cooeperation among all parts of our continent-wide republic. The network of railroads which bind the North and the South, the slope of ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... matches, vulcanized rubber, and the artificial sulphides, like HgS, H2S, CS2, etc. The last is a very volatile, ill- smelling liquid, made by the combination of two solids, S being passed over red-hot charcoal. It dissolves S, P, rubber, gums, and many other substances insoluble ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams

... presence here is fortunate, almost providential. You can help us. Your interest in such things and your success in the solution of many apparently insoluble affairs is known to all of us. While we are between us able to cope with most of the things that arise, you, an outsider, without having your emotions involved may see more clearly than we, aside from your undoubted talents in ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew

... will say no more but leave the problem as insoluble, only fearing that it will become a formidable weapon in the hands of the ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... The further explanation of motion, the definition of a virtue or potency that produces it, first a neglected problem, then an irrelevant problem, is finally, for a naturalistic philosophy in which this progression is completed, an insoluble problem. For the sequel to this purely descriptive procedure on the part of science is the disavowal of "metaphysics" by those who will have no philosophy but science. Thus the scientific conservatism of Newton has led to the positivistic and agnostic ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... coming century, the investigation I have here outlined, will sometime be made; and, as a result, the cause of cancer may be as well known to medical science, as the causes of typhoid fever or malaria,—mysteries that seemed insoluble less than a century ago. And I venture with assurance to predict, that some time within the next fifty years, the Governments of England and of the United States, alarmed, it may be, by a continually increasing mortality from cancer, will condemn ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell

... begins the definite work of dissolving those foods which are insoluble in water. This, as already stated, is a double process. There is first a chemical action in which the insoluble are changed into soluble substances, and this is followed immediately by the dissolving action of water. The chief substances digested in the stomach are ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.

... life seemed as anomalous to me as my own desultory and self-found way must have seemed to him. We passed the time in the delight of trying to make ourselves known to each other, and in a promise to continue by letter the effort, which duly lapsed into silent patience with the necessarily insoluble problem. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... impossible virtue; for the woman it commonly implies many uncongenial submissions. There are probably few married couples who have escaped distressful phases of bitterness and tears, within the constraint of their, in most cases, practically insoluble bond. But, on the other hand, and as a reward that in the soberer, mainly agricultural civilization of the past, and among the middling class of people, at any rate, has sufficed, there comes the great development of associations and tendernesses that arises ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... actually lighter than the sinking fund method, depends on the relation of the drop in prices over the short period to the drop over the ensuing period, with a proper allowance for discount—at the moment an insoluble problem. I cannot yet with confidence join those who, on purely economic and non-political grounds, commend the scheme and treat it as "good business for ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various

... Holland's eyes were dreamy and her tongue unguarded. "I don't know what I'm going to do with him," said she with a gesture as of one who despairingly gives over an insoluble problem. ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... lost the root of Livingness and with it all possibility of growth or of liberty. This is dualism, which cuts us off from our Source of Life; and so long as we take this false conception for the true law of Being, we shall find ourselves hampered by limitations and insoluble problems of every description: We have lost the Key of Life and are consequently unable to ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... house of David, and fall into ecstasies in the garden of Bethany. Solace comes, but no inspiration. Though the marvellous Lara is briefly introduced, and though a beautiful young woman comes straight out of the 'Arabian Nights,' and asks the insoluble question, What would have become of the Atonement, if the Jews had not persuaded the Romans to crucify Jesus? we are still tantalised by the promised revelation, which melts before us like a mirage. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... per cent. of suberine, which is soluble in alcohol and ether, and is plastic, ductile, and malleable under the action of humid heat. Mixed with suberine, cerine and resin give cork its insolubility and inalterability. These substances are soluble in alcohol and ether, but insoluble in water. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various

... one who raises colonial troops, equips a colonial squadron, claims a Federal Parliament sending its measures to the Throne instead of to the Colonial Office, and, being finally brought by this means into insoluble conflict with the insular British Imperialist, "cuts the painter" and breaks ...
— Maxims for Revolutionists • George Bernard Shaw

... discontents which undermine the thrones of monarchies. Equality here was not a name; it was a reality. Riches were not persecuted, because they were not envied. Here those problems connected with the labours of a working class, hitherto insoluble above ground, and above ground conducing to such bitterness between classes, were solved by a process the simplest,—a distinct and separate working class was dispensed with altogether. Mechanical inventions, constructed on the principles that baffled my research ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... completely dissolved before they are given; insoluble ones should be finely divided by powdering or by shaking, and should be well agitated and mixed immediately before they are given. In the latter case a menstruum with considerable body, such as ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... cymbals upon those who inspire it. The most I can say is that their impassive exterior seems to denote a complete indifference. I do not insist that this is so; the intimate feelings of the insect are an insoluble mystery. ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre

... they will permit us to study the physical and chemical factors of life under much simpler conditions than heretofore, and it is toward this end that I am directing my researches. They will enable us to approach much nearer the solution of the old insoluble problem of life and death. What indeed is the death of an organism all of whose parts may yet survive for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... people do not believe in it any more. It is curious how ignorant educated people have become. Hell is an actual plane, less vivid than was formerly imagined, not hot but cold, grey rather than red, but amply provided with demons, with the devils of self-accusation, with the fiends of insoluble queries. Very real and very actual, it is surprising how many educated people are there. The oddity of that is increased by the fact that they regard it as a private establishment. They regard their hell ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... communicate this to a living soul. I am the only one who suspects the real truth. If it came to be generally known all human motives would be lacking, all human activities would be paralyzed—the whole world would come to a standstill. Mum's the word. For if the problem is insoluble and meant to be, just as sure is it that we were not intended ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller

... sat down again on the cask, and drew from an inner pocket of his doublet a little leather bag. "I am glad to be able to resolve a difficulty that at one moment seemed insoluble." And under the bulging eyes of Levasseur and his officers, he untied the mouth of the bag and rolled into his left palm four or five pearls each of the size of a sparrow's egg. There were twenty such in the bag, the very pick of those taken in that raid ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... 'disposed to act' somewhat differently under similar pressure. "History is only able to grasp the conditions of their existence." And what M. Seignobos calls the final problem—Is evolution produced merely by changed conditions?—must according to him remain insoluble by the legitimate processes of history. The student may accept or reject this view as his notions of evidence prompt him to do. M. Seignobos has at all events laid down a basis for discussion ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois

... most valuable topographical records, but she has not the means of working them into a universal history. Is such a universal history, then, to be regarded as unattainable? Are all the grandest and most interesting problems which offer themselves to the geological student essentially insoluble? Is he in the position of a scientific Tantalus—doomed always to thirst for a knowledge which he cannot obtain? The reverse is to be hoped; nay, it may not be impossible to indicate the source whence help ...
— Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life • Thomas H. Huxley

... The problem is probably insoluble. No decisive data are available, for the mere absence of traces of matrilineal descent does not necessarily prove more than that it had long been superseded by reckoning of kinship through males. All that can be said is that in the kinship organisations ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas

... the sheath, and gradually passes into the more insoluble ferric oxide. These actions are of extreme importance in nature, as their continuation results in the enormous deposits of bog-iron ore, ochre, and—since Molisch has shown that the iron can be replaced by manganese in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... was universally in earnest to do some business, and Veto came upon it, Honorable Members, I observe, gathered passionately round the vetoing Brother; conjured, obtested, menaced, wept, prayed; and, if the case was too urgent and insoluble otherwise, the NIE POZWALAM Gentleman still obstinate, they plunged their swords through him, and in that way brought consent. The commoner course was to dissolve and go home again, in a ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... not so much exhaust this general question as pass from it to her insoluble individual problem again: ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... embarrassment on such duty as that of the South Carolina and Georgia coasts. To economize, so as to remain as long as possible away from the base at Port Royal, and yet to have the ship ready for speedy movement, was a difficult problem; indeed, insoluble. We used to meet it by keeping fires so low, when lying inside the blockaded rivers, that we could not move promptly. This was a choice between evils, which the event justified, but which might ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan

... revolving about a superior center of gravitational force, would not result in the formation of a ring of small bodies, but rather of a dispersed mass of them. But back of any speculation of this kind lies the problem, at present insoluble: How could the explosion be produced? (See the question of explosions in Chapters 6 ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss

... wondered whether it was accident or intention which made Balzac so frequently combine early and late work in the same volume. The question is certainly insoluble, and perhaps not worth solving, but it presents itself once more in the present instance. L'Illustre Gaudissart is a story of 1832, the very heyday of Balzac's creative period, when even his pen could hardly keep up with the abundance of his fancy and the ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... If he were not acquainted with his mother's history himself, how could he have found out Obed Chute for his friend? and if he were acquainted with it, how could he have tolerated him as such? From either point of view the question was unanswerable, and the problem insoluble. Yet the fact remained that Lord Chetwynde was in the habit of making constant visits to the house of the man, the very man, to whom the history of Lord Chetwynde's mother was known as a story of shame, and who himself had been the chief agent in helping her, as it appeared, from the ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille

... Renan calls it, has in many ways more affinity with the modern mind than any other in the Old Testament. It is weary with the weight of an insoluble problem. With a cold-blooded frankness, which is not cynical, only because it is so earnest, it faces the stern facts of human life, without being able to bring to their interpretation the sublime inspirations of religion. More than once is the counsel ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen

... wrought havoc on the plateau and amid the breastworks. The sound was enormous, a complex tumult that crashed and echoed in the head. The whole of the field existed in the throbbing, expanded brain—all battlefields, all life, all the world and other worlds, all problems solved and insoluble. The wide-flung grey battlefront was now sickle-shaped, convex to the foe. The rolling dense smoke flushed momently with a lurid glare. In places the forest was afire, in others the stubble of the field. From horn to horn of the sickle galloped the riderless horses. Now and again ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... hundred roots which remain, the insoluble residuum (so thought by Professor Mueller) of Language, after eliminating the immense mass of variable and soluble material, he says: 1. That 'they are phonetic types produced by a power inherent in human nature;' 2. 'Man, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... towards my bonnet; the Vicar smiled, and bent his head in a courtly little bow, which said much without the banality of words. The Squire had no expression! Whether he approved, disapproved, or furiously disliked, he remained insoluble as the Sphinx. Oh, some day—somehow—some one—I hope, will wake him into life, and whoever she is, may she shake him well up, and ride rough-shod over him for a long, long time before she gives in! He needs ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... again and again, in reference to these two solutions, can a man overstep the limits of himself—of his own consciousness? If he can, then says the querist, the reality of the external world is indeed guaranteed; but what an insoluble, inextricable contradiction is here: that a man should overstep the limits of the very nature which is his, just because he cannot overstep it! And if he cannot, then says the same querist, then is the external ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... Providence over-ruling the present and the future, we regard the problems before us, though great, not insoluble to faithful, wise and patient Christian effort along the lines upon ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various

... so I entered this world: a being, sliding obscurely in among human beings. But whence, or whither? Those questions belong among the gigantic, terrible ones, insoluble, silent,—the unanswering primeval sphinxes of the mind. We can sit and stare at such questions, and wonder; but staring and wondering are not thought. They are close to idiocy: both states drop the lower jaw and open the mouth; and assuming the idiotic physique tends, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various

... still clings, in a way, to the miraculous and special creation of the earth as described in Genesis. It clings with an intransigentism and bitterness far exceeding other part of America. Why? To Peter the problem appeared insoluble. ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling

... century of this earliest ascertainable date. Even the career of the lawgiver Lykourgos, which seems to belong to the commencement of the eighth century B. C., presents us, from lack of anything like contemporary records, with many insoluble problems. The Helleno-Dorian conquest, as we have seen, must have occurred at some time or other; but it evidently did not occur within two centuries of the earliest known inscription, and it is therefore folly ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske

... has overreached himself. He has given you a choice of two problems, both of which he deems insoluble. Neither of them is insoluble. The only gleam of intelligence Old Cotangent showed was when he said that squaring the circle was too easy. He was right. It would have given you your Liebchen in five minutes. I squared the circle before I discarded pantalets. I will show you the work—but ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various

... change had taken place almost overnight. The fact that the case had the appearance of presenting the unusual had merely stimulated him at first. But then doubts had crept in and the problem had begun to appear insoluble. ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse

... legislation; and these customs are no less opposed to the tone of society. If the English colonies had been founded in an age of darkness, or if their origin was already lost in the lapse of years, the problem would be insoluble. ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... the upper end of Jan Mayen. Only a week had elapsed since he had actually ascertained the impracticability of reaching a higher latitude,—what likelihood could there be of a channel having been opened up to the northward during so short an interval? Such was the series of insoluble problems by which I posed myself, as we stood vainly smacking our lips at the island, which lay ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)

... Littlejohn whispered. "We're a dying race. That's the primary problem. And it's an insoluble one. Just this afternoon—" And he told him about the interview ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch

... God, we are not here as those who face an insoluble riddle. We believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the resurrection of the dead; and with this key in our hand, we stand here at the grave's mouth, and looking backward, interpret the lesson of this closed life; and looking forward, ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... last book—I know you don't believe in heroes,—at any rate, the leading man—was an innocent child walking with his nurse along Easy Street, when compared with Cavour. Cavour had fifty problems at the same time, and all of them were insoluble ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers

... my dear child, what opinions can poor I give on the almost insoluble problems you put before me? I wish I knew of any book or any man or woman who could tell me whether a Poor Law, even the very best, is on the whole a blessing or a curse, and how the "unemployed" can be chosen out for work of any useful or productive kind without injury to ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... the one insoluble problem is——, given a good and perfect God, where does sorrow come from, and why is there any pain? Men have fumbled at that knot for all the years that there have been men in the world, and they have not untied it yet. They have tried to cut it and it has resisted all their knives and all their ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... of the grandest building upon earth at that distance." [424] If therefore we are to see the settlement of the matter in the speculum of a telescope, it may be some time before we have done with what Guillemin calls "the interesting, almost insoluble question, of the existence of living and organized beings on the surface of the satellite of our little earth." [425] Some cynic may interpose with ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... were on a different social footing from Trix, would have better expressed Trix's meaning. But she chose her own phraseology, and doubtless it conveyed to her exactly what she did mean. Anyhow, it was an amazing riddle, an insoluble riddle. Trix stared at the photograph, finding ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore

... able to go, freely and unhampered by belief in authority or in the Bible, as far as human knowledge could lead him. We learn this from the concluding words of his chapter on religion "The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel

... been gradually descending into what appears to have once been the bottom of a salt lake. The ground is partially incrusted with a compound salt called tequisquita, is composed of equal proportions of muriate of soda, carbonate of soda, and insoluble metal (common earth): this compound is used by the Mexican bakers and soap-boilers as a substitute for salt and soda. A stinted grass is here and there scattered in patches over the bad land, as these barren plains ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... in the result of this experiment, is, that the fixed air, into which this mixture had been put, and which had been in part diminished by it, was in part also rendered insoluble in water by this means. I made this experiment four times, with the greatest care, and observed, that in two of them about one sixth, and in the other two about one fourteenth, of the original quantity, was such as could ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley

... certain quantity of mineral salts, coloring substances, and other unknown extractive matters. Some of these substances can be removed from it tolerably easily. The effective substance is insoluble in absolute alcohol. It can be precipitated by it, though not, indeed, in a pure condition, but still combined with the other extractive matter. It is likewise insoluble in alcohol. The coloring matter may also be removed, rendering it ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various

... us to grasp reality. Then we habitually regard movement as something superadded to the motionless. This is quite legitimate in the world of affairs; but when we bring this habit into the world of speculation, we misconceive reality, we create lightheartedly insoluble problems, and close our eyes to what is most alive in the real world. For us movement is one position, then another position, and so on indefinitely. It is true that we say there must be something else, viz., the actual passing ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... flattered the King, although perpetually denounced by Winwood in his letters to his sovereign as tyrannical, over-bearing, malignant, and treacherous. He did his best to counsel moderation and mutual toleration, for he felt that these needless theological disputes about an abstract and insoluble problem of casuistry were digging an abyss in which the Republic might be swallowed up for ever. If ever man worked steadily with the best lights of experience and inborn sagacity for the good of his country and in defence of a constitutional ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... was written it shows on its face that it is more an effort of memory or the effect of one of the fearful sermons of fifty years ago on the impressionable mind of youth, than the original production of a precocious boy struggling with the insoluble problem of life and judgment to come. Mark how the stock words of the pulpiteer, "transgressor," "worldly lusts," "dreadful," "awful," "perdition" stalk fiercely through the sermon of the youthful saint ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... decomposition. Many compostable materials come with bits of soil already attached and few are sterile in themselves. But extra soil ensures that there will initially be a sufficient number and variety of these valuable organisms. Soil also contains insoluble minerals that are made soluble by biological activity. Some of these minerals may be in short supply in the organic matter itself and their addition may improve the health and vigor of the whole decomposition ecology. A generous addition of rock dust may do this ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon

... own himself beaten: there was absolutely no flaw in the alibi. And since his duty to his journal obviously forbade his wasting time on insoluble mysteries, he ceased to frequent Granice, who dropped back into a deeper isolation. For a day or two after his visit to Allonby he continued to live in dread of Dr. Stell. Why might not Allonby have deceived him as to the alienist's diagnosis? What ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... a year—a fact which, though contrasting unfavourably with the L12,000 or L13,000 enjoyed by each of the Queen's Colleges, nevertheless would have seemed to cut the ground from under the feet of those who argued that the University question was insoluble since they would not countenance the application of public ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell

... plant-food available. The content of phosphoric acid varies because the original rock-phosphate varies, but the most common grade on the market is guaranteed to contain 14 per cent available phosphoric acid, and 1 to 2 per cent insoluble. Some acid phosphate is guaranteed to contain 16 per cent available phosphoric acid, and some runs down to 10 per ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee

... others I have ever seen." No information as to the use of this curious box was forthcoming from any of the learned and ingenious correspondents of Notes and Queries; and a problem which they cannot solve may not unreasonably be regarded as insoluble. ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson

... similar identity will probably be discovered. But in this category the problem of separating what is general, because human, from that which is common, because diffused, always a complicated task, will be found more difficult than in literary matter, and without the aid of extensive collection insoluble. It is possible to fall back on the consideration that, after all, such resolution matters not very much, since in any case the survival of the belief indicates its humanity, and for the purpose of the study of human nature borrowed superstitions may be cited as confidently as if original in ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various

... atmospheric air, it causes unpleasant sensations, makes respiration difficult, and, by acting powerfully on the mucous membranes, produces catarrhal effects; and as such air will kill small animals, it shews that pure ozone must be highly injurious to the animal economy. It is insoluble in water, is powerfully electromotive, and is most strikingly energetic in numerous chemical agencies, its action on nearly all metallic bodies being to carry them at once to the state of peroxide, or to their highest point of oxidation; it changes sulphurets into sulphates, instantaneously destroys ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various

... father of monasticism—that spirit of seclusion and self-abnegation which became so prevalent in the third and fourth centuries, and which remained in the church through the mediaeval period. Gnosticism busied itself with the solution of insoluble questions respecting the origin of evil, which Christianity justly relinquished to the domain of useless inquiries—"the wisdom of the world." Gnosticism would acknowledge no limits to human speculation; Christianity accepts mysteries hidden from the wise and prudent, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... herself. Every effort was made to restore the half-crazed girl, but unfortunately hospital restraint was not considered necessary, and a month later, in spite of the vigilance of her new employer, her body was taken from the lake. One more of those gentle spirits who had found the problem of life insoluble, had sought refuge ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams

... of each vial. As nearly as can be ascertained, M'Munn's Elixir is simply an aqueous infusion of opium—procured by the ordinary maceration—and preserved from decomposing by the subsequent addition of a small portion of alcohol. Narcotin being absolutely insoluble in water is eliminated as the circular says. This fact alone would not account for the difference between its action and that of laudanum. This is explained by the fact that all the other alkaloids possess diverse rates of solubility in water, ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day

... compounds which result from the combination, in each of the small number of possible proportions, of any acid whatever with any base. We have also the curious law, discovered by Berthollet, that two soluble salts mutually decompose one another whenever the new combinations which result produce an insoluble compound, or one less soluble than the two former. Another uniformity is that called the law of isomorphism; the identity of the crystalline forms of substances which possess in common certain peculiarities of chemical composition.(133) Thus it appears that even heteropathic laws, such ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... As a matter of fact, Diderot's treatment of the narrower question (pp. 324, etc.) is more closely coherent than his treatment of the wider one, for the simple reason that the special limitation of experience in the born-blind cannot fairly be made to yield any decisive evidence on the great, the insoluble enigma. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... that has proved a weakness and a strength to it: a weakness because embarrassed with subtle, complicated, insoluble questions wherein mankind will always be involved, it was forced to engage in endless discussions wherein the bad or feeble reasons advanced by this or that votary compromised the whole work; a strength because whoever brings a rule of life is practically compelled to support ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet

... though the Piedmontese journal had no thought but to put insoluble problems to the Government, in the face of public opinion, so as to try to prejudice its action in advance. The Stampa's program practically means that to the diplomatic rupture with the Central Empires would be added another diplomatic rupture with the Triple Entente, thus insuring the isolation ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... expression—entirely free from artifice or affectation, charmed Henri for one reason, yet, on the other hand, redoubled his perplexity. How could he conciliate his scruples of conscience with the aspirations of his heart? The problem seemed then as insoluble as when it had been presented the first time. But Valentine was saved. For the moment that was the essential point, the only one in question. The involuntary revelation of her secret had brought the color to her cheeks, the light to her eyes, a smile to her ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... This cement remains fluid when cold, and dries quickly. After the ring has become set, or stiff, the whole slide is immersed for a minute or so in a 10-grain solution of bichromate of potash, and is then allowed to dry, exposed to the light, which makes the bichromated gelatine perfectly insoluble, even in boiling water, and thoroughly prevents the ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne

... here, sir," said I impressively: "you're an Englishman, and you're proud of your country; but I tell you we're going to have a race of people in these provinces such as the world has never seen before." And, as I looked at the child, I drifted into a labyrinth of insoluble enigmas and perplexing hypotheses—no new thing with me, as the sympathetic reader is by ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... beyond the Gnostics, and in modern times it is applied contemptuously (e g. by the early opponents of the evolution theory) to a conception or hypothesis which purports to be a simple solution of apparently insoluble phenomena. The Gnostic physician Serenus Sammonicus gave precise instructions as to its mystical use in averting or curing agues and fevers generally. The paper on which the word was written had to ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... see, all the great questions, more or less insoluble, which the study of fossil organic bodies can offer, were raised and even discussed by the celebrated professor of Goettingen as early as 1803, before anything of the sort could have arisen from the essays of M. G. Cuvier; the errors of distribution ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... It carries in it carbonic acid; and that acid, beating in shower after shower against the face of a cliff— especially if it be a limestone cliff—weathers the rock chemically; changing (in case of limestone) the insoluble carbonate of lime into a soluble bicarbonate, and carrying that away in water, which, however clear, is still hard. Hard water is usually water which has invisible lime in it; there are from ten to fifteen grains and more ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley

... settled even such minor questions as to which party should decide whether and how much the window should be open and how many blankets should be on the bed, and at what hour they should go to bed and get up so as to avoid disturbing one another's sleep, seemed insoluble questions to me. But the members of the conference did not seem to mind. They were content to have the whole national housing problem treated on a basis of one room for two people. That was the essence ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw

... seed-cotton which was to pass through the rollers as the first step toward its preparation for the market. How simply does a sudden stroke of inventive genius solve a problem which wise men have regarded as insoluble! Not much more than a century ago a commission of practical English savans discouraged the cultivation of a textile fabric which "might be useful but for the impossibility of clearing it of the seeds!" But the foot-gin appeared on the scene, and indigo went ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... set no store by his observation of real life, which was excellent. It was his crank to fancy himself as a philosopher, and he wished to write sociological plays and novels of ideas. He had no difficulty in solving all sorts of insoluble questions, and at every turn he discovered America. When in due course he found that America was already discovered, he was disappointed, humiliated, and rather bitter: he was never far from scenting injustice and intrigue. He was consumed by a thirst for fame ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... lives. The younger men, their hearts beating with conscious power and freedom, resented this control, or accepting it, refused to assume the responsibility for the outcome of their lives. It was the old, old strife, the insoluble mystery; and the minister's wife, far from making light of it, allowed its full weight to press in upon the members of her class, and wisely left the question as the apostle leaves it, with a statement of the two great truths of Sovereignty and Free Will without attempting the impossible ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor

... abroad without crossing the ocean, and abandon an interesting family of children without getting completely beyond their reach, and escape from the frying-pan of housekeeping without falling into the fire of the summer hotel? This apparently insoluble problem we usually solve by going ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke

... Moreover, the dip at this spot was 89 degrees 11', practically what it had been ever since one hundred and fifty miles. Sixty-five miles for nothing! How far for the other forty-nine minutes which were needed for a vertical dip and the South Magnetic Pole? This problem was insoluble, so each toggled himself into his bag in a rather depressed state ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... that the creation of the world had now become no more mysterious than the making of a dumpling, though concerning this last there were still some to whom the question as to how the apples were got in presented an insoluble problem—this seized me with an amazement of pleasure. I do not mean to say a presumptuous thing at all; but it is a simple fact that from this first beginning of acquaintance with Carlyle, he never once appeared to teach me anything in the way of ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray

... important part in the production of taste; it does not differ much from water, excepting by containing a quantity of mucilage; and nothing is sapid, or capable of affecting the sense of taste, unless it is in some degree soluble in this liquor. Hence earthy substances, which are nearly insoluble, have ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett

... calls the problem of understanding how the complete coherence of all things in the absolute should involve as a necessary moment in its self-maintenance the self-assertion of the finite minds, a self-assertion which in its extreme form is error,—he calls this problem, I say, an insoluble puzzle. If truth be the universal fons et origo, how does error slip in? 'The coherence theory of truth,' he concludes, 'may thus be said to suffer shipwreck at the very entrance of the harbor.'[12] Yet in spite of this rather bad form of irrationality, Mr. Joachim stoutly asserts his 'immediate ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James

... and the gold-diggers. Unity is not always the absolute good, and it may be that progress must come through disruption. Who knows whether instantaneous secession would not perform the mission of resolving certain problems otherwise insoluble? Who knows whether slavery must not disappear in this wise in the very effort that it makes to strengthen itself through isolation? Who knows whether it is not important to the prosperity and real power of the United States to escape from theories of territorial monopoly, those evil counsellors ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin

... Regime; and those who have been the scourges of God have been, in general, mere scourges, and nothing better; smiting blindly, rashly, confusedly; confounding too often the innocent with the guilty, till they have seemed only to punish crime by crime, and replace old sins by new. But, however insoluble, however saddening that puzzle be, I must believe—as long as I believe in any God at all—that such men as Robespierre were His instruments, even ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley

... a snow-bank to dam a river. The snow melts and swells the torrent which it was intended to arrest. Each side reads admitted truths into its own dialect, and infers that its own dialect affords the only valid expression. To regard such antitheses as final and insoluble would be to admit complete scepticism. What is true for one man would not therefore be true—or at least its truth would not be demonstrable—to another. We must trust that reconciliation is achievable by showing that the difference is really less vital and corresponds ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... dark secret between the two villains of the piece, which he leaves to the reader as an exercise for the imagination. This is a characteristic of all his longer stories. There is an unknown quantity, an insoluble point, in them, which tantalizes ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... Booker Washington had presented a solution of an apparently insoluble problem. He had offered a platform upon which, as Clark Howell said in the Atlanta Constitution, "both races, blacks and whites, could stand with full justice to each." In the course of the speech he told this story: "A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe

... compact, impenetrable, unimpressible, unyielding, rigid, adamantine, dense, insoluble, flinty, indurate, indurated, infrangible; arduous, laborious, wearisome, onerous, burdensome, toilsome, tiresome, exhausting, difficult, knotty, intricate, puzzling, incomprehensible; irresistible, uncontrollable; severe, rigorous, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... leaned back in his chair and crossed his slippered feet before the fire, "it appears to come to this: instead of discovering a way to drain 'the forty rods,' you have only provided us with another insoluble problem to puzzle our heads over. There seems to be no way that we can figure out—at present, anyhow—by which the water can be brought to the surface, and consequently our only resource is, apparently, to discover, if possible, ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp

... stumbled, I might have still been groping for her at the dawn. My next business was to gain the shelter of a wood, for the wind was cold as well as boisterous. How, in this well-wooded district, I should have been so long in finding one, is another of the insoluble mysteries of this day's adventures; but I will take my oath that I put near an hour ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... logical doctrinal statements in which it delighted, but also in the possession of a definite scheme of republican church government which became as distinctive of the Calvinistic or "Reformed" churches as their doctrine of the Supper. It was at a later epoch still that those insoluble questions which press most inexorably for consideration when theological thought and study are most serious and earnest—the questions that concern the divine sovereignty in its relation to human freedom and responsibility—arose in the Catholic Church to divide Jesuit from Dominican ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... reached the insoluble part," said Adine gravely. "I've just given you the details leading up to it. I have shown that there were two ranches, two plans of management, an intermingling of assets, and never the least bit of friction. Yet there is one thing in which they are as far ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney

... since Julius had given up his attempts to locate the right box in the first choice and was apparently satisfied to discover it by a process of trial and error. He had, it would seem, satisfied himself that the problem was insoluble. These results obtained in problem 1a constitute a most interesting comment on the effects of problem 2 on the orang utan. Behavior similar to that which he developed well might have been obtained from a child of three to four ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes

... instinctively that he was not dreaming, and yet was powerless to solve the mystery. He was not, however, the man to puzzle himself for long over any insoluble problem. "Come what may," he presently exclaimed, "we will make up our minds for the future to be ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne

... shaft of love and the desolation of death had struck me almost in the same hour, and before these twin mysteries, supremely equal, I recoiled and quailed. I had neither faith nor friend. I was solitary, and my soul also was solitary. The difficulties of Being seemed insoluble. I was not a moral coward, I was not prone to facile repentances; but as I gazed at that calm and unsullied mask I realized, whatever I had gained, how much I had lost. At twenty-one I knew more of the fountains of life than Aunt Constance at over sixty. Poor aged thing that had walked among ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett

... left him with a more insoluble perplexity on his hands; two, in fact—oh, half a dozen! What was she doing there? Did Rodney know? Well, those questions, and others in their train, could wait. But—what was he going to ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... questions concerning which men have always differed and ever will differ. Although the Alexandrian divines invoked the aid of reason, it is a matter which reason cannot settle. It is a matter to be received, if received at all, as a mystery which is insoluble. It belongs to the realm of faith and authority. And the realms of faith and reason are eternally distinct. As metaphysics cannot solve material phenomena, so reason cannot explain subjects which do not appeal to consciousness. Bacon was a great benefactor ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord

... every effort to keep, not only the army, but the people as well, supplied with all that was needed to live and to resist the enemy. Supplies had always been a hard problem in that poverty-stricken little land and when the Serbian refugees began flocking in, it became an insoluble problem, unless with help from outside, which was ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... super-poet, in view of the life and education of the public to whom he catered, let alone the evidence of the plays themselves, and their author's status as mere translator and adapter, must remain an insoluble mystery. The simple truth is that a playwright such as Plautus, having undertaken to feed a populace hungry for amusement, ground out plays (doubtless for a living),[20] with a wholesome disregard for niceties of composition, provided only ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke

... Association was appointed to deal with questions of national defense, and the cooperation between this committee and the department has been most cordial and effective, and but for some such arrangement the great transportation problem would have been insoluble. I am happy, therefore, to join the Quartermaster General in pointing out the extraordinary service rendered by the transportation agencies of the country, and I concur also in his statement that "of those who are now serving ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various

... is very complex. It carries on the work of the saliva, and also splits insoluble fats ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... enough from accepting the conventional orthodoxy of Dante which, referring all human action to the simple formula of purgatory, heaven and hell, leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths of Dante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of the donor, Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit or discredit of attracting some shadow of ecclesiastical ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... toward the point of excitement, even the central tentacles, which are motionless when themselves charged, now responding to the call. The inflection which follows mechanical irritation or the presence of any inorganic or insoluble body is transient; that which follows the application of organic matter lasts longer, more or less, according to its nature and the amount; but sooner or later the tentacles resume their former position, their glands glisten anew with fresh secretion, and they ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... least a score of times every day that she could not understand how this dreadful affair had come to pass. The most complete explanation from her daughter availed nothing; she deemed the event an insoluble mystery, and, in familiar talk with Mrs. Mumford, breathed singular charges against Louise's lover. 'She's shielding him, my dear. I've no doubt of it. I never had a very good opinion of him, but now she shall ...
— The Paying Guest • George Gissing

... a point we must insist upon. There is certainly a real antinomy which is difficult to reconcile between this dual egoism of exclusive and concentrated love and social solidarity or human altruism. The problem is not insoluble, but we must admit that ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... however, we only put forth as a conjecture, not having within reach the MSS. of Grettir's saga. A critical examination of these might, perhaps, allow of a more positive discourse on this vexed point, which to all commentators on Grettir has hitherto remained an insoluble riddle. ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris

... We still want a plain answer to a plain question and insist that he really means either that the saint is annihilated or enters on an infinite existence. But the true analogues to this question are the other insoluble questions, for instance, is the world infinite or finite in space? This is in form a simple physical problem, yet it is impossible for the mind to conceive either an infinite world or a world stopping abruptly with ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... to face with an apparently insoluble enigma. Schiaparelli regards the "germination" of his canals as a periodical phenomenon depending on the Martian seasons. It is, assuredly, not an illusory one, since it was plainly apparent, during the opposition of 1886, to MM. Perrotin and Thollon at Nice,[995] and to the former, using ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... empire, however, none too surely held, were already involving it in insoluble difficulties and imminent dangers. On the one hand, in Asia, it had been found impossible to establish military fiefs in Arabia, Kurdistan, or anywhere east of it, on the system which had secured the Osmanli tenure elsewhere. On the other hand, in Europe, ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... problems that the Japanese builders of the past had to face in the erection of a few of the great temples which still adorn the country have proved insoluble to many European engineers and architects. The erection and support of the magnificent pagoda at Nikko is an example in point. Dr. Dresser has referred to this and pointed out what he deemed a great waste of material in connection ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery

... constitutes the elementary tissues of vegetable? This substance is found quite pure in many bodies, especially in cotton, which is nothing more than the down of the seeds of the cotton plant. Now cotton, combined with cold nitric acid, become transformed into a substance eminently insoluble, combustible, and explosive. It was first discovered in 1832, by Braconnot, a French chemist, who called it xyloidine. In 1838 another Frenchman, Pelouze, investigated its different properties, and finally, in 1846, Schonbein, professor of chemistry at Bale, proposed ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne

... underneath it. Why did the voice that urged her to perform the necessary action not add the one word that was capable of ensuring that action? The problem moreover is equally perturbing and perhaps equally insoluble whether it concerns our own subconscious faculties, or spirits, or strange intelligences. Those who give these warnings must know that they will be useless, because they manifestly foresee the event ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck

... solution of glue, observed that they were hardly mixed together before a white felamentous precipitate took place, owing to a combination of the glue with the tanning principle contained in the solution of tan. This precipitate is insoluble in water, either hot or cold, and acquires colour by being exposed to the light. The foregoing experiment furnishes a true explanation of the process of tanning; for it will easily be conceived that the solution of tan acts upon the hides (from which glue is produced) in the ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger

... the anger of men, he appears no longer to me as I saw him last—a white speck catching all the dim light left upon a sombre coast and the darkened sea—but greater and more pitiful in the loneliness of his soul, that remains even for her who loved him best a cruel and insoluble mystery. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... entire fluid, appeared to be a perfect and durable ink. Lastly, a portion of the infusion of galls was kept for some time at the boiling temperature, by means of which a part of its contents became insoluble; this was removed by filtration, when, by the addition of the sulphate of iron, a very perfect and durable ink was produced. In the above three processes I conceive that a considerable part of the mucilage, the tan, and the extract, were respectively removed from ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various

... of the most frequent operations required in making up medicines, its object being to extract the aromatic and volatile principles of substances, that would be lost by decoction, or digestion; and to extract the soluble from the insoluble parts of bodies. Infusions may be made with cold water, in which case they are weaker, but more pleasant. The general method employed consists in slicing, bruising, or rasping the ingredients first, then placing them in a common jug (which should be as globular as possible), ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... succeed in spoiling the afternoon. I had never been forced to think so much about it in all my life. He made me very uncomfortable, very! What's the use of going miles out of your way, I say, out of the station to which it has pleased God to place us? I believe in leaving such insoluble problems to ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... because reason is still stronger than love, and logic more tenacious than crime; it is because here as everywhere in our civilization there reigns an insoluble contradiction. Let us not wander into fantastic worlds; let us embrace, in all its frightful ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... natural cause by which all could have come about. As he grew older and his mind became more cautious he came to think the matter deeper than the human mind could ever fathom. He gave up the hope and believed the problem of animal origin and derivation would forever remain insoluble. He feared there was not in man the power ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker

... insoluble if chance had not laws of its own. It was Maxwell who first thought of introducing into the kinetic theory the calculation of probabilities. Willard Gibbs and Boltzmann later on developed this idea, and have founded a statistical method which does not, perhaps, give ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare

... unaesthetic, but amusing. I have not seen Ruth, by Mrs. Gaskell. I hear it much admired—and blamed. It is one of the many proofs of the desire women now have to friser questionable topics, and to poser insoluble moral problems. George Sand has turned their heads in that direction. I think a few broad scenes or hearty jokes a la Fielding were very harmless in comparison. They confounded nothing. . ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... to the voters. Fifth on this latter committee was the name of S.A. Douglas of Sangamon.[77] The machinery of the party was thus created out of hand by a group of unauthorized leaders. They awaited the reaction of the insoluble elements in ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... that Canadian sealers should give up their rights in Bering Sea for a money payment, and to arrange for a measure of reciprocity in natural products and in a limited list of manufactures. But the question of the Alaskan boundary proved insoluble, and the Commission broke up in ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton

... they convey a meaning; but then from what is known of Kidd, I could not suppose him capable of constructing any of the more abstruse cryptographs. I made up my mind, at once, that this was of a simple species—such, however, as would appear, to the crude intellect of the sailor, absolutely insoluble without ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... phosphorus is changed by combustion into an extremely light, white, flakey matter; and its properties are entirely altered by this transformation: From being insoluble in water, it becomes not only soluble, but so greedy of moisture, as to attract the humidity of the air with astonishing rapidity; by this means it is converted into a liquid, considerably more dense, and of more specific gravity than water. In the state of phosphorus ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier

... frequently called Bolognian phosphorus. In 1774 K. W. Scheele, in examining a specimen of pyrolusite, found a new substance to be present in the mineral, for on treatment with sulphuric acid it gave an insoluble salt which was afterwards shown to be identical with that contained in heavy spar. Barium occurs chiefly in the form of barytes or heavy spar, BaSO4, and witherite, BaCO3, and to a less extent in baryto-calcite, baryto-celestine, and various complex silicates. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... speculations with regard to the other side. Some, indeed, have wished to imagine that our satellite is shaped like an egg, the more pointed end being directed away from us. We are here, of course, faced with a riddle, which is all the more tantalising from its appearing for ever insoluble to men, chained as they are to the earth. However, it seems going too far to suppose that any abnormal conditions necessarily exist at the other side of the moon. As a matter of fact, indeed, small portions of that ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage

... naturalist, of the more or less mystical intellectual speculations of the Deists of 1790-1830. Scientific workers were very tired of Deism just then. They had given up the riddle of the Great First Cause as insoluble, and were calling themselves, accordingly, Agnostics. They had turned from the inscrutable question of Why things existed, to the spade work of discovering What was really occurring in the world ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... fluid porous cup battery with carbon negative plate, zinc positive plate, and mercury sulphate, a nearly insoluble salt, as depolarizer and excitant. Mercurous or mercuric sulphates have been used in it. Its electromotive force is 1.5 volts. The local action and waste, owing to the slight solubility of the mercury compounds, is very slight. If used on close circuit it becomes polarized. ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone

... Sea, on the coast of Thrace and opposite the mouth of the Hebrus; the Mysteries are said to have found their first home in this island, where the Cabirian gods were worshipped; this cult, shrouded in deep mystery to even the initiates themselves, has remained an almost insoluble problem for the modern critic. It was said that the wishes of the initiates were always granted, and they were feared as to-day the 'jettatori' (spell-throwers, casters of the evil eye) in ...
— Peace • Aristophanes

... these problems has no bearing at all on any moral or religious question. It is insoluble. It leaves us not in doubt but ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock

... lack of the power of concentration being attributed to adenoid vegetations, but in which the defect might, with at least as much reason, have been referred to the play of sexual ideas. To the teacher, his pupil's inattentiveness is often an insoluble riddle, merely because he ignores in the child the play of erotic imagination, and, in fact, ignores the child's inner life in general. And yet, in such cases, the child's failure to attend to the work of the class sometimes depends upon nothing more than occupation with thoughts about a beloved ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll



Words linked to "Insoluble" :   unsoluble, hopeless, unsolvable, incomprehensible, indissoluble, soluble, inexplicable



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