"Mechanism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he concluded, "he wants to have an easier life, and, besides, if the despatches and orders leave him time for it, to occupy himself with his favourite amusements—his clocks and pieces of mechanism. Finally, his sufferings remind him often enough of the approach of death, and he hopes by religious exercises to secure his place in the kingdom ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... hands, and a rapid change of position, you might almost suppose that he was sleeping on his legs. But go close up, and you notice that the machine is slowly moving backward and forward, and still more slowly at the same time in a lateral direction. Some curious piece of mechanism is placed on it, and the movements of the machine cause a sharp steel-cutter to pass over the iron surface, which cuts it as easily and truly as a joiner planes a piece of fir. The side motion brings all the surface gradually ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... to the girl, and began explaining the mechanism of the gun to her, without appearing to notice her embarrassment, for she shrank perceptibly ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... had concealed nothing from her, save the mechanism of the short, sharp struggle which was to make him almost a millionaire, if Jack ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... acts as one with the lungs (as has been shown above) therefore what has been said (in n. 404) about affection for truth, perception of truth, and thought, can nowhere be more clearly seen and proved than in the lungs and the mechanism thereof. These, therefore, shall be briefly described. After birth, the heart discharges the blood from its right ventricle into the lungs; and after passing through these it is emptied into the left ventricle: thus the heart opens the lungs. This it does through the ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... those studies and investigations which have been my delight since youth. In imagination I pictured myself the owner of a sightly residence surmounted by a spacious observatory, in which was located a magnificent reflector-telescope operated by the newest and nicest mechanism. It was pleasing to be rich, even in fancy. My ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... to be involved in inextricable confusion. Long and careful examination has at length been efficient in ascertaining that in this apparent disorder are to be seen the traces of an order, as perfect as that of any other mechanism of nature, and of a succession of changes by which the earth has been finally fitted for the habitation of man. These strata have been finally arranged into five distinct classes, differing in their ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... he said, "if you are certain that in the mechanism of the vision and that of the recognition, which is a vision of the past, there ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... rectilinear motion of the piston is changed into a circular motion. In rotatory engines the steam acts at once in the production of circular motion, either upon a revolving piston or otherwise, but without the use of any intermediate mechanism, such as the crank, for deriving a circular from a rectilinear motion. Rotatory engines have not hitherto been very successful, so that only the single acting or pumping engine, and the double acting or ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... sent me and mine the fattest broad-tailed sheep of his flock, with five measures of matama grain. The mutton was excellent, unapproachable. For his timely and needful present I gave him two doti, and amused him with an exhibition of the wonderful mechanism of the Winchester rifle, and ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... simultaneously, at twelve open doors, twelve knights in armor, retiring one after another, as the hour struck. The time-piece then had superseded the sun-dial and hour-glass: the mechanical arts had attained no slight degree of perfection. But passing over all ingenious mechanism, making no mention here of astronomical discoveries, some of them surprising enough, it is especially for the Algebraic analysis that we must thank the Moors. A strange fascination, doubtless, these ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... so with rapidity and precision at sight. At this point it may be well to begin lessons on the organ, taking great pains to become familiar with the technical part of the instrument, the names of stops and meaning of these names, mechanism and its use. Then will come the careful practice of pedals, which are at first so absolutely bewildering that amateurs are filled with despair at the apparent impossibilities they are asked ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... suspicion that "nature-study" as now followed in the schools—or shall I say in the colleges?—this classroom peeping and prying into the mechanism of life, dissecting, probing, tabulating, void of free observation, and shut away from the open air—would have cured me of my love of nature. For love is the main thing, the prime thing, and to train ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... man is made to pay tribute to this divine and charming cancer! See by what admirable instrumentalities it feeds itself from the surrounding, quivering, dainty flesh! See how it gradually but surely expands and grows! By what marvelous mechanism it is supplied with long and slender roots that reach out to the most secret nerves of pain for sustenance and life! What beautiful colors it presents! Seen through the microscope it is a miracle of order and beauty. All the ingenuity of man cannot stop its growth. Think of the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... has seen something of the kitchen where great reputations are made; he had been behind the scenes; he had seen the seamy side of life, the consciences of men involved in the machinery of Paris, the mechanism of it all. As he watched Florine on the stage he almost envied Lousteau his good fortune; already, for a few moments he had forgotten Matifat in the background. He was not left alone for long, perhaps for ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... Man's mechanism stands at the center of the universe with telegraph-lines extending in every direction. It is a marvelous pilgrimage he is making through life while myriad influences stream in upon him. It is no small thing to carry such a mind for ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... on the very first page of the "Caracteres," "you make a book as you make a clock"; he ought to have said, "I make my book," for no other work is quite so clock-like in its variety of parts, its elaborate mechanism, and its air of having been constructed at different times, in polished fragments, which have needed the most workmanlike ingenuity to fit them together into an instrument ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... circuit, thereby ringing a bell and switching on a red lamp. Clissold had realised that the continuous ringing of the bell would not be soothing to the nerves of our party, nor the continuous burning of the lamp calculated to prolong its life, and he had therefore added the clockwork mechanism which automatically broke the circuit after a short interval of time; further, this clockwork mechanism could be made to control the emersion of the same warning signals at intervals of time varied according to the desire of the operator;—thus because, ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... a broken propeller-shaft two or three scores of tons in weight, the most intricate machinery, or the most delicate electric mechanism, he was equally at home and sure in his work; in fact nothing seemed to come amiss to him. His machinery was always the object of his most anxious care, and, providing that all worked satisfactorily, ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... it, especially in the part of Nebuchadnezer and the dialogue is very easy, and the dinouement in favour of Barbara interesting. There are, however, I think, some objections to be made, which, having written so well, you may easily remove, as they are rather faults in the mechanism than in the writing. Several scenes seem to me to finish too abruptly, and not to be enough connected. Juliana is not enough distinguished, as of an age capable of more elevated sentiments: her desire of playing ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... so as to fold back and constitute a wagon-body. In this same wagon were carried the cotton canvas cover, the anchor and chains, and a due proportion of the balks, cheeses, and lashings. All the troops became very familiar with their mechanism and use, and we were rarely delayed by reason of a river, however broad. I saw, recently, in Aldershot, England, a very complete pontoon-train; the boats were sheathed with wood and felt, made very light; but I think these were more liable ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... our hotel we knew of it only the second day through the failure of the morning rolls, for there had been no baking overnight. Most of the in-door service was of Swiss or other foreign extraction, and the mechanism of our comfort, our luxury, was operated as usual. Our floor facchino, or porter, went to the meeting of the unions in the evening, being an Italian. Otherwise the strike fell especially on the helpless and guiltless foreigner, who might be, and very often was, in sympathy ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... dramatic poem. Thus, in regard to this last point, Zicari has already noted (p. 270) that Salandra's scenic acts were necessarily reproduced in the form of visions by Milton, who could not avail himself of the mechanism of the drama for this purpose. Milton was a man of the world, traveller, scholar, and politician; but it will not do for us to insist too vehemently upon the probable mental inferiority of the Calabrian monk, in view of the high ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Dr. Carpenter, "the vague designation of 'instinctive' does not in the least help us to account for them, since what we want is to discover the MECHANISM by which they are worked out; and it is most difficult to conceive how so artificial a selection can be made by a creature so simple" (Mental Physiology, 4th ed. ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... try to remedy the trouble by changing the eccentric, or if the eccentric slips do not go to the valve to mend the trouble. I am well aware that among young engineers the impression prevails that a valve is a wonderful piece of mechanism liable to kick out of place and play smash generally. Now let me tell you right here that a valve (I mean the ordinary slide valve, such as is used on traction and portable engines), is one of the simplest parts of an engine, and you are not to lose any sleep about it, so ...
— Rough and Tumble Engineering • James H. Maggard
... you not take coffee and rolls in London as well as in some Paris cafe"? It would seem so, yet it cannot be done. The mere sight and sound—or lack of sound— of that warm, softly carpeted breakfast-room, moving like some gloomy, inevitable mechanism as it has moved for countless years, attacks the already weakened will like an opiate. At the first bewildering '"Q?" from that steely-fronted maid the ritual overpowers you and you bow before porridge, kippers, bacon and ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern. Motherwell was in favour of scientific methods of editing. Given two copies of a ballad, he says, "perhaps they may not have a single stanza which is mutual property, except certain commonplaces which seem an integral portion of the original mechanism of all our ancient ballads . . . " By selecting the most beautiful and striking passages from each copy, and making those cohere, an editor, he says, may produce a more perfect and ornate version than any that exists in tradition. Of the ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... life—of creating offspring—of impregnating and developing into perfect being, with thinking and reasoning brain and mind, pulsating heart, expanding lungs, sentient nerves, motive muscle, and all that beautiful, minute and co-ordinate mechanism that forms a perfect human being—the only secretion in the body capable of propagating ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... merely a piece of mechanism. But the real automaton possesses a human brain which has been transplanted into it and ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... running beautifully. The cleaning out that Cora gave the base, and the regulating of the oil cups together with adjusting the wires, helped to make the mechanism run more smoothly, and she glided along without "missing," which means, of course that every explosion was in perfect rhythm to every other explosion. There was a "hot ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... of loosened ore, down to the finest dust, was forced into a conveyor and thence into the armored body of the machine. There it went into a mechanism whose basic principles Hilton could not understand. From this monstrosity ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... Some delicate mechanism seemed to stop. Had he broken it? As one might lay a rare watch to his ear he waited, listening, while they stood looking off to where water, sky, and sun met; and presently, to his immeasurable ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... what demand is there for the ability that they may have prematurely acquired? Will they not be indisposed to bend to any kind of hard labour or drudgery? and yet many of them must submit to it, or do wrong. The mechanism of the Bell system is not required in small places; praying after the fugleman is not like praying at a mother's knee. The Bellites overlook the difference: they talk about moral discipline; but wherein does it encourage the imaginative feelings, without ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... seemed to stop, the blood moved with a sick slowness in her veins, it seemed impossible that she should go forward, and yet, by the curious mechanism of the human machine, her feet carried her on until Blake's presence was tangible to all her senses—until suspense was engulfed in actuality, and joy was singing about her in the air, a song so triumphant, ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... their conception and ripening' to various periods of his life, but to the popular mind they are all associated with the wizard's present home, from whence for several years the bulletins of inventions—playful, useful, necessary, revolutionary—often as simple in their mechanism as they are astonishing in their results, have been given to a delighted world. Some of Edison's inventions have a character at present of little more than picturesque playfulness, such as the Phonograph, perhaps the most remarkable of these minor inventions; the Aerophone, by which ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... of mechanism, the reply to her rhetorical question came down to her from heaven. It came in the shape of a thunder-roll that began far off and reverberated from mountain to mountain; then muttered itself into silence in the more distant hills. The Mistress, like ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... to see it, added some notes, and induced him to revise and publish it. The artist found in it the theory of ideal beauty, which had been taught him by Zachary Mudge, from the writings of Plato, and which enabled him to rise above the mere mechanism of his predecessors. That Mason's version surpasses the original, is not saying much in its praise. In some prefatory lines addressed to Reynolds, he has described the character of Dryden with ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... constantly being made to set up one-to-one correspondences between simple notions and more complicated ones, or between the well-explored fields of research and fields less known. Thus, by means of the mechanism employed in analytic geometry, algebraic theorems are made to yield geometric ones, and vice versa. In geometry we get at the properties of the conic sections by means of the properties of the straight line, and ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... it, you see, is a Horsten psychomat (stolen from one of my ideas, by the way) and you, the user, become part of the device. Your own mind is necessary to furnish the background. For instance, if George Washington could have used the mechanism after the signing of peace, he could have seen what you suggest. We can't. You can't even see what would have happened if I hadn't invented the thing, but I can. ...
— The Worlds of If • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... trauma of the kind we have seen is a mystery." The scientist gestured to the TV receiver. "The transmitter is incorporated into the TV chassis, and the 'rabbit ears' act as an antenna when adjusted properly. The recorder is a simple EEG mechanism." ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... as a mechanism is far from perfect. It can be beaten or surpassed at almost every point by some product of the machine-shop or some animal. It does almost nothing perfectly or with absolute precision. As Huxley ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... paradox, the true poet is more truly ourselves than we are. The astronomical telescope is constructed upon the same principles as the terrestrial one, only it is more powerful and more perfectly made. Not only the lenses, but all the details of the mechanism are more highly finished; more thought and more labour are bestowed upon them; the parts are more skilfully co-ordinated together; it is a better instrument. We do wrong to genius in connecting it with mental aberration; it is more normal, ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... new hare. I have got a glimpse of a method of causing a piston-rod to move up and down perpendicularly, by only fixing it to a piece of iron upon the beam ... I think it one of the most ingenious simple pieces of mechanism I have contrived. ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... Captain Malu agreed that the intention was ambitious and honorable. It was not until several days later that he became interested in Bertie, when that young adventurer insisted on showing him an automatic 44-caliber pistol. Bertie explained the mechanism and demonstrated by slipping a loaded magazine up ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... had become rigid like the shell of an egg; then the force of the "tidal explosion'' produced by the appulse of another sun would be more violent in consequence of the greater resistance overcome. Such, then, is the mechanism of the first phase in the history of a spiral nebula according to the Planetesimal Hypothesis. Two suns, perhaps extinguished ones, have drawn near together, and an explosive outburst has occured in one or both. The second phase calls for a more ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... watching the purple ring upon the silver towers, with the shining white needle hanging below it. He stared at Mars, glowing like a red and sinister eye above the incredible mechanism. ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... artillery-horses—the legs that tell of muscularity and lasting stamina. Their drill was very loose, and skill in musketry left much to be desired. They had no perception of distance-judging, and some were so grossly ignorant of the mechanism of their weapons that they knocked off the back-sights of their rifles, alleging that they hindered them from taking correct aim. The Marquis de la Hormazas—a meagre, tall, elderly man—was commandant of the battalion, and was stern ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... now and silent, he thought once more of the girl's strange attitude, of her distraught face, of her haggard eyes. And he also began to wonder what accident had released the mechanism which had hurled the formidable iron curtain upon him, craftily ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... lives only on fruit, and he lives only a few degrees on either side of the Equator. All the businesses that in your earth arise from the preparation and sale of meat and all the various confections, disappear there, and also all the mechanism of house heating and lighting. Also there are no railroads, but innumerable canals, which form a labyrinth of waterways, and are fed from the tides of the ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... he said, "where you are surrounded by the triumphs of science and of mechanism—you, whose river is ploughed by the great steamships whose white wake has been called the fittest avenue to the palace front of a mercantile people—you know well that in the achievements of science there is not only beauty and wonder, but ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... the sense of law as the voice of past wisdom. He was, said Burke, "the greatest genius which has enlightened this age"; and Burke had every reason to utter that noble panegyric. But Montesquieu was more than this. He emphasized legislation as the main mechanism of social change; and therein he is the parent of that decisive reversal of past methods of which Bentham first revealed the true significance. Nor had any thinker before his time so emphasized the importance of liberty as the true end of government; even the placid ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... all laws and rules of Philosophy, and to continue to advocate its claims is to remain where we are in relation to the cause of Gravitation, and in complete ignorance of the beauty and harmony of the wonderful physical mechanism that underlies the whole of the universe. Of course, if experience and observation are no guide to Philosophy, then we will let imagination run riot, and postulate the most extravagant explanations for the varied phenomena of the heavens. With experience of no account, we ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... of deciding great issues. Four weeks ago he was something of a piece of mechanism, fairly content with his drab-colored life; and now a girl had entered it and brought to him visions too fair and beautiful to be viewed unveiled, and he knew at last the mystery and power of love. Almost a week of her stay had gone before he met her. In those that followed, ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... lowest qualities and the basest acts found justification under the name of policy. Courage in battle was supplanted by the shield and mechanism of bodily safety. They killed the men who tried to rouse them. They had wasted all their inheritance but great memories, and had acquired a truculent and factious spirit. While they were nearing the utter decay of their ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... mutilated limb, unequaled in mechanism and utility. Hands and Arms of superior excellence for mutilations and congenital defects. Feet and appurtenances, for limbs shortened by hip disease. Dr. HUDSON, by appointment of the Surgeon General of the U. S. Army, furnishes limbs to mutilated Soldiers and Marines. References.—Valentine Mett, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... serve a purpose. Floor upon floor filled with merchandise, broad aisles, easy stairways, elevators to do the stair climbing, cash system for quick and easy change-making, with all the newest ideas in store mechanism; places to sit, wait, meet, lunch, talk and rest; in short, an ideal place to shop in. Everything done that can be done to study the convenience of customers and look after their interests. This constitutes one of the greatest factors in ...
— How Department Stores Are Carried On • W. B. Phillips
... such a manner, with very slight variation. The Doctor envied them their simplicity of faith. To him, on the contrary, the patient was a factor which could not be counted on, at all—a force about which he knew virtually nothing, acting upon a mechanism about which he knew little more, and capable of interactions, reactions, and counteractions innumerable, reversing and nullifying all past experience at a moment's ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... of ammunition, examined the rifle until he had mastered its mechanism, and saw that it was loaded and ready. When the children reached him—the two smaller ones staring vacantly ahead as if walking in their ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... be said for the unfortunates who swabbed the floors, scraped out the jets, realigned the drive mechanism, or did any other tidying work. Their jobs were never done; they always suffered from the nagging thought that just a little more work might bring the inspection rating up a decimal ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... "I shall maybe prove a small cog in the bigger mechanism, and that's something. And Markledew was satisfied, anyway, so far. And if I don't get something out of that chap Davidge tonight, write ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... of Jupiter, as it was discovered by Galileo, and investigated by Laplace, appeared in its outward aspect so symmetrical, and displayed in its inner mechanism such harmonious dynamical relations, that it might well have been deemed complete. Nevertheless, a new member has been added to it. Near midnight on September 9, 1892, Professor Barnard discerned with the Lick 36-inch "a tiny speck of light," closely following ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... exterior of the cranium and is nourished by a transudation of the blood through the coronal suture. This pellicle is also said to have a connection with the heart, which arrangement furnishes a decidedly curious explanation of the mechanism of sympathetic and maudlin lachrymation. For, as Gilbert tells us, when the heart is compressed this pellicle is also compressed, and if any moisture is found beneath the pellicle it is expressed into the substance of the lachrymal gland ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... remark the striking difference which obtains between the Mosaic and the New Testament dispensations in all that regards the materialisms of their respective places of worship. We find in the Pentateuch chapter after chapter occupied with the mechanism of the tabernacle. The pattern given in the mount is as minutely described as any portion of the ceremonial law, and for exactly the same reason: the one as certainly as the other was 'a figure of ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... and a speaker's table decorated with a large pitcher for ice-water. The regular meetings came once a month and Roosevelt attended them faithfully, because he never did things by halves, and having made up his mind to learn the mechanism of politics, he would not neglect ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... not tremulous, but, rather, vibrant, a taut mechanism played on by the rage that possessed her. Her eyebrows, high on her forehead, reminded him of things that crawled. Her eyes, brilliant like clear ice with sunshine on it, were darting, furtive, always ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... uttered inaudible cries. He was filled with beastly, uncontrollable impatience. He cried out at the mechanism of the contagion-lock as a beast might bellow at the opening through which food was dropped ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... rifle from its sheath, wiped the dew from the butt, and tested the mechanism. The horse cocked his ears, but stood motionless while the rifle was taken out and replaced. Ashton picked up the reins from the ground and threw them over the horse's head. The beast did not swing around, but his ewe neck straightened and his entire ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... done."—Dr. Murray cor. "The rapidity of his movements was beyond example."—Wells cor. "Murray's Grammar, together with his Exercises and Key, has nearly superseded every thing else of the kind."—Murray's Rec. cor. "The mechanism of clocks and watches was totally unknown."—Hume cor. "The it, together with the verb to be, expresses a state of being."—Cobbett cor. "Hence it is, that the profuse variety of objects in some natural landscapes, occasions neither confusion nor fatigue."—Kames cor. "Such a ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... an inhuman, devilish deftness in the rhymes. The mighty mechanism of English verse had been employed to proclaim my remoteness from ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... member of the Brende household—the maid-servant, a girl about Elza's age. I knew her well, of course, but this evening I had forgotten her existence. She was standing in the corridor. Did I imagine it, or had she been gazing up at the mechanism ten feet above the floor—the mechanism controlling the ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... an atmosphere of summer blight or fog in the village church. She knelt, or rose, as her prayer-book taught her, and went through the solemn service as placidly as if she had been a wondrous piece of mechanism constructed to perform such movements; and then, like a creature in a dream, she found herself walking out of the church presently, with her hand on Stephen Whitelaw's arm. She had a faint consciousness of some ceremony in the vestry, where it had taken Stephen ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... Control.*—In respect to the actual mechanism of government the principal achievement of the Norman-Plantagenet period was the overhauling and consolidation of the agencies of administration. Despite the fact that local institutions of Saxon origin were largely respected, so that they have ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... the organs of generation not to be destined to perpetuate the species. This mechanism is very admirable, but the sensation which nature has joined to this mechanism is still more admirable. Epicurus had to avow that pleasure is divine; and that this pleasure is a final cause, by which are ceaselessly produced sentient beings who ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... gate;" its warehouses, stalls for the sale of relics. A very mean idol-worship, too, unrelieved by awe and reverence,—a selfish, earthward-looking devotion to the "least-erected spirit that fell from paradise." I grow weary of seeing man and mechanism reduced to a common level, moved by the same impulse, answering to the same bell-call. A nightmare of materialism broods over all. I long at times to hear a voice crying through the streets like that of one of the old prophets proclaiming the great first ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Antony Henderson's office in Corn Street, where poor Jack Henderson sat on his low stool, with his long legs bent up under the watchmaker's counter, pulling to pieces a large watch in a pinchbeck case, and thinking more of Bryda than the wheels of that cumbrous bit of mechanism. ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... once. A mania is upon me which, after thirty years of useless resistance and superhuman struggle, still draws me from bed and sleep to rehearse in ghastly fashion that deed of my early manhood. I can not resist it. To tear out the deadly mechanism, unhinge weight and drum and rid the house of every evidence of crime would but drive me to shriek my guilt aloud and act in open pantomime what I now go through in fearsome silence and secrecy. When the hour comes, as come it must, that I can not rise and ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... Men.—Now what is the essential reason for the efficient direction exercised by the helmsman of the Pennsylvania, and the relative impotency of generals? Is it not that the helmsman acts through the medium of mechanism, while the generals act through the medium of men? A ship is not only made of rigid metal, but all her parts are fastened together with the utmost rigidity; while the parts of an army are men, ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... contemplation; bent and swung himself about; crept on his knees, and stuck his head into corners and between the machines, for he would know everything so exactly; he would see the screw in the propelling vessels, understand their mechanism and effect under water—and the water itself poured like hail-drops down his forehead. He fell unconscious, backwards into my arms, or else he would have been drawn into the machinery, and been crushed: he looked at ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... malheurs," his view of the significance of man's sufferings is different and almost approaches the facile optimism of Pope—"whatever is, is right." He regards all the race's actual experiences as the indispensable mechanism of Progress, and does not regret its mistakes and calamities. Many changes and revolutions, he observes, may seem to have had most mischievous effects; yet every change has brought some advantage, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... spinal column, or backbone, is a marvelous piece of mechanism, combining offices which nothing short of perfection in adaptation and arrangement could enable it to perform. It is the central structure to which all the other parts of the skeleton are adapted. It consists of numerous ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... heard of? How are coins made? Where is the United States mint located? Where are the branch mints? How much value does the stamp of the government add to a piece of gold? Is there a dollar's worth of silver in a silver dollar? Why? (See Jevons' Money and the Mechanism of Exchange.) ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... mechanism of Cleggett's gun. With an oath he flung the weapon to the deck. A hand thrust another one into his grasp, and Lady Agatha's voice said in his ear, "Take ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... curious device for altering the gearing automatically while one rode, so as to enable one to adapt it to the varying slope in mounting hills. This part of the mechanism he explained to me elaborately. There was a gauge in front which allowed one to sight the steepness of the slope by mere inspection; and according as the gauge marked one, two, three, or four, as its gradient ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... 'the people I have round me here. Poor old Grealy is quite impracticable, though he means well. He talks about nothing but the Fianna and Finn McCool, and can't see that my fellows must have riding lessons, and must be got somehow to understand the mechanism of a rifle. Tim Halloran has been in a sulk ever since I told him what I thought of his conduct at the Rotunda. He never comes near me, and Mary O'Dwyer told me the other day that he called my volunteers a "pack of blackguards." I dare say it's perfectly ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... definite reason for the failure of theoretical investigation to produce a satisfactory Science of Voice Culture. This cannot be due to any present lack of understanding of the vocal mechanism on the part of scientific students of the subject. The anatomy and physiology of the vocal organs have been exhaustively studied by a vast number of highly trained experts. So far as the muscular operations of tone-production ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... rendered so by the admiring and excited state of his mind. He dwelt upon the matter of her "looks," and the way she lighted up the dingy dining-room, and so conversed that a man found himself listening and glancing when it was his business to be an unhearing, unseeing piece of mechanism. ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... bath, but I have several sisters-in-law who keep on coming to stay, and they all do it. Few things make the leaves of a book stick together so easily as being dropped in a hot bath, so they had better have a book-rest; and if they go to sleep I shall set in motion my emergency waste mechanism, by which the bath can be emptied ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... in the calculation. The psychologist knows that the mental elements cannot be brought under such a simple formula according to which good will and insight are sufficient; he knows that the mental mechanism which is at work there has its own complicated laws, which must be considered with the same care for detail as those technical schemes for improvement. The psychologist is not astonished that though the technical improvements of the railways are increased, yet one serious accident ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... powerful impulse to the inventive faculties of man, which lasts through generations. More frequently, however, inventions are not entirely new, but modifications of contrivances previously known, though to a few, and not yet brought into practical use. Glancing back over the history of mechanism, we occasionally see an invention seemingly full born, when suddenly it drops out of sight, and we hear no more of it for centuries. It is taken up de novo by some inventor, stimulated by the needs of his time, and falling again upon the track, he recovers the old footmarks, follows ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... thought in which they never have been and perhaps never will be surpassed, so some future age may direct its energies into channels that are as unknown to us as clocks and steam-engines were to the Greeks. This is the age of mechanism and of science; and mechanism and science sweep everything before them, and will probably be carried to their utmost capacity and development. After that the human mind may seek some new department, some new scope for its energies, and an age of new ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... centre of the deck. Just beyond this stood the most important part of the vessel—the lantern-house. This was a circular wooden structure, above six feet in diameter, with a door and small windows. Inside was the lantern—the beautiful piece of costly mechanism for which the light-ship, its crew, and its appurtenances were maintained. Right through the centre of this house rose the thick unyielding mast of the vessel. The lantern, which was just a little less than its house, ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... life seemed to be ceasing from their play, for, from this day, strictly speaking, he ate nothing more. His existence henceforward seemed to be the mere prolongation of an impetus derived from an eighty years' life, after the moving power of the mechanism was withdrawn. His physician visited him every day at a particular hour; and it was settled that I should always be there to meet him. Nine days before his death, on paying his usual visit, the following little circumstance occurred, which affected ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... Motherhood.—Ellen Key expresses this feeling that fitness for a task so tremendous as parenthood is more important than any mechanism by which parenthood is secured when she says, "It is solely from one moral point of view that motherhood without marriage, as well as the right of free divorce, must be judged. Irresponsible motherhood is always sin with or without marriage; responsible motherhood is always sacred with ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... centuries earlier, came in again with these first rifles, but after 1865 the British navy went back to muzzle-loading and stuck to it persistently for the next 15 years. By that time the breech-loading mechanism had been simplified, and its adoption became necessary to secure greater length of gun barrel, increased rapidity of fire, and better protection for gun-crews. About 1880 quick-fire guns of from 3 to 6 inches, firing 12 or 15 shots a minute, were ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... with double soles, and toes shaped like a toad's mouth, a propensity which sometimes continues throughout the career of his pupilage. He likewise takes off his hat when he enters the dissecting-room, and thinks that beautiful design is shown in the mechanism and structure of the human body—an idea which gets knocked out of him at the end of the season, when he looks upon the distribution of the nerves as "a blessed bore to get up, and no use to him after he has passed." But at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... bodies, limbs and heads waved, swayed, gesticulated, bowed, stooped, whirled, squirmed, twisted and undulated as if they were part and parcel of a single individual; and it was difficult to believe they were not moved in a body by some exquisite piece of mechanism. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Monday and his birthday arrived together, without bringing any birthday remembrance other than a letter from his old chum, Charlie Henchman, Reggie's heart went down to a depth for which he had no idea there was room in his mechanism. ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... of grief over, young Armstrong rose, and began sadly to wander about the ruins. It had been an extensive structure, fitted with all the most approved appliances of mechanism which wealth could purchase. These now helped to enhance the wild aspect of the wreck, for iron girders had been twisted by the action of fire into snake-like convolutions in some places, while, in others, their ends stuck out fantastically from the blackened walls. Beautiful ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... are useless unless one is able to see, to feel something beyond this ruthless mechanism by which we are surrounded and hemmed in, to have some perception of another scheme. Why struggle, unless we struggle for something definite? Oh, I don't mean heavenly rewards. Nothing could be more insipid and senseless than the orthodox view of the hereafter. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... your littleness as human beings, because to our microscopic mole-like sight the immense mechanism of the world is lost, do not for a moment doubt it. The earth turns. Without moving from where you are, in twenty-four hours you will have made the complete circuit with the globe. Without moving our ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... up stairs. But the method of avoiding the confusion and din of two or three hundred bells must not be omitted. All the wires from the different rooms centre at one bell, which is located in a case in the lobby, with the mechanism seen on one side through a sheet of plate-glass. The other side of the case is covered with numbers in rows. By each number is a small straight piece of brass, which drops and hangs down when the bell is sounded, displaying the number to the attention of the clerk, who sends ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... He refers in another place to the majority, who "may be considered as human zeros. Thus appears the enormous difference in method," concludes Pouget, "which distinguishes syndicalism and democracy: the latter, by the mechanism of universal suffrage, gives direction to the unconscious ... and stifles the minorities who bear within them the ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... race is insured, as we have just seen, by a mechanism, which, though it may be subjected to rational consideration, is instinctive in its operation. The human beings that people the earth to-day are offspring of human ancestors reaching back to the ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... remembering that Greaves had been found on the bed I first of all lay down for a minute or two. The bed was not made up, but the mattresses were there with blankets over them, and the hangings were in place. The key to the mystery might lie in some hidden mechanism in the bed. Then I settled myself in the chair beside the bed, my hand in my ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... preceding day; and especially how often violent and painful emotions, when they are extreme, result in decided and sometimes in permanent and hopeless insanity—that is, in an irreparable damage to some delicate mechanism in the brain—we shall see that there is every reason for supposing that all sudden shocks to the nervous system of children, all violent and painful excitements, all vexations and irritations, and ebullitions of ill-temper and anger, have a tendency to disturb the healthy development ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... rise to the same monstrous doctrine in the science of metaphysics which that of another verbal misconception, the equality of men, did in that of politics. The Scottish metaphysicians powerfully combined to illustrate the mechanism of the mind,—an important and a curious truth; for as rules and principles exist in the nature of things, and when discovered are only thence drawn out, genius unconsciously conducts itself by a uniform process; and when this process had been traced, they inferred that what was ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... any quantity of kerosene or gasoline, don't examine containers by match or candlelight. Use an electric flashlight and turn it on before going near such explosives. These dangers may seem obvious but it is astonishing how many times that faulty mechanism known as the genus homo has been guilty of just ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... orchestra and choir, illuminating with its fire, like chain lightning, the arches of a vast cathedral. Enchanted thing—what nameless spirit impregnates with magnetic ether the fine fibres of thy mechanism! ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... possible also that in very late times the weavers' comb was introduced. It is safe to say that the Egyptians had no knowledge of the reed. Both forms of looms were simple, without harness or other complicated pieces of mechanism. The Egyptians accomplished fairly good work and judging these people from their looms alone we must conclude they were ...
— Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms • H. Ling Roth
... realization of which money possesses no purchasing power. To relieve the pungent pinchings of penury with raiment, food and shelter, and so send the sunshine of gladness to the poor and needy, is something—indeed is much. But, ah! the delicate and intricate mechanism of mind is out of gear, a secret sorrow swells and sways the heart, and unitedly they cry: "Who will show us any good? Who remove this rankling sorrow? What good Samaritan competent to the task of affording relief to this dazed brain?" Oh! it is here that the trained votaries ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins |
