"Mercurial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her best to help him throw off his misgivings; she defended him from himself; she promised him her help, not with the old effusion, but still with a cousinly kindness. And his mercurial nature soon passed into another mood—a mood of hopefulness that the doctor would set everything right, that Alice would consent to place herself under proper care, that the crisis would end well—and ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... danger from the outskirts was soon taken up in the centre of the city, and now nothing was to be seen in any direction but a dashing and scampering of the mercurial and excitable citizens of the place, each to his lodge or burrow. Far as the eye could reach was spread the city, and in every direction the scene was the same. We rode leisurely along until we had reached the more thickly settled portion of the city, when we halted, and after taking the bridles ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... scarcely exaggerated her condition. The monotony of her life affected her spirits; the very absence of the necessity of thinking and caring for herself left a dull void in her heart and brain, and as the winter waned the annual spring fever of lassitude and dejection to which mercurial organizations like her own are subject, tended to increase the malady that Mrs. Condiment termed ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... of his age. During the first weeks of the Conference, Wilson seems to have fallen under the spell of Lloyd George to some extent, who showed himself quite as liberal as the President in many instances. But Wilson was clearly troubled by the Welshman's mercurial policy, and before he finally left for America, found relief in the solid consistency of Clemenceau. He always knew where the French Premier stood, no matter how much he might differ from him in ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... stop there as a matter of course in their flight between Florida and Newport. They go up and down the coast like the mercury in a thermometer—up when it's warm, down when it's cold. There's the secret of our mercurial temperament." ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... Parliament. St. Helena was a constituent part of the British Empire. Every patriot agreed that the Empire without it would be incomplete; and was so far right that its subtraction would have left the Empire by so much less. Most of its inhabitants were aboriginal—a mercurial race, full of fire, quick-witted, and gifted with the exuberant eloquence of savages, but deficient in dignity and self-control. Before any one else had been given them by Providence to fight, they slaughtered and ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... sulphur preparations not only fail to do good, but materially aggravate the condition. In such cases, if resorcin preparations also fail, the mercurial lotion and ointment employed in acne may be prescribed. Mercurial and sulphur applications should not be used, it need scarcely be said, within a week or ten days of each other, otherwise an increase in the comedones and a slight darkening of the skin result from the ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... countries, the people, more simple, of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government, only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance, by the badness of ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... questioned successfully. It could not be long before the doctrine of Bourbon authority must also be questioned. Even if French thought and literature did for a moment pay tribute at the throne of Louis XIV the closing years of the century were marked by the names of Leibnitz, Bayle and Newton; the mercurial intelligence of France could not long remain stagnant with such forces as these casting their influence over European civilization. {16} The new century was not long in, the Regent Philip of Orleans had not long been in ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... that staid, opulent, intensely respectable city—not even if the imputation of dullness, cast upon her by the more mercurial South, be a slander; for the few hours of my stay there were spent almost entirely with my Asiatic friend, whose invitations and inducements to a longer sojourn were very hard to resist. But I was impatient to get on (as men will be who cannot see their arm's-length into the future), ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... weeping. He turned at the sound of her hurrying steps, puzzled by the pursuit and on his guard against her influence. He was suspicious of her intentions now, and waited for her to explain the meaning of this mercurial change. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... his face, and crushing his hat down over his eyes, he set off at a quick pace in an opposite direction to that part of the street where I was standing. I confess I felt ashamed of the espionage in which I was occupied, and although I followed my mercurial fiend at a safe distance, for the distinct purpose of earthing him wherever he was going, I by no means liked the office which a sort of fatality had forced upon me. But I was somewhat reconciled to it by a secret conviction ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... closed by the Chinaman, and Kerry stood out in the darkness of the dismal, brick-walled street, feeling something as nearly akin to dejection as was possible in one of his mercurial spirit. Something trickled upon the brim of his hat, and, raising his head, Kerry detected rain upon his upturned face. He breathed a prayer of thankfulness. This would put ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... went to Grand Rapids that the intermittent, remittent, and pernicious fevers, which prevailed in that place and in the surrounding country, were generally treated by the resident physicians with mercurial or other cathartic remedies, followed or accompanied by Quinine and brandy or fermented drinks containing Alcohol, and opiates where they were supposed to be necessary. As I began to look into homoeopathy, I first prescribed Ipecac for the vomiting which sometimes ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... barometer were securely bolted to the bulkhead, side by side, in such a position that they could be seen from outside by merely glancing through the window. And near them, hung in gimbals from a long bracket, was a very fine Fitzroy mercurial barometer. ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... collection composed with more facility and grace. [24] Among the more elaborate pieces, Diego de San Pedro's "Desprecio de la Fortuna" may be distinguished, not so much for any poetic talent which it exhibits, as for its mercurial and somewhat sarcastic tone of sentiment. [25] The similarity of subject may suggest a parallel between it and the Italian poet Guidi's celebrated ode on Fortune; and the different styles of execution may ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... de la foret, with its indescribable glamour, its affecting sincerity, its restraint, its exquisite and unflagging simplicity. The hesitant and melancholy personages who invest its scenes—Melisande, timid, naive, child-like, wistful, mercurial, infinitely pathetic; Pelleas, dream-filled, ardent, yet honorable in his passion; old Arkel, wise, gentle, and resigned; the tragic and brooding figure of Golaud; Little Yniold, artless and pitiful, a figure impossible anywhere save in Maeterlinck; the ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... purse is low my spirits sink, as the mercury does with the cold. You used to say my spirits were mercurial—I think they were." ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... lengths of the oscillations; but the pendulum was affected by the tossing of a ship at sea, and was also subject to a variation in weight, depending on the parallel of latitude. Graham, the well-known clock-maker, invented the mercurial compensation pendulum, consisting of a glass or iron jar filled with quicksilver and fixed to the end of the pendulum rod. When the rod was lengthened by heat, the quicksilver and the jar which contained it were simultaneously expanded and elevated, and the centre of oscillation ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... operations are performed without the assistance of fire. The whole ointment being well mixed with a spatula, you dress the yaw with it; after that put your negro into a copious sweat, and he will be cured. Take special care that your surgeon uses no mercurial medicine, as I have seen; for that will occasion the ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... degrees of heat has different degrees of elasticity, different degrees of tension, and different degrees of capacity to hold vapor. Dalton, by a series of experiments with barometer-tubes, into which he introduced air and vapor at certain temperatures, found what its force was upon the mercurial column from degree to degree. He also experimentally determined the ratio of the weight of moisture and of air, the former being five-eights of the latter,—in other words, how many grains of moisture additional could be held by the air, advancing ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... Tone proceeded to Paris to arrange for the despatch of a French auxiliary corps. On 20th April General Clarke, head of the Topographical Bureau at the War Office, agreed to send 10,000 men and 20,000 stand of arms. The mercurial Irishman encountered endless delays, and was often a prey to melancholy; but the news of Bonaparte's victories in Italy led him to picture the triumph of the French Grenadiers ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... can from one another. The idleness and irregularity of children in school often depends more on accidental circumstances than on character. Two boys may be individually harmless and well-disposed, and yet they may be of so mercurial a temperament that, together, the temptation to continual play will be irresistible. Another case that more often happens is where one is actively and even intentionally bad, and is seated next to an ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... a well-educated man, but of slow comprehension, who had imbibed a wariness in his speeches and actions, from having suffered by his collisions with his more mercurial and apt brethren who had laid the foundations of their practice in the Eastern courts, and who had sucked in shrewdness with their mothers milk. The caution of this gentleman was exhibited in his actions, by the utmost method ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... Demeter to all the earth. Certainly, the extant works of art which represent him, gems or vase-paintings, conform truly enough to this ideal of a "nimble spirit," though he wears the broad country hat, which Hermes also wears, going swiftly, half on the airy, mercurial wheels of his farm instrument, harrow or plough—half on wings of serpents—the worm, symbolical of the soil, but winged, as sending up the dust committed to it, after subtle firing, in colours and odours of fruit and flowers. It is an altogether sacred character, again, that he assumes in ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... faring to Holyrood. They were the pioneers of the trans-Atlantic sky-builders, were those old burghers, who, shut in about their castled hill by the two lochs, one of which is now the enchanting Princes Street, were fain to build heavenwards as population grew. It was a stormy morning when the mercurial Professor of Botany, recking naught of the rain that saturated his brown cloak, itself reluctantly donned, led me hither and thither, through the highways and byways of old Edinburgh. Everywhere a litter of building operations, and we trod gingerly many a decadent staircase. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... that had been wound around her head. Once she leaned back, her cheek against the sharp thwart, her gaze heavenward. She remained thus a long while, with body motionless, though her fingers continued to toy with the bit of heavy silk, as if keeping pace with some mercurial ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... subjected to heat. But one observer now made another experiment which seemed to go entirely the other way, and puzzled him altogether. He took some of this boiled infusion that I have been speaking of, and by the use of a mercurial bath—a kind of trough used in laboratories—he deftly inverted a vessel containing the infusion into the mercury, so that the latter reached a little beyond the level of the mouth of the 'inverted' vessel. You see that he thus had a quantity of the infusion shut off from any possible ...
— The Method By Which The Causes Of The Present And Past Conditions Of Organic Nature Are To Be Discovered.—The Origination Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... a gentleman and a great man; and in order to confute a friendly objector decides to select from the workhouse a boy to experiment with. He chooses a boy with a bad reputation but with excellent instincts, and adopts him, the story narrating the adventures of the mercurial lad who thus finds himself suddenly lifted several degrees in the social scale. The idea is novel and handled with Mr. Manville Fenn's accustomed cleverness, the restless boyish nature, with its inevitable tendency to get into scrapes, being ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... is elected by the Provincial Assemblies by direct ballot. In the opinion of the writer, the Chinese Parliament in spite of obvious shortcoming, is representative of the country in its present transitional stage.] Hopes rose with mercurial rapidity as a solution at last seemed in sight. But hardly had the first formalities been completed and Speakers been elected to both Houses, than by a single dramatic stroke Yuan Shih-kai reduced to nought these labours by stabbing in the ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... citizens, if they dared freely to express their opinions, would be found to favor the restoration of the city's ancient autonomy under the aegis of the League of Nations. The Italians of Flume are at bottom, beneath their excitable and mercurial temperaments, a shrewd business people who have the commercial future of their city at heart. And they are intelligent enough to realize that, unless there be established some stable form of government which will propitiate the Slav minority as well ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... mercurial gauge must be affixed to the machine, showing the steam pressure above forty-five pounds per ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... a theory that any boy, if rightly trained, can be made into a gentleman. He chooses a boy from the workhouse, with a bad reputation but with excellent instincts, and adopts him, the story narrating the adventures of the mercurial lad. The restless boyish nature, with its inevitable tendency to get into scrapes, ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... been named Vulcan. These announcements would have received little attention but for the fact that the motion of Mercury has irregularities which have not been accounted for by known planets; and Le Verrier[3] has stated that an intra-Mercurial planet or ring of asteroids would account for the unexplained part of the motion of the line of apses of Mercury's orbit amounting to ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... occasionally possesses some quality, usually dependent upon its having heated in the mow or having become moldy, which produces salivation. Second-crop clover and some irritant weeds in the pasture or forage may cause salivation. Cattle rubbed with mercurial ointment may swallow enough mercury in licking themselves to bring about the same result. (See "Mercury poisoning," p. 57.) Such cases, of course, arise from the constitutional action of mercury, and, on account of the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... For he was too careless and too fond of his own pleasure to ever think of sending her money. "Jerry," he thought, "was a mighty stingy fellow, and never spent a cent on himself—and could easily send Nell all she wanted." And yet Gerald Rodman, knowing his brother's weak and mercurial nature, and knowing that he took no care in the welfare of any living soul but himself, would have laid his life down for him, because happy, careless Ned had Nellie's eyes and Nellie's mouth, and in the tones of his voice he heard ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... ephemeral literature of the day, Calendars, Almanacks, and Chep-Books. The Leicestershire pronunciation to this day at markets is "Buy Chep" for Cheap, hence the Chep-side, or Cheape-or Cheapside; otherwise derivation of Chap Men, or Running, Flying, and other mercurial stationers, peripatetic booksellers, pedlers, packmen, and again chepmen, these visited the villages and small towns from the large printers of the supply towns, as London, Banbury, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, etc. The "History ...
— Banbury Chap Books - And Nursery Toy Book Literature • Edwin Pearson
... my troth," exclaimed the mercurial Jimsy, "ye shall not be disappointed in me fair damsels. Hullo! an ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... all other gasses, of being received and contained in vessels, and preserving its gasseous form so long as it remains at the temperature of 80 deg. (212 deg.), and under a pressure not exceeding 28 inches of the mercurial barometer. As this phenomenon has not been generally observed, no language has used a particular term for expressing water in this state[10]; and the same thing occurs with all fluids, and all substances, which do ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... and its unusual visitors, the whole adventure ending in the happiest laughter over the expulsion of the dramatist. I may not have any right to say so, but I throw myself on the mercy of my hearers: I remember nothing in any chronicle so mercurial or jovial in its high spirits as this story of the first encounter and the beginning of friendship between Charles Nodier and ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... had dropped into a different world, and the old one would fade like a receding star. She would soon find her that her only choice must be to make new associations and friendships and find new pleasures; and this her mercurial, frank, and fearless nature would incline her to do ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... pure white. Beyond this a protecting influence is powerfully exerted; and notwithstanding the action of the dispersed light, which is very evident over the plate, a line is left, perfectly free from mercurial vapor, and which, consequently, when viewed by a side light, appears quite dark. The green rays are represented by a line of a corresponding tint, considerably less in size than the luminous green rays. The yellow rays appear to be without action, ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... such folk were unworthy genteel countenance. They looked down upon Richard, Storri looked down upon them; the greater included the less, and deductions were easy. Storri arrived at a most happy contempt of Richard as a mathematician gets to the solution of a problem, and, being mercurial, not thoughtful, arranged with himself that Richard was ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the legend attached to Tapton Everard, and such the story which the lively Caroline Ingoldsby detailed to her equally mercurial cousin, Charles Seaforth, lieutenant in the Hon. East India Company's second regiment of Bombay Fencibles, as arm-in-arm they promenaded a gallery decked with some dozen grim-looking ancestral portraits, ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... occupants—if of ordinary dimensions—from sitting together without rubbing shoulders. It will also be observed, that the passage through the centre of the carriages enables any one to pass with ease throughout the whole length of the train. This is a privilege of which the mercurial blood and inquisitive mind of the American take unlimited advantage, rendering the journey one continued slamming of doors, which, if the homoeopathic principle be correct, would prove an infallible cure for headache, could the sound only ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... blind panic when the stories of the barbarities practised by the invaders reached their ears, or that their heads were turned by the hysterical enthusiasm, the lavish hospitality, with which they were received in England? That as a result of being thus lionized, many of these ignorant and mercurial people became fault-finding and overbearing, there is no denying. Nor can it be truthfully gainsaid that, for a year or more after the war began, there hung about the London restaurants and music-halls a number of young Belgians who ought to have been with their army on the firing-line. ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... Dr. Wilson gave offence to his superiors, he began to be depicted as an idiot and a scoundrel, and this judgment promptly displaced the other one in the popular mind. The late Major General Roosevelt was often a victim of that sort of boob-bumping. A man of mercurial temperament, constantly shifting his position on all large public questions, he alternately gave great joy and great alarm to the little group of sagaciously wilful men which exercises genuine sovereignty over the country, ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... that she should have gone on to the study of Herodotus. And I described to her the situation of the vivacious and mercurial Athenian, in the early period of Pericles, as repeating in its main features, for the great advantage of that Grecian Froissart, the situation of Adam during his earliest hours in Paradise, himself being the describer to the affable archangel. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Agricola considering gypsum (calcium sulphate) as a compound of lime, while calcium nitrate and chloride became known at about the beginning of the 17th century. Antimonial, bismuth and arsenical compounds were assiduously studied, a direct consequence of their high medicinal importance; mercurial and silver compounds were investigated for the same reason. The general tendency of this period appears to have taken the form of improving and developing the methods of the alchemists; few new fields were opened, and apart from a more complete ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... of the mercurial column the night had been fair, and in the morning the sky was clear. We lost no time in moving on and we continued until we were four miles beyond our former camp; and then crossing Golgol creek we occupied a clear point of land between it and ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... taken his usual lolling attitude in the most comfortable chair he could find, while his more mercurial friend kept pacing the room, now raised his head in surprise, following the quick motions of the other, with his eyes, as if he doubted whether he had ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... glands drink up a certain fluid from the circumfluent blood, and pour it into the mouth. They are sometimes stimulated into action by the blood, that surrounds their origin, or by some part of that heterogeneous fluid: for when mercurial salts, or oxydes, are mixed with the blood, they stimulate these glands into unnatural exertions; and then an unusual ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... and wrote with enthusiasm of the former to his father, as 'one who gave men an insight into the real Hero-world, as one from whom he could catch reflected something of the Divine'. But Morier's spirits were mercurial, and between moments of elation he was apt to fall into fits of melancholy, when he could find no outlet for his energies. Waiting for his true profession tried him sorely, and he was even resigning himself to the prospect of a visit to Australia as a professional journalist, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... Impatience, mercurial emotions and the expenditure of too much of his electricity in every little experience are the tendencies most to ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... but it is well to remember that the typical Frenchman, like the typical Irishman and his brother the Jew, exists only in the comic papers, and on the vaudeville stage. The frivolous and the mercurial ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... who has promised to teach every man who desires wisdom; and in the next place, I have no fear but that the sound practical intellect which that same One has bestowed on the Englishman, will give you a far better auditory in any harvest field, than Socrates could find among the mercurial ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... after the publication of the Dunciad. But Pope found a living antagonist, who succeeded in giving him pain enough to gratify the vilified dunces. This was Colley Cibber—most lively and mercurial of actors—author of some successful plays, with too little stuff in them for permanence, and of an Apology for his own Life, which is still exceedingly amusing as well as useful for the history of the stage. He was now approaching seventy, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... of these lune-shaped regions, one at the east and the other at the west, each between 1,200 and 1,300 miles broad at the equator. At the sunward edge of these regions, once in eighty-eight days, or once in a Mercurial year, the sun rises to an elevation of forty-seven degrees, and then descends again straight to the horizon from which it rose; at the nightward edge, once in eighty-eight days, the sun peeps above the horizon and quickly sinks ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... the dew-point by Daniell's and Regnault's hygrometers, as well as by the dry and wet bulb thermometers, and to compare the results; (2) to compare the readings of an aneroid barometer with those of a mercurial barometer up to the height of 5 m.; (3) to determine the electrical state of the air, (4) the oxygenic condition of the atmosphere, and (5) the time of vibration of a magnet; (6) to collect air at different elevations; (7) ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... surmise that the central episode of faithless love occurred about 1594. If so, here was enough to deepen and impassion the plastic personality of the rhymer of VENUS AND ADONIS; to add a new string to the heretofore Mercurial lyre. All the while, too, he was undergoing the kind of culture and of psychological training involved in his craft of acting—a culture involving a good deal of contact with the imaginative literature of the Renaissance, so far as then translated, ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... to an abrupt termination by the angry "Now, then, sir!" of the guard, and the reckless thrusting of the little gentleman into his second-class carriage, to the endangerment of his life and limbs, and the exaggerated display of authority on the part of the railway official. Mr. Bouncer's mercurial temperament had enabled him to get over the little misfortune that had followed upon his examination for his degree; but he still preserved a memento of that hapless period in the shape of a wig of curly black hair. For ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... small quantities, appears to affect time, much as acids affect some metals, curiously changing its substance, until dates seem to melt into a mercurial form that renders them elusive even to the eye of the most ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... Bellair, whose billet regarding the "broad gauge" occasioned her to swoon, and dispelled the romantic attachment of Lord Montacute, was but a repetition of the French countesses, who thronged the antechambers of Law a century before. More vehement in their desires, more mercurial in their temperament than the English, the French, when seized with any general mania, push it even into greater excesses, and induce upon themselves and their country ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... is said to be falling when the mercury in the tube is sinking, at which time its upper surface is sometimes concave or hollow. The barometer is rising when the mercurial column is lengthening; its upper surface being then, as in general, ...
— Barometer and Weather Guide • Robert Fitzroy
... sure," Julien interposed, setting down his glass. "The politics of Paris are the politics of France, and the spirit of the Parisian is essentially mercurial. Besides, the days of the great alliance draw nearer—the next step forward after the arbitration treaty. Who can doubt that when that is completed, France will embrace the ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of the group, was the delight of them all. The carriage of a bantam rooster, the courage of a lion, more brain than he could stagger under; a disposition fiery, mercurial, sanguine, witty; he was made, according to Billy Fairfax's dictum, of "wire and brass tacks," and he possessed what Honey Smith (who himself had no mean gift in that direction) called "the gift of gab." He lived by writing magazine articles. Also he wrote fiction, ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... decrease; the mercurial thermometer, which freezes at 42 degrees below zero, was no longer of service, and the spirit thermometer of the Dobryna had been brought into use. This now registered ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... of china Dinah's mistress arrived in time to see her favorite coffee-set in pieces. The sight was too much for her mercurial temper. "Dinah," she said, "I cannot stand it any longer. I want you to go. I want you to go soon, I want you to go ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... the medical faculty. Sulphur waters are very useful in the treatment of rheumatism, gout, neuralgia, and kindred diseases, and in glandular affections and certain chronic diseases of the stomach, liver, intestines, spleen, kidneys, bladder and uterus, and in dropsy, scrofula, chlorosis and mercurial diseases. It is beneficial, used both internally and externally in the form of baths at different degrees of temperature, best determined in each case by the physician under whose advice, as a general rule, they should be used. The water is highly beneficial in cutaneous ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... it found no peer. The care which Dr. Holmes bestowed upon the finish of his work, the endless labor over its details, are almost inconceivable when we remember that "this power of taking pains," which Carlyle calls one of the attributes of genius, was combined with a gay, mercurial temperament ready to take fire ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... because it expands and contracts with temperature about the same as glass, and hence there is little chance of the glass cracking through unequal stress. The vacuum in the bulb is made by a mercurial air pump of the Sprengel sort, and the pressure of air in it is only about one-millionth of an atmosphere. The bulb is fastened with a holder like that shown in figure 64, where two little hooks H connected to screw terminals T T are provided to make contact with the platinum terminals ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... employed Pollyooly as his model for a set of stories for The Blue Magazine. Hilary Vance was devoted to Pollyooly, and he had a spare bedroom. But for a while the Honourable John Ruffin hesitated; the artist was a man of an uncommonly mercurial, irresponsible temperament. Was it safe to entrust two small children to his care? Then he reflected that Pollyooly was a strong corrective of irresponsibility, and ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... Ireland, to attend the Dublin Industrial Exhibition, and were received with undiminished enthusiasm. It is remarkable that in Ireland the Queen was not once shot at, or struck in the face, or insulted in any way, as in her own capital. All the most chivalric feeling of that mercurial, but generous people, was called out by the sight of her frank and smiling face. She trusted them, and they proved ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... unstable, unsteadfast, reversible, alterable, revocable, mobile, convertible, transmutable, commutable, kaleidoscopic, transformable, impermanent; volatile, fickle, mercurial, protean, irresolute, capricious, vacillating, fitful, inconstant, erratic, eccentric, crotchety; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... mercurial friend sighed heavily, and then drawing a chair, sat down opposite me. 'Listen to me a moment, sir,' said he. 'Cast aside your mortified pride, and answer me frankly. Do you really love my sister? Would you wish to see her subjected ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... not long suit your mercurial spirit. You used to say that the fairies were all, in common belief, creatures feminine, hence deservedly called "good people,"—that they made the country merry, and kept clowns in awe, and were better for the people's morals than a justice of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... remained of the soldiers who, but for her, would have been massacred long ere then, without one spared among them, threw themselves forward, crowded round her, caressed, and laughed, and wept, and shouted with all the changes of their intense mercurial temperaments; kissed her boots, her sash, her mare's drooping neck, and, lifting her, with wild vivas that rent the sky, on to the shoulders of the two tallest men among them, bore her to the presence of the only officer of high rank who had survived ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... voice broke a little. John Doran had died under an operation when Max was ten, but he had adored his father, and still adored his memory. There had been great love between the big, quiet sportsman and the mercurial, hot-headed, enthusiastic little boy whom Jack Doran had spoiled and called "Frenchy" for a pet name. After more than fourteen years, he could hear the kind voice now, clearly as ever. "Hullo, Frenchy! how are things with you to-day?" used to ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... a mercurial youth of two and twenty, was one of a group of young people assembled, some on horseback, some in yellow buckboards, in front of a stately ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... quantity, perhaps, when it is remembered that four grains is a fatal dose. Fortunately, however, for the prevention of accidents, but unfortunately for the therapeutic value of the soap, a decomposition of the sublimate occurs as soon as it is incorporated in the soap mass, by which an insoluble mercurial soap is formed. This change takes place independently of the alkali used in the soap; in fact, as mentioned above, a well-made soap contains no appreciable amount of free alkali, but is due to the action of the fat acids. Corrosive sublimate is incompatible ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... begged him to be more grave lest his enemies should report his levity. Raleigh answered, 'It is my last mirth in this world; do not grudge it to me.' Dr. Tounson, Dean of Westminster, to whom Raleigh was a stranger, then attended him; and was somewhat scandalised at this flow of mercurial spirits. 'When I began,' says the Dean, 'to encourage him against the fear of death, he seemed to make so light of it that I wondered at him. When I told him that the dear servants of God, in better causes than his, had shrunk back and trembled a little, he denied it not. But yet he gave God thanks ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... thorough proficiency in all classical and literary studies, the result of old-world method and application. Mentally and physically they were splendid men. The whole race of Flemings and Dutch was found by our young recruits to be a grave and powerful people, although exceptional cases of mercurial temperament were not rare. Some curious individuals were to be found among them, as is more the case in European nationalities in general than in our own. Both Americans were much liked and respected by all their new-found brethren, though Brother Hecker, for reasons soon to be told, was sometimes ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... effort, but as sphered apart by the atmosphere of refinement and superiority which enveloped her. Yet she almost constantly accompanied her husband to rehearsal and play, where, for a time, her presence was grateful both to the pride and a more amiable passion of her mercurial lord. But the sight of that shy, shadowy figure haunting the wings, of those keen, critical eyes ever following the business of the stage, at last grew irksome to him, and he would fain have persuaded her to remain quietly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... other, and their relatives have been often associated. "We have a good deal in common," says the Barometer. "Of the same blood, as we may say; quicksilver is thicker than water." "Yes," says the little Fahrenheit, "and we are both of the same mercurial temperament." While their columns are dancing up and down with laughter at this somewhat tepid and low-pressure pleasantry, there come in a New York Reaumur and a Centigrade from Chicago. The Fahrenheit, which has got warmed ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... appear upon the scene is Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, whose brilliant mercurial figure flashes for a moment across the wild and troubled stage of Ireland, only the next to vanish like some Will-o'-the-wisp into an abyss of darkness ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... yellow ploughed lands which were never sown, weedy now, and crossed and recrossed by vividly-green ribbons of vine, with stretches of pale-green lucerne, orchards, and the white village of Monpont near the railway, all embowered, the Isle drawing its mercurial streams through the village-meadow, which is dark with shades of oaks: and to have played there a boy, and used it familiarly from birth as one's own hand or foot, must have been very sweet and homely; after this, the river divides, and takes the shape of a heart; ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... Genius fain wou'd Court superiour Blessings; those Passions are too hurrying to last; Vapours that start from a Mercurial Brain, whose wild Chimera's flush the lighter Faculties, which tir'd i'th'vain pursuit of fancy'd Pleasures; a Passion more substantial Courts our Reason, solid, persuasive, elegant, sublime, where ev'ry Sense crowds to the luscious Banquet, ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... utter absence of excitement in the crowd, the calm, methodical tone of the auctioneer, and the occasional mournful cry of "Lot here, gentlemen!" from the porter when any article was too large to move, all served to depress Ventimore's usually mercurial spirits. ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... aneroid barometer, to indicate extreme pressures of the atmosphere. An ordinary barometer would not have answered the purpose, as the pressure would increase during our descent to a point which the mercurial barometer [1] ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... sound was utterly unexpected, and completely incongruous. That was the wonder of her, Kennon reflected. Her mercurial temperament made life something that was continually exciting ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... said, almost roughly. Then his tone changed in a way through which his mercurial disposition spoke. "Look here," he went on, "whatever happens in the future, I'd like you to understand that all you've done for me in ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... The mercurial French half-breeds now joined in the struggle. They forwarded a petition to Her Majesty the Queen, couched in excellent terms, in the French language, in the main asking that their right to enjoy the liberty of commerce be given ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... young girl whose amused pity he had awakened might be there again. He found California Street quickly, and in a few moments he stood before No. 85. He was a little disturbed to find it a rather large building, and that it bore the inscription "Bank." Then came the usual shock to his mercurial temperament, and for the first time he began to consider the absurd ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... for Sunday afternoon, would have passed unanswered, but for the mercurial nature ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the ardor and evident sincerity so visible in the conversation and manners of Macer; and Macer was drawn toward Demetrius by the cast of melancholy—that sober, thoughtful air—that separates him so from his mercurial brother, and indeed from all. He wished he were a Christian. And by happy accidents being thrown together—or rather drawn by some secret bond of attraction—he in no long time had the happiness to see him one. From the hand of Felix he received ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... to which much encouragement was given by the excellence of the instruments with which we were now furnished. The times of register at sea had been three and nine, A.M. and P.M.; those hours having been recommended as the most proper for detecting any horary oscillations of the mercurial column. When we were fixed for the winter, and our attention could be more exclusively devoted to scientific objects, the register was extended to four and ten, and subsequently to five and eleven o’clock. The most rigid attention to the observation and correction of the column, during several ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... December. The weather, too, though cold, is wholesome and often conducive to health. The two months of fog in London are often termed the suicidal months, because of the number of persons who destroy their own lives in those months. The people of Paris with their mercurial temperaments would never endure it for a long time, ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... made no impression on Bohannan. His mercurial temperament seemed to have gone quite to pieces, in view of ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... This mercurial brigand, it would appear, has paid Turon another visit, but, with the exception of what may be considered the legalised robbery of the betting ring, has not levied contributions. Rather the other way, indeed. A hasty note for Mr. Dawson, whom he had tricked into temporary association ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... dimpled wave; KIRKLAND alone such grace from Heaven could win, His features radiant as the soul within; That smile would let him through Saint Peter's gate While sad-eyed martyrs had to stand and wait. Here flits mercurial Farrar; standing there, See mild, benignant, cautious, learned Ware, And sturdy, patient, faithful, honest Hedge, Whose grinding logic gave our wits their edge; Ticknor, with honeyed voice and courtly grace; And ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... show any inclination for the company of young ladies, but he is very much a lady's man all the same. There isn't a young lady in this hall but would be proud to have the honour of Jim Langford's company and companionship at any time. He is of that deep, mercurial disposition that attracts women. It is good for Jim Langford that he does not know his own power," she said, nodding her dainty ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... brought to the islands, and the methods of preparing them for sale. They arrived frequently in a sickly and disordered state, and then they were made up for the market by the application of astringents, washes, mercurial ointments, and repelling drugs, so that their wounds and diseases might be hid. These artifices were not only fraudulent but fatal: but these, it was obvious, would of themselves fall with the trade. A third was, excessive labour joined with improper food; and a fourth was, the extreme ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... little fellow, as black as the ace of spades, and possessing to the full the mercurial temperament of the Southern negro. Full of fun and drollery, he attracted plenty of attention when he came into the village, and earned many a penny from the boys by ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... a visionary, but a visionary of an uncommon and successful kind. The manner in which his ardent, imaginative, and mercurial nature was controlled by a powerful judgment, and directed by an acute sagacity, is the most extraordinary feature in his character. Thus governed, his imagination, instead of exhausting itself in idle flights, lent aid to his judgment, and enabled him to ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... constancy, which can abide by an opinion or a purpose or an interest of their States through adversity and through prosperity, through the years and through the generations, are things by which the people of the more mercurial North may take a lesson. And there is another thing—covetousness, corruption, the low temptation of money has not yet found any place in our ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... has been proposed to heat portions of a mercurial air pump to secure more perfect vacua, or to hasten the action. Heating expands the air and thus produces the ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... acquaintance and of his own years said of him, "We were all his lacqueys." Here we have in anticipation the aged Goethe whose Jove-like presence put Heine out of countenance; the god "cold, monosyllabic," of Jean Paul. But behind the stiff demeanour, in youth as in age, there was the mercurial temperament, the etwas unendlich Ruehrendes, which made him a problem at all periods of his life even to those who knew him most intimately. He has himself noted his youthful reputation for eccentricity, "his lively, impetuous, and excitable temper"; and this was the side of him that ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... of France, by a few spasmodic efforts, broke the threefold chain of Priest, King, and Noble, and began to lift up their head. But Saxon England is sober, and so went to work more solemnly than her mercurial neighbor. And besides, the British people had already a firm, broad basis of personal freedom to stand on. Much was thought, written, and spoken about reform in England, then most desperately needing it. The American Revolution had English admirers whom no ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... once to a grace which he would be years in learning to understand, and which yet affected him subtilely, and with something of the same influence that it had upon Webb, who felt that a new element was entering into his life. Mercurial Burtis, however, found nothing peculiar in his own pleasant sensations. He had a score of young lady friends, and was merely delighted to find in Amy a very attractive young woman, instead of a child or a dull, plain-featured ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... amused Isung, the imperial minstrel, that he left court to follow him to the land of the Huns, where the fickle youth next offered his services to Etzel (Attila). The King of the Huns, afraid to keep such a mercurial person near him, gave him the province of Steiermark (Styria), bidding him work off all surplus energy by defending it against the numerous enemies always trying ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... was instantly apparent, from the excessive yelping that greeted their ears, and satisfied them that some, at least, of their annoyers had got something to remember; while they were gratified to listen to the fast receding sounds of these "mercurial inhabitants of the plain." The dogs quickly "made themselves scarce," nor did they afterwards attempt to reduce the distance they had placed between themselves and the travellers; who, upon the establishment of quiet, and after supplying fresh material to their fire, nestled themselves in ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... that the eternities beget chaos, and that the immensities are at the mercy of the divine ananke. Infinitude crouches before a personality. The mercurial essence is the prime mover in spirituality, and the thinker is powerless before the pulsating inanity. The cosmical procession is terminated only ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... who has any theatrical novelty to offer, whether as a political mountebank, or a bogus hero, or a peculiarly atrocious crime, is sure of a large audience. For there is a wide range of appreciation in that mercurial nature which, according to Voltaire, is half monkey and ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... met with fractious opposition from Bristol. It is difficult to find a consistent clue to all the windings of policy devised by that mercurial brain, and to guess at the objects which inspired him. The Bill was easily passed by the House of Commons, where some opposition might have been expected. In the House of Lords its passage was less easy. ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... methods, it is stubborn and litigious. Abeunt studia in mores. This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Antelope as the smoke swirled and almost hid him, he poured his six balls into his enemy, and thus died one brave man at the hands of another in fair battle. The sergeant leaped back and lay down among the men, stunned by the concussions. He said he would do no more. His mercurial temperament had undergone a change, or, to put it better, he conceived it to be outrageous to fight these poor people, five against one. He characterized it as "a d—— infantry fight," and rising, talked in Sioux to the enemy—asked them to surrender, or they must otherwise ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... wrinkles near the eyes, and a dark circle round them, spoke of cares and fatigue, and perhaps dissipation. But he had evidently a vigour of constitution that had borne him passably through all; his frame was wiry and nervous; his eye bright and full of life; and there was that abrupt, unsteady, mercurial restlessness in his movements and manner which usually accompanies the man whose sanguine temperament prompts him to concede to the impulse, and who is blessed or cursed with a superabundance of energy, according as circumstance may favour or judgment ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... descend toward the surface of the sea, thus necessitating periodic visits to the pilot-house to renew the vacuum. This set the professor's brain to work, and by nightfall he succeeded— with the aid of a second barometer having a small piece of highly magnetised steel floating on the top of the mercurial column, and a couple of magnetised steel bars—in constructing a somewhat rude but thoroughly efficient apparatus for automatically maintaining the ship at any desired height, unaffected by the movements, be they few or ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... a very animated conversation about authors and their manuscripts. When they were ready to leave Osborne called the waiter, but instead of asking for la note a payer, he said "Garcon, apportez-moi votre manuscrit." This sally of the mercurial Irishman was received with hearty laughter, Chopin especially being much tickled by the profanation of the word so sacred to authors. From the same source we learn also that Chopin took delight in repeating the criticisms on his performances ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... expanded as Irving proceeded, and he ended by not merely satirizing the pedantry of local antiquaries, but by creating a distinct literary type out of the solid Dutch burgher whose phlegm had long been an object of ridicule to the mercurial Americans. Though far from the most finished of Irving's productions, "Knickerbocker" manifests the most original power and is the most genuinely national in its quaintness and drollery. The very tardiness and prolixity of the story are skilfully ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... went here and there at my own dear will, bound by no limits of space, time or comportment. I dined in weird cabarets, at weirder tables d'hote to the sound of Hungarian music and the wild shouts of mercurial artists and sculptors. Or, again, where the night life quivers in the electric glare like a kinetoscopic picture, and the millinery of the world, and its jewels, and the ones whom they adorn, and the men who make all three possible are met for ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... novels,[52] calls Friedrich in "Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre" arepresentative of Sterne's humor, and he finds in Mittler in the "Wahlverwandtschaften" aunion of seriousness and the comic of caricature, reminiscent of Sterne and Hippel. Friedrich is mercurial, petulant, utterly irresponsible, acreature of mirth and laughter, subject to unreasoning fits of passion. One might, in thinking of another character in fiction, designate Friedrich as faun-like. In all of this one can, however, find little if any demonstrable likeness to Sterne or ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... things happened that were not down on paper—in the plans of the German General Headquarters! It became distressingly evident that these Yanks knew as little, and cared as little, what was expected of them as the stupid Britishers or the mercurial French or the suicidal Belgians. They didn't know how to fight—they couldn't know—they had never done any fighting, and whom had they had to teach them warfare? They were absurd. They didn't know ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... is strange that such severe penalties should be visited on a woman, for a first and only indiscretion in the suffrage line, when a man may rise up on election morning and go forth, voting and to vote. If he be of an excitable and mercurial nature, one of the sort of citizens which sweet Ireland empties on us by the county, he may sportively flit about among the polls, from ward to ward, of the metropolis, and no man says to him nay; he may even travel hilariously from city to city, with free passes and free drinks—who ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... mercurial condition was influenced by every breath of wind, shook with apprehension, but Pepin came to the rescue. To be called "a thing" by an Indian was an insult that cut into the quick of his nature. He had taken ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... alteration than that produced by lassitude, he is already prepared, therefore, to renew his communications with its different members, all of whom were well disposed to show off in their respective characters, the moment they were favored with an opportunity. The mercurial Pippo, as he had been the most difficult to restrain during the day, was the first to steal from his lair, now that the Argus-like eyes of Baptiste permitted the freedom, and the exhilarating, coolness of the sunset invited ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... of their own lives; and so after a rapid consultation they determined that they would beard the lion in his den. Rather unexpectedly on the 7th April (1913) Parliament was opened in Peking with a huge Southern majority and the benediction of all Radicals.[7] Hopes rose with mercurial rapidity as a solution at last seemed in sight. But hardly had the first formalities been completed and Speakers been elected to both Houses, than by a single dramatic stroke Yuan Shih-kai reduced to nought these labours by stabbing in ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... to deeply analytical, philosophical studies, criticising and dissecting, the policies of their rulers. But underlying, you will find a deeply practical sense and appreciation of material benefits. The German Socialist is in fact a practical dreamer, quite in contrast to his mercurial, effervescent Latin prototype. The rulers of Germany have learned the lesson that the stability of a throne rests in the welfare of her people and everyone must admit that they have succeeded in this respect better than any other ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... of manner and tone that was extremely foreign to the mercurial Holmes, and this, together with certain signs he had read of late, caused Laurence to look up ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... this is equal to 11/2 in. per 100 deg. Fahr., and from these data a scale is constructed, the correctness of which is easily verified by transferring the spiral heater into an air bath or oil of high boiling point, and then comparing the readings of the pyrometer scale with those of a mercurial thermometer placed alongside of the spiral heater. By this means it can be clearly demonstrated that, up to the highest point to which it is safe to use a mercurial thermometer, the readings of the pyrometer scale and that of the thermometer ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... cantharides 2 oz., strong mercurial ointment 4 oz., oil of turpentine 4 oz., iodine 3 oz., mix all with a sufficiency of lard to make a thin ointment; apply to the spavin only once a day until it bursts; then oil it with sweet oil until healed. If the bunch ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... be measured by attaching the carotid artery of a living animal to a reservoir of mercury, provided with an upright open tube or pressure- gauge.... Under pressure of the blood, the mercury rises in this tube, and the height of the mercurial column becomes an indication of the pressure to which the blood itself is subjected within the artery. The arterial pressure is found to be equal to the average of a column of mercury 150 millimetres, ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... of tender pleasure that warmed me. Taking advantage of his mother's absorption in her fish he threw me a kiss. I knew that I had pleased him wonderfully by tacitly agreeing to go to Marvin, and that our quarrel was to him as if it had never been. I wish I had his mercurial temperament. Long after I have forgiven a wrong done to me, or an unpleasant experience, the bitter memory of it comes ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... remember a day in the summer of 1859 when Procter had a party of friends at dinner to meet Hawthorne, who was then on a brief visit to London. Among the guests were the Countess of ——, Kinglake, the author of "Eothen," Charles Sumner, then on his way to Paris, and Leigh Hunt, the mercurial qualities of whose blood were even then perceptible ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... leather of an armed chair. Learning somehow or other sinks down to that part into which it was first driven, and produces therein a leaden heaviness and weight, which counteract those lively emotions of the brain that might otherwise render students too mercurial and agile for the safety of established order. I leave this conjecture to the consideration of experimentalists ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 16th Rice had an attack of acute indigestion, which might have resulted seriously had it not been for the mercurial pills which promptly relieved him. The reader should observe that practically all of this testimony comes from Jones. There is no extraneous evidence that Patrick induced the giving of the mercury. Patrick, however, spread false rumors as to ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... interested everybody. It was taken up seriously in the country regions. It absorbed New York gossip for two days, and then another topic took possession of the mercurial city; but it was the sort of event to take possession of the country mind. New York millionaires get more than their share of attention in the country press at all times, but this romance became ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... natural laziness, which rendered jumping about like a jack- in-the-box impossible, Hugh Mathison preferred to stand on the defensive; while his lighter opponent, giving way to the natural bent of his mercurial temperament and corporeal predilections, comported himself in a manner that cannot be likened to anything mortal or immortal, human or inhuman, unless it be to an insane cat, whose veins ran wild-fire instead of blood. ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... 'mercurialism,' 'hydrargyrism,' 'ptyalism,' or 'salivation,' including most of the symptoms enumerated above. May get eczema mercuriale and periostitis. Profound anaemia often a prominent symptom; neuritis not uncommon. If fumes of mercury inhaled, mercurial tremors develop. ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... feelings and affairs are a singular compound of the ludicrous and the lamentable, that I could not avoid giving way to my mercurial disposition, and congratulating my fellow-voyager on the ease with which he had recognized his old comrade by his present remaining half. "Lord help your honour!" said he, "a seaman's weather-gauge is made for squalls—foul weather or fair—in stays or out of trim—sailing all right before ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle |
