"Oscillating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... continental needle telegraphy in which the message is transmitted by the movements of an index normally vertical, but oscillating to one side or the other under the influence of the current, the latter being controlled by the transmitter of the message, the left hand swings of the needle are interpreted as dots, ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... the negotiations for the purchase of the Fair Emily kept him oscillating between Tredgold and Stobell until those gentlemen fled at his approach and instructed their retainers to make untruthful statements as to their whereabouts. Daily letters from Captain Brisket stated that he was ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... time. Once I found a meeting of the Council of the Big Four going on in his study, and a meeting of the financial and economic experts—twenty or thirty of them—in full session upstairs in the drawing room—and the President oscillating between the two. ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... are liable to injury; while the fort offers but a small mark,—the opening of the embrasures, a small part of the carriage, and now and then a head or arm raised above the parapet,—the ratio of exposed surfaces being not less than twenty to one. In the vessel the guns are fired from an oscillating deck, and the balls go at random; in the fort the guns are fired from an immoveable platform, and the balls reach their object with unerring aim. There is always more or less motion in the water, so that the ship's guns, though accurately pointed at one moment, at the ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... private practice. He was like somebody trying to protect a raw surface from heat and cold; so cursed with diffidence, and so sensitive about his boyish appearance that he chose to shut himself up in an oscillating wooden coop on the sea. The long run to Australia had exactly suited him. A rough life and the pounding of bad weather had fewer terrors for him than an office in town, with constant exposure ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... etiquette," said George, grasping his tumbler in a passionate manner and smashing it upon the marble slab, causing a sudden emeute in the camp. "Order! order! order!" was sounded from every tongue. "You mustn't be afeard, Captain," said one of the party. "This is perfectly South Carolinian-just the oscillating of the champagne; ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... a few days before the trial, Donald after oscillating between the hotel and his club and finding each equally intolerable, jumped on the car and went out to the Queeringtons. It was a cold, raw day, with a fine mist filling the air, and even the dull formality of the drab parlor seemed a relief from ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... more. His conduct on this trying occasion has been severely condemned for its duplicity. To me he appears more deserving of pity than censure. His was not the tergiversation of one who seeks to effect his object by fraud and deception: it was rather the hesitation of a mind oscillating between the decision of his own judgment and the opinions and apprehensions of others. His conviction seems to have remained unchanged: he yielded to avoid the charge of having by his obstinacy drawn destruction on the heads of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... frequently unintelligible. But in the end he seems genuinely a man—a man of the sort we see about us in the real world—not a patent and automatic fellow, reacting docilely and according to a formula, but a bundle of complexities and contradictions, a creature oscillating between the light and the shadow—at bottom, for all his typical representation of a race and a civilization, a unique and inexplicable personality. More, he is a man of the first class, an Achilles of his world; and here the achievement of Dreiser is most striking, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... is made in mocking and ridicule. The open and oscillating hand touches the point of the nose with that of the thumb. It has the particular sense of stigmatizing the person addressed or in question as a dupe. A credulous person is generally imagined with a gaping mouth and staring ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... the morning, and none of us had slept. Just as we began to try to sleep a little, my diabolical compass showed that the balloon was turning back again. 'Where are you going to take us to?' cried out Yon to the immense mass of canvas which was oscillating above our heads. Louis Godard again proposed to descend; but we said, 'No! forward! forward!' Two hours sped away without our being able to tell where we were. At five o'clock day broke, and broad daylight came on ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... oscillating head, through his set teeth, in one malign monotone. As he quoted the preacher he mechanically drew his revolver. There was no bravado in this; he might lie, but he did not know how to sham; did not know, now, that his face ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... she withdrew her head, pushed herself free, hung to the invisible rope ladder for a moment, swaying against the open port. His eyes were fastened on her where she dangled there against the darkness betwixt sky and sea, oscillating with the movement of the ship, her pendant figure now gilded by the light from the room, now phantom dim as she ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... was turning rapidly now, oscillating from side to side. The hole seemed to travel in a wavering loop, dipping lower, swinging ...
— Gambler's World • John Keith Laumer
... had—never dreamed of the tremendous potentialities in his oscillating ethereal ray that had a range and penetration beyond anything known. But he knew, in a vague way, that this ray was a channel for light waves to follow, and he learned that he could vary the range of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head. He is clean-shaven, pale, and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward, and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion. He peered at me with great curiosity ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... bygone days. Almost every speech began with "Do you remember?" Vixen was gayer than she had been for a long time, save once or twice, when a pang shot through her heart at the idea that Bullfinch was being shaken about in a railway-box, oscillating helplessly with every vibration of the train, ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... stated.[49] At Lyons (211 miles), the declination, horizontal force and vertical force, magnets were all disturbed at 6h. 25m. 47s. A.M., and Perpignan (264 miles), all three magnets, but especially those for the declination and horizontal force, were set abruptly oscillating at 6h. ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... Revigny and the great maneuver was initiated, that gigantic movement by the flank, surrounding and enmeshing us by a series of forced marches conducted in the most admirable order through Champagne and the Ardennes. While the French were stumbling aimlessly about the country, oscillating uncertainly between one place and another, the Prussians were making their twenty miles a day and more, gradually contracting their immense circle of beaters upon the band of men whom they held within their ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... against the creature's tyranny. Their master was working them too hard. I ran up the stair on all fours: it was my way when I was in a hurry. Swinging went the pendulum in the window, and the wind roared in the chimney. I seized hold of the oscillating thing, and stopped it; but to my amaze and consternation, the moment I released it, on it went again. I must sit and hold it. But the voice of my aunt called me from below, and as I dared not explain why I would rather not appear, ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... down at the detector plate. "Here we are," he said. "The dial's oscillating between four and eight, all ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance
... kitchen the roast beef and turkey were meeting their deserts. Up in the store-room—for Lady Georgiana was not above housekeeping, any more than her daughter—the ladies of the house were doing their part; and I was oscillating between my uncle and his niece, making myself amazingly useful now to one and now to the other. The turkey and the beef were on the table, nay, they had been well eaten, before I felt that my moment ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... art is beheld in his childish scratchings and barbarous glimmerings; Indian, Egyptian, and Assyrian art in his boyish rigidity and crude fixedness of idea and purpose; Mediaeval, or pre-Raffaelle art is seen in his youthful timid darings, his unripe fancies oscillating between earth and heaven; there where we expect truth, we see conceit; there where we want little, much is given—now a blank eyed riddle,—dark with excess of self,—now a giant thought—vast but repulsive,—and now angel visitors ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... colossal chambers the phosphorescent light from enormous radiators beats incessantly through and through the slowly, oscillating, vibrating, revolving soul matter. And here the process of individualization is achieved. A soul, or many souls, are separated from the great tide, by flashing, under the bombardment of the phosphorescent ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... literature which loves the balanced clauses of rhetoric will be sure to have something analogous. Our own heroic couplet is a case in point. So perhaps is the invention of rhyme which tends to confine the thought within the oscillating limits of a refrain, and that of the stanza, which shows the same process in a much higher ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... solenoids moved their contacts and the filaments turned cherry red. Oscillating circuits hummed silently to themselves in perfect Q. The life warmth of hysteresis pulsed and throbbed along wires and channels. Three-plus-one, two-plus-two—tell me which is really true. The problem criss-crossed in and ...
— Two Plus Two Makes Crazy • Walt Sheldon
... window for only [page 21] two or three minutes whilst a glass filament was fixed vertically to the hypocotyl; it was then again placed in darkness for half an hour and afterwards observed by light passing through bichromate of potassium. The point, oscillating as usual, crossed five divisions of the micrometer (i.e. 1/100 inch) in 1 m. 30 s. The seedling was then left in darkness for an hour, and now it required 3 m. 6 s. to cross one division, that is, 15 m. 30 s. to have crossed five divisions. Another seedling, ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... touching cris de coeur redolent of the jungle, the lagoon and the hinterland, will appeal with irresistible force to all lovers of sincere and passionate emotion. The Chimpanzee's "swing song" on page 42 is a marvel of oscillating melody. ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... tightly to the purlin — for the waves made the masts tremble with their violence — I tried to look around and below me. The sea was literally raging beneath, and great masses of livid-looking foam were dashing be- tween the masts, which were oscillating terrifically. It was still dark, and I could only faintly distinguish two figures in the stern, whom, by the sound of their voices, that I caught occasionally above the tumult, I made out to be Curtis and ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... In a tea or coffee boiler, the base, D, so constructed and adapted, relatively to the other parts, that an oscillating motion will be imparted to the vessel by process of ebullition, substantially ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... not playing the game, and the Colonel fumes inwardly and frets outwardly. In the intervals of pressing down the unlit tobacco in his pipe with an oscillating thumb, he alternately pokes his king out of the corner and pulls it back again; while his transparent impulse is to scrap the board, wreck the ante-room and run amok. The Adjutant continues his innocent amusement until at last the pleasure wanes. The two heroic pawns are carried decently off, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... door when he entered, "as if he half expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley's pigtail sticking out into the hall," were unhesitatingly erased by the Reader, as, from his point of view, not necessarily to the purpose. Then, after the goblin incident of the disused bell slowly oscillating until it and all the other bells in the house rang loudly for a while—afterwards becoming in turn just as suddenly hushed—we got to the clanking approach, from the sub-basement of the old building, of the noise ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... scattered along the western slope of the Iranian Plateau north of the Cossaeans.* Many of them—as, for instance, the Lullume—had been civilized by the Chaldaeans almost from time immemorial; the most southern among them were perpetually oscillating between the respective areas of influence of Babylon and Nineveh, according as one or other of these cities was in the ascendant, but at this particular moment they acknowledged Assyrian sway. Were they excited to rebellion against the latter power by the emissaries of its ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the snake from her body and held it by the tail high above her. The hideous creature stretched up its head towards the roof of the cavern, which it was just able to reach. It then began to move its head backwards and forwards, with a slow, oscillating motion, as if looking for something At the same moment, the witch began to walk round and round the cavern, coming nearer to the centre every circuit; while the head of the snake described the same path over the roof that she did over the floor. for she held it up still. ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... machines worked by water pressure the author proposes to refer only to two which appear to him in every respect the most practical and advantageous. One is the piston machine of M. Albert Schmid, engineer at Zurich. The cylinder is oscillating, and the distribution is effected, without an eccentric, by the relative motion of two spherical surfaces fitted one against the other, and having the axis of oscillation for a common axis. The convex surface, which is movable and forms part of the cylinder, serves ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... no easy matter to dress and undress in an oscillating room. That the vessel's motion could have changed so markedly within the one hour since he left the cabin, astonished Frederick. The simple operation of drawing off his boots and trousers, finding others in his trunk, ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... using it merely as an illustration. I say that if we imagine this sort of action greatly exaggerated and greatly prolonged Parliamentary government becomes impossible. If there are three parties, no two of which will steadily combine for mutual action, but of which the weakest gives a rapidly oscillating preference to the two others, the primary condition of a Cabinet polity is not satisfied. We have not a Parliament fit to choose; we cannot rely on the selection of a sufficiently permanent executive, because there is no fixity in the thoughts ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... himself and the sleeping queen, as a symbol of their chastity which the king is too honest to suspect. He draws, with a psychological power truly extraordinary in the beginning of the thirteenth century, the two other figures in this love drama: King Mark, cheated, dishonoured, oscillating between horrible doubt, ignominious suspicion and more ignominious credulity, his love for his wife, his trust in his nephew, his incapacity for conceiving ill-faith and fraud, the very gentleness and generosity of his nature, made the pander of guilt in which he cannot believe; and, on the other ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... the youthful sun was shining on the choppy water of the Irish Sea, just off the Little Orme, to the west of Llandudno Bay. Oscillating on the uneasy waves was Denry's lifeboat, manned by the nodding bearded head, three ordinary British longshoremen, a Norwegian who could speak English of two syllables, and two other Norwegians who by a strange neglect ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... that even the problem of COADAPTATION IN STERILE ANIMALS can thus be satisfactorily explained. If the determinants are oscillating upwards and downwards in continual fluctuation, and varying more pronouncedly now in one direction now in the other, useful variations of every determinant will continually present themselves anew, and may, in the course of generations, ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... him from his perilous condition; but our efforts were not a little crippled by the legs of the Norwegian, which he flung violently about at every possible tangent; and one arm, moving with the rapid oscillating motion of a steam-engine, brought the fist in sharp contact with the other Norwegian's chest, and threw him, head over heels, into the identical pool whence he had ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... bird suddenly ducks her head, with the mandibles of her beak wide agape, between which the fledgling thrusts its head, almost out of sight, and so keeps it for more than a minute. Finally, withdrawing it, up again goes the head of the mother, with neck craned out, and oscillating from side to side in a second spell of speech-making. These curious actions are repeated several times, the entire performance lasting for a period of nearly a quarter of an hour. When it ends, possibly from the food supply having become exhausted, the mother bird leaves the little glutton ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... means. The most daring strategical moves of the enemy, in war as in diplomacy, they ridiculed as either bluff or madness. The journalistic campaign in neutral countries they scoffed at as vain, and put their faith in the final triumph of truth. Their financial measures, oscillating from one extreme to another, denoted the absence of any settled plan, of any clear-cut picture of the needs of the moment. The odds in their favour, which circumstance had given and circumstance might take away again, they looked upon as inalienable, until they ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... it, quintessentialized, the man's stark and venomous hatred of a world which had ill-used him; and 'twas over with too as quickly as the lightning, yielding to the pleasantest smile imaginable. Meanwhile you are to picture me, and my emotions, as I lay beneath his oscillating toes, entirely helpless. "'Twas not that I lacked the courage to fight you," he continues, "nor the skill, either. But there is always the possibility that by some awkward thrust or other you might deprive the stage of a distinguished ornament; and as a sincere admirer of my genius, ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... ... to express my willingness to accept the, or almost any mortgage, any thing to get out of the tremulous Funds of these oscillating times. There will be a war somewhere, no doubt—and whatever it may be, the Funds will be affected more or less; so pray get us out of them with all proper expedition. It has been the burthen of my song to you three years and better, and about as useful ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... from which he had contrived to have other travellers excluded, Darrow looked at her curiously. He had never seen a face that changed so quickly. A moment since it had danced like a field of daisies in a summer breeze; now, under the pallid oscillating light of the lamp overhead, it wore the hard stamp of experience, as of a soft thing chilled into shape before its curves had rounded: and it moved him to see that care already stole upon her when ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... retain in the lenses of a telescope, levelled by hand, a spark of light so minute and faint as to be invisible to the unaided eye in the midst of the surrounding darkness, and the difficulty is enhanced when the attempt is made from the deck of a small vessel oscillating though ever so gently on the ridges of a long, low-running swell, and for the life of me I could not again find the feeble glimmer that had seemed to swim athwart the ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... about 1860. USNM 192872; 1951. A hand-crank operated the winnowing mill for separating grain from chaff and beans from hulls. A four-blade, wooden fan, shaped like a paddle wheel, blows a draft below oscillating screens. The chaff is blown off from the threshed grain, and the grain or beans fall from the screens into the path of the draft. The screens catch any straw left after threshing. Gift of Arden Wilson, ...
— Agricultural Implements and Machines in the Collection of the National Museum of History and Technology • John T. Schlebecker
... effective in the present predicament of a human race (oscillating uneasily between the possibility of social advance and the probability of recession into another Dark Age of ignorance, superstition and social stagnation), must include certain essential elements. First and foremost, it must be planet-wide. Given planetary unification ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... own guns had been put in perfect working order, and shone like silver, one bearing the name of Worden, the other that of Ericsson. Her engineer, Mr. Campbell, was in the act of giving some final touches to the machinery, when his leg was caught between the piston-rod and frame of one of the oscillating engines, with such force as to bend the rod, which was an inch and a quarter in diameter and about eight inches long, and break its cast-iron frame, five-eighths of an inch in thickness. The most remarkable fact in this case is, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... is cut by the ring are called "nodes"; and these nodes are not stationary, but are slowly regressing, i.e. travelling in a direction opposite to that of the moon itself. Also the angle of tilt is varying slowly, oscillating up and down ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... were already fixed. Americanism would have been bad form in the liberal Edinburgh Review; it would have seemed eccentric even for a Scotchman, and Reeve was a Saxon of Saxons. To an American this attitude of oscillating reserve seemed more eccentric than the reckless hostility of Brougham or Carlyle, and more mischievous, for he never could be sure what preposterous commonplace it ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... upon their feet, making the hands grasp, and fastening the eyes on the spot where they should look. Even lifeless figures, as vessels and stools—let them be drawn ever so correctly—lose all effect so soon as they lack the resting upon their centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming and oscillating appearance. The Raphael in the Dresden gallery[672] (the only great affecting picture which I have seen) is the quietest and most passionless piece you can imagine; a couple of saints who worship the Virgin and child. Nevertheless it awakens a deeper ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... despising them as so many outlived stages, but also fearing and fleeing them because they know his secrets, pry into his plans, watch his rise with envy, and look forward to his fall with pleasure. From this relationship springs his dual, indeterminate character, oscillating between love of distinction and hatred of those who have already achieved it. He says himself that he is an aristocrat, and has learned the secrets of good company. He is polished on the outside and coarse within. He knows already how to wear the frock-coat with ease, ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... his feet and, rigid still, but oscillating from side to side, as though his strength did not suffice to hold him quite erect, was surveying them with eyes sunk so deeply in his head that they looked like dying sparks reanimated for an instant ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... efforts were in vain. The female jaguar, furious at the death of her mate, and anxious for the safety of her whelps, stayed only to utter one savage yell; and then, bounding downward from the branches, she launched herself upon the student. The hammock, however, oscillating violently to one side, caused her to let go her hold, and making a second spring, she dropped down into the canoe. The weight of her body, combined with the impetus which her anger had given to it, at once capsized the little craft; and Indian, negro, and jaguar ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... came straight up from below drew the weight of her body towards the abyss. It seemed to her that the ground of the oscillating square went up the walls and that the floor dipped on end like a tossing boat. She was right at the edge, almost hanging, surrounded by vast space. The blue of the heavens suffused her, the air was whirling in ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... simple, good things, he did not even notice that he had gone more than half-way. He did not want to wake Marya Dmitrievna, he lightly pressed Lisa's hand and said, "I think we are friends now, aren't we?" She nodded, he stopped his horse, and the coach rolled away, lightly swaying and oscillating up and down; Lavretsky turned homeward at a walking pace. The witchery of the summer night enfolded him; all around him seemed suddenly so strange—and at the same time so long known; so sweetly familiar. Everywhere near and afar—and one could see ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... shall have an opportunity of watching an interesting variant of the trapeze act. We shall get the people, who own the existing cash registers on the swing and then hold them to ransom. We shall set our small trapeze oscillating right across their airy path and decline to remove it unless they agree to part with some of the very shiniest of their spangles and hand them over to us for our adornment. I wondered how Ascher, who is so deeply moved by the perils of his own flights, ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... picture soon faded. Love—and this ridiculous George vowed he was in love—love is a mental see-saw. The nicely- balanced mind is set suddenly oscillating: now up, commandingly above the world, intoxicated with the rush and the elevation; now down to depths made horribly deep by contrast, wretchedly jarred ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... many a time cross'd the river of old, Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies, Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left the rest in strong shadow, Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south, Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water, Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... lying next to Constans touched him on the arm, directing his attention to a squad of the defenders who were working to dislodge one of the massive coping-stones of the gateway arch. Already it was oscillating under the heave of the levers; if it fell, a score of men might be crushed beneath its weight, and the destruction of the testudo would be a certainty. Constans raised his rifle. It was a long shot, but he could not wait to take deliberate ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... the air and the wind around it do the same; for they accompany it both when it rushes to those parts of the earth, and when to these. And as in respiration the flowing breath is continually breathed out and drawn in, so there the wind oscillating with the liquid causes certain vehement and irresistible winds both as it enters and goes out. When, therefore, the water rushing in descends to the place which we call the lower region, it flows through the earth into ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... remembering the third was distracted by the fourth, and made amends whenever she went wrong by giving the unfortunate fowls an extra spin, which made their chance of ever getting cooked exceedingly doubtful. But it was pleasant cookery too. Meanwhile Miss Lavinia, oscillating between the kitchen and the opposite room, prepared the dining-table in the latter chamber. This office she (always doing her household spiriting with unwillingness) performed in a startling series of whisks and bumps; laying the table-cloth ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... different size: the shorter produces a considerably higher pitched note than the longer one. If a mirror be attached to one of the prongs of each fork, and a beam of light be cast upon each mirror successively and then reflected in a revolving mirror, the oscillating spot of light is converted into a series of waves; and if the waves obtained by reflecting the light from the mirror of the smaller one be counted and compared with those reflected from the mirror attached to the larger fork, it will be found that the ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... analogue of a short magnet carried on a pivot like a small compass needle. This sphere follows the pole of a vibrating sphere which is presented to it, as the pole of a magnet would do, with this difference always, that in the magnet, like poles repel, while in oscillating bodies like phases attract. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... you," said Hamoud, turning his limpid eyes toward her face which was veiled by swaying fringes of the awning. She unclenched her fists; her body slowly relaxed; and a look of incredulity appeared in her eyes, as she returned from afar to this oscillating world of steamy heat, throbbing with aboriginal song, impregnated with the smell of putrefying foliage and of sweat. From under the feet of the machilla carriers a cloud of mauve butterflies rose like flowers to ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... what they did not do. Once out of the inlet, they went about and headed northward, up the coast, and we remained watching them until Mr. Trevor became a mere oscillating black speck against ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... serpent was oscillating like a pendulum, its little tongue playing like forked red lightning, its loathsome red eyes holding his own. Terror gripped his heart, and his soul curdled. He would have cried out, but that his tongue clave to the roof of his mouth. ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... lanterns dazzled him as he looked up, but he saw a line of men with bared sabres standing to his right—tall Uhlans, buttoned to the chin in their sombre overcoats, helmet-cords oscillating ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... quick change from one wave length to another. It has a spark gap, quenched type, break system relay—operator can hear any interference while transmitting—transformation by a single throw of a six-point switch which tunes the oscillating ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... boy,' said Solomon, who, with his spectacles on his forehead and the great chronometer in his pocket, was incessantly oscillating between Florence on the sofa, and his nephew in all parts of the parlour, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... doings of his shipmates, and in following the bent of his own joyous nature, in the hours of solitude and in the dark night, when no one saw him, his mind ever reverted to the one engrossing subject, like the oscillating ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... our hero, at the age of nineteen, stood at the dividing ridge of his life. If the oscillating spirit, trembling between right and wrong, had decided to lean to the right, what might have been his fate no one can tell. He paused on the balance a short time, then he leaned over to the left, and what his fate was it is the purpose of this volume to disclose. At the outset, ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... appear engrossed in another portion of the paper. But I could not refrain from darting a look at my fellow-traveller. To my horror I perceived that the paper he was reading was the same as the one I had; and that the page between which and myself his eyes were uncomfortably oscillating was the very page on ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... "was a glorious success." However glorious, it was dearly bought; and a few more such victories would be ruin. The governor presently achieved a success more solid and less costly. The wavering mood of the north-western tribes, always oscillating between the French and the English, had caused him incessant anxiety; and he had lost no time in using the defeat of Phips to confirm them in alliance with Canada. Courtemanche was sent up the Ottawa to carry news of the French triumph, and stimulate the savages of Michillimackinac to ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... that we can live comfortably with it. Only now and then, by way of special excitement, it starts up wide awake. We perceive how delicately our fortune is poised and balanced on the pivot of a single incident. We get a peep at the oscillating needle, and, because we have happened to see it tremble, we call ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... a wave of the first order. In waves of the second order, the force raising them acts only on the surface, and there the effect is greatest (as in the wind waves)—where one assists in giving to the water oscillating motion which maintains the next, and gradually puts the whole surface in commotion; but at a short distance ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... was to bring more energy into play, still using Leyden jars; and for this purpose Dr. Morton placed within the circuit between the jars a Tesla oscillating coil. He was thus able to use in his shadow pictures the most powerful sparks the machine was capable of producing (twelve inches), sending the Leyden-jar discharge through the primary of the coil, and employing for the excitation of the vacuum tube the "step up" current of the secondary ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... snake from her body, and held it by the tail high above her. The hideous creature stretched up its head towards the roof of the cavern, which it was just able to reach. It then began to move its head backwards and forwards, with a slow oscillating motion, as if looking for something. At the same moment the witch began to walk round and round the cavern, coming nearer to the centre every circuit; while the head of the snake described the same path over the roof that she did over the ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... great victory, mankind will conclude that the heaviest cost in proportion to prewar population and treasure was paid by the nations that first felt the shock of war, Belgium, Serbia, Poland and France. All four were the battle-grounds of huge armies, oscillating in a bloody frenzy over once fertile ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... interview Nadar on the Place Saint Pierre at Montmartre, above which his captive balloon the "Neptune" was oscillating in the September breeze. He was much the same man as I had seen at the Crystal Palace a few years previously, tall, red-haired, and red-shirted. He had begun life as a caricaturist and humorous writer, but by way of buttering his bread had set up in business ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... campfires were growing paler and dying down. High up in the light sky hung the full moon. Forests and fields beyond the camp, unseen before, were now visible in the distance. And farther still, beyond those forests and fields, the bright, oscillating, limitless distance lured one to itself. Pierre glanced up at the sky and the twinkling stars in its faraway depths. "And all that is me, all that is within me, and it is all I!" thought Pierre. "And they caught all that and put it into a shed boarded up with planks!" He smiled, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the village was an eccentric, ne'er-do-well fellow, named Keezar, who led a wandering, unsettled life, oscillating, like a crazy pendulum, between Haverhill and Amesbury. He had a smattering of a variety of trades, was a famous wrestler, and for a mug of ale would leap over an ox-cart with the unspilled beverage in his hand. On one ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... glad that you are taking up this subject, for you will be sure to throw much light on it. I remember well, long ago, oscillating much; when I thought of the Fauna and Flora of the Galapagos Islands I was all for isolation, when I thought of S. America I doubted much. Pray ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... wire conveying an electric current. 2. The effect upon other circularly vibrating bodies within that field of force corresponding to the action and reaction of electric currents upon one another. 3. The effect on pulsating and oscillating bodies similarly immersed, illustrating the mutual effects upon one another of magnets and electric currents. The first of these effects is one of induction, and, from what has been said from an earlier part of this article, it will be understood that the analogy between the hydrodynamic ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... conventionally-named simple substances are really simple. Each yields a spectrum having lines varying in number from two to eighty or more, every one of which implies the intercepting of ethereal undulations of a certain order by something oscillating in unison or in harmony with them. Were iron absolutely elementary, it is not conceivable that its atom could intercept ethereal undulations of eighty different orders. Though it does not follow that its molecule contains as many separate atoms as there are lines in its ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... of the old wired bells, and it sprang backwards and forwards so violently under the impulse of the unseen pull that the other bells ranged alongside responded to the vibration by oscillating in sympathy. ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... are nearly all from American models, and include the oscillating engines of the "Golden Gate," the last important advance in the construction of the marine engine; for, although the form of the oscillator has been known for years, it had never been applied to marine uses until the success of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... with longing eyes directed towards the Messiah's ass or other member of the long-eared fraternity; the other occupied with fingering state securities and the pages of a cyclopaedia, and constantly oscillating between wealth and bankruptcy, oppression and tolerance. Their own science is dead among Jews, and the intellectual concerns of European nations do not appeal to them, because, faithless to themselves, they are strangers to abstract truth and slaves of self-interest. ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... curriculum of the school from the primary department to the graduating class. Those four were notably the most advanced and the only thoroughly-grounded boys of the sixteen. A few of the others had attended nearly all the private schools in the city, while two of them had been oscillating between the public and private schools for years at their own sweet wills, and could never decide whether the commercial or classical department of the school in question was the one for which they were best fitted. It may well be understood, therefore, what a medley my ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... modesty are most numerous in May, June, and July, as Villerme, Lacassagne, and others have shown. Villerme, investigating 1,000 such cases, found a gradual ascent in frequency (only slightly broken in March) to a maximum in June (oscillating between May and July, when the years are considered separately), and then a gradual descent to a minimum in December. Legludic gives, for the 159 cases he had investigated, a table showing a small ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... modification of the spectrum of a radiating gas by a magnetic field, such as would result from the hypothesis that the radiators are the system of revolving or oscillating electrons in the molecule, was detected by P. Zeeman in 1896, and worked up, in conjunction with H. A. Lorentz, on the general lines suggested by the electron-theory of molecular constitution. While it cannot be said ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... feel that fish pull—to get a firm hand on him, and have him charge off with an impetuosity that involved more line or broken tackle—to feel that vigorous, oscillating pull of his, and to note the ease and strength with which he swam against the powerful current or dashed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... clock-work. When the horseshoe is in the circuit, it is a magnet, and it pulls its clapper toward it with enormous power. When it is out of the circuit, the next second, it is not a magnet, and it lets the clapper go. The clapper, oscillating to and fro, imparts a rotatory motion to a fly-wheel, which transmits it to the drivers on the rails. Such are our motors. They are no novelty, for ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... her growth, and strengthened with her strength; until it became a deep and all-absorbing passion—the great reality of her spirit-life; for love such as hers, outstripping the bounds of time, links itself even with our hopes beyond the grave;—how, when he lay stretched upon the bed of suffering, oscillating between life and death, the bitter anguish that the thought of separation occasioned her, enlightened her as to the true nature of her feelings; how, as his recovery progressed, to watch over him, and minister to his comfort, was happiness beyond expression to her;—how, when ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... and ominous echoes, and making the vast folds of sable drapery wave slowly backward and forward, as if agitated by unseen hands. A few spectators, standing in the background, appeared like grim figures on a black tapestry; and the gleam of the wax tapers, oscillating on their countenances, made them ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... broad sheets of the brightest green. As we sailed on we perceived lofty palms rising amid the matted mass of vegetation, and from their crests hung long feathered leaves, silently and gracefully oscillating in the light ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... work.[17] Now the case is altogether different. The perfection of modern machine-tools is such that the utmost possible precision is secured, and the mechanical engineer can calculate on a degree of exactitude that does not admit of a deviation beyond the thousandth part of an inch. When the powerful oscillating engines of the 'Warrior' were put on board that ship, the parts, consisting of some five thousand separate pieces, were brought from the different workshops of the Messrs. Penn and Sons, where they had been made by workmen ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... yours upon my soul, and when hundreds of years have passed, I shall tell of the undying friendship of two bohemians, who, day and night, set their own fashion, created a world of their own, and lived ecstatically, oscillating between the blunders of Bacchus and ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... For six days I had been oscillating within a pretty complete circumference of alarms. It is small blame to me, I hope, that with my nerve on so nice a pivot, I quivered and swung to this new apprehension like a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the ablest physicists and mathematicians. This was the phenomenon of Arago's rotating disc. It was briefly as follows: If a copper disc be rotated above a magnet, the needle tends to follow the plate in its rotation; or, if a copper plate be placed at rest above or below an oscillating magnet, it tends to check its oscillations and bring the needle quickly to rest. Faraday investigated these phenomena and soon discovered that a copper disc rotated below two magnet poles had electric currents generated ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... lithotomy forceps. These are slightly warmed and oiled, and carried forward along the floor of the passage of the vulva for 4 inches, when the orifice of the urethra will be felt exactly in the median line. Through this the forceps are gradually pushed with gentle, oscillating movement until they enter the bladder and strike against the hard surface of the stone. The stone is now grasped between the blades, care being taken to include no loose fold of the mucous membrane, and it is gradually withdrawn with the same ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... received permission to revisit Field Place, and had an allowance made him of 200 pounds a year. His uncle, Captain Pilfold of Cuckfield, was instrumental in effecting this partial reconciliation. Shelley spent some time at his uncle's country house, oscillating between London, Cuckfield, and Field Place, with characteristic rapidity, and paying one flying visit to his cousin Grove at Cwm Elan, near Rhayader, in North Wales. This visit is worth mention, since he now for the first time saw the scenery of ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... found it out when I was sitting on the garden seat near by, learning Latin irregular verbs. I saw the minute preposterous round birds going and coming, and I found something so absurdly amiable and confiding about them—they sat balancing and oscillating on a standard rose and cheeped at me to go and then dived nestward and gave away their secret out of sheer impatience—that I could not bring myself to explore further, and kept the matter altogether secret from the enthusiasm of Mr. Siddons. And in a few days there were ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... shedding a brilliant light. The dark lines of troops could be seen almost as clearly as by day. Their positions were distinctly marked, however, by the flashes from the rifles, coming thick and fast, making them look, as they moved along, bending and oscillating, like rolling waves of flame, throwing off fiery spray. When my brigade had moved far around upon the left, and had taken position, obliquing toward the enemy's rear, it suddenly opened. The Federal line recoiled, and closed ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... are double, being equipped with rotary screens or oscillating sieves, that segregate the imperfectly pulped cherries so that they may be put through again. Pulpers are also equipped with attachments that automatically move the imperfectly pulped material over into a repassing machine for another rubbing. Others ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... supply is capable of indefinite increase, their normal and permanent value is regulated by Cost of Production, and their temporary or market value is regulated by Demand and Supply, oscillating around Cost of Production (which consists of the amount ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... plank was yet oscillating beneath his feet, one of the men in the trench below, by a dexterous drive of his pick, loosened the earth on the side of the excavation; and, hardly had Mr Flinders got out his defiant words than he and the plank on which he was standing came tumbling down, the bully going plump into the pool ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... chances of its warfare is born that incessant ebb and flow of chemical change, that inability to reach an equilibrium, which we term "vitality." The course of life, like that of a flying express train, is not a perfectly straight line, but an oscillating series of concentric curves. Without these oscillations movement could not be. Exaggerate one of them unduly, or fail to rectify it by a rebound oscillation, ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... by Mr. C.J. Woodward, and recently presented to the Physical Society of London, is an adaptation of this experiment to the production of an oscillating motion by alternations in the internal and external ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... silently and with difficulty; for the car was oscillating so greatly that they were obliged to hold on, by its side, not to be thrown out. The descent was less rapid than it had been, ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... hurled from the heavens. It had been loosened on the mountain crest a half mile above, and was plunging downward with inconceivable momentum. Striking some obstruction, it rebounded like a rubber ball against the opposite side of the gorge, then recoiled, still diving downward, oscillating like a pendulum from wall to wall, whirling with increasing speed until it crashed to the bottom of the gorge with a shock so terrific that the ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... such as whirling, twisting, and reeling, we all took a part. Henry, for that was the name of the youth who was so zealous in his aspersions, united awkwardly and derisively in these exercises. Amid so many arms, legs, and bodies, revolving, oscillating, staggering, and tripping, it is not remarkable that a few should be thrown prostrate (not violently, however) upon the floor. One evening, in a boy's meeting at a time of great excitement, when the spirits of some of our ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... of getting everything we get and changing everything we change by quietly and coolly looking at facts, the old lumbering fashion of having a beautiful, showy, emotional revolution now on one side, and then waiting to have another beautiful, showy, emotional revolution on the other, each oscillating back and forth year by year until people finally settle down, look at facts together, become scientific, and see things as they are—has gone by. We have not time for revolutions nowadays. They may be amusing, but they are not practical, and evolution or revolution-without-knowing-it, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... see a globular mass with a moon-like face oscillating in the night. With hands held out and groping for the rails of the bedsteads, it is seeking its way. The orb of its belly distends and stretches its shirt like a crinoline, and shortens it. The mass is carried by two little and extremely slender ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... my horror I saw that it was beside her naked feet. Although no longer advancing, the head was still raised high as if to strike; but presently the spirit of anger appeared to die out of it; the lifted head, oscillating a little from side to side, sunk down lower and lower to rest finally on the girl's bare instep; and lying there motionless, the deadly thing had the appearance of a gaily coloured silken garter just dropped from her leg. It was plain to see that she ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... drawn up on the parade-ground. They looked chill in the cold light of early morning; their gray jackets lay loose on their spare shoulders; their hands hung inertly at their sides, and they walked with the oscillating motion of men whose feet were sore in their heavy boots. The civil guard was drawn up, the chief warder whistled, and then the men fell out into gangs of twenty-five each, attended by an ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... "But mathematics says so. A freely oscillating segment of space would naturally come to equilibrium in a position parallel to the rest of its ...
— The Einstein See-Saw • Miles John Breuer
... individual—a caprice of vanity by those who do not know Lord Carlisle's personal qualities, a caprice of patriotic benevolence by those who do. According to the construction of the case as thus indicated, oscillating between a question of profound revolution moving subterraneously amongst us, and a purely personal question, such a discussion would ascend to the philosophic level, or sink to the level of gossip. The other direction of the public surprise points to a question that ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... and does, occur that the plain man is practising physical and intellectual calisthenics, and running a vast business and sending ships and men to the horizons of the earth, and keeping a home in a park, and oscillating like a rapid shuttle daily between office and home, and lying awake at nights, and losing his eyesight and his digestion, and staking his health, and risking misery for the beings whom he cherishes, and enriching insurance companies, and providing joy-rides for nice young women whom he ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... arena was a blaze of riotous colour now, with the mid-morning's sun darting its rays almost perpendicularly on the south side of the huge oval place. A sea of heads gold and brown, ruddy and black oscillating in unison to right or left like waters driven by the tide, as the combatants down below shifted their ground across the floor of the arena—fans of coloured feathers swinging, mantles caught by a passing breeze, every grain of sand on the floor of the arena ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... to some spears of grass that grew near the impression, but I did not comprehend the mystery until he dismounted and explained to me that, when the wind was blowing, the spears of grass would be bent over toward the ground, and the oscillating motion thereby produced would scoop out the loose sand into the shape I have described. The truth of this explanation was apparent, yet it occurred to me that its solution would have baffled the ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... the feminine language consists of language rapidly vibrating or oscillating between two persons. The object of any conversation is always accusative, e.g., "Mrs. Edwards has no taste in hats." Most conversations consist of an indeterminate number of sentences, but sometimes it is difficult to tell where one sentence ends and the next begins. It is even possible ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... the shoulder-shaking, oscillating dancing of to-day, is really not intended to be vulgar or immoral at all, despite the crusades of the anti-immorality dancing committees! What is dancing, after all, if not the expression of one's ideals and emotions? It is only ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... there was a handsome leopardess gazing steadily at me. Our eyes met, and how long we confronted each other I know not. It must have been some minutes. Her eyes contracted and expanded, the pupil elongated and then opened out into a round lustrous globe. I could see the lithe tail oscillating at its extreme tip, with a gentle waving motion, like that of a cat when hunting birds in the garden. I seemed to possess no will. I believe I was under a species of fascination, but we continued our steady stare ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... of the hideous reptile, which was evidently gliding over the earth when it detected his approach. It instantly threw itself into coil, and with its flat triangular head upraised and slowly oscillating back and forth, waited for the intruder to come within reach of its ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... hesitation between giving the alarm and following Alice silently and alone, he chose the latter. He was a swift runner and light footed. With a few bounds he reached the little gate, which was still oscillating on its hinges, darted through and away, straining every muscle in desperate pursuit, gaining rapidly in the race, which bore eastward along the course twice before chosen by Alice in leaving ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... spent in that strangely noisy, oscillating, onward-rushing dwelling-place of a railway-carriage, was not without a certain subdued brightness of intercourse and conversation. Katherine was neither preoccupied nor distrait, or unamused even by the small accidents ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the Brahminical and Mahometan creeds by an incoherent syncretismus; or, as amongst many heretics of Persia and Arabia, who are mere crazy freethinkers, without any religious determination, without any principle of libration for the oscillating mind. Whereas our differences, leaving generally all central truths untouched, arise like our political parties, and operate like them; they grow out of our sincerity, and they sustain our sincerity. That interest must be unaffected ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... indeed encouraged, to do to our brother, our sister is to be left to the tyranny of authority and tradition. With few insignificant exceptions, girls have been educated either to be drudges, or toys, beneath man; or a sort of angels above him; the highest ideal aimed at oscillating between Claerchen and Beatrice. The possibility that the ideal of womanhood lies neither in the fair saint, nor in the fair sinner; that the female type of character is neither better nor worse than the male, but ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... is found by a back and front sight arranged upon the right side of the sleeve in which the gun is mounted. The back side permits of aiming while the gun is being loaded. It carries a small oscillating level that indicates the elevation of the gun ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... respond. It was shaking, uncontrollably, and moved off to the right of where he wanted it to go. When he tried to correct, it swung too far to the left, waving as if it were alive. It hung there before him as in a dream, oscillating back and forth. ...
— Sound of Terror • Don Berry
... flourish of a brightly coloured pocket-handkerchief, whose vivid hue approximated closely to the general tint of his cheeks and eagle-like beak, and which he held loosely, ready for action, in his disengaged left hand; for, his right was ever at work oscillating between the magazine of snuff in his deep waistcoat pocket and the nasal promontory that consumed it with almost rhythmical regularity, sniff and snort and resonant trumpet blast of satisfaction succeeding each other in systematic sequence, as the veteran came down the ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... system, especially for lateral balance, was that of arranging the wings in the shape of a broad V, to form a dihedral angle, with the center low and the wing-tips elevated. In theory this was an automatic system, but in practice it had two serious defects: first, it tended to keep the machine oscillating; and second, its usefulness was restricted ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... too is the prodigious nest of the Eumenes, "with its egg suspended by a thread from the roof, like a pendulum, oscillating at the lightest breath in order to save it from contact with the caterpillars, which, incompletely paralysed, are wriggling and writhing below"! Later, when the egg is hatched, "the filament is transformed into a tube, a place of refuge, up which the grub clambers backwards. ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... a simple rotary gap, indirectly excited spark and provided with nine taps on the inductance coil of the closed oscillating circuit. Five varying toothed discs for the rotary spark gap yield five different signal tones and nine different wave ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... not quiet I'll rip your dress into ribbons, and you may go home, and tell your mother what you like,—damn you I'll murder you,—I'll give you ten shillings." "You fool he'll give you ten shillings." I heard no more, oscillating my arse, and driving with all my force between her legs, I knew not how, I knew not where. Still the girl ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... crossing of the roads the name Fairfield on the sign-post seemed to be the thing that tipped the oscillating balance of decision in favor ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... many a time crossed the river, the sun half an hour high; I watched the twelfth-month sea-gulls—I saw them high in the air, floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies, I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow, I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... suspense, of anticipation which is not tonally realized, for the succeeding number is in a widely divorced key. But it must have pressed hard the philistines. And this prelude, the twenty-third, is fashioned out of the most volatile stuff. Aerial, imponderable, and like a sun-shot spider web oscillating in the breeze of summer, its hues change at every puff. It is in extended harmonics and must be delivered with spirituality. The horny hand of the toilsome pianist would shatter the delicate, swinging fantasy of the poet. Kullak points out a variant in the fourteenth bar, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker |
