"Oscillation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... extravagant, and she walked in the streets as if she wished every one to notice her. It is the walk of the Music-Hall stage, and the trick of it consists chiefly in giving, so to speak, prominence to the shoulders and oscillation to the skirts. In fact, she was one of those ladies who ardently desire that all the world should ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... adjourned there has been a fluctuation in the interest on call money from 2 per cent to 30 per cent; and the fluctuation was even greater during the preceding six months. The Secretary of the Treasury had to step in and by wise action put a stop to the most violent period of oscillation. Even worse than such fluctuation is the advance in commercial rates and the uncertainty felt in the sufficiency of credit even at high rates. All commercial interests suffer during each crop period. Excessive rates for call money in New York attract money from the interior banks into the speculative ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... The same is true of all the laws of matter. The ideal law is known because it is a fact. The law is imperative. It must be obeyed without hesitation. Laws of crystallization, laws of proportion in chemical combination,—neither in these nor in any other law of Nature is there any margin left for oscillation of disobedience. Only the primal will of God works in the material world, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... traversing; and with good reason, since the law of self-preservation had now obliged the fugitive Tartars to plunder provisions and to forage wherever they passed. In this respect their condition was a constant oscillation of wretchedness; for sometimes, pressed by grinding famine, they took a circuit of perhaps a hundred miles, in order to strike into a land 5 rich in the comforts of life; but in such a land they were sure to find a crowded ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... part or head is lowered to its extreme limit, the machine occupies the least space. In this position, by means of the foot-holder it communicates oscillation to the legs; by means of the single-rubber, it acts upon the feet, ankles, and lower leg; by means of the double-rubber, it acts upon the legs, including the feet, the ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... surface in reefing them. Thence the necessity of running out on foot-ropes—movable ropes stretched below the yards—of working with one hand while holding on by the other—perilous work for any one who is not used to it. The oscillation from the rolling and pitching of the ship, very much increased by the length of the lever, the flapping of the sails under a stiff breeze, have often sent a man overboard. It was then a truly dangerous operation for Tom and ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... various objects contained in dwellings; but it was generally admitted that these did not proceed from earthquake shocks, but from atmospheric vibrations. No deviation of the magnetic needle was observed at the Meteorological Institute of Batavia; but a vertical oscillation was apparent, and persons who listened with the ear placed on the ground, even during the most violent detonations, could hear no subterranean noise whatever. It became clear that the sounds came from some volcano burst into activity; but it ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... according to him, is a modification of the brain by which it is disposed, or prepared, to set our other organs in motion. The will is necessarily determined by the quality and pleasantness of the ideas which act upon it. Deliberation is the oscillation of the will when moved in different directions by opposing forces; determination is the final prevalence of one force over the other. There is no difference between the man who throws himself out of a window and the man who is thrown out, except that the impulse on the latter comes from something ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... throb started, a feeder valve in the pre-induction energy chamber developed a positive-feedback oscillation that threatened to blow out the whole pre-induction stage unless it was damped. The search for the out-of-phase external field tubes had to be dropped while the more ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... drummed with his thick hands on the board in front of him; he looked steadily in Herrick's face, and Herrick as steadily looked upon the table and the pattering fingers; there was a gentle oscillation of the anchored ship, and a big patch of sunlight travelled to and fro between the ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... of knowledge based on the analysis of the idea of Disorder—Two opposed forms of order: the problem of genera and the problem of laws—The idea of "disorder" an oscillation of the intellect between the two kinds ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... room is for an instant filled with light. With light, I say, though you can see nothing. You can see and hear the spark indeed—but that is a mere secondary disturbance we can for the present ignore—I do not mean any secondary disturbance. I mean the true ethereal waves emitted by the electric oscillation going on in the neighborhood of this recoiling dielectric. You pull aside the prong of a tuning fork and let it go; vibration follows and sound is produced. You charge a Leyden jar and let it discharge; vibration follows ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... ceased to gaze, with an air of amiable authority, into a world which, as yet, beheld no symptoms of the Indian Mutiny. And yet, gently swinging against the wall, within the black tube, was a voice which recked nothing of Uncle James, of China teapots, or of red velvet curtains. She watched the oscillation of the tube, and at the same moment became conscious of the individuality of the house in which she stood; she heard the soft domestic sounds of regular existence upon staircases and floors above her ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... indeed a new play of the first magnitude. Tarzan was entranced. Soon he discovered that by wriggling his body in just the right way at the proper time he could diminish or accelerate his oscillation, and, being a boy, he chose, naturally, to accelerate. Presently he was swinging far and wide, while below him, the apes of the tribe of Kerchak ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... I had the pleasure of ploughing its rascally waters! The remainder of our voyage was a succession of squalls, calms, contrary winds, sticking on shoals for hours, and being detained on shore, with an accompaniment of pitching, tossing, oscillation and botheration, that baffles all description. However, time brings the greatest miseries to an end; and in the process of time we arrived at Tadousac—loaded our boat deeply with flour—shook hands with our friends—related our adventures—bade them adieu—and again found ourselves scudding down ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... what it is to be responsive to every call, solicited by every impulse, yet still, like the magnet, vibrate ever to the north, never so tense, never so aware of the stress and strain of force as when most irremovably fixed upon that goal. The intensity of life is not to be measured by the degree of oscillation. It is at the stillest point that the most tremendous energies meet; and such a point is the intelligence open to infinity. For such stillness I feel myself to be destined, if ever I could attain it. But others, I suppose, like MacCarthy, have a different ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... a minority of turbulent demagogues disloyal; and in December, 1880, the rebellion duly broke out, and the Transvaal Republic was proclaimed. What followed we know, war, Laing's Nek, Majuba, and one more violent oscillation of policy in the concession of a virtual independence to ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... ascertained that each lunar day, or the interval of twenty-four hours and about fifty-four minutes between two successive meridian passages of our satellite, is marked by a perceptible, though very small, double oscillation of the needle—two progressive movements from east to west, and two returns from west to east.[367] Moreover, the lunar, like the solar influence (as was proved in each case by Sabine's analysis of the Hobarton and Toronto observations), extends to all three ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... much value, and because it is not probable that the writer was influenced by prejudice and preconceived ideas. I shall quote from John Stuart Mill's "System of Logic," page 477: "There is a perpetual oscillation in spiritual truths, and in spiritual doctrines of any significance, even when not truths. Their meaning is almost always in a process either of being lost or of being recovered. Whoever has attended to the history of the more serious convictions ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... the Ottoman power in Europe pretty nearly on that basis to which it had again fallen back by 1821. The long interval of time between these two dates involved a memorable flux and reflux of power, and an oscillation between two extremes of panic-striking grandeur, in the ascending scale (insomuch that the Turkish Sultan was supposed to be charged in the Apocalypse with the dissolution of the Christian thrones), and in the descending scale of paralytic dotage tempting its own instant ruin. In speculating ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... interrupted by his vibrating diaphragm were conveyed to a distance by a metallic circuit, and there passed through a coil like that of Page, the iron needle would emit a note like that which had caused the oscillation of the transmitting diaphragm. Acting on this knowledge, he ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... or dead-beat escapement, combined with a long pendulum terminating in a heavy bob, the force of gravity caused such slight variation that the motion was practically harmonic and had only a very minor effect on the clock. For a long case, you see, has an exceedingly confined arc of oscillation because the swing of the pendulum is so limited. It is this length of pendulum together with its almost harmonic motion which results in the excellent time-keeping done by clocks of the "grandfather" class. The time a pendulum takes to vibrate always depends on its ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... would have been the case if the breeze had been abeam or on her quarter—she listed first to port and then to starboard, with the "send" of the sea, as regularly as the swing of a clock's pendulum. Really, the oscillation made it almost as impossible for Fritz to move about as if the ship had been contending with all the powers of the elements in a heavy storm, whereas the skipper said she was only "going easy," with a ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... been fully asleep all night, and the sight of that mess, and what it meant, jolted me immediately awake. Something, probably a heavy truck, had started a tiny oscillation in that ball. And the ball had been heavy enough to start the table bouncing with it until, by dancing that table around the room, it had literally torn the clamp off and shaken itself free. What had happened afterward was obvious, ...
— The Big Bounce • Walter S. Tevis
... approximately the future velocity of the aerial locomotive. Let us rather attempt to calculate the probable velocity of a locomotive gliding through the air, without the possibility of running off the rails, without any oscillation, without the least obstacle. Let us fancy such locomotive encountering on its way, in the midst, one of those atmospheric currents which travel at the rate of forty leagues an hour, and following that current; add together these formidable data, and your imagination ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... liquid at rest will obviously assume the shape of a sphere, under the influence of gravitation, and it is a stable form, because any oscillation of the liquid which might be started would gradually die away under the influence of friction, however small. If now we impart to the whole mass of liquid a small speed of rotation about some axis, which may be called the polar axis, in such a way ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... condemned to the high roads, or at least to comparatively smooth and level ground, constitutes a severe handicap. Again, when travelling at high speed, and this is essential when pursuing a fast aeroplane, the accurate laying of the weapon is extremely difficult, owing to the oscillation of the vehicle itself, especially if the road surface is in a bad condition. The sighting arrangements are of a wonderfully complete character, as described elsewhere, but the irregular rolling movement arising ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... difficulty in descending the stairs; there was practically no oscillation of any kind in this still and windless summer night, and the two came down easily and looked round the ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... for it has no trace of inspiration. There is no such thing as mediation. We must not attach too much importance to the Messianic idea, for this would imply a special revelation. The Gospels rest on a very insecure basis. The theses of Paul betray a continued oscillation between the mystic and Jewish conceptions. As a whole, the Bible is not divine, and we should at once discard faith in its authoritative character. The only way by which Christ now acts upon persons is by the force of his example and ideas, just as Moses, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... carries a glass tube, c, which dips into a vessel containing either water or methylic alcohol. Three or four gas jets, one of which is shown at E, are arranged around the porous vessel, as close as possible, but in such a way as not to touch it during the oscillation of the beam. These gas jets communicate with a gasometer tilled with hydrogen, the bell of which is so charged as to furnish a jet of sufficient strength. Experience will indicate the best place to give the gas jets, but, in general, it is well to locate ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... wood, suggested to Brunell a plan by which the Thames river could be tunneled. The twitching of a frog's flesh as it touched a certain kind of metal led Galvani to invent the electric battery. The swinging of a spider's web across a garden walk led to the invention of the suspension bridge. The oscillation of a lamp in the temple of Pisa led Galileo to invent the measurement of time by a pendulum. A butterfly's wing suggested the combination of colors. So little things are suggestive of great things ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... a French physicist, born in Paris; distinguished for his studies in optics and problems connected with light; demonstrated the rate of the rotation of the globe by the oscillation of a pendulum (1819-1868). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... in ab there wouldn't be any effect in cd when a current in ab started or stopped. Look at the circuit of the oscillating audion in Fig. 38. If we should turn these coils at right angles to each other we would stop the oscillation. Electrons only influence other electrons which ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills
... truth, was one of those high-strung men who pay for their periods of religious rapture by hours of melancholy. This oscillation of the spirits in extraordinary men appears to be more or less a law of nature; and this the Widow Gough ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the West, when once one has grasped the idea of continental oscillation, or submergence and emergence of the land, of the sequence of the marine and fresh-water deposits in laying down these pages of earth-history, he will know exactly where to look for this wonderful layer-bed of the giant dinosaurs; he will find that, owing to the ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... the Spider's moving her position, the oscillation is resumed in the opposite direction. By means of this alternate motion, interspersed with numerous contacts, a segment of the sheet is obtained, of a very accurate texture. When this is done, the Spider moves ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... watering-place for cattle. The sun, now at high noon, massed the trees' shadow close around their trunks. The unbroken surface of the water reflected its rays back in our eyes. The current was barely indicated by the gentle oscillation of a few water-lily leaves. Two big blue dragonflies poised and quivered upon our floats, and not a fish seemed to ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... use. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) delineated, if he did not build, a crank and slider mechanism, also for a sawmill (fig. 2). In the 16th century may be found the conversion of rotary to reciprocating motion (strictly speaking, an oscillation through a small arc of a large circle) and vice versa by use of linkages of rigid members (figs. 3 and 4), although the conversion of rotary to reciprocating motion was at that time more frequently accomplished ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... raises her left hand with a sign of disapprobation. This position of the hand is described in full as open, raised high, and oscillated from right to left. Several of the Indian signs have the same idea of oscillation of the hand raised, often near the head, to express folly, fool. She clearly says, "What a thing to ask! what a fool you are!" and at the same time makes with the right hand the sign of money. This is made by the extremities of the thumb ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... deciphered the last word, when I had it borne fully in upon me, the significance of it all, I turned to the one natural effort to answer this Martian communication. I sent out from the battery of our transmitter the longest wave of magnetic oscillation I could emit. The message was simple: "Have received ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... the early trouble with the foundation of the great tower, there was from the first no intention of making it a belfry. Even before the spire was decided upon, the oscillation of a mass of swaying bells was obviously too dangerous to be seriously considered. A special campanile, as at Chichester, was therefore built at the north-west corner of the close. Its style was evidently similar to that of the cloisters and the chapter house. Multangular in form, an early historian ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... aptitudes for their instant comprehension, no racial impulses whatever in harmony with them. But when they have become familiar through study, after a long residence in the Orient, how nervously fascinant the oscillation of the dance, and the singular swing ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... who are found fighting now in this camp, now in that. The camps themselves are fairly matched: Rads and Tories—the sexes of politics—are as evenly created as men and women. They are like ten-pound weights standing on either scale of a balance. What, then, determines the oscillation this way or that? Evidently the miserable little half-ounce weight placed sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other. In fine,'tisthe tiny squadron of free-lances that wins general elections, the voters who think or who don't think, or who veer to be with the majority. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... to have been one of the first who observed this significance of the oscillation of the birth-rate, though he expressed it in a somewhat peculiar way, as the social capillarity theory. It is the natural and universal tendency of mankind to ascend, he declared; a high birth-rate and a strong ascensional ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... than is generally paid to him. He is the link between the old classic and the modern way of thinking in verse. You will observe in him an oscillation between the objective poetry of the ancients and the subjective mood of the moderns. His power of pleasingly reproducing the same thought in different language is remarkable, as it is in Pope. Read particularly ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... attracted by the oscillation of a brass lamp suspended from the ceiling of the cathedral at Pisa. Galileo was impressed with the regularity of its motion as it swung backwards and forwards, and was led to imagine that the pendulum movement might prove a valuable method for ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... aerial bridge, sometimes exceeding 200 feet, caused it—confined as it was only at the extremities—to dip, with an alarming inclination towards the centre; while the motion given it by the passenger created an oscillation frightful to one whose eye glanced down into the dark abyss of waters, that foamed and ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... ceased to enquire of Him. Hence her present vices and misery in contrast with her early troth and safety. Hence the twin evils of the time—on the one hand the nation's trust in heathen powers and silly oscillation between Egypt and Assyria; on the other the gross immoralities to which the Baals had seduced its sons. There was a double prostitution, to gods and to men, so foul that the young prophet uses the rankest facts ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... firmly to the carriage door and the oscillation of the cab caused her to nod violently, but it was not in assent to Christopher's proposition. She appeared to be turning something over ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... observations here there was a to and fro motion of the earth in the vicinity of Washington amounting to about four-tenths of an inch at the time of its greatest oscillation. These movements kept up in a constantly decreasing ratio until nearly ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... rooms at the hotel; a dark solitary figure, with bent head, and a heart full of tumultuous hopes and fears. The events of the evening had stirred him as he had not been stirred since those early days of torment, of undignified oscillation between yearning and despair: and now, at last, love unsteadied for the first time the foundations of his pride; brought home to him the cardinal truth that all the beauty and terror of life spring from the inexorable law of duality that links man and woman, ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... life appears in its entirety as an immense wave which, starting from a centre, spreads outwards, and which on almost the whole of its circumference is stopped and converted into oscillation: at one single point the obstacle has been forced, the impulsion has passed freely. It is this freedom that the human form registers. Everywhere but in man, consciousness has had to come to a stand; in man alone it has ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... are complementary to one another, the sum-total of the two combined always remaining the same in any cycle of work, according to the principle of the conservation of energy. We get a good example of this oscillation from kinetic to potential, and vice versa, in the planetary system. When the earth is farthest from the sun, its velocity, and consequently its kinetic energy, is at its lowest point; but there the potential energy is at its greatest. As the earth turns round in its orbit, however, ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... real meaning of that mystery which appears so prominently in the lives of great sceptics, which appears with especial prominence in the life of Charles II. I mean their constant oscillation between atheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is indeed a great and fixed and formidable system, but so is atheism. Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas, more daring than the vision of a palpable day of judgment. For it is the assertion of a universal ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... I imparted to the avuncular pendulum a gentle oscillation, and retiring to cover behind a contiguous rock, lifted up my voice in a long rasping cry whose diminishing final note was drowned in a noise like that of a swearing cat, which emanated from the sack. Instantly that formidable sheep was ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... comparison. As for the vaunted promenade—the man who would avail himself thereof, would, probably waltz with grace and comfort to himself on the deck of the Lively Sally in a sea-way: it requires some practice even to stand upright without holding on; the jolting and oscillation are such that I think you take rather more involuntary exercise than on the back of a cantering cover-hack. The pace is not such as to make much amends: from twenty to twenty-five miles an hour is the outside speed even of expresses: and on many lines you ought to calculate ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... time, it was observed of Captain Tonkins that he began to show signs of fatigue, rocking heavily in his seat with every oscillation of the sleigh, and talking thick like a jaded man. These phenomena seeming to require some explanation, the Captain stated that he had been up late the past three nights, and could keep himself awake only by taking occasional draughts of Quigg's brandy. The Captain then ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... roared and flashed on its invisible way under a dome of stars. It shrieked by mysterious stations, dragging furiously its freight of luxury and light and human masks through placid and humble villages and towns, of which it ignored everything save their coloured signals of safety. Ages of oscillation seemed to pass. In traversing the corridors one saw interior after interior full of the signs of wearied humanity: magazines thrown aside, rugs in disorder, hair dishevelled, eyes heavy, cheeks flushed, ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... ever since the day when at Ajaccio he attended a performance of "Norma," in which the moon was represented by a round transparent disc, lit from behind by a lantern hanging at the end of a string, whose oscillation revealed by turns first the luminary and then the transparency. This was enough to disgust him for ever with the theatre and the opera, whose motionless choruses, contrasting with the sometimes frantic movement of the music, left him with a ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... was slow and spasmodic. There was a clearly perceptible interval—probably several minutes—between the first stirrings of consciousness and the full clarification of my faculties. I began to be aware of the rumble and oscillation of the train without realizing what was meant. Then I opened my eyes and blinked at the lamp, and vaguely noted the yellow oil washing to and fro in the bowl. Then the white square of the "Avis aux Voyageurs" caught my eye ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... smaller islands, indeed, were for a time completely submerged. Before long, however, the sea fell again, and as it did so the observers "found it impossible to resist the impression that the islands were rising bodily out of the water." For no less than three days this strange oscillation of the sea continued to be experienced, the most remarkable ebbs and floods being noticed at Honolulu, on the ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... people acquire a see-saw motion of their bodies from one side to the other, as they sit, like the oscillation of a pendulum. By these motions the muscles, which preserve the perpendicularity of the body, are alternately quiescent, and exerted; and are thus less liable to fatigue or exhaustion. This therefore ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... length of this aerial bridge, sometimes exceeding two hundred feet, caused it, confined, as it was, only at the extremities, to dip with an alarming inclination towards the centre, while the motion given to it by the passenger occasioned an oscillation still more frightful, as his eye wandered over the dark abyss of waters that foamed and tumbled many a fathom beneath. Yet these light and fragile fabrics were crossed without fear by the Peruvians, and are still retained by the Spaniards over those streams which, from the depth or impetuosity ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... having now ascended as far as possible forward in its swing, and its motion checked by the banking action of the plan it will again swing back, and again carry with it the frame, thus setting up an oscillation, ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... of a class of gentlemen who used to attach an heterogeneal collection of massive seals and keys to one end of a chain, and a small church-clock to the other. The chain then formed a pendulum in front of their small-clothes, and the dignified oscillation of the appendages was considered to distinguish the gentleman. They were also used as auxiliaries in argument; for whenever an hiatus occurred in the discussion, the speaker, by having resort to his watch-chain, could frequently confound his adversary by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... that made by the oscillation of a falling leaf came from a point some distance ahead and on his right. So soft indeed was the sound that it cannot be explained how the human ear could be trained to the point of ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... more, the table at which they were seated, began to move up and down with a kind of vertical oscillation, and several things in the room began to slide about, by short, apparently purposeless jerks. Everything threatened to assume motion, and turn the library into a domestic chaos. Mrs. Elton declared afterwards that several books were thrown about the room. — But suddenly ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... everywhere else, Plato is making war against the philosophers who put words in the place of things, who tear arguments to tatters, who deny predication, and thus make knowledge impossible, to whom ideas and objects of sense have no fixedness, but are in a state of perpetual oscillation and transition. Two great truths seem to be indirectly taught through these fallacies: (1) The uncertainty of language, which allows the same words to be used in different meanings, or with different degrees of meaning: (2) The necessary limitation ...
— Euthydemus • Plato
... seemed to be a new reign: the Legislative Assembly found themselves on that day face to face with a king who, destitute of authority, ruled over a people destitute of moderation. They felt on their first sitting the oscillation of a power without a counterpoise, that seeks to balance itself by its own wisdom, and changing from insult to repentance, wounds itself with the weapon that has ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... are swallowed up by the barns, the still available houses being reserved for officers and departments. Our half-company is led at first to the end of the village, and then—by some misunderstanding among the quartermasters—back to the other end, the one by which we entered. This oscillation takes up time, and the squad, dragged thus from north to south and from south to north, heavily fatigued and irritated by wasted walking, evinces feverish impatience. For it is supremely important to be installed and set free as early as possible if we are to carry out the ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... of this oscillation? Take the case to which I have previously referred. The finer or coarser sediments that are carried down by the current of the river, will only be carried out a certain distance, and eventually, as we have already seen, on reaching the stiller ...
— The Past Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... portion has been taken from the Upaskara of S'ankara Mis'ra on the Vais'e@sika sutras of Ka@nada. It must be noted here that the notion of number according to Vais'e@sika is due to mental relativity or oscillation (apeksabuddhijanya). But this mental relativity can only start when the thing having number is either seen or touched; and it is in this sense that notion of number is said to depend on the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... across the dust reddened by the sunset glow as the dust of a battlefield is reddened with blood. I felt as if I were stabbed; the red dust seemed to swim round me; I staggered slightly: in another instant I had recovered myself, but the momentary oscillation had terrified my comrades. The seventh and highest, feeling the human pyramid tremble beneath him, involuntarily, unconsciously, opened his arms to save himself. He did not lose his balance, but he let the child ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... Frenchman, unable longer to endure the awful sight bowed his head upon his hands; another moment, and he was lost to sight in the circle of mist and spray that enveloped the foot of the column; then a strong oscillation began to be visible in the body of the water-spout; it swayed heavily to and fro; the cloud at its apex seemed to stoop, and the whole mass broke and fell, with a noise that might have been heard for miles. The sea, far around, was crushed into smoothness by the shock; immediately where the vast ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... the fight to the audience. A succession of heaves from the back of the crowd had sent a series of long ripples running through it, all the heads swaying rhythmically in the one direction like a wheatfield in a squall. With every impulsion the oscillation increased, those in front trying vainly to steady themselves against the rushes from behind, until suddenly there came a sharp snap, two white stakes with earth clinging to their points flew into the outer ring, and a spray of people, dashed from the solid ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... installation embodying sheer perfection of instrumental control—a system which only those wonder instrument-makers, the Osnomians, could have devised. The new object-compasses were housed in arenak cases after setting, and the housings were then exhausted to the highest attainable vacuum. Oscillation was set up by means of one carefully standardized electrical impulse, instead of by the clumsy finger-touch Seaton had used. The bearings, built of arenak and Osnomian jewels, were as strong as the axles of a truck and yet ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... wildest and most satirical misnomer. Liza had not been too severe on Dash's physical infirmities when she described him as lame on one of his hind legs, for both those members were so effectually out of joint as to render locomotion of the simplest kind a difficulty attended by violent oscillation. This was probably the circumstance that had recommended Dash as the object of Robbie's half-drunken pastime; and after a fruitless half-hour's exercise the tractable little creature, with a woeful expression ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... was covered with dense clouds, but not a breath of air was stirring; and the balloon, kept in its place by only a single anchor, experienced not the slightest oscillation. ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... Madame," was his reply, in a French sufficiently heavy and stiff-jointed, enforced by a dubious oscillation of the head. ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... were then interlaced with branches of hazel and brushwood and upon this the sleepers and rails were laid, the whole being ballasted with sand and other light material. And, in the end it proved a triumph for courage and ingenuity. Though there might be some slight oscillation, heavy trains have been running over this interesting two or three mile stretch for many a long ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... he said would have certified little or nothing in it; but that little or nothing was pleasantly uttered, and served perhaps as well as something cleverer to pass a faint electric flash between common mind and mind. The slouch, the hands-in-pocket mood, the toe-and-heel oscillation upon the hearth-rug—those flying signals that self was at home to nobody but himself, had for the time vanished; desire to please had tied up the black dog in his kennel, and let the white one out. By keeping close in the protective shadow of the fashion, he always managed to be well-dressed. ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... turned up from under the newer formations along the flank of the Ural chain. It would thus seem that they spread continuously across the whole breadth of Russia in Europe. Though almost everywhere undisturbed, they afford evidence of some terrestrial oscillation between the time of their formation and that of the Silurian rocks on which they rest, for they are found gradually to overlap ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... most important being the vitascope, which has a revolvable cylinder, blackened with soot, and this being rotated at a certain speed, the stylus, which is attached to the vibrating body, in contact with the cylinder, will show the number per second, as well as the particular character of each oscillation. ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... muddy estuary, into which floating carcasses were swept. At Punta Gorda, in Banda Oriental, I found an alternation of the Pampaean estuary deposit, with a limestone containing some of the same extinct sea-shells; and this shows either a change in the former currents, or more probably an oscillation of level in the bottom of the ancient estuary. Until lately, my reasons for considering the Pampaean formation to be an estuary deposit were, its general appearance, its position at the mouth of the existing great river the Plata, and the presence of so many ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... Peter Dreyer managed this workshop, and there was no fault to find with his management; he was energetic and vigilant. He was not capable, however, of managing work on a large scale, for his mind was in constant oscillation. In spite of his abilities he was burning to ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... peculiarly of the ancient race that dwelt in hollow trees ere white men came. In almost all climes the tortoise and the frog are among the precursors and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... or Edinburgh chairmen. You must sit quite in the middle, or run the perpetual chance of capsizing. A little alarming, also, is it to look out on the stone-strewn furrow, over which the mules carry you safely enough; and when you have become reconciled to the oscillation, and have learned to trim the boat in which you have embarked, it is long before your ear becomes accustomed to the stunning sound of a hundred little bells fastened to the mules' heads. "Do take them off," said we, after half an hour's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... At one place, the way is upon long beams introduced into holes made in the rock, like a bridge, and covered up with earth. Brr!—At the thought that a little stone might get loose and roll down the slope of the mountain, or that a too strong oscillation of the beams could precipitate the whole structure into the abyss, and with it him who had ventured upon the perilous path, one feels like fainting more than once during ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... permanent; that they can be other than poor temporary makeshifts, which, if they try to fancy and make themselves permanent, will be displaced by new explosions recurring more speedily than last time. In such baleful oscillation, afloat as amid raging bottomless eddies and conflicting sea-currents, not steadfast as on fixed foundations, must European Society continue swaying, now disastrously tumbling, then painfully readjusting itself, at ever shorter intervals,—till once the new rock-basis does come to light, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... condition, adopting, in short, a modus vivendi which merely gives us the complex impression of life. But imagine these two feelings as INELASTIC and unvarying elements in a really living man, make him oscillate from one to the other; above all, arrange that this oscillation becomes entirely mechanical by adopting the well-known form of some habitual, simple, childish contrivance: then you will get the image we have so far found in all laughable objects, SOMETHING MECHANICAL IN SOMETHING LIVING; ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... higher than political, by showing them that these sources are within them, and that no contrivance of man can permanently emancipate narrow natures and depraved minds. His politics were always those of a poet, circling in the larger orbit of causes and principles, careless of the transitory oscillation of events. ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... "Yes; oscillation means danger. If you're ever in a coach that oscillates much, tell of it at the first station and get it coupled up closer. Coaches when they're too loose are apt to jump, or swing off the rails; and it's quite ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... sight of a thousand men crossing the great structure in measured tread, with band playing and colors flying. They did not know that the structure, being a suspension bridge, might have been weakened and possibly destroyed by the force of rhythmic oscillation. Yet the accumulated force in the tramp of a thousand men is no greater than that which lies in the sympathetic vibrations of a musical note. Every metal structure has its note, and it is an old engineering saw that a huge structure like the ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... clock slowly crept along the dial-plate towards four, the hour so relentlessly enforced for interments for half a century by the sexton, who was now about to lay away his own wife in the greedy maw of the grave. The monotonous oscillation of the pendulum, sounding as the stroke of a passing bell, gathered solemnity of tone in the felt hush that rested upon all in the room—a hush as deep as that which rested upon the dead. All eyes, under the cover of stealthily drooping ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... pushed Hans over the brink. He fell into the car. It swayed into an oscillation with the impact. The balloon sank below our wing level and was gone, with only Hans, muffled shouts ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... to ensure its better protection and in accordance with a Roman custom lately introduced into Carthage, a man was fastened by the waist to a long chain let into the wall. His beard and nails had grown to an immoderate length, and he swayed himself from right to left with that continual oscillation which is characteristic of captive animals. As soon as he recognised Hamilcar he ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... has therefore been largely the product of commercial development, it has necessarily been of slow and gradual growth, tentative in its character, and subject to oscillation between the extremes of conflicting interests according to the temporary and varying predominance of each of these interests from time to time. No intelligible grasp of the principles which underlie the history of bankruptcy legislation in England, and no satisfactory ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... confutations let one suffice. According to this system the idea or vibration a from the external object A becomes associable with the idea or vibration m from the external object M, because the oscillation a propagated itself so as to re-produce the oscillation m. But the original impression from M was essentially different from the impression A: unless therefore different causes may produce the same effect, the vibration a could never produce the vibration m: and this ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... tendencies at work eternally in the same world produce strain and tension and anguish. The tension occasioned by these opposite forces gives rise to the third "quality," which is a tendency toward movement, oscillation, rotation—what Boehme often calls the wheel of nature, or the wheel of motion, or the wheel of life.[28] This, too, is both outer and inner; a law of the physical world and a tendency of spirit. There is nothing in nature that is not ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... 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 was thus continued at the same distance from the ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... Father! pardon in me The oscillation of a mind Unsteadfast, and that cannot find Its centre of rest and harmony! For evermore before mine eyes This ghastly phantom flits and flies, And as a madman through a crowd, With frantic gestures and wild cries, It hurries onward, and aloud Repeats its awful prophecies! ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... fat, and sun-tanned man from his willow chair on the veranda behind her. There was a slight palsied oscillation in his head. He leaned forward somewhat on a staff, and as he spoke his entire shapeless and nearly helpless form quaked with the effort. But Mary, for all his advice, raised the glass and swung it slowly from east ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... its upheaval. The Red Sea, therefore, is the only area in which we have clear proofs of the recent elevation of a district, which, by our theory (although the barrier-reefs are there not well characterised), has lately subsided. But we have no reason to be surprised at oscillation, of level of this kind having occasionally taken place. There can be scarcely any doubt that Savage, Aurora (Aurora Island is described by Mr. Couthouy ("Remarks," page 58); it lies 120 miles north-east of Tahiti; it is not coloured in the ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... ecliptic. The strong evidence afforded by the history of mythology, and geological researches, that some event of this nature has taken place already, affords a strong presumption that this progress is not merely an oscillation, as has been surmised by some late astronomers. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley |
