"Disproportionately" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... There are in every species biological "sports" and reversions, and there are individuals of this kind among sporting men who are not reached by ordinary social suggestion and stimuli. But granting that what we may call the instinctive interests are disproportionately strong in the sporting class, as compared with, say, the merchant class, yet these instincts are also strongly marked in what may roughly be called the artist class and in spite of a marked psychic ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... and, looking again at the disproportionately small hands of the men about him, corrected his first impression that they were too feminine to be good ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... observed that, from the necessity of the case, the books of the six principal allies against the Teutonic Powers are threefold in number the books of those powers; and that, from choice of their promulgators the books of the Teutonic Powers are also disproportionately less in total volume, owing to the almost entire absence in them of communications between Austria-Hungary and Germany; while the correspondence between their adversaries is presented by these with a fulness which gives the neutral reader the impression that nothing of importance has been ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... localities of South and Central America. Boys will like to know the origin of their name. Stilts are called zancos in Spanish, and these flies, a species of mosquito, are called sancudos—more properly spelled zancudos—on account of their very long, slender legs and disproportionately small bodies, which remind one of a very small boy on very high stilts. Flies on stilts is a funny idea, but not more funny than the appearance ...
— Harper's Young People, January 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Rome or were entirely unobserved because they were receiving no complaints behaved still more insolently and involved the Romans even contrary to their own wishes in a war. This proved the saying that even good fortune, when a disproportionately large portion of it falls to the lot of any individuals, becomes the cause of disaster to them; it entices them on to a state of frenzy (since moderation refuses to cohabit with vanity) and ruins their greatest interests. So these Tarentini, too, after rising to an ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... advantages and the materials furnished by nature on the spot for the purpose of constructing a secure and imposing fortress; without any further regard to the rules or pedantries of architecture. Attached to the main building, which ascended to the height of five stories—and yet did not seem disproportionately high from the extent of its range, were several smaller dependencies—some of which appeared to be framed of wood. The purists of our days, who are so anxious to brush away all the wooden patchwork and little tributary cells that formerly clustered ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... dripping off him, stood in the window watching the guest. Ivan Ivanovich Tushin was a tall, broad-shouldered man of thirty-eight, with strongly-marked features, a dark, thick beard, and large grey rather timid eyes, and hands disproportionately large, with broad nails. He wore a grey coat and a high-buttoned vest, with a broad turned-down home-spun collar. He was a fine man, but with marked simplicity, not to put a fine point on it in his glance and his manners. ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... parish constable; and their cardinal principle was disunion, because they were convinced that within the Union the position of slavery was impregnable. In spite of the proverb, great effects do not follow from small causes,—that is, disproportionately small,—but from adequate causes acting under certain required conditions. To contrast the size of the oak with that of the parent acorn, as if the poor seed had paid all costs from its slender strong-box, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... white, and their perfume stirred memories. The houses in Eden Village were not crowded; for the first quarter of a mile they passed hardly more than a dozen. After that, although they became more neighborly, each held itself well aloof. Then came a small church with a disproportionately tall spire, a watering trough, the Town Hall, and "Prout's Store, Zenas Prout 2nd, Proprietor." Here the gray sidled up to the ancient hitching-post. The boy tossed the reins over the dashboard ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... which detracted materially from the supple and undulating beauty which had so captivated Claude de Buxieres. The imprisonment of a tight corset caused undue development of the bust at the expense of her neck and throat, which seemed disproportionately short and thick. Her cheeks had lost their gracious curves and her double chin was more pronounced. All that remained of her former attractions were the caressing glance of her eye, tresses still golden and abundant, especially as seen under ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... this state were quite transparent, except the eyes, which were disproportionately large; and they seemed to be perfectly aware that they owed their safety to concealment, as those that I saw immediately buried themselves in the gravel when they were set at ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... once said that Shelley was too beautiful for portraiture; and yet the descriptions of him hardly seem to bear this out. He was quite tall and slender, but he stooped so much as to make him appear undersized. His head was very small-quite disproportionately so; but this was counteracted to the eye by his long and tumbled hair which, when excited, he would rub and twist in a thousand different directions until it was actually bushy. His eyes and mouth were his best features. The former were of a deep violet ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... of Kaffir kraals, to say nothing of the lairs of the Australian blacks. The poorest huts were definitely planned and securely built. The shape was oblong, the walls low, the roof high pitched and disproportionately large, though not so much so as in some of the South Sea Islands. The framework was of the durable totara-wood, the lining of reeds, the outside of dried rushes. At the end turned to the sunshine was a kind of verandah, on to which opened the solitary door and window, both low and small. ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... meaner table, in an angle between two windows, a pale-faced thread-bare secretary was performing for a yearly pittance the duties for which my Lord the Seneschal was rewarded by emoluments disproportionately large. ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... more deadly and disastrous, superiority. If we institute a competition between Holland and Switzerland as to the relative grace and agility of their mountain guides, it will be clear that the decision is disproportionately easy; it will also be clear that certain facts about the configuration of Holland have escaped our international eye. If we establish a comparison between them in skill and industry in the art of building dykes against the sea, it will be ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... and rolling heavily, was a small steamer. She was stumpy, high bowed, low waisted, with a short black funnel. Her bridge and single deck-house were disproportionately high. She was shabby and rusty. She looked insignificant. She was swept frequently with showers of white spray. On her bow and on her funnel could be seen the white letters and numbers which proclaimed her proper ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... tunic of the same color, belted tightly to the waist, reached the seat—apparently a box—upon which he sat; his legs and feet were not seen. His left forearm appeared to rest in his lap; he moved his pieces with his right hand, which seemed disproportionately long. ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... weight. The first is, that we draw our information and statistics now from a vastly wider area than in the "good old times," and hence that our figures relating to crime and disease always appear disproportionately large. The railroad, the steamboat, the telegraph, the printing-press—effects and causes of advancing civilization—have practically enlarged our mental horizon, and death, disease, and crime appear in unnaturally large proportions. And ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... roll about in, felt stifled in the narrow space where he now had to keep quiet. His rosy cheeks became pale, he grew up puny, serious, like a little man, with eyes which stared at things in wonder. He was five by now, and his head by a singular phenomenon had become disproportionately large, in such wise as to make his father say, 'He has a great man's nut!' But the child's intelligence seemed, on the contrary, to decrease in proportion as his skull became larger. Very gentle and timid, he became absorbed in thought for hours, incapable of answering a question. And when he emerged ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... hand, it does destroy self-respect; it does leave men psychically disturbed, and for that reason it affects consciousness of the presence of God disproportionately quickly as compared with other sins, and produces the feeling of loss of spiritual power. There are, in fact, abundant reasons for desiring deliverance, though there is ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... above paragraph (3) was written, and I introduce it here because it serves to show incidentally—and perhaps even better than the preceding figure—the points there mentioned with regard to the feet and great toes. Again, as Dr. Robinson observes, the attitude, and the disproportionately large development of the arms as compared with the legs, give all the photographs a striking resemblance to a picture of the chimpanzee "Sally" at the Zoological Gardens. For "invariably the thighs are bent nearly at right angles to the body, and in no case did the lower limbs hang down and take ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... Bushmen and Hottentots are low types of the Negrito stock, and they lead us to the lowest men of all, the Akkas of the West Congo region. It is difficult for us to realize how utterly degenerate and apelike these pygmies are. The jaws are disproportionately large as compared with the cranium or brain-case, and project to a degree which brings the skull very close to that of the higher apes; while in mental respects, in the absence of dwellings, and in many other ways they prove to be the lowest ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... a good proportion or balance between the several organs. Each organ must be sound in itself, and its strength must have a due relation to the strength of the other organs. If the heart and the digestive system be disproportionately strong, they will overload and oppress the other organs, one of which will soon give way; and, as the strength of the human body, like that of a chain, is to be measured by its weaker link, one disproportionately feeble organ endangers or destroys the whole. ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... of these birds is slow, unsteady, and affords but little amusement to the sportsman. From the disproportionately small, convex, thin-quilled, wing,—so thin, that a vacant space, half as broad as a quill appears between each,—the flight may be said to be a sort of fluttering more than any thing else: the bird giving two or three claps of the wings in quick succession, at the same time hurriedly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... more irresistibly ludicrous than its aspect as it slowly raised its small wondering eyes to mine. It was so much taller in its haunches than its shoulders—its fore legs were so disproportionately small—that in walking, its hind feet invariably took precedence. It was perpetually pitching forward over its pointed, inoffensive nose, and recovering itself always, after these involuntary somersaults, with the gravest astonishment. ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... blundering way, she plays a double game. All sweetness and light to Storm when she's with him, and immense pride in him as an employe—the pride a small, dull comet might feel in attracting attention to itself by trailing a disproportionately brilliant tail across the sky. All specious promises and excuses to Caspian when she's with him and not with Peter. Caspian, you remember, used to be a protege of hers when he was a rising young socialist, and she was the widow of a quaint genius ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... character. As something new and strange, it for the instant slightly agitates and discomposes the mind. Being unable to classify it with its like, we naturally magnify its intensity, and so tend to ascribe it to a disproportionately ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... description; tall as a yearling, with an unnaturally large head and dangerous looking tusks, that curved above his savage snout like small horns. There was promise of magnificent power in his immense shoulders, while flanks and hams were disproportionately light. He came out to the open leisurely munching his acorns, or amusing himself by ploughing deep furrows with his nose, and not until within ten yards did he appear to note the presence of a stranger. Suddenly he raised ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... their taste. They are very small, scarcely larger than a cherry-stone. Their shape is extremely curious. The body is dumpy, tapering to an acorn-shaped posterior; the legs are very long, resembling those of the spider when outspread; the hinder legs are disproportionately long and curved, being thus excellently adapted to enlace and press the little ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... in Western Con-naught, seven miles from the nearest railway station. It possesses a single street, straggling and very dirty, a police barrack, a chapel, which seems disproportionately large, and seven shops. One of the shops is also the post office. Another belongs to John Conerney, the butcher. The remaining five are public houses, doing their chief business in whisky and porter, but selling, ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... narrow as they are, each of them is parted by a circular mullion or central pillar. You will better understand how high they must be, when told that, in the southern tower, the space of the upper row is divided into three distinct tiers; and still the windows do not appear disproportionately short. They also are double, and the interior arches are pointed; but the arches, within which they are placed, are circular. In this circumstance lies the principal anomaly in the front of the cathedral; but there is no appearance of any disparity ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... movements. According to a common custom among juvenile Indians during the warm months of the year, he was dressed in nothing save a mere rag tied round his waist. His body was very brown, extremely round, fat, and wonderfully diminutive, while his little legs and arms were disproportionately small. He was so young as to be barely able to walk, and yet there he stood, his black eyes glittering with excitement, his tiny bow bent to its utmost, and a blunt-headed arrow about to be discharged ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... waded through the deep channel for a few yards, and then reared his majestic form dripping from the lake. He stood upon the 'point.' I never saw so grand an animal; it seemed as though no single ball could kill him, and although his head and carcass were enormous, still his length of leg appeared disproportionately great. With quick, springy paces he advanced directly for his favourite tree and began his process of rubbing, perfectly unaware of the hidden foes ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... ourselves should be preserved by our own merits,—just as when we are in good health we hear of sciatica, lumbago, or gout, and accept them without concern as part of the composition of the universe, until one day one of these disagreeables attacks ourselves, and stands out quite disproportionately as something that after all is of more consequence than we thought. It unfortunately nearly always happens that we have to face the mental crises of life inadequately prepared. We think we have pictured them beforehand, and according to that picture we are ready, ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... other day the captain of a patrol boat told me that he had just come over from service on the North Sea, and in his opinion it would be years before those waters could again be fished, owing to the immense numbers of still active mines which would render such an attempt disproportionately hazardous. From this point of view, if from no other more disinterested angle, we owe a great and continuous debt to the splendid people of Britain's oldest colony. It was among these white fishermen that I came out to work primarily, the floating ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... present some vital phase of the subject; it should not be merely something attractive attached to the article to catch the reader's notice. In his effort to make the beginning attractive, an inexperienced writer is inclined to linger over it until it becomes disproportionately long. Its length, however, should be proportionate to the importance of that phase of the subject which it presents. As a vital part of the article, the introduction must be so skillfully connected with what follows that a reader is not conscious of the transition. ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... more lines of capitals of the same size should be spaced as nearly alike as possible. These three lines are so disproportionately spaced that they ...
— Capitals - A Primer of Information about Capitalization with some - Practical Typographic Hints as to the Use of Capitals • Frederick W. Hamilton
... traffic will greatly decrease rail traffic and hence the revenue of the railroad; whether the amount of taxes paid by the railroads of the State, part of which is devoted to the upkeep of public highways used by motor carriers, is disproportionately higher than the amount paid ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... grave but glowing enthusiast made his way to St. Domingo, and afterwards returned to Spain, to be vexed henceforth by those mean miseries and small disputes which afflicted him for the remainder of his days—miseries the more galling, as they were so disproportionately small in comparison with the greatness of such a man, and with the aims and hopes ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... degree of illumination, those beyond would give lower and lower candle-power, successively, until the last lamp, or group, would be giving only about two-thirds the light of the first two. In other words, a very slight drop in voltage means a disproportionately great loss in illumination. Hence, by using a primitive system of distribution, such as that shown by Fig. 1, the initial voltage would have to be so high, in order to obtain the proper candle-power at the end of the circuit, that the ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... soothing and sweet, the second is annoying, or even maddening, according to the temperament of the patient. Susie, however, never suspected that anyone could be sorry for her; and when, after a party, before they went to bed, Anna would put her arms round her and give her a disproportionately tender kiss, she would show her surprise openly. "Why, what's the matter?" she would ask. "Another mood, Anna?" For she could not know how much Anna felt the snubs she had seen her receive. How should she? She was so used ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... Lateran has been so disfigured by modern alterations as to be unrecognizable. The former of the two adjoined the site of the martyrdom of St. Peter in the circus of Caligula and Nero; it was five-aisled, 380 feet in length by 212 feet in width. The nave was 80 feet wide and 100 feet high, and the disproportionately high clearstory wall rested on horizontal architraves carried by columns. The impressive dimensions and simple plan of this structure gave it a majesty worthy of its rank as the first church of Christendom. St. Paul beyond the Walls (S.Paolo ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... anxiety to reach the portal whence the fire was given out. The commander-in-chief particularly complimented Colonel Storrs upon the orderly way in which this ceremony was conducted under his regime. The population of Jerusalem is exceedingly mixed—and the percentage of fanatics is of course disproportionately large. There are many groups that have been gathered together and brought out to the Holy Land with distinctly unusual purposes. One such always had an empty seat at their table and confidently expected that Christ would some day appear to occupy it. The long-haired Russian and Polish ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... his scowling and bushy eyebrows, are of a quick gray, stern, and penetrating in their general expression, yet, when narrowly observed, putting on an air of vacancy, if not stupidity, that furnishes a perfect blind to the lurking meaning within. His nose is large, yet not disproportionately so; his head well made, though a phrenologist might object to a strong animal preponderance in the rear; his mouth bold and finely curved, is rigid however in its compression, and the lips, at times almost woven together, are largely indicative ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... fulfils no useful purpose, and on account of its breeding a very copious and varied bacterial flora, could with advantage be dispensed with. He also has said that man, who could support himself on food easily digestible, has a small intestine which is disproportionately fully developed. Instead of having between 18 and 21 feet of small intestine, man might do with one-third of that length. According to him, there is a disharmony of our food and our digestive system. Referring ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... rather stout, though her figure is still not bad. She has an abundance of chestnut hair, all her own, and naturally wave; her hands are pretty, her feet are pretty, her face is pretty. Her mouth is very small, almost disproportionately so, and her eyes are very large and blue and very wide open. She was intended for a placed woman, but Hermione and Modern Thought have made complete placidity impossible. She has a fondness for rich brocades and ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... of one of the leading magazines in the country. The welcome they met exceeded even his anticipations. By the very next mail, he received a note from his friend, enclosing a check, which to Harley Allen's inexperience of such matters seemed disproportionately large. "Your little Cape Cod girl is a wonder, indeed," wrote the editor. "If she can keep on writing such verse as this, she will make a name for herself. Send us some more: we'll pay her well ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... things. The great danger of all this, and of the evils that come from it, is that society by-and-by will turn as blindly against female intellectual culture as it now advocates it, and, having worked disproportionately one way, will work disproportionately in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... man to walk through—and walk he must, unless carried through on men's shoulders; for neither elephant, horse, nor bullock could ascend over the flight of steps. In all these places the staircases, on the contrary, are as disproportionately small; they look as if they were made for rats to crawl through, while the gateways seem as if they were made for ships to sail under.[12] One of the most interesting sights was the immense swarms ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... roman capitals, the following impressive annotation: DEUM TIME, PAUPERES SUSTINE, MEMENTO FINIS. On the reverse of the ensuing leaf, is a large head of Christ, highly coloured: but with the lower part of the face disproportionately short: not unlike a figure of a similar kind, in the Duke of Devonshire's Missal, described on a former occasion.[176] The crucifixon, on the next leaf but one, is full of spirit and effect. Then commence ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... bugles and banners and how much a grey, sedentary grind, the charm of which was all at the core. You might have an emotion about it, and an emotion that would be a help, but this was not the sort of thing you could show—the end in view would seem so disproportionately small. Nick put it to her that one really couldn't talk to people about the "responsibility" of what she would see him pottering ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... continental; Mediterranean only on the southern Crimean coast; precipitation disproportionately distributed, highest in west and north, lesser in east and southeast; winters vary from cool along the Black Sea to cold farther inland; summers are warm across the greater part of the country, hot ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... should, however, think a long time before building his villa, but not about farming his property, which he should set about at once. Let him wait until his thirty-sixth year and then build, provided his whole property is under cultivation. So build that neither the villa be disproportionately small in comparison with the farm nor the farm in comparison with the villa. It behooves a slave-owner to have a well-built country house, containing a wine-cellar, a place for storing olive-oil, and casks in such numbers that ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... in astonishment. A young and very smartly dressed man was advancing towards them with a soft, cat-like tread. He was of medium height and slim build. His head disproportionately large; his right ear standing out, in proof that it had long been used as a pen-rest; his nose pronounced and Semitic in outline; his eyes, big, projecting and yellowish brown; his chin, retreating; ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... the evil. If, as it would be natural to expect, the States which have been least favored in past appropriations should insist on being redressed in those here after to be made, at the expense of the States which have so largely and disproportionately participated, we have, as matters now stand, but little security that the attempt would do more than change the inequality from one ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... were to be found there, and the Moorish metropolis would naturally be the depository of such literary treasures as had escaped the general shipwreck of time and accident. On the whole, the estimate of Gomez would appear much too small, and that of Robles as disproportionately exaggerated. Conde, better instructed in Arabic lore than any of his predecessors, may be found, perhaps, here, as ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... was tall, but disproportionately stout for his height. His face was broad, and his loose double chin gave it a flabby appearance. A pallid complexion and black-grey hair, brushed straightly down where he was not bald, produced an impression of sanctimoniousness which was increased by a fawning manner of speech. Mr Sharnall ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... something like keeping foxhounds, and began alarmingly to resemble a necessity of shooting foxes. The situation was aggravated by the fact that these sexual pleasures were often the only ones the very poor could obtain, and were, therefore, disproportionately pursued, and by the fact that their conditions were often such that prenatal nourishment and such things were utterly abnormal. The consequences began to appear. To a much less extent than the Eugenists assert, but ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... the Greek and Latin writers, has thus put it in my power to collect on my own shelves, for my actual use, almost all the best books in spite of my small income. Somewhat too I am indebted to the ostentation of expense among the rich, which has occasioned these cheap editions to become so disproportionately cheap. ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... title to property, such as notes, checks, drafts, deeds, wills, etc. To a less extent the disputed portions involve alterations of books of account and other writings, by erasure, addition, interlineation, etc., while sometimes the trouble comes in the form of disguised or simulated writings. A disproportionately large number of these cases arise from forged and fictitious claims against the estates of deceased people. This results, first, from the fact that such claims are more easily established, as there ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... make a deep-piled carpet. I do not know whether it is a mango tree at all, for I am no botanist: but anyhow the fruit is rather like that of the mango in external appearance, and in internal still more so, for it has a disproportionately large stone. These stones are cracked, and the kernel taken out. The kernels are spread a short time in the shade to dry; then they are beaten up into a pulp with a wooden pestle, and the pulp put into a basket lined carefully with plantain leaves and placed in the sun, which melts it ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... a want, a plaint, an offer of substantial gratitude: "TWO HUNDRED POUNDS REWARD.—The above reward will be paid to any person giving information as to the identity and whereabouts of a man observed yesterday in the neighbourhood of the Green Park. He was over six feet in height, with shoulders disproportionately broad, close shaved, with black moustaches, and wearing a sealskin great-coat." There, gentlemen, our fortune, if ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... hooked bill is white, like that of the goat-sucker, and furnished at the base with stiff hairs, directed forwards. The plumage is of a sombre brownish grey, mixed with black stripes and large white spots. Their eyes are incapable of bearing the light of day, and their wings are disproportionately large, measuring no less than four and a-half feet from tip to tip. The birds quit the cavern only at nightfall, to feed on fruits. A most horrible noise is made by them in the dark recesses of the cavern, and the clamour increases as ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... furnished on an average equal numbers of soldiers,(2) now, although the proportions of the population had changed probably in favour of the burgesses rather than to their disadvantage, the demands on the allies were by degrees increased disproportionately,(3) so that on the one hand they had the chief burden of the heavier and more costly service imposed on them, and on the other hand there were two allies now regularly levied for one burgess. In like manner with this military supremacy the civil superintendence, which (including the supreme ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... far from being hostile to State rights, are almost invariably framed on the principle of giving disproportionately large representation to the smaller States. In the United States and Australia, for example, every State, however small, has an equal ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... calling barely fed him, save on "chickpeas and a little wine." But we must beware lest, in view of the increasing and excessive dearness of living in France, the beggarly salaries of the poor schoolmasters of a former day, so little worthy of their labours and their social utility, appear even more disproportionately small than they actually were. What is more to the point, the teachers had no pension to hope for. They could only count on a perpetuity of labour, and when sickness or infirmity arrived, when old age surprised them, after fifty ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... person to carry their request to the elder. "Wee Andra" the young man had been called in his babyhood, to distinguish him from his father, and he still bore the anomalous title though he stood six-feet-four in his moccasins and was disproportionately broad. But in spite of these physical securities, the young giant flatly refused the doubtful honour of approaching his father on the sore subject; so, after much discussion, the delicate task devolved ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... lowest order of reptiles; but it would be an error to admit this consideration. Indeed, the serpents being animals which, in order to hide themselves, have adopted the habit of gliding directly along the ground, their body has lengthened very considerably and disproportionately to its thickness. Now, elongated legs proving disadvantageous to their necessity of gliding and hiding, very short legs, being only four in number, since they are vertebrate animals, would be incapable of moving ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... difficulties which had beset the quartermaster and commissary departments were also encountered by the surgeons. Hospital accommodations were scanty, the quantity of medicines available was very limited, the number of wounded men disproportionately large, and, when sickness was added to the wounds, the small number of surgeons available at the front were not able to give the individual attention and scientific treatment which forms a part of our admirable medical ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... impossible. On the other hand, the elocutionists who prescribe for students practices that involve the excessive use of this muscle, with a cramped position of the vocal organs, the larynx being greatly drawn down, with the view of producing disproportionately heavy lower tones, must take no comfort from the above anatomical and physiological facts. Art implies proportion, and it was one of the ambitions of all the best actors in the golden age of histrionic art to have an "even voice"—i.e., one equally good through the whole range required. The tragic ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... relatively diminutive as their little world, or were they as disproportionately huge as the lesser attraction of gravity upon the surface of their globe ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of employing the aboriginal tribes to work for him, and on one occasion a party of his men found in the jungle a man and woman in a state of starvation, and brought them in. They were both very short in stature, with disproportionately long arms, which in the man were covered with a reddish-brown hair. They looked almost more like baboons than human beings, and their language was unintelligible, except that words here and there resembled those in ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... the heightening of slave prices at such a rate as to keep the cost of freedom always greater than the generality of the slaves can pay with their own accumulated savings or peculia. Slave prices in fact, whether in ancient Rome or in modern America, advanced disproportionately to the advantage which the owners could derive from the ownership. "This shows that an element of speculation enters into the valuation of the slave, or that there is a hypervaluation of the slave. This is the central phenomenon ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... task of apportioning the labor was assigned to the local authorities, and great care was taken that it should be done in such a manner, that, while the most competent hands were selected, it should not fall disproportionately heavy on any.27 ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... to Paaker's plot of ground through the wall which surrounded it, was disproportionately, almost ostentatiously, high and decorated with various paintings. On the right hand and on the left, two cedar-trunks were erected as masts to carry standards; he had had them felled for the purpose on Lebanon, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... one, the nagah, that dominates the imagination of many Dayak tribes. It appears to be about the size of a rusa, and in form is a combination of the body of that animal and a serpent, the horned head having a disproportionately large dog's mouth. Being an antoh, and the greatest of all, it is invisible under ordinary conditions, but lives in rivers and underground caves, and it eats ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... Don't talk grandly about your two parlors when you mean two halves of one. Have wide doors, by all means, not only between rooms but into main hall,—four, six, or eight feet, if the rooms are so wide and high that they shall not be disproportionately large. Then, if you must have the whole broadside of sliding or folding doors, let the two rooms thus connected be of different styles but equal richness,—different, that they shall not seem one room cut in two,—peers, ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... sixteen, watched him curiously, for he was young as compared with the grey heads about him. His image, as he stood up to speak, is very clear to me even now—a face strong-featured and ruddy with vigour beneath a massive forehead whose thatch had the blackness and luxuriance of youth. His trunk was disproportionately large, carried on legs sturdy enough but noticeably short. The wits used to describe him as the statesman "with coat-tails very near the ground." It is worth while to remark on this physical peculiarity ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... long neck, head like a sheep, bearing two long spiral horns, white as polished ivory, and standing in perpendiculars parallel to each other. Its body was like that of a deer, but its forelegs were most disproportionately long, and its tail, which was very bushy and of a snowy whiteness, curled high over its rump and hung two or three feet by its side. Its colors were bright bay and white, brindled in patches, but of no regular form." This is probably the animal known to us on earth, and ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... impossible service. The fire at her heart would have burnt them up; for there was a strange passion of resistance and sense of wrong mixed with Dolly's bitter pain. The way was not short, and it seemed threefold the length it was; every step was so hard, and the crowd of thoughts was so disproportionately great. ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... I experienced the unpleasant sensations of having a secret to keep. I fancy the pain of this solitary liability was disproportionately acute in my case, for I was naturally very open and very nervous. I was always on the point of betraying it apropos des bottes—always reproaching myself for my duplicity; and in constant terror when honest Mary Quince approached the press, or good-natured Milly made her occasional survey ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... figure beyond him smells a flower, perhaps as a preservative against infection. Behind the physician stands a man leaning on a staff; he is wounded in the left leg, which is bandaged. By his side stands a dwarfish figure with disproportionately large head, whose body exhibits deformities typical of the developmental disease now known as Achondroplasia; in addition to these deformities we note that his body is hairy and the bridge of his nose sunken; on his back he carries a hare which is almost ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... therefore unlikely to be jaded by the truisms of these pages, a few words in explanation may not be resented. The seed of the durian is roughly cordate, about an inch and a quarter long. In the form of a disproportionately stout and blundering worm the sprout of my seed issued from the soil, peered vaguely into daylight, groped hesitatingly and arched over to bury its apex in the soil, and from this point the delicately white primal ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... capital, drowning the white violets of the marble floor; or else reabsorbed into their limits, contracting still further a crabbed Latin inscription, bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the arrangement of its curtailed characters, closing together two letters of some word of which the rest were disproportionately scattered. Its windows were never so brilliant as on days when the sun scarcely shone, so that if it was dull outside you might be certain of fine weather in church. One of them was filled from top ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... wonderment that they had gone, that obscurity had somehow engulfed them; and how afterwards, in the light of later things, memory and fancy attended them, figured their history as the public complication grew and the great intersectional plot thickened; felt even, absurdly and disproportionately, that they had helped one to "know Southerners." The slim, the sallow, the straight-haired and dark-eyed Eugene in particular haunted my imagination; he had not been my comrade of election—he was too much my senior; but I cherished the thought of the fine fearless young ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... Now, as a man's recollection of an interval of time is, as we all know, mainly derived from the number of impressions that his memory has received while it was passing, it follows that, so far as this cause alone is concerned, the earlier part of his day's journey will always seem to have been disproportionately long compared to the latter. It is remarkable, on taking a long half-day's walk, and subsequently returning, after resting some hours, how long a time the earlier part of the return journey seems to occupy, and how rapidly different well-remembered points seem to succeed each other, as ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... and the kingdom should be placed under the protection of a single ruler or authority. The small separate governments of princes and counts consume a disproportionately large amount of revenue without furnishing any real security. For this reason we must have a single government, and for its support we must have a definite amount of the income from taxes and revenues yearly set aside by a representative parliament ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... formative period of child-life—do inevitably determine the future character of the individual, and the immediate result of neglect in these vitally important stages is painfully and promptly apparent in the aggressive and unchildlike deportment of the turbulent young neophytes of both sexes, so disproportionately in evidence in all directions throughout the community of the present, as to bring into ridicule and utter contempt existing methods of control. This dire defect in individual restraint may be largely ascribed to both physical and mental degeneracy, of hereditary origin; ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... an odd place for festivities. The people say that it is fear of fire which makes them separate their insignificant wooden houses by such disproportionately broad streets. Certainly it gives to the town a low look anything ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... smiling. He made no reply, and the smile died from her face, suddenly, as though some one had blown out a light. She returned to her work, or pretended to. But her aspect had left him inwardly shaken. The eyes, disproportionately large and brilliant, were of an emphasis almost ghastly, the usually clear complexion was flecked and cloudy, the mouth dry-lipped. She looked much older than she had done a fortnight before. And the fact was the more noticeable ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... rebuff and stole a timid glance at the thinker. Espalin was a lean little, dried-up manikin, with legs, arms, and mustaches disproportionately long for his dwarfish body. His black, wiry hair hung in ragged witchlocks; his black pin-point eyes were glittering, cold, and venomous. He looked, thought Pringle, very much like ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... probabilities, complete harmony is not to be looked for. These formidable difficulties confront us even in attempting to work out from abundant material a brief chapter in the phylogenetic history of some small and clearly limited group, and they become disproportionately greater, when we extend our view over vast periods of time and undertake to determine the mutual relationships of classes and types. If the evidence were complete and available, we should hardly be able to ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... district corresponds to an old marquisate or feudal principality of the vassal unit type—is often a poor, dusty, dirty, depressing, ramshackle agglomeration of villages or hamlets, surrounded by a disproportionately pretentious wall, the cubic contents of which wall alone would more than suffice to build in superior style the whole mud city within; for half the area of the interior is apt to be waste land or stagnant puddles: it was so even in Peking ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... animals he was convinced experimental physiologists made a great mistake. It is exactly like making experiments in chemistry with an insufficient quantity of material; errors of observation and manipulation become disproportionately large. It was of extreme importance just at present that scientific men should assert their right to have their material big. That was why he was doing his present series of experiments at the ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... short, stout man, with a head disproportionately large. He had a dusky complexion and a bushy eyebrow, beneath which his eye wore a fixed and somewhat defiant expression; he seemed to be challenging you to insinuate that he was top-heavy. The duchess, judging from her charge to Newman, regarded him as a bore; but this was ...
— The American • Henry James
... quantity of stiff and lustrous black brocade, with enhancements, of every description, that twinkled and tinkled, that rustled and rumbled with her least movement, she presented a huge, hideous, pleasant face, a featureless desert in a remote quarter of which the disproportionately small eyes might have figured a pair of rash adventurers all but buried in the sand. They reduced themselves when she smiled to barely discernible points—a couple of mere tiny emergent heads—though the foreground of the scene, as if to make up for it, gaped with ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... stained yellow, purple, red, green, or striped with various colors; sometimes it is crowned with paste-work, representing, in a most primitive way, a hen,—her body being the egg, and her pastry-head adorned with a disproportionately tall feather. These eggs are exposed for sale at the corners of the streets and bought by everybody, and every sort of ingenious device is resorted to, to attract customers and render them attractive. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... facts have been noticed, there seems no great inequality, as to strength or endurance, between the sexes. In migratory tribes, as of birds or buffaloes, the males are not observed to slacken or shorten their journeys from any gallant deference to female weakness, nor are the females found to perish disproportionately through exhaustion. It is the English experience that among coursing-dogs and race-horses there is no serious sexual inequality. Aelian says that Semiramis did not exult when in the chase she captured a lion, but was proud when she took a lioness, the dangers of the feat being ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... generations. Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked calm, Sylvia extremely agitated. She had been awake at the early hour of deadly pale dawn when a swift, long-barreled car had drawn up under the porte-cochere and Arnold had been taken away under the guard of a short, broad, brawny man with disproportionately long arms. She was not able to swallow a mouthful ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... Homunculus weary us not a little, unless, indeed, a poem be nothing, after all, but a prolonged conundrum. Many of Schiller's lyrical poems—though the best of them find no match in modern verse for rapid energy, the very axles of language kindling with swiftness—seem disproportionately long in parts, and the thought too often has the life wellnigh squeezed out of it in the sevenfold coils of diction, dappled though ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... bloom, something like a magnum bonum plum, three times magnified. The only way of eating it in comfort is to have a tub of water beside you. It should be eaten in private by any one who wants to retain the admiration of his friends. It has an immense stone, and a disproportionately small pulp. I think it tastes strongly of turpentine at first, but this is ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... brother, in the uniform of the Royal Gardes du Corps, whose looks were reported (I think rather mythologically) to be as superb as his attire. In which case he must have been strikingly unlike his sister, who was one of the ugliest women I ever saw; with a disproportionately large and ill-shaped nose and mouth, and a terrible eruption all over her face. She had, however, an extremely beautiful figure, exquisite hands and feet, skin as white as snow, and magnificent hair and eyes; in spite of which numerous ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... legislation sufficed to rouse the South to a deep feeling of grievance. It was no longer a question of reasonable concession to the general national good. A vast artificial economic system had been set up, whose benefits accrued to the North and whose burdens fell disproportionately upon the South. The tone and temper of the manufacturing sections and of the agricultural West gave no promise of a change of policy. The obvious conclusion was that the planting interests must find some means of bringing pressure to bear for their ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... very pre-eminence, he drew an argument for the general inferiority of the French poetry. The French drama, he argued, was confessedly exalted amongst the French themselves beyond any other section of their literature. But why? Why was this? If the drama had prospered disproportionately under public favour, what caused that favour? It was, said Voltaire, the social nature of the French, with their consequent interest in whatever assumed the attire of conversation or dialogue; and, secondly, it was the peculiar strength of their language in that one function, which ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... right kind of sophistication, always with generosity and with an unflagging zeal for the rights of human beings, were mixed in him. The reach of any ample-natured man exceeds his grasp. Rhodes was ample-natured, but he cannot be classed as great because his grasp was too often disproportionately short of the long reach. His ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... 21st. Each side claimed that sanguinary day as a victory; the Garibaldians remained masters of the ground, but the Austrians, in retiring, took with them a large number of prisoners. The losses of the volunteers on this and other occasions when they were engaged were disproportionately heavy. They were spendthrift of their lives, but in war, and especially in mountain warfare, caution is as needful as courage, and in caution they were so deficient that they were always being surprised. General Kuhn's numerically ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... approached the couple was one which, familiar as it was to Bolsover, would have struck a stranger as remarkable. A big youth, so disproportionately built as to appear almost deformed, till you noticed that his shoulders were unusually broad and his feet and hands unusually large. Whether from indolence or infirmity it was hard to say, his gait was shambling and awkward, and the strength that lurked in his big limbs and chest seemed to unsteady ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... economized by the employment to so large an extent of the natural substance. The size and color of the bricks vary. The general shape is square, or nearly so, while the thickness is, to modern ideas, disproportionately small; it is not, however, so small as in the bricks of the Romans. The earliest of the baked bricks hitherto discovered in Chaldaea are 11 1/4 inches square, and 2 1/2 inches thick, while the Roman are often 15 inches square, and only an inch and a quarter thick. The ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... once recognised by the length of the pistil, which is (including the ovarium) fully one-third longer than that of the mid-styled, and more than thrice as long as that of the short-styled form. It is so disproportionately long, that it projects in the bud through the folded petals. It stands out considerably beyond the mid-length stamens; its terminal portion depends a little, but the stigma itself is slightly upturned. The globular stigma is considerably larger than that of the other two forms, with ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... early morning of this season, and is relatively dry in the afternoon: in the hills again, it is scarcely more humid at sunrise than at 3 p.m. That this dryness of the hills is partly due to elevation, appears from the disproportionately moister state of the atmosphere below ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... existed in the central islands of the Pacific Ocean a singular breed of pigs. These are described by the Rev. D. Tyerman and G. Bennett[156] as of small size, hump-backed, with a disproportionately long head, with short ears turned backwards, with a bushy tail not more than two inches in length, placed as if it grew from the back. Within half a century after the introduction into these islands of European and Chinese pigs, the native breed, according ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... only add a scene of sea sport off Fort Rotterdam, at Macassar, an island between Java and Borneo; shaped like a huge tarantula, a small body, with four disproportionately long legs, which stretch into the sea in narrow and lengthened peninsulas. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various
... and find scarcely anything beautiful, appropriate, or tender. A lion, ill done, and yet to some degree impressive, lies complacently above a menagerie keeper, and near this is a tomb of some imagination, with reliefs of the life of Christ. In one place a grotesque horse, with a head disproportionately vast, is to be seen. Perhaps among all these monuments the one to Mrs. Blake is the most pleasing. It is a simply and quaintly executed kneeling figure, with a certain quiet and pathetic reverence of pose that is strangely restful against the ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... wall was what I recognized as tropical vegetation, mainly by its wild luxuriance. In the center of the rear wall was what seemed to be a giant stone lizard, standing on its hind legs. The one foreleg that showed was disproportionately short. The body, too, was more attenuated than that of any lizard. The thing was headless and the statue, idol or whatever it was, stood on a pedestal, and before that again, seemed to be a slab of stone. Then my attention ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... tree, 20-45 feet in height, with a disproportionately large trunk, 1-4 feet in diameter; often attaining under favorable conditions much greater dimensions. It ramifies at a few feet from the ground and throws out long, rather stout, and nearly horizontal branches, the lower slightly drooping, forming for the height of the tree a very ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... three good legs, his coat was faded and mangy, his limbs were thin, and his ears and paunch were disproportionately large. Yet his mother thought the world of him. She was evidently convinced that he was a little beauty and the Prince of all Bears, so, of course, she quite spoiled him. She was always ready to get into trouble on his account, and he was always delighted to lead her there. ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... her daughter, and the daughter because she would emulate the fair skin of Densuke and be fairer in his eyes. O'Mino had suffered both from fate and fortune. She had been born ugly; with broad, flat face like unto the moon at full, or a dish. Her back was a little humped, her arms disproportionately long, losing in plumpness what they gained in extension. She seemed to have no breasts at all, the chest forming a concavity in correspondence to the convexity of the back, with a smoothness much like the inner surface of a bowl. This perhaps was no disadvantage—under ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... feelings were accessible and whose taste was not squeamish. She was already old, with a ravaged countenance and a physique curiously hard and stiff. She moved with difficulty—I think she was lame—I seem to remember some story about a malady of the spine. Her Armand was disproportionately young and slight, a handsome youth, perplexed in the extreme. But what did it matter? I believed devoutly in her power to fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness. I believed her young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... work precisely like shears. I have seen the bee at work cutting out these pieces. She moves through the leaf like the hand of the tailor through a piece of cloth. When the pattern is detached, she rolls it up, and, embracing it with her legs, flies home with it, often appearing to have a bundle disproportionately large. Each cell is made up of a dozen or more pieces: the larger ones, those that form its walls, like the walls of a paper bag, are oblong, and are turned down at one end, so as to form the bottom; ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... the Lesotho Defense Force (LDF) and Ministry of Defense and Public Service over the past five years has focused on subordinating the defense apparatus to civilian control and restoring the LDF's cohesion; the restructuring has considerably improved capabilities and professionalism, but the LDF is disproportionately large for a small, poor country; the government has outlined a reduction to a planned 1,500-man strength, but these plans have met with vociferous resistance from the political opposition and from inside the ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Westminster with an air of carelessly not having permission, and the whole effect of industrial London and of all London east of Temple Bar and of the huge dingy immensity of London port is to me of something disproportionately large, something morbidly expanded, without plan or intention, dark and sinister toward the clean clear social assurance of the West End. And south of this central London, south-east, south-west, far west, north-west, all round the northern hills, are similar disproportionate growths, endless streets ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... contained five grey eggs with green speckles. Then came the little birds, big-headed, with disproportionately large yellow mouths, their bodies covered with down. They chirruped plaintively, stretching their long necks out from the nest, and ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... ossifying junction. Exaggerated growth in the length of a bone is rare, and has been observed chiefly in the bones of the leg. Where there are two parallel bones—as in the leg, for example—the growth of the diseased bone may be impaired, and the other continuing its normal growth becomes disproportionately long; less frequently the growth of the diseased bone is exaggerated, and it becomes the longer of the two. In either case, the longer bone becomes curved. An obliquity of the bone may result when one half of the epiphysial cartilage ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... chocolate-coloured patches, oval in form, and symmetrically disposed. The lips are bright yellow, the cavernous mouth pale flesh colour, the throat and under-surface dull white. The body is lumpy, and about the size of a large man's fist. The eyes, placed on the summit of a disproportionately large head, are embedded in horn-like protuberances, capable of being elevated or depressed at pleasure. When the creature is undisturbed, the eyes, which are of a pale gold colour, look out as from a couple of watch towers, but when touched on the head ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... interesting and quite disproportionately important because they had such a host of great individuals. How was that possible? This point ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... to be based on the theory that men, as a whole, are scarcely fit for rights but must be kept to their duties with a strong hand. Neither belief is entirely true. As Mazzini saw, the French Revolution failed because it emphasized the rights so disproportionately in comparison with the duties of man. Conservatism fails, on the other hand, because its conception of duty inevitably ceases before long to be an ethical conception: duty in the mouth of reactionaries usually means simply obedience to one's "betters." The melancholy ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... the history of the Association the practice prevailed among certain clubs of offering inducements to crack players in order to secure them as members. The clubs which could afford this grew disproportionately strong, and in the face of continual defeat the weaker clubs were losing interest. In 1859 a rule was made forbidding the participation in any matches of paid players, but it was so easily evaded that it was a dead letter. In 1866 the rule was reworded, but with ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... they were there still, but coupled with pathetic signs of some disintegrating and poisonous influence. The face which once, in its pallid austerity, had not been without beauty, had now coarsened, even in emaciation. The features stood out disproportionately; the hair had receded from the temples; something ugly and feverish had been, as it were, laid bare. And composure had been long undermined. The nurse who had just left had been glad ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was afraid to speak of it, lest I should be betraying what need never be mentioned. Of Viola's adventure, to my surprise, her uncle did not make much, but he had heard of that from the fountain-head, unpolluted by Stympson gossip; and, moreover, Lady Diana had been so disproportionately angry as to produce a reaction in him. Viola was his darling, and he had taken her part when he had found that she knew her brother was at hand. He allowed, too, that she might fairly be inspired with confidence by the ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... golden idols are always hollow; but they exhibit no distinct trace of the soldering. They are of various sizes; some of them weigh three quarters of a pound. Those of silver are always solid. All these images of deities have the same physiognomy, and disproportionately large head. In most instances the head is covered by a ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... and solid even my untrained eye could see. Many of the deck fittings seemed disproportionately substantial. The anchor-chain looked contemptuous of its charge; the binnacle with its compass was of a size and prominence almost comically impressive, and was, moreover the only piece of brass which was burnished and showed traces of reverent care. Two huge coils of stout and ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... architrave cornice," with the mutiles; while the frieze, with its rich triglyphs and metopes is altogether omitted. The Corinthian order of the upper story is altogether more worthy of admiration, notwithstanding that some objection has been raised to the "disproportionately slender columns, when contrasted with the massive shafts beneath them." Here, too, the entire frieze, with its emblematical embellishments of the British crown, surrounded with laurel, and alternate leaves of the rose, the thistle and shamrock, is sure ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 278, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... DICKSON and D. MACLEOD MALLOCH. Our Scottish kirk has a great reputation for dourness—but it has probably kindled more humour than it ever quenched. The pulpits have inevitably been filled by a race of men disproportionately rich in "characters," originals, worthies with a gift for pungent expression and every opportunity for developing it. There is a fund of good stories here which forms a worthy sequel to Dean Ramsay's Reminiscences ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... the characters. The drama of the past and the drama of the present proceed, so to speak, in interlacing rhythms, or, as I said before, in a rich, complex harmony. In Ghosts this harmony is not so rich as in some later plays, because the drama of the present is disproportionately meagre. None the less, or all the more, is it a conspicuous example of Ibsen's method of raising his curtain, not at the beginning of the crisis, but rather at ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... guerilla warfare, which he and the rest of the small band attached to Mr. Fox carried on, during this period, against the invaders of the Constitution, is interesting rather by its general character than its detail; for in these, as usual, the episodes of party personality are found to encroach disproportionately on the main design, and the grandeur of the cause, as viewed at a distance, becomes diminished to our imaginations by too near an approach. Englishmen, however, will long look back to that crisis with interest; and the names of Fox, of Sheridan, and of Grey will ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... delight always alloyed with fear that I would be found out and convicted of larceny. There was a Swiss wood-carving representing a very big hunter on one side of an exceedingly small mountain, and a herd of chamois, disproportionately small for the hunter and large for the mountain, just across the ridge. This always fascinated us; but there was a small chamois kid for which we felt agonies lest the hunter might come on it and kill it. There was also a Russian moujik drawing a gilt sledge on a ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... increased. As the whole of an establishment becomes larger its product becomes cheaper; but, in the enlargement, there should be no undue stinting in the amount of land used. In both agriculture and manufacturing, then, there is a loss of productive power when areas of land are disproportionately small, as compared with amounts of labor and artificial capital; but in the realm of manufacturing large establishments under single entrepreneurs combining the agents of production in the right proportion increase the productive power of men and instruments ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... a profound bow, motioned Lady Elphinstone to enter. The first emotion of those who entered this important compartment for the first time was invariably one of disappointment; for the room, although full of machinery, was small— disproportionately so, it appeared, compared with the bulk of the ship and the power required to drive it at the enormous speeds that had been indisputably attained by the Flying Fish. And this emotion was further ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Amenhetep (the king had several other names, which annoyed Sir John Biddell) darkened the painted, royal chamber of death, and suddenly lit up several white, sleeping faces, the ghostly dusk was alive with little gasps. There lay Amenhetep himself, in a disproportionately large sarcophagus of rose-red granite from Suan; and in companion coffins were a woman and a girl, all three brilliantly illuminated. They had the look of the light hurting their poor eyes, and being outraged because, against ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... upwards and outwards, and the hair coarse, lank and invariably black. The beard appears late in life, and remains generally scanty. The eyebrows are straight and the iris of the eye is black. The nose is generally short, broad and flat. The hands and feet are disproportionately small, and the body early inclines to obesity. The complexion varies from an almost pale-yellow to a dark-brown, without any red or ruddy ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... in nobility of speech, and especially in the fine line and phrase, so justly but disproportionately prized in the present day. I ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... incongruous, again, than a long, slim, aesthetic figure with a head-gear so disproportionately large as to suggest a Sandwich-Islander with his head-dress of mats. The "aesthetic craze" has, however, brought in one improvement in costume. It is the epauletted sleeve, which gives expansion to so many figures which are, unfortunately, too narrow. All physiologists ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... were originally parallel. Whether v.-xi. was part of the book discovered is not so certain. Much of the finest religious teaching of Deuteronomy is to be found in this section; but, besides being disproportionately long for an introduction, it repeatedly demands obedience to the "statutes and judgments," which, however, are not actually announced till ch. xii.; it seems more like an addition prefixed by one who had the commandments in xii.-xxvi. before him. Ch. xxvii., which is narrative ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... emerged—his hand upon the shoulder of the servant—a very ferret of a man in black, with a parson's bands and neckcloth, a coal-black full-bottomed wig, and under this a white face, rather drawn and haggard, and thin lips perpetually agrin to flaunt two rows of yellow teeth disproportionately large. After him, and the more remarkable by contrast, came a tall, black-faced fellow, very brave in buff-colored cloth, with a fortune in lace at wrist and throat, ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... heads. All members of the military class resembled, to a greater or less extent, the monarch himself, in that those parts of their skulls which our phrenologists had designated as the bumps of destructiveness, combativeness and so on were enormously and disproportionately developed. ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... coated and scaly with rust to such an extent, that we were unable to form any idea as to its age or nationality. It would most probably have been a twelve or eighteen-pounder howitzer, for it was about four feet in length, and disproportionately large in girth; but one of the trunnions, and the button at the breech, were broken off, the portion that had lain undermost had entirely disappeared, and the remainder was so honeycombed, that beyond ascertaining that it was a piece of ordnance, we could elicit nothing from this ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... from him and towards the figure-head, as though he were about to address to it his devotions; he was seen to heave a deep breath; and raised his arms. In common with many men of his unhappy physical endowments, Huish's hands were disproportionately long and broad, and the palms in particular enormous; a four-ounce jar was nothing in that capacious fist. The next moment he was plodding steadily forward on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Fitter, in order to escape a scarcely ambiguous ambiguity. But the use of the word "Survival" should have sufficed to indicate that the real point of application of the force by which Nature modifies species and raises the average in any quality, lies not in selective breeding, but in the disproportionately numerous deaths of the individuals below the average. And even the methods of the breeder of cattle, if they are to produce a permanent alteration in the species of cattle, must consist not only in breeding the desirable but in either killing the undesirable, or at least—what is the quintessence, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... The purity of his speech, his cultivated manners, his reticence, served to stimulate their curiosity the more. Such as observed him closely were struck by an incongruity between his demeanor, which had the ease and grace of a patrician, and certain points of his person. Thus his arms were disproportionately long; and when, to steady himself against the motion of the vessel, he took hold of anything near by, the size of his hands and their evident power compelled remark; so the wonder who and what he was ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace |
