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Indistinguishable   /ɪndɪstˈɪŋgwɪʃəbəl/   Listen
Indistinguishable

adjective
1.
Exactly alike; incapable of being perceived as different.  Synonym: identical.  "Cars identical except for their license plates" , "They wore indistinguishable hats"
2.
Not capable of being distinguished or differentiated.  Synonym: undistinguishable.  "The twins were indistinguishable" , "A colorless person quite indistinguishable from the colorless mass of humanity"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Indistinguishable" Quotes from Famous Books



... the words were indistinguishable from the brook's murmuring. "God of all, send her back to me. Behold! with patience I have waited these last long months—and yet would I wait even until death—for thou, O! Allah, in Thy greatness hast allowed me dimly to understand this woman's mind—my woman, my heritage ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest

... poet (see Chapter IV). In rimed verse the end of the line is so emphasized that the line itself stands out as a very perceptible rhythmic unit; in unrimed verse, however, the line is frequently not felt as a unit at all, but is so interwoven with the natural prose rhythm of the words as to be almost indistinguishable to the ear, though of course visible to the eye on the printed page. This fact is easily apparent in reading the second, fifth, and sixth illustrative selections on ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum

... running amuck. He was jumbling three languages together into an indistinguishable tumult of sound and he was emptying the cook-tent of everything which his stout, German muscles could fling from it. Not a thing did he leave that was eatable and the dishes within his reach he scattered recklessly to all the winds of heaven. When one venturesome soul ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower

... indistinguishable in a manuscript. Yet no alteration is necessary, since the speech is not unintelligible as it now ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson

... into a low, indistinguishable murmur. Dennison realized that the moment had come to depart; the edge of the encounter was in Cunningham's favour and to remain would only serve to sharpen this edge. So he went outside, slamming the door ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath

... throwing down his palette. "That's how I'll paint you. I've been puzzling over it for days. Darling, it will be my chef d'oeuvre!" He seized her hands. "Think of it! You standing under a great shaft of sun, nude, exalted, your hands and eyes lifted. About you gold, pouring down in cataracts, indistinguishable from the sunlight—a background of prismatic fire—and your hair lifting into it like wings!" ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... interruption, "nothing stirred in all that emptiness of naked space. Of life there was not the least sign anywhere. This appeared the very home of death and intolerable cold. Yet at one spot, between two little, almost indistinguishable ridges of snow, might have been noticed a tiny wisp of vapor. If one had put his face down close to the snow, so that the vapor came between his eyes and the light, he would have made it out quite distinctly. And it would have certainly ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts

... a bomb explosion is largely in an upward direction, those in the immediate vicinity of a dropping bomb are advised to assume a recumbent position, in which they will enjoy the added advantage of being indistinguishable from the pavement. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various

... clear against the northern sky. With dilated pupils I began to examine the inclosed cube of air. During one particularly long and vivid flash,—there, in that corner, was there not a heap, a translucent shape, indistinguishable in quality or form? It was enough. Swiftly as wild beasts when they spring, I raised the net, leaped into the window, and grasped toward the corner where I thought ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various

... a geologist went out with his hammer in the interest of his science. He struck a rock; and there in the seam lay the form of a fern—every leaf, every fibre, the most delicate traceries of the leaves. It was the fern which ages since grew and dropped into the indistinguishable mass of vegetation. It perished; but its memorial was preserved, and ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller

... Their nerve fibres run together undistinguished, and it is only by the study of pathological changes that we have been able to distinguish the course of the motor fibres, which to the most careful inspection are indistinguishable from the sensitive. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various

... laboriously ascending the steps, a black figure, indistinguishable at first on account of deformities. It was David Macdonald. Since his last, really terrible comments on the failure of the boat-attack, he had been lying hidden somewhere. It came upon me in a flash that he was making his way ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... brush had maliciously determined to affront the bourgeois Sabbath. George stamped on the carpet; he hated it because it was not his carpet; and he swore to himself to possess that very carpet or its indistinguishable brother. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... of thought which have been won for us by the painful efforts of civilization. The incidents, making all due allowance for these differences and those of climate and physical surroundings, are not merely alike; they are often indistinguishable. It cannot, of course, be expected that the characters of the actors in these stories will be drawn with skill, or indeed that any attention will be paid to them. Character-study is a late development. True: ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... him until he became an indistinguishable black spot upon the prairie; then they turned wearily towards the cabins. They had seen and shared the long sorrow and discontent of the household; they hardly expected anything but trouble in some form or other. Both were also thinking of the punishment they were likely to receive; ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... substantial forms had taken its rise? Is the wholeness of a living thing the mere resultant of the orderly operations of its parts? Is a bee no more essentially one than a swarm is? Is the life of a living animal indistinguishable from the rhythm of a going watch, except in degree of complication and subtlety of contrivance? And if an animal's body, say my own, is simply an agglomerate of minute interacting material units, and its wholeness is merely accidental and apparent, ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz

... of an artist. Who has not, once at least in his life, had a sudden vision of landscape as pure form? For once, instead of seeing it as fields and cottages, he has felt it as lines and colours. In that moment has he not won from material beauty a thrill indistinguishable from that which art gives? And, if this be so, is it not clear that he has won from material beauty the thrill that, generally, art alone can give, because he has contrived to see it as a pure formal combination of lines and colours? ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... those groups of men loitering about the name of that ship is as familiar as Suez or Rio, even though they have never seen her? They know her as well as they know their business. They know her house-flag—it is indistinguishable in the picture—and her master, and it is possible the oldest of them remembers the clippers of that fleet of which she alone now carries the emblem; for this is not only another year, but another era. But they do not look at her portrait. They spit into the road, or stare ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson

... Welsh." Huxley replied on the 21st, meeting his historical arguments with citations from Freeman, and especially by completing his opponent's quotation from Caesar, to show that under certain conditions, the Gaul was indistinguishable from the German. The assertion that the Anglo-Saxon character is midway between the pure French or Irish and the Teutonic, he met with the previous question, Who is the pure Frenchman? Picard, Provencal, or Breton? or the pure ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... A few huge trees lifted their grey heads above the low undergrowth of bushes like weary giants. They were a sinister sight; it seemed as though wicked old men had met together bent on some evil design. A narrow path almost indistinguishable wandered beside it. No one went near the Avduhin pond without some urgent reason. Natalya intentionally chose this solitary place. It was not more than ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev

... all the world; the slave-trade was active, and kidnappings and abductions with the corresponding meetings and recognitions were no doubt frequent. Thus such a plot as that of the Menaechmi was by no means the sheer impossibility which Shakespeare made it by attaching indistinguishable Dromios to his indistinguishable Antipholuses. To reduplicate a coincidence is in fact to multiply it by a figure far beyond my mathematics. It may be noted, too, that the practice of exposing children, on which the Oedipus, and many plays of Menander, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... immortality, nor distinction of day or night. But THAT ONE breathed calmly[41] alone with Nature, her who is sustained within him. Other than Him, nothing existed [which] since [has been]. Darkness there was; [for] this universe was enveloped with darkness, and was indistinguishable waters; but that mass, which was covered by the husk, was [at length] produced by the power of contemplation. First desire[42] was formed in his mind; and that became the original productive seed; which the wise, recognizing it by the intellect ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... harmony, going up and down alternately, without a thought of debating the eternal question of superiority between the sexes. Their weight was the same. Their dark eyes and hair were alike. Their voices, whether they wept or cooed, were indistinguishable. Everybody agreed that a finer boy and girl had never been seen in Saint Gerome. But nobody except Pat and Angelique could tell them apart as they swung in the cradle, gently rising and falling, in unconscious illustration of the equivalence and ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke

... joined in interest. The ground of unrest and uneasiness, in short, on the part of the public at large, is the growing knowledge that many large undertakings are interlaced with one another, are indistinguishable ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson

... the great lakes, especially of the marshes at the mouth of the Volga, in the Caspian, where the two elements are for miles indistinguishable, and where no one can speak of a shore; but here the thing is more marvellous, because it is the true sea. You have, I say, the true sea, with great tides, and bearing ships, and seaports to which the ships ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc

... people, to be thus made aware that many of the humorists whom we have loved best are precisely those whose writing has been marked by the most delicate restraint, whose theory of life has been the most highly urbane and civilized, whose work is indistinguishable in tone—though its materials are so different—from that of other humorous writers on the other side of the Atlantic. On its social side all this is a fresh proof of the extraordinary adaptability of the American mind. On the literary side it is one more evidence of the national fondness for ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry

... strain throughout the web of the world, as from a vexatious planet in the house of life. Things are not congruous and wear strange disguises: the consummate flower is fostered out of dung, and after nourishing itself awhile with heaven's delicate distillations, decays again into indistinguishable soil; and with Caesar's ashes, Hamlet tells us, the urchins make dirt pies and filthily besmear their countenance. Nay, the kindly shine of summer, when tracked home with the scientific spyglass, is found to issue from the most portentous nightmare ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... of this country, as I do not doubt, yellowed with age, stained and indistinguishable, lost among uncared-for relics of another day, there may be records of that interview between two strange personalities, John Calhoun and Helena von Ritz, in the arrangement of which I played the part above described. I was not at that time privileged to have much more than ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough

... indeed, whatever that fancy represented, was not a time of sensible exclusion for Jim, who was in a state of manifest response to the charm of his adventure. Small and fat and constantly facetious, straw-coloured and destitute of marks, he would have been practically indistinguishable hadn't his constant preference for light-grey clothes, for white hats, for very big cigars and very little stories, done what it could for his identity. There were signs in him, though none of them plaintive, of always paying for others; and the principal ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James

... continued stretch of expectation, become at length monotonous and wearisome. It is like a music from which the piano should be altogether excluded, and in which even the difference between forte and fortissimo should, from the mistaken emulation of the performers, be rendered indistinguishable. I find too few resting-places in their tragedies similar to those in the ancient tragedies where the lyric parts come in. There are moments in human life which are dedicated by every religious ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... fallen together into one group. This kind of leveling is quite frequent in the history of language. In English, for instance, we have seen that all the old long ue-vowels, after they had become unrounded, were indistinguishable from the mass of long i-vowels. This meant that the long i-vowel became a more heavily weighted point of the phonetic pattern than before. It is curious to observe how often languages have striven to drive originally distinct sounds into certain favorite positions, regardless of ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir

... trust the Egyptian army in this conflict, though India, having learnt from Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald that there are really anti-Militarists in England who regard Indians as fellow creatures, is actually rallying to us against the Prussian Junkers, who are, in Indian eyes, indistinguishable from the Anglo-Indians who call Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald traitors, and whose panicstricken denial of even a decent pretence of justice in the sedition trials is particularly unfortunate just now. We ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various

... A much more important discovery than this, however, resulted from his vain endeavor to recognise the boy from his features, they were so contracted by terror, as has already been said, and so covered with blood as to be indistinguishable. But on turning him upon his back, and passing his hands over his face, Collins was surprised to find that there was not that icy chill which he had expected, but on the contrary the faint warmth that indicates ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson

... very clearly. Now, as a matter of fact, it has been very accurately determined that red is the hardest color to distinguish at night, and blue the very easiest. A blue coat would be clearly visible long after reddish-brown trousers had become indistinguishable ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post

... this moment was in a very different scene. She was in the large gallery, which was a little chill and dreary of a morning when all the windows were full of a gray, indefinable mist instead of light, and the ancestors were indistinguishable in their frames. She had just been going through her usual exercise with the baby, and had joined Lucy at the upper end of the gallery, that sport being over, and little Tom carried off to his mid-day sleep. There was a fire there, in ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant

... resembling a Bee in appearance. Cf. "The Hunting Wasps": chapter 14.—Translator's Note.), willingly adding, sometimes as a side-dish, sometimes as the principal game, Helophilus pendulus, whose costume is very different. On the faith of indistinguishable remains, we must no doubt enter a number of other Flies in her game-book. The Golden-mouthed Hornet (Crabro chrysostomus, LEP.) another burrower in old willow-trees, prefers the Syrphi, without distinction ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... themselves maintained that it was Osiris and not Adonis whose death was mourned by them. Such a view could certainly not have been held if the rituals of the two gods had not been so alike as to be almost indistinguishable. Herodotus found the similarity between the rites of Osiris and Dionysus so great, that he thought it impossible the latter could have arisen independently; they must, he supposed, have been recently borrowed, with slight alterations, by the Greeks from the Egyptians. Again, Plutarch, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... adopted," and the "requirements of ladies, especially those of fortune, were generally known" to comprise a uniform for the maid-servant, she might succeed in closing the market of domestic service to the flaunting abigail whose audacious finery renders her to the outward eye indistinguishable from ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... said Janet, in a mystified way. She had a general impression of Jonathan's library as of century-old preserves, altogether dried up and quite indistinguishable one from the other except by labels. Poetry she could not imagine as being there at all. Finally she thought of the early Victorians, and Spenser and Chaucer. The library might include them, but she had an idea that ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... grew in the moss at the roots, and out again into light to catch the silver down of thistles that grew by the red roadside and rustle their purple bloom; then on the cliff, just touching the blue sea with the slightest ripple, and losing themselves where sky and ocean met in indistinguishable azure fold. ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall

... off into great distances; the champing and snorting of horses in the dressing-tent died away as if by magic; the subdued voices of the men and women who waited their turn to bound into the merry ring faded into indistinguishable whispers; the crack of the ring master's whip and the responsive yelp of the clown trailed off into silence. His head fell back, his body relaxed, and he slipped off into ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon

... boiling with rage at the manner in which the tables had been turned on him, had determined not to resign his lost authority without a struggle. Disregarding the summons, he came straight on, with his eyes fixed on the vessel. It was now nearly dark, and the figures on the deck were indistinguishable. The indignant lieutenant could but guess at the condition of affairs. Suddenly, from out of the darkness a voice ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke

... thousand men lay dead or wounded on that fatal hill, in that dreadful valley. Happy the fate of those who were dead—horrible the condition of those who were wounded. English, Prussians, Germans, Bavarians, Hollanders, French, trampled together in indistinguishable masses. Horses, guns, weapons, equipment—everything in hopeless confusion. Every horror, every anguish, every agony was there—incense burned about the altar of one ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... comprehension, [Greek: ho-s philosophias ousaes megistaes monsikaes]. Both poetry and philosophy deal in abstractions, only in both the abstractions must be true, i.e. must be true general statements of ideas found in nature; when this is the case poetry and philosophy are indistinguishable, except by mere external and conventional features. Under which heading are we to class, for example, Plato's Republic? Or the Upanishads? or the book of Job? They are generally thought of as philosophy, but all who ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight

... Allen applied the name nebrascensis to harvest mice from Montana south to central Colorado and western Nebraska. Howell (1914:30-31) placed nebrascensis in synonymy under dychei because he found specimens from Kennedy to be "indistinguishable from specimens of typical dychei in comparable pelage." We concur with Howell. Topotypes of nebrascensis that we have examined average only slightly paler than topotypes of dychei in the same pelage (some specimens from each series can be matched almost exactly), and do not ...
— Geographic Variation in the Harvest Mouse, Reithrodontomys megalotis, On the Central Great Plains And in Adjacent Regions • J. Knox Jones

... you! It's all the same thing—pure human inadvertence; inability to throw myself into so unfamiliar an attitude. I forget every minute that YOU do not recognise the essential identity of your own taboos and poojahs and fetiches with the similar and often indistinguishable taboos and poojahs and fetiches of savages generally. They all come from the same source, and often retain to the end, as in your temple superstitions and your marriage superstitions, the original features of their savage beginnings. And as to your being comparatively civilised, I grant ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen

... guarantees for all intelligent readers a palpitating interest in every line of it. Among the thousands of MSS. which reached us—many of them coming in carts early in the morning, and moving in a dense phalanx, indistinguishable from the Covent Garden Market waggons; others pouring down our coal-chute during the working hours of the day; and others again being slipped surreptitiously into our letter-box by pale, timid girls, scarcely more than children, after ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock

... mist is quite low on the hill. The birds are twittering to each other about the indifferent season. O, here's a gem for you. An old godly woman predicted the end of the world, because the seasons were becoming indistinguishable; my cousin Dora objected that last winter had been pretty well marked. "Yes, my dear," replied the soothsayeress; "but I think you'll find the summer will be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... against the sun's glitter on the waves, points them out one by one, with names, port-of-hail, name of captain, and bits of gossip about the craft. As the mountaineer identifies the most distant peak, or the plainsman picks his way by the trail indistinguishable to the untrained eye, so the fisherman, raised from boyhood among the vessels that make up the fleet, finds in each characteristics so striking, so individual, as to identify the vessel displaying them as far as a ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... evening, the captain assembled the travellers and the officers of the ship at a farewell repast in his cabin. Kennedy, whom nobody ventured to question now, sat with his eyes riveted on Dr. Ferguson, murmuring indistinguishable words. In other respects, the dinner was a gloomy one. The approach of the final moment filled everybody with the most serious reflections. What had fate in store for these daring adventurers? Should they ever ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne

... unconsciously into phrases from that one love-poem of the Bible which such men as he read so purely and devoutly, and which warm the icy clearness of their intellection with the myrrh and spices of ardent lands, where earthly and heavenly love meet and blend in one indistinguishable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... our own position. Such operations might take the form of insignificant coastal diversions, or they might rise through all degrees of importance till, as in Wellington's operations in the Peninsula, they became indistinguishable in ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett

... gone bankrupt when his stock in trade escaped across the ice. Bitterly cold and steadily cold, and deep snow lay upon the hills, blue-white in the distance. The evergreens were blue-black blotches on this whiteness. The birches, almost indistinguishable, were like trees in camouflage. To me the hills are never so grand as in this winter coat they wear. It is easy to believe that a brooding God dwells upon them. I wondered as I ploughed my way down to Hazen Kinch's farm whether God did indeed dwell among ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... tea-house was still open, and the invariable graphophone was grinding out some indistinguishable tune. When the two passed up the dark stairway an attendant slipped out of the public room, walked to the foot of the stairs, and observed the two mounting figures. When the sailor opened the door to as miserable a room as the sun of the Orient ever shone on, the attendant slipped back to ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson

... and went on to Cleveland, where it arrived at dawn. He would steal a ride on the local and when he got to Cleveland would lose himself in the crowds there. He would get work in some shop and become friends with the other workmen and would be indistinguishable. Then he could talk and laugh. He would no longer be queer and would make friends. Life would begin to have warmth and meaning for him as it had ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson

... walked on, eating the rolls, it soon became evident that the town was close at hand. At intervals I passed large houses, standing in their own grounds, and carefully I read the names on their gate-posts, lest one should be Colebrook Park. The path, which had been almost indistinguishable from the roadway, was now asphalted, and I stopped to read a notice board concerning vagrants, wondering whether I ought to be reckoned under that denomination. I do not know whether the sun had affected me—for it shone with brilliant force that ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various

... subject I want to warn you once more that if any man as much as stamps upon the floor, or moves about except on tip-toe this substance will explode and will lay London from here to Charing Cross in one mass of indistinguishable ruins. I have spent ten years of my life in completing this invention. And these pills, worth a million a box, will cure all ills to which ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr

... he completed unaided, but then, tiring of the drudgery, he turned over half of 'The Odyssey' to two minor writers. So easy, however, was his style to catch that if the facts were not on record the work of his assistants would generally be indistinguishable from his own. From an absolute point of view many criticisms must be made of Pope's version. That he knew little Greek when he began the work and from first to last depended much on translations would in itself have made ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... indistinguishable as the Chouans got further away; but the silence of the country was so great that several of the notes reached Barbette's ear as she neared home, holding her boy by the hand. A peasant-woman never listens ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac

... live apart from the others beyond a certain time, even though furnished with food and shelter, how can we help recognizing that the hive is really, and not metaphorically, a single organism, of which each bee is a cell united to the others by invisible bonds? The instinct that animates the bee is indistinguishable, then, from the force that animates the cell, or is only a prolongation of that force. In extreme cases like this, instinct coincides ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... of rage the colonel turned the contents upon the stone floor of the vault and raked it over with the end of his walking-stick. The diamonds were intact, and they at least were something; but the greater part of eight hundred thousand dollars was indistinguishable from any other kind of paper that had been treated with one of the most destructive acids ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace

... copestone of the stone parapet, his back against a stone pilaster; his attitude not comfortable, but rigid, and his silence not comfortable, either, but heavy. However, to the eyes of his mother and his aunt, who occupied wicker chairs at a little distance, he was almost indistinguishable except for the stiff white shield ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington

... Faces, they came and went so constantly, like bubbles in a tideway, that to Sofia most of them seemed indistinguishable one from another, mere blurs of flesh colour studded with staring eyes and slitted by apertures which automatically and alternately gaped to receive gobbets of food and goblets of drink and closed to gulp them down. A man needed to be remarkable for something in his looks, not necessarily ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... most unreal, as you mortals might say, fell on tree and water, cliff, hill, and villages. The effect was not unlike that instant in photography when a developing plate shows the outlines of its objects in dazzling silver before the half tints are added, and the image fades away into indistinguishable shadow. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... in the existing scientific data, we ere driven to doubt one thing after another, finally, after two years of experiment, we cast it all aside, and decided to rely entirely on our own investigations. Truth and error were everywhere so intimately mixed as to be indistinguishable.... We had taken up aeronautics as a sport. We reluctantly entered upon ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian

... the vessels about the handle of the malleus and periphery of the membrane are injected, and possibly a number of injected vessels may be seen coursing across the surface of the membrane. In the later stages the whole membrane presents a red surface, the anatomical landmarks being indistinguishable, the membrane bulges outwards into the meatus, and, if an abscess is pointing, a yellowish area may be visible upon it. The sudden cessation of pain and the appearance of a discharge from the meatus indicate perforation of ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... his words were indistinguishable, but Hampton remained standing in the open door watching the missionary ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish

... and waited, and looked for a long time at these far-away bright panes of glass. It amused her to have so extended a view, she thought. It amused her to see the house of Hermiston—to see "folk"; and there was an indistinguishable human unit, perhaps the gardener, visibly sauntering on the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... one, and, you are surprised to find, not the most important one, judging from all you can discover. Some of the others are much larger and are attended by more satellites. In fact, the earth is indistinguishable in this little group. While it is not the largest, neither is it the smallest. It is not the farthest from the sun nor the nearest to it. It is merely one among the number. And how much alike the members of this family are. Your telescopes do not point ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan

... his saddle, save for an occasional restless stamp of his horse, Bud Jessup waited patiently in front of the adobe shack at Las Vegas camp. His face was serious and thoughtful, and his glance was fixed on the open door through which came the broken, indistinguishable murmur of Buck Stratton's voice. Once, thinking he heard an unusual sound, the youngster turned his head alertly and stared westward through the shadows. But a moment later his eyes flashed back to that narrow, black oblong, and he resumed his uneasy pondering ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames

... garden where the tall, impassive ladies were arranging many wooden dishes on the ground. Now the moon was clear of clouds, and by its brilliant light we examined their contents. Some were cooked meat covered with a kind of sauce that made its nature indistinguishable. As a matter of fact, I believe it was mutton, but—who could say? Others were evidently of a vegetable nature. For instance, there was a whole platter full of roasted mealie cobs and a great boiled pumpkin, to say nothing of some bowls of curdled milk. Regarding this feast ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard

... had heard the horses being brought round the house; heard plainly the jingle of the bits and a sneeze or two. This had been followed by long interminable talking, muffled and indistinguishable, that came up to him from some unknown direction. Voices changed curiously in loudness and articulation as ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson

... for life or death. It was the fatal bane of Polish nationality that the days of its greatness had left it a claim upon vast territories where it had planted nothing but a territorial aristocracy, and where the mass of population, if not actually Russian, was almost indistinguishable from the Russians in race and language, and belonged like them to the Greek Church, which Catholic Poland had always persecuted. For ninety years Lithuania and the border provinces had been incorporated with the Czar's dominions, and with the exception of their Polish landowners ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... early spring to latest fall. Now, links, as well as parterres and driveways, are lying under an even blanket of winter snow, and even the building, with its picturesque gables and rows of be-diamonded windows, is well-nigh indistinguishable in the shadows cast by the heavy pines, which soar above it and twist their limbs over its roof and about its forsaken corners, with a moan and a whisper always desolate to the sensitive ear, but from this ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green

... wind-swept ice gave place to an almost flat snow surface. Meanwhile the sky had rapidly clouded over, and the outlook was threatening. The light became worse, and the sastrugi indistinguishable. Such a phenomenon always occurs on what we came to call a "snow-blind day." On these days the sky is covered with a white, even pall of cloud, and cloud and plateau seem as one. One walks into a deep trench or a sastruga two feet high ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... bottom of the baggage. The consequence was, that when it came to be opened, its several ingredients were found to have got loose, and fused together in a most hopeless way. Jam, and pickles, and Liebig's extract, and moist sugar were indistinguishable. The only thing seemed to be to attack the concoction en masse, without needless delay, and to that end Ranger had summoned the assistance of his friends and neighbours. Fisher major was unable to attribute any part of the weight on his mind to this perfectly ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed

... and slipped away from him; then pausing at a little distance, in the deep shadow of an archway opposite the station, she knelt down upon the pavement, and taking some small object, which was indistinguishable in the darkness, from the bosom of her frock she clasped her hands together and looked upwards through the gloom at the black walls of the great building. The Cossack looked at her in a sort of half-stupid, half-awed surprise, scarcely understanding ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford

... dreary little entrance passage in which they stood, wainscoted solidly from floor to ceiling with wood that looked damp and black from age; the ceiling itself was indistinguishable in the twilight; the floor seemed composed of packed earth, three or four doors showed in the woodwork; that opposite to the one by which they had entered stood slightly ajar, and a smoky light shone from beyond it. The air was ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson

... forty years the biography of Cecil is almost indistinguishable from that of Elizabeth and from the history of England. Of personal incident, apart from his mission to Scotland in 1560, there is little. He represented Lincolnshire in the parliament of 1559, and Northamptonshire in that of 1563, and he took an active part in the proceedings ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... and vagabond class of ordinary criminals, or suspects, who are frequently whisked off to Siberia—for the sake of clearing "Society," as it is called—when the criminals often become mixed up with the political exiles in an indistinguishable mass. This is the very refinement of torture, applied by the agents of a brutal despotism against men generously striving for a reform of the State and ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... of an hour went by. Five minutes more. Footsteps nearing the cabin from the direction of the woods. Low voices—very low. Indistinguishable words. Then the back door opened. Two persons entered, and all that they now ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various

... jerseys, gradually turned black with mud, of magenta forms dashing on to the School forwards, of wild, inarticulate black insects bawling on the touch-line. The pervading impression was mud. Everything was mud; he was mud, the ball was mud. Lovelace was indistinguishable. His own voice leading the scrum seemed strangely unreal. There was a vague feeling of disquiet when, early in the first half, he found himself standing under the posts, while the Buller's half placed the ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh

... transparency helps the chameleon in seeming to be a part of the green plant, or the brown bark, upon which it lies. And Professor Drummond, in his interesting account of his African travels, describes certain insects which render themselves indistinguishable either in color or in form from the branchings and exfoliation of certain grasses upon which they feed. Deception therefore becomes a chief resource of the weak, while violence is that of the strong. And those which are in the middle of the scale practise both. There ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... little world had showed itself, it swiftly passed, began to dwindle behind us. A huge half moon. A thinner, smaller quadrant. A tiny crescent, like a silver barpin to adorn some lady's breast. And then it was a dot, a point of light indistinguishable among the myriad others hovering in this ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings

... practice, war or no war. If those cruisers steaming across the range had been sending six or eight-inch shrapnel, we should have preferred not to be so near that towed square of canvas. Flashes from turrets indistinguishable at a distance from the neutral-toned bodies of the vessels and the shells struck, making great splashes just beyond the target, which was ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... cabin door opened and a man stepped out. His features were indistinguishable, but both could see that he was a large man, for his bulk had filled the doorway. He swung a heavy pack to a toboggan which stood waiting before the door with the dogs in harness. The next moment the form of a woman appeared in the doorway. She evidently called ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx

... religion. She was attracted to religion, much more attracted than she would confess even to herself, but every circumstance in her training dissuaded her from a free approach. Her mother treated religion with a reverence that was almost indistinguishable from huffiness. She never named the deity and she did not like the mention of His name: she threw a spell of indelicacy over religious topics that Ellen never thoroughly cast off. She put God among objectionable topics—albeit a sublime ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... lyrics and the dialogue according to situation and emotion and the qualities of players. The words of Cathleen ni Houlihan about the "white-scarfed riders" must be little more than regulated declamation; the little song of Leagerie when he seizes the "Golden Helmet" should in its opening words be indistinguishable from the dialogue itself. Upon the other hand Cathleen's verses by the fire, and those of the pupils in "The Hour-Glass," and those of the beggars in "The Unicorn," are sung as the country people understand ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... dusty and disorderly. The center-table of fine old mahogany was littered with pipes and newspapers. A patent rocker was doing duty as a clothes rack for hats and coats. A mahogany desk was almost indistinguishable under a clutter of doll's furniture. The sunset glow pouring through the window disclosed rolls of dust on the faded red ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow

... upon a course of disclamation, I should like to make a mild protest against a further charge that Georgian Poetry has merely encouraged a small clique of mutually indistinguishable poetasters to abound in their own and each other's sense or nonsense. It is natural that the poets of a generation should have points in common; but to my fond eye those who have graced these collections ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various

... them, except on some of the decorative inlay. The whole job must have been miked in ten-thousandths, and what's more, whoever made them used metric measurements. You'll find pairs of English dueling pistols as early as 1775 that are almost indistinguishable, but in 1575, when these things were supposed to have been made, a gunsmith was working fine when he was working in sixteenth-inches. They just didn't have the measuring instruments, at that time, to do closer work. I won't bother taking these ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper

... thus a hundred times before. On the pillow near him an indistinguishable mass of golden fur—the helpless bulk of a squirrel chained to the leg of his cot; at his feet a wall-eyed cat, who had followed his tyrannous caprices with the long-suffering devotion of her sex; on the shelf ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte

... it very badly. Many letters have to do duty for the expression of several sounds, and sometimes several of them have nearly or quite the same sound. For example, there are a number of distinct sounds of a, i, and o while g is sometimes indistinguishable from j and c from k. This is not always a matter of modification of sounds by the sounds of other letters combined with them. One has to learn how to pronounce cough, dough, enough, and plough, the ough having four distinct sounds in these four words. Each ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton

... nine-o'clock—struck, I cast a glance all round the ship before again measuring my angle, when, away down in the south- eastern quarter, I caught a glimpse of very pale blue stretching along the horizon that elsewhere was indistinguishable owing to the glassy calm of the ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood

... of feeling that attrition with it occasions. Motion is absolutely necessary to give us an ides of the density or configuration of an object. The mere touch of that object is insufficient to possess us with its nature. Iron and down are indistinguishable, unless we, to a certain extent, manipulate them. Glass would be indistinguishable from sand-paper did we not to a certain extent pass our fingers over the different surfaces. Mere touch would not suffice. We have the evidence of all of our senses to prove to us the nature of an object. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... when first they distinctly appear on the scene of history, they are indistinguishable from Tartars. Mount Altai, the high metropolis of Tartary, is surrounded by a hilly district, rich not only in the useful, but in the precious metals. Gold is said to abound there; but it is still more fertile in veins of iron, which indeed is said to be the most plentiful in the world. There ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... well-known firm of hare-raisers in Carmelite Street informs us that young rabbits fed on sponge-cake soaked in port wine have a flavour which renders them indistinguishable ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 25, 1917 • Various

... the name of the society for all he had done for the cause of women, the poet, while disclaiming the honor of having consciously worked for the woman's cause—indeed, not even being quite clear as to what the woman's cause really was, since in his eyes it was indistinguishable from the cause of humanity—concluded his ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... of Les Baux remain quite indistinguishable even when you are directly beneath them, at the foot of the charming little Alpilles, which mass themselves with a kind of delicate ruggedness. Rock and ruin have been so welded together by the confusions ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... end of the individual and that of the State, such as was entirely foreign to the Greek conception. The best individual, in their view, was also the best citizen; the two ideals not only were not incompatible, they were almost indistinguishable. When Aristotle defines a state as "an association of similar persons for the attainment of the best life possible", he implies not only that society is the means whereby the individual attains his ideal, but also that that ideal ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... knew that none had fallen since the evening before, and also that there had been a strong frost to preserve impressions. I passed along the tradesmen's path, but found it all trampled down and indistinguishable. Just beyond it, however, at the far side of the kitchen door, a woman had stood and talked with a man, whose round impressions on one side showed that he had a wooden leg. I could even tell that they had been disturbed, for the woman had run back swiftly to the door, as was shown ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... from an outbuilding—apparently the housekeeper of the mansion, but so roughly and dirtily dressed as almost to seem indistinguishable from a man. Chichikov inquired for the master of ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... the ignorant peasant of modern times, and the savage tribes of all ages. Classical writings, the literature of the Middle Ages, and the popular beliefs of the present day all contain views concerning teratologic subjects which so closely resemble those of the Chaldean magi as to be indistinguishable from them. Indeed, such works as those of Obsequens, Lycosthenes, Licetus, and Ambroise Pare only repeat, but with less accuracy of description and with greater freedom of imagination, the beliefs of ancient Babylon. Even at the present time the most impossible cases of so-called 'maternal ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... share of the feast, and while we were at breakfast I heard a crash in the direction of the kitchen, and hastening tremblingly to discover the origin of it I found the cake and the plate containing it in one indistinguishable heap ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn

... struck us all with astonishment. The entire valley with its woods and prairies was spread far and wide before our sight as far as the bays, the little detached huts being quite indistinguishable, while only a part of the town and a few masts of ships were perceptible in ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer

... same coarse home-spun, carried similar sticks, were equally begrimed about the nose with snuff, and each wound in an identical plaid of what is called the shepherd's tartan. In a back view they might be described as indistinguishable; and even from the front they were much alike. An incredible coincidence of humours augmented the impression. Thrice and four times I attempted to pave the way for some exchange of thought, sentiment, or—at the least of it—human words. An Ay or a Nhm was the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... latter, quite indispensable for pure foolishness). What surprises await one! Would you believe it, that Wagner's heroines one and all, once they have been divested of the heroic husks, are almost indistinguishable from Mdme. Bovary!—just as one can conceive conversely, of Flaubert's being well able to transform all his heroines into Scandinavian or Carthaginian women, and then to offer them to Wagner in this mythologised form as a libretto. ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.

... undeniable. Dr. Gould,[1283] Mr. Hind, and Dr. Copeland,[1284] each computed a separate set of elements from the first rough observations, and each was struck with an agreement between the two orbits so close as to render them virtually indistinguishable. "Can it be possible," Mr. Hind wrote to Sir George Airy, "that there is such a comet in the system, almost grazing the sun's surface in perihelion, and revolving in less than thirty-seven years. I confess I feel a difficulty in admitting ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... surprised. Sicilians, because they learn good Italian at their schools, think themselves indistinguishable from other men. ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... to meet no more. It was impossible, among the long and irregular lines of Gothic casements, which now looked ghastly white in the moonlight, to distinguish that of the apartment which she inhabited. "She is lost to me already," thought I, as my eye wandered over the dim and indistinguishable intricacies of architecture offered by the moonlight view of Osbaldistone Hall—"She is lost to me already, ere I have left the place which she inhabits! What hope is there of my maintaining any correspondence with her, when leagues shall ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... battle in these desperately cramped quarters. After the first moment or two friend and foe were indistinguishable and the men of both parties began firing or thrusting at whatever loomed nearest out of the gloom. The narrow ravine quickly became a place of utter confusion, a volcano of blasphemies, a press of jostling, ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach

... the wagon yet down the bank at the edge of the water. The words were indistinguishable, but a warning was in the voice. On the echo of that ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower

... Dog and his whole gang are coming," he shouted, instantly reining about and looking anxiously back. Behind him, nearly a thousand yards, lay the low, squat buildings of his official station. Beyond that, nearly two thousand more, and but for the flag and staff almost indistinguishable from the dull hues of the prairie, except to Indian eye, lay the low log walls of the cantonment. Already signs of alarm and bustle could be seen about the former. A buckboard was just hurriedly driving ...
— Under Fire • Charles King

... driving up volumes and flying rags of clouds, and sweeping onward at the same time the gathering waves that fell hissing and thundering on the shore. Far as the eye could reach the sea and the air and the sky seemed to be one indistinguishable mass of whirling and hurrying vapor, as if beyond this point there were no more land, but only wind and water, and the confused and awful voices ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various

... AEschylean nurse, to some genuine boys, to a wise Youth,—but that society grows as numerous as brilliant. Mr. Besant has made us friends with twins of literary and artistic genius, with a very highly- cultured Fellow of Lothian, with a Son of Vulcan, with a bevy of fair but rather indistinguishable damsels, like a group of agreeable-looking girls at a dance. But they are too busy with their partners to be friendly. We admire them, but they are unconcerned with us. In Mr. Black's large family the Whaup seems most congenial to some strangers; the name of one of ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang

... their daughters can. They send their daughters to the same schools with the daughters of the "four hundred," and the girls make friends with each other, and with a little skill the password may be learned and the young plebeian may find herself indistinguishable from a patrician. There are fathers and mothers who urge their daughters to make haste to occupy every coigne of vantage, and gradually advance into the heart of the enemy's country. I am not speaking now of those who are so vulgar as to intrigue ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}

... as I sat by the window working, the noise was not intolerable, but at night when the Lisbonensians took to amusing themselves they roused me from a well-earned sleep. They shouted and sang and made mingled and indistinguishable uproars which rose wildly through the narrow deep space and burst into my open window. After long endurance I rose and shut it, preferring heat to insomnia. But in the day, after that discord, I always had the harmonious ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts

... more common and widespread throughout the animal world. The eye does not easily see an object if it is colored like the background against which it stands. A host of animals find their main safety in being indistinguishable in color from the surface on which they live. There are many biologists who seriously question whether protective coloration, as Darwin called it, is as effective as he believed it. In some quarters it is the present fashion to doubt protective coloration ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker

... to and fro on the deck. It might have been called the living chariot of the Apocalypse. A dim wavering of lights and shadows was added to this spectacle by the marine lantern, swinging under the deck. The outlines of the cannon were indistinguishable, by reason of the rapidity of its motion; sometimes it looked black when the light shone upon it, then again it would cast pale, glimmering ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various

... marine garden blend with the fringes and fur of the animal's rugged and misshapen figure and deformed limbs. As an artistic finish to a marvellous piece of mummery, in one of the crude green claws is carried a fragment of coral, green with the mould of the sea. It and the claw are indistinguishable until, in the faintest spasm of fright, the crab abandons the coral, and shrinking within itself becomes inanimate—as steadfast a patch of weeds as any other of the reef. Recovering slowly from its fright, and conscious of the necessity for each ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... of men, and some women, nowadays, who can carry on a conversation in Chinese with the utmost facility, and even with grace. Some speak so well as to be practically indistinguishable from Chinamen. ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles

... Bandello, and both in print before the date of Twelfth Night. These, as also the three forms of the tale mentioned above, all agree in having a brother and sister, the latter in male attire, and the two bearing so close a resemblance in person and dress as to be indistinguishable; upon which circumstance some of the leading incidents are made to turn. In one of the Italian plays, the sister is represented as assuming the name of Cesare; which is so like Cesario, the name adopted by Viola in her disguise, that the one may well be thought to have suggested the other. Beyond ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... described above. Such brooches were made in gold, silver or bronze, adorned with precious stones, filigree work, or enamel; but whatever the richness of the material, the pin was nearly always of iron. The Scandinavian or northern group of T-shaped brooches are in their early forms indistinguishable from those of the Frankish tombs, but as time went on they became more massive, and richly decorated with intricate devices (perhaps brought in by Irish missionary influence), into which animal forms were introduced. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... among the bramble bushes on the waste ground around rue Docteur Blanche.... Now he was clad in a long black knitted garment moulded tightly to his figure, a sinister garment, by means of which the wearer can blend with the darkness so as to be almost indistinguishable. His face was entirely concealed by a long black hood, a movable mask, which prevented his features being seen: through two slits gleamed two eyeballs: they might have burned a way through like ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... Illimitation is negative, Limitation, its contradictory, is positive, whether conditional or unconditional. In brief, if the Infinite and Absolute are wholly incomprehensible, they are not distinguishable; but if they are distinguishable, they are not wholly incomprehensible. If they are indistinguishable, they are to us identical; and identity precludes contradiction. But if they are distinguishable, distinction is made by difference, which involves positive cognition; hence one, at least, must be conceivable. It follows, therefore, by inexorable logic, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... tang of ghostliness in the night. The crest of the ridge over which they had come through the dusk now showed silvery white; white also were some dead branches of desert growth—they looked like bones. Always through the intense silence stirred an indistinguishable breath like a shiver. Individual bushes assumed grotesque shapes; when she looked long and intently at one she began to fancy that it moved. She scoffed at herself, knowing that she was lending aid to tricking her own senses, yet her heart beat a wee bit faster. She gave her mind to large ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory

... one form at least the highest art has been brought within the reach of a man of very moderate means. Photography can reproduce a drawing with such absolute perfection that he may cover his walls with works of Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci that are indistinguishable from the originals. The standard of comfort in mere material things is now so high in well-to-do households that to a healthy nature the millionaire can add little to it. Perhaps among the pleasures of wealth that which has the strongest influence is a country place, especially ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... large lumps from the computer-banks, gyro platform, fuel pumps, and other more massive components. This was not wanton destruction, however. It was more careful planning by the same brains which had devised the missile itself. To a radar set on the ground near the target, each fragment was indistinguishable from the nose cone carrying the warhead. In fact, since the fragments were separating only very slowly, they never would appear as distinct objects. By the time the cloud of decoys entered the atmosphere, its more than two dozen members would appear to the ...
— Pushbutton War • Joseph P. Martino

... most he would concede was to drop his voice as he continued: "You know, gentlemen, and they know, that any true man would as soon be slapped in the face and spit upon as to be laughed at.... No, I—" His words became indistinguishable. ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable

... mouth and ate what his landlady gave him, not first deliberately shutting his eyes according to the formula, the rather pluming himself on keeping them very wide open. But it is difficult for saints to see through their own halos; and in practice an aureola about the head is often indistinguishable from a mist. The tea to be scalded in Mr. Constant's pot, when that cantankerous kettle should boil, was not the coarse mixture of black and green sacred to herself and Mr. Mortlake, of whom the thoughts of breakfast now reminded her. Poor ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill

... regions known to harbor these animals. Were it not, indeed, for the evident artistic similarity between these carvings of supposed foreign animals and those of common domestic forms—a similarity which, as Squier and Davis remark, render them "indistinguishable, so far as material and workmanship are concerned, from an entire class of remains found in the mounds"—the presence of most of them could readily be accounted for through the agency of trade, the far reaching nature of which, even among the wilder tribes, is well ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw

... fall of water from a high cliff or the sweeping of dust and beech-tree leaves over a plain, when the March wind blows hard, or to the rapidity of thunder rattling over the firmament. A man would say that there were eight legs under each horse, so rapid and indistinguishable is the motion of their limbs and hoofs. Identify those horses, O Conall, and that chariot, for to ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady

... straining over the enormous yolk, answers to the pressure. The gastrula in the fowl is solid. The primitive streak is, in fact, the scar of a closed blastopore. As we should expect from this view of its homology, at the primitive streak, the three embryonic layers are continuous and indistinguishable (Figure 2). Elsewhere in the blastoderm they are distinctly separate. Just as the yolk cells of the frog form the ventral wall of the intestine, so nuclei appear along the upper side of the yolk of the fowl, ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells

... galloped up to the square, stopped his sorrel at the steps of the town hall, and waving his whip in the air, shouted to the peasant. The shouts rattled against the window panes, but the words were indistinguishable. The peasant rose and stretched his hand, pointing to something. The sergeant jumped to the ground, reeled, threw the reins to the peasant, and seizing the rails with his hands, lifted himself heavily up the steps, and disappeared behind the ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky

... his character, narrow his sympathies, or undermine his purposes. His intelligence served to enlighten his will, and his will, to establish the mature decisions of his intelligence. Late in life the two faculties became in their exercise almost indistinguishable. His judgments, in so far as they were decisive, were charged with momentum, and his actions were instinct with ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... feet;—all these charms were ample excuse for his coxcombry and continual posings. They were ample excuse, too, for the admiration bestowed upon him by his mottled brown mate, whose colours were obviously designed not for show but for concealment. When sitting on her nest, she was practically indistinguishable from the twigs and dead ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts

... that inhabit the Hawaiian woods. The natives are persuaded that these shells have the power of chirping a song of their own, and the writer has often heard the note which they ascribe to them; but to his ear it was indistinguishable from the piping of the cricket. This is the song that the natives credit to ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... doubtless familiar with Victor Hugo's description of the marine monster said to be found in the vicinity of the Channel islands, and known as the Devil Fish. It is apparently formed of an almost transparent jelly, colorless, almost indistinguishable from the water which surrounds it, armed with long slender limbs, numerous as the feet of the centipede, and strong in their grasp as hands of iron. The bather in those waters habitually provides himself with a long keen blade, which, ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... passed largely in silence, each of us, no doubt, busied with our own thoughts. Sam made no endeavor to speed his engine, keeping most of the way close to the deeper shadow of the shore, and the machinery ran smoothly, its noise indistinguishable at any distance. Twice we touched bottom, but to no damage other than a slight delay and the labor of poling off into deeper water, while occasionally overhanging limbs of trees, unnoticed in the gloom, struck our faces. By what uncanny skill the negro ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish

... miscellaneous thing the Keltic race must be. There is nothing that may or may not be a Kelt, and I know, for example, professional Kelts who are, so far as face, manners, accents, morals, and ideals go, indistinguishable from other people who are, I ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... the ground and, drawing his coat over his head, lay, a brown spot indistinguishable from the sand about him, an irregularity in the great waste surface of earth. He shut the prospect from his eyes, and over the thousands of miles of continent and sea he drew Ethne's face towards him. A little while and he was back again in Donegal. The summer night whispered through the ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason

... hidden building, indistinguishable externally from the neighboring houses; within, gold and silver glistened in the pomegranates and bells of the Scrolls of the Law or in the broidery of the curtain that covered the Ark; the glass ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... verses in which the lyrist put forth sentiments common to all mankind and in no wise specifically those of his own race; and from the days of Phyllis Wheatley to the present the most of the poems written by men who were not wholly white are indistinguishable from the poems written by men who were wholly white. Whatever their merits might be, these verses cast little or no light upon the deeper racial sentiments of the people to whom the poets themselves belonged. But in the ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson

... to leave. The very tapestries rustled with the legends of the Cornelii of long, long ago, on the shores of the Rivo Alto, before the story of Venice had won its honored place in the chronicles of nations—yet not the less for their indistinguishable outlines and mythical color were they woven into the proud consciousness of the duty the Cornari ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... comparable in size with some of the other star clusters which we see, and that, viewed from a remote point in space, the Milky Way would seem to be but one of the many clusters of stars containing our sun as an indistinguishable unit. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... of the same fibre as the little Buttons, he would have felt, thought and acted as they, and this history would never have been written. He would have grown up to man's estate in the factory and have been merged an indistinguishable unit in the drab mass of cloth-capped humans who, at certain hours of the day, flood the streets of Bludston, and swarm on the roofs of clanging and shrieking tramcars, and on Saturday afternoons ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... been the condition that is called catalepsy," said Challenger. "It has been a rare phenomenon in the past and has constantly been mistaken for death. While it endures, the temperature falls, the respiration disappears, the heartbeat is indistinguishable—in fact, it is death, save that it is evanescent. Even the most comprehensive mind"—here he closed his eyes and simpered—"could hardly conceive a universal outbreak of it ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle

... state of things did not last, for the trail became to her indistinguishable the moment the swamp was passed, and at last, during a very dark wet day, she lost herself as well as the trail. At evening of the same day she climbed into a tree. Opening out her bundle of dried ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne

... these two characteristics of philosophical propositions by saying that philosophy is the science of the possible. But this statement unexplained is liable to be misleading, since it may be thought that the possible is something other than the general, whereas in fact the two are indistinguishable. ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... they went directly to the power room. Here they heard the soft purring of a large oscillator tube and the indistinguishable murmur of smoothly running AC generators powered ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell

... the loon world. Then a peculiar object is seen to emerge from the marshy bay and cross under the shadowy cedars toward the open water. A field-glass shows it to be the mother loon and her two offspring, the three huddled so closely together that they are almost indistinguishable. The mother is unceasing in her care and attention. She strokes the backs of the young birds with her bill, playing and fussing around and close to them, as if they could not exist without her constant attention. Now and then she leans over and lifts a broad, black, webbed foot ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various

... their knees. They are in their Sunday clothes, with stiff white shirts. Their hats are on the floor beside their chairs. Each wears upon his lapel the gilt badge of a fraternal order, with a crepe rosette. In the gloom they are indistinguishable; all of them talk in the same strained, throaty whisper. Between their remarks they pause, clear their throats, blow their noses, and shuffle in their chairs. They are intensely uncomfortable. Tempo: Adagio lamentoso, with ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken

... has been sought by various imitative processes, some of which are indistinguishable from it except by close inspection. In one of these wax, either in its natural state or tinted with an addition of powder colour, was used; in another glue mixed with whiting or plaster, also sometimes ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson

... of men; both are affected by the external circumstances of climate, situation, and mode of life; and the state of one may always be determined by that of the other. "No savage horde has been caught with its language in a state of chaos, or as if just emerging from the rudeness of indistinguishable sounds. Each appears, not as a slow formation by painful processes of invention, but as a perfect whole, springing directly from the powers of man."[22] And though this rigor of expression is not equally applicable to the Indian's religion, the fact is attributable solely ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel

... lost—for the most part beyond hope of recovery; and accordingly the distinction of species is still recognised; although there are cases, chiefly at the lower stages of organisation, in which so many varieties occur as to make adjacent species almost or quite indistinguishable. So far as species are recognised, then, they present a complex co-inherence of qualities, which is, in one aspect, a logical problem; and, in another, a logical datum; and, coming more naturally under the head of Natural Kinds than any other, they must ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... repeater strike. It would have been friendly, home-like. He had not even strength to remember that the old watch was last wound the day he began to lie here. The pulse of his brain beat so feebly that faces which came and went, nurse's, doctor's, orderly's, were indistinguishable, just one indifferent face; and the words spoken about him meant all the same thing, and that almost nothing. Those things he used to do, though far and faint, were more distinct—walking past the foot of the old steps at Harrow 'bill'—'Here, sir! Here, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... were rather against the general finish of the pictures, causing in some places an unsightly smudge or a blotchy appearance. In one page the Tower of Babel was disfigured by this very injudicious haste, and the bricks and the builders were wholly indistinguishable for a sad blotch of ochre; still, the title page made up for all such defects: "To my dear sister, Esther, from her affectionate ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... had another fine sight one evening, walking along a rising ground, about two miles distant from the shore. It was about the hour of sunset, and the sea was perfectly calm; and in a quarter where its surface was indistinguishable from the western sky, hazy, and luminous with the setting sun, appeared a tall sloop-rigged vessel, magnified by the atmosphere through which it was viewed, and seeming rather to hang in the air than to float upon ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... larger and is lined in most cases by a more or less permanent lining which is thick and tough in birds with a muscular gizzard, very slight in the others. In many birds, specially those feeding on fish, the two regions of the stomach are of equal width, and are indistinguishable until, on opening the cavity, the difference in the character of the lining membrane becomes visible. In other birds the proventriculus is separated by a well marked constriction from the posterior and larger region. In graminiferous forms the latter becomes a thick-walled muscular gizzard, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... waved his hand to and fro. Gradually, as Miss Terry sat back in her chair, the library grew dark; or rather, things faded into an indistinguishable blur. Then it seemed as if she were sitting at a theatre gazing at a great stage. But at this theatre there was nothing about her, nothing between her and the ...
— The Christmas Angel • Abbie Farwell Brown

... mysterious whistle was repeated, and answered by a kind of report, but almost indistinguishable, for the storm was raging with renewed violence. McNabbs and John Mangles could not hear themselves speak. They went for comfort under the shelter ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne

... placed not far from the south window, whose blinds, half open, admitted almost the only light that entered the room. With its head near this reading-table and faintly visible, a bamboo lounge stretched its length towards the southward windows, where all was darkness, and something vague and indistinguishable lay extended upon the lounge. Cram marched half-way across the floor, then stopped short, glanced down, and stepped quickly to one side, shifting his heavily-booted feet as though to avoid some such muddy pool ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King

... Odyssey, a thing of growth through several centuries, which overlapped the centuries in which the Odyssey grew, the moral ideas of the Iliad and Odyssey would necessarily be much the same, would be indistinguishable. But, as a matter of fact, it would be easy to show that the moral standard of the Iliad is higher, in many places, than the moral standard of the Odyssey; and that, therefore, by the critical ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... sustains: in other words, denies the validity of Consciousness. Thirdly and lastly, he attempts to show that all actions of individuals originate not in themselves, but result from a law working in the general and indistinguishable lump of society,—from laws of like nature with that which preserves the balance of the sexes; so that no man has more to do with his own deed than the mother in determining whether her child shall ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... the water's edge the boys could discern the big form of Sergeant Martin, and even as distance welded them in an indistinguishable mass, they could still see him, towering above the others, his hat describing wide ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll

... They got into conversation, and the stranger said almost in atone of solemnity, "It is indeed a singular mystery, how a picture often arises in the mind of an artist, the figures of which, previously indistinguishable, incorporate mist driving about in empty space, first seem to shape themselves into vitality in his mind, and there seem to find their home. Suddenly the picture connects itself with the past, or even with the future, representing something that has really ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... alone which knows Be as a sword consumed before the sheath By sightless lightning? From the axiom 'Nought we know dies'—an axiom which should be understood as limited to what we call material objects (which Shelley however considered to be indistinguishable, in essence, from ideas, see p, 56)—he proceeds to the question, 'Shall that alone which knows'—i.e. shall the mind alone—die and be annihilated? If the mind were to die, while the body continues extant (not indeed in the form of a human body, but in various phases of ulterior development), then ...
— Adonais • Shelley

... caught. Between the travellers and the church extended a wide, woody dell, along which the brook roved among broken rocks and trunks of fallen trees. Over a deep, black part of the stream was thrown a bridge. The road which led up to it was thickly shaded, and in places indistinguishable at any great distance by overhanging trees, which cast a gloom about it, even in daytime, but occasioned a fearful darkness at night. This place was reputed to be a favorite resort for the witches of Salem, for they had frequently been seen dancing ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick

... Immediately overhead an almost indistinguishable blur marked a high, square window, some seven feet from the floor. There was but one. In all probability the door lay directly opposite. That being true, the natural inclination of a man flying down the hall in the direction we ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson



Words linked to "Indistinguishable" :   distinguishable, undistinguishable, indistinguishability, same



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