"Insoluble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him with a more insoluble perplexity on his hands; two, in fact—oh, half a dozen! What was she doing there? Did Rodney know? Well, those questions, and others in their train, could wait. But—what was he going ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... of pedantry. He chooses harsh words by preference, liking unusual or insoluble rhymes, like 'haps' and 'yaps,' 'thick' and 'sick,' 'skin' and 'kin,' 'banks' and 'thanks,' 'skims' and 'limbs.' Two lines from The Woods of Westermain, published in 1883 in the Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, sum up in themselves the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Mary Stewart, a most ingenious examination of a practically insoluble problem: performed in the true spirit of historical investigation. The conclusions, with a less exhaustive treatment of the evidence, are presented in the History of Scotland—which is also a running criticism on English affairs as ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... of the identity of Paulus was like all court secrets and most secrets of intriguing governments, no mystery at all to hundreds, but to thousands an insoluble conundrum. The official propagandists of the court news, absolutely in control of all the channels through which facts could reach the public, easily offset the constant leakage from the lips of slaves and gladiators by disseminating artfully concocted ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... of our morals and of our imperfect civilization, a problem crops up which for the moment is insoluble, and which renders superfluous all discussion on the art of choosing a wife; we commend it, as we have done all the others, ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... apostolic succession in ancient churches. It is easy to see why certain affluent, cultivated, and eminently well-conducted people should be considered "the thing" in their day and generation; but why they should be considered as the "only thing" is the point insoluble to human reason, and to be received by faith alone; also, why certain other people, equally affluent, cultivated, and well-conducted are not "the thing" is one of the divine mysteries, about which whoso observes Boston society ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... insoluble in concentrated caustic lyes, and, for the most part, in strong solutions of sodium chloride, hence the addition of caustic soda or brine to a solution of soda soap causes the soap to separate out and ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... "History is only able to grasp the conditions of their existence." And what M. Seignobos calls the final problem—Is evolution produced merely by changed conditions?—must according to him remain insoluble by the legitimate processes of history. The student may accept or reject this view as his notions of evidence prompt him to do. M. Seignobos has at all events laid down a basis for discussion in ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... Englishman, and you're proud of your country; but I tell you we're going to have a race of people in these provinces such as the world has never seen before." And, as I looked at the child, I drifted into a labyrinth of insoluble enigmas and perplexing hypotheses—no new thing with me, as the sympathetic reader is by this time ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... performance (Vollbringen); and it is these discordances that so often embarrass man during his earthly course. The slightest confusion, arising from a trivial error which may be cleared up unexpectedly and without injury, gives rise to ridiculous situations. The greatest confusion, on the contrary, insoluble or unsolved, offers us the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... insoluble questions; and what did it matter? The essence of the thing was contained in this fact: The Needle was hollow. At forty or fifty yards from that imposing arch which is called the Porte d'Aval and which shoots out from the top of the cliff, ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... was vegetable fermentation, were composed of it. To prove this, he collected the contents of these bubbles in a bottle containing lime-water. When this bottle was shaken violently, so that the lime-water and the carbonic acid became thoroughly mixed, an insoluble white powder was precipitated from the solution, the carbonic acid having combined chemically with the lime to form the insoluble calcium carbonate, or chalk. This experiment suggested another. Fixing a piece of burning charcoal in the end of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... species was a "special creation" quite independent of all others; while the great body of naturalists equally held, that the change from one species to another by any known law or cause was impossible, and that the "origin of species" was an unsolved and probably insoluble problem. The only other important work dealing with the question was the celebrated Vestiges of Creation, published anonymously, but now acknowledged to have been written by the late Robert Chambers. In this work the action of general laws was traced throughout ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... rather took pains to turn public attention from the causes to the occasion of the conflict, the judgment of neutrals is affected by this, and if they are really impartial in their view, they suffer morally under the burden of an insoluble problem. But if outspoken sympathy draws them toward one of the belligerent powers, then their judgment is as little objective as that of the belligerents themselves. Their pretended neutrality gives to their expressions a loathsome Pharisaical aspect, because they come to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... sulphuric acid to render its plant-food available. The content of phosphoric acid varies because the original rock-phosphate varies, but the most common grade on the market is guaranteed to contain 14 per cent available phosphoric acid, and 1 to 2 per cent insoluble. Some acid phosphate is guaranteed to contain 16 per cent available phosphoric acid, and some runs down to ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... several shady forests of casuarina. A curious provision of nature for the distribution of the seeds of a parasitical plant was observed here, each seed being enclosed within a sort of pulp, like bird-lime, insoluble in water; the whole resembling a very thin-skinned berry. On this being broken, probably by birds, the bird-lime is apt to attach the seed to trees or branches, and so the parasitical growth commences. ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... the problem as insoluble; for if reason be insufficient to give authority to the Bible, and criticism fails to discover its truth, how are we to know that ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... say no more, but leave the problem as insoluble, only fearing that it will become a formidable weapon in the hands of ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... a rock composed of sulphuric acid, lime, and water. It is usually a soft whitish-yellow rock, with a texture resembling that of loaf-sugar, but sometimes it is entirely composed of lenticular crystals. It is insoluble in acids, and does not effervesce like chalk and dolomite, because it does not contain carbonic acid gas, or fixed air, the lime being already combined with sulphuric acid, for which it has a stronger affinity than for any ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... the disjointed fragments and form a general idea from all the agonizing and conflicting experiences of the day. He felt something bordering upon despair, which he had never known till then. Towering like a mountain above all the rest stood the fatal, insoluble question: How would things end between his father and his brother Dmitri with this terrible woman? Now he had himself been a witness of it, he had been present and seen them face to face. Yet only his brother Dmitri could be made unhappy, terribly, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... square, and being piled one upon the other to a height of about six feet in an hydraulic press, are subjected to a pressure of some hundred tons. This disengages the pure oleaginous parts from the more insoluble portions, and the fat residue, being increased in hardness by its extra density, is mixed with stearine, and by a variety of preparations is converted into candles. The pure oil thus expressed is that known in the shops ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... possible. It is not profitable to tell us that the greatest of all the immense difficulties in the way of a solution of the problem of the union of Greater Britain into a Federation is a difficulty that we make ourselves: 'is the false preconception which we bring to the question, that the problem is insoluble, that no such thing ever was done or ever will be done.' On the contrary, those who are incurably sceptical of federation, owe their scepticism not to a preconception at all, but to a reasoned examination of actual ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... adapted to a society of which all the members are responsible. This is a point we must insist upon. There is certainly a real antinomy which is difficult to reconcile between this dual egoism of exclusive and concentrated love and social solidarity or human altruism. The problem is not insoluble, but we must admit that the solution ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... in vain to solve the insoluble problem—the problem of constructing a government "which will constrain the individual to obedience without itself ceasing to be the servant of society," men at last attempt to free themselves from every form of government ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... another Frewen. The reader must bear Mrs. Buckner in mind; it was by means of that lady that Fleeming Jenkin began life as a poor man. Meanwhile, the relationship of any Frewen to any Jenkin at the end of these evolutions presents a problem almost insoluble; and we need not wonder if Mrs. John, thus exercised in her immediate circle, was in her old age "a great genealogist of all Sussex families, and much consulted." The names Frewen and Jenkin may almost seem ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Pettengill slit envelopes and read letters to an accompanying rumble of protest. She several times wished to know what certain parties took her for—and they'd be fooled if they did; and now and again she dwelt upon the insoluble mystery of her not being in the poorhouse at that moment; yes, and she'd of been there long ago if she had let these parties run her business like they thought they could. But what could a lone defenceless woman expect? She'd show them, though! Been ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... ancestors took their origin. Septimius, the rather disagreeable hero of his last romance, is a peculiar example of a similar change. Brought up under the strict discipline of New England, he has retained the love of musing upon insoluble mysteries, though he has abandoned the old dogmatic guide-posts. When such a man finds that the orthodox scheme of the universe provided by his official pastors has somehow broken down with him, he forms some audacious theory of his own, and is perhaps plunged into an ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the fundamental question for any philosophy of ethics; but it receives no answer at all from the prevailing school of metaphysical thought. This school offers no solution of the problem which was found insoluble by the type of philosophy whose aim is to co-ordinate the results of science. A comparison of the purposes and results of the ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... stones which were worn as amulets. Subsequently its use spread beyond the Gnostics, and in modern times it is applied contemptuously (e g. by the early opponents of the evolution theory) to a conception or hypothesis which purports to be a simple solution of apparently insoluble phenomena. The Gnostic physician Serenus Sammonicus gave precise instructions as to its mystical use in averting or curing agues and fevers generally. The paper on which the word was written had to be folded in the form of a cross, suspended from the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... has discovered the proverbial truth. I need hardly tell you that it is only the insoluble that is finally baffling and this is very probably insoluble. You remember the awful smash on the Central and Suburban at Knight's Cross ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... Canadian sealers should give up their rights in Bering Sea for a money payment, and to arrange for a measure of reciprocity in natural products and in a limited list of manufactures. But the question of the Alaskan boundary proved insoluble, and the Commission broke up in ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... resistless and often inscrutable, determined their lives. The younger men, their hearts beating with conscious power and freedom, resented this control, or accepting it, refused to assume the responsibility for the outcome of their lives. It was the old, old strife, the insoluble mystery; and the minister's wife, far from making light of it, allowed its full weight to press in upon the members of her class, and wisely left the question as the apostle leaves it, with a statement of the two great truths of Sovereignty and Free Will without attempting the impossible task ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... be done satisfactorily under pressure. The bones of fish are composed of large quantities of harmless lime, bound by a matrix of collagen, which is insoluble under ordinary conditions. When subjected to a high temperature under pressure this collagen is converted into gelatin and dissolved, leaving the bones soft and friable and even edible. Bony fish, such as herring and shad, which are too small to use otherwise are greatly ...
— Every Step in Canning • Grace Viall Gray
... woman it commonly implies many uncongenial submissions. There are probably few married couples who have escaped distressful phases of bitterness and tears, within the constraint of their, in most cases, practically insoluble bond. But, on the other hand, and as a reward that in the soberer, mainly agricultural civilization of the past, and among the middling class of people, at any rate, has sufficed, there comes the great development of associations ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... different poets. This theory has been attacked and supported with great energy: for a half century men have flown into a passion for or against the existence of Homer. Today we begin to think the problem insoluble. What is certain is that these poems are very old, probably of the ninth century. The Iliad was composed in Asia Minor and is perhaps the result of the union of two poems—one dedicated to the combats of the Trojans, and the other to the adventures ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... one only these two duties, to cause to spring from the earth I cannot tell how many thousands of men who voluntarily accepted this burden, and who were not crushed by it—that is a problem which one might have been pardoned for thinking insoluble. We have not sufficiently considered it. We have not pictured to ourselves with sufficient vividness the Templars and the Hospitallers in the midst of one of those great battles in the Holy Land in which the fate of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... be entirely restored to its original weight and condition: and it also follows, that the earth separated from lime-water by an alkali, is the lime which was dissolved in the water now restored to its original mild and insoluble state. ...
— Experiments upon magnesia alba, Quicklime, and some other Alcaline Substances • Joseph Black
... will. To him Lucien was more than a son, more than a woman beloved, more than a family, more than his life; he was his revenge; and as souls cling more closely to a feeling than to existence, he had bound the young man to him by insoluble ties. ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... Wade and Arcot reported to the others the curious constants they had discovered for coronium. It was not attacked by any acid except boiling selenic acid, since it formed a tremendous number of insoluble salts. Even the nitrate violated the long-held rule that "all nitrates are soluble"—it wouldn't dissolve. Yet it was chemically more ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... here is fortunate, almost providential. You can help us. Your interest in such things and your success in the solution of many apparently insoluble affairs is known to all of us. While we are between us able to cope with most of the things that arise, you, an outsider, without having your emotions involved may see more clearly than we, aside from your undoubted ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... legislation; and these customs are no less opposed to the tone of society. If the English colonies had been founded in an age of darkness, or if their origin was already lost in the lapse of years, the problem would be insoluble. ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... There is a stove. The bell-rope hangs from the wire just to the right of my desk. Whoever rang it must have come right up to the desk to do it. But why should any criminal wish to ring the bell? It is a most insoluble mystery." ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... juices exposed to the air harden into firm substances, commonly called gum. Some of these dissolve, or at least soften, in water; these technically are known as "gums," and usually are so designated in commerce. Others are insoluble in water, but dissolve readily in alcohol, in naphtha, in turpentine, or in other essential oils; these are designated as "gum-resins." Still others yield oils or pitchy substances on distillation; these are known as "oleo-resins." There are many other dried vegetable juices, ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... our opening episode. The murder of Michael Pendean became received as a fact capable of everything but proof absolute, while the escape of Robert Redmayne offered an insoluble problem to the authorities. Michael Pendean indeed was dead enough, for it had been a part of my original conception that he should never reappear. Obviously he could not do so; and I, who had already created "Doria," ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... not insoluble.—Before going on to say more about human personality, especially the personality of Jesus, it is requisite that we should determine our attitude toward a great question which in manifold forms has beset the human intellect ever since the dawn of history, ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... ascertained, M'Munn's Elixir is simply an aqueous infusion of opium—procured by the ordinary maceration—and preserved from decomposing by the subsequent addition of a small portion of alcohol. Narcotin being absolutely insoluble in water is eliminated as the circular says. This fact alone would not account for the difference between its action and that of laudanum. This is explained by the fact that all the other alkaloids ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... Great Dvoryansky Street and the two other smartest streets lived on the interest of capital, or on salaries received by officials from the public treasury; but what the other eight streets, which ran parallel for over two miles and vanished beyond the hills, lived upon, was always an insoluble riddle to me. And the way those people lived one is ashamed to describe! No garden, no theatre, no decent band; the public library and the club library were only visited by Jewish youths, so that the magazines and ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... an insoluble problem. He could tell now by the flow of the current the points of the compass, but could not tell in which direction he ought to go. The New Brunswick coast he thought was nearest, but he dreaded it. It seemed perilous and unapproachable. He did not think much ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille
... be failing him. The change had taken place almost overnight. The fact that the case had the appearance of presenting the unusual had merely stimulated him at first. But then doubts had crept in and the problem had begun to appear insoluble. ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... politics, and their obsession has always been international trade. Here in Utopia the World State cuts that away from beneath their feet; there are no imports but meteorites, and no exports at all. Trading is the earthly economists' initial notion, and they start from perplexing and insoluble riddles about exchange value, insoluble because all trading finally involves individual preferences which are incalculable and unique. Nowhere do they seem to be handling really defined standards, every economic dissertation and discussion ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... problem was still a burning question, and the Nat Turner insurrection of 1831, in which a few slaves rose against their masters and killed many men, women, and children, forced a reconsideration. Again the difficult problem was declared insoluble. Thomas R. Dew, a professor of political science in William and Mary College, gave the deciding counsel in elaborate testimony before a committee of the legislature, which was enlarged and published in book ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... intolerable lot of the common man in these times helps us to understand one thing which otherwise would be an insoluble problem: which was, why did Christian soldiers so often become renegadoes and fight for the corsairs under the banner of those who were the fiercest and most irreconcilable foes of themselves and their kindred? The ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... in fact, the gist of the War; the insoluble problem for Don Philip and the French. By detours, by circuitous effort and happy accident, your troops may occasionally squeeze through: but without one secure road open behind them for supplies and recruitments, what good is it? Battles ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... has overreached himself. He has given you a choice of two problems, both of which he deems insoluble. Neither of them is insoluble. The only gleam of intelligence Old Cotangent showed was when he said that squaring the circle was too easy. He was right. It would have given you your Liebchen in five ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... minute. You will allow that the rendering skins insoluble in water by combining with them the astringent principle of certain vegetables is a chemical invention, and that without leather, our shoes, our carriages, our equipages would be very ill made; you will permit me to say, that the bleaching ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... aprosexia,[105] the lack of the power of concentration being attributed to adenoid vegetations, but in which the defect might, with at least as much reason, have been referred to the play of sexual ideas. To the teacher, his pupil's inattentiveness is often an insoluble riddle, merely because he ignores in the child the play of erotic imagination, and, in fact, ignores the child's inner life in general. And yet, in such cases, the child's failure to attend to the work of the ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... the need of a future world, to rectify the injustices of this, not yet being felt, the doctrine would have been of but little service. But in later Hebrew literature, many magnificent passages revealed the despair felt by prophet and thinker over the insoluble problem presented by the evil fate of the good and the triumphant success of the wicked; and a solution was sought in the doctrine of a Messianic kingdom, until Christianity with its proclamation of a future life set ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... from the leaves and dissolved in the water; and as a second feature of the fermentation the soluble material is changed in its chemical nature into indigo proper. As this change occurs the characteristic blue colour is developed, and the material is rendered insoluble in water. It therefore makes its appearance as a blue mass separated from the water, and is then ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... a drunken man. The spaniel barked his respectable disapproval. In his long life of eighteen months he had seen many people, postmen and butcher boys and casual diggers in kitchen gardens, whose apparent permit to exist in Drane's Court had been an insoluble puzzle; but never had he seen so outrageous a trespasser. With unparalleled moral courage he told him exactly what he thought of him. But the trespasser did not hear. He kept on advancing. Miss Winwood rose, disgusted, and drew herself up. The ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... was the man, who, in a few years, had unravelled more apparently insoluble mysteries, and caused the arrest of more hitherto evasive scoundrels, than his predecessors had managed to secure in a decade. The name of Gimblet was known and detested wherever a coiner carried on ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... natural development of human thought; elaborate ceremonial institutions being shown to have come after the ruder beginnings of religious development instead of before them. Thus came a new impulse to research, and the fruitage was abundant; the older theological interpretation, with its insoluble puzzles, yielded on ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... from accepting the conventional orthodoxy of Dante which, referring all human action to the simple formula of purgatory, heaven, and hell, leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths of Dante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of the donor, Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit or discredit of attracting some shadow of ecclesiastical censure. This Matteo ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... rolled towards my bonnet; the Vicar smiled, and bent his head in a courtly little bow, which said much without the banality of words. The Squire had no expression! Whether he approved, disapproved, or furiously disliked, he remained insoluble as the Sphinx. Oh, some day—somehow—some one—I hope, will wake him into life, and whoever she is, may she shake him well up, and ride rough-shod over him for a long, long time before she gives in! ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... was now one pressing and immediate problem to be solved—how to keep Buisson-Souef as his own without paying for it? To one less sanguine, less daring, less impudent and desperate in his need, the problem would have appeared insoluble. ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... cannoneers wrought havoc on the plateau and amid the breastworks. The sound was enormous, a complex tumult that crashed and echoed in the head. The whole of the field existed in the throbbing, expanded brain—all battlefields, all life, all the world and other worlds, all problems solved and insoluble. The wide-flung grey battlefront was now sickle-shaped, convex to the foe. The rolling dense smoke flushed momently with a lurid glare. In places the forest was afire, in others the stubble of the field. From horn to horn of the sickle galloped the riderless horses. Now and ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... thus evincing the profoundest of all infidelity—the fear lest the truth be bad. On the other hand, the sincere man of science, content to follow wherever the evidence leads him, becomes by each new inquiry more profoundly convinced that the Universe is an insoluble problem. Alike in the external and the internal worlds, he sees himself in the midst of ceaseless changes, of which he can discover neither beginning nor end. If, tracing back the evolution of things, he allows ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... one insoluble problem is——, given a good and perfect God, where does sorrow come from, and why is there any pain? Men have fumbled at that knot for all the years that there have been men in the world, and they have not untied it yet. They have tried to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... even another Milton. The world is devoted to physical science, because it believes these discoveries will increase its capacity of luxury and self-indulgence. But the pursuit of science leads only to the insoluble. When we arrive at that barren term, the Divine voice summons man, as it summoned Samuel; all the poetry and passion and sentiment of human nature are taking refuge in religion; and he, whose deeds and words most nobly represent Divine thoughts, ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... have already become evident what abstruse and insoluble questions present themselves—rise, as it were, like ghosts of many an ancient creed, on every side, as soon as we have crossed the threshold of this great Mausoleum of human thought and imagination. There is the spectre ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... these monoliths represent? To what distant period do these testimonies of the industry of a race long disappeared, or the recollection of whom has perished, seem to point? This problem must remain for ever insoluble. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... 18 to 37 percent sugars. Accordingly, it has been proposed[107] to extract the caffein with chloroform, and the sugars with acidulated water. The aqueous solution so obtained is then fermented to alcohol. The insoluble portion left after extraction can be used as fuel, and the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... to be thought of, even if the problem of getting goods through to that country in face of the chaos which was rapidly making way in Russia was almost becoming insoluble. The French, like ourselves, were most anxious to afford succour to that stricken kingdom. Amongst other things, they requested us to send off to Moldavia a certain consignment (thirty, I think it ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... which fords the Medway at Rochester, and the Thames at Lambeth and Westminster, or by the trackway we call the Pilgrims' Way along the southern slope of the North Downs, in which case he would have forded the Medway at Aylesford and the Thames at Brentford. The question is insoluble, Caesar himself ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... the cipher extremely difficult to any one even who had the key, but the key was changed every day by a scheme arranged before I left London and known only by the office and myself. My cipher, if used according to the directions, is absolutely insoluble by any patience or experience, and the Fenian boast that they read it was pure "blague." I knew that they had the telegraph in their hands and made my arrangements accordingly. But the secret power of the organization ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... that the Japanese builders of the past had to face in the erection of a few of the great temples which still adorn the country have proved insoluble to many European engineers and architects. The erection and support of the magnificent pagoda at Nikko is an example in point. Dr. Dresser has referred to this and pointed out what he deemed a great waste of material in connection therewith. He failed to understand for what reason ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... other puzzling facts remained insoluble until the publication, in the year 1840, of Mr. Darwin's famous work on coral reefs; in which a key was given to all the difficult problems connected with the subject, and every difficulty was shown to be capable of solution by deductive reasoning from a happy combination ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... sitting thus in the silence. The answer to my silent question may come to me in the most commonplace way days or weeks after it is asked. Some person may say something that will be the very clue I am seeking. We are not to be anxious or troubled if many questions perplex us, or many problems seem insoluble, but wait, trusting that 'he is faithful who promised.' We must not be wishing for the same signs or powers that others have, but appreciate what is given to us, for faithfulness shall receive its full reward in due time 'if we ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... thrones of monarchies. Equality here was not a name; it was a reality. Riches were not persecuted, because they were not envied. Here those problems connected with the labours of a working class, hitherto insoluble above ground, and above ground conducing to such bitterness between classes, were solved by a process the simplest,—a distinct and separate working class was dispensed with altogether. Mechanical inventions, constructed on the principles that baffled ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... declared at least a score of times every day that she could not understand how this dreadful affair had come to pass. The most complete explanation from her daughter availed nothing; she deemed the event an insoluble mystery, and, in familiar talk with Mrs. Mumford, breathed singular charges against Louise's lover. 'She's shielding him, my dear. I've no doubt of it. I never had a very good opinion of him, but now ...
— The Paying Guest • George Gissing
... many countries is found in great abundance, from its adhesive property, and its retaining its form when dry, and becoming insoluble in water after having been baked in the fire, would naturally attract the attention of an improving people: from this it arises that the early remains of culinary and other vessels which have been discovered have been formed of this material. Among the remains of ancient ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... above as consisting of a multitude of little cells or vesicles, having an envelope, insoluble in water, formed of a kind of organized membrane, and containing within it a substance which is soluble in water, termed amidin. This soluble material is the nutritive element on which the young ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various
... dots did not reappear, and they turned their minds once more to their great problem, which seemed as insoluble as ever. The flowing of the current, gentle but deep and strong, swung the Independence a little further from the two lines of boats, but those on board, in their absorption, did not notice it. Three or four minutes passed, and there was the report of a rifle shot from the southern ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... oars. The reason for this was that the French fleet was a mixed one, the sailing division having been reinforced by a squadron of galleys from the Mediterranean. The elaborate attempts to combine the two types tactically—a problem which the Italian admirals had hitherto found insoluble—points to an advanced study of the naval art that is entirely ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... various desert spots of Palestine; he unlocks the springs of Jordan, and in another passage of the life of Christ she adds that it was he who taught the Hebrews the culture of wheat and of the vine. In fact, she throws no light on this insoluble enigma." ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... in the book, the chart, the lever, the crystal, the crucible, the plane, the hammer. The intention of this picture has been disputed, but the best explanation of it is that which regards the woman as pondering on the humanly unsolved and insoluble mystery of the sin and ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... colossal advertisements across the Hudson, at the freight trains below; I gazed upon the lordly Hudson itself, that majestic sewer which drains the Empire State, bearing within its resistless flood millions of tons of insoluble matter from that magic fairyland which we call "up-state," to the sea. And, thinking of disposal plants, I thought of that sublime paraphrase—"From the Mohawk to the Hudson, and from the ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... of course, the explosion of a great independent body, not originally revolving about a superior center of gravitational force, would not result in the formation of a ring of small bodies, but rather of a dispersed mass of them. But back of any speculation of this kind lies the problem, at present insoluble: How could the explosion be produced? (See the question of explosions in ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... warm. This cement remains fluid when cold, and dries quickly. After the ring has become set, or stiff, the whole slide is immersed for a minute or so in a 10-grain solution of bichromate of potash, and is then allowed to dry, exposed to the light, which makes the bichromated gelatine perfectly insoluble, even in boiling water, and thoroughly prevents the escape ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... problems ever intertwined, Close home, elusive, present, baffled, grappled. By each successive age insoluble, pass'd on, To ours to-day—and we ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... much concerning feminine conceit when we ask how a man could have altered the inclination of a woman whose equal he in no sense was. It is not necessary in such cases to fuss about the insoluble riddle of the female heart and about the ever-dark secrets of the feminine soul. Vulpes vult fraudem, lupus agnum, femina laudem—this illuminates every profundity. The man in question knew how to make use of laudem—he knew how to excite feminine conceit, and so vanquished others who were ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... speculative writers was how to reconcile the Absolute of philosophy, who is above all distinctions,[40] with the God of religion, who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. They could not allow that evil has a substantial existence apart from God, for fear of being entangled in an insoluble Dualism. But if evil is derived from God, how can God be good? We shall find that the prevailing view was that "Evil has no substance." "There is nothing," says Gregory of Nyssa, "which falls outside of the ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... proximate cause of the formation of the calculous concretions of the kidneys, and of chalk-stones in the gout, and of the insoluble concretions of coagulable lymph, which are found on membranes, which have been inflamed in peripneumony, or rheumatism, consists in the too great action of the absorbent vessels of those parts; yet the remote cause in these cases is probably owing to the inflammation of the membranes; which ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... toward the point of excitement, even the central tentacles, which are motionless when themselves charged, now responding to the call. The inflection which follows mechanical irritation or the presence of any inorganic or insoluble body is transient; that which follows the application of organic matter lasts longer, more or less, according to its nature and the amount; but sooner or later the tentacles resume their former position, their glands glisten ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... Using Carbonate of Lime (Figs 2, 3, and 10)—When chalk is acted upon by sulphuric acid, there is formed an insoluble sulphate which, by covering the chalk, prevents the action of the acid from continuing if care be not taken to constantly agitate the materials. This has led to a change in the arrangement of the generator in the apparatus designed for the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... eyes it becomes distinctly visible.[dd] That ordinary black pencil-marks will endure on paper for two centuries may very likely be doubted by many readers, but without reason. Plumbago-marks, if not removed by rubbing, are even more durable than ink; because plumbago is an organic, insoluble substance, not subject to the chemical changes which moisture, the atmosphere, and fluids accidentally spilled, and solvents purposely applied, make in the various kinds of ink which are known to us. The writer discovered this in the course of many ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... is a vast one but this is no reason why it should be looked upon as insoluble, or left to grow year by year still vaster and ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... Seamew's island, all trace of them vanished. At no station along the line could we gain any news of them. Their maid had left the inn the same morning with their luggage, and we tracked her to Inverness; but there the trail stopped short, no spoor lay farther. It was a most singular and insoluble mystery. ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... all the great questions, more or less insoluble, which the study of fossil organic bodies can offer, were raised and even discussed by the celebrated professor of Goettingen as early as 1803, before anything of the sort could have arisen from the essays of M. G. Cuvier; the errors of distribution in the classes ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... The problem is insoluble. The body is harnessed to a brain. Beauty goes hand in hand with stupidity. There she sat staring at the fire as she had stared at the broken mustard-pot. In spite of defending indecency, Jacob doubted whether he liked it in the raw. He had a violent ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... the insoluble problems of life, but having presented them as powerfully, perhaps, as is possible for human intelligence, he turned in his last period, of only two or three years, to the expression of the serene ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... it came about that, within three months of his extraordinary accident, Mr. Fenwick was comfortably settled in an apartment within a few minutes' walk of Krakatoa Villa; and all the incidents of his original appearance were getting merged in the insoluble, and would soon, no doubt, under the influence of a steady ever-present new routine of life, be completely absorbed in ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... not understand you, Rebecca. You—you yourself and your whole conduct—are an insoluble riddle to me. I am free now—both in my soul and my circumstances. You are absolutely in touch with the goal you set before yourself from the ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... of good and evil is insoluble by universal suffrage. It is not given to a ballot to make the false true, or injustice just. Human conscience is not to be put to ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... grey and very mysterious, the moored, ice-blocked barges silent and deserted, and here and there a lit window shone warm. The sun sank right out of sight into a bank of blue, and the Surrey side dissolved in mist save for a few insoluble, spots of yellow light, that presently became many. And after our lovers had come under Charing Cross Bridge the Houses of Parliament rose before them at the end of a great crescent of golden lamps, blue and faint, halfway between the earth ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... A two fluid porous cup battery with carbon negative plate, zinc positive plate, and mercury sulphate, a nearly insoluble salt, as depolarizer and excitant. Mercurous or mercuric sulphates have been used in it. Its electromotive force is 1.5 volts. The local action and waste, owing to the slight solubility of the mercury compounds, is very slight. If used on close circuit it becomes polarized. It is also subject ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... carried to a successful issue that difficult case in the family of the Sultan of Mingrelia (you will observe that I use a fictitious name). I can assure you, Lord Embleton, that polygamy presents problems almost insoluble; problems ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... a half-idiotic creature with a vague, staring gaze she would not bate a centime of the prices fixed by her brother. In the intervals of business she did the work of the house, and solved the apparently insoluble problem—how to live on "the mists of the Seine." The Remonencqs' diet consisted of bread and herrings, with the outside leaves of lettuce or vegetable refuse selected from the heaps deposited in the kennel before the doors of eating-houses. The two between them did not spend more than fivepence ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... laboratory on the response of matter, and the unexpected revelations in plant life, have opened out very extended regions of inquiry in physics, in physiology, in medicine, in agriculture, and even in psychology. Problems hitherto regarded as insoluble have now been brought within ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... effects of poisons by a chemical union, forming an insoluble compound, or a mild, harmless one. Alkaline solutions are antidotes for the mineral acids; as soap in solution, a simple remedy, and always at hand. Lard, magnesia, and oil are antidotes for poisoning by arsenic; albumen,—in ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... support, he brought down the hanging his mother had knitted, which covered the inner as well as the outer walls of the hall. This he flung upon the snorers, and then applying the crooked stakes, he knotted and bound them up in such insoluble intricacy, that not one of the men beneath, however hard he might struggle, could contrive to rise. After this he set fire to the palace. The flames spread, scattering the conflagration far and wide. It enveloped the whole dwelling, destroyed the palace, and burnt them all while ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... mysterious features about it," said the inspector. "But I do not regard them as insoluble. Nothing is insoluble," he added, ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... defeated at Chancellorsville, Hooker soon recovered control of the Army of the Potomac and prepared to dispute Lee's right of way. Lee faced a difficult, perhaps an insoluble, problem. Longstreet urged him to relieve the local pressure on Vicksburg by concentrating every available man in eastern Tennessee, not only withdrawing Johnston's force from Grant's rear but also depleting the Confederates ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... force in the germ manifests itself, in the plant, in the conversion of the insoluble starch of the seed into sugar, and in an additional change of a part of that sugar so as to set at liberty a large amount of carbon, which, uniting with the oxygen of the air, forms carbonic acid, and this process ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... fact that the majority is more good than mean, and that from this may be developed the strength of the whole. In the clutch, the men at Cape Sabine who believed in the word "duty," and who understood spiritually that its first meaning was mutual responsibility, remained joined in an insoluble union. That was the inevitable outcome, leadership doing its part. The minority had no basis for organic solidarity, as each of its number was motivated only by self-interest. Goodwill and weakness may be combined in one man; bad will and strength in another. High moral leading can lift the ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... on the sea-coast very striking. It is identity,—not mere resemblance. In most cases the organic substances undergo great changes in the bowels of the earth. The animal matter of the Caithness ichthyolites exists, for instance, as a hard, black, insoluble bitumen, which I have used oftener than once as sealing-wax; the vegetable mould of the Coal Measures has been converted into a fire-clay, so altered in the organic pabulum, animal and vegetable, whence it derived its fertility, that, even when laid open for years to the meliorating ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... entire fluid, appeared to be a perfect and durable ink. Lastly, a portion of the infusion of galls was kept for some time at the boiling temperature, by means of which a part of its contents became insoluble; this was removed by filtration, when, by the addition of the sulphate of iron, a very perfect and durable ink was produced. In the above three processes I conceive that a considerable part of the mucilage, the tan, and the extract, were respectively removed from the infusion, while ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... aside and belittled as if they were denied the common human experiences. They too wish to climb steep stairs and to eat their bread with tears, and they imagine that the problems of existence which so press upon them in pensive moments would be less insoluble in the light ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... but merely an hallucination. Such an appearance can, prima facie, suggest no reasonable inference as to the continued existence of the dead. On the other hand, the new studies have raised the perhaps insoluble question, 'Do not hallucinations of the sane, representing the living, coincide more frequently than mere luck can account for, with the death or other crisis of the person apparently seen?' If this could be proved, then there would seem to be a causal nexus, a relation ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... the plasterer as whitening. Here is a large jar containing this whitening and water, and I have here some strong sulphuric acid, which is the acid you might have to use if you were to make these experiments (only, in using this acid with limestone, the body that is produced is an insoluble substance, whereas the muriatic acid produces a soluble substance that does not so much thicken the water). And you will seek out a reason why I take this kind of apparatus for the purpose of shewing this experiment. I do it because ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday
... None, or worse. He once officially put these learned Associates upon ascertaining for him "Why Champagne foamed?" They, with a hidden vein of pleasantry, required "material to experiment upon." Friedrich Wilhelm sent them a dozen, or certain dozens; and the matter proved insoluble to this day. No King, scarcely any man, had less of reverence for the Sciences so called; for Academic culture, and the art of the Talking-Schoolmaster in general! A King obtuse to the fine Arts, especially to the vocal Arts, in a high degree. Literary ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... reaction against, the violent folly for which Nero stood the symbol; but it certainly was not philosophical considerations of this kind that led the Roman authorities to rage against the Christians. The problem, I repeat, is insoluble. However this may be, the Christians were declared responsible for the fire; a great number were taken into custody, sentenced to death, executed in different ways, during the festivals that Nero offered to the people to appease them. Possibly Paul himself ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... the age of thirty the face of a woman is a book written in a foreign tongue, which one may still translate in spite of all the feminisms of the idiom; but on passing her fortieth year a woman becomes an insoluble riddle; and if any one can see through an old woman, it ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... calcareous clay when placed in acid effervesces vigorously, but when allowed to stand the effervescence ceases in a few minutes and the insoluble ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... afforded a number of questions for solution, some of which I have cleared up and embodied in the plates; a few are I believe insoluble. I have also been able to add a few wholly new points, not indicated by ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... I should think, about as catholic as receptions could be. Margaret found herself with a weekly houseful of insoluble problems in intercourse. One did one's best, but one got a nightmare feeling as ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... called "whiteness," or whether white things are to be defined as those having a certain kind of similarity to a standard thing, say freshly fallen snow, is a question which need not concern us, and which I believe to be strictly insoluble. For our purposes, we may take the word "white" as denoting a certain set of similar particulars or collections of particulars, the similarity being in respect of a static ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... microscope tells us that the contents of the white cells are composed of very fine, opaque grains, insoluble in water and of greater density. The use of chemical reagents on the object-slide proves that nitric acid dissolves these grains, with effervescence and without leaving the least residue, even when they are still enclosed in their vesicles. On the other hand, the true fatty cells suffer in no ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... forming from period to period, in endless succession, new kinds of universes, each abounding in hitherto unimagined modes of life and degrees of bliss? To our present faculties, with only our present opportunities and data, the final problem of being is insoluble. We resolve the properties of matter into methods of activity, manifestations of force. But there, covered with alluring awe, a wall of impenetrable mystery confronts us with its baffling "Thus far, and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... all the captains of industry in England had a soul in them such as yours. The look of England is to me at this moment abundantly ominous, the question of capital and labour growing ever more anarchic, insoluble altogether by the notions hitherto applied to it—pretty sure to issue in petroleum one day, unless some other gospel than that of the 'Dismal Science' come to illuminate it. Two things are pretty sure to me. The first is that capital and labour ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... second assistant waiter boys took our shoes and we disposed ourselves on the sofas, Tanno in the place of honor, I rejoicing again that his presence had solved, acceptably to all the rest, the otherwise insoluble problem of to whom I should accord ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... sense. Thus Fr. haricot[145] is connected by him with Lat. faba, a bean, via the conjectural "forms" *fabarius, *fabaricus, *fabaricotus, *faricotus, *haricotus, a method to which no problem is insoluble.[146] He suggests that Fr. geindre, or gindre,[147] baker's man, comes from Lat. gener, son-in-law, because the baker's man always marries the baker's daughter; but this practice, common though it may be, is not of sufficiently unfailing regularity to constitute a philological ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... of sulphur in insoluble sulphates, for the determination of copper in copper ores by iodometric methods, for the determination of iron by permanganate in hydrochloric acid solutions, and for the standardization of potassium permanganate solutions using sodium oxalate as a standard, and of thiosulphate ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... in the absolute should involve as a necessary moment in its self-maintenance the self-assertion of the finite minds, a self-assertion which in its extreme form is error,—he calls this problem, I say, an insoluble puzzle. If truth be the universal fons et origo, how does error slip in? 'The coherence theory of truth,' he concludes, 'may thus be said to suffer shipwreck at the very entrance of the harbor.'[12] Yet ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... cure our young students of their present ludicrous impression that what is simple, in English, is knowing, in Greek; and that terms constructed out of a dead language will explain difficulties which remained insoluble in a living one. But Greek is not yet dead: while if we carry our unscholarly nomenclature much further, English soon will be; and then doubtless botanical gentlemen at Athens will for some time think it fine to describe what we used ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... exhausted a man on whose decision important executive acts, dealing really with a state of revolution, were always depending. All through the second year, as it seemed to me, he was overwhelmed by a growing sense of a monstrous and insoluble problem, to which no one, through nearly another forty years—not Mr. Gladstone with his Home Rule Acts, as we were soon to see, nor Mr. Balfour's wonderful brain-power sustained by a unique temperament—was to find the true key. It is not found yet. Twenty years ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Booker Washington is working. The English have had a wide experience of native races in all parts of the world and they have not yet found the problem of living with them and of holding at least their respect, together with some measure of their active good-will, anywhere insoluble. To an Englishman it does not seem that it should be insoluble in the United States. He is rather inclined to think that the rapidity with which the negro of the South would work out his economic salvation, if once the political ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... of ceaseless questioning of the human heart, had yielded no results, then, at least, the lesson of their failure and defeat remained for the instruction of future generations. Either the problems they sought to solve were proved to be insoluble, or their methods of solution were found to be inadequate; for here the mightiest minds had grappled with the great problems of being and of destiny. Here vigorous intellects had struggled to pierce the darkness which ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... &c. (hard) 323; knotted, knotty; gnarled; crystalline, crystallizable; thick, grumous|, stuffy. undissolved, unmelted[obs3], unliquefied[obs3], unthawed[obs3]. indivisible, indiscerptible[obs3], infrangible[obs3], indissolvable[obs3], indissoluble, insoluble, infusible. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... that has proved a weakness and a strength to it: a weakness because embarrassed with subtle, complicated, insoluble questions wherein mankind will always be involved, it was forced to engage in endless discussions wherein the bad or feeble reasons advanced by this or that votary compromised the whole work; a strength because whoever brings a rule of life is practically compelled to support it ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... himself beaten: there was absolutely no flaw in the alibi. And since his duty to his journal obviously forbade his wasting time on insoluble mysteries, he ceased to frequent Granice, who dropped back into a deeper isolation. For a day or two after his visit to Allonby he continued to live in dread of Dr. Stell. Why might not Allonby have ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... earth and the fruits of the earth belong to all men and yet a few of them have turned tiger or dog or jackal and snatched what is precious for themselves while their fellows starve and freeze. Insoluble as are the dilemmas he propounded and tense and unrelieved as his accusations were, he stood in his methods nearer, say, to the humane Millet than to the angry Zola. There is a clear, high splendor about his landscapes; youth and love on his desolate plains, as well as anywhere, can find glory ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... regents had only summoned a united jury to give evidence of their constituents' readiness to grant certain sums of money. In reality the new scheme was sure to take root, because it held out a hope of getting rid of a constitutional difficulty which had hitherto proved insoluble—the difficulty, that is to say, of weakening the king's power to do evil without establishing baronial anarchy in its place. It was certain that the representatives of the freeholders in the counties would not use their influence for the ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... whether it was accident or intention which made Balzac so frequently combine early and late work in the same volume. The question is certainly insoluble, and perhaps not worth solving, but it presents itself once more in the present instance. L'Illustre Gaudissart is a story of 1832, the very heyday of Balzac's creative period, when even his pen could hardly keep up with the abundance of his fancy and the gathered stores of his minute observation. ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... bilobed structure on either side of the windpipe. Like the thymus it is a ductless gland, abundantly supplied with blood-vessels, and possesses a vast number of small cavities, lined with cells and containing an insoluble jelly. So far as appears, both these glands are useless, or nearly so, to man; or if the thyroid performs any useful service it is a minor and obscure one. Such functions as it may have could probably be performed by some of the ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... analysis we observe that the nitrogenous matter is to the carbonaceous in the proportion of one-sixth, which is the composition of a perfect food. Besides taking part in this composition, the bran, being in a great measure insoluble, passes in bulk through the bowels, assisting daily laxation—a most important consideration. If wheat is such a perfect food, it must follow that wholemeal bread must be best for our daily use. That such is the case, evidence on every side shows; those who eat it are healthier, ...
— The Allinson Vegetarian Cookery Book • Thomas R. Allinson
... plastic, ductile, and malleable under the action of humid heat. Mixed with suberine, cerine and resin give cork its insolubility and inalterability. These substances are soluble in alcohol and ether, but insoluble in water. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... various articles should be filled in with some insoluble and neutral substance, to prevent corrosion, or the infiltration of water and consequent damage to the plates. Then, the entrance to the chamber being securely sealed, permanent records should be made in many places and in various ways, setting ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis"—had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... mortality or the immortality of the soul does not divide them so clearly; because such a question is entirely insoluble; and a vivid consciousness of its insolubility accompanies all argument. The question of race does not divide them so clearly; because both with regard to race and with regard to class the division is very largely a superficial thing, dependent upon public opinion and upon group-consciousness ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... not altogether cheat that common sadness of the new time, that memory, and insoluble riddle of the countless lives that had stumbled and failed in pain and darkness before ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... education, for a Political Reformation in this matter, as well as such means of defence as will meantime counterbalance the existing impulse to aggression. To concentrate on either half to the exclusion of the other half is to render the whole problem insoluble. ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... etc., with more or less speed. A rubber gas mask lasts about an hour. Glass first frosts and then disappears. Plastics act like rubber, only a little slower. The heavy metals, iron, nickel, copper, monel, etc., stand up well, forming an insoluble coat of fluorides at first ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... they fell back upon 'by Beelzebub'; and they thereby admitted that humanity without something more at the back of it never made such a man as that. And I beg you to lay that to heart. It is very easy to solve an insoluble problem if you begin by taking all the insoluble elements out of it. And that is how a great deal of modern thinking does with Christianity. Knock out all the miracles; pooh-pooh all Christ's claims; say nothing about Incarnation; declare Resurrection to be entirely ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... and fusion is easily illustrated: a lump of sugar heated over a candle-flame melts or fuses; suspended in water it dissolves. Many substances which are insoluble or infusible of themselves, become soluble or fusible when mixed with certain others; thus, in this way, solution is got with the aid of reagents, and fusion with the help of fluxes. For example, lead is insoluble in water, but if nitric acid ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... that there are trivialities which might deserve (here is an example) "to line a box," or to curl some maiden's locks, that there are weaknesses of thought, that the poet now speaks of himself as a linnet, singing "because it must," now dares to approach questions insoluble, and again declines their solution. What is all this but the changeful mood of grief? The singing linnet, like the bird in the old English heathen apologue, dashes its light wings painfully against the walls of the chamber into which ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang |
