"Superincumbent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... originally as a sepulchre. These structures presuppose a larger amount of architectural skill; still more so the gigantic portals of Stonehenge, which are formed by two pillars of equal height, joined by a superincumbent stone. Here weight alone was no longer considered sufficient for imparting strength and safety, but holes were worked in the upper stones, and the pointed tops of the pillars were fitted into them. In the slabs that ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... be due, as Mr. Scrope has suggested, to the exact proportion between the expansive and repressive forces; the expansive force arising from the generation of a certain amount of aqueous vapour and of elastic gas; the repressive, from the pressure of the atmosphere and from the weight of the superincumbent volcanic products. Steam is here, as in a steam-engine, not the originating agent in the phenomena recorded; but the result of water coming in contact with molten lava constantly welling up from the interior, by which it is converted into steam, which from time to time acquires sufficient elastic ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... become a powerful means of effect, as in the splendid close of Fayrfax's Mass Albanus quoted by Professor Wooldridge on page 320 in the second volume of the Oxford History of Music. Here the tenor part ought to be sung by a body of voices that can be distinctly heard through the glowing superincumbent harmony; and then the effect of its five steps of sequence in a melodious figure of nine semibreves will reveal itself as the principle which gives the passage consistency of drift and finality ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... on examination that a space had been cleared out under the cargo, and filled with straw and shavings and other light matter. This had caused the smoke, though until the bales above it had been removed the flames were kept down. When the superincumbent bales were lifted off, the flames quickly rose up; but the material which fed them being light, had speedily burned out before they had time to ignite the surrounding cargo, which, fortunately being very tightly packed, did not easily catch fire. A thorough examination ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... hands were struggling with stones and earth, foremost among them Alexis White. The utmost care was needful to prevent the superincumbent weight from falling in and crushing the life there certainly was beneath, happily not the rock from above, but some of the debris of the stable. Frank Stebbing and the foreman had to drive back anxious crowds, and keep ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... splinter of wood, which, when it is not in use, is stuck in her hair. She may speak to nobody but her mother; indeed nobody else would think of coming near her. At evening she lays hold of the two digging-sticks and by their help frees herself from the superincumbent weight of sand and returns to the camp. Next morning she is again buried in the sand under the shade of the tree and remains there again till evening. This she does daily for five days. On her return at evening on the fifth day her mother decorates her with a waist-band, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... over cities built on the ridges, sides, and foot of the parent mountain-chain, and far beyond the extreme bounds of these cities, for miles over and parallel with the sea, at a height which from the lower cities makes the superincumbent mass rarely distinguishable from the illuminated ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... the idea of a garden floating on a bed of rushes; and that is capillary attraction, which would raise particles of water, one by one, among the fibres of the rushes until the frail raft on which the earth rested was saturated; and still pressing upward, the busy drops would penetrate the superincumbent earth, moistening and adding to the specific gravity of the garden by filling the porous earth until it became too heavy to float, ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... of the abyss should be broken up, and the solid Earth submerged, I am not concerned to explain:—nor how it had come to pass that from a world of seas and continents, it had become a watery ball, wrapped about with superincumbent vapour:—nor how the blessed sunlight had suffered dire eclipse;—so that the Earth revolved in a horror of great darkness. My faith however is not troubled,—nor even perplexed,—by the strangeness ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... foggy; but whether it was this or something else, certain it is, that he felt himself more than usually overpowered. The air oppressed him like a leaden shroud, and the energies of his soul seemed for once on the point of sinking beneath the superincumbent burden. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... or lintels are, therefore, thrown from pier to pier, and a level preparation for carrying the real roof is made above them. After we have examined the structure of piers, therefore, we shall have to see how lintels or arches are thrown from pier to pier, and the whole prepared for the superincumbent roof; this arrangement being universal in all good architecture prepared for vertical pressures: and we shall then examine the condition of the great roof itself. And because the structure of the roof very often introduces certain lateral pressures which ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin |
