"Cumulative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... past, not by ambitious schemes of sudden and universal reform (which the sagacious man always suspects, just as he suspects all schemes for returning a fabulously large interest upon investments), but by the gradual and cumulative efforts of innumerable individuals, each doing something to help or instruct those to whom his influence extends. He who makes two clear ideas grow where there was only one hazy one before, is the true benefactor of ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... must assume that God is (Strong). It is said of the beautiful, "It may be shown, but not proved." So we say of the existence of God. These arguments are probable, not demonstrative. For this reason they supplement each other, and constitute a series of evidences which is cumulative in its nature. Though taken singly, none of them can be considered absolutely decisive, they together furnish a corroboration of our primitive conviction of God's existence, which is of great practical value, and is in itself sufficient to bind the moral actions ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... incredible, now, that she had ever deceived herself into thinking that Ditmar meant to marry her, that he loved her enough to make her his wife. Nor was it necessary to summon and marshal incidents to support this view, they came of themselves, crowding one another, a cumulative and appalling array of evidence, before which she stood bitterly amazed at her former stupidity. And in the events of yesterday, which she pitilessly reviewed, she beheld a deliberate and prearranged plan for her ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... contracting parties inevitably weakened it. The affiliations of the Russian aristocracy with the Austrian; the smart of both under the Continental System, which rendered their agriculture unprofitable; England's stand under Castlereagh; the Oldenburg question—all these were cumulative in their effect. With Alexander, Poland and the Continental System were the real difficulties; the marriage question was only secondary. On January twelfth, 1812, the Czar with mournful and solemn mien declared ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Argonauts is only one story, after all, and these tales of Harte's are but so many facets of the same gem. They are not, however, like chapters in a romance; there is no such vital connection between them as develops a cumulative force. We are no more impressed after reading half a dozen of them than after the first; they are variations of the same theme. They discover to us no new truth about human nature; they only show us certain human beings so placed as to act out their ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... like her rewards, are cumulative. Because her sentences against evil works are not executed speedily, therefore the hearts of the sons of men are fully set in them to do evil. But the sentence always is executed, sooner or later, and that inexorably. Your son, O unthinking mother! may fall by the way in the full prime of his ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... and look facts resolutely in the face. I sometimes wonder whether the influence or emanation from the sick-room at times affects me as it did the others—the Detective, for instance. Of course it may be that if it is anything chemical, any drug, for example, in vaporeal form, its effects may be cumulative. But then, what could there be that could produce such an effect? The room is, I know, full of mummy smell; and no wonder, with so many relics from the tomb, let alone the actual mummy of that animal which Silvio attacked. By the way, I am going ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... much; but I do not know that he suspected I had lived beyond the ordinary span of life. There are a good many traditions about this visit of Moses, some of which are extant at the present day; but these, of course, are the result of what might be called cumulative imagination. Many of them are of Moslem origin, and the great Arabian historian Tabari has ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... trouble, to quote the old adage that "prevention is better than cure." Many people laugh at wettings, and some foolish young ones even seek exposure. We would impress upon all such that the effects of exposure may be, and often are, cumulative: that is, you may escape any direct effect for years, and then find your recklessness end in rheumatism for the rest of your life. Let care, then, be taken to avoid wettings, unless these lie in the way of duty. Change clothes as speedily as possible when they are wet, and encourage the skin to ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... could be said for such an hypothesis? Here, probably, is its charm, and its strong hold upon the speculative mind. Unproven though it be, and cumbered prima facie with cumulative improbabilities as it proceeds, yet it singularly accords with great classes of facts otherwise insulated and enigmatic, and explains many things which are thus far utterly inexplicable upon ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... before the rejoicings were ended and all had passed in procession. Canale surpasses himself here, for he loved State ceremonies; he gives a paragraph to the advance of each gild, its salutation and withdrawal, and the cumulative effect of all the paragraphs is enchanting, like a prose ballade, with a repeated refrain at the ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... hope the amendment will not be adopted. It is not necessary to the sense of the article. It is cumulative in its effect. We have expressly excluded the Cherokee grant, lest we might seem to overrule the Cherokee treaty by a provision ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... situation. He relies upon von Holst instead of the documents, then misquotes him on a point of essential chronology, and from unwarranted assumptions and erroneous and incomplete data draws unreliable conclusions. Before this letter of February 24 and the new cumulative evidence of the crisis, there falls to the ground the sneer in Mr. Lodge's question, "if [Webster's] anxiety was solely of a public nature, why did it date from March 7 when, prior to that time, there was much greater cause for alarm than afterwards?" ...
— Webster's Seventh of March Speech, and the Secession Movement • Herbert Darling Foster
... power of description, is in the heathen lands. The vastness of the numbers there, the utter ignorance, the smallness of their chance of getting any of the knowledge and uplift of the Gospel, all go to spell out that word "greatest." The awful cumulative power of sin, unchecked by the common moral standards of life, with the terrific momentum of centuries; the common temptations known to us, but with a fierceness and subtlety wholly unknown to us in Christian lands—and yet how ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... cunning he had quickly enlisted Madame de Tecle in his interest. From that moment the realization of his ambitious dreams seemed assured, for he was not ignorant of the incomparable value of woman's assistance, and knew all the power of that secret and continued labor, of those small but cumulative efforts, and of those subterranean movements which assimilate feminine influence with the secret and irresistible forces of nature. Another point gained-he had established a secret between that pretty woman ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... poppy and of hashish. They lend a peculiar charm to his poems, but it is not worth while to try to construct a philosophy out of them. The knowledge, if knowledge it be, of the mystic is not transmissible. It is not cumulative; it begins and ends with the solitary dreamer, and the next who follows him has to build his own cloud-castle as if it were the first aerial edifice that a human ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Rather it is marked by the balancing of phrases or of ideas, so that it runs in couplets or in triplets throughout. In the Psalms there is always a balance of clauses. They are sometimes adversative; sometimes they are simply cumulative. Take several instances from the 119th Psalm, each a complete stanza of Hebrew poetry; (verse 15) "I will meditate in thy precepts, and have respect unto thy ways"; or this (verse 23), "Princes also did sit and speak against me: but thy servant ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... gives to copyright owners—the exclusive rights of reproduction, adaptation, publication, performance, and display—are stated generally in section 106. These exclusive rights, which comprise the so-called "bundle of rights" that is a copyright, are cumulative and may overlap in some cases. Each of the five enumerated rights may be subdivided indefinitely and, as discussed below in connection with section 201, each subdivision of an exclusive right may be ...
— Reproduction of Copyrighted Works By Educators and Librarians • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.
... chargeable as overt acts, any single one of which could have constituted a cause for war, if the Administration was looking for one. But Germany's offenses, viewed singly, were passed over; it was their cumulative force that was providing the momentum ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Cannon his voice, he came. The fount of miracles from drought-dust arose, Amazing even on his Imperial stage, Where marvels lightened through the alternate hours And winged o'er human earth's heroical shone. Into the press of cumulative foes, Across the friendly fields of smoke and rage, A broken structure bore his furious powers; The man no more, the Warrior Chief the same; Match for all rivals; in himself but flame Of an outworn lamp, to illumine nought anon. Yet loud ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... collect into a focus, bring into a focus; amass, accumulate &c (store) 636; collect in a dragnet; heap Ossa upon Pelion. Adj. assembled &c v.; closely packed, dense, serried, crowded to suffocation, teeming, swarming, populous; as thick as hops; all of a heap, fasciculated cumulative. Phr. the plot thickens; acervatim [Lat.]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... organic evolution, and I shall do so by classifying the arguments in a way tending to show their distinct or independent character, and therefore calculated to display the additional force which they acquire from their cumulative nature. ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... swung southward in silence, but suddenly Stefan heaved a great breath. "Nom d'un nom d'un nom d'un vieux bonhomme!" he exploded, voicing in that cumulative expletive his ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... a long, hard fight only to lose in the end, and his son, with full knowledge of the loneliness and discouragement and final hopelessness that had been his father's lot, was passing slowly from sadness to a cumulative anger. That cottage amid its green grounds bright in a patch of sunshine did not help to soften him. It stood on land reclaimed from the forest by his father's labor. It should have belonged to him, and it had passed into hands that already ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... that can only be explained upon the hypothesis that there is a widespread lack of appreciation of the fact that, though they may have an immediate pleasant and agreeable effect upon the body, their injurious effects are cumulative, and are usually ultimate, and so distant as to be difficult of direct connection with their cause to ordinary observation. The more moderate the use of these substances, the more remotely is the effect removed from the cause and more difficult of detection. That the ordinary habitual, so-called ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... lacked variety, not so their cumulative effect upon poor human nature. A change was going on in the travellers that will little commend them to ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... man was more than he could bear. The cumulative force of the reproach of the woman he loved, the confidence of the Viceroy, the rapturous happiness of his best friend, was not to be endured longer. Pleading indisposition, he early begged leave to withdraw ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... real existence of the power of this magic was the first step in the rebuilding of Lady Anstruthers. To realise that the wonderful and yet simple necromancy was gradually encircling her again, had its parallel in the taking of a tonic, whose effect was cumulative. She herself did not realise the working of it. But Betty regarded it with interest. She saw it was good for her, merely to look on at the unpacking of the New York boxes, which the maid, sent for from London, brought down ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... spent 7L. on 'Arcana Coelestia,' so Sir Walter was anxious to go to Egypt to examine the facts of ink-gazing clairvoyance. Kant confesses that each individual ghost-story found him sceptical, whereas the cumulative mass made a ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... Vancouver. "It was an allegory, you know. A hundred years hence people will write a book to explain what Bulwer meant. Vril stands for the cumulative power ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... amusement, not necessarily accompanied by "mere joy or happiness," whilst the latter is to a great extent the outcome of simple, non-intellectual human pleasure. In the case of a witty comedy one hears ripples of laughter rather than waves, and they have no cumulative effect, one may even laugh during a great part of the evening without reaching that agony of laughter which comes from an intensely funny situation—in fact, each laugh at dialogue is to some extent independent of the others. In the ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... Goethe more than any other man of letters—certainly more than any other of the present century—in having done work which is very frequently, if not even commonly, faulty, and in yet requiring that his work shall be known as a whole. His appeal is cumulative; it repeats itself on each occasion with a slight difference, and though there may now and then be the same faults to be noticed, they are almost invariably accompanied, not merely by the same, but by ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... among them being a "village patriarch," suggesting cheap melodrama; a veterinary surgeon, a postman, a village dressmaker and Jinny herself, who "ran" a wagon, and who subsequently fell in love with a rival who tried to drive her out of the business. There were four acts of cumulative hopelessness, and by the time Jinny was ready to get married, the audience seemed just as ready to ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... as though working the thing out for himself, "is enough to convince eleven jurors out of the twelve; now we must make sure of the twelfth. How will we do it? One way is to find the lost bank notes in Thornton's possession. The other way is to get other evidence to add to yours, cumulative evidence all of which will point one way, ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... make. The old man—he permitted himself this indulgence as he never could have in Anne's lifetime, as touching her father—the old man had been square all through. He was as good as they make 'em. But there was nothing for him, Raven, in the concern except its cumulative capacity for making money. He'd no traditional pride in it, as the old man had. He'd worked for all he was worth, to squeeze every drop he could out of it so that his mother—"your grandmother, you know, Dick"—might have every last luxury she wanted. Well, ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... have met in the latest product, how mysteriously the joint characteristics of body and mind have blended, and how unexpected yet how entirely natural a recombination is the result—these points are elaborated with cumulative effect until we realize at last how little we are dealing with an independent unit, how much with a survival and reorganization of what seemed buried in ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... and Rasselas do not easily lend themselves to illustration; the effect they produce is a cumulative effect. Slowly, as we read paper after paper, the mind and character of Johnson take hold of us; what we began with impatience or {198} perhaps with contempt, we put down with respect and admiration. At the end we feel that we ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... a position neither new nor striking, but, like other every-day things, sure to have a cumulative effect that will be felt in the long run: he was held to be a much more substantial man than he really was. And as we are all apt to believe what the world believes about us, it was his habit to ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... teachers as such were sought. The facts are the most authoritative and dependable available, and are the very same upon which the administrative procedure of the school relative to the pupil is mainly dependent. The individual, cumulative records for the pupils provided the chief source of the facts secured. These school records, as might be expected, varied considerably as to the form, the size, the simplicity in stating facts, and the method of filing; but they ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... beneath: the one informed by the light of nature, the other inspired by divine revelation. The light of nature consisteth in the notions of the mind and the reports of the senses; for as for knowledge which man receiveth by teaching, it is cumulative and not original, as in a water that besides his own spring-head is fed with other springs and streams. So then, according to these two differing illuminations or originals, knowledge is first of all divided ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... rivers or stretches of them. Some smaller watercourses, like historic Antietam Creek below Hagerstown, Maryland, have deteriorated under the influence of discharges from single or limited sources, while larger ones suffer from a cumulative waste buildup in areas of concentrated population or industry. Some twenty miles of both industrial and municipal pollution in the South River Branch of the Shenandoah's South Fork below Waynesboro, Virginia, have done ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... system perhaps as astounding as those to which the tides have conducted us. In one respect we may compare these laws of heat with the laws of the tides; they are both alike non-periodic, their effects are cumulative from age to age, and imagination can hardly even impose a limit to the magnificence of the works they can accomplish. Our argument from heat is founded on a very simple matter. It is quite obvious that a heated body tends to grow cold. I am not now speaking ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... not say when," replied Colonel Talbot, somewhat sharply. "It is possible that Harry and I may linger a while in Nashville. They do not need us yet in Charleston, although their tempers are pretty warm. There has been so much fiery talk, cumulative for so many years, that they regard northern men with extremely hostile eyes. It would not take much ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... inspiration. As an influence in my career his marvelous genius is unique. In my own teaching I have only to recall his tone, his playing in his little cottage on the banks of the Meuse which the tide of war has swept away, to realize in a cumulative sense the things he tried to make plain to me then. Ysaye taught the technic of expression as against the expression of technic. He gave the lessons of a thousand teachers in place of the lessons of one. The greatest technical development was required by Ysaye of a pupil; ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... that the root of this plant, when eaten, acts as a powerful stimulant; but the better class among the tribe look upon it with disfavour, as its use often leads to madness and death. The effect of the poison is cumulative, and the Indians under its influence, like the Malays, run amuck and try to ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... now shrewd enough to suspect that I might still be far from the western frontier of America. The evidence had been cumulative but was no longer questionable. I mean to say, one might do here somewhat after the way of our own people at a country house in the shires. I resolved at the first opportunity to have a look at a good map ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... a studied attempt is made to represent the origin of that property as the product of honest toil and great public service. Every searcher for truth is entitled to know whether this is true or not. But what is much more important is for the people to know what have been the cumulative effects of a system which subsists upon the institutions of private property and wage-labor. If it possesses the many virtues that it is said to possess, what are these virtues? If it is a superior order of civilization, in what does ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... The wonderful German syntax seems at its most enigmatical in this sort of literature, and sometimes they lost themselves in its labyrinths completely, and only made their way perilously out with the help of cumulative declensions, past articles and adjectives blindly seeking their nouns, to long-procrastinated verbs dancing like swamp-fires in the distance. They emerged a little less ignorant than they went in, and better qualified ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... government to that place. The result of such a bit of politics would be a marked increase in the present extraordinarily low death rate among government officers and employees, American and Filipino, [515] beginning in about two years, when the cumulative effect of long residence in the lowlands ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... determine his own destiny, may go upward into light, or downward into darkness. Man thus made, when put to trial, failed, followed lower instincts instead of higher, and experienced the awful penalty of sin, namely its cumulative power, the tendency of sin to beget sin, and to make higher choices ever more difficult. Christ, however, the new Adam, has succeeded. He has completely revealed the way of obedience, the way in which spirit conquers ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... Madagascar was another. As the grotesque details of these incredible transactions came out one by one ripples of laughter ran over the closely packed court—each one a little louder than the other. The audience ended by fairly roaring under the cumulative effect of absurdity. The Registrar laughed, the barristers laughed, the reporters laughed, the serried ranks of the miserable depositors watching anxiously every word, laughed like one man. They laughed hysterically—the poor wretches—on ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... not pause. Evidently he was planning to let the force of his exposure be cumulative, until from its sheer momentum ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... up a new world of thought, a new vision of the things that existed about her. The sternest teacher of all had brought to her the knowledge that comes of grief, of terror, and of death, and she had passed beyond her years, just as the cumulative processes of generations made the Indian children pass ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... issuance of the petition of Reuben Searcy and others (March 23d) protesting against the alleged excessive fees taken and injustices practised by Robert (Robin) Jones, the famous lawyer. These disturbances were cumulative in their effect; and the people at last (1765 ) found in George Sims, of Granville, a fit spokesman of their cause and a doughty champion of popular rights. In his "Serious Address to the Inhabitants of Granville County, containing ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... class of men that I have cited have some unknown element in their constitutions that renders them immune. With the second class the power of resistance is great, and can be renewed from time to time by a spell home in a European climate. In the third class the state is that of cumulative poisoning; in the fourth ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... and the higher refinements of life. The Americans are a type of an extremely restless people. They have been so throughout the greater part of their history, and the characteristic is now more marked than ever. It is a fixed condition of their national being, an expression of the cumulative ambition that is the source of their varied progress. Yet from time to time men have arisen among them who not only have given intimate views of a new civilisation, but have added something to the permanent stock of what Matthew Arnold used to call 'the best ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... of amazement passed over me as I looked. I was convinced. There could be no getting away from it. The cumulative proof was overwhelming. The sketch, the photographs, the narrative, and now the actual specimen—the evidence was complete. I said so—I said so warmly, for I felt that the Professor was an ill-used man. He leaned back in his chair with drooping eyelids and a tolerant smile, ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... we had so long been breathing when in the air-chamber, and when we made use of our air-bottles, was very similar to what is popularly known as "laughing-gas"; and undoubtedly we were all more or less experiencing the cumulative effects of the constant mild doses we had inhaled. Laughing-gas acts in a different manner upon persons of different temperaments: some will keep laughing, moderately or immoderately; others will become irritable, angry, or even pugnacious; whilst ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... different interests, calls into activity different muscles or faculties, brings back the spirit of play, recalls the spontaneous and joyous mood, and re-creates through diversion, variety, and the appeal to another side of the nature. To work long and with cumulative power, one must play often and honestly; that is to say, one must play for the ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... merely that the bottom has fallen out of it. It is quite self-evident that scientific men are at war with wilder and more unfathomable fancies than the facts of the age of Huxley. I attempt no controversy about any of the particular cases: it is the cumulative effect of all of them that makes the impression one of common sense. It is really true that the perspective and dimensions of the man's bedroom have altered; the disciples of Einstein will tell him that straight lines are curved and perhaps measure more one way than the other; if ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... corner, and his slippers wait before the empty chair. On one of the vine-clad hills, just without the city walls, one's feet may press the same stairs that Milton climbed to visit Galileo. To an American there is something supremely impressive in this cumulative influence of the past full of inspiration and rebuke, something saddening in this repeated proof that moral supremacy is the only one that leaves monuments and not ruins behind it. Time, who with us obliterates the labor and often ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... would have thought extravagantly lavish. Including those completed by his executors after his death, he printed in all fifty-three books in sixty-five volumes, and this annual output of nine or ten volumes of all sizes, save the duodecimo, which he refused to recognise, gave his work a cumulative force which greatly increased its influence. Had he printed only a few books his press might have been regarded as a rich man's toy, an outbreak of aestheticism in a new place, of no more permanent ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... the wreck and ruin that came upon him in cumulative degree, from year to year, Sutter managed to save, for a period, what is known as Hock farm, a very extensive and valuable estate on the Feather River. This estate he proposed to secure as a resting-place ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... REMEMBERING RESULT.—The results of cultivating the memory under Scientific Management are cumulative. Ultimately, right habits of remembering result that aid the worker automatically so to arrange his memory material as ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... aquiline, and reddish hair that was her cross, because it curled by nature and she constrained it. Sometimes, when it kinked unusually, either in moist weather or because she had forgotten to smooth it, and when the pupils of her eyes enlarged under cumulative excitement, she looked young and impetuously willful; but the times were rare, and perhaps her husband had never, since their courting days, noted any such exhilaration. He was a large, imperious-looking man, with a cascade of silvery beard ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... wages when I employ you, I claim the right to make your necessities a factor in the problem, thus making your misfortunes cumulative. By the law of supply and demand (God bless its expounder!) the less you have and the less chance to get more, the more I have the right to take from you in labor and the less I am bound to give you ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... natural selection at the expense of their less fortunate brethren, and would leave a greater number of offspring, of whom some possessed it in an even more marked degree than themselves. And so it would go on. The process was a cumulative one. The slightest variation in a favourable direction gave natural selection a starting-point to work on. Through the continued action of natural selection on each successive generation the useful variation was gradually worked up, until at last it reached the ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... the consonants in their cumulative force become an independent element of expressiveness, strengthening that of the meaning of the words. Or in Tennyson's oft-quoted line, "the murmuring of innumerable bees," the sounds taken together have a genuine imitative ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... peculiar grandeur to that wonderful 18th Psalm, David's song of triumph; his masterpiece, and it may be the masterpiece of human poetry, inspired or uninspired, only approached by the companion-Psalm, the 144th. From whence comes that cumulative energy, by which it rushes on, even in our translation, with a force and swiftness which are indeed divine; thought following thought, image image, verse verse, before the breath of the Spirit of God, as ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... near for us to go back, I began to experience a feeling of depression. While I had not noticed it before, I suppose the cumulative effect of the experiences of the last eight months was beginning to tell on me. I noticed that Bouchard appeared to be in about the same condition. He would sometimes sit for an hour or more, in our room at the Cecil, gazing ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... more significantly, occupied. She was doing her best to evade the wild onslaught of a young man in glasses who had been wanting to marry her for a considerable period, and had now broken all bounds in a cumulative attempt to inform ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... 2001 prevalence rate of 2.7%, which represents the cumulative result of the past incarceration experiences of the living adult population, the lifetime likelihood is a hypothetical projection of the future if a birth cohort were to experience a fixed set of rates of first incarceration and mortality ...
— Prevalence of Imprisonment in the U.S. Population, 1974-2001 • Thomas P. Bonczar
... elsewhere. It is an offence both at common law and by statute, and is punishable by fine and imprisonment. By a statute of 1726, if the person guilty of common barratry belonged to the profession of the law, he was disabled from practising in the future. It is a cumulative offence, and it is necessary to prove at least three commissions of the act. For nearly two centuries there had been no record of an indictment having been preferred for this offence, but in 1889 a case occurred at the Guildford ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... this could be said for such an hypothesis? Here, probably, is its charm, and its strong hold upon the speculative mind. Unproven though it be, and cumbered prima facie with cumulative improbabilities as it proceeds, yet it singularly accords with great classes of facts otherwise insulated and enigmatic, and explains many things which are thus far utterly inexplicable ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... is the weight of cumulative evidence of similarity in the production of unusual tricks of style that proclaims a common authorship for ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... presence as a sweetheart should do, yet from first to last she had repressed all recognition of the true nature of the thread which drew them together, blinding herself to its meaning and only natural tendency, and appearing to dread his announcement of them. The present seemed enough for her without cumulative hope: usually, even if love is in itself an end, it must be regarded as a beginning to ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... crystal-gazing, telepathy, possession, and kindred manifestation, is what Mr. Lang contends; nor would he have any quarrel with the anthropologists were they not fully impressed with the importance of similar or even weaker cumulative evidence for conclusions which happen to be in harmony with their preconceived hypotheses. Where such evidence exists it must be faced, and at least its ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... was, however, characteristic of Shelley to rest his actions upon the dominant motive; so that, if several inducements operated to the same end, he absolutely discarded the minor considerations, and acted solely upon the grand one. I can well remember, that, when other persons urged upon him cumulative reasons for any course of action, whether in politics, or morality, or trifling personal matters of the day, he indignantly cast aside all such makeweights, and insisted upon the one sufficient motive. I mention this the more explicitly because the opposite course is the most common, and some who ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... was noble or virtuous, when he looks over the whole that he has written? But in Shakspere there is no suspicion of a cloven foot. Everywhere he is on the side of virtue and of truth. Many small arguments, with great cumulative force, might be adduced to ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... the end of Lent, Mrs. Lander had another of her attacks; she now began to call them so as if she had established an ownership in them. It came on from her cumulative over-eating, again, but the doctor was not so smiling as he had been with regard to the first. Clementina had got ready to drive out to Miss Milray's for one of her Sunday teas, but she put off her things, and prepared to spend the night at Mrs. Lander's bedside. "Well, I should ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and private works in this country, and the cumulative testimony of English and French engineers, have demonstrated that the only tile which it is economical to use, is the best that can be found, and that the best,—much the best—thus far invented, is the "pipe, or round tile, and collar,"—and ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... upon my spirits. The cumulative effect of all the dreadful sights which we had seen upon our journey was heavy upon my soul. With my abounding animal health and great physical energy any kind of mental clouding was a rare event. I had the Irish faculty of seeing some gleam of humor in every darkness. But now the obscurity ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... unconquerable feeling which most persons have, I presume, experienced; and which frequently, I think, results from a kind of cumulative evidence of uncongeniality or unworthiness, made up of a number of slight indices of character, which, separately, may appear of little moment, but altogether, produce a strong, if undefinable, feeling of aversion. Mr. Harlowe's manners were bland, polished, and insinuating; his conversation was ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... be because the paternal branch of the family bequeathes to its daughters the same natural tendencies and capacities that are the heritage of its sons. It is biologically impossible for sons to inherit the cumulative capacities of their fathers alone just as it is biologically impossible for the daughters to inherit from their mothers alone. So that, at birth, it appears that both sexes must remain on an equal footing so far as heredity is concerned. But the social and ...
— Women As Sex Vendors - or, Why Women Are Conservative (Being a View of the Economic - Status of Woman) • R. B. Tobias
... Duhm and Cornill partly on the insufficient ground that verses 2 and 3 have separate introductions and therefore could have had originally no connection. But in quoting two utterances of the Prophet for their cumulative effect it was natural to prefix to each his usual formula. Duhm's and Cornill's real motive, however, is their repugnance to admitting that Jeremiah could have advised desertion from the city. So Duhm equally rejects XXI. 9, of which XXXVIII. 2 ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... (store) 636; collect in a dragnet; heap Ossa upon Pelion. Adj. assembled &c. v.; closely packed, dense, serried, crowded to suffocation, teeming, swarming, populous; as thick as hops; all of a heap, fasciculated, cumulative. Phr. the plot thickens; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... reprieved for the time being," said Smellie, as the gesticulating witch-doctor and his myrmidons passed on, "but only to become the victims of a more refined and protracted torture at last. Having failed to exhibit any signs of fear in the first instance we are spared to witness the cumulative sufferings of those who are to precede us, in order that by the sight of their exquisite torments our courage may be quelled by the anticipation of our own. I imagine, from what I have read of the customs of this people, that we ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... attacks upon vessels of Argentina, indignant protests in each case being met by apologies and promises of indemnity on the part of Germany. There has been much irritation in spite of these promises, cumulative irritation, which however might have remained submerged had it not been for the revelations of the acts of Count Luxburg, which have made the expression "spurlos versekt" a byword. This exhibition ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... her the whole thing from beginning to end, leaving out only that part of Nat's cumulative scheme that had to do with Nellie Tanner. He showed Elsa how his enemy had left no stone unturned to bring him back home a pauper, a criminal, and one who could never again lift his head among his own people even though he ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... Family," so that the three Madonna pictures I am claiming for Giorgione are marked off by this peculiarity from the bulk of Titian's work. This in itself is not enough to disqualify Titian, but it is a factor in that cumulative proof by which I hope Giorgione's claim may be sustained. The marble parapet again is a feature in Giorgione's work, but not in Titian's. But the most convincing evidence to those who know the master lies in the composition, ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... remarkably well as to its main details. Those who believed in the "sabbath" of witches must have felt their opinions confirmed by the testimony of the witnesses at Lancaster. Even the modern reader, with his skepticism, is somewhat daunted by the cumulative force of what purports to be the evidence and would fain rationalize it by supposing that some sort of a meeting actually did take place at Malking Tower and that some Pendle men and women who had delved in magic arts till they believed in them ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... "young ladies take arsenic in minute doses to improve the complexion and promote tissue, forgetting that the effects are cumulative when they stop suddenly. Your young friend has 'sworn off' ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... and the most disastrous for British arms during the century. We had in the short space of seven days lost, beyond all extenuation or excuse, three separate actions. No single defeat was of vital importance in itself, but the cumulative effect, occurring as they did to each of the main British forces in South Africa, was very great. The total loss amounted to about three thousand men and twelve guns, while the indirect effects in the way of loss of prestige to ourselves and increased confidence and more numerous recruits ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... classic tales which have held small children,—"The Gingerbread Man," "The Three Little Pigs," "Goldylocks,"—have patterns so obvious and so simple that they cannot be missed. In "The Gingerbread Man" the pattern is one of increasing additions. It belongs to the aptly called "cumulative" tales. The refrains act like sign-posts to help the child to mark the progress. This is simply a skilful way of making the continuity close, of showing the ladder rungs for the child's feet. I venture to say that any good ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... fact that many of the minor incidents that occur in such finely amusing sketches as Mason and Keeler's "In and Out" [1] do not lend weight to the ending, but seem introduced merely to heighten the cumulative effect of the farce-comedy, does not prove them, or the offering, to be lacking in entertainment value for vaudeville. Rather, the use of just such extraneous incidents makes these sketches more worth while; but the introduction ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... with wonder, they followed their leader's example, and knelt within the Lady Chapel, while the brief Latin service for the ninth hour was sung through by the canon, clerks, and boys. It really was the Sixth, but cumulative easy-going treatment of the Breviary had made this the usual time for it, as the name of noon still testifies. The boys' attention, it must be confessed, was chiefly expended on the wonderful miracles of the ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Now observe the cumulative action of this power, applied to the youth of humanity, and in each generation further applied to each individual youth. Certain ideas first grasped in ages of dark savagery, or even previous to that, and then believed to be of supreme importance, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... return to incarnation, and this they did all through the fifth, sixth and seventh sub-races (indeed, some did not take birth till the Atlantean period), so that the impetus given to the progress of the race was a cumulative force. ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... adequately developed by exposition of facts and of principles in the several cases, pointing out, where necessary, substantial identity underlying superficial diversity, establishes gradually a body of precedents, which reinforce, by all the weight of cumulative authority, the principle that they illuminate. Thus is laid the substantial foundation upon which the Art of War securely rests. It is perhaps advisable—though it should be needless—to say that, when a student has achieved such comprehension, when his ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... abridged report of the proceedings of the International Congress, under the head of "Cumulative Imprisonment," we learn that the following question was submitted, and several important ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... right to the same fine, old name that Alan himself bore, and had too often disgraced, the barrier between him and Tony Holiday was swept away. That was the bitterest drop in the cup. No wonder he hated Dick—hated him now with a cumulative, almost murderous intensity. He had mocked at the other, but how should he stand against him in fair field? It was he—Alan Massey—that was the outcast, his mother a woman of doubtful fame, himself a follower of false fires, his life ignoble, wayward, erratic, unclean? Would it not be John ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... lead through the trees to imposing gates of red and gold. There is, too, a delightful appreciation of climax. As one walks up a spacious avenue, passing through gate after gate, each more magnificent than the last, one is being prepared by this cumulative splendor for the tomb itself. One feels everywhere the dignity of space. There is no smallness, no crowding. One feels the greatness of the people that has done these things: a race that looks at life and death with a vision as broad as the ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... And Rogers went about his work that day as though the pleasure was his own. The world felt very sweet. He saw the good in every one with whom he came in contact. And the inner excitement due to something going to happen was continuous and cumulative. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... be part of and one with it—the forgotten memories they may be called. For they mostly refer to a far period in our lives, to our early years, to days and events that were happy and sad. The events themselves have faded from the mind, but they registered an emotion, cumulative in its effect, which endures and revives from time to time and is that indefinable feeling, that tender melancholy and "divine despair," and those idle tears of which the poet says, "I know not what they mean," which gather to the eyes at the sight of happy autumn fields and of all ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... describing the Roman playhouses, says: "After these they composed others, but differing in form from the theatre or amphitheatre, and every such was called Circus, the frame globe-like and merely round." The evidence is cumulative, and almost inexhaustible.] ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... dreams, like personality among savages, may indeed be inwardly very great, but it is not efficacious. To be socially important and expressible in some common medium, initial differences in temper must be organised into custom and become cumulative by being imitated and enforced. The only artists who can show great originality are those trained in distinct and established schools; for originality and genius must be largely fed and raised on the ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... conditions, woman has always been robbed of the fruits of her own toil. The influence the Catholic Church has had on religious free thought, that monarchies have had on political free thought, that serfdom has had upon free labor, have all been cumulative in the family upon woman. Taught that father and husband stood to her in the place of God, she has been denied liberty of conscience, and held in obedience to masculine will. Taught that the fruits of her industry belonged to others, she has seen man enter into every avocation most suitable ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... will have the quality of surprise, of pitiless revelation. Instead of the seesaw, the bickering interchange of battles of the old time, will come swiftly and amazingly blow, and blow, and blow, no pause, no time for recovery, disasters cumulative and irreparable. ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... The cumulative effect was enormous, and could have but one possible result. The normal boy is always at least ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... aunt Camilla was coming down the stairs by the rustling of her silk flounces along the rails of the banisters, like harp-strings; then there was a cumulative whisper and an entrance. ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... municipal reform, like the crusade against alcohol, has been based upon emotionalism, not upon definite proof. Reformers have been unable to lead in the right direction, because they have looked at their lantern instead of their road. Not having cumulative information as to government acts, they have been unable to keep their fires burning. To illustrate: in November, 1907, the governor of New York state, the mayor of New York City, and reformers of national reputation eulogized the tenement-house department; yet ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... I can be great enough now to do right and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... with bacteria, on the other hand, is cumulative, as the organisms not only multiply in the tissues, but in addition produce chemical poisons (toxins) which aggravate the irritative effects. The resulting reaction is correspondingly progressive, and has as its primary object the expulsion of the irritant and the limitation ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... matrons would "touch the likes of her"; we ministered at the deathbed of a young man, who during a long illness of tuberculosis had received so many bottles of whisky through the mistaken kindness of his friends, that the cumulative effect produced wild periods of exultation, in one ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... yells, no doubt, and can imagine the tempo of these cries, the cumulative rush of the spelled out letters, the booming roar at the end. The voice of Bertie beat back from the wind-shield with devastating effect upon our ears; and then our car rolled on, and the clamor died away, and I answered the questions of Carpenter. "They are College boys. They have won a ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... If you can read this work without criticizing its Italian views, you may find in the characters of Tito and Romola, one selfish and the other generous, the best example of George Eliot's moral method, which is to show the cumulative effect on character of everyday choices or actions. You will find also a good story, one of the best that the author told. But if you read Romola as an historical novel, with some knowledge of Italy and the Renaissance, you may decide that George Eliot—though she slaved at this ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... The cumulative effect of all these forces, hitherto so rigorously repressed, now made itself felt, and the circle spontaneously broke up, everybody moving at once by a common instinct. The professor's wife left the party abruptly, with excuses about an early start next morning. She first shook hands ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... miseries of soldiering which the Englishman readily forgets, the light of self-sacrifice shines upon the human race with a never fading beauty. Herein lies the true romance of war. As the reader turns over the ensuing pages he cannot but realise something of the cumulative drudgery and hardships which these men endured ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... knowledge, in minute details, it is impossible to give an idea. I am assured of its existence because I have come across surviving examples of it, but I may not begin to describe it. One may, however, imagine dimly what the cumulative effect of it must have been on the peasant's outlook; how attached he must have grown—I mean how closely linked—to his own countryside. He did not merely "reside" in it; he was part of it, and it was part of him. He fitted ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... triumphantly re-established the unity of the empire and to the pride of intellectual activity it could add the pride of might and dominion. But the same cannot be said for the Sung period. From a political standpoint its history is one of cumulative disaster. Ancient China retreated by degrees before the thrusts of the barbarians, until the great thunderbolt of Genghis Khan's conquest, reverberating with formidable echoes throughout all Asia, announced the approaching downfall ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... between the two countries, amalgamated their budgets and exchequers, and ordered that henceforth all the receipts and expenditure of the United Kingdom should be consolidated into one single fund, which was henceforward to be known as the Consolidated Fund. It was not long before we had cumulative examples of the truth of Dr Johnson's dictum that England would unite with us only that she may rob us. Successive English chancellors imposed additional burdens upon our poor and impoverished country, until it was in truth almost taxed out of existence. The weakest points ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... carefully and precisely laid out after twenty years of experience in conditioning men. It should be followed absolutely, not partially or occasionally. It is far from severe. Its strength lies in the cumulative effect rather than in any special effort ...
— Keeping Fit All the Way • Walter Camp
... that there should be prejudice, even in science, against all innovations; and I was prepared to wait till the first incredulity could be overcome by further cumulative evidence. Unfortunately there were other incidents and misrepresentations which it was impossible to remove from this insulating distance. Thus no conditions could have been more desperately hopeless than those which confronted me for the next twelve years. It is ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... at Pont St Maxence began with a carouse and ended with a cumulative disappointment. In the middle was the usual wait, a tiresome but necessary part of all military evolutions. To entrain a Signal Company sounds so simple. Here is the company—there is the train. But first comes the man-handling of cable-carts on to trucks that were built ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... casts may occur. It also produces an unusual amount of uric acid crystals and oxalates, due to the modified tissue changes produced by the alcohol. The effect of a single act of over-indulgence in alcohol does not last more than thirty-six hours, but it is cumulative under continued use.' ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... to gather some further particles of evidence, to add their cumulative weight to the mass of slender probabilities with which we are endeavoring to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... stood staring at him, then followed his example. As I relaxed I realized I was tremendously weary. The cumulative exhaustion of the past thirty-six hours seemed to crowd upon me with a smothering sense of physical oppression. I looked at my watch and wound it. Five o'clock. Through the narrow slits near the roof of our swinging cell I could see the changing light of dawn, melting in with ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... the fact that the educational missionaries who set before themselves as the aim of their work a far distant goal to be attained by the cumulative effect of Christian influence brought to bear upon generation after generation of children who do not themselves become Christians, naturally resent a table which seems to demand a present, immediate, result in the tabulation of baptisms, and we fear that the other tables will hardly reconcile ...
— Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions • Roland Allen
... doubtful inscriptions, or mere oral traditions, perhaps. Nor can implicit trust be placed on every reference to historical events, for the memoried deeds of great rulers were not always unassociated with persistent and cumulative myths. It must be recognized, therefore, that even portions of the data which had of late been sifted and systematized by Oriental scholars in Europe, may yet have to be subjected to revision. Many interesting and important discoveries, ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... he exclaimed. "Think of it! a whole city wiped out." I lowered my eyes to the goat nibbling beside us. "The courage and energy that rebuilt it is herculean." His enthusiasm was cumulative. "And rebuilt it in practically three years! No wonder you date all things ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray
... acquaintance in that work of the "petits pays chauds" among whom Jack learnt the first lessons of life was to see the Institution Vergnes at once revive, swarming as it did with small homesick Cubans and Mexicans; the complete failure of blondness that marks the memory is doubtless the cumulative effect of so many of the New York "petits pays chauds," preponderantly brown and black and conducing to a greasy gloom. Into this gloom I fear I should see all things recede together but for a certain salient note, the fact ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... kind of stories that the kindergartners call "cumulative," or "repetitive." They keep repeating and then adding to themselves until they are quite long. The repetition helps the children memorize them, and adding to them holds the children's attention ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... them avowed and illustrated in memorable words by the greatest authorities of the time; lastly, we have seen them embodied in public acts of the States collectively and individually; and now, out of this concurring, cumulative, and unimpeachable testimony, constituting a speaking aggregation absolutely without precedent, I offer you the American definition of a republican form of government. It is in vain that you cite philosophers or ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... generating the great master purpose, the one unwavering life aim, which we often see so marked in the young man from the country. Nor do city-bred youths store up anything like the reserve power, the cumulative force, the stamina, which are developed in the simple life ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... similar Their traits may be prepotent in a child, Thus giving rise to qualities convergent. So if you take a circle and draw off A line which would become another circle If drawn enough, completed, but is left Half drawn or less, that illustrates a mind Of cumulative heredity. Take John, My gardener, John, within his sphere is perfect, John has a mind which is a perfect circle. A perfect circle can be small, you know. And so John has good sense within his sphere. But if some force began to work like yeast In brain cells, and his ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... counting-room proofs of his efficiency in the line of the Events' greatest successes, and he wasted no thrill that the sensation in his hands was capable of imparting to his readers. Yet the effect was disappointing, not only in the figure of the immediate sales, but in the cumulative value of the recognition of the fact that the Events had been selected by Northwick as the best avenue for approaching the public. The Abstract, in copying and commenting upon the letter, skilfully stabbed its esteemed contemporary with an acknowledgment of its prime importance ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... making progress, to pass over a word, a line, or even more lines than one. As has been explained before, the eye readily moves from one ending to a similar ending with a surprising tendency to pursue the course which would lighten labour instead of increasing it. The cumulative result of such abridgement by omission on the part of successive scribes may be easily imagined, and in fact is just what is presented in Codex B[263]. Besides these considerations, the passages which are omitted, and which we claim to be genuine, bear in themselves the character belonging to ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... the training, the practice, in which she had been immersed, enabled Verena to unroll a coil of propositions dedicated even to a private interest with the most touching, most cumulative effect. Olive was completely aware of this, and she stilled herself, while the girl uttered one soft, pleading sentence after another, into the same rapt attention she was in the habit of sending ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... this distress goes on, that rate must be largely increased, perhaps doubled. This shows the amount of pressure which is threatening this immediate district. I have always been of opinion that this distress and suffering must be cumulative to a degree which few people have ever foreseen, because your means of meeting the difficulty will diminish just in proportion as the difficulty will increase. Mr Farnall has told us that one-third of the rateable property will fall out of existence, as it were, ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... named line of diplomacy has convicted itself of miscarriage and has lost the strategic advantage, as against the none too adroit finesse of the other side. The statesmen of this European war power were so ill advised as to enter on a course of tentatively cumulative intimidation, by threats and experimentally graduated crimes against the property and persons of American citizens, with a view to coerce American cupidity and yet to avoid carrying these manoeuvres of terrorism far ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... I began a list, which I have added to from time to time, of some of the changes which may be fairly laid at his door. I give a few of them as showing their tendency, all the more dangerous that their effect, like that of some poisons, is insensibly cumulative, and that they are sure at last of effect among a people whose chief reading is the daily paper. I give in two columns the old style ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... rather startled him. Often afterward he was to find in her that curious ability to detach herself from custom and tradition, skiff away the husks of cumulative prejudice and find the ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... on the march deployed and brought up suddenly against the enemy in open conflict the anticipatory suspense was not long and was forgotten in the brief space of conflict. Here this suspense really had been cumulative for months. It built itself up, little by little, as the material and preparations increased, as the battalions assembled, until sometimes, despite the roar of the artillery, there seemed a great silence while you waited for a ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... contingent, contortion, contravene, contumacious, contumacy, contumelious, convergent, conversant, convivial, correlate, corrigible, corroborate, corrosive, cosmic, covenant, crass, credence, crescent, criterion, critique, crucial, crucible, cryptic, crystalline, culmination, culpable, cumulative, cupidity, cursive, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... always find it surrounding these builders, even in countries so far apart as India and Ireland. Then, as we pass beyond the merely monumental stage, we find threads of historical evidence connecting the different branches of this race, increasing in their complexity and strengthening in their cumulative force as we go on, until at last we are brought to the history of the age in which we live; and finally most remarkable affinities of language put the finishing touch to the mass of proofs which can be gathered along all these different lines. In this magic circle countries so remote ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... the existence of these "long radiants," although doubted by Tisserand[1250] because of its theoretical refractoriness, must apparently be admitted. The first plausible explanation of them was offered by Professor Turner in 1899.[1251] They represent, in his view, the cumulative effects of the earth's attraction. The validity of his reasoning is, however, denied by M. Bredikhine,[1252] who prefers to regard them as a congeries of separate streams. The enigma they present has evidently not ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... very great ability has appeared in Paris, under the title of De la Certitude, (Upon Certainty), by A. JAVARY. It makes an octavo of more than five hundred pages, and for originality of ideas and illustrations, and cumulative force of logic, is almost unrivalled. The sceptical speculation of the time is reduced by it to powder, and thrown to ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... was peculiarly picturesque or vivid; no electric phrase that sent the whole striking scene shuddering home to every hearer; no sudden light of burning epithet, no sad elegiac music. The passage was purely academic. Each word was choice; each detail was finished; it was properly cumulative to its climax; and when that was reached, loud applause followed. It was general, but not enthusiastic. No one could fail to admire the skill with which the sentence was constructed; and so elaborate a piece of workmanship justly challenged high praise. But still—still, do ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... carelessly thrown away. Coupled with expressions of sincere regret over the country's irreparable loss were heard strong denunciations of the criminally careless smoker who caused it. A terrible indictment cumulative in character is being drawn against the cigarette habit, not only as being responsible for the sad scene just witnessed, but for the useless waste of money, the undermining of health, yea even to the destruction of life itself, ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... of generations, in a race where alcohol is freely used by most of the population, one seems unable to escape from the conclusion that the effects of this racial poison, if it be such, must necessarily be cumulative. The damage done to the race must increase in each generation. If the deterioration of the race could be measured, it might even be found to grow in a series of figures representing ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... preceded the receipt of that message. First he had written her a letter that was unusually long and exuberant for him, telling her of his success and that now he was ready to come and get her in accordance with their agreement, suggesting a time and place. Three days of cumulative doubt and agony had gone by without a reply. Then he had tried to reach her by long distance telephone, but without success. Finally he had wired, although he knew that a telegram is a risky vehicle for confidential ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... as she emerged from the grounds, saw Feller, garden-shears in hand and in his workman's clothes instead of his Sunday black, a figure of stone watching the approach of some field-batteries. In the week of distracting and cumulative suspense that had elapsed since his secret had been revealed to her, their relations had continued as before. She studiously kept up the fiction of his deafness by writing her orders. The question ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... re-elected commander-in-chief of five battalions of Belleville National Guards. The Government, however, declines to recognize this cumulative command. The "Major" writes a letter to-day to the Combat denouncing the Government, and demanding that the Republic "should decree victory," and shoot every unsuccessful general. Blanqui says that he lost his election ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... say, cheap corn operating throughout the world, created a new demand for many kinds of articles; the production of a large number of such articles being aided by iron in some one of its many forms, iron to that extent was exported. And the effect is cumulative. The manufacture of iron being stimulated, all persons concerned in that great manufacture are well off, have more to spend, and by spending it encourage other branches of manufacture, which again propagate the demand; they receive and so encourage ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... now being propounded thus. Why should not all transfers of energy, whether in living or non-living bodies, be accompanied by a "somewhat "that is akin to man's mental life? The arguments in favour of such a view are numerous, many-sided, and cumulative. The hypothesis of evolution gives them keen edge and gathering force. Behind the cosmic process men feel there must be a creative power, an animating impulse. The struggle upwards must mean something. Mechanism is but a mode of working—its Ground ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... spring passed into summer, all the elements in Paulus's life seemed to confirm the glory of that day on the slopes of Hymettus when he had first felt sure of the significance Greece held for him. The cumulative effect of his association with older men, his young friendships, his work toward his chosen goal, his grave but piercing pleasures, was to make him at home in Athens as he had never been at home ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... from experience; especially from childish recollections (see 141); abstract ideas; cumulative ideas, like composite portraits (see also Appendix, "Generic Images," p. 229); their resemblance ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... evidence that this discourse was delivered on the day of Malachy's death is cumulative. (1) The opening words of Sec. 1, and the closing sentences of Sec. 8 (note "this day"). (2) The statement in Sec. 5, "He said to us, 'With desire I have desired,'" etc., implies that those who tended Malachy in his sickness were present (see Life, Sec. 73). The ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... Tacitus occupies a unique position. He rivals Dante in the cumulative effect of sombre detail and in the gloomy energy which hate supplies. In depth and variety of creative insight he approaches Balzac,[6] whilst in his peculiar province, the psychology of death, he stands alone. His is the most profoundly imaginative ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... Brahms differs from later writers in not giving himself much to mere lusciousness of tone contrast, but confines himself to carrying out his ideas with those portions of the orchestra best suited in turn, and with more reference to cumulative impression from the treatment than to mere richness and contrast of color. The contrasts do still meet us here, but they are never glaring. It is even a question whether the colors are so strongly contrasted as commonly in Beethoven. But ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... them. When such careful investigators as Hill and Podmore, dealing with the same body of fact, differ constantly and diametrically in their conclusions, it is evident that the facts so far collected have not cumulative force enough to establish in the generality of disciplined minds a substantial unanimity of conviction. There are far too many alternatives in the interpretation of the facts and, in general, the personal equation ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... of personality and courtesy are never lost. They create a cumulative business asset ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... of cold water, should suffer with this disease, "Yes, my ancestors drank the liquor and I foot the bills." In 1834 the Parliament of the British House of Commons made a report of intemperance in which they stated that the evils of alcoholism "are cumulative in the amount of injury they inflict, as intemperate parents, according to high medical testimony, give a taint to their offspring before birth, and the poisonous stream of spirits is conveyed through the milk of the mother to the infant at the breast; so that the fountain of life, through ...
— Almost A Man • Mary Wood-Allen |
