"Discontinuity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have been. But there are species of insects in which some generations are winged and others wingless; a winged mother gives birth to wingless offspring, and a wingless parent to young with well-developed wings. Such discontinuity in the life-story of a single generation forces us to recognise the possibility of similar sudden mutations in the course of that age-long process of evolution to which the facts of insect growth, and indeed of all ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... is distasteful. One does not like to think of himself as a chance hit of the irrational physical elements; neither does he feel at ease with the thought that he is the result of any break or discontinuity in natural law. He likes to see himself as vitally and inevitably related to the physical order as is the fruit to the tree that bore it, or the child to the mother that carried it in her womb, and yet, if only mechanical and chemical ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... now acts unconsciously and without power of introspection, and that, do what he will, he can rarely or never draw a sharp dividing line whereat anything shall be said to begin, though none less certain that there has been a continuity in discontinuity, and a discontinuity in continuity between it and certain other past things; moreover, that his opponents postulated so much beginning of the microscope as that there should be a dew drop, even as our evolutionists start with a sense of touch, of which ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... N. disjunction, disconnection, disunity, disunion, disassociation, disengagement; discontinuity &c 70; abjunction^; cataclasm^; inconnection^; abstraction, abstractedness; isolation; insularity, insulation; oasis; island; separateness &c adj.; severalty; disjecta membra [Lat.]; dispersion &c 73; apportionment &c 786. separation; parting &c v.; circumcision; detachment, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to the oddity of the contrast between that and the flashy passages with which it is interlarded. From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step. You laugh and are surprised that any one should turn round and travestie himself: the drollery is in the utter discontinuity of ideas and feelings. He makes virtue serve as a foil to vice; dandyism is (for want of any other) a variety of genius. A classical intoxication is followed by the splashing of soda-water, by frothy effusions of ordinary bile. After the lightning and the hurricane, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... point where an electric conductor is cut, broken, or opened by a switch or other device, or simply by discontinuity ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... in the course of his experiments on the discs and flowers produced in the interior of a mass of ice by sending a warm ray through the mass, that the pieces of ice were in some cases traversed by hazy surfaces of discontinuity, which divided the apparently continuous mass into irregular prismatic segments. The intersections of the bounding surfaces of these segments with the surface of the slab of ice formed a very irregular network of lines.[210] I am inclined, however, to think that ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... by means of endless repetitions to acquire, and endless views to retain, the mind soon wanders, and thus discontinuity is promoted; but, in reciting a Correlation forwards and backwards from memory, the mind cannot wander, and thus the continuity is greatly strengthened. Again, memory is improved by exercise, and improved in the highest degree by making and memorising correlations, ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... identity; as much one and the same as man is one and the same—which he believes himself to be, though he also believes, and cannot help believing, that both in his body and in his thoughts there is change and succession. There is no real discontinuity then in the universe; and if we say that there was an order framed in the beginning, and that the things which are now produced are a consequence of a previous arrangement, we speak of things as we are ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... considerable period during which the weather is warm enough for growth. Desert vegetation, on the other hand, which consists primarily of bushes with small, drought-resistant leaves, needs only a few irregular and infrequent showers in order to endure long periods of heat and drought. Discontinuity of moisture is the cause of deserts, just as continuity is the necessary condition of forest growth. Grasses prevail where the climatic conditions are intermediate between those of the forest and the desert. Their primary requisite is a short period of fairly abundant moisture with ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... species—and the species is a much more definite unit than the genus, the order, the class, which are not divisions imposed by us upon Nature. Species are definitely discontinuous,[33] and this is the only discontinuity which Nature shows us. Buffon put his views into practice in his Histoire Naturelle, where he describes species after species, never uniting them into larger groups. We have seen, however, how the facts forced upon him the conception of ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell |
