"Discontinuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the rising school of biologists who, in opposition to Darwin's views, held that species might arise by what was at the time termed "discontinuous variation." ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... excluded, but the most important lectures are open to all. Hence the Sorbonne is a national institution in every sense of the word. I do not say that Glasgow does not benefit a little from the corps of professors at Gilmorehill. But the benefit is spasmodic, discontinuous, and extremely limited. Some of the professors do at times come down into the open and speak words of wisdom. But more is wanted than that if the universities are to be saved from denationalisation. We hear of Dugald Stewart's class-room being, in the old days, crowded with the keenest intellects ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... the geography of atolls. Here and there, where it was high, the farther side loomed up; here and there the near side dipped entirely and showed a broad path of water into the lagoon; here and there both sides were equally abased, and we could look right through the discontinuous ring to the sea horizon on the south. Conceive, on a vast scale, the submerged hoop of the duck-hunter, trimmed with green rushes to conceal his head—water within, water without—you have the image of the perfect atoll. Conceive one that has been partly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... half cut sheer; nor stayed But with swift wheel reverse, deep entering, shared All his right side. Then Satan first knew pain, And writhed him to and fro convolved; so sore The griding sword with discontinuous wound ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... the patches of colour on a blank (i.e. uninteresting) ground along which the glance sweeps, were invariably contiguous and continuous. But these colour patches, and the sensations they afford us, are just as often, discontinuous in the highest degree; and the lines constituting a shape may, as for instance in constellations, be entirely imaginary. The fact is that what we feel as a line is not an objective continuity of colour-or-light-patches, but the continuity of our glance's sweep which may either accompany this ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... of a higher nature than it hitherto possessed seeks admission. And this Higher, if it enters into the whole of life, so far from revealing itself as a continuation of what had already happened, reveals itself as something which is discontinuous with the ordinary life, and superior even to the highest attainments of the intellectual life. And it is this aspect which produces the conviction of such a revelation as being objective in its very ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... as such in some plants) as to the complex basis of which all will agree. And it is known, from common observation as well as from pedigree studies, that it is not inherited as a unit: children are never born in two discontinuous classes, "tall" and "short," as they are with color blindness or normal color vision, for example. Is it not a fair assumption that the difference between the apparent unit character of feeble-mindedness, and the ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... more than a man is mentally a discontinuous being. The drifting chaos of his mind makes its experimental beginnings at a hundred different points and in a hundred different spirits and directions; here he flashes into a concrete realization, here into a conviction unconsciously incompatible; here is something originally conceived, here something ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... earliest England with which we are historically acquainted consisted of a mere long strip or borderland of Teutonic coast, divided into tiny chieftainships, and girding round half of the eastern and southern shores of a still Celtic Britain. Its area was discontinuous, and its inland boundaries towards the back country were vaguely defined. As Massachusetts and Connecticut stood off from Virginia and Georgia—as New South Wales and Victoria stand off from South Australia and Queensland—so Northumbria ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... tins of biscuits portrayed with a ghastly realism of perspective, and mendaciously screaming that I needed them—U-need-a biscuit; of gigantic quakers, multiplied as in an interminable series of mirrors and offering me a myriad meals of indigestible oats; of huge painted bulls in a kind of discontinuous frieze bellowing to the heavens a challenge to produce a better tobacco than theirs; of the head of a gentleman, with pink cheeks and a black moustache, recurring, like a decimal, ad infinitum on the top of a board, to inform me that his beauty is the product of his own toilet ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... these Purushas, homogeneous units, countless in number, stands Prakriti, Matter, the second in the Samkhyan duality. Prakriti is one; Purushas are many. Prakriti is a continuum; Purushas are discontinuous, being innumerable, homogeneous units. Continuity is the mark of Prakriti. Pause for a moment on the name Prakriti. Let us investigate its root meaning. The name indicates its essence. Pra means "forth," and kri is the ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... the Italian volcanoes as a whole, we find that they lie in a long, discontinuous line extending from the northern part of the valley of the Po, within sight of the Alps, to AEtna, and in subterranean cones perhaps to the northern coast of Africa. At the northern end of the ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... is—with which of the European series shall they be classed?—with which do they most agree?—from which do they differ least? And this being the mode of inquiry, there is apt to result great laxity of interpretation. How lax the interpretation really is, may be readily shown. When strata are discontinuous, as between Europe and America, no evidence can be derived from the order of superposition, apart from mineral characters and organic remains; for, unless strata can be continuously traced, mineral characters and organic remains afford the only means of classing them as such ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... mutation occurred, the original condition of one spot would not be first developed and then gradually split into two. Morgan proceeds to state clearly what I wish to insist upon concerning mutations. He writes that in recent times the idea that variations are discontinuous has become current. Actual experience, he tells us, shows that new characters do not add themselves to the line of existing characters, but if they affect the adult characters, they change them without as it were ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... stockade of gnarled trees which framed in Casterbridge was itself an avenue, standing on a low green bank or escarpment, with a ditch yet visible without. Within the avenue and bank was a wall more or less discontinuous, and within the wall were packed ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... perhaps with a rolling log, becoming a rude cart, and being gradually transformed by successive inventions until it has become one of the marvels of the nineteenth century. It is impossible for those who have attained the view-point of modern science to conceive of discontinuous progress; of continually rising types of being, of thought, or of moral life, in which the higher does not find its ground and root and thus an important part of its explanation, in the lower. Such is the ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... course of their production is added or removed the factor upon whose removal or addition the new variation owes its existence. The new variation springs into being by a {142} sudden step, not by a process of gradual and almost imperceptible augmentation. It is not continuous but discontinuous, because it is based upon the presence or absence of some definite factor or factors—upon discontinuity in the gametes from which it sprang. Once formed, its continued existence is subject to the arbitrament of natural selection. ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... think I have said, of bronze. It was not a mere block, but highly decorated with deep framed panels on either side. I went and rapped at these. The pedestal was hollow. Examining the panels with care I found them discontinuous with the frames. There were no handles or keyholes, but possibly the panels, if they were doors, as I supposed, opened from within. One thing was clear enough to my mind. It took no very great mental effort to infer that my Time Machine was inside ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... became universal. It seemed as though the tragic calamities of the eruption of A.D. 79 were about to be repeated. But gradually the force of the explosions decreased, and the noise from the crater became discontinuous, so that on the 30th the detonations were very few, and by the 1st May the ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... does 'this' tell us about the age of any given bed in Loch Lomond, as compared with that of any given bed in the Lake of Killarney? It is, indeed, obvious that if any two sets of deposits are separated and discontinuous, there is absolutely no means whatever given you by the nature of the deposit of saying whether one is much younger or older than the other; but you may say, as many have said and think, that the case is very much altered ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley |
