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Seminal   Listen
adjective
Seminal  adj.  
1.
Pertaining to, containing, or consisting of, seed or semen; as, the seminal fluid.
2.
Contained in seed.
3.
Hence: Holding the first place in a series of developed results or consequents; serving as a source, or first principle; giving rise to related ideas or results; germinal; radical; primary; original; as, seminal principles of generation; seminal virtue; a seminal discovery. "The idea of God is, beyond all question or comparison, the one great seminal principle."
Seminal leaf (Bot.), a seed leaf, or cotyleden.
Seminal receptacle. (Zool.) Same as Spermatheca.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Seminal" Quotes from Famous Books



... thither; arid gravely asserts that he has often experienced, that if diamonds be wetted with May-dew, they will grow to a great size in a course of years. This probably is an improvement upon the Arabian philosophy or the production of pearls by the oysters catching that superlative seminal influence. The following singular article of intelligence respecting India, may be copied as a specimen of the work: "In that countree growen many strong vynes: and the women drynken wyn, and men not: and the women shaven hire berdes, and the men not." From India he proceeds ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr

... centrifugal and reviling the centripetal force. One party would be condemning the malignity of the force which was dragging us all into the sun, and the other the malignity of the force which was driving us madly into space. The seminal error of modern speculation is shown in this tendency to speak as advocates of one of different forces, all of which are necessary to the harmonious ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... ago, certain new sidereal conceptions arose in the minds of half a dozen philosophers, (isolated and utterly destitute of political or social influence, powerful only in the possession of a sublime and seminal thought,)—conceptions which, during these two centuries, have succeeded in overthrowing a doctrine as old as the human mind, closely interknit with the entire texture of opinions, authority, politics, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... Behold here the seminal principle, which contains within it, as in an embryo state, the rudiments of all true virtue; which, striking deep its roots, though feeble perhaps and lowly in its beginnings, silently progressive; ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce

... turgescence is indispensable, no longer admits into its vascular plexus or network, a quantity of fluid sufficient to give the organ the power of penetrating—jacet exiguus—and, although it may be supposed that the seminal glands perform their functions perfectly well, and secrete abundantly the fluid peculiar to them, the copulative organ remains paralyzed. This is the impotence which is brought on by old age, and which Ariosto has so forcibly described in the following lines, ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport

... natural objects on the mind. But it was Mr. Wordsworth's purpose to consider the influences of fancy and imagination as they are manifested in poetry, and from the different effects to conclude their diversity in kind; while it is my object to investigate the seminal principle, and then from the kind to deduce the degree. My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... between the stones of court-yard pavements. If you strike at one of their heads with the bludgeon of the law, or of violence, it flies open like the seedcapsule of a snap-weed, and fills the whole region with seminal thoughts which will spring up in a crop just like the original martyr. They chased one of these enthusiasts, who attacked slavery, from St. Louis, and shot him at Alton in 1837; and on the 23d of June just passed, the Governor of Missouri, chairman of the Committee on Emancipation, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... feet in height according to cultural treatment and age. The flowers are white or red, large, borne in corymbose clusters, and produced in great profusion during June and July. The varieties that have arisen under cultivation by seminal variation, hybridisation, or otherwise are exceedingly numerous. Those now grown are mostly double, and a large proportion of them are light in colour. They include the quatre saisons and the true York and Lancaster. The flowers are highly fragrant, and, like those of R. centifolia and other ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster

... drawn good burning lights, and good medicines against burning. Though the seminal humour seems of a contrary nature to fire, yet the body completed proves a combustible lump, wherein fire finds flame even from bones, and some fuel almost from all parts; though the metropolis of humidity seems least disposed unto it, which might render ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne

... only when new truth, moral or spiritual, has thus to fit itself to the lips of men, that such enlargements of speech become necessary: but in each further unfolding of those seminal truths implanted in man at the first, in each new enlargement of his sphere of knowledge, outward or inward, the same necessities make themselves felt. The beginnings and progressive advances of moral philosophy in Greece, [Footnote: See Lobeck, Phrynichus, p. 350.] the transplantation ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench

... seminal quality of the best of this little book. The writer was obviously a man who read closely and reflected to good effect on what he read, with the result that he saw new things and helped open new problems and point the way to a generally more ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous

... the prostate gland, as obtained by prostatic massage, and from the seminal vesicles, as obtained by "milking," or "stripping," the vesicles, must be free from pus and gonococci. To make sure, it is best to repeat such examination at ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... Vibhandaka, having proceeded to a big lake, devoted himself to the practice of penances. And that same saint, comparable to a god, laboured for a long period. And once while he was washing his mouth in the waters, he beheld the celestial nymph Urvasi—whereupon came out his seminal fluid. And, O king! a hind at that time lapped it up along with the water that she was drinking, being athirst; and from this cause she became with child. That same hind had really been a daughter of the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... suggestiveness that Coleridge's great service to posterity resided. He was what J. S. Mill called a "seminal mind," and his thought {236} had that power of stimulating thought in others, which is the mark and the privilege of original genius. Many a man has owed to some sentence of Coleridge's, if not the awakening in himself of a new intellectual life, at least the starting of fruitful trains of reflection ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... prostate gland, to form a "carrying medium" for the spermatozoa which originate in the testicles. There are small ducts leading from the testicles into the pocket which contains the prostate fluid. These are known as the seminal ducts, and through them the spermatozoa pass from the testicles into the prostate pocket. Here they mingle with the prostate fluid, in which they can move about freely, and by means of which they can be carried wherever this fluid goes. The combination ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long

... from seed die annually, and are succeeded by new buds by solitary reproduction; which are larger or more perfect for several successive years, and then they produce sexual flowers, which are succeeded by seminal reproduction. The same occurs in bulbous rooted plants raised from seed; they die annually, and produce others rather more perfect than the parent for several years, and then produce sexual flowers. The Aphis is in a similar manner hatched from an egg ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin



Words linked to "Seminal" :   originative, germinal, semen, original, seminal fluid



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