"Abnormally" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of 90 lb. pressure from a double ended boiler 13 feet 9 inches diameter by 15 feet long, having a total heating surface of 2,310 feet, so that these engines have every qualification for being economical so far as general proportions go, the stroke being an abnormally long one and the boiler of ample size. Experience has since shown that these engines are economical in coal, and the wear and tear ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various
... fear, but not disguising the terror which leapt from her eyes as they stared, fairly hypnotized, at an ungainly man who stood leering down at her. His head was set deep between massive, stooping shoulders, and his arms were abnormally long, while the color of his face indicated a diet, at some period of his life, of clay and berries. Two fang-like teeth, curving outward as the tusks of a wild boar—having furnished inspiration for the name by which he was most popularly known—added ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... been shown that ether, alcohol, many esters of the normal alcohols and fatty acids, benzene, and its halogen substitution products, have critical constants agreeing with this originally empirical law, due to Sydney Young and Thomas; acetic acid behaves abnormally, pointing to associated ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... made three, running himself out in his second over. As the misfortune could not, by any stretch of imagination, be laid at anybody else's door but his own, he was decidedly savage. The team returned to Beckford rather footsore, very disgusted, and abnormally silent. Norris sulked by himself at one end of the saloon carriage, and the Bishop sulked by himself at the other end, and even Marriott forbore to treat the situation lightly. It was a mournful home-coming. No cheering wildly as the brake drove to the College from Horton, no shouting of the School ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... wait the coming of the coach—their one excitement—agreed that "MacGeorge would gang on if the de'il himsel' stude across the road." MacGeorge was guard of the mail-coach, a fine, determined man, an old soldier, one imbued with abnormally strong sense of duty. Once before, for some quite unavoidable delay, the Post-Office authorities had "quarrelled" him (as he expressed it), and this undeserved blame rankled in the old soldier's heart. It should not be said of him a second time that he had failed to get his mails through ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... based upon fact, as the explorations of late years have proved: the dwarfs are homunculi of various tribes, the Akka, Doko, Tiki- Tiki, Wambilikimo ("two-cubit men"), the stunted race that share the central regions of Intertropical Africa with the abnormally tall peoples who speak dialects of the Great South African tongue, miscalled the "Bantu." Hole makes the Pygmies "monkeys," a word we have borrowed from the Italians (monichio a monoape) and quotes ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... the spring of 1902, were not moulted till the beginning of October. This shows the great importance of pulling out the feathers as soon as they show signs of ceasing to grow, in order to obtain the abnormally long feathers. The central rectrices continued to grow till the beginning of September 1903, when that of the left side was 3 feet 6 inches long, that of the right about an inch shorter. The coverts had ceased to grow of their own accord some time before this, and the central ones of ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... untouched, and said to me: "I am afraid you are ill; you are eating nothing." "No, not at all, only very uncomfortable"—and then I explained the situation to him—that my dress was so tight I could neither move nor eat. He was most indignant—"How could women be so foolish—why did we want to have abnormally small waists and be slaves to our dressmakers?—men didn't like made-up figures." "Oh, yes, they do; all men admire a slight, graceful figure." "Yes, when it is natural, but no man understands nor cares about a fashionably dressed woman—women dress for each ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... figures of old and young, rich and poor, trying only to put into each face the eager, upward look which should focus all, in spirit as well as in actual direction, upon the flying, luminous figure. In some attempts she succeeded and in some she failed. There was one old woman, with abnormally deep wrinkles, and shoulders somewhat out of drawing, whose face had caught a curiously inspired look; Madge did not dare touch her again for fear of losing it. Her artist, on the other hand, the young man with the ideal brow and very large eyes, grew ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... financiers and economists, very many tender-hearted women who will not consent to suffering, and who are destined to participate in government, as well as a great many who are personally conscious of wrongs that need rectifying, should assume the administration of the SUPERFLUOUS WEALTH abnormally accumulated. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... this way is not easy except by eternal vigilance, both for the public who have to be taught some things over every day, and for library workers who have to learn to be good natured but unyielding, obliging but arbitrary, eternally patient but abnormally quick. ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... language we must also differ with you. Your argument that you have friends who speak the language does not strike us as very sound. There are numbers of Europeans who have learned Chinese, but that does not alter the fact that Chinese is an abnormally difficult tongue. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 54, November 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... and attained to such proficiency in the classics that she could not only write Latin but think in Latin. She took a great delight in reading, and, of course, read omnivorously, with a special preference for history, poetry, and politics. Her inquisitive and abnormally active mind early began its inquiries into the mysteries of religious faith, but as these were not conducted in a patient or reverent spirit, it is no wonder, perhaps, that they proved unsatisfactory. She got hold of the works of Dugald Stewart, Hartley, and Priestley; plunged boldly into the ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... extracted (shortly after this) a twenty franc note from the back of his neck, and presented it to us with extreme care. I may say that most of his money went for cheese, of which The Zulu was almost abnormally fond. Nothing more suddenly delightful has happened to me than happened, one day, when I was leaning from the next to the last window—the last being the property of users of the cabinet—of The Enormous Room, contemplating ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... life, whenever you hear of General Booth, to realise what it means for such a man, struggling to carry on and extend such a work, to know every minute, day and night, that he is being accused and suspected of seeking only his own, all the time. Remember that his nature was perhaps abnormally sensitive about any mistrust or suspicion, and about the confidence of those nearest to him. And then you may have some conception of the cross he had always to bear, and of the wounded heart that went about, for years, inside that bold ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... than a hundred feet or so when Migul slowed our pace, and began to walk stooped over, with one of its abnormally long arms held close to the ground. The fingers were stiffly outstretched and barely skimmed the floor surface of the tunnel. As we passed through a spot of light I saw that Migul had extended from each of the fingertips an inch-long ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... angle—this striking arrangement is only found in man and the anthropoid apes, the gorilla, chimpanzee, orang, and several species of gibbons. The fine short hairs on the body become developed into "thickset, long, and rather coarse dark hairs," when abnormally nourished near old-standing inflamed surfaces.[32] The fine wool-like hair or so-called lanugo with which the human foetus, during the fifth and sixth months, is thickly covered, offers another proof that man is descended from an animal which was born ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... uplifted in blessing, His left hand resting on an open book; His bare feet rest upon the border of the oval enclosure. This oval is supported by two angels, the arms which hold the upper part being abnormally lengthened. On each side is a round shaft, enriched with a deeply cut series of ornaments running in a spiral; and at the head is a cushion capital with interlacing ornamentation. On each side of the shaft ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... the Prime Minister of Great Britain in this supreme crisis in English history, a remarkable man, of an abnormally quick mind, pretty nearly a great man, but now a spent force, at once nimble and weary. History may call him Great. If it do, he will owe this judgment to the war, with the conduct of which his name will ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... indeed been very slow with us, and I had learned to dread such periods of inaction, for I knew by experience that my companion's brain was so abnormally active that it was dangerous to leave it without material upon which to work. For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. Now I knew that under ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in Wickford, R. I., a few years ago, a Narragansett Pacer that was nearly full blooded. She was a villainously ugly animal of faded, sunburnt sorrel color. She was so abnormally broad-backed and broad-bodied that a male rider who sat astride her was forced to stick his legs out at a most awkward and ridiculous angle. That broad back carried, however, most comfortably a side-saddle or a pillion. Being extremely short-legged ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... in the same ratio. For when an emphysematous lung shall fully occupy the right thoracic side from B to L, then G, the liver, will protrude considerably into the abdomen beneath the right asternal ribs, and yet will not be therefore proof positive that the liver is diseased and abnormally enlarged. Whereas, on the other hand, when G, the liver, is actually diseased, it may occupy a situation in the right side as high as the fifth or sixth ribs, pushing the right lung upwards as high as that level; and, therefore, while ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... pool, standing up to his waist in water, there is another queer creature. He has long, red hair, and through his lips you can see that in his rage he is grinding a large set of teeth with the canine incisors abnormally developed. ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... your case a very little tuition would be sufficient," says Ryde, with such kindly encouragement in his tone that Ronayne, who is at Olga's feet, collapses, and from being abnormally grave breaks into ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... necessary, and vegetation has something of a subtropical appearance, palms growing naturally as far south as 37 deg. The climate is healthy and agreeable, though the death-rate among the common people is abnormally high on account of personal habits and unsanitary surroundings. In southern Chile the climate undergoes a radical change—the prevailing winds becoming westerly, causing a long rainy season with a phenomenal rainfall. The plains as well as the western ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... that she should die. And yet she yearns to be "ontbonden" (loosed), and begs of me to pray to that effect. Now, God forgive me, but this dying girl's request I cannot, cannot accede to. Humanly speaking, she simply cannot live; it is only her abnormally strong constitution that fights so grimly. I have wrestled with God for her life. Oh, she must not, may not, die! Think of the weak, frail mother—of the father far, far away in Ceylon! "O ye of little faith"; and yet I firmly believe God ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... because rents are always high for colored people and because the colored mothers are obliged to support their children, seven times as many of them, in proportion to their entire number, as of the white mothers, the actual number of colored children neglected in the midst of temptation is abnormally large. So closely is child life founded upon the imitation of what it sees that the child who knows all evil is almost sure in the end to share it. Colored children seldom roam far from their own neighborhoods: in the public playgrounds, which are theoretically open to them, ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... major's figure was a familiar one in the card-room of the Rag and Bobtail, at the bow-window of the Jeunesse Doree. Tall and pompous, with a portly frame and a puffy clean-shaven face which peered over an abnormally high collar and old-fashioned linen cravat, he stood as a very type and emblem of staid middle-aged respectability. The major's hat was always of the glossiest, the major's coat was without a wrinkle, and, in ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... said, rather a precocious little boy—he learnt to talk at an abnormally early age, and he was so sane and "old-fashioned," as people say, that he was permitted an amount of initiative that most children scarcely attain by seven or eight. His mother died when he was two, and he was under the less vigilant and authoritative care of a ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... that I believe my remembrance of events depends much more upon the events themselves than upon my possessing any special facility for recalling them. Perhaps I am too imaginative, and the earliest impressions I received were of a kind to stimulate the imagination abnormally. A long series of little misfortunes, so connected with each other as to suggest a sort of weird fatality, so worked upon my melancholy temperament when I was a boy that, before I was of age, I sincerely believed ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... was wafted to the nostrils of Greiffenhagen the familiar fragrance of Bourbon. He glanced at Dan and Jimmie. Each appeared almost abnormally sober and solemn. At this moment Miss Mary ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... "Yes; but abnormally developed in a single direction. His one object is to out-manoeuvre in a game of desperate and immoral chances. The tactical spirit in him has none of the higher ambition. It has felt itself in the degree only ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... she was one of that numerous type of wife who loses a great deal of interest in her husband after their first child is born. The Laird's wife was normally intelligent, peacefully inclined, extremely good-looking both as to face and figure, despite her years, and always abnormally concerned over what the most inconsequential people in the world might think of her and hers. She had a passion for being socially "correct." Flights of imagination were rarely hers; on the few occasions when they were, her thoughts had to do with an advantageous marriage for Jane and Elizabeth, ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... slightly heavy with wine, went to bed. Clarges, abnormally wakeful, tried to read Bell's Life which lay before him and waited until Bovey was fast asleep. They occupied the same room, a large double-bedded one, which opened into a bathroom and parlour ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... that he had nothing to fall back on, and that that was as great a humiliation in a good cause as a proud man could desire. It had not yet been so distinct to him that he made no show—literally not the smallest; so complete a show seemed made there all about him; so almost abnormally affirmative, so aggressively erect, were the huge, heavy objects that syllabled his hostess story. "When all's said and done, you know, she's colossally vulgar"—he had once all but said that of Mrs. Lowder to her niece; only just keeping it back at the last, keeping ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... and reason, acting as warning, may perform their duty abnormally, or assume abnormal proportions. And then we have the FEELING of fear. The normal warning is induced by actual danger apprehended by mind in a state of balance and self-control. Normal mind is always capable of such warning. There are but two ways in which so-called ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... vibrate with redoubled activity, to become abnormally acute. For the first time he was conscious of the imperative clamor of the electric bell in O'Hagan's quarters, as well as of the janitor's rich brogue voicing his indignation as he opened the basement door and prepared to ascend. ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... and walked up and down the platform. He passed the closed and darkened windows of the sleeping-car; and it seemed to his abnormally quickened sense that he was beside her, bending over her, and ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Mick slipped out of bed, carefully opened his knife and made a few judicious slits in the veiling canvas. My senses had become abnormally acute. I seemed to hear every shade of sound within and without the house. I could sense, I imagined, the very positions in which sat the persons in the kitchen below. Even Twinetoes was affected by the tense atmosphere. He murmured in his sleep and seemed ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... unbearable agony. The room began to spin slowly on its axis. There was no mist now, or even a shadow, and every sense was abnormally acute. The objects in the whirling room were phenomenally clear; even a scratch on the front of his chiffonier stood ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... laughing. Perhaps laughter was somewhat rare in that old garden. Tamzine, who was weeding at the far end, lifted her head in a startled fashion and walked past us into the house. She did not look at us or speak to us. She was reputed to be abnormally shy. She was very stout and wore a dress of bright red-and-white striped material. Her face was round and blank, but her reddish hair was abundant and beautiful. A huge, orange-coloured cat was at her ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Fig. 68, is made abnormally thick to give the stiffness necessary for levering the waste out ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... these various members and organs. The ears of a child might suggest the ears of a dog or of a lion or of a swine, and similarly the nose, mouth, lips, hands, or feet might present a peculiar appearance. A single member or the features in general might be small or abnormally large. All these peculiarities meant something; and since few if any children are born without presenting some peculiarities in some part of the body, it would seem as though the intention of the compilers of the series was to provide a complete handbook for the interpretation of signs connected ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... spring air he was conscious of a certain chilliness. Her level, indifferent tone seemed to him almost abnormally callous. A horrible realisation flashed for a moment in his brain. She was speaking of the man whom she ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... men, a fair, horsey-looking boy, with a yellow moustache, a turned-up nose, and an almost abnormally impudent and larky expression, laughed in a very male and soldierly way; the other, who was dark, with a tall figure and severe grey eyes, looked impenetrably ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... frequent { in the mild depressions and in all victims of { self-attention. { Retardation { found in most depressions. { Deficiency { as in idiocy—the inability to form new concepts. { Acceleration { as in hypo-mania. { Poverty { as in the abnormally self-centered; { as in melancholia. { Rambling ideas { as in chronic insanity. { Flight of ideas { as in manias, hysterias, and acute deliriums. Disorders / Fixed ideas of < as in paranoia. Ideation Perversions (concepts change their meaning ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... itself could not have presented a more hideous scene than our encampment. The lust of blood is abhorrent enough in civilized races, but in Indian tribes, whose unrestrained, hard life abnormally develops the instincts of the tiger, it is a thing that may not be portrayed. Let us not, with the depreciatory hypocrisy, characteristic of our age, befool ourselves into any belief that barbaric practices were more humane than customs which are the flower of civilized centuries. ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... whose iron endurance and stern will have enabled him to wear down all his associates by work sustained through arduous days and sleepless nights, was not at all strong as a child, and was of fragile appearance. He had an abnormally large but well-shaped head, and it is said that the local doctors feared he might have brain trouble. In fact, on account of his assumed delicacy, he was not allowed to go to school for some years, and even when ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... to the door with one hand, and the frame with the other, swinging back and forth on the threshold, with abnormally large iron shoes flying up and down in the wet green foreground, and the whole North Sea towering over me in the middle distance—oh, but ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... have attempted to dissolve truth by detaching it from this divine origin. You speak the truth in other words, but you are accused of blasphemously ignoring its sublime authorship. Nor is that all. Your philosophy must have gripped him hard, for he declares that you have an abnormally clairvoyant mind, and that "no female intelligence" can long withstand the diabolical influence of your heathen suggestions. Really it made my flesh creep! You might have thought he was warning me against a snake charmer. And when I declined to ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... original form). But he liked to choose his accomplices, and the gay sparks of the senior day-room did not appeal to him. They were not intellectual enough. In his lucid intervals, he was accustomed to be almost abnormally solemn and respectable. When not promoting some unholy rag, Shoeblossom resembled an elderly gentleman of studious habits. He liked to sit in a comfortable chair and read a book. It was the impossibility of doing this in the senior day-room that led him to try ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... perception—that is, the brain—is exceeded, just as nature frequently forms monstrosities in which ONE ORGAN is developed at the expense of the others. Such a monstrosity, if it reaches the highest degree, is called GENIUS, which at bottom is caused only by an abnormally rich and powerful brain. This organ of perception, which originally and in normal cases looks outward for the purpose of satisfying the wants of the will of life, receives in the case of an abnormal development such vivid and such striking impressions from outside ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... to move as if they were placed on the background of the vault; the result being that the mind is obliged to conceive them as expanded or contracted, in its unconscious attempts to make them always fill their due proportion of space in the various parts of this abnormally shaped sky. ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... of traffic was torture to his abnormally acute ears. Increased atmospheric pressure did funny things to his chest and stomach. And quick and sure-footed on Mars, he struggled constantly against the heavy gravity that made all his ...
— Native Son • T. D. Hamm
... experience, it seems that his sexual fetichism is causally dependent upon his childish love of flowers—and probably he is right in so thinking. But we must not for this reason assume that his childish preference had any sexual character. It is more likely that the abnormally great fondness for flowers, beginning in childhood, was a favouring factor of the subsequent development of the rose-fetichism. What applies here to a pathological instance, may also be assumed to be true of the normal sexual life. That is to say, the ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... rather abnormally normal about this. Persons of robust emotions seldom think very much about them. The temperament that cultivates its emotional soil assiduously, warms it, waters it and watches anxiously for the first sprouts, gets a rather anemic growth for its pains. Which of these facts is cause and which effect, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... looked from one of the horses to the other. She saw the dilated pupils, the abnormally full forehead, the few coarse hairs growing just above the eyelid, and they told ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... he's the most perfect specimen of manhood I've ever beheld. He's abnormally big without the slightest suggestion of being either too big or awkward. He's simply magnificent. Most men of that size are just leggy and gawky: he is neither. Again, other men built as he, are usually rather brainless and weak, or probably made so much of by women that they ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... and the perspiration stood out in great drops upon West's brow as he waited for the discovery which he felt must be made. For a movement on the part of either of the ponies, or a check of the rein to keep them from stretching down their necks to graze, would have been enough. But they remained abnormally still, and at last, to the satisfaction and relief of both, the Boer vedette moved off at a trot, leaving the pair of listeners once ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... was constitutionally sensitive and almost abnormally active; and she more than once overtaxed it by too continuous study, or by a disregard of its laws of health, or by a stupendous multiplicity of cares, some of which it would have been wiser to leave to others. She took everybody's ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... his wits abnormally sharpened, he set to work to devise how to meet his brother, and even as he was meditating how to trick him, his heart was full of affection for his little Vidal. Poor Vidal! How he must have suffered to lose ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... every time the condenser is charged the fibers have their ends at different potentials, so a current passes to equalize them and energy is lost. This current increases the capacity. One condenser made of paper boiled in ozokerite took an abnormally large current and heated rapidly. At a high temperature it gave off water, and the power wasted and current ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... whole the season was backward in spring and the summer was abnormally cool. There was sufficient ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... them. Yet there are the symptoms. Call it hysteria, or what you will. I call it an injustice on the part of the Higher Power. I suppose that is blasphemy, but I am forced to it. Can that girl help the longings for her rights, her longings which are abnormally acute because of her over-fine nervous system? Those longings, situated as she is, can never be satisfied in any way except for her own harm. Meantime she eats her own heart, since she has nothing else, and heart-eating produces all kinds ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... drew nearer the market-place the progress became yet slower, for the crowd seemed suddenly and abnormally swelled. There was a great shouting of voices, too, in front, and the smell of burning came distinctly on the breeze. The man riding beside Robin turned his head and called out; and in answer one of the others riding behind pushed his horse up level with the other two, so that the ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... is, not finally. I keep arriving at new conclusions. My first impression was that you were a person of frigid altitudes,—severe, exacting, and abnormally superior. Then, later, I have thought you warm-hearted—even impulsive: that your indifference is not always real. But of that, I am not sure. Still, I believe you possess a ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... any rate in the name of the publication which tells of work that did come. Thackeray's mind was at all times peculiarly exercised with a sense of snobbishness. His appreciation of the vice grew abnormally, so that at last he had a morbid horror of a snob—a morbid fear lest this or the other man should turn snob on his hands. It is probable that the idea was taken from the early Snob at Cambridge, either from his own participation in the work or from ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... man. He has inherited them from the animal world. Their strength and weakness depend on the make-up of the machine. Some are very strong and some abnormally weak, and there are no two machines that emphasize or repress the same instincts to the same degree. One need but look at his family and neighbors to see the various manifestations of these instincts. Some are quarrelsome and combative and will fight ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... are qualities found in varying intensity among the colonists from New Hampshire to Georgia. Nowhere, however, were they so marked as along the Western border, where centrifugal forces were particularly strong and local attachments were abnormally developed. Under stress of real or fancied wrongs, it was natural for settlers in these frontier regions to meet for joint protest, or if the occasion were grave enough, to enter into political association, to resist encroachment upon what ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... in the remarkable long-nosed ape of Borneo (Nasalis larvatus). Its finely-shaped nose would be regarded with envy by many a man who has too little of that organ. If we compare the face of the long-nosed ape with that of abnormally ape-like human beings (such as the famous Miss Julia Pastrana, Figure 1.185), it will be admitted to represent a higher stage of development. There are still people among us who look especially to the face ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... to be an abnormally small one. A nest sent me from Sikhim, where it was found in July, contained much larger eggs, and more in proportion to the size of the bird. The nest I refer to was placed in a clump of bamboos about 5 feet from the ground. ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... would be a most favourable condition for watching small signs. He knows that while we fixate a point with the centre of our eye we are most sensitive to slight movement impressions on the side parts of our eye, and that this sensitiveness is often abnormally heightened. Just when the child is looking steadily into our face or to the ceiling, the outside parts of her sensitive retina may bring to her the visible unintentional signs from her sister or mother. The untrained observer is also ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... better than to get him down," I suggested; "he's most abnormally keen at ferreting out a mystery that promises any news—if any one can learn the truth ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... could hardly cause a tentacle to bend with precision to a definite point. Though I carefully looked, I could never detect any wrinkling of the surface at the bending place, even in the case of a tentacle abnormally curved into a complete circle, under circumstances ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... although there was a vacant seat in the little circle, of which Copal and Lightmark formed the nucleus, and to which Rainham had joined himself, he shuffled off to his favourite corner, and buried himself in "Gil Blas" and an abnormally ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... no choice, limping piteously on his sprung leg with his jaw hanging so that the missing teeth were abnormally conspicuous. Outside his door a single torch flared and back of its waver stood a semicircle of unrecognized avengers, coated in black slickers with hats turned low and masks upon their faces. They led him away into the darkness ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... name. 'Tain't of no consequence. Say," the choreman broke out suddenly, "you don't figger to git boostin' steers in that rig?" He stretched out an abnormally long arm, and pointed a rough but wonderfully clean finger at the flowing corduroys Tresler had now become ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... ever been at the mercy of my moods, easily elated, quickly cast down. I have always been abnormally sensitive, affected by sunshine and by shadows, vacillating, intense in my feelings. I was truly happy in those days, finding time in the long evenings to think of the scenes of stress and sorrow I had witnessed, reconstructing ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... head, but, to make up for it, the skin, which was a saffron yellow, was an amazing mass of wrinkles. The cranium, and, indeed, the whole skull, was so small as to be disagreeably suggestive of something animal. The nose, on the other hand, was abnormally large; so extravagant were its dimensions, and so peculiar its shape, it resembled the beak of some bird of prey. A characteristic of the face—and an uncomfortable one!—was that, practically, it stopped short ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... teeth in a human head. The expression of his smile, however, was by no means unpleasing, as might be supposed; but it had no variation whatever. It was one of profound melancholy—of a phaseless and unceasing gloom. His eyes were abnormally large, and round like those of a cat. The pupils, too, upon any accession or diminution of light, underwent contraction or dilation, just such as is observed in the feline tribe. In moments of excitement the orbs grew bright ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... almost abundant, in Wagner and Liszt and their German contemporaries. Indeed it was an age of lyricists. The fault was that they failed to recognize their lyric limitation, lengthening and padding their motives abnormally to fit a form that was too large. Hence the symphony of Liszt, with barren stretches, and the impossible plan of the later music-drama. The truest form of such a period was the song, as it blossomed in the ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... the weirdly grotesque. His imagination played round those subjects of fantastic horror which had so potent an attraction for Fitz James O'Brien, the writer whom he most resembles. There was something of Poe's cold pleasure in dissecting the abnormally horrible in "The Story of John Pollexfen," the photographer, who, in order to discover a certain kind of lens, experimented with living eyes. His cat and dog each lost an eye, and finally a young ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... provided; but my youthful acquaintance, ALLBUTT-INNETT, Jun., Esq., informs me that this is a common failing among the English classes, who fondly imagine that nothing is needed to render a frog the exact equivalent to an ox except an increased quantity of air, forgetting that if a frog is abnormally inflated, it is apt to provide the rather ludicrous catastrophe of exploding ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... smiling June with gentle breezes. There are also January, February and March, the months winter really settles to his task and delivers, as he will, snow storms, or spells of abnormally cold weather that make the house hard to heat and may freeze pipes. There are also rainy spells of two or three days' duration that come any time, spring, summer or fall. It is fun to be in the country when the sun shines. ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... Shand, in which he told her that though he had not been absolutely engaged to marry Hester Bolton before he started for Australia,—and consequently before he had ever been at Pollington,—yet his mind had been quite made up to do so; and that therefore he regarded himself as being abnormally constant rather than fickle. 'And tell your daughter, with my kindest regards,' he added, 'that I hope I may be allowed ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... well-dressed: he was very dark in complexion, and had a rather heavy jaw; but his dark eyes were pleasant and honest, and he had a very attractive smile. The length of his moustache was almost the first thing that struck Lesley: it seemed to her so abnormally lengthy, with such very stiffly waxed ends, that she could scarcely avert her eyes from them. She was not able to tell, save from instinct, whether a man were well or ill-dressed, but she felt sure that Captain Duchesne's ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... have successfully seized the grieved and startled buffalo by the tail, but they are not here to testify to the circumstances. They are dead, abnormally ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... fought a noble fight. He was no beginner. The atmosphere, abnormally high and thick in the gravitational potential of this world whipped and burned about the ship, but to the very last it looked as though he might bring ...
— Youth • Isaac Asimov
... all of Nature's doing," he said. "It's just the abnormally hard rock that is bothering us. Only for that we'd be all right, though we might have petty difficulties because of the mean acts of Blakeson & Grinder. But I ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... they dropped for a wink at a neighbour. Joanna waltzing with Socknersh to the trills of Mr. Elphick, the Brodnyx schoolmaster, seated at the tinkling, ancient Collard, Joanna in her pink gown, close fitting to her waist and then abnormally bunchy, with her hair piled high and twisted with a strand of ribbon, with her face flushed, her lips parted and her eyes bright, was a sight from which no man and few women could turn their eyes. Her vitality and happiness seemed to shine from her skin, almost to light up the dark ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... moments Rob's powers of observation seemed as if they were abnormally sharpened, and as he noted the soft hairs toward the end of the tail erected and then laid down, and again erected, making it look thick and soft, he noted too that the muzzle was furnished with long ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... can tell a bigger one than that," said Win laughing, "but perhaps you'll swallow it because your friend Bill told it to me. He said that some time in the sixteenth century there was an abnormally low tide, lower than any one had ever known. Some fishermen who happened to be out between Orgueil and the coast of France came in and reported that they had distinctly seen down in the channel the towers and streets and ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... an appearance of uncertainty and unsafeness.... Men seldom take to wife a girl who has too small a waist, whether natural or artificial." "In architecture, a pillar or support of any kind is called debased and bad in art if what is supported be too heavy for the thing supporting, and if a base be abnormally heavy and large for what it upholds. The laws of proportion and balance must be understood. In a waist of fifteen inches both are destroyed, and the corresponding effect is unpleasant to the eye. The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... power of thought, also that at times it has an influence upon our general feelings, but I do not admit that it can have any direct influence upon the body." Here is one who has allowed herself to be long given to grief, abnormally so—notice her lowered physical condition, her lack of vitality. The New York papers within the past twelve months recorded the case of a young lady in New Jersey who, from constant grieving over the death of her mother, died, fell ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... exceptional circumstances. They are intense only—in the absence of any further motive—when the thing to be won for another becomes invested for the moment with an abnormal value, and the thing to be lost by oneself becomes abnormally depreciated; when all intermediate possibilities are suddenly swept away from us, and the only surviving alternatives are shame and heroism. But this never happens, except in the case of great catastrophes, of such, for instance, as a shipwreck; and thus the only conditions ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... passed through one of the most severe periods of financial depression with which she has ever been afflicted. The period between 1854 and 1856 saw great commercial activity. Vast sums of money had been spent in constructing railways. This outlay, three bountiful harvests, and the abnormally high prices of farm products caused by the Crimean War, combined to make a period of almost unexampled prosperity—a prosperity more {54} apparent than real. The usual reaction followed. Peace in Europe, coinciding with ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... that they were closely associated with one of the early outpourings of nomadic peoples from Arabia, a country which is favourable for the production of a larger population than it is able to maintain permanently, especially when its natural resources are restricted by a succession of abnormally dry years. In tracing the Akkadians from Arabia, however, we are confronted at the outset with the difficulty that its prehistoric, and many of its present-day, inhabitants are not of the characteristic Semitic type. On the Ancient Egyptian pottery and monuments the Arabs ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... leanings towards archaeology and ecclesiology. A monastic library was the proper place for this gentle emotional dreamer, who clung so fondly to the ancient traditions. To a prince of his temperament the vehement activity of his abnormally energetic father was very offensive. He liked neither the labour itself nor its object. Yet Peter, not unnaturally, wished his heir to dedicate himself to the service of new Russia, and demanded from him unceasing ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... is abundant and wrong methods of feeding horses are commonly practised. It is a very common practice to feed horses accustomed to hard work the same ration when idle for a few days as when working. The blood of horses cared for in this way may become abnormally rich in albuminoids. The suddenness of the attack, occurring shortly after the animal is given exercise, indicates auto-poisoning. This may be due to the blood in the portal vessels and the liver capillaries, charged with nutritious and waste products from the overfed animal's intestines, being ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... that he had an air of thinking it quite natural he should leave many simple folk, tasting of him, as simple as ever he found them, and that he very seldom talked about the newspapers, which, by the way, were always even abnormally vulgar about him. Of course he may have thought them over—the newspapers—night and day; the only point I make is that he didn't show it while at the same time he didn't strike one as a man actively on his guard. I may add that, touching his ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... innocent and guileless passengers. The customs examination had been thorough beyond parallel. Not even the steerage and second-cabin passengers had escaped; everybody's belongings had been combed fine by a corps of inspectors whose dutiful curiosity had been abnormally stimulated by the prospect of a ten-thousand-dollar reward. Not a few passengers had been obliged to submit to the indignity of personal search—Staff and Alison in their number; the latter for no reason that Staff could imagine; the former presumably because he had roomed with the elusive Mr. ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... energies have been more directed towards increase of size, is relatively incomplete in structure; and shows it in a comparative awkwardness, bodily and mental. Now this law is true of each separate part of the organism, as well as of the whole. The abnormally rapid advance of any organ in respect of structure, involves premature arrest of its growth; and this happens with the organ of the mind as certainly as with any other organ. The brain, which during early years is relatively ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... and the wrath of an outside Creator and Judge, and his desire is aimed at escape from this wrath through "election" and God's grace. But he is a Puritan endowed with a psychopathic temperament sensitive to the point of disease and gifted with an abnormally high visualising power. Hence his resemblance to the mystics, which is a resemblance of psychical temperament ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... of him was conscious of her and exulted in that which he had seen in her eyes when she had told him that she would be at home that evening and that she would be glad to have him call. With all his senses abnormally alert, he saw and noted everything about him. A thousand trivial, commonly unseen things, along his way and in the faces, dress, and manner, of the people whom he met, caught his eye. Yet, always, vividly before him, was the face ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... thousand dollars, yet all the damage it had done was to destroy a tumble-down and uninhabited cottage, which proves that, save against permanent fortifications, there is a point where the usefulness of these abnormally large guns ceases. While we were discussing this specimen of Bertha Krupp's handicraft, the door opened and General Gouraud entered the room. Seldom have I seen a more striking figure: a tall, slender, graceful man, with a long, brown, ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... for her still burning fires of suspicion—fires which had, indeed, blazed up anew at this second long period of absence on the part of Arkwright. Naturally, therefore, the call was anything but a joy and comfort to either one. Arkwright was nervous, gloomy, and abnormally gay by turns. Alice was nervous and abnormally gay all the time. Then they said good-by and Arkwright went away. He sailed the next day, and Alice settled down to the summer of study and hard work she had laid ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... venture along the spit of rocks unless the tide is in a proper state to allow him a safe return. A melancholy warning of the dangers of the Brig is fixed to the rocky wall of the headland, describing how an unfortunate visitor was swept into the sea by the sudden arrival of an abnormally large wave, but this need not frighten away from the fascinating ridge of rock those who use ordinary care in watching the sea. At high tide the waves come over the seaweedy rocks at the foot of the headland, making it necessary to climb to the grassy top in order to ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... Gloria nor the fawning Denny dared approach him. The very force of his emotions had permanently disturbed his poise, or perhaps effected some obscure lesion in his brain. Even when he showed himself again in public he was still abnormally choleric. His fits of passion became almost apoplectic in their violence; they caused his associates to shun him as a man dangerous, and in his calmer moments he thought of them with alarm. He had tried to regain his nervous control, but without success, and his wife's anxiety only chafed ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... find superfluous energy adequate to attend to the subject in hand. This is on the same principle that governs the effects of poisonous stimulants. Taken into the system, the whole bodily activity is aroused in an attempt to expel the poison. Some of this abnormally awakened energy may be applied to uses other than those intended by nature. Hence some individuals are actually helped in their work at least temporarily by the use of stimulants. Most of the energy is of course required to expel the poison, and hence the method of generating ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... Three days later the crew, while fishing, hooked a swordfish. Xiphias, however, broke the line, and a few moments after leaped half out of the water, with the object, it should seem, of taking a look at his persecutor, the Dreadnaught. Probably he satisfied himself that the enemy was some abnormally large cetacean, which it was his natural duty to attack forthwith. Be this as it may, the attack was made, and the next morning the captain was awakened with the unwelcome intelligence that the ship had sprung a leak. She was taken back to Columbo, ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... first half of May. These dates, however, are dependent upon the state of the weather. When the weather is unusually wet the start is late. The plant suffers from the rank growth of grass and weeds, and extra labor is required to keep the fields clean. In abnormally hot weather, especially after rains, the plant sheds its leaves, thus exposing the bolls, which fall off, whereupon replanting becomes necessary. In addition to injuries by the weather the cotton-plant is subject to depredations ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... phantoms of the mind. For he judged them to be phantoms (alcoholic in their origin), his scruples of last night. Strictly speaking, it was on Wednesday night that he had got drunk; but he felt as if his intoxication had prolonged itself abnormally, as if this were the first moment ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... the center where the color is uniformly reddish or reddish-brown because the surface is not broken up into scales; gills close, free, white, ventricose; stem smooth, enlarged at the base. In some plants the base of the stem is abnormally large; ring white, ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... Alfred's being insane and abnormally irritable, and under a pecuniary illusion, as stated in his certificate: and to his own vast experience. But the fire of cross-examination melted all his polysyllables into guesswork and hearsay. It melted out of him that he, a stranger, had intruded on the young man's privacy, and had burst ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... worst of aristocratic prejudices and treats poverty as in itself criminal. It led him, too, to attack some worthy people, and among others the 'earless' Defoe. Defoe's position is most significant. A journalist of supreme ability, he had an abnormally keen eye for the interesting. No one could feel the pulse of his audience with greater quickness. He had already learned by inference that nothing interests the ordinary reader so much as a straightforward ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... figure than Septimus Searle Lingard has seldom walked the streets of any town. Though not actually much over sixty, you would have said he must be a thousand; his abnormally long, narrow, shaven face was so thin and gaunt and hollowed, and his tall, upright figure was so painfully fragile, that his black broadcloth seemed almost too heavy for the worn frame inside it. And nothing in the world else was ever so piercingly solemn as his keen weary ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... the bar overhead with a long pething-pole, like an abnormally long and heavy alpenstock, in his hand; he selects the beast to be killed, stands over it in breathless . . . silence, adjusts his point over the centre of the vertebra, and with one plunge sends the cruel point with unerring ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... normal happenings were unreasonable. It was a place of madness. He recalled the words of the navvy on the London dock, "Everything is unreasonable at sea." Certainly that was true of the vast stewing labyrinth of the Sargasso. He had lived abnormally so long that it seemed strange to him now to think that there were comfortable, well-ordered places on the face of the earth. Just as one cannot imagine snow and ice in the depth of summer, so Madden could not imagine the simple ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... the ordinary run of men, and, apart from his shyness, built up an intangible, invisible barrier between him and his kind. He had lived all his life in Carlisle; and all the Carlisle people knew of or about him—although they thought they knew everything—was that he was painfully, abnormally shy. He never went anywhere except to church; he never took part in Carlisle's simple social life; even with most men he was distant and reserved; as for women, he never spoke to or looked at them; if one spoke to him, even if she were ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the room, for a moment Nigel had the impression that she was a stranger coming in. Why was that? His mind repeated the question, and he gazed at her with intensity, seeking the reason of his impression. She was looking strangely, abnormally fair. Had she again, despite the conversation of the morning, "done something" to her face? Was its whiteness whiter than usual? Or were her lips a little redder? Or—he did not know what she had done, whether, indeed, she had done anything—but he felt troubled, ill at ease. He felt a ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... pneumonia, air has been displaced by inflammatory product occupying the air space, or if fluid collects in the lower part of the chest, the percussion sound becomes dull. If, as in emphysema, or in pneumothorax, there is an excess of air in the chest cavity, the percussion sound becomes abnormally ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... motionless on the verge of its retreat. It seemed to be on guard, and as a companionable feeling had been aroused, I was careful as I passed not to unduly affright it. The statuesque position being abnormally retained, I stooped down, to find the crab dead, with the froth still on the complicated lips, while beside it was a huge wolf spider, "tremendous still in death," with head crushed to pulp. One may theorise that ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... within a foot of me and a kingfisher was busy on a twig almost at my elbow. Twilight was just creeping along, and I could hear nothing but faint creakings of sculls from the river and sometimes the drip of a punt-pole. I thought the river seemed to become suddenly deserted; it grew quite abnormally quiet—and abnormally dark. But I was so deep in reflection that it never occurred to ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... the contrast between eosinophil and neutrophil cells. At the height of ordinary leucocytosis, the number of eosinophil cells is diminished often to disappearance; whilst during its decline they occur in abnormally high numbers. Hence it follows that the eosinophil and neutrophil cells must react towards stimulating substances completely differently, and in a certain ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... a large crew, abnormally large hawse-pipes, and a bad reputation—the last attribute born of the first. Registered as the Rosebud, this innocent name was painted on her stern and on her sixteen dories; but she was known among the fishing-fleet as ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... differences is no better than opinion. Two facts, however, such studies do make clear. First, the supposition that "the increases in ability due to a given amount of progress toward maturity are closely alike for all children save the so-called 'abnormally-precocious' or 'retarded' is false. The same fraction of the total inner development, from zero to adult ability, will produce very unequal results in different children. Inner growth acts differently according ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... stuffing a house with half-fading flowers, it always suggests a funeral to me, with the banked-up mantels for coffins. It's horrid, I know, but I can't help it. However, if I am writing in this vein it's time I stopped. My letter is abnormally long as it is—I hope the right number of stamps will be put on it. Forgive me for mentioning it, my dear, but we always have to pay double postage due on your epistles. I don't mind at all—they are quite worth it—only I thought you ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... work to nurse that sense of impending calamity, to find his brain ceaselessly active upon the forecast of a future in which he should walk alone, and while he was thus harassed still to keep up a false cheerfulness before Doris. She was abnormally sensitive to impressions. A tone spoke volumes to her. He did not wish to disturb her by his own ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair |
