"Amorphous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sliced and polished specimens of these concretions, and of the solid marl-rock, collected in various places between the Colorado and Santa Fe Bajada. In the greater number, Dr. Carpenter finds that the whole substance presents a tolerably uniform amorphous character, but with traces of incipient crystalline metamorphosis; in other specimens he finds microscopically minute rounded concretions of an amorphous substance (resembling in size those in oolitic rocks, but not having a concentric structure), united by a cement which is ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... the house a ragged, poorly-dressed, grey- headed, awkward, amorphous—in short, a very strange-looking— little old man. At first glance it might have been thought that he was perpetually ashamed of something—that he had on his conscience something which always made him, as it were, bristle up and then shrink into ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... metallurgical difficulties which make it unprofitable in any event. A gold ore may contain copper or arsenic, so as to debar cyanidation, where this process is the only hope of sufficiently moderate costs. A lead ore may be an amorphous compound with zinc, and successful concentration or smelting without great penalties may be precluded. A copper ore may carry a great excess of silica and be at the same time unconcentratable, and there may be no base mineral supply available ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... name had been the hope of escape. Where should we find people more likely to be quick and responsive? They would be among the first to understand the nature of the calamity which had overtaken us. They would know, long before amorphous and alien London, what that new world should be like which we owed to the young, a world in which might grow a garden for the bruised ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... Irishwoman, Kitty Fagan, huddled together in such amorphous guise, that she looked as if she had been fitted in a tempest of petticoats and a whirlwind of old shawls, who presented herself at ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... into it. They could all see it there, in the middle of the amorphous body, while the creature stopped, as if determining whether or not it was food. Quade screwed his courage together in the pause, and tried to dodge past to the door of the sphere; but the monster was alert: ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... their faces tirelessly held downward on a level with their hands, they seem but gnomes; surely they are huge, undeveloped embryos of women, with neither head nor trunk. For this light is pitiless. It makes them even more a part of this earth, out of which they seem to have sprung, a strange amorphous growth. The bronzed skins are dyed in the gold as if to match with the hue of the mud; the wet skirts are shreds, gray and brown tatters, not so good in texture as the lichens, and the ragged jerseys seem only bits of the more distant weeds woven ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... which up to the present English politicians have taken no account. The party of Revolution is the party which under an Irish Parliament would be master of the situation. Leaders will not be lacking. But at present the party must from the necessity of the case be amorphous, and therefore, politically and as a power, practically non-existent. Pass the bill, and then you will see something. A new party, the party of Independence, or, as they will call it, of Freedom, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... the curious and the unusual in Australian life. The idea is in part a survival from earlier years when a host of military officers, Civil Servants, journalists and tourists described in some form the more obvious peculiarities of the colonies: their giant, evergreen forests, strange amorphous animals, aristocratic gold-diggers, ex-convicts in carriages, and general state of topsy-turveydom. There is quite an amazing variety of occasional records of this class in forgotten books, magazines and pamphlets. In at least a score of well-known novels there are charming ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... the exasperating. From that he went on to remember that its colour was, on the whole, fair, a light brown. But he had forgotten her mouth, he had failed to name the colour of her eyes. She wore glasses, it is true. And her dress was indefinite in his memory—an amorphous dinginess. ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... defence against all "liberals" has glorified the unchanging. Every outburst of the interior fires in the history of Gaul has been followed by a rapid, plastic action which reduced to human use what might otherwise have crystallised into an amorphous lava. So the wild freedom of the twelfth century was captured to form the Monarchy, the University, the full Gothic of the thirteenth: so the Revolution permitted Napoleon and produced, not the visionary unstable grandeur of the Gironde, but the schools and laws ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... a light, I could have passed the time without thinking it half so long. The darkness appeared to me to double the duration of the hours, as though it was something physical and substantial that clogged the wheels of my watch, and hindered the motion of time itself. Amorphous darkness! I fancied it gave me pain—a pain that light would at once have alleviated; and sometimes I felt as I had once done before, when laid upon a sick couch counting over the long drear hours of the night, and anxiously watching for the ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... as pure quicksands, in which the solid matter is so finely divided that it is amorphous and virtually held in suspension, ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... no final release, since he could not be liberated from himself. Strange and amorphous, she must go yearning on through the trouble, like a warm, glowing cloud blown in the middle of a storm. She felt so rich, in her warm vagueness, that her soul cried out on him, because he harried her and wanted ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... amorphous Sansculottism taking form, ought we not above all things to specify how the Amorphous gets itself a Head? Without metaphor, this Revolution Government continues hitherto in a very anarchic state. Executive Council ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... mouth, nerves, muscles, or distinct organs, and only manifesting its vitality to ordinary observation by thrusting out and retracting from all parts of its surface, long filamentous processes, which serve for arms and legs. Yet this amorphous particle, devoid of everything which, in the higher animals, we call organs, is capable of feeding, growing, and multiplying; of separating from the ocean the small proportion of carbonate of lime which is dissolved ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... lissom figure. They pronounce her morally unsound; they say her nature has a taint; they chill her popularity with silent smiles of slow disparagement. But they have no particulars; their slander is not concrete. It is an amorphous accusation, sweeping and vague, spleen-born ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... was vehement for a fight to a finish and a good licking for the Boers. Of this larger faction Val Dartie was naturally a member. Radical youth, on the other hand, a small but perhaps more vocal body, was for stopping the war and giving the Boers autonomy. Until Black Week, however, the groups were amorphous, without sharp edges, and argument remained but academic. Jolly was one of those who knew not where he stood. A streak of his grandfather old Jolyon's love of justice prevented, him from seeing one side only. Moreover, in his set of 'the best' there was a 'jumping-Jesus' ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... rusty ramshackle diligence awaited them. Their luggage, together with hen-coops, baskets, bundles, packing-cases, were piled on top in an amorphous heap. They took their places inside together with an old priest and a peasant woman in a great flapping cap. The old priest absorbed snuff in great quantities and used a red handkerchief. The closed windows of the vehicle rattled, it was very hot, and the antiquated cushions smelled ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... threatened a child, who, in soiled tights and spangles, crouched against the muddy hind-wheel of a wagon, tears dribbling down his cheeks, his arm raised to ward off the impending blow. From the menagerie—an amorphous huddle of gray tents, ranged behind a flight of wooden steps leading up to an open gallery hung with advertisements of the many attractions within—came the hideous laughter of a hyena, and the sullen roar of a lion weary of the rows of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... not said that he was a handsome boy, for youth is amorphous and the promise of today is not always fulfilled by the morrow. Jerry's features were unformed at ten and, as has already been suggested, made no distinct impression upon my mind. Whatever his early ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... punishment was simply that it was a Sacculina—that it was a Sacculina when it might have been a Crustacean. Instead of being a free and independent organism high in structure, original in action, vital with energy, it deteriorated into a torpid and all but amorphous sac confined to perpetual imprisonment and doomed to a living death. "Any new set of conditions," says Ray Lankester, "occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained, seem to lead as a rule to degeneration; just as ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... the conception of God through human history is presented with skill in concision. He was man-like at first, then an amorphous cloud, then endowed with mighty wings, then jealous, fierce, yet ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... 4000 years; and there is nothing in the observed rate of the growth of peat opposed to the conclusion that the number of centuries may not have been four times as great, even though the signs of Man's existence have not yet been traced down to the lowest or amorphous stratum. As to the "kitchen-middens," they correspond in date to the older portion of the peaty record, or to the earliest part of the age of stone as known ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... all decay. That this organic law should rule in every living structure is a necessity inherent in the actual conditions of the creation. And wherever we look in the realm of physical man, even "from the red outline of beginning Adam" to the amorphous adipocere of the last corpse when fate's black curtain falls on our race, we shall discern death. For death is the other side of life. Life and death are the two hands with which the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the furnaces, and from thence emptied through hoppers, 3-1/2 to 4-1/2 tons at a time, into the large calcining furnace. Here it is roasted for a period ranging from twelve to twenty-four hours, after which it is drawn into the ash-pit, where it remains to cool. In this state, the ore is a black, amorphous substance, and is termed calcined ore. The object of this process is to oxidise the extraneous metals, and also to reduce the quantity of sulphur, by driving it off in the form of vapour. It is, therefore, in this and the analogous processes ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... like finely ground glass, it contained. He greedily absorbed what there was and, petulantly exploring the empty container, flung it into the bushes. A nodding drowsiness overtook him, his head rolled forward, he sank slowly into a bowed amorphous heap. Harry Baggs roused him ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... up—what? Character, ourselves. But what sort of a thing is it that we are building? Some of us pigsties, in which gross, swinish lusts wallow in filth; some of us shops; some of us laboratories, studies, museums; some of us amorphous structures that cannot be described. But the Christian man is to be building himself up into a temple of God. The aim which should ever burn clear before us, and preside over even our smallest actions, is that which lies in this misused ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... common are the varieties of steatite. This is especially so at Bergen Hill and Staten Island. They occur in amorphous masses generally, and may be distinguished by being so soft as to be readily cut by the finger nail. I will detail further upon the soapstone forms in discussing the localities on Staten Island, and the chloritic form under the head of "Weehawken Tunnel." The surest method ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... two-thirds of what would have been its normal size. Instead of filling the skull completely, it shared the space with a green, amorphous shape. This was ridged somewhat like a brain, but the green shape had still darker nodules and extensions. Lea took her scalpel and gently ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... vibrios, which crowded the liquid as motile threads, are destroyed and disappear. After the action of the air, only fine amorphous granules can be found, unfit for culture as well as for the transmission of any disease whatever. It might be said that the air ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... constitutional development. The Leicestrian period, despite its record of incompetence and failure, had however the distinction of being the period which for good or for evil gave birth to the republic of the United Netherlands, as we know it in history. The curious, amorphous, hydra-headed system of government, which was to subsist for some two centuries, was in its origin the direct result of the confused welter of conflicting forces, which was the legacy of Leicester's rule. ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... military situation in Europe was almost disheartening. Imperial Russia had disappeared and the Germans were preparing to carve up the vast amorphous Russian carcass. Having driven their way through the Balkans to Constantinople they were on the point of opening their boasted direct route from Berlin to Bagdad. England, France and Italy began to feel war-weary. The German submarines ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... comparatively recent, the protagonist of chaos in these things happened to be that rigid but curiously amorphous power which Prussia has wielded for many years to no defined end. The protagonist upon the other side of the arena was that same Romanized Gaul which had ever since the fall of the Empire least lost the continuity with ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... cottages:—on the top of this Harlungsherg the Wends "set up their god Triglaph;" a three-headed Monster of which I have seen prints, beyond measure ugly. Something like three whale's-cubs combined by boiling, or a triple porpoise dead-drunk (for the dull eyes are inexpressible, as well as the amorphous shape): ugliest and stupidest of all false gods. This these victorious Wends set up on the Harlungsberg, Year 1023; and worshipped after their sort, benighted mortals,—with joy, for a time. The Cathedral was in ashes, Priests all slain or fled, shadowy Markgraves the like; Church ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... such a great city as this London, at least in its present amorphous, unorganised state, having grown up, and growing still, any how and any whither, by the accidental necessities of private commerce, private speculation, private luxury—is it not, I ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... beach are fishermen's huts constructed of tree-stems which are smothered under multitudinous ropes of grass, ropes of all ages and in every stage of decomposition, some fairly fresh, others dissolving once more into amorphous bundles of hay. There is a smack of the stone ages, of primeval lake-dwellings, about these shelters on the deserted shore; two or three large fetichistic stones stand near their entrance; wickerwork objects of dark meaning strew ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Mrs. Harrisson. If I introot, you shall say I introot." It is the Baron, manifestly. His form—or rather his bulk, for he cannot be said to have a form; he is amorphous—is baronial in the highest degree. His stupendous chest seems to be a huge cavern for the secretion of gutturals, which are discharged as heavy artillery at a hint from some ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... appointment, with such special view. That structure compels each mountain to assume the safest contour of which under the given circumstances of upheaval it is capable. If it were all composed of an amorphous mass of stone as at A, Fig. 19, a crack beginning from the top, as at x in A, might gradually extend downwards in the direction x y in B, until the whole mass, indicated by the shade, separated itself and fell. But when the ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... by F. M. Lamond. 1913 ff. (Six volumes, representing the German three. A learned, somewhat amorphous work, from the Catholic ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... do not favorably correspond with the sample under consideration, being much more highly colored, and in comparison having a very strong odor. Saccharin now occurs as a very pale yellow, nearly white, amorphous powder, free from grittiness, but giving a distinct sensation of roughness when rubbed between the fingers. It is not entirely free from odor, but this is very slight, and not at all objectionable, reminding one of a very slight flavor of essential oils of almonds. Its taste is intensely ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... hand-bill; and while he is reading it, let us briefly describe him. Hopeful is not a beauty, and he knows it; and though some of the rustic wits call him 'Beaut,' he is well aware that they intend it for irony. His countenance runs too much to nose—rude, amorphous nose at that—to be classic, and is withal rugged in general outline and pimply in spots. His hair is decidedly too dingy a red to be called, even by the utmost stretch of courtesy, auburn; dry, coarse, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... another table, worth about forty sous, and two kitchen chairs with the straw seats almost gone. The extremely picturesque costume of the centenarian pauper was hanging from a nail, and below it, on the floor, were the shapeless mat-weed coverings that served him for shoes, the whole forming, with his amorphous old hat and knotty stick, a sort of panoply ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... "the Corn," another youth—a pedestrian, and very different—saluted the Warden. He wore a black jacket, rusty and amorphous. His trousers were too short, and he himself was too short: almost a dwarf. His face was as plain as his gait was undistinguished. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... was the pre-war Peggy, with her cut-and-dried little social ambitions and her definite projects of attainment; but in another she was not. The pre-war Peggy had swiftly turned into the patriotic English girl who had hounded him into the army. He found himself face to face with an amorphous, characterless sort of Peggy whom he did not know. It was perplexing, baffling. Before he could formulate an idea, she ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... much puzzled in his choice as an untravelled Cockney with a Parisian bill of fare. The making of the flaked cocoa is peculiarly interesting, and is, we were informed, peculiar to this establishment. To see how the amorphous mass comes from the mill in long curling ribbons, uniform in thickness and texture, is a sight that provokes astonishment, as much by the rapidity of the operation as by the ease with which it appears to be accomplished, but which has only been arrived ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... infancy, the shelves of the British Museum and other repositories groan beneath mountains of State papers, law reports, pamphlets, and chaotic raw materials, from which some precious ore may be smelted down. But these amorphous masses are attractive chiefly to the philosophers who are too profound to care for individual character, or to those praiseworthy students who would think the labour of a year well rewarded by the discovery of ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... it was already, looming up grey and amorphous, patched with snow. It had a grey, heaped, sordid look in the November light. She had imagined Boulogne gay and brilliant. Whereas it was more grey and dismal than England. But not that magical, mystic, ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... sentiment or an idea, having in itself a reason for existence, slips into the crowd, its members soon crystallize and form a sect. The sect is then the first crystallization of every doctrine. From the confused and amorphous state in which it manifests itself to the crowd, every idea is predestined to define itself in the more specific form of the sect, to become later a party, a school, or ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... mass, began to build, each according to its nature, under the superintendence of a curious chemistry,—here forming sheets of black mica, there rhombs of a dark-green hornblende and a flesh-colored feldspar, yonder amorphous masses of a translucent quartz. It would add further, that at length, when the slow process was over, and the entire space had been occupied to the full by plate, molecule, and crystal, the red fiery twilight of the dream ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... walking swiftly down the main road of Beldover, a wide street, part shops, part dwelling-houses, utterly formless and sordid, without poverty. Gudrun, new from her life in Chelsea and Sussex, shrank cruelly from this amorphous ugliness of a small colliery town in the Midlands. Yet forward she went, through the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street. She was exposed to every stare, she passed on through a stretch of torment. It was strange that she should ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... bark and isolated an amorphous resin of yellowish color and very bitter taste. It is soluble in alcohol, ether and chloroform, slightly soluble in sulphuret of carbon, insoluble in turpentine or benzin. He believes that it is the active principle of the root, and produces the anthelmintic action already mentioned: the proper ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... from the enormous, amorphous Plum-pudding, more like a Scottish Haggis, which Herr Teufelsdrockh had kneaded for his fellow-mortals, to pick out the choicest Plums, and present them separately on a cover of our own. A laborious, perhaps a thankless enterprise; in which, however, something ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... firm favourite with the rank and file. Her particular crony is one Private Mackay, an amorphous youth with flaming red hair. He and Gabrielle engage in lengthy conversations, which appear to be perfectly intelligible to both, though Mackay speaks with the solemn unction of the Aberdonian, and Gabrielle ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... attacked a true Via Dolorosa, the normal road of the Lower Congo. The steep ascent of dry, clayey soil was strewed with schist and resplendent silvery gneiss; quartz appeared in every variety, crystallized and amorphous, transparent white, opaque, dusky, and rusty. Tuckey's mica slate appears to be mostly schist or gneiss: I saw only one piece of true slate which had been brought from the upper bed. Merolla's ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... smile stirred in her eyes. It was amusing that she, who detested large dinners and adored general conversation, should at the moment be so engrossed in preventing the very type of conversation she preferred. She returned to Pollen. What a horrid man he really was! Unangled and amorphous, and underneath, cold! He had a way of framing the woman to whom he was talking and then stepping back out of the picture. One felt like a model in all manner of dress and undress. She laughed softly. "Don't," she begged, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... distinct from this; there are no shafts or bolts, but a steady blaze which fills the whole firmament with a white quivering light, lasting many seconds of time, and followed by long intervals of amorphous darkness. Such lightning is rarely accompanied by thunder, and rain is not always its concomitant, though it was this sort we now witnessed, and rain-drops ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... pass Huge piles of wood and stone, And glance at each amorphous mass, Whose cumbrous weight has crushed the grass, With ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... In the meantime a second conical flask containing 1250 cc. of toluene is attached to the funnel, and a new charge of 150 g. of crude methyl red is placed in the paper. When extraction is complete it is found that a certain amount of black amorphous insoluble matter remains on the filter; this is discarded. The crystals of methyl red are filtered off and washed with a little toluene. The weight of pure material is 755-805 g. The mother liquors are concentrated to one-fourth of their volume, and the crystals which separate ...
— Organic Syntheses • James Bryant Conant
... Socialist Party of America cannot afford to remain amorphous at the present stage of the building of the new International. It has refused to go with those elements who have either betrayed or were unwilling to remain true to their professions. It belongs among those parties which have remained true to International ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... said of me that my methods are empirical. That is true only so far as chemistry is concerned. Did you ever realize that practically all industrial chemistry is colloidal in its nature? Hard rubber, celluloid, glass, soap, paper, and lots of others, all have to deal with amorphous substances, as to which comparatively little has been really settled. My methods are similar to those followed by Luther Burbank. He plants an acre, and when this is in bloom he inspects it. He has a sharp eye, and can pick out of thousands a single plant that has promise of what ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... a huge, amorphous house some three-quarters of a mile to the west of the campus. It was a construction in wood, with manifold "features" suggestive of the villa, the bungalow, the chateau, the palace; it united all tastes and contravened all conventions. In its upper story was the commodious apartment which was ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... yet lost in the dusk; the false dawn is spreading the figments of its illusion; the trees in the distance seem like rain-clouds; and the amorphous shadows of the monasteries on the mountain heights and hilltops all around, have not yet developed into silhouettes. Everything, except the river in the wadi below, is yet asleep. Not even the swallows are astir. Ah, but my neighbour yonder is; the light in the loophole ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... review is the most popular, as being the most readable. When the rumour goes abroad that some notable man has been actually crushed,—been positively driven over by an entire Juggernaut's car of criticism till his literary body be a mere amorphous mass,—then a real success has been achieved, and the Alf of the day has done a great thing; but even the crushing of a poor Lady Carbury, if it be absolute, is effective. Such a review will not make all the world call for the 'Evening Pulpit', but ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... having as it were, in himself, a double quantity of being. Robust humor and lofty sentiment alternated so strangely in him, that sometimes he seemed like the natural son of Rabelais, and at others he rose up a very twin brother of the Stratford Seer. There was nothing in him amorphous and unconsidered. Whatever he chose to do was always perfectly done. There was a genuine Thackeray flavor in everything he was willing to say or to write. He detected with unfailing skill the good or the vile wherever it existed. He had an unerring eye, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... nature of gravel is too well known to require description. The grains of quartz sand are either sharp cornered or else rounded pieces of stone of quartz, occasionally mixed with grains of other amorphous pieces of silica—such as horn stone, silicious slate, carnelian, etc.; again, with lustrous pieces of mica, or red and white pieces of feldspar. The gravel used for a tar paper roof must be of a special nature and be prepared for the purpose. The size of its grains must not exceed a certain ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... physics to achieve the analysis of the living protoplasm itself into a molecular mechanism. If there is any truth in the received doctrines of physics, that contrast between living and inert matter, on which Bichat lays so much stress, does not exist. In nature, nothing is at rest, nothing is amorphous; the simplest particle of that which men in their blindness are pleased to call "brute matter" is a vast aggregate of molecular mechanisms performing complicated movements of immense rapidity, and sensitively adjusting ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... as yet relatively free from the ravages of war, for the shops were open and the inhabitants stood talking and gossiping at the doors of their houses. Here and there rubble lay across the pavement, and what had once been a home was now an amorphous pile of bricks and beams. Just by the church was a ruined restaurant, and a host of little children played hide and seek behind the remnants of ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... intellectual, Lear introduces quite another element—the element of the poetical and even emotional. Carroll works by the pure reason, but this is not so strong a contrast; for, after all, mankind in the main has always regarded reason as a bit of a joke. Lear introduces his unmeaning words and his amorphous creatures not with the pomp of reason, but with the romantic prelude of rich hues and ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... rest in that unresting vehicle. Although it was chill, I was obliged to open my window, for the degradation of the air soon became intolerable to one who was awake and using the full supply of life. Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the black, amorphous hills shoot by unweariedly into our wake. They that long for morning have never longed for it more earnestly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ascended, and procured a valuable round of angles from its summit. This hill has an altitude of 1,688 feet above the sea, and is formed by the eruption of a coarse dark-coloured crystalline trap through a base of amorphous sandstone, the direction of the range of which it forms a part being nearly north and south. Skirting round the north end of this range, we struck east over a stony plain, thinly grassed amongst open wattles, ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... have an account of I. Pulverulent or amorphous sediments; II. Crystallized sediments, or gravel; and III. Solid concretions, or urinary calculi. Of the latter, our author ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... regular in outline than the epicarp. The cells of the mesocarp become as large as 100 mu broad, but in the inner parts of the layer they become very much flattened. Fibrovascular bundles are scattered through the compressed cells of the mesocarp. The cell walls are thick; and large, amorphous, brown masses are found within the cell; occasionally, large crystals are found in the outer part of the layer. The fibro-vascular bundles consist mainly of bast and wood fibers and vessels. The bast fibers are as large as 1 mm long and 25 mu broad, with thick walls and very ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... once donned, never to have been absent; as if, indeed, she had always been this royal creature, this woman bright and winning as some warm, rich summer's day. The fire that sleeps in marble never flashes and informs the whole mass so fully; if a pearl—lazy growth and accretion of amorphous life—should fuse and form again in sparkling crystals, the miracle would be less. And with what complete unconsciousness had she stepped from passive to positive existence, and found this new state to be as sweet and strange as any child has found it! Long a wife, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... prayer is a genuine prayer from a person to a person. To pray to the Universal Spirit, to the Supreme Being of Kant, of Hegel—to a purified, amorphous God, is ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... the bye, fifty-two years old) had worn for the last nine years. Bixiou, who had never seen any other hat on Poiret's head, dreamed of it and declared he tasted it in his food; he therefore resolved, in the interests of his digestion, to relieve the bureau of the sight of that amorphous old hat. Poiret junior left the office regularly at four o'clock. As he walked along, the sun's rays reflected from the pavements and walls produced a tropical heat; he felt that his head was inundated,—he, who never perspired! Feeling that he was ill, or on the point of ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... of a flood of disease germs that have invaded a body, that paper. There I was, one corpuscle in the big amorphous body of the English community, one of forty-one million such corpuscles and, for all my preoccupations, these potent headlines, this paper ferment, caught me and swung me about. And all over the country that day, millions ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Balzac—Stendhal—his scorn of technique was notorious. Stendhal was capable of writing, in a masterpiece: "By the way I ought to have told you earlier that the Duchess—!" And as for a greater than either Balzac or Stendhal—Dostoievsky—what a hasty, amorphous lump of gold is the sublime, the unapproachable Brothers Karamazov! Any tutor in a college for teaching the whole art of fiction by post in twelve lessons could show where Dostoievsky was clumsy ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... off to receive other guests, and Henry was alone with Miss Marchrose in a nook between a cabinet and a phonograph. Many eyes were upon them. Miss Marchrose, a woman of thirty, with a thin face and an amorphous body draped in two shades of olive, was ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... dropped in an aluminum alkyl, and then pushed the polymerization along with both ultraviolet and heat. Got a stiff gel out of the pot and drew it into a quarter of a pound of fibers. I only had time to determine that the fibers were amorphous—no time to draw them further to see if they would develop crystallinity. I put them in an open-mouth jar which I later found had been used to store mercury. One evening I took them out and found they had developed ...
— The Professional Approach • Charles Leonard Harness
... end, a sense of undefined fear still holds possession of them. Nor is this due to the fast approaching fog. That could not frighten men who have dared every danger of the deep, and oft groped their way through icy seas shrouded in darkness almost amorphous. ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... investigated the dimorphism of arsenious acid and antimony oxide. In 1841 he made the discovery that dimorphous bodies have different fusing points, according as they are in the crystallized or amorphous condition. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... was their fear, when, after hours spent in fruitless wandering, they stood holding each other's hands, crouching and cowering together in the midst of that amorphous darkness! ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... when it was a nebulous mass, all the materials of the future individuals of the animate and inanimate creation,—that the elaborate creatures of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, as well as every mineral, were floating in amorphous masses through space. Human beings, like genius that was condensed from vapor at the rubbing of Aladdin's lamp, were diffused in gases, waiting the touch of the Great Magician's wand to bring them into form and infuse them with life. In all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... forward, but on a much higher political level. In 1886, and the years following, the best that the working class could do in the way of organization was to produce the craft union movement, which, notwithstanding all its failings, was an advance in liveability at least, over the amorphous and confused Knights of Labor. But now, the working class, grown stronger, more experienced and more ideologically developed, has given birth to the C.I.O. movement, with its industrial unionism, trade union democracy, organized ...
— Labor's Martyrs • Vito Marcantonio
... me a touching glance,—or rather, a glance which her amorphous features meant to make touching,—and, waving musk from her handkerchief ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... as foreign missions we might easily include every human activity, unless we defined beforehand the end to be served and selected carefully only the appropriate factors. Carefully defined, missionary survey is not the unwieldy, amorphous thing which people often imagine. There is indeed a dangerous type of survey which starting with a hypothesis proceeds to prove it by collecting any facts which seem to support it to the neglect of all other facts which might disprove it. The procedure advocated here is the adoption ...
— Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions • Roland Allen
... at once chart and compass. It led Ralph Peden out into a cloudy June dawning. It was soft, amorphous, uncoloured night when he went out. Slate-coloured clouds were racing along the tops of the hills from the south. The wind blew in fitful gusts and veering flaws among the moorlands, making eddies and back-waters of the air, which twirled the fallen ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... added that the capillitial threads are always exceedingly delicate, probably tubular, but never filled with lime throughout; the peridium may be almost nude or encrusted with lime, which, where present, is always amorphous, never crystalline; the sporangia when distinct may be either sessile or stipitate, and the stipe in the latter case is often hollow and charged with lime. In capillitium intermediate between Leocarpus and Badhamia, since in the first the capillitium is unequally calcareous, ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... thwarted by adulation any more than by contemptuous neglect, he might well have become spoilt—so enthusiastic, that were it not for the heavy and prolonged counterbalancing dead weight of public indifference, a huge amorphous mass only of late years moulded into harmony with the keenest minds of the century, we might well be suspicious of so much and long-continued eulogium, and fear the same reversal of judgment towards him on the part of those who come after us as we ourselves ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... dies with the malleable, plastic ends of the foraging columns. Again and again came to mind the comparison of the entire colony or army with a single organism; and now the home, the nesting swarm, the focus of central control, seemed like the body of this strange amorphous organism—housing the spirit of the army. One thinks of a column of foragers as a tendril with only the tip sensitive and growing and moving, while the corpuscle-like individual ants are driven in the current of blind instinct ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... early hour on Sunday all Kirton seemed astir. The streets were alive with thronging people, with banners, with inchoate and still amorphous processions, with vendors of meat, drink, and newspapers. According to the official arrangements, the proceedings were not to begin till one o'clock, and, in theory, the forenoon hours were left undisturbed; but, what with the people ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... civilization and flung into the arms of Nature the most terrible thing is the sense of the amorphous, the feeling that there is no structure in this world where houses are not and laws are not and streets are not, no power to intervene between oneself and injury, no thread to cling to. The idea of a Providence to such a person is ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... [Footnote: Liebig's Ann, 1853, 87, 159.] and Loewe [Footnote: Jahresh. f. Chem., 1868, 559.] must be especially noted; they treated gallic acid with phosphorus oxychloride or arsenic acid, and thereby obtained amorphous compounds, exhibiting the reactions characteristic of tanning substances. E. Fischer and Freudenberg, [Footnote: Liebig's Ann., 372, 45.] by treating p-hydroxybenzoic acid in the same way, succeeded in obtaining a didepside, and during ...
— Synthetic Tannins • Georg Grasser
... shawl which enveloped the head of the little one, and unbuttoned the cloak which hid her form; until, by the time that the footmen had taken charge of these articles and removed the fur boots, there stood forth from the amorphous chrysalis a charming girl of twelve, dressed in a short muslin frock, white pantaloons, and smart black satin shoes. Around her, white neck she wore a narrow black velvet ribbon, while her head was covered with flaxen curls which so perfectly suited her beautiful face in front and her bare ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... Bee is to the Flowret," &c., and other similar compositions. I now give Moore's first sonnet, including its footnote, reminding us of the child's usual explanatory addition to his first drawing of some amorphous animal—"This is a horse!" or "a bear!" as the case may be. Neither the metre nor the matter would prepare us for the height to which the writer afterwards scaled "the mountain's ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... knew the lad outside as the son of a leading merchant of the town. The merchant and his wife were both of old families which had lived in the community for several generations, and whose blood was presumably of the purest strain; yet the boy was sallow, with amorphous features, thin shanks, and stooping shoulders. The youth standing in the judge's office, on the contrary, was straight, shapely, and well-grown. His eye was clear, and he kept it fixed on the old gentleman with a look in which there was nothing of cringing. He was no darker than many ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... remember that the Hinduism of to-day is not the Brahmanism of thirty centuries ago. It has been the passion of that faith, from the beginning, to absorb all cults and faiths that have come into contact with it. Hinduism is an amorphous thing; it has been compared to a many-coloured and many-fibred cloth, in which are mixed together Brahmanism, Buddhism, Demonolatry, and Christianity. And all these, utterly regardless of the many contradictions which they ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... suffered the pause to lapse without comment—save for an amorphous sort of conversation which he felt to be going on between his eyes ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... older? Rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes. And fancy the most assiduous Potter, but without his wheel; reduced to make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by mere kneading and baking! Even such a Potter were Destiny, with a human soul that would rest and lie at ease, that would not work and spin! Of an idle unrevolving man the kindest Destiny, like the most assiduous Potter without wheel, can bake and knead nothing ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... domicil. Nowhere does it posit the powers of the states or the nation upon that amorphous, highly variable common-law conception. * * * No legal conception, save possibly 'jurisdiction,' * * *, affords such possibilities for uncertain application. * * * Apart from the necessity for travel, [to effect a change of domicile, the latter], criterion comes down ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... there is a substance which is called amorphous or structureless, and a filling to be in harmony with this substance should be amorphous or structureless in its composition. The only materials we have which meet these conditions are gutta-percha and tin. ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... to offer advice. Your father had a very good business head, and I presume you are likewise gifted." His face brightened perceptibly as he went on: "While returning from Happenchance with my personal effects, I clipped a really excellent specimen of amorphous diapase from a reef among the hills. The cellular crystallization of the diapase is intensely interesting. It will give me pleasure to show it to ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish
... occurs naturally as greenockite (q.v.), and can be artificially prepared by passing sulphuretted hydrogen through acid solutions of soluble cadmium salts, when it is precipitated as a pale yellow amorphous solid. It is used as a pigment (cadmium yellow), for it retains its colour in an atmosphere containing sulphuretted hydrogen; it melts at a white heat, and on cooling solidifies to a lemon-yellow ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... said he knew the history and ways of all such pachydermata. He said the kangaroo had pockets, and carried its young in them when it couldn't get apples. And he said that the emu was as big as an ostrich, and looked like one, and had an amorphous appetite and would eat bricks. Also, that the dingo was not a dingo at all, but just a wild dog; and that the only difference between a dingo and a dodo was that neither of them barked; otherwise they were just the same. He said that the only game-bird in Australia ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... lye from chinamine is evaporated down and protractedly exhausted with boiling ligroine, whereby conchinamine and a small quantity of certain amorphous bases are dissolved out. Upon cooling the greater part of the amorphous bases precipitates out. The ligroine solution is then first treated with dilute acetic acid, and then with a dilute solution of caustic soda, whereupon a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... Sansculottism taking form, ought we not above all things to specify how the Amorphous gets itself a Head? Without metaphor, this Revolution Government continues hitherto in a very anarchic state. Executive Council of Ministers, Six in number, there is; but they, especially since Roland's retreat, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... drawing or its color, yet, like the pastel, they grow indefinably shabby, and will grow shabbier until they cease to count at all, when my books will either perish, or, if the world is still poor enough to want them, will have to stand, with Bunyan's, by quite amorphous qualities of temper and energy. With this conviction I cannot be a bellettrist. No doubt I must recognize, as even the Ancient Mariner did, that I must tell my story entertainingly if I am to hold the wedding guest spellbound in spite of the siren sounds of the ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... mixture, filter the liquid obtained, and this liquid will contain the cerealine sufficiently pure to be studied in its effects. Its principal properties are: The liquid evaporated at a low temperature produces an amorphous, rough mass nearly colorless, and almost entirely soluble in distilled water; this solution coagulates between 158 deg. and 167 deg. Fah., and the coagulum is insoluble in acids and weak alkalies; the solution is precipitated by all diluted acids, by phosphoric ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... Alfred Lyall regarding Hinduism, "can scarcely comprehend an ancient religion, still alive and powerful, which is a mere troubled sea without shore or visible horizon."[62] In these days of opportunist denunciation of creeds, the amorphous state of creedless Hinduism ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... shadows; would thicken and spread out; would draw together and rise in an irregular spiral column, curling, swaying, poising, as if uncertain what to do next; and at last, all at once making up its mind, (how like a younker or a prodigal!), would go sailing away, straggling away, amorphous, on a puff of wind, leaving the hillside clear again;—till, presently, the process would recommence ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... behavior of the compound NH3, but which Denham alone had managed to procure. Tommy deduced that it was an allotropic modification of the substance which forms an amalgam with mercury, as metallic tin is an allotrope of the amorphous gray powder which is tin ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... and amorphous—like the body of an elemental giant—about each of these books. In the "Titan," especially, the peculiar power of Dreiser's massive, coulter-like impetus is evident. Here we realize how, between animal passion and material ambition, there is ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... has been transliterated kiracruv [in Greek], by the author an extract from whose works has been preserved by Damascius. He gives a different version of the tradition, according to which the amorphous goddess Mummu-Tiamat consisted of two persons. The first, Tauthe, was the wife of Apason; the second, Moymis, was the son of Apason and of Tauthe. The last part of the sentence is very obscure in the Assyrian ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... also found, but these are not regarded as essential to the life and growth of plants. They appear to be present because the plant has not the power to reject them. Many of the substances named above, are found deposited either in an amorphous or crystalline form in the substance of the cell wall. In addition to this, crystals of mineral matter, having various shapes and sizes, are often found in the interior of cells. The most common of these interior cell crystals are those composed of calcium oxalate and calcium carbonate. Others ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... cold despair and you think with animosity: "Where then is that celebrated, broad, beautiful Russian soul? So much was and is being said about it, but wherein does its breadth, might and beauty actively manifest itself? And is not our soul broad because it is amorphous? And it is probably owing to its amorphousness that we yield so readily to external pressure, which disfigures us so ...
— The Shield • Various
... the carbonate of lime is present in the form of very minute amorphous lumps until near to maturity, when it is dissolved and reappears as bicarbonate of lime deposited ...
— The Myxomycetes of the Miami Valley, Ohio • A. P. Morgan
... had to pass the old store-house. It loomed a black, amorphous pile heaved up against the stars, and the man's footsteps dragged as he came to the ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... the strength of their bottles with a manometer before using them, but for some time past they have given up the practice, feeling convinced that it was productive of more harm than good. Glass is an amorphous and unelastic substance which, although it will stand a high pressure once, often succumbs when put to a second test by the action of the fermenting wine. The firm calculate their annual breakage at from 2 ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... in a man which touches human nature at most points of its circumference, which reinvigorates the consciousness of our own powers by recalling and confirming our own unvalued sensations and perceptions, gives classic shape to our own amorphous imaginings, and adequate utterance to our own stammering conceptions or emotions. The poet's office is to be a Voice, not of one crying in the wilderness to a knot of already magnetized acolytes, but singing amid the throng ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... even before Matilda had gone—a queer new something had begun to stir within her, almost as though threatening an eruption. It seemed a force, or spirit, rising darkly from hitherto unknown spaces of her being. It frightened her, with its amorphous, menacing strangeness. She tried to keep it down. She tried to keep her mental eyes away from it. And so, during all these days, she had no idea what ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... above this loomed another line of vast windmills, and then suddenly the amorphous tumult of the rotating wheels was pierced with a deafening sound. It was a mechanical shrilling of extraordinary intensity that seemed to come simultaneously from ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... our franchised men, our unfranchised women and our young Americans of both sexes, as hypocrisy is to a church member or spurious currency to a bank. It is to be remembered that the evils which are pointed out in our commonwealth today are not the evils of a democracy but of an amorphous something which is afraid to be a democracy. Whether the opposition to women's voting be honestly professed or whether it is concealed under chivalrous idolatry, distrust and skepticism are behind it.... When pushed to the wall, objectors to woman suffrage now-a-days take refuge behind ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... tine of them?—but was this rag of a thing all that was left of the splendid stag he had beheld lying on the heather? However, Mr. Macleay speedily reassured him. He was shown the various processes and stages of the taxidermist's art, the amorphous mass of skin and hair gradually taking shape and substance until it stood forth in all its glory of flaming eye and proud nostril and branching antlers; and he was highly pleased to be told that this head he had got in Strathaivron ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... she felt would have had its distinction in an older society. It was, moreover, one of his gifts to look his part; to have a height which lifted his head above the crowd, and the keenly-modelled dark features which, in a land of amorphous types, gave him the air of belonging to a more specialized race, of carrying the impress of a concentrated past. Expansive persons found him a little dry, and very young girls thought him sarcastic; but this air of ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... acid, and the limestone hitherto held in solution by it was deposited in the solid form. For every equivalent of carbon buried in the earth, there was an equivalent of carbonate of lime separated from the sea—not necessarily in an amorphous condition, most frequently under an organic form. The sunshine kept up its work day by day, but there were demanded myriads of days for the work to be completed. It was a slow passage from a noxious to a purified ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... big clumsy boy, a little inclined to fat, with small eyes, heavy low forehead, thick lips, and amorphous nose, lurched over to where Dam endeavoured to read himself into a better and brighter world inhabited by Deadwood Dick, Texas Joe, and Red Indians of ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... small, waxy-looking cylinders, which are kept in water to prevent oxidation. It may also occur as the amorphous non-poisonous variety, a red opaque infusible substance, insoluble in carbon disulphide. Ordinary phosphorus is soluble in oil, alcohol, ether, chloroform, and carbon disulphide; insoluble in water. It is much used in rat poisons, made into a paste with flour, sugar, fat, ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... our world and of one not ours. Its lineaments flowed from another sphere, took fleeting familiar form—and as swiftly withdrew whence they had come; something amorphous, unearthly—as of unknown unheeding, unseen gods rushing through the depths of star-hung space; and still of our own earth, with the very soul of earth peering out from it, caught within ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... anamezites, and dolerites, names which, however, only denote differences in texture without implying any difference in mineral or chemical composition: the term BASALT being used only when the rock is compact, amorphous, and often semi- vitreous in texture, and when it breaks with a perfect conchoidal fracture; when, however, it is uniformly crystalline in appearance, yet very close- grained, the name ANAMESITE (from anamesos, intermediate) is employed, but if the rock be so coarsely crystallised ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... who was enjoying his afternoon's holiday at the piano, in the drawing-room, picking out tunes for himself and singing them. He was supremely happy, perched like an amorphous bundle on the high stool, with his head thrown back, his eyes fixed on the opposite cornice, and his lips wide open, sending forth, with all his might, impromptu syllables to a tune of Arne's which ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... with Whitman—always through correspondence—was simply beautiful. A superficial reader of human nature might have inquired what they had in common—the rough, amorphous American poet, and the exquisite English poet, a flower of millenniums of culture. But there is something deeper than form. It is substance. There is something deeper than language. It is manhood. And on the common ground ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... its own, but it fills the spectator with a vague and stupefying ennui. Light brings life: darkness may bring thought, but a dull daylight, the uncertain glimmer of a leaden sky, merely make one restless and weary. These indecisive and chaotic states of nature are ugly, like all amorphous things, like smeared colors, or bats, or the viscous polyps of the sea. The source of all attractiveness is to be found in character, in sharpness of outline, in individualization. All that is confused and indistinct, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... never-to-be-forgotten role. It was inevitable that he should have stood out among the men of his time as a strange, bewildering figure. To his very matter-of-fact and much annoyed antagonist, Karl Marx, he was little more than a buffoon, the "amorphous pan-destroyer, who has succeeded in uniting in one person Rodolphe, Monte Cristo, Karl Moor, and Robert Macaire."[11] On the other hand, to his circle of worshipers he was a mental giant, a flaming titan, a Russian Siegfried, holding ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... be placed in a certain position, we style them a judge; and so an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a bishop." In Sartor Resartus Carlyle let himself go. It was willful, uncouth, amorphous, titanic. There was something monstrous in the combination, the hot heart of the Scot married to the transcendental dream of Germany. It was not English, said the reviewers; it was not sense; it was disfigured by obscurity and "mysticism." Nevertheless even the thin-witted and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of a piece of Commentry cannel coal shows that this substance consists of a yellowish-brown amorphous mass holding here and there in suspension very different plant organs, such as fragments of Cordaites, leaves, ferns, microspores, macrospores, pollen grains, rootlets, etc., exactly as would have done a gelatinous mass that upon coagulating in a liquid had carried ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... of Goethe's expression; the face, altogether, of one who knew men too well to respect them. At least, he was a man of clear enough vision. He saw what was needed in those strange times, and he went straight to the thing which he saw. It was his wisdom which perceived that the huge amorphous empire of Alexander could not be kept together, and advised its partition among the generals, taking care to obtain himself the lion's share; not in size, indeed, but in capability. He saw, too (what ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... were to be rescued from the heathen darkness in which it has dwelt, and to be admitted within the community of scientific truth, by being christened a monolith. If it be large and shapeless, it may take rank as an amorphous megalith; and it is on record that the owner of some muirland acres, finding them described in a learned work as "richly megalithic," became suddenly excited by hopes which were quickly extinguished when the import of the term was ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... decalcified bone, with traces of the earthy salts occasionally left. The corpuscles with their processes were very distinct in most parts; but in some parts, especially near the periphery of the hyoidal bone, none could be seen. Other parts again appeared amorphous, with even the longitudinal striation of bone not distinguishable. This amorphous structure, [page 106] as Dr. Klein thinks, may be the result either of the incipient digestion of the fibrous basis or of all ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... His chief models were literary dramas. 'Goetz von Berlichingen' had won its way into favor as a book for the reader. The dramatic works of Klinger, Lenz, Wagner and the like, were for the most part too extravagant and amorphous for representation, and Shakspere's ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... do find in Lodge certain qualities of style that show clearly an advance over the formlessness of some of the stories that had preceded. Though the sentence and paragraph structure is loose and amorphous, the transitions from one subject to another are almost invariably well made, or at least are clearly marked. Phrases such as, "But leaving him so desirous of the journey, to Torismond"[1]; "Leaving her to ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... borderland of Islington and Hoxton, in a corner made by the intersection of the New North Road and the Regent's Canal, is discoverable an irregular triangle of small dwelling-houses, bearing the name of Wilton Square. In the midst stands an amorphous structure, which on examination proves to be a very ugly house and a still uglier Baptist chapel built back to back. The pair are enclosed within iron railings, and, more strangely, a circle of trees, which in due season do veritably put forth green leaves. One ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... is the chief impurity found in raw cotton. It can be obtained in the form of an amorphous substance of a light yellow colour, not unlike gum in appearance. It is soluble in boiling water, and the solution has a faint acid reaction. Acids and many metallic salts, such as mercury, chloride and lead acetate, precipitate pectic acid from its solutions. Alkalies combine with it, and these ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... pearly pinks give place at last to the clear blue sky of a sunny, cloudless day. He watched it from the window of his bedroom in the new-built wing of Banghurst's Tudor house. And as the stars were overwhelmed and the shapes and substances of things grew into being out of the amorphous dark, he must have seen more and more distinctly the festive preparations beyond the beech clumps near the green pavilion in the outer park, the three stands for the privileged spectators, the raw, new fencing of the enclosure, the sheds and workshops, ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... or mortal, divine or perishable. This drives men to seek their Paradise in Culture. Well, they find in it a Beulah, and beyond rolls the Jordan of the soul. Men have made a dwarfed Providence to suit their dwarfed aims, an amorphous Deity, whose attributes are imperfect, disproportioned. But yesterday I heard a Frenchman, who has no acquaintance with our literature and never heard of Emerson, say, 'God, with the multitude, is no more than a feeble old man, whose ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... foolish fat scullion to burst out crying for a sentiment. She is of the serviceable, red-handed, broad-and-high-shouldered type; one of those imported female servants who are known in public by their amorphous style of person, their stoop forwards, and a headlong and as it were precipitous walk,—the waist plunging downwards into the rocking pelvis at every heavy footfall. Bridget, constituted for action, not for emotion, was about to deposit a plate heaped ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... are very late. This is how you become smart all at once in your New York atmosphere! But pray be seated; and here are cigarettes, if you will. No? Very well; but tell me; has that amorphous gill-slit—oh, no, the branchial lamella—has it behaved itself and proved to be the avenue which ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... are composed of certain fundamental and similar elements which are governed by the same rules of life, though at first glance they may appear to be widely different. These are (a) amorphous substances, (b) fibers, and ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... can find a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood," mysticism seems reduced to an emotional development on all fours with emotional development in other directions. It is not peculiar to religious minds because "it has no specific intellectual content." It is amorphous, so to speak. And it may form diverse 'matrimonial alliances' precisely because it does not point to a hidden world of reality, but is merely indicative of tense emotional moods. In the face of nature the non-theistic Richard Jeffries experiences all the feelings of mental ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... smug black garments with his diamond stud gleaming in the ivy-bosomed shirt (his rings had been given to Miss Birdie), with his features wilting like the wild pansies in the lapel of his coat, dwindled to an amorphous streak beneath the keen glance of ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... sulphocarbonate reaction as a means of defining a normal cellulose. As already pointed out, cotton cellulose passes quantitatively through the cycle of treatments involved in solution as sulphocarbonate and decomposition of the solution with regeneration as structureless or amorphous cellulose (hydrate). ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... are," she declared. "You've found them both." He mounted to the porch, and shook her extended hand, cushioned with fat, and oddly damp and lifeless. He could see her countenance now—it was plaster white with insignificant features and rose like an amorphous column from a swollen throat, a nose like a dab of putty, eyes obscured ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... amorphous, Mrs. Brenton, a mere lump of old associations. It's good for Mr. Opdyke to have somebody ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... to the jacket of the motionless man, and then, as he exerted his strength, a strange, hideous thing happened. The body under his touch dropped to pieces. Its head rolled away; its trunk became dismembered and he fell backward heaving an amorphous torso into the air. For, exerting the needful pressure to move a heavy weight, he found none and tumbled to the ground, holding up a coat ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... psychical faculty and the same elements are necessary for the personification of such types or idols. The three elements appear in their proper sequence even in the amorphous phantasms which these types first shadow forth, and which are subsequently perfected and embodied in human form. For the consciousness of the external form always exists in the first vague and nebulous conception of the phantasm which gradually appears and formulates ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... discovery was afterwards verified by Professors Friedel and Moissan, who found that the Canyon Diablo Meteorite contained the three varieties of carbon—diamond (transparent and black), graphite and amorphous carbon. Since this revelation the search for diamonds in meteorites has occupied the attention of ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... Tannic Acid Lustrous, yellow-brown, amorphous tannin, having the chemical composition C76H52O46. Derived from the bark and fruit of many plants; used as an astringent [contracts the tissues or ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... strenuous study of Beethoven's and Weber's orchestras. Tannhaeuser is more manly in its fiber. But the style, the mixture of styles; the lack of organic unity, the blustering orchestration, and the execrable voice-killing vocal writing! The Ring is an amorphous impossibility. That is now critically admitted. It ruins voices, managers, the public purse, and our patience. Its stories are indecent, blasphemous, silly, absurd, trivial, tiresome. To talk of the Ring and Beethoven's symphonies is to put wind and wisdom ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... thing of dream that had passed. And one came awake to a light and wholesome world furnished with such solidly comforting facts as soaps and razors and hot and cold saltwater taps; and subsequently one left one's stateroom to see, at the breakfast table, leaden-eyed and flushed of countenance, an amorphous lump of humid flesh in shapeless garments of soiled white duck, the author of that mutter in the dark; who, lounging over a plate of broken food and lifting a coffee cup in the tremulous hand of an alcoholic, looked ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance |
