"Arithmetical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... curiously modern names. He wrote, for instance, a series of mathematical treatises, in Latin of course, on "Geometric Transmutations," on "Arithmetical Complements," on "Mathematical Complements," on "Mathematical Perfection," and on "The Correction of the Calendar." In his time the calendar was in error by more than nine days, and Cusanus was one of those who ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... successor," whispered Albert. "I suppose, Dick, we might call this an arithmetical ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... that I shall only touch upon this point for the purpose of conveying, by illustrations, some shadow of ideas far transcending the powers of the imagination to realize. It must be remembered that these comparisons are not matters susceptible of dispute, being founded on simple arithmetical computations, level to the capacity of any intelligent schoolboy. A person who once wrote a very small pamphlet made some show of objecting to calculations of thus kind, on the ground that the highest dilutions could easily be made with a few ounces of alcohol. But he should have remembered ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... lay stretched like a map under their feet. But the weather was bitter, the snow lay thick in the passes, sentinels were frozen at the outposts, and a curious stream of desertions began. The warm plains of sunny France tempted the half-frozen troops, and Southey computes, with an arithmetical precision which is half-humorous, that the average weekly proportion of desertions was 25 Spaniards, 15 Irish, 12 English, 6 Scotch, and half a Portuguese! One indignant English colonel drew up his regiment on parade, ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... arithmetic. Even if we assume this statement to be correct, there is so little intricacy in a calculation of the price of 18 cwt. of fish at 6s. 6d. per cwt., and dividing the sum among five or six men, that a very low arithmetical faculty would not be severely taxed in checking it. There is little doubt that in stating this objection, which scarcely deserves refutation, the simple settlement at landing a cargo of fish, or at paying cash for a week's fishing, is confounded with the ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... arithmetical talents of my Chancellor of the Exchequer have, by the most rigid economy, succeeded in reducing the revenue very considerably below the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... gamesters, Scot had often tried magical and cabalistic numbers, in the hope of discovering lucky numbers in the lottery or at the roulette-tables. He had in his possession a cabalistic manuscript, containing various arithmetical combinations of the kind, which he submitted to Cagliostro, with an urgent request that he would select a number. Cagliostro took the manuscript and studied it, but, as he himself informs us, with no confidence in its truth. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... hackneyed adventures, feels within herself the stirring impulse of corresponding genius, and triumphantly exclaims: 'And I, too, am an author!' The glutted imagination soon overflows with the redundance of cheap sentiment and plentiful incident, and, by a sort of arithmetical proportion, is enabled by the perusal of any three novels, to produce a fourth; till every fresh production, like the prolific progeny of Banquo, is ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... have been in the ratio of the peculiarity, or unusualness, of the hairy mark. If, the feet of Marie being small, those of the corpse were also small, the increase of probability that the body was that of Marie would not be an increase in a ratio merely arithmetical, but in one highly geometrical, or accumulative. Add to all this shoes such as she had been known to wear upon the day of her disappearance, and, although these shoes may be 'sold in packages,' you so far augment the probability as to verge upon the certain. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... instincts which aided them in the struggle of existence, and as reason gradually came these instincts may have waned away. Some instincts certainly do wane when the intellect is applied steadily to their subject-matter. The curious 'counting boys,' the arithmetical prodigies, who can work by a strange innate faculty the most wonderful sums, lose that faculty, always partially, sometimes completely, if they are taught to reckon by rule like the rest of mankind. ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... old telephone were scattered about on the teacher's desk. A model of a piggery stood on a shelf, done in cardboard. Instead of the usual collection of text-books in the desk, there were hectograph copies of exercises, reading lessons, arithmetical tables and essays on various matters relating to agriculture, all of which were accounted for by two or three hand-made hectographs—a very fair sort of printing plant—lying on a table. The members of the school ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... controversy. It is what people less intelligent than Mr. Wells meant by calling themselves fin de siecle; though, of course, rationally speaking, there is no more reason for being sad towards the end of a hundred years than towards the end of five hundred fortnights. There was no arithmetical autumn, but there was a spiritual one. And it came from the fact suggested in the paragraphs above; the sense that man's two great inspirations had failed him together. The Christian religion was much more dead in the eighteenth ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... vine-dresser being the equatorial case between the two extremes of the envoy.—Malthus again, in his population-book, contends for a mathematic difference between animal and vegetable life, in respect to the law of increase, as though the first increased by geometrical ratios, the last by arithmetical! No proposition more worthy of laughter; since both, when permitted to expand, increase by geometrical ratios, and the latter by much higher ratios. Whereas, Malthus persuaded himself of his crotchet ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... thinking that the interviews would be unpleasant. They increased in unpleasantness in arithmetical progression, until they culminated finally in a terrific encounter with ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... 'proceed in the small chink-lighted, or even oil-lighted, underground workshop of Logic alone; and man's mind become an Arithmetical Mill, whereof Memory is the Hopper, and mere Tables of Sines and Tangents, Codification, and Treatises of what you call Political Economy, are the Meal? And what is that Science, which the scientific ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... at Richmond, Barnum tried to pay Turner for that practical joke about the Rev. Mr. Avery. A score of the company were telling stories and singing songs in the sitting room of the hotel. Presently somebody began propounding some amusing arithmetical problems. Then Turner proposed one, which was readily solved. Barnum's turn came next, and he offered the ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... to take these trifles for arithmetical estimates, or arithmetical estimates for trifles. The illusions of life are the best things in life; that which is most respectable in life is our futile credulity. Do there not exist many people whose principles are merely prejudices, and who not having the force of character ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... [theta] is the inclination of the mirror. In the perspective view, Fig. 1, the curved edge cuts the scale at 1. The instrument being thus set, the following elements may be read either directly on the scales or by simple arithmetical calculation: ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... By the time that I was satisfied of this, hunger and even faintness warned me that I must not delay preparing my breakfast. When I had finished this meal and fulfilled some necessary tasks, practical and arithmetical, the hand of the chronometer indicated the eighth hour of my third day. I turned again somewhat eagerly to the discometer, which showed an apparent distance of 360 terrestrial radii, and consequently a movement which had not materially varied from the rate of 11-1/4 radii per hour. By this time ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... of it. This is real parody, inseparable from admiration. It is the same in the parody of Dumas, which is arranged on the system of "Aramis killed three of them. Porthos three. Athos three." You cannot write that kind of thing unless you have first exulted in the arithmetical ingenuity of the plots of Dumas. It is the same in the parody of Charlotte Bronte, which opens with a dream of a storm-beaten cliff, containing jewels and pelicans. Bret Harte could not have written ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... sat together on the hearthrug, and for some time there was no sound but the creasing of bills and the jingling of guineas, broken occasionally by the exulting exclamations of Rowley. The arithmetical operation on which we were embarked took long, and it might have been tedious to others; not to me ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that we willingly contribute our own efforts to beguile our better judgments. Whether the coincidence which I have mentioned was really one of those singular chances, which sometimes happen against all ordinary calculations; or whether Mannering, bewildered amid the arithmetical labyrinth and technical jargon of astrology, had insensibly twice followed the same clew to guide him out of the maze; or whether his imagination, seduced by some point of apparent resemblance, lent its aid to make ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... was drawn up, and the other had slipped towards the ground, having apparently carried with it a manuscript volume of verse, which lay with its leaves crushed. In a corner sat Sandro, playing a game at mora by himself, and watching the slow reply of his left fingers to the arithmetical demands of his right ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... was not to be. He was not without success in the circus which he subsequently joined, but he was improvident. His income increased in arithmetical progression, and his expenditure in geometrical. This, as Dr. Micawber and Professor Malthus have shown us, must end in disaster. Looking at it from the noblest point of view—the autobiographical—I saw that a marriage with Hugo ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... Crood's approval and consent. They were never shown to me. In short, my position has been this, simply, I have had certain accounts placed before me by the Town Trustees with the curt intimation that my sole duty was to see that the merely arithmetical features were correct and to sign them ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... was not told the length of the bar, but was given the direct order: "Cut that bar into five pieces all of the same size." The boy was unable to lay out the work, although when asked by the foreman, "Don't you know how to divide 81/2 by 5?", he performed the arithmetical operation without difficulty. The employer gave this instance as an illustration of what to his mind constituted one of the principal defects of public school teaching. "Mere knowledge of mathematical ...
— Wage Earning and Education • R. R. Lutz
... business towards the close of his useful and admirable life, he spoke to his friends of occupying himself with "ingenious trifles," and of turning "some of his idle thoughts" upon the invention of an arithmetical machine and a machine for copying sculpture. These and other useful works occupied ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... a thief or a kubiustis, that thou art afraid of the day?' To which the Angel replies, 'No, I am not; but it is my turn to-day, and for the first time, to sing the Angelic Hymn of Praise in Heaven: let me go.' In another Tadmudical passage an early biblical critic is discussing certain arithmetical difficulties in the Pentateuch. Thus he finds the number of Levites (in Numbers) to differ, when summed up from the single items, from that given in the total. Worse than that, he finds that all the gold and silver contributed to the sanctuary is not accounted for, and, clinching ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... does possess that critter to act so to-day?" then glancing at the sky, which at the time happened to be overcast by dull murky clouds, he said; "It must be the weather." I chanced one day to be present when Uncle Ephraim was busily occupied in making some arithmetical calculations regarding his farm-products. The result not proving satisfactory he handed his slate to a friend for inspection, and it was soon discovered that he had made a very considerable error in his calculation. When the error was ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell
... sight of Jerusalem. The city and the temple suddenly meet his view, as he reaches the height, and he is deeply moved. Any reflective mind might well have been stirred by the thought of the masses of men gathered there. Nothing is so futile as an arithmetical numbering of people, for after a certain point figures paralyse the imagination, and after that they tell the mind little or nothing. But here was actually assembled the Jewish people, coming in swarms ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... height of the breakwater, they exert a very much less violent motive force than at and near the surface of the sea, because this force diminishes in geometrical, and the distance below the surface increases in arithmetical, proportion. The shock of the waves is received several thousand times in the course of twenty four hours, and hence the sum of impulse which the breakwater resists in one stormy day amounts to many thousands of millions of tons. The breakwater is entirely an ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... pupils' hands and minds not unprofitably employed. For instance, the ivory disks of various colors—which you see arranged upon the table as the pupils have left them—serve very successfully to elucidate the arithmetical processes of numeration, addition, and subtraction; and the more intelligent children are taught to observe that the disks of varying colors are varyingly numbered—white, 1; red, 5, and blue, 10—and so are encouraged to identify ...
— Santa Fe's Partner - Being Some Memorials of Events in a New-Mexican Track-end Town • Thomas A. Janvier
... of this painful possibility, I will not (as I might) appeal indignantly to my other writings as a proof that I am incapable of such a deed: I will not (as I might) point to the strong moral purpose of this poem itself, to the arithmetical principles so cautiously inculcated in it, or to its noble teachings in Natural History—I will take the more prosaic course of simply ...
— The Hunting of the Snark - an Agony, in Eight Fits • Lewis Carroll
... Favourite and the rest of the Royal Hareem competed who should most beguile the leisure of the Serene Haroun reposing from the cares of State—which were generally, as in most affairs of State, of an arithmetical character, the Commander of the Faithful being a ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... only variable quantity in the above formula is the "True" semi-diameter of the moon at the time, we may add the Constant logarithm 2.889214 to the arithmetical complement of the logarithm of the true semi-diameter, and we have in two lines the log. ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... highest admiration of J.J. Sylvester, was discovered and exhibited to him by one of his pupils, named Lipkin, who, however, it was afterwards found, had been anticipated by A. Peaucellier. Chebichev further constructed an instrument for drawing large circles, and an arithmetical machine with continuous motion. His mathematical writings, which account for some forty entries in the Royal Society's catalogue of scientific papers, cover a wide range of subjects, such as the theory of probabilities, quadratic forms, theory of integrals, gearings, the construction ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... number. Whilst drenching the body politic with Reform purge, or, with slashing tomahawk, inflicting Repeal gashes, they bid the prostrate and panting state subject rejoice over the wondrous dispatch with which its parts can be dismembered, the arithmetical accuracy with which its financial plethora can be depleted. Eccentric in its motions and universal in its aspirations, for the genius of this age no conception is too mean, no subject too intricate, no enterprise too rash, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... reward, the family name of so great a philosopher. Sir Isaac, after all, is a vague appellation; any dog has a right to be Sir Isaac—Newton may be left conjectural. Let us see if we can add to our arithmetical information. Look at me, Sir Isaac." Sir Isaac looked and grinned affectionately; and under that title learned a new combination with a facility that might have relieved Sophy's mind of all superstitious ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... me most heroically, and out-lied me most inconceivably. Knowing nothing either of Latin or Greek, they were beneath a gentleman's notice, fit only for parsons and pedants; and he was too patriotic to cast a thought away upon French. As he was engaged for the arithmetical and mathematical departments, it would have been perhaps as well if he had known a little of algebra and Euclid; but, as from the first day he honoured me with a strict though patronising friendship, he made me soon understand that we were to share this ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... made up of anomalies far greater than any that can be found in this bill (a cry of "No!"). Yes; far greater. Answer me, if you can; but do not interrupt me. On this point, indeed, it is much easier to interrupt than to answer. For who can answer plain arithmetical demonstration? Under the present system, Manchester, with two hundred thousand inhabitants, has no members. Old Sarum, with no inhabitants, has two members. Find me such an anomaly in the schedules which are now on the table. But is it possible that you, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... seconds since the beginning of the Christian era?" We prefer to call this a prodigy rather than a miracle,—a distinction more verbal than real; and we fancy we have explained it when we say that such arithmetical power was a peculiar endowment of his mental life. Now all of the inexplicable, inimitable reality that at any time has to be left by the baffled intellect as an unsolved wonder under the name of miracle is just that,—the ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... important speech: "Depend upon it, when you come to close quarters with this subject, when you come to measure and test the respective relations of intelligence and labor and property in all their myriad and complex forms, and when you come to represent those relations in arithmetical results, you are undertaking an operation of which I should say it was beyond the power of man to conduct it with satisfaction, but which, at any rate, is an operation to which you ought not constantly to recur; for if, as my noble friend once said ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... to the arithmetical problem of yesterday's date, "Yes, if A starts with 87 horses, loses 2, and finds 1, he does end the journey with 110, for he collects 24 more at the last estancia. Only experts can do this; hence your correspondent's failure to find ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... attempt the solution of the problem. His first process was purely mechanical, and he was so far convinced he had made the discovery that he took to educating himself, and became an expert arithmetician, and then found that arithmetical results agreed with his mechanical experiments. He appears to have eked out a bare existence for many years by teaching arithmetic, all the time struggling to get a hearing from some of the learned societies, but without ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... a massive jaw the lawyer has got. Yonder is Mr.——, the celebrated millionaire, he is just raising his hat; you see he has lost all the top part of his head, indeed he has little of his head left, except the bump of acquisitiveness and the faculty of arithmetical calculation. There are two ladies, members of the fashionable world, their case is very pitiable, they consist of nothing whatever but a pair of eyes and a bundle of nerves. There are two members of the ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... generations, the English tongue has not been spoken—a number of fictions, amongst the rest the tale of Cupid and Psyche—closely corresponding to that of the Greeks?[7] Who that has been a child does not recollect the untiring delight with which he listened to those ingenious arithmetical progressions, reduced to poetry, called "The House that Jack built," and the perils of "The Old Woman with the Pig?" Few even of those in riper years would suspect their Eastern origin. In the Sepher ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... thousand feet high, giving a pressure of four hundred and thirty-two pounds to the square inch at the bottom, water becomes steam, if at all, only by great heat. Every engineer knows that the pressure exerted by steam increases by great geometrical ratios as the heat increases by small arithmetical ratios. Steam made by two hundred and twelve degrees exerts a pressure, as we have said, ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... care to distribute the results of his investigations; at most he sought to use them for purposes of practical utility.[237] Even in childhood he is said to have perplexed his teachers by propounding arithmetical problems. In his maturity he carried anatomy further than Delia Torre; he invented machinery for water-mills and aqueducts; he devised engines of war, discovered the secret of conical rifle-bullets, adapted paddle-wheels ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... schools of literature, and all such institutions, Jasmin denounced as the curse and the bane of true poetry. They had spoiled, he said, the very French language. You could no more write poetry in French now than you could in arithmetical figures. The language had been licked and kneaded, and tricked out, and plumed, and dandified, and scented, and minced, and ruled square, and chipped—(I am trying to give an idea of the strange flood ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... the strength of the "gang" aloft that could turn the applause to its favorite. On a Broadway first night a wooer of fame may win it from the ticket buyers over the heads of the cognoscenti. But not so at Creary's. The amateur's fate is arithmetical. The number of his supporting admirers present at his try-out decides it in advance. But how these outlying Friday nights put to a certain shame the Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and matinees of ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... and Islam to the medieval Europe that inherited their learning. There are many differences, notably because of the especial development of that peculiar characteristic of the West, mathematical astronomy, conditioned by the almost accidental conflux of Babylonian arithmetical methods with those of Greek geometry. However, the lines are surprisingly similar, with the exception only of the crucial invention of the escapement, a feature which seems to be replaced by the influx of ideas connected with perpetual ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... 11th.—I am told that it was WILLIE REDMOND'S ambition to be the Father of the House; indeed, that by some arithmetical process peculiar to himself be claimed, although only elected in 1883, to be already entitled ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... of the manifestations, there is no possible doubt, even though we put on one side for the present the arithmetical phenomena, which perhaps must be treated from a particular standpoint, as I shall explain. The question before us is therefore a dilemma. Is there intelligence in the dog, or is ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... Christian truth. The tendency of reform at the present day is too often to separate itself from religion; for religion cannot work fast enough to satisfy its haste; cannot, at the end of each year, count the steps it has advanced in arithmetical numbers. The reformer asks not always for general growth and advancement in Christian Character; but demands special evidences, startling results, tangible proofs. These things all have their value, and the persons who strive for them doubtless have their reward; ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... his brow; looked downwards, as if he were mentally engaged in some arithmetical calculation; then upwards, as if the total would not come at his call; then at Solomon Daisy, from his eyebrow to his shoe-buckle; then very slowly round the bar. And then a great, round, leaden-looking, and not at all transparent tear, came ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... friend, by triumphant foe. Sulleau's Pamphlets, of the Rivarol Staff of Genius, circulate; heralding supreme hope. Durosoy's Placards tapestry the walls; Chant du Coq crows day, pecked at by Tallien's Ami des Citoyens. King's-Friend, Royou, Ami du Roi, can name, in exact arithmetical ciphers, the contingents of the various Invading Potentates; in all, Four hundred and nineteen thousand Foreign fighting men, with Fifteen thousand Emigrants. Not to reckon these your daily and hourly desertions, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... day going from one to the other. I consider a house the only safe part of the metropolis. Were I to frequent the street during the season, I am so apt to fall into a brown study, that I'm certain to be jostled until I am black and blue—I have found myself calculating an arithmetical problem at a crossing, and have not been aware of my danger until a pair of greys sixteen hands high in full trot have snorted in my face—I am an idler by profession, live at a club, sleep at chambers, and have just sufficient means to pay my ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... described is altogether above comparison with the Chess-Player of Maelzel. By no means—it is altogether beneath it—that is to say provided we assume (what should never for a moment be assumed) that the Chess-Player is a pure machine, and performs its operations without any immediate human agency. Arithmetical or algebraical calculations are, from their very nature, fixed and determinate. Certain data being given, certain results necessarily and inevitably follow. These results have dependence upon nothing, and are influenced ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of his garden was rather striking. He laid out each bed in the shape of an arithmetical figure. The pansy beds were in figure eights, the nasturtiums were pruned and ordered into stubby figure ones, while the asters and fall flowers ranged ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... prevail—frequent reduplications and the like, of which we have survivals in the later and even in the most highly developed languages. In various languages, too, we find relics of ancient modes of thought in the simplest words and expressions used for arithmetical calculations. Words and phrases for this purpose are frequently found to be derived from the words for hands, feet, fingers, and toes, just as clearly as in our own language some of our simplest measures of length are shown by their names to have been ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... poorest land under cultivation at the time; and therefore being in its amount independent of direct human control. The Malthusian law of population showed that population tended to increase in a geometrical ratio, subsistence for the population, on the other hand, only in an arithmetical ratio, and that poverty was, therefore, the natural and inevitable result in old countries of a pressure of population on subsistence. The sanction of science was thus given alike to the desires of the lovers of freedom and to the regrets of those who deplored ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... and wilder at each hole in arithmetical progression. If he had been a plow, he could hardly have turned up more soil. The imagination recoiled from the thought of what he would be doing in another half hour if he deteriorated at his ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... perfect as any human production can be. They consist of thirteen books,—the first four on plane geometry; the fifth is on the theory of proportion, and applies to magnitude in general; the seventh, eighth, and ninth are on arithmetic; the tenth on the arithmetical characteristics of the division of a straight line; the eleventh and twelfth on the elements of solid geometry; the thirteenth on the regular solids. These "Elements" soon became the universal study of geometers throughout the civilized world. They were translated into the ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... expression. He would reduce it, if possible, to a practical and numerical form, at any cost of labour: and would use any approximations which would conduce to this result, rather than leave the result in an unfruitful condition. He never shirked arithmetical work: the longest and most laborious reductions had no terrors for him, and he was remarkably skilful with the various mathematical expedients for shortening and facilitating arithmetical work of a complex character. This ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... unnecessary for an individual to pause, in order to estimate a sum like that abovementioned. Many, indeed most persons who are familiar with figures, might compute these numbers while reading, and without the slightest pause; but it certainly requires some practice. And the most important use of arithmetical studies (except as a discipline to the mind) is to enable us to reckon without slates and pencils. He has but a miserable knowledge of arithmetic, who is no arithmetician without a pen or pencil in his hand. These are but the ladders upon which he should ascend ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... Bulletin 157 of the Maine Experiment Station was published, it showed by averages as given in the table on page 202 that the egg yield at the station was for the entire period on the decline. In Bulletin 157, the statement was made that "arithmetical mistakes" and "faulty statistical methods" accounted for the discrepancies between the former publications and the criticised data. The further explanation that "the experiment was a success as an experiment," etc., only appeared to the public mind as a graceful way ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... valuing it by any regular computation, however, for it was one solid diamond—and if it were offered for sale not only would the bottom fall out of the market, but also, if the value should vary with its size in the usual arithmetical progression, there would not be enough gold in the world to buy a tenth part of it. And what could any one do ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... makes our great music great is the very thing which confuses these people; unfortunately, this cannot be expressed in words and concepts, nor in arithmetical figures. Yet, what is it other than music? and music only! What, then, can be the reason of this barrenness, dryness, coldness, this complete inability to feel the influence of true music, and, in its presence, to forget any little vexation, any small jealous ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... with any exactness. Professor Smyth, in speaking of the calculations and theoretical dimensions of this coffer—as published by Mr. Jopling, a believer in its wonderful standard character—critically and correctly observes, "Some very astonishing results were brought out in the play of arithmetical numerations." ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... silvery tongue and swung from side to side until it struck, "Come!" As though all the great guns of eternal disaster were discharged at once, and they boomed forth in one resounding cannonade of "Go!" Arithmetical sum in simple division. Eternity the dividend. The figure two the divisor. Your unalterable destiny ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... described) of harmonic analysis consists in deducing from the hourly observations the facts with regard to each of the constituent tides. This art has been carried to such perfection, that it has been reduced to a very simple series of arithmetical operations. Indeed it has now been found possible to call in the aid of ingenious mechanism, by which the labours of computation are entirely superseded. The pointer of the harmonic analyzer has merely to be traced over the curve which the tide-gauge has drawn, and it is the function of the ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... most particulars of the same value in both periods: she paid eight pence a day to every foot soldier. But our late delusions have much exceeded any thing known in history, not even excepting those of the crusades. For I suppose there is no mathematical, still less an arithmetical demonstration, that the road to the Holy Land was not the road to paradise, as there is, that the endless increase of national debts is the direct road to national ruin. But having now completely reached that goal, it is needless at present to reflect ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... this theory had really been exploded in advance by Hume. Facts do not appear as causally connected, nor, if they did, would this guarantee that they will continue to do so in the future. The continuum of experience, we may add, is not given as a series of arithmetical units or geometrical equalities, unless we deliberately measure it out in accordance with mathematical principles. Empiricism thus gives no real account of the scientific rational ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... those conditions necessary to healthy life. The need of food is vital and permanent. The desire for food, immediate and prospective, is the first motive of all animal activity, but the amount of food available in the world is limited, and the possible increase of food is estimated by Malthus at an arithmetical ratio. ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... lies in the simple arithmetical fact, that if you add an odd number to an even number, the result will be odd; if you add an odd number to an odd number, the result will be even. You have only to take care, therefore, that the number you yourself add, whether large or ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... and all the more if he has the rare genius to do all these in one, his books, we may almost say, ought to go first through the magazines. If he wants them to do so, then it will be a godsend to himself as well as to the editors if he will lay his plans, as far as they have any arithmetical character (and they can have much), according to the magazines' mechanical exigencies. He should know just how much of any magazine page his own typewritten pages will occupy; how many of its own pages that magazine commonly allows to writings of the kind he proposes to offer—how many yearly, and ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... true of economic science? Within certain limits, it is apparently true: Ricardo used mathematical formulae, though he kept to arithmetic, instead of algebra. When Malthus spoke of arithmetical and geometrical ratios, the statement, true or false, was, of course, capable of precise numerical expression, so soon as the ratios were assigned. So there was the famous formula proving a relation between the number of quarters of corn produced by a given harvest, and ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... needlessly aggressive passages, and some sallies which ought to have been avoided, because they gave pain to good people. There was perhaps too much of the particular excitement of the time. It was the date when Essays and Reviews was still thought a terrible explosive; when Bishop Colenso's arithmetical tests as to the flocks and herds of the children of Israel were believed to be sapping not only the inspiration of the Pentateuch but the foundations of the Faith and the Church; and when Darwin's ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... all, a certain justice in the query. A novelist may also write a play or a sociological treatise: he remains a novelist and we know him for what he is. What, then, is Mr. Belloc? If we examine his works by a severely arithmetical test, we shall find that the greater part of them is devoted to description of travel. You will find his greatest earnestness, perhaps his greatest usefulness, in his history: but his travel lies behind his history and informs it. It is the most ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... African residing in Virginia, did not know how to read or write, but had great facility in arithmetical calculations. He was once asked, how many seconds has an individual lived when he is seventy years, seven months, and seven days old? In a minute and a half he answered the question. One of the company took a pen, and after a long calculation, said Fuller ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... plant will have produced fifty more of its kind; by the end of the second year these will have increased to 2,500; and so on, in succeeding years, you get beyond even trillions; and I am not at all sure that I could tell you what the proper arithmetical denomination of the total number really is; but, at any rate, you will understand the meaning of all those noughts. Then you see that, at the bottom, I have taken the 51,000,000 of square miles, constituting the surface of the dry land; and as the number of square feet ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... position" of any denomination, when none of that precise denomination occurred in the number itself? Under this view the process at least becomes simple and natural; and as the early merchants contributed so largely to the improvement of our arithmetical processes, such a conclusion is wholly divested of improbability on any other ground. The circle would then naturally become, as it certainly has practically become, the ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.04.06 • Various
... what manner we intend to treat the wretched inhabitants of the other side of the Rhine. This Daru is too good a calculator and too fond of money to throw away his expenses; he is master of a great fortune, made entirely by his arithmetical talents, which have enabled him for years to break all the principal gambling-banks on the Continent, where he has travelled for no other purpose. On his return here, he became the terror of all our gamesters, who offered him an annuity of one hundred thousand livres—not to play; but ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... Schiller has observed, cannot always be explained in 'conversations by the parlour fire,' or in written treatises that resemble such. The cui bono of these doctrines may not, it is true, be expressible by arithmetical computations: the subject also is perplexed with obscurities, and probably with manifold delusions; and too often its interpreters with us have been like 'tenebrific stars,' that 'did ray out darkness' on a matter itself sufficiently dark. But what then? Is the ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... explains arithmetical puzzles, and card and other tricks. There are suggestions for celebrating the different holidays, and two children's ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... was not in vogue among the adherents of Bushido. It believed in a service which can be rendered only without money and without price. Spiritual service, be it of priest or teacher, was not to be repaid in gold or silver, not because it was valueless but because it was invaluable. Here the non-arithmetical honor-instinct of Bushido taught a truer lesson than modern Political Economy; for wages and salaries can be paid only for services whose results are definite, tangible, and measurable, whereas the best service done in education,—namely, in soul development (and this includes the services ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... the more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawning of time. Some eighty thousand years are supposed to have existed between paleolithic ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... difficulty, some of the puzzles, especially in the Arithmetical and Algebraical category, are quite easy. Yet some of those examples that look the simplest should not be passed over without a little consideration, for now and again it will be found that there is some more or less subtle pitfall or trap into which the reader may be apt to ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... or possible visibility, it knows only of distance and nearness, composition (or rather compaction) and decomposition, in short, the relations of unproductive particles to each other; so that in every instance the result is the exact sum of the component qualities, as in arithmetical addition. This is the philosophy of Death, and only of a dead nature can it hold good. In Life, and in the view of a vital philosophy, the two component counter-powers actually interpenetrate each other, and generate a higher third, ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... excitement men have worked out on paper wonderful arithmetical problems concerning the partition of the soil of the forest into small plots of ground for the poor. Paper is very forbearing, and it looks very idyllic and comfortable to see, carefully calculated before our eyes, how many hundreds of dear ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... reconstruct all the twenty games without any apparent effort of memory. Most people, including myself, play chess (when they play it at all) from hand to mouth, and can hardly recall the last move but one, or foresee the next but two. Also, when I have to make an arithmetical calculation, I have to do it step by step with pencil and paper, slowly, reluctantly, and with so little confidence in the result that I dare not act on it without 'proving' the sum by a further calculation involving more ciphering. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... with various arithmetical questions, which were answered instantly, and then he made a sudden leap and asked: ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... chroniclers. It owes, of course, much of its tenacity of existence to the amazing inexhaustibility of its nature. Some chess writers have loved to dwell upon the unending fertility of its powers of combinations. They have calculated by arithmetical rules the myriads of positions of which the pieces and pawns are susceptible. They have told us that a life time of many ages would hardly suffice even to count them. We know, too, that while the composers of the orient and the occident have displayed during long centuries an admirable subtility ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... conditions imagined by Condorcet and Godwin these checks are removed, and consequently the population would increase with great rapidity, doubling itself at least in twenty-five years. But the products of the earth increase only in an arithmetical progression, and in fifty years the food supply would be too small for the demand. Thus the oscillation between numbers and food supply would recur, and the happiness of the species would come ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... same Christian name, was a native of Culross, where he was originally employed in superintending the coal works in that vicinity, under the late Earl of Dundonald. He subsequently became agent for the collieries of John Francis Erskine, afterwards Earl of Mar. A book of arithmetical tables and calculations from his pen, entitled, "The Corn-dealer's Assistant," was long recognised as an almost indispensable guide ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... showed that information communicated to a subject in the hypnotic trance could be subsequently reproduced through the handwriting, whilst the attention of the subject was fully employed in conversing or reading aloud; or an arithmetical problem which had been set during the trance could be worked out under similar conditions without the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... to beguile the time. There was a single chess-board and a single pack of cards. Sometimes as many as twenty of us would be playing dominoes for love. Feats of dexterity, puzzles for the intelligence, some arithmetical, some of the same order as the old problem of the fox and goose and cabbage, were always welcome; and the latter, I observed, more popular as well as more conspicuously well done than the former. We had a regular daily competition to guess the vessel's progress; and twelve ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as he dressed himself, 'I have an arithmetical question to solve. If a Roman, by hard scratching, can earn twenty cents a day, and it costs him twenty-five cents for board and lodging, how long will it be before he saves up a dollar and a half to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was worsted as regarded the illustration, and with a bit of the boy's fear of the pedagogue, he fought Anthony off by still pressing the arithmetical problem upon Master Gammon; until the old man, goaded to exasperation, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... congenitally predisposed to a one-sided development; and in some persons there occurs a phenomenally early development of certain particular talents. It will suffice to remind the reader of children who while still quite young can perform extraordinary arithmetical operations, and of those who at six or seven years of age can play beautifully on the piano or some other instrument. In these latter cases the most important feature is the congenital predisposition, but this predisposition ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... be that of a direct arithmetical progression in the relation of wage and work such as would require every difference in quantity of food, etc., consumed by labourers to be reflected in an exactly correspondent difference of output of productive energy—an assumption which needs ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... on all I had seen that was rich and rare, or have been placing, perhaps in order, the various additions with which I had supplied my stock of information—and now, like a stupid boy blundering over an arithmetical question half obliterated on his slate, I go stumbling on upon the audit of pounds, shillings, and pence. Why, the increase of charge I complain of must continue so long as the value of the thing represented ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... to forty-five. Some are smoking. Others, with tongue protruding slightly from the corner of the mouth, and head on one side, are slowly and painfully copying the drawing of a pump or a valve-box. Others, again, are in the murky depths of vast arithmetical solutions extracting, with heavy breathings, the cube root from some formidable quantity, and bringing it to the surface exhausted and far from certain as to the ultimate utility of their discoveries. ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... speculative, who did not share in the general delusion was Edmund Burke. David Hume, undoubtedly one of the most profound political economists of his time, declared that our madness had exceeded the madness of the Crusaders. Richard Coeur de Lion and Saint Lewis had not gone in the face of arithmetical demonstration. It was impossible to prove by figures that the road to Paradise did not lie through the Holy Land; but it was possible to prove by figures that the road to national ruin was through the national debt. It was idle, however, now to talk about the road; we had done with the road; ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... now began to dawn upon him that he was doomed for life to the greatest of all his horrors, the top of a three-legged stool! He had hated writing and figures, and now visions of ledgers, cash-books, invoice-books and similar literature with endless arithmetical calculations began to float before his mental vision. With intense regret he reflected that if he had only used reasonably well the brief period of life which as yet lay behind him, he might by that time have been done with initial drudgery and have been entering on a brilliant ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne |
