"Atrophy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... know—as you need to—make a song about it!" winced the Senior Surgeon. "It's just about the crudest case of complete muscular atrophy that ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... reconciled to his immobility. It is probable that after passing several months or years in a state of immobility fakirs no longer experience any desire to change their position, and even did they so desire, it would be impossible owing to the atrophy of their muscles and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... experiment was in regard to the effect of electricity on plant life. He referred particularly to the fact that it was his aim to discover the law of growth and atrophy among plants. Such a discovery had a great bearing on the future of agriculture and would revolutionise world thought. Electricity, he explained and illustrated, would promote or retard the growth of life by reaction. In England and other countries electricity ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... plains, every fertile huerta of the seacoast, is a Spain. Iberia exists, and the strong Iberian characteristics; but Spain as a modern centralized nation is an illusion, a very unfortunate one; for the present atrophy, the desolating resultlessness of a century of revolution, may very well be due in large measure to the artificial imposition of centralized government ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... face glossy, verging to a darkish hue; aspect of the face terrible, and with a fixed look; with acumination or pointing and contraction of the pulps of the ear. And there are many other signs, as pustules and excrescences, atrophy of the muscles, and particularly of those between the thumb and forefinger; insensibility of the extremities; fissures, and infections of the skin; the blood, when drawn and washed, containing black, earthy, ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope
... generally used; for this constant effect must render them too copious, and thus, according to all physical experience, the blood must be thickened in the greater vessels, which frequently terminates in an atrophy. ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... therefore it is necessary that he should resist it. If he does so resist, if he declines to yield himself to the feelings suggested to him, the particles within him which need those vibrations become apathetic for lack of nourishment, and eventually atrophy and fall out from his astral body, and are replaced by other particles, whose natural wave-rate is more nearly in accordance with that which the man habitually permits ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... life for any boy or girl; but a false start, a bad beginning for the children of the very poor who happen to possess brain power is fatal. Their talents get no chance, for they are never used, consequently they atrophy, or, worse still, are used in a wrong direction and possibly for evil. Good is changed into evil, bright and useful life is frustrated, and the State loses the useful power and influence that should result ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... genius which springs up from the ranks of unknown men is the genius which renews the youth and the energy of the people; and in every age of the world, where you stop the courses of the blood from the roots, you injure the great, useful structure to the extent that atrophy, death, and decay are sure to ensue. This is the reason that an hereditary monarchy does not work; that is the reason that an hereditary aristocracy does not work; that is the reason that everything of that sort is full of corruption and ready ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... in human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no salvation for men in the pitiful condescensions of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a land of freemen. Prosperity guaranteed by trustees has no prospect of endurance. Monopoly means the atrophy of enterprise. If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of the government. I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it; what we have ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... obliged to you,)" said the Superior, pleased at the Gordian knot being loosed, and then relapsed into his atrophy, without moving a ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... thought to be a service peculiarly fitted for men of letters, was illustrated in Hawthorne's career in many ways and on several occasions, but nowhere more plainly than in the period of his five years of atrophy from the time he entered the consulate till the composition of "The Marble Faun." He wrote vigorously in his note-books, from time to time, but such composition was the opiate it had always been for his higher ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... students or physicians of human nature, in this world of superficial observers, who go deep enough into the springs of man's action to distinguish the external symptoms of heart-cancer from ossification, or to learn ihe difference between satiety and atrophy. A night of nervous sleeplessness, a day of irresolution and dread, had aggravated almost beyond her control the restlessness which in Mabel was the unerring indication of unhealthiness of mind and body. To sit still ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... to filter out some things, to break up and alter others, and to expel them from the body in the form of bile. There are certain diseases in which the liver suddenly declines to do any more work. Acute atrophy of the liver is the name of this condition, and when it arises death rapidly results from suppression of the secretion of bile. It brings about a state of things called acholia; the patient is actually poisoned by the non-removal of those ingredients from the blood which it is the duty of the ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... the phenomenon must be looked for in the race character; and whatever the higher education may accomplish in the remote future, it can scarcely be expected to transform nature. But does it at present atrophy certain finer tendencies? I think that it unavoidably does, for the simple reason that, under existing conditions, the moral and mental powers are overtasked by its requirements. All that wonderful national spirit of duty, of patience, of self-sacrifice, anciently directed to social, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... socialism....I rather like the idea though of the strong man having the opportunity to prove himself stronger than Life...find out what, he was put on earth and endowed with certain characteristics for...rather a pity all that should atrophy....However—what shall my friend do? Continue to live ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... feel I may say to you what I could not well say to the colonel—I suspect the cause of her illness is rather a spiritual one. She has evidently a strong mental constitution; and this strong frame, so to speak, has been fed upon slops; and an atrophy is the consequence. My hope in your plan is, partly, that it may furnish a better mental table for her, for the time, and set her foraging in ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... of healthy children, if the average man loses the will and the power to work up to old age and to fight whenever the need arises. If the homely commonplace virtues die out, if strength of character vanishes in graceful self-indulgence, if the virile qualities atrophy, then the nation has lost what no ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... records and never find a line to prove that any man with "occupation or profession—novel reading" is recorded as dying of consumption. The humped-over attitude promotes compression of the lungs, telescoping of the diaphragm, atrophy of the abdominal abracadabra and other things (see Physiological Slush, p. 179, ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... Tacitus would have delighted in this example of the 'inertia rusticorum'! It is a great mistake to imagine that dwellers in quiet districts are more easily excited by any event than are dwellers in packed cities. On the contrary, the very absence of 'sensations' produces an atrophy of the senses. It is the constant supply of 'sensations' which creates a real demand for them in cities. Suppose that in our day some specially unpopular clergyman were martyred 'at the corner of Fenchurch ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... IVY. The Leaves and Berries.—The leaves have very rarely been given internally; notwithstanding they are recommended (in the Ephem. natur. curios. vol. ii. obs. 120.) against the atrophy of children; their taste is nauseous, acrid, and bitter. Externally they have sometimes been employed for drying and healing ichorous sores, and likewise for keeping issues open. The berries were supposed by the ancients to have a purgative and emetic quality; later writers have ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... to think, each after his kind. The horse rejoices in the liberty of acting like a horse, and not like an ox; and man enjoys the privilege of acting the part of a man, and not of a disembodied spirit. If the limbs of the former are struck by an atrophy, we do not expect him to win the race. If the brain of the latter is blasted by disease or deterioration, we cannot expect the fruits of a sound and vigorous organism. When we say that a person with a brain vitiated by an accumulation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... life of primal innocence and wonder that had ever brimmed the heart of the Irishman, acknowledged while not understood, might have slumbered itself away with the years among modern conditions into atrophy and denial, had he not chanced to encounter a more direct and vital instance of it even than himself. The powerfully-charged being of this Russian stranger had summoned it forth. The mere presence of this man quickened and evoked this faintly-stirring ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... is becoming stone like that. His is a case in point, and a good one, because the atrophy is coming about not from physical disease, or from any dissipation. You would call him sane and full of fire. He was. He married three years ago. Their life was full, too, like ours, and precious. They did not throw it away; they were wise guardians of all its possibilities. ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... knowledge stood him in no stead in the Bush; and first he lost his money, and he fashed himself terrible about that, and then he lost a child or two, and then he lost his wife, and he came back to us a broken-hearted man, with no wish to live. The doctor may call it atrophy, but I will call it what the Scripture calls it, a ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... one that I know of has maintained], "or even if they might occasionally be transmitted" [which cannot, I imagine, be reasonably questioned], "a powerful support would be given to the Lamarckian principle, and the transmission of functional hypertrophy or atrophy would ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... our spiritual indigestion tabloids. In cases of all the more ordinary moral ailments, from simple lying, to homicidal mania, in cases again of tendency to hatred, malice, and uncharitableness; of atrophy or hypertrophy of the conscience, of costiveness or diarrhoea of the sympathetic instincts, &c., &c., our spiritual indigestion tabloids will afford unfailing ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... patient, felt his pulse, and asked him a few questions; when, looking grave, he said, "Sir, you are in a very dangerous way," "I know it Sir, I know it Sir," said George Dyer. The Dr. replied, "Sir, yours is a very peculiar case, and if you do not implicitly follow my directions, you will die of atrophy before to-morrow morning. It is the only possible chance of saving your life. You must directly make a good meal off beef-steaks, and drink the best part of a pot of porter." "Tis too late," said George, but "I'll eat, I'll eat." The doctor now withdrew, and so nicely had ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... written language as also its literature and the teachings of the great Chinese philosopher, Confucius, are believed to have been introduced several hundreds of years previously. This contact with and importation from China undoubtedly had a marked effect in inducing what I may term atrophy in the development of the Japanese language as also the growth of its own literature, that is a literature entirely devoid of Chinese influences. Indeed it is impossible to speculate on what might have been the development ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... of their interview, and having lost the thread of the rigmarole, did not know to what his silence had been supposed to assent. Next, Algernon conquered his uncle by representing Lucy as on the road to an atrophy, and persuading him that he should be much safer on the Continent with a wife than without one: and though the two ladies were harder to deal with in themselves, they were obliged to stand by the decision of their lords. Above all, he made way by his sincere habit ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the negative one, is that aesthetic pleasure is not in the least dependent upon the fact of personal ownership, and that it therefore affords an opportunity of leaving inactive, of beginning to atrophy by inactivity, the passion for exclusive possession, for individual advantage, which is at the bottom of all bad luxury, of all ostentation, and of nearly all rapacity. But before entering on this ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... setting aside all considerations which affect your mere personal ruin—not mentioning the atrophy of spiritual life and the clinging sense of degradation which is involved in such a course as yours—I want you to see if you will be honest, that the fault is yet more deadly, because you involve other souls and other lives in your own destruction. Is it not a reminiscence ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... were laid Numbers of all diseased; all maladies Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence, Dropsies and asthmas, and ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... are ever the best because less frequently drawn, are deserted, for distance of course adds greatly to expense. The farmers round the centre of the county become sullen, and those beyond are indifferent; and so, from bad to worse, the famine goes on till the hunt has perished of atrophy. Grease to the wheels, plentiful grease to the wheels, is needed in all machinery; but I know of no machinery in which everrunning grease is so necessary as in ...
— Hunting Sketches • Anthony Trollope
... men had been drawn together by a common characteristic. Their consciences were dead. That atrophy of conscience made them all worshipers of the same idol—money. The motives that propelled each of the three to the altar were as diverse as their separate natures, but the sacrifice that each offered to the ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... love, this fleeting victory over themselves, which had kept them from atrophy and extinction; which, in her, had reached out to him in every struggle against the influence of her surroundings, and in him, had kept alive the faith that now drew him penitent and reconciled ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... enumerated his chief contributions to the advance of the question. On the other hand, from his ignorance of any power in Nature competent to modify the structure of animals, except the development of parts, or atrophy of them, in consequence of a change of needs, Lamarck was led to attach infinitely greater weight than it deserves to this agency, and the absurdities into which he was led have met with deserved condemnation. Of the struggle for existence, on which, as we shall ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... played it, but speak it he could not. Here is a point that reveals Chopin's native indecision, his inability to make up his mind. He recalls to me the Frederic Moreau of Flaubert's "L'Education Sentimentale." There is an atrophy of the will, for Chopin can neither propose nor fly from Warsaw. He writes letters that are full of self-reproaches, letters that must have both bored and irritated his friends. Like many other men of genius he suffered ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... was a little more than sixteen, came a letter to tell that she was wasting away in either atrophy or consumption, and that the doctors said the only hope for her was home and native air. Poor child! what home was there for her, with her sister-in-law absorbed in the care of her brother, whose imbecility was ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... applied to the authorities for the second printer's license in Angouleme. Hitherto old Sechard had contrived to reduce this license to a dead letter, thanks to the war crisis of the Empire, and consequent atrophy of commercial enterprise; but he had neglected to buy up the right himself, and this piece of parsimony was the ruin of the old business. Sechard thought joyfully when he heard the news that the coming struggle with the Cointets would be ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... reduce it to something perfunctory, conventional, and perhaps secretly despised. A philosophy is not genuine unless it inspires and expresses the life of those who cherish it. I do not think the hereditary philosophy of America has done much to atrophy the natural activities of the inhabitants; the wise child has not missed the joys of youth or of manhood; but what has happened is that the hereditary philosophy has grown stale, and that the academic philosophy afterwards developed has caught the stale odour from it. America ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... flood of eulogy will be supplied by Sir ALMROTH WRIGHT, who, taking the view that the simplicity with which logarithms can be handled is leading the nation inevitably towards mental atrophy, will introduce the question, "The Logarithm: is it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... weakening of the generative power and of the constructive imagination coincide in old age, which is, in a word, a decay of nutrition, a progressive atrophy. It is proper not to omit the influence of castration. According to the theory of Brown-Sequard, it produces an abatement of the nutritive functions through the suppression of an internal stimulus; and, although its relations to the imagination have not been especially studied, it is not rash ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... Francisco Bay to the Colorado River and letting the Pacific Ocean do the rest. Another solution envisaged shutting off all light from the grass by means of innumerable radiobeams to interrupt the sun's rays in the hope that with an inability to manufacture chlorophyll an atrophy would set in. Several contestants urged inoculating other grasses, such as bamboo, with the Metamorphizer, expecting the two giants of vegetation, like the Kilkenny cats, would end by devouring each other. This proposal received such wide popular support there is reason to believe it ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... value is the process of thought, the line of argument by which the old tacticians arrived at their conclusions good and bad. In studying the long series of Instructions we are able to detach certain attitudes of mind which led to the atrophy of principles essentially good, and others which pushed the system forward on healthy lines and flung off obsolete restraints. In an art so shifting and amorphous as naval tactics, the difference between health and disease ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... on intelligence, but in those disorders of speech which occur as a result of degenerative processes of the central nervous system the difficulty of articulate speech precedes that of phonation. Take, for example, bulbar paralysis, a form of progressive muscular atrophy, a disease due to a progressive decay and destruction of the motor nerve cells presiding over the movements of the tongue, lips, and larynx, hence often called glosso-labial-laryngeal palsy. In this disease the lips, tongue, throat, and often ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... of nourishment, for the maternal blood-vessels do not follow the expanding sac but retain their original position at its base. Partly on account of the lack of nutriment thus occasioned and partly on account of the distention caused by the contents of the sac, atrophy occurs in the distant portions of the sac's wall. As a final result of these two factors, the maternal tissue which covers the ovum becomes thinned and stretched; it is pushed entirely across the uterine cavity; ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... atrophy left his intellect entirely untrammelled; and he was more ambitious than ever of attaining a high position in society. Inasmuch as he had such a stepping-stone, the very least he could do was to ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... people is proportionate to the number of hands and minds usefully employed. To the community, sedition is a fever, corruption is a gangrene, and idleness an atrophy. Whatever body, and whatever society, wastes more than it acquires, must gradually decay; and every being that continues to be fed, and ceases to labour, takes away something from ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... follows a basket of flowers on a summer day. As Mrs. de Tracy, like the Stoic that she was, accepted all the inevitable facts of life,—birth, death, love, hate (she had known them all in her day), she accepted this one also. But in that atrophy of every feeling except bitterness, that atrophy which is perhaps the only real solitude, the only real old age, her animosity was stirred. It was as though a dead branch upon some living tree was angry with the spring for breathing on it. As she returned, herself unseen in the shadow ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... least neutralized by undesirable effects produced elsewhere. The continued use of large doses of alcohol produces chronic gastritis, in which the continued irritation has led to overgrowth of connective tissue, atrophy of the gastric glands and permanent cessation of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... it's gone the process must have involved a bewildering change of ideals and criterions. I guess he's come to despise a great many things that he once respected, and that intellectual ability is among them—what we call intellectual ability. He must have undergone a moral deterioration, an atrophy of the generous instincts, and I don't see why it shouldn't have reached his mental make- up. He has sharpened, but he has narrowed; his sagacity has turned into suspicion, his caution to meanness, his courage to ferocity. That's the way I philosophize a man ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... disease that must either break out or strike inward with fatal results. When Sunday night came, Mitchell was about ready to fare forth with gun and mask and take conversation away from anybody who had it to spare. He had begun to fear that his vocal cords would atrophy. ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... diet was injurious, even if the quality brought by the change was better. That milk fresh from the udder was the best. The Talmud describes jaundice and correctly ascribes it to the retention of bile, and speaks of dropsy as due to the retention of urine. It teaches that atrophy or rupture of the kidneys is fatal. Induration of the lungs (tuberculosis) was regarded as incurable. Suppuration of the spinal cord had an early, grave meaning. Rabies was known. The following is a description given of the dog's condition: 'His mouth ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... are more or less subject to arrest of development, [682] in a later stage. They may even sometimes become abnormal. Stamens may unite into pairs, or carpels bear four stigmas. The pollen-sacs are as a rule barren, the mother-cells undergoing atrophy, while normal grains are seen but rarely. Likewise the ovaries are rudimentary, but Wittmack has observed the occasional production of ripe ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... ajn okazos. At any time iam. Atheist ateisto. Atheism ateismo. Athletic atleta. Athlete atleto. Atlas landkartaro. Atmosphere atmosfero. Atom atomo. Atomism atomismo. At once tuj. Atone rebonigi. Atonement rebonigo. Atrocious kruelega. Atrocity kruelego. Atrophy atrofio. Attach alligi. Attachment alligo. Attack atako. Attack ataki. Attain atingi. Attain (to) trafi, atingi (al). Attainment akiro. Attempt atenci. Attempt atenco. Attendants (retinue) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... value of the catch was much diminished) until some fisherman of genius conjectured that the cod lived only too contentedly in those tanks, and suffered from the atrophy of calm. The cod is by nature a lethargic, torpid, and plethoric creature, prone to inactivity, content to lie in comfort, swallowing all that comes, with cavernous mouth wide open, big enough to gulp its own body down if that could be. In the tanks the cod rotted at ease, rapidly deteriorating ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... as prescribed by us in our Constitution and By-Laws, is and must be a mass of disease from head to foot; it being self-evident that he is simultaneously affected with Apoplexy, Arthritis, Ascites, Asphyxia, and Atrophy; with Borborygmus, Bronchitis, and Bulimia; with Cachexia, Carcinoma, and Cretinismus; and so on through the alphabet, to Xerophthalmia and Zona, with all possible and incompatible diseases which are necessary to make ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... a moment the result of Socialism as a permanent policy. It means the substitution, as already shown, of government or official judgment and initiative for that of the individual. The whole process would be one to deaden and atrophy the powers of the people in general, with the result that there would follow a leveling down to a plane of mediocrity rather than a leveling up according to individual capacities and ambitions, exercised ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... not reflecting—China was awake and thinking hard. Japan's continued civil wars, which caused the almost total destruction of books and manuscripts, secured also the triumph of Buddhism which meant the atrophy of the national intellect. When, after the long feuds and battles of the middle ages, Confucianism stepped the second time into the Land of Brave Scholars, it was no longer with the simple rules of conduct and ceremonial of the ancient days, nor was it as ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... persons, there is an easy answer ready for it. But considering that religion is now so far dead that it consists in little else than formalities, and that its divine truth is no longer such to half the great world, which lies, indeed, in dire atrophy and wickedness,—and if we further consider and agree that the awakened human soul is the divinest thing on earth, and partakes of the divine nature itself, and that its manifestations are also divine in whomsoever it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... go to bed as soon as the evening's work was over, as she would have done at ordinary times. To counteract the malign spell which she imagined poor Eustacia to be working, the boy's mother busied herself with a ghastly invention of superstition, calculated to bring powerlessness, atrophy, and annihilation on any human being against whom it was directed. It was a practice well known on Egdon at that date, and one that is not quite extinct at ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... to the general degradation of the Batrachians, touches upon the atrophy of legs which has taken ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... mania of eating earth. We found at the mission of San Borja an Indian child of the Guahiba nation, who was as thin as a skeleton. The mother informed us that the little girl was reduced to this lamentable state of atrophy in consequence of a disordered appetite, she having refused during four months to take almost any other food than clay. Yet San Borja is only twenty-five leagues distant from the mission of Uruana, inhabited by that tribe of the Ottomacs, who, from the effect no doubt of a habit progressively ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Christendom, in the atrophy both of mental and physical activity, broken for short periods and in certain lands by the revivals of Charles the Great, of the Isaurian Emperors, of Otto I., of Alfred and his House, the practical energy of Heathen ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... expression of thought and emotion. It is a pity that this should be so, for it can be shown that life would not be worth living divorced from the gracious and ennobling influence of literature, and that literature suffers atrophy when it does not concern itself with the facts ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... men, seemingly a part of everyday life, were, all the time, "dead souls." There is hardly a more terrible idea in all that terrible book, and yet it is a possibility in our own daily life—this atrophy of the spiritual nature, corresponding to the atrophy of the poetical nature which Darwin noted in himself as due to his own neglect. Mr. Clifford, in "A Likely Story," forcibly depicts a soul awaking in the next ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... years of age, as it is notorious that they are less capable of it. Their muscular movements are feebler, and soon bring on fatigue; their actions are slow and painful. Even old men whose mental vigour is unimpaired admit their muscular weakness. The physical correlate of this condition is an actual atrophy of the muscles, and has for long been known to observers. I have found that the cause of this atrophy is the consumption of the muscle fibres by what I call phagocytes, or eating cells, a certain kind ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... missions, and framed in the year 1798 its law against church extension. But we know of no Church that ever recovered from fine-bodyism when the disease had once fairly settled into its confirmed and chronic state. In at least this age and country it exists as the atrophy of a cureless decline. It were well, however, that we should say what it is we mean by fine-bodyism; and we find we cannot do better than quote our definition from the first speech ever delivered by Chalmers in the General ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... a counterpoise to sociocracy. We must beware of any organisation, be it internationalist or pacifist, which claims to subjugate and atrophy the living forces of man. The political ideal is a genuine federalism which shall respect individualisms. As the old saying has it: Let everything be ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... slow and lingering decline at the end of a definite number of days, weeks, or even months, as was desired. Death was not less sure because deferred, and it could be made to assume the appearance of dumb paralysis, wasting atrophy, or burning fever, at the discretion of the compounder ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... about by the entire dependence of the individual and afterwards of the entire race, on machinery to do the work required of the individual by the Creator, such dependence finally terminating in almost complete atrophy of ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... lacteals, atrophy. Distaste to animal food. II. Cause of dropsy. Cause of herpes. Scrophula. Mesenteric consumption. Pulmonary consumption. Why ulcers in the lungs ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional side of one's nature. So far as he could judge, his mind had become in his later years a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, and that atrophy had taken place in that part of the brain on which the higher aesthetic tastes depend. Curiously enough, however, he retained his relish for novels, and for books on ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... the rapid whirling movements, a great part of the endolymph is hurled into the scala tympani, the organ of Corti in the scala vestibuli is fixed and its parts are rendered incapable of vibration. The condition of atrophy which is observable in the sense cells and in the nerve elements is probably due to the impossibility of functional activity; it is an atrophy caused by disuse "(25 ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... life, a will which is burdened with its own selfhood, an imagination which paints the misty walls of this earthly prison with awful shapes that terrify and faint hopes that mock, a heart that hungers for love, and a reason which pines in atrophy without light. And all these the gospel which is lodged in our hands meets. It addresses itself to nothing in men that is not in man. Surface differences of position, culture, clime, age, and the like, it brushes aside as unimportant, and it goes straight ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... He would doubtless have thought it mere imagination, some accidental resemblance to which his ear had given identity, had not Cardington's manner registered a sudden emotional disturbance. He paused in his narration, like one smitten with mental atrophy and searching for the word that was about to reach his lips. His position on the inside of the walk offered a barrier between Leigh and the retreating couple, and he gave a curious impression of maintaining that position carefully as they passed the street. Then he resumed ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... meeting must still be delayed. It was a little thing, perhaps. Yet, it was capable of meaning much concerning the nature of the lad. It revealed surely a tender heart, one responsive to a pure love. And to one of his class, there are many forces ever present to atrophy such simple, wholesome power of loving. The ability to love cleanly and ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... conventionalities, and a fixed and stubborn conviction as to what was or was not "smart." "If she has a soul," Silvia said to herself with rather unusual heat, "no one could tell whether it is in a condition of arrested development, hopeless atrophy or complete ossification. As well seek diamonds in a common sandbank as inspiration or aspiration in its sawdusty recesses." Then she laughed, and said, "Cat!" softly, ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... officer to get out of the desk habit, and caution, conservatism, sureness, seem even in time of crisis to be more important than a bit of daring. In my Department, I figure that it takes about seven years for the nerve of initiative and the nerve of imagination to atrophy, and so, perhaps, it is in other departments. It took five months for one of our war bureaus to get out a contract for a building that we were to build for them. Fifteen men had to sign the contract. And of course we have been impatient. But things are bettering every day. The men in the camps ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... workers give five or six years of their life, and shall never know love, or the joys of maternity. The queen's brain turns to pulp, that the reproductive organs may profit; in the workers these organs atrophy, to the benefit of their intelligence. Nor would it be fair to allege that the will plays no part in all these renouncements. We have seen that each worker's larva can be transformed into a queen if lodged and fed on the royal plan; and similarly could each royal larva be turned into worker ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... meant, To tear religion's lovely face: Strip her of every ornament and grace; In striving to wash off th'imaginary paint? Religion now does on her death-bed lie, Heart-sick of a high fever and consuming atrophy; How the physicians swarm to show their mortal skill, And by their college arts methodically kill: Reformers and physicians differ but in name, One end in both, and the design the same; Cordials are in their talk, while all they mean Is but the patient's death, and ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... she sent Fanny off to keep Zoe company. That poor girl had a bitter time, and gave Doctress Gale great anxiety. She had no brain fever, but seemed quietly, insensibly, sinking into her grave. No appetite, and indeed was threatened with atrophy at one time. But she was so surrounded with loving-kindness that her shame diminished, her pride rose, and at last her agony was blunted, and only a pensive languor remained to show that she had been ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... enormously developed, by compensatory hypertrophy in consequence of the removal of the other testis. At the same time the male instincts and the other generative organs were unchanged. In a few cases, however, Ancel and Bouin observed atrophy of the interstitial cells as well as the spermatic cells. They believe this is due to the nerves supplying the testis being included in the ligature. This is rather a surprising conclusion in view of the fact that testicular grafts show active spermatogenesis. ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... which is exerted on the pulmonary and cutaneous absorbents by reverse sympathy, and produces a great absorption of the fluid effused into the cellular membrane in anasarca, with dry skin; constituting one kind of atrophy. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... the door and a tall loutish man in the uniform of a German officer entered, followed by two grey-coated soldiers. The officer neither bowed nor saluted, but merely glared with an intimidating frown. The maire's clerk sat in an atrophy of fear, unable to move a muscle. The officer advanced to the desk, pulled out his revolver from its leather pouch, and laid it with a lethal gesture on the maire's desk. The maire examined it curiously. "Ah, ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... not accept the offer. There was a numbness upon him, a numbness either of unborn, absent volition, or of atrophy. Perhaps it was the absence of volition. For he was strangely elated at Rupert's offer. Yet he was still more glad to reject it, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... could not believe that anyone could think a thing wrong and yet do it. His biographer said, very shrewdly, that his sense of sin was as dead as his ear for music—that he did not possess even the common liberty of right and wrong. That's a bad case of atrophy! You must not, of course, be at the mercy of your moods, but you must not be at the mercy of your ethical habits either. Of the two, I am not sure that the ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... past history. What sort of character-development has so far been going on? Commonly it happens that there has been no spiritual effort that is worth thinking about; but that does not mean that nothing spiritual has been happening. It means on the contrary that there has been going on a spiritual atrophy, the spiritual powers have been without exercise and will be difficult to arouse to activity. In such a case as that spiritual awakening will be followed by a long period of spiritual struggle against habits of thought and action which ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... may be confined to the cortical substance, or even to the tubular. The kidneys are occasionally much larger than usual, without any other change of structure; or simple hypertrophy may affect but one of them. They are subject to atrophy, which may be either general or partial; or one of the kidneys may be completely wanting, and this evidently the ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... freedom do not spring full-blown into life only in times of trial, they are nurtured carefully and often unknowingly over the years. They demand, as Jefferson said, "eternal vigilance". Certainly, liberty and freedom were not allowed to atrophy and become weak in colonial Virginia. Instead, it was the English who had not been vigilant and who had allowed a particularly strong concept of liberty to grow ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... at the Front?" they will lose half their savour. He will be as dull as Io without her gad-fly. Mr. "Boanerges" STANTON is happily still with us, but with no pacifists to bellow at I fear that his vocal chords will atrophy. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... Stammering (Literal Bulbo-nuclear Dysarthria and Anarthria).—Patients who have lost control over the muscles of speech through bulbo-nuclear paralysis, stammer before they become speechless, and along with paralysis and atrophy of the tongue occur regularly fibrillar contractions of the muscles of the tongue. The tongue is no longer regulated ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... that the sweet creature was falling into an atrophy. So she carried the forlorn damsel post haste to the Black Rock for the recovery of her health, or her heart. Clementina, my dear, no reproachful looks; in your secret soul do not you know, that I could not do ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... in his heart. Men in business and professions have so little time for reading or thinking—and idle people have still less—that their means of grace, as the theologians say, are confined to discipline without nourishment, whence their religion, if they have any, is often from mere atrophy but a skeleton; and the office of preaching is, after all, to wake them up lest their sleep turn to death; next, to make them hungry, and lastly, to supply that hunger; and for all these things, the pastor has to take thought. If he feed not the flock of God, then ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... means. It need not be said that the personality of the artist may be as strenuous in the one case as in the other; unless, indeed, we maintain, as perhaps we may, that individuality is more apt to atrophy in the latter instance; for as one gets farther and farther away from nature he is in more danger from conventionality than from caprice. And this is in fact what has happened since the high Renaissance, the long line of conventionalities being continued, sometimes punctuated ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... conceded, and such men as I have spoken of were the first to admit it, that lives such as these are necessarily imperfect. The stunting or the atrophy of the religious instinct, the hunger and thirst for something beyond the sphere of sense when left totally unsatisfied, produces at length a restless, tormented feeling, which turns the very joy of existence to sadness, and dims the ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... action or it is harmful and vicious in its reaction. Having learned of Home Mission conditions and needs, "word and deed must become one witness in action," else our knowledge will mean a hardening of sympathy, the atrophy of some spiritual impulse. The Lord calls us and sends ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... play, false to nature, false to true morality, propagandist of indecent emotions disguised as idealism, need yield nothing to the so-called "strong" story. Both pander to different forms of the same diseased craving for the unnatural. Both produce moral atrophy. The one tends to encourage the shallow and unthinking in ignorance of life and so causes them to suffer the merciless penalties of ignorance. The other tends to miseducate the shallow and unthinking, to give them a ruinously false notion of the delights of vice. The Anglo-Saxon "morality" ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... Kaiser Karl, clear out of it, home to Spain and San Justo a little earlier; to wave the coming Jesuitries away, as with a flaming sword; to forbid beforehand the doleful Thirty-Years War, and the still dolefuler spiritual atrophy (the flaccid Pedantry, ever rummaging and rearranging among learned marine-stores, which thinks itself Wisdom and Insight; the vague maunderings, flutings; indolent, impotent daydreaming and tobacco-smoking, of poor Modern Germany) which has followed ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... in Shoulder joints, Arm joints, Hand joints, Atrophy of the muscles of Arms, Shoulders, Stiffness of all those joints, Insomnia, Excruciating pains most of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... &c. (b.) Congenital syphilis (c.) Tertiary syphilitic manifestations or disabilities directly attributable to syphilis infection:— (i.) Affecting nervous system—e.g., gumma, locomotor, G.P.I., &c. (ii.) Affecting ear, eye, &c. (special senses)—e.g., optic atrophy, &c. (iii.) Affecting respiratory system—e.g., syphilitic laryngitis, &c. (iv.) Affecting digestive system—e.g., syphilitic stricture of rectum, &c. (v.) Affecting circulatory system—e.g., syphilitic angina, aneurism, ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... wild waste which leaves behind it a barren and ill-natured soil exhausted of its power, of its generous and native health. There was a strange apathy in his senses, an emotional stillness, as it were, the atrophy of all the passionate elements of his nature. But because of this he was the better poised, the more evenly balanced, the more perceptive. His eyes were not blurred or dimmed by any stress of emotion, his mind worked in a cool quiet, and his forward tread had leisurely decision and grace. He ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... between Jesus of Nazareth and human life? It is best brought out, when we realize what he has made of Christian society, and contrast it with what the various religions have left or produced in other regions—the atrophy of ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... persistence of supernaturalism. Assuming that originally there existed what was accepted as good evidence for the existence of a supernatural, it is hardly credible that every subsequent generation went on accepting it merely because one generation received evidence of its existence. As organs atrophy for want of exercise, so do beliefs die out in time for want of proof. Some kind of evidence must have been continually forthcoming in order to keep the belief alive and active. It is not a question of whether the evidence was good or bad. All evidence, ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... expect either tunefulness or humor in a musical comedy as to expect a statement of fact in an advertisement. In short, where any human activity is conventionalized, standards are arbitrarily fixed; and critical discernment grows dull if it does not altogether atrophy. It simply does not occur to the great majority of men that any activity should be judged otherwise than by comparing it with the stereotyped average of the day. This is, to be sure, only that blindness of the common mind which Socrates and Plato observed in their day, but it is now ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... separation or division. His face was as sharp and almost as long as an inverted pyramid, and was garnished on either side by a miserable half starved whisker, which seemed scarcely able to maintain itself, amid the general symptoms of atrophy and decay. This charming countenance was supported by a figure so long, so straight, so shadowy, that you might have taken it for the monument ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in method. Their isolation from the great currents of the world's life acts on them intellectually and spiritually as the process of in-and-in breeding does upon animals: it intensifies their peculiarities and defects. A process of atrophy or degeneration takes place; and they grow from generation to generation more isolated, sectarian, and peculiar. Unitarianism has escaped this tendency because it has accepted the modern spirit and because to a large degree its adherents have been educated ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... American colleges that a fundamental and most injurious error was made in relieving trustees and faculty from responsibility, and concentrating all in the president. The result, in many of these institutions, had been a sort of atrophy,—the trustees and faculty being, whenever an emergency arose, badly informed as to the affairs of their institutions, and really incapable of managing them. This state of things was the most serious drawback to President Tappan's administration at the University ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... the Continent the enervating climate, facile conquest, and easy life had naturally tended to atrophy the energy of the Spaniards. In Chile, on the other hand, the constant and fierce struggles of the warlike natives, the hardships and frugal living, and the temperate and exhilarating atmosphere, tended not only ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... irritant poison, but days may elapse before any characteristic symptoms appear, and these may be mistaken for those of acute yellow atrophy of the liver. The earliest signs are a garlicky taste in the mouth and pain in the throat and stomach. Vomited matter luminous in the dark, bile-stained or bloody, with garlic-like odour. Great prostration, diarrhoea, with bloody stools. Harsh, dry, yellow skin, purpuric spots with ecchymoses ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... plague-spot—centre of the universal social gangrene, threatening all modern things with frightful death. To him that will consider it, here is the stem, with its roots and top-root, with its world-wide upas boughs and accursed poison exudations, under which the world lies writhing in atrophy and agony. You touch the focal centre of all our disease, of our frightful nosology of diseases, when you lay your hand on this. There is no religion; there is no God; man has lost his soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt. Vainly: in killing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... in, and jigs and reels succeeded each other with such rapidity, that, notwithstanding the copious supplies of whiskey, the drummer's arms failed him, and the fifer had almost blown himself into an atrophy. Did I dance? To be sure I did, and right merrily too. I had such pleasant, fair-haired, rosy, Hebe-like instructresses, ready to tear each other's eyes out to get me for a partner. Then, they talked Irish so musically, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... knowledge where she listed; her further faculty flashed forth fine rays at unexpected intervals to cheer her, and her hungry heart also began to seek satisfaction. For Beth was by nature well-balanced; there was to be no atrophy of one side of her being in order that the other might be abnormally developed. Her chest was not to be flattened because her skull bulged with the big brain beneath. Rather the contrary. For mind and body acted and reacted on each other favourably, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... or nerves may produce partial atrophy and paresis, as is often seen after injuries in ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... seems never to occur to him that children have large powers of resistance and that some of his pupils may have won distinction in spite of his teaching and his methods of examination and not because of them. His trouble is mental and spiritual atrophy. He thinks and feels by rule of thumb, "without variableness or shadow of turning." In the matter of new methods he is quite immune. He settled things to his complete satisfaction years ago, and what was good enough for his father, in school methods, ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... inflammatory German Admiralty War Orders had deliberately rejected, one by one, the deep-seated principles of humanity and chivalry in war. It had been done gradually and systematically—scientifically, in fact, and in the majority of cases it succeeded in producing a state of atrophy of the moral sense that was altogether admirable—from ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... alone, is the asceticism to which Browning summons his disciple; it is the asceticism of energy not that of atrophy; it does not starve the senses, but reinforces the spirit; it results not in a cloistered but a militant virtue. A certain self-denial it may demand, but the self-denial becomes the condition of a higher joy. And if life with its trials frays the flesh, what matters it when the ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... sacrifice. I do not mean by reading the Bible what, I am afraid, is far too common, reading a scrap of Scripture as if it were a kind of charm. But I would most earnestly press upon you that muscle and fibre will distinctly atrophy and become enfeebled, if Christian people neglect the first plain way of hiding the word in their heart, which is to make the utterances of Scripture as if incorporated with their very being, and part ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... hold their own in the way that would cause the greatest amount of unnecessary suffering. They did not deliberately desire to cause unnecessary suffering; they simply could not help an instinct passed by time into their fibre, through atrophy of the reasoning powers and the constant mating, generation after generation, of those whose motto had been, "Kings of our own dunghills." And now George came forward, defying his mother's belief that he was a Totteridge, as champion of the principle in tail male; for in the Totteridges, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... It is difficult to imagine Elizabethan audiences as not more intelligent than those that applaud Mr. Pettit's plays. Impossible that an audience that could sit out Edward II. could find any pleasure in such sinks of literary infamies as In the Ranks and Harbour Lights. Artistic atrophy is benumbing us, we are losing our finer feeling for beauty, the rose is going back to the briar. I will not speak of the fine old crusted stories, ever the same, on which every drama is based, nor yet of the musty characters with which they are peopled—the miser ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... world" seems to consider it unreasonable to ask—and just as it is the fashion to let their spines droop until they suggest nothing so much as Tenniel's drawing in Alice in Wonderland of the caterpillar sitting on the toad-stool—so do they let their mental faculties relax, slump and atrophy. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... Suppose they perish, at least they have lived. If we are to live hereafter, as to which no one is certain, we are faced at our temporal death with the fact that, born into this world with certain faculties, instincts, appetites, and senses, we have let most of them atrophy, and the rest rot, by many contributory causes, of which the chief is over-eating. If I die, to live again, I have it behind me that I have lived well already. I am that much to the good. And, that others ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett |
