"Attrition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of months later, I heard that Epsilon-Terra had received its official name: Atri-Terra. Atri from attrition. I've wondered ever since whether GS based the choice upon the secular or the ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... with Bethune's Mounted Infantry, captured eighty fighting Boers near Dewetsdorp, and sixty more were taken by a night attack at Boschberg. There is no striking victory to record in these operations, but they were an important part of that process of attrition which was wearing the Boers out and helping to bring the war to an end. Terrible it is to see that barren countryside, and to think of the depths of misery to which the once flourishing and happy Orange Free State had fallen, through joining in a quarrel with a nation which bore it nothing ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... curious commentary on the crude notions of mechanics of previous generations that it should have been necessary to prove by experiment that the thin, almost membranous stomach of a mammal has not the power to pulverize, by mere attrition, the foods that are taken into it. However, the proof was now for the first time forthcoming, and the question of the general character of the function of digestion was forever set at rest. Almost simultaneously ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... of the opposing armies at this time was not altogether passive. A war of attrition was carried on continuously. This took the form of daily bombardments by the artillery of positions and areas behind the trenches; also the raking of parapets of opposing trenches, and No Man's Land, by machine gun fire at night. Sniping with the rifle had become a fine art, ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... opportunity of expressing his contempt for blank verse; he was only too likely to exalt the influence of his masters on the poets of his own time, and to ignore the influence of Milton. Since handbooks of literature are commonly formed by a process of attrition from such works as Johnson's Lives, his opinions on a point like this persist in epidemic fashion; they are detached from their authority, and repeated so often that at last they become orthodox. But no ignoring of Milton can alter the fact that English verse went ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... like that "anciently religious woman," the Lady Deborah Moodie; by fervid emotionalists, such as Anne Hutchinson or the Quaker missionaries: and every discussion of the creed left it more precisely defined, more narrow, and more official. Under the stress of conflicting opinion and the attrition of acrid debate, the covenant of grace steadily hardened into a covenant of barren works, in which an air of sanctimony became an easy substitute for the sense of sanctification, and the tithe of mint and ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... to carry the fragments to a distance, it can scarcely fail to wear off their angles, and the formation then becomes a CONGLOMERATE. If occasionally globular pieces of scoriae abound in an agglomerate, they may not owe their round form to attrition. When all the angular fragments are of volcanic rocks the mass is usually ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... specious. But when I began these studies, no movements had yet been made that were not evidently unaccurate and uncertain: and even of the mechanical labours which I now hear so loudly celebrated, when I consider the obstruction of movements by friction, the waste of their parts by attrition, the various pressure of the atmosphere, the effects of different effluvia upon metals, the power of heat and cold upon all matter, the changes of gravitation and the hazard of concussion, I cannot but fear that they will supply ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... on Charles, the French seized the Three Bishoprics, at that time imperial fiefs, Metz, Verdun, and Toul. A large German army under Alva besieged Metz, but failed to overcome the brilliant defence of Francis of Guise. Worn by the attrition of repulsed assaults and of disease the imperial army melted away. When the siege was finally raised Guise distinguished himself as much by the humanity with which he cared for wounded and sick enemies as he ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... earth yawned, as though rent by an earthquake; but water had evidently something to do with the formation of the chasm. It was of nearly equal width at top and bottom, and its bed was covered with a debris of rocks rounded by attrition. Its sides were perfectly vertical, and the stratification, even to the surface-turf, exactly corresponded—thus rendering it invisible at the distance of but a few paces from its brink. It appeared to shallow to the right, and no ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... found a small hot spring called Igabo. In the middle of a plot of turf encircled by trees was a bare spot of oval form, nearly a hundred paces long and seventy wide. The whole space was covered with stones, rounded by attrition, as large as a man's head and larger. Here and there hot water bubbled out of the ground and discharged into a little brook; beside it some women were engaged in cooking their food, which they suspended ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... though some eminent writers have lately pointed out that Buffon's original remark was le style c'est de l'homme. That only proves that, like many other good sayings, it has been polished and brought to perfection by the process of attrition in numerous minds, instead of being struck out at a blow by a solitary thinker. From a purely logical point of view, Buffon may be correct; but the very essence of an aphorism is that slight exaggeration which makes it more biting whilst less rigidly accurate. According ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... themselves to those of the hard, cool, self-relying Anglo-Saxon. I am free to confess to a very thorough dislike of their religious intolerance and bigotry, but am content to wait for the change that time and the attrition of new circumstances and ideas must necessarily make in this respect. Meanwhile I would strive to reverence man as man, irrespective of his birthplace. A stranger in a strange land is always to me an ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... now assumed by this struggle—a war of attrition—the Germans are bound ultimately to lose, and it is the consciousness of this fact that inspires their present policy. This is to achieve as early as possible some success of sufficient magnitude to influence the neutrals, to discourage the Allies, to make ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... way out. Complete contrition included love to God as its motive, and the truly contrite man was not always easy to find; but some of the scholastic Doctors had discovered a substitute for contrition in what they called "attrition." viz., incomplete contrition, which might have fear for a motive, and which the Sacrament of Penance could transform into contrition. When, therefore, a man was afraid of hell or of purgatory, he could make ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... the possibility of repose for refitting and producing necessary supplies for carrying on resistance. Second, to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources, until, by mere attrition if in no other way, there should be nothing ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... and painfully down the dangerous foot-paths; all these pictures flash before the mind's eye, each with its own appeal, as one looks back upon those awful days. The end was not in sight then. The war, we were told, was going to be a war of attrition. It was to be a case of "dogged does it." Under the wheels of the car of the great Juggernaut our men had to throw themselves, till the progress of the car was stayed. How peaceful were the little cemeteries where lay those warriors who had entered into rest. But how stern was the voice from the ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... communities, not in times of great excitement, for such times may give an extraordinary impetus to ideas, but in times of peace. There is then, he says, 'a small and uncomfortable agitation, a sort of incessant attrition of man against man, which troubles and distracts the mind without imparting to it either loftiness or animation.' It rests with you to prove whether these things are necessarily so—whether scientific genius cannot find, in the midst of you, a ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... attrition and conflict the natural result was Scott's triumph. It was not reached, however, until the fifty-third ballot and until the fifth day of the convention. It was brought about by the votes of some Fillmore ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... not treated, as for neither formed nor fondled nor finished, at all. Nothing seemed to have been done for it but what the razor and the sponge, the tooth-brush and the looking-glass could officiously do; it had in short resisted any possibly finer attrition at the hands of fifty years of offered experience. It had developed on the lines, if lines they could be called, of the mere scoured and polished and initialled "mug" rather than to any effect of a composed physiognomy; though we must at the same time add that its wearer carried ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... might to the British navy. It was hoped, perhaps, that the naval forces of the two powers could be equalized and a battle fought on even terms after the Germans had cut down British advantage by a policy of attrition. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... schemes had received a decisive check. The transfer of Louisiana had been delayed by the opposition of Godoy, who had returned to royal favor in Spain; Leclerc's invading army had been worn away by the attrition of incessant war with the negroes; a second army had been decimated by yellow fever; and finally Leclerc himself had succumbed to the dread destroyer, leaving the remnants of the French troops to their fate. Without the most extraordinary exertions, Santo Domingo was lost; and what ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... brought up the topic again. In the interim she had heard considerable direct and indirect opinion. She selected after dinner as the most propitious time for discussion. As a matter of fact, earlier in the day would have been better, before Keith's soul had been rubbed raw by downtown attrition. ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... the effect of rivers transporting the rocks and stones, is not accurate or in perfect science. That stones are thus continually transported is certain; it is also indisputable, that in this operation they are broken and worn by attrition, more or less; but, that angular stones of the hardest substance are thus made into that round gravel, which we find so abundantly in many places forming the soil or loose materials of the surface, is a conclusion which does not necessarily follow from the premises, so far as there is another ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... which lie bands of dull gold, pink, orange and vermilion. In some instances the massive sandstones have curious architectural resemblances, as if they had been designed and scaled on a draughting-board, but they have been so oddly worked upon by the elements, by the attrition of their own disintegrated particles and the intangible carving of water, that while one block stands out as a castle embattled on a lofty precipice, another looms up in the quivering air with a quaint likeness to something neither human nor divine. This is where the Overland traveller ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... the countenance of Old Nick. This party had joined us at Fort Benton, whither he had come on a steamboat, up the Missouri. This was his maiden venture upon the plains, and his habit of querulous faultfinding had, on the first day out, secured him the sobriquet of Old Pernicketty, which the attrition of time had worn down to Old Nick. He knew no more of wolves and other animals than a naturalist, and he was now a trifle frightened. He was crouching beside his saddle and kit, listening with all his soul, his hands suspended ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... don't you see, won't you see, that, if you leave the one great sin all uncovered, open to the continual attrition of a life of goodness, God will let it wear away? It will lessen and lessen, until at the last, when the Ocean of Eternity beats against it, it shall go down, down into the deeps of love that no mortal line can fathom. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... treated, as "vagabonds and sturdy beggars." Such a licence once issued to a company was regarded as a valuable corporate asset by its sharers. At times a company possessing a licence would diminish by attrition until the ownership of the licence became vested in the hands of a few of the original sharers, who, lacking either the means or ability to continue to maintain themselves as an effective independent organisation, would form a connection with a similarly depleted ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... avocation in his electorship, and would quibble on the Franchise over Ophelia's grave, instead of more appropriately discussing the duration of bodies under ground. From this tendency, from this gradual attrition of life, in which everything pointed and characteristic is being rubbed down, till the whole world begins to slip between our fingers in smooth undistinguishable sands, from this, we say, it follows that we must not attempt to join Mr. Tatler in his simple division of students ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... beautiful and apposite words, and meditated an exchange, but that, from circumstances, was out of the question. At last, subdued by grief, and probably his spirit having chafed itself smooth by such constant attrition, he became, to all seeming, calmer; but it was only the calm of a broken and weary heart. Such was Major Jones at the time, when, "suadente diabolo," it seemed meet to Fathers Mooney and D'Array to ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... and then another of our armies, and the possibility of repose for refitting and producing necessary supplies for carrying on resistance; second, to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources, until by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left to him but an equal submission with the loyal sections of our common country to the Constitution and laws of ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... treeless ridges of sandstone, and disappeared at evening behind ridges equally naked and arid. The sides of these barren masses, seamed by the action of water in remote geologic ages, and never softened or smoothed by the gentle attrition of rain, were infinitely more wild and jagged in their details than ruins. It seemed as if the Titans had built here, and their works ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... service. Born of an old and distinguished Philadelphia family, so proud of its name that in his instance they had doubled it, the usual bluntness and roughness of the sea were tempered by this gentle birth and breeding, and by frequent attrition with men and women of the politest society of the largest and most important city of the colonies. Offering his services as soon as the news of Lexington precipitated the conflict with the mother country, he had already made ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... action. The foot tastes it and henceforth rests not. The joy of moving and surmounting, of attrition and progression, the thirst for space, for miles and leagues of distance, for sights and prospects, to cross mountains and thread rivers, and defy frost, heat, snow, danger, difficulties, seizes it; and from that day forth ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... spite of its painful success, had no effect upon the vital situation in the West. That episode was against us, but the tendencies were in our favour; our losses might equal the German, but equal attrition would leave us paramount in the end, barring collapse on the part of a principal ally. It was the fundamental situation which led to the German proposals for peace at Christmas, and the superficial impression which provoked the simultaneous ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... not—but I have frequently remarked, that if a man has made himself enemies either from neglect of that sophistry and humbug, so necessary to enable him to roll down the stream of time with his fellows without attrition, if they can find no point in his character to assail, their last resort is, to assert that he is an uncertain tempered man, and not ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... alpaca coat, or for a new pair of trousers when the seat of the old ones grew too refulgent or perilously extenuate. As Eddie stood up at his tall desk most of the time, however, it was rather his shoes than his pantaloons that felt the wear and tear of attrition. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... Caesar's." This was followed by the further injunction: "and unto God the things that are God's." Every human soul is stamped with the image and superscription of God, however blurred and indistinct the lines may have become through the corrosion or attrition of sin;[1111] and as unto Caesar should be rendered the coins upon which his effigy appeared, so unto God should be given the souls that bear His image. Render unto the world the stamped pieces that are made legally current by the insignia of worldly powers, ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... interior. Sparsely settled, with unfrequent opportunities of communion with one another, the minds of the forest population turned naturally for their tone and direction to the capital city. The active attrition of rival and conflicting minds, gives, in all countries, to the population of a dense community, an intellectual superiority over those who live remote, and feel none of the constant moral strifes to which the citizen is subject. ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... where the attrition of a stream had worn pot-holes in the rocks, there were meetings of Haddam witches, to the number of a dozen. They brewed poisons in those holes, cast spells, and talked in harsh tongues with the arch fiend, who sat on the brink of the ravine with his tail laid against his shoulder, ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... middle latitudes. One boulder in particular had had its origin in a valley where rounded fragments of water-washed greenstone had been poured out by the torrents and frozen into the coast-ice of the belt. The attrition of subsequent matter had truncated the great egg-shaped rock, and worn its sides into a striated face, whose scratches still indicated the ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... brasses were sent from England. He is represented at full length in the episcopal dress, his head lying between two shields, the royal arms of England within the Garter, (as Chancellor of the order,) and his own bearings. But the tomb being placed exactly in front of the high altar, the attrition to which it has been exposed in this part of the church has nearly effaced the engravings." His funeral, we are told, was attended by the assembled princes and prelates and nobles of the council, who followed him to the grave with every ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... on its weary way. Victories and occasional defeats marked the stages of attrition by which the bravery and obstinacy of a determined foe was gradually worn down. On August 16th, 1901, Lord Kitchener issued his proclamation banishing all Boer leaders taken in arms after September 15th: three days later the Duke of ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... intelligent negro from the South said the negro men could not vote the Democratic ticket because the women would not live with them if they did. The negro men go out in the hotels and upon the railroad cars. They go to the cities and by attrition they wear away the prejudice of race; but the women remain at home, and their emotional natures aggregate and compound the race-prejudice, and when suffrage is given them what must ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... often contain pebbles rounded by attrition, and of a figure more or less elliptical. In the places where the stratification is horizontal, the longer axes of these pebbles are all horizontal, for the same reason that an egg cannot stand upon ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... cataract is nearly perpendicular. The bank over which it is precipitated is of concave form, owing to its upper stratum being composed of lime-stone, and its base of soft slate-stone, which has been eaten away by the constant attrition of the recoiling waters. The cavern is about one hundred and twenty feet in height, fifty in breadth, and three hundred in length. The entrance was completely invisible. By screaming in our ears, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... have the central permanent nippers growing, the other two pairs uniting, six grinders in each jaw, above and below, the first and fifth level with the others, and the sixth protruding. As the permanent nippers wear and continue to grow, a narrow portion of the cone-shaped tooth is exposed to the attrition; and they look as if they had been compressed. This is not so, however; the mark of some gradually disappears as the pit is worn away. At the age of three and a half or four years the next pair of nippers will be changed, and the mouth at that time ...
— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley
... action was as surprising to Madame as it was disconcerting. The consequences were such as her wily husband had foreseen. Encountering no externally resisting medium, its force was wasted by internal attrition, so that Madame was being reduced to a nervous wreck, all of which was duly appreciated ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... and so zealously discharged his duties as a citizen, returned to his Josephine, to his children; and, weary with the storms and debates of the last months, longed for a quiet little place, away from the turmoil of the capital and from the attrition of parties. Josephine acquiesced gladly in the wishes of her husband, for she felt her innermost being shattered by these last exciting times, and perhaps she cherished the secret hope that her husband, once removed from Paris, would be drawn ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... usual, flattened into edges, but resembling truncated cones; the cuspidati are not pointed, but broad and flat on the masticating surface, like the neighbouring bicuspides. This may be attributable to mechanical attrition, depending on the nature of the food which the teeth are employed in masticating. The upper does not overlap the under jaw, but the teeth meet at their surfaces. This peculiarity of teeth has been noticed ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... contentment that were vouchsafed me during seven years of existence; seven long years of toil and mental anguish. How can I picture to the imagination of my readers the noble qualities of head and heart with which this child of nature was endowed? He was a rough diamond, and it was only by the attrition of constant intercourse that his best qualities displayed themselves. Physically he was perfect; his movements were instinct with that grace and ease that are the attributes of those alone whose lives have been spent in the cultivation of all exercises that look to the development ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... poems, with more originality of treatment. It was his fortune to be born and reared in the western part of Massachusetts, and to become familiar with some of the most beautiful inland scenery of New England in youth and early manhood, when the mind takes impressions which the attrition of life never wears out. In his study of Nature he combines the faculty and the vision, the eye of the naturalist and the imagination of the poet. No man observes the outward shows of earth and sky more accurately; no man feels them more vividly; no man describes them more beautifully. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... inadequate. And in many directions, the intervention of that organized control which we call government seems necessary to produce the same result of justice and right conduct which obtained through the attrition of individuals ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... will examine a sea-beach he will see, not a vast mass of pebbles perpetually rolling and grinding each other, but an expanse of sand. And this is to be expected; for as soon as a part of the pebbles is, by the attrition of the waves, reduced to sand, the sand packs around the stones and arrests their further waste. To form such a mass of gravel as is ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... morning with no tale to tell. Except when an enterprising member of a patrol entered the back door of a hut unknown to the officer who entered the front door. A little mutual stalking was indulged in with bombs ready, but fortunately recognition took place before attrition. ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... however, other and less interesting inhabitants in that region, as I one day discovered to my great consternation. I was passing up the bed of a small stream, where the water, by attrition during many ages, had worn a chasm or "flume" through the solid basaltic rock, the walls of which rose at least a hundred feet nearly perpendicularly, when I found an obstacle to my further progress in the shape of some large rocks, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... things, O Father, demand the hand of Apostolic correction, that the present unseemliness of teaching, learning, and debating may by your authority be reduced to definite form, that the Divine Word may not be cheapened by vulgar attrition; that it may not be said on the corners, Lo! Here is Christ, or Lo! He is there! that sacred things may not be cast before dogs or pearls before swine to be trampled under ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... pervades a republican atmosphere. There was little of justice perhaps, and less of security and comfort; but there was at any rate life, intellectual development, thought, pulsation, fierce collision of mind with mind, attrition of human passions and divine faculties, out of which an elemental fire was created which flamed over the civilized world, and has lighted the torches of civilization for centuries. He who would study the artes humaniores must turn of necessity ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... soft smiles uncultur'd man subdued, 210 And charm'd the Savage from his native wood; You, while amazed his hurrying Hords retire From the fell havoc of devouring FIRE, Taught, the first Art! with piny rods to raise By quick attrition the domestic blaze, 215 Fan with soft breath, with kindling leaves provide, And lift the dread Destroyer on his side. So, with bright wreath of serpent-tresses crown'd, Severe in beauty, young MEDUSA frown'd; Erewhile subdued, round ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... authorities did not figure on employing the submarine as a separate offensive tactical unit being sufficiently equipped in large ships carrying large guns. And being weaker in capital ships Germany was compelled to rely upon underwater warfare in her campaign of attrition. Not only were the naval authorities of the rest of the world uninformed about the improvements that German submarines carried, but they were fooled even as to the actual number which ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... dug. The preacher tends to underestimate the comprehensive character of the pervasive ideas, worked into many institutions and practices, which are continually impinging upon him and his message. They form a perpetual attrition, working silently and ceaselessly day and night, wearing away the distinctively religious conceptions of the community. Much of the vagueness and sentimentalism of present preaching, its uncritical impressionism, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... time his terrible antagonist watched him as a tiger gloats on a helpless and certain prey—silent, merciless, inexorable. Then the end came suddenly. As soon as the process of attrition was sufficiently far advanced to demoralise the Dervish host, without completely dissolving them, the Sirdar and his army moved. The victim, as if petrified, was powerless to fly. The tiger crept forward two measured strides—from Ras-el-Hudi to Abadar, from Abadar to Umdabia—crouched for a ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... by reason of his more intimate contact with the normal truth of things. In life, for instance, the conflict of will with will, the passionate crises of human existence are but rarely concentrated into a brief space of time or culminate in a highly salient situation. Long and wearing attrition, and crises that are seen to have been such only in the retrospect of calmer years are the rule. In so telling a bit of dramatic writing as the final scene in Augier's Le gendre de M. Poirier the material of life has been dissected into mere shreds and these have been rewoven into a pattern ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... that Mudgala "attained that highest eternal bliss the sign of which is Nirv[a]na" (iii. 261. 47), he can only suppose that the word means here absorption into brahma or union with Vishnu. In fact Nirv[a]na is already a word of which the sense has been subjected to attrition enough to make it synonymous with 'bliss.' Thus "the gods attained Nirv[a]na by means of Vishnu's greatness" (iii. 201. 22); and a thirsty man "after drinking water attained Nirv[a]na," i.e., ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... consider lexical elements only. But this statement must be clearly understood. It is postulated that in the growth of languages new words are formed by combination, and that these new words change by attrition to secure economy of utterance, and also by assimilation (analogy) for economy of thought. In the comparison of languages for the purposes of systematic philology it often becomes necessary to dismember compounded words for the purpose of comparing the more primitive forms thus obtained. ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... there was left of her after seventy-four years of time's attrition—had a way of speaking which made it easy enough to believe that she had, in her day, been a beautiful singer. As her message to the world was usually one of promise and reassurance, she had the gift ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... and Subsistence Departments for storehouses. Among these the astronomers had to walk by day and night, in going to and from their work. After a rain, especially during winter and spring, some of the streets were much like shallow canals. Under the attrition of the iron-bound wheels the water and clay were ground into mud, which was at first almost liquid. It grew thicker as it dried up, until perhaps another rainstorm reduced it once more to a liquid condition. In trying first one street and then another to see which offered the fewest obstacles to ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... from the lowlands, led across dips, and into a draw. A little stream meandered down and gurgled over rocks worn smooth by ages of attrition. Alders brushed the stream and their foliage checkered the trail ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... into their crevices and crannies. In families at such times they are like Pharaoh's plague of frogs—"in their bedchambers, and upon their beds, and in their ovens, and in their kneading troughs." Their shrilling noise is occasioned by a brisk attrition of their wings. Cats catch hearth-crickets, and, playing with them as they do with mice, devour them. Crickets may be destroyed, like wasps, by phials half filled with beer, or any liquid, and set in their haunts; ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... the attrition of glacier, the erosion of water, the cracking of frost, the weathering of rain and wind and snow—these it had eternally fought and resisted in vain, yet still it stood magnificent, frowning, battle-scarred and undefeated. Its sky-piercing ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... things, or even the idea of them, will set the teeth on edge. Small-pox, itch, and other diseases, are contagious; if so, say they, mercurial amulets bid fair to destroy the germ of some complaints when used only as an external application, either by manual attrition, or worn as an amulet. But medicated or not, all amulets are precarious and uncertain, and in the cure of diseases are, by no means, to be ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... surface is not accessible, and the brush must be used. Sometimes the carving is extremely coarse, and with an open porous grain, in which case it is best to oil it first and then to fine-paper it down; by this process a thin paste is formed by the attrition, which materially assists in filling up the pores. Before commencing to use the varnish have ready an earthenware dish or box,—one of the tins used for the preserved meats or fish will answer the purpose,—with ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead
... Breccia d' Egitto. It is not, however, a true breccia, but a pudding-stone, composed, not of calcareous but of siliceous fragments; and these fragments are not angular, as in the true breccias, but rounded, indicating that they had been carried by water and consequently rounded by attrition. The connected pebbles must have been broken from rocks of great hardness to have withstood the effects of constant abrasion. In the Egyptian breccia are found very fine pebbles of red granite, porphyry of a ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... on his followers, so that it took several years before they decided on sending their commissioners to Benares to report on the Veda and its real character. Yet that mission was, Ibelieve, the result of a slow process of attrition produced by the contact between native and European minds, and as such I wished to present it in my address ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... stood and peered into the grave. He was the father of Levi Baggs, the hackler, and people said he was never seen except on the occasion of a funeral. The ancient had been reduced to a mere wisp by the attrition of time. ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... long, 22 high, and 21 broad, in the form of a parallelopipedon. It was cleft by a blast, the middle part taken away, and in the cavity was constructed a forge for the wants of the journey. Carburi did not use cylindrical rollers for his undertaking, these causing an attrition sufficient to break the strongest cables. Instead of rollers he used balls composed of brass, tin, and calamina, which rolled with their burden under a species of boat 180 feet long, and 66 wide. This extraordinary spectacle ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... N. friction, attrition; rubbing, abrasion, scraping &c v.; confrication^, detrition, contrition^, affriction^, abrasion, arrosion^, limature^, frication^, rub; elbow grease; rosin; massage; roughness &c 256. rolling friction, sliding friction, starting friction. V. rub, scratch, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... always greatly outnumbered; they continued stubbornly to defy for the space of two years and seven months the most numerous and the most efficient Army which has ever left the shores of Great Britain, until at last they were worn down by mechanical friction and attrition, and not by the stroke of war. When the Boers were driven out of the Hlangwhane positions, they took up a new position facing S.E. on the left bank of the Tugela. Their right was near the head of Hart's loop, and their ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... can be evaded by slight concessions. The world as a whole is less harsh and emphatic than it was. Customs and customary attitudes change nowadays not so much by open, defiant and revolutionary breaches as by the attrition of partial negligences and new glosses. Innovating people do conform to current usage, albeit they conform unwillingly and imperfectly. There is a constant breaking down and building up of usage, and as a consequence a lessened need ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... Twenty-five per cent. would be a liberal deduction for the sick, camp-guards, orderlies, etc. The navy was equally powerful in its way, though it did little service here. Large as it was, this army was virtually destroyed by continued attrition. ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... every fact and circumstance before me, with more information, perhaps, than any other man breathing, predicted peace within three months. I was wrong. Germany to-day is great and unconquered, but Germany has lost her opportunity. This may be a war of attrition, or even now the unexpected may come, but to all effects and purposes ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the Atlantic telegraph was first laid a certain preacher thought proper to use it as an illustration of the connection between heaven and earth, thus: "When the sulphuric acid of genuine attrition corrodes the contaminating zinc of innate degeneracy and actual sinfulness, and the fervent electrical force of prayerful eternity ascends up to the residence of the Eternal Supreme One, you may calculate on unfailing and immediate ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... inches of chin will produce, on an average, about a sofa per annum. The whiskers, if properly attended to, may be made to yield about an easy chair in the same space of time; whilst luxuriant moustachios will give a pair of anti-rheumatic attrition gloves every six months. Mr. M. recommends, as the best mode of cultivation for barren soils, to plough with a cat's-paw, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... sufficient fighting resources under his hand to deal the decisive blow in the war when the psychological moment should come, months ahead. He was not, in 1915, looking to 1916; he was looking to 1917, having made up his mind from the outset that this was to be a prolonged war of attrition. He, no more than all others, could foresee that the Russian revolution was to occur and was to delay the final triumph of the Entente for ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... before the sand is used. Gravel found mixed with it must be removed by screening or sifting. River sand is frequently used, but is not so good as pit sand on account of the particles being rubbed smooth by attrition. Sea sand is objectionable for two reasons; it cannot be altogether freed from a saline taint, and if it is used the salt attracts moisture and is liable to keep the brickwork permanently damp. The particles, moreover, are generally rounded by attrition, caused ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... They draw men from the whirlpools of folly, break up degrading habits, dissipate the charms of money-making, and raise the value of the soul. How charming, how delightful, how inspiring is the eloquence which is kindled by the attrition of gifted minds! What privilege is greater than to be with those who reveal the experiences of great careers, especially if there be the absence of vanity and ostentation, and encouragement by those whose presence is safety and whose smiles are an inspiration! ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their fhape and luftre have been given by the attrition of ages. Bring me the fineft fimile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will fhow you a fingle word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a more ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... averted. However, the President and his cabinet decided to continue the old tactics of dodging from place to place, meeting the hard, stubborn blows of the enemy, only waiting the time, when the South, by mere attrition, would wear itself out. ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... and Australian fraternized in a common enterprise. Here again the old trench life was resumed; sentinel duty, daring adventures, wild charges, the shock and din of constant battle, brief periods of rest and recuperation. But the process of attrition was going on, the enemy was being pushed back, inch by inch it seemed, but always, eventually, back. As for Pen, he led a charmed life. Men fell to right of him and to left of him, and were torn into shreds at his back; but, save for superficial wounds, for temporary strangulation from gas, for ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... his squadrons within the protection afforded by Helgoland and that the most damage could be done to the enemy by picking off her larger ships one by one. In other words, he again turned to the policy of attrition. He immediately put it ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... government, it was and is a school of democracy. In Vermont it was the natural political expression of social forces. How else, indeed, could the general will find fit expression, except through the attrition of many minds? And who could know better the needs of the community than the commonalty? Not that men reasoned about the philosophy of their political institutions: they simply accepted them. And young Douglass grew up in an atmosphere friendly to local self-government ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... out on the beach, and in order to prevent the continuous attrition of the surf upon the outer edge of it from befouling the white-sand bathing-beach farther up the Bight of Tyee, The Laird had driven a double row of fir piling parallel with and beyond the line of breakers. This piling, driven as close together as possible and reenforced ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... the floor. Inasmuch as the vocal cords are subject to the same laws of vibration, the lesson drawn from the string and the bit of paper applies to them, the node taking the place of the paper. Note, however, the difference. The string is single, and there is no attrition. If there were two strings, the bit of paper might be caught and twisted in the miniature whirlwind of opposing vibrations. But the vocal cords are wedded in phonation, and by their attrition the node is formed. Very often strands of tough mucus appear spanning the chink or slit between ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... conversed with cultivated minds, yet the results of such acquaintance and converse were here. Middleton was inclined to think him, however, an old man, one of those itinerants, such as Wordsworth represented in the "Excursion," who smooth themselves by the attrition of the world and gain a knowledge equivalent to or better than that of books from the actual intellect of man awake ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... find a thickening and a roughened appearance of the endocardium throughout the cavities of the heart. This condition may be followed by a coagulation of fibrin upon the inflamed surface, which adheres to it, and by attrition soon becomes worked up into shreddy-like granular elevations. This may lead to a formation of fibrinous clots in the heart and sudden death early in the disease the second or ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... sharp-edged, elaborately flaked, "turtle-backed" weapons, similar in shape to much of the more modern and finished work in flint. With few exceptions, however, these are made of argillite, and in many cases they have lost the fineness of edge and angle by weathering and by attrition against the gravel in which they were rolled under glacial floods. They bear about the same relation in their roughness and shapelessness to the carefully-worked relics of the red Indian found on the surface, or in the accumulation of soil resulting from the decay of countless generations of forest ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... breakers rolled in over the seaweed-covered rocks, and dashed into a deep chasm in the rocks, cleft by the attrition of ages, breaking with a dull sough upon the ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... with credible sincerity professed Protestantism probably he might have overturned the House of Hanover. So strong was inbred reverence for hereditary right, that until the accession of George III. the English Government was always subject to the unceasing attrition of ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really—what shall we say?—the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain?—Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... blended in one element, and purified, without the tempests and cross-currents, which lash the ocean into fury. Nor would a stagnant calmness, blind attachment to the limited horizon of a homestead, or the absence of all irritation or attrition, ever make one people of the emigrants from ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... early love, and the convenience of uniting with manners pliant, and minds susceptible of new impressions, which might wear away their dissimilitudes by long cohabitation, as soft bodies, by continual attrition, conform ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... it into thirds, plus compelling Cornwallis to divide his own army. Greene knew that Cornwallis, victorious as he might have been, was detached from Charleston and had to live off the land. He would fight a war of attrition and wear Cornwallis down. His strategy worked, although not without fateful moments. He had great faith in his command officers and gave them considerable leeway. They rewarded him with two stunning victories—King's Mountain, ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... as to skin, white as winter as to clothes—was a satisfactory specimen of the village artificer in stone. In common with most rural mechanics, he had too much individuality to be a typical 'working-man'—a resultant of that beach-pebble attrition with his kind only to be experienced in large towns, which metamorphoses the unit Self into a ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy |
