"Infinitesimal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were indescribable. Horrible roars and bellows, loud as those of a thousand angered bulls, shattered the air. The diplodocus halted, stunned by pain and the partial loss of eyesight; then, its infinitesimal brain becoming gripped with fear, it plunged and lumbered sidewise, nearly shaking the warriors from the howdah, where they clung for dear life. Nelson was barely able to avoid the sweep of the powerful tail as the diplodocus wheeled about on hind legs, reeled and started ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... not doing so she injured herself; but she could not do it. The knife in passing through the loaf would make the portion to be parted with less by one third than the portion to be retained. Half a pound of salt butter would reduce itself to a quarter of a pound. Portions of meat would become infinitesimal. When standing with viands before her, she had not free will over her hands. She could not bring herself to part with victuals, though she might ruin herself by retaining them. Therefore, by the order of the master, were the servants ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... individuality, however all-sufficient for myself, is an infinitesimal point, an atom subject in all things to the Law of Storms called Life. I feel, I know that Fate is. But I cannot know what is or what is not fated to befall me. Therefore in the pursuit of perfection as an individual lies my highest, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... young women carrying tiny round babies; there were old women who had all they could do to carry themselves; there were little girls gravely knitting their brothers' stockings; and toddling creatures so infinitesimal that one could not guess whether they would grow up male or female. There were men, too, but not many young ones; and there were plenty of ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... from power. What was the use of having a strong-handed man at the head of the Government if bombs still continued to terrify the country? Moreover, he had displeased the Chamber by his voracious appetite, which had prevented him from allowing others more than an infinitesimal share of all the good things. And this time he had been succeeded by Vignon, although the latter's programme of reforms had long made people tremble. He, Vignon, was honest certainly, but of all these reforms he had only been able to carry out a few insignificant ones, for he had found himself hampered ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... with the speed of light. The young man's mental revolution was over and done with in a second's time; the pause was infinitesimal. Almost as she finished her last remark, Mr. Carstairs's daughter turned from the rail and took a step forward upon the deck, as though to jog her host toward that promised tour of the yacht which had ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... progression, still would the prospect of effectual relief be discernible only through a vista of years. Meanwhile, time presses, and the patient might perish if condemned alone to the homoeopathic process of infinitesimal doses ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... come to you the wish to reveal your gratitude by giving them out again; for the wise man is aware that we retain spiritual qualities only as we give them away. Let your light shine. To him that hath shall be given. The exercise of wisdom brings wisdom; and at the last the infinitesimal quantity of man's knowledge, compared with the Infinite, and the smallness of man's Sympathy when compared with the source from which ours is absorbed, will evolve an abnegation and a humility that will lend a perfect Poise. The Gentleman is a man with perfect Sympathy, Knowledge, ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... the appearance of the railway carriage, was there the slightest sign of struggle or even of resistance. Only the look in the poor woman's eyes spoke of sudden terror, of the rapid vision of an unexpected and violent death, which probably only lasted an infinitesimal fraction of a second, but which had left its indelible mark upon the face, otherwise so placid and ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... possible, eject formic acid in the direction of the enemy. Like shrapnel from machine guns, the liquid missile sweeps a considerable area. Against the sunlight it appears as a continuous spray, and should one infinitesimal drop descend into the eye the stoutest mortal will blink. Attacks are made singly and in detachments. Heroes actually hurl themselves from the branches, and, failing to reach the enemy, run along the ground and, scaling his legs, inflict ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... the broad daylight, on the deck of the steamer, however, I began to see that her face was marked by innumerable small lines, which followed the shape of her features like the carefully traced shadows of an engraving; they crossed her forehead, they made labyrinths of infinitesimal wrinkles about her eyes, they curved along the high cheek-bones and the somewhat sunken cheeks, and they surrounded the mouth and made shadings on her chin. They were not like ordinary wrinkles. They looked as though they had been drawn with infinite precision and care ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... had comprehended that she was expected to write down her name and address, which she did, in slanting cobwebby lettering, perhaps a trifle laboriously. Ruth Enschede, Hartford, Conn. The address was of course her destination, thousands of miles away, an infinitesimal spot in ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... space they now claimed was not empty! Solid rock was here, yielding no space to anything! Like the little materialization bombs, this was nature outraged. The ground and the solid rock heaved up, broken and torn, invisibly permeated and strewn with the infinitesimal atomic particles of what a moment before had been the bodies ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... stand. I looked into blackness at first, and yet I thought that I could detect a mystic commotion of the invisible particles at which I was staring. I made no doubt that, if I waited, in due season the promise would be fulfilled. After a period of expectancy which I could not measure, infinitesimal sparks darted hither and thither, and there was a slight crackling sound. I concentrated my attention on what I was about to see; and in a moment more ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... chair, his eyes half shut, his long legs stretched out in front of him, patting with one thick boot. Under his chin was a violin, on the strings of which he jiggled his bow back and forth spasmodically, an infinitesimal length of the horse-hair being used for each stroke, so that there was no sonority in the tones. Vincent gazed at him with astonishment. He had not known that you could make a violin, a real violin, sound ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... separates them again; but this is simply the folly and bad taste of a certain, and only a certain, perversion of mediaeval sentiment, the crowning instance of which is found in Guy of Warwick. Hartmann himself was no such simpleton; and (with only an infinitesimal change of a famous sentence) we may be sure that as he was a good lover so he made a good ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... That infinitesimal dose of The World which Master Ripton Thompson had furnished to the System with such instantaneous and surprising effect was considered by Sir Austin to have worked well, and to be for the time quite sufficient, so that Ripton ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... eyes was seldom introspective; rather, as it seemed, did they look out eagerly, sadly, pitifully at the pain and sorrow of the world; a pain he toiled manfully to lessen, so far as his own infinitesimal corner of the universe ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... cast, in the same infinitesimal whispers we made our arrangements, which were few and simple. They amounted to this—that we were to creep on to the men and each of us to kill that one who was opposite to him, I with the axe and Hans with his knife, remembering that it must be done with a single ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... impetus would neither gain nor lose, if the particle wobbled out of it into a small extremely near alternative path. Mathematicians would express this by saying, that the integral impetus is stationary for an infinitesimal displacement. In this statement of the law of motion I have neglected the existence of other forces. But that would lead ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... only wonder that our own blunders and brutalities were less severely punished. Even on the field of Samoa, though German faults and aggressions make up the burthen of my story, they have been nowise alone. Three nations were engaged in this infinitesimal affray, and not one appears with credit. They figure but as the three ruffians of the elder playwrights. The United States have the cleanest hands, and even theirs are not immaculate. It was an ambiguous business when a private American adventurer was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have never found myself in the very slightest degree gene—as the abonne was by Gautier's and as others are by the styles of Mr. George Meredith and Mr. Henry James—by Flaubert's style. It has never put the very smallest impediment, effected the most infinitesimal delay, in my comprehension of his meaning, or my enjoyment of his art and of his story.[391] What is more, though it has intensified that enjoyment, it has never—as may perhaps have been the case with some other great "stylists"—diverted, a little ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... position will have some relation to the direction in which the heat escapes. Now, when all, or a majority of particles of the same nature have a general tendency to one position, that must of course determine a cleavage- plane. Thus we see the infinitesimal crystals of fresh-precipitated sulphate of barytes, and some other such bodies, arrange themselves alike in the fluid in which they float; so as, when stirred, all to glance with one light, and ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... that poor diversion, that miserable consolation for the tedium of her existence. Perhaps he had tried too much to be sympathetic; but who again would not have tried? He had given her nothing to go upon. What had he ever given her beyond some infinitesimal portion of his valuable time, at the most some luminous hour of insight, or perhaps a little superfluous piece of good advice that was of no possible use to himself? For these things she had given herself—given ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... of those summers of my early life welled up within me, memories which for years past had lain slumbering under this old wall, sheltered by the ivy boughs. While all that is ourselves perpetually changes and passes away, the constancy with which Nature repeats, always in the same manner, her most infinitesimal details, seems a wonderful mystery; the same peculiar species of moss grows afresh for centuries on precisely the same spot, and the same little insects each summer do the same thing in the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... buildings, and churches, dwindled down to mere toy-work in the deserts of space intervening; countless throngs of citizens and carriages scarcely bigger than ants to the eye; broad sheets of water, dotted with steamers, brigs, barks, wood-barges and row-boats, still infinitesimal in the distance; long rows of trees, forming a foliage to some of the principal promenades, with glimpses of gardens and shrubbery at remote intervals; canals and dismal green swamps—not all at one sweep of the eye, but visible from time to time in the course of an afternoon's ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... himself that putrefaction was set up by tiny living organisms carried in the dust of the air, and that the process was due to what we now familiarly term 'germs' or 'microbes'. The existence of these infinitesimal creatures was known already to scientists, but their importance was not grasped till Pasteur, in the years 1862 to 1864, expounded the results of his long course of studies. He himself was no expert in medicine, but his discovery ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... said to have been essential, in its actual termination, to the whole order of subsequent events. But when I speak of Causes and Effects, I speak of the obvious and important agency of one fact upon another, and not of remote and fancifully infinitesimal influences. I am aware that, on the other hand, the reproach of Fatalism is justly incurred by those, who, like the writers of a certain school in a neighbouring country, recognise in history nothing more than a series of necessary phenomena, ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... rail when he saw, some distance to starboard as it seemed, and well forward of the ship, an infinitesimal bluish brown spark. How he happened to notice it he did not know. "Once a scout, always a scout," perhaps. In any event, it was only by fixing his eyes intently upon it that he could keep it in sight. And even so, he lost it after a few seconds. He tried ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... it, the differential calculus gives results of most amazing accuracy, and is such a simple affair that, if its mere name did not inspire terror, any fourth-form schoolboy could easily be made to understand it, and even taught to use it. What we call the soul may be infinite or infinitesimal, or finite, or it may be the Hegelian Nothing, which is Pure Being under another name; whatever it is, our acquaintance with it is not knowledge of it, since whatever we can find out about it is based on the Criticism ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... and Shepherd, each three feet ten inches in height. They were pages at Court, and Charles I. gave away the female infinitesimal. ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... Occasionally, when a blood-curdling screech from his antagonist rang upon his eardrums, the cub would stop a moment and gaze pensively through and beyond the end of the wood shed, as if, indeed, from far off, a certain sound, made filmy and infinitesimal by distance, had reached him. Then he would smile deprecatingly to himself, as if to say, ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... the story of the beginnings of aviation and the evolution of aircraft up to the war, we have seen that though its growth was infinitesimal compared with that which came with the impetus of war, the air service took definite and practical shape more rapidly than had up to that time any other arm of the Army or ...
— Aviation in Peace and War • Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes
... however infinitesimal any part may be as compared with the whole, it must also be a complete whole on its own scale, if the greater whole is to be built up. On the same principle, our recognition that our personality is an infinitesimal fraction of an inconceivably ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... as to better enable them to pay the large general tax for the aggregate sum. No one hears any complaint regarding the sum necessary to support the General Government, except by those in remote districts, who have but an infinitesimal interest involved, but an imaginary part of the sum to pay, and who, producing but little, and having nothing to do, assume the right to manage the affairs of those who really have something at stake. The ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... irony of his refusal was more than justified by his confidence that if the Pope got the money it would not be expended for the benefit of Christendom; moreover, he did actually hand over four thousand pounds. In fact, he took the Church as he found it. There was but one almost infinitesimal curtailment of ecclesiastical privileges in his reign, necessitated by political considerations and accepted by the Pope, whereby the right of Sanctuary was ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... mortal. Her attendant was smiling, and to Pobloff his grin resembled a newly sliced watermelon. But her voice filled him with ecstasy. His ear, as sensitive as the eye of a Claude Monet, noted every infinitesimal variation in tone-colour, and each shade was a symbol for the fantastic imagination of this poetic composer. The girlish voice affected him strangely. It pierced his soul like a poniard. It made his spine chilly. It evoked visions of white women languorously moving ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... is your money to you?" insisted Shirley. "You are able to spend only an infinitesimal part of it. You cannot even give it away, for nobody will have ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... actions and actions which are not automatic. Doubtless we may pass gradually from the purely reflex, through the consensual, to the voluntary. Taking the case Mr. Bain cites, it is manifest that from a heat of such moderate degree that the withdrawal from it is wholly voluntary, we may advance by infinitesimal steps to a heat which compels involuntary withdrawal; and that there is a stage at which the voluntary and involuntary actions are mixed. But the difficulty of absolute discrimination is no reason for neglecting the ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... and provocative. In the midst, an absurd small unprominent nose that meant nothing! Her complexion was divine, surpassing all similes. To caress that smooth downy cheek (if you looked close you could see the infinitesimal down against the light like an aura on the edge of the silhouette), even to let the gaze dwell on it, what an enchantment!... She considered herself piquant and comely, and she was not deceived. She ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... another faint sound that came to the Duke's ears. It he understood when, a moment later, he saw the surface of the river alive with infinitesimal fountains. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... works. The influence of this system was not always satisfactory. The Middlemen or Dealers, who stood between the artist and the final possessor of the works, were not generous. They higgled about prices, and the sums which they gave were almost infinitesimal compared with the value of Patrick Nasmyth's pictures ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... gather from one of these titles, 'On irrational lines and solids', that he wrote on irrationals. Democritus realized as fully as Zeno, and expressed with no less piquancy, the difficulty connected with the continuous and the infinitesimal. This appears from his dilemma about the circular base of a cone and a parallel section; the section which he means is a section 'indefinitely near' (as the phrase is) to the base, i. e. the very next section, as we might say (if there were one). Is it, said Democritus, equal or not equal ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... sort of undefined, painful unbelief. To me, somehow, there is no other side of the ocean. And looking out on its boundless space, covered with the blue vault lighted by millions of worlds and floating over, to me, bottomless waters, I feel so lost in space, such an infinitesimal atom, that the doctrine of the sparrow that falls seems a chimera, and a God inconceivable. I wonder if this is not so with others. I wonder if all of us do not shrink from this immensity and take refuge in our own hearts ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... to any of the glories about us; he was all for cook-shops and hauled us into cook-shops without number, sometimes presenting his Gallic friends, Asper and Felix, to his good friend, the proprietor, sometimes bursting into invectives against the bad cookery, infinitesimal portions or absurd prices of his enemies' establishments. In cook-shops Agathemer and I felt safe, near a cook-shop we felt almost safe, between cook-shops, companioned by Colgius and any cook-shop frequenters ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... were to spend August in the Congressman's home across the big river. This fact alone was enough to stir the Crow establishment to its most infinitesimal roots. Rosalie was to be one of the guests at the house party, but her foster-sisters were not the kind to be envious. They revelled with her in the preparations for ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... crept away. Our progress seemed infinitesimal, and yet it was real. In a while we had gained sea room; in a while more we were fairly under sailing way, and the cliffs had begun to drop from our quarter. With one accord we looked back. Percy Darrow waved his hand in an indescribably graceful and ironic gesture; then turned ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... awake, threatened several times to pull the house down, by her violence in this condition. She had strength like a lion, and no man could manage her. I saw the same thing in the hospital later. This aunt is now healthy; not cured by her own prescriptions or the magnetic or infinitesimal doses of Dr. Arthur Lutze, but by a strong emotion which took possession of her at the time of my great-aunt's death. She is not sorry that she has lost all these strange powers, but heartily glad of it. When she afterwards visited us ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... and I did not feel confident of solving it; but it was some consolation to reflect that the doubt as to the possibility of demonstrating a full application of the law in the domain in which chance has sway, and Ethics its sphere, was comparatively infinitesimal in the case of those domains in which men make themselves felt by virtue of genius or talent as producers of literary and artistic works. Here, where natural gifts and their necessary deployment were of such extraordinary weight, ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... is no lesser or greater in the economy of Nature (Nature is God Manifest), the most infinitesimal mote in the universe is as perfect within itself as is the most gigantic sun. Size is but relative. The anatomy of the midget is as perfect and complex as is that of the mammoth, and so there exist in the universe inhabited worlds that are ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... would have been unable to hold any intercourse with foreign countries, no envoys could have been despatched, no volunteers could have entered the country, and they would have been ignorant of the opinion of the world—a factor in the brave resistance against their enemy which was by no means infinitesimal. Delagoa Bay was the Boers' one window through which they could look at the world, and through which the world could watch the brave struggle of the farmer-citizens ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... first place, I couldn't keep from thinking of Alsina Teeswater. And in the second place, never, never on the prairie, have I watched a railway-train come in or a railway-train pass away without feeling lonesome. It reminds me how big is the outside world, how infinitesimal is Chaddie McKail and her unremembered existence up here a thousand miles from Nowhere! It humbles me. It reminds me that I have in some way failed to mesh in with ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... through the instrument, we find the fluid swarming with animals of various shapes and magnitudes. Some are darting through the water with great rapidity, while others are pursuing and devouring creatures more infinitesimal than themselves. Many are attached to the twig by long delicate threads, several have their bodies inclosed in a transparent tube, from one end of which the animal partly protrudes and then recedes, while others are covered by an elegant shell or case. The minutest kinds, ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... the other nineteen are on the offensive. People are silly enough to think that they can build themselves up with the bricks they pull out of your wall. Pass on and leave them. What a waste of powder for a hunter to go into the woods to shoot black flies, or for a man of great work to notice infinitesimal assault! My Newfoundland would scorn to be seen making a drive ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... a direct and immediate gain,—the very coin, as it were, of happiness, and not, like all else, merely a cheque upon the bank; for it alone makes us immediately happy in the present moment, and that is the highest blessing for beings like us, whose existence is but an infinitesimal moment between two eternities. To secure and promote this feeling of cheerfulness should be the supreme aim of all ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Parley, but at this juncture he did really smile—yes, and it was a smile which combined so much malevolent pity and scorn and derision that poor Lawrence felt himself shrivelling up to the infinitesimal dimension of a pea in a bushel-basket. He led the flea-bitten mare to the cherry tree and tied her there. "If you bark that tree I 'll tan you alive," said Lawrence hoarsely, to the champing, frisky creature, for now he hated all animal life from Dr. Parley down, ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... judiciously checked, they merge into a harsh flood that sweeps away all grace, like the magic fountain in the German myth, whose fairy tricklings, uncovered for a single night, burst into a curbless flood, that drowned the sleeping landscape ere the dawn. The small reactions of contrast in infinitesimal tints, are perhaps neglected or unforeseen, but their influence is fearfully apparent in ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... words of Phoebe rang in the ears of the big doctor as he bent over Mother Bab's sightless eyes and began the tedious operation. His hands moved skilfully, with infinite precision, cutting to the infinitesimal ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... it would be a magnet, as I shall prove later on, because it rotates in an electro-magnetic medium. It would possess elasticity, compressibility, inertia, and, further, would possess a certain amount of mass. That mass might be infinitely small, but nevertheless it would possess mass of an infinitesimal order. ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... wonderful appearance of interest to county matters, i.e., to minute scandal and infinitesimal politics; to the county cricket match and archery meeting; to the past ball and the ball to come. In the drawing-room, when a cold fit fell on the coterie, she would glide to one egotist after another, find out the monotope, and set the critter ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... a long pause after this was said; every one present seemed to breathe more freely. I had heard of homoeopathy, and something about infinitesimal doses, but had never seen the medicine used, neither did I know any thing about the mode in which ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... centre, made large and luminous by means of a ray of magnifying light. When that time comes the amoeba—that "wandering Jew," as an irreverent Quarterly Reviewer has called it—will lose its immortality, and the spry rotifer will fall a victim to the infinitesimal fine bright arrows of the chase. A strange quarry for men whose paeliolithic progenitors hunted the woolly mastodon and ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... seconds—a minute—they waited in breathless suspense. Then came a slight rustle as from some disturbance of the vine, then footfalls, again, modulated and stealthy they seemed, on the door just above them. A speck of dirt, or an infinitesimal pebble, maybe, fell upon Archer's head from the slight jarring of some crack in the ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... to be too much to ask that our opponents (speaking to some one on the stage) I am not sick at all. I am all right. I can not tell you of what infinitesimal importance I regard this incident as compared with the great issues at stake in this campaign and I ask it not for my sake, not the least in the world, but for the sake of our common country, that they make up their minds to speak only ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... used, or are so unimaginative and ill-disciplined as to prefer such immediate and tangible rewards as a half-crown for their vote, a donation to their football club or local charity, or a gracious word from an interested lady, to their distant and infinitesimal share in the direction of national government. This participation is, in fact, so minute to the individual voter and so intangible in its operation, that a high degree of education is required to appreciate its value; and the Education Acts of 1870 and 1889 were indispensable ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... the control room to make an estimate. From the pilot's seat one could see a speck of brightness directly ahead. Infinitesimal dots of brightness appeared, grew swiftly brighter and then darted outward. As they darted they disappeared because their motion became too swift to follow. There were, of course, methods of measuring this phenomenon so that one could get an accurate measure of one's speed in overdrive. ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... in eliminating crime. The merely intellectual training received in these institutions has little salutary influence upon conduct. Nothing can be mope deplorable than that sectarian bickerings, respecting infinitesimal points in the sanctions of morality, should result in the children of England receiving hardly any moral instruction whatever. Conduct, as the late Mr. Matthew Arnold has so often told us, is three fourths ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... morning of the gale, when I was absorbed in delicate investigations. It is still legible. From poor dear Casimir! It is as well," he chuckled, "that I have educated him to patience. Poor Casimir and his correspondence—his infinitesimal, timorous, idiotic correspondence!" ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "You are very weak, but shall have a bit." She went for it, returning with an infinitesimal portion ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... leaves shook, and a boy came striding into the sunlight. In one hand he trailed a gun, and at his heels trotted a waggish spaniel of immense importance and infinitesimal size. In his other hand the boy carried by the legs a splendid cock-grouse, ruffled and hunger-compelling. The boy, perhaps two years older than Aladdin, was big and strong for his age, and bore his shining head ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... all," Mangan said, frankly. "People will think the book has something to do with the American civil war. However, don't take my opinion at all. My connection with literature is almost infinitesimal—I'm merely a newspaper hack, ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... story. It hit me right between the eyes. I knew the rancher and his wife couldn't have possibly heard the Albuquerque couple's story, only they and a few Air Force people knew about it. The chances of two identical stories being made up were infinitesimal, especially since neither of them fitted the standard Lubbock Light description. I wondered how many other people in Lubbock, Albuquerque, or anywhere in the Southwest had seen a similar UFO during this period and ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... to be careful, if it were worth avoiding the misunderstanding of men who won't take a joke. Meanwhile, I can only state that when Alpine travellers indulge in a little swagger about their own performances and other people's incapacity, they don't mean more than an infinitesimal fraction of what they say, and that they know perfectly well that when history comes to pronounce a final judgment upon the men of the time, it won't put mountain-climbing on a level with patriotism, or even with excellence in ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... parvenu as money is the first and last word in the Balkans. Belgrade and everybody in it pride themselves on their up-to-date Parisian style. Everybody lives in the Parisian way. Army officers, whose pay is infinitesimal, all live like Russian Grand Dukes. How they are able to manage this on the official Servian army salaries of 65 cents a day would naturally puzzle an outsider. The answer is, Russian gold. It buys anything and everything south of Budapest. ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... of Daniel and Drayton something has been said already. But Daniel's sonnets are a small and Drayton's an infinitesimal part of the work of the two poets respectively. Samuel Daniel was a Somersetshire man, born near Taunton in 1562. He is said to have been the son of a music master, but was educated at Oxford, made powerful friends, and died an independent person ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... not near so black as he was painted; but we will try and avoid personalities altogether in talk, won't we? We will range the fields of science, dear madam, and communicate to each other the pleasing results of our studies. We will, if you please, examine the infinitesimal wonders of nature through the microscope. We will cultivate entomology. We will sit with our arms round each other's waists on the pons asinorum, and see the stream of mathematics flow beneath. We will take refuge in cards, and play at "beggar my neighbour", not abuse my neighbour. We ...
— English Satires • Various
... its ruins, and was to wait centuries longer until it should reconstruct itself into a whole—been reduced by subdivision, disintegration, the perpetual dissolvent of religious dispute, and the selfish policy of infinitesimal dynasties. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... system space, and the jump out of warp was something not even a veteran took lightly. Rip's round face thinned while they watched. Jellico was still functioning. But if the Captain collapsed the whole responsibility for the snap-out would fall directly on Shannon. An infinitesimal error would condemn them to ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... addicted to much alcohol are far more liable to fatal attacks. But while large doses of alcohol are, of course, more obviously injurious, it would be absurd to imagine that lesser quantities are entirely without influence in the same direction. It has, indeed, been shown by Dr. Ridge, that even infinitesimal quantities of alcohol, such as one part in 5,000, cause a more rapid multiplication of the bacillus subtilis and other bacilli of decomposition, while, by the same quantities, the growth of both animal and vegetable protoplasm is retarded. Hence there can be no longer ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... he do away the right of confiscation, except in cases of treason. The small prince-bishops, whose revenues were largely swelled by trials for witchcraft, kept on burning at a furious rate. In one moment, as it were, six hundred persons were burnt in the infinitesimal bishopric of Bamberg, and nine hundred in that of Wurtzburg. The way of going to work was very simple. Begin by using torture against the witnesses; create witnesses for the prosecution by means of ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... rich. But it was only her capitalists, some scores of thousands of individuals among some forty million people, who were rich. These indeed had incredible accumulations, but the remainder of the forty millions—the whole people, in fact, save an infinitesimal fraction—were sunk in poverty. It is said that England had a larger and more hopeless pauper problem than any other civilized nation. The condition of her working masses was not only more wretched than that of many contemporary people, ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... God's Word we must believe, as Dan Crawford has tersely and beautifully expressed it, that "The God of the infinite is the God of the infinitesimal." Yes, he ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth
... suspended animation followed Byrne's words. The sorceress with the spoon ceased stirring the mess in the iron pot, the very trembling of the other's head stopped for the space of breath. In this infinitesimal fraction of a second Byrne had the sense of being really on his quest, of having reached the turn of the path, almost within hail ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... knowledge, taken by the brain to shoot up to terrific heights of surveyal; and there she rocked; and only her youthful healthiness brought her down to grass and flowers. She had once or twice received the electrical stimulus, to feel and be as lightning, from a seizure of facts in infinitesimal doses, guesses caught off maternal evasions or the circuitous explanation of matters touching sex in here and there a newspaper, harder to repress completely than sewer-gas in great cities: and her mother had seen, with an apprehensive pang ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of boughs would be dry, but the night would be his, and the good, cool ground, and the soughing of the pines, and the sweet, infinitesimal and innumerable sounds of the breathing, sleeping earth. He found the place and threw himself down. Why, here were green boughs under him, not the dried remains of what he had placed there! Kitty—it was Kitty, dear, gay, joyous, various Kitty, who had done this thing, thinking that he might want ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... it was a wild, grand upstirring of the modem democrat against the aristocratic, against the idea of caste and the privilege of living on the labor of others. This atom of humanity (how infinitesimal this drop in the ocean of humanity!) was feeling the name-less longing of expanding personality, and had already pierced the conventions of society and declared as nil the laws of the land-laws that were survivals of hate and prejudice. He had exposed ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... of something in motion, is an immense mass-meeting. Look sharper, and you will see a mite brandishing his mandibles in an excited manner. That is the great Mr. Soandso, defining his position amid tumultuous and irrepressible cheers. That infinitesimal creature, upon whom some score of others, as minute as he, are gazing in open-mouthed admiration, is a famous philosopher, expounding to a select audience their capacity for the Infinite. That scarce discernible pufflet ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... has filled up the lakes, so that they now are only shallow ponds. But this by no means removes the difficulty, for then, as now, the waters of the southern laguna flowed into Tezcuco, conveying with them the infinitesimal infusion of tequisquite that had instilled itself into the Chalco. Had the volume of Chalco and Xochimulco been increased several feet, then the slight Indian barriers and the long grass would no longer have been able to retard the progress of the water till evaporation had diminished its quantity, ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... characteristic indolence. Modern authors would fill as many pages as Johnson has filled lines, with the biographies of some of his heroes. By industriously sweeping together all the rubbish which is in any way connected with the great man, by elaborately discussing the possible significance of infinitesimal bits of evidence, and by disquisition upon general principles or the whole mass of contemporary literature, it is easy to swell volumes to any desired extent. The result is sometimes highly interesting and valuable, as it is sometimes a ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... incident recalls the "Mon cher Tibulle" of Voltaire and the youthful Parny (see Note 42). Derjavine flourished during the reigns of Catherine the Second and Alexander the First. His poems are stiff and formal in style and are not much thought of by contemporary Russians. But a century back a very infinitesimal endowment of literary ability was sufficient to secure imperial reward and protection, owing to the backward state of the empire. Stanza II properly concludes with this line, the remainder having been expunged either ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... heard! Boaz's other emotions—hatred and contempt and distrust—were overshadowed. Sitting in darkness, no sound had come to his ears, no footfall, no infinitesimal creaking of a floor-plank. Yet by some sixth uncanny sense of the blind he was aware that Manuel was standing in the dusk of the entry joining the shop ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... not stand on the order of my going. I rocked perilously, and my crutches made a furious clatter, but I was outside in a truly infinitesimal space of time. Yes; there they were, chatting with Dunny, who had hurried to meet them. And at sight of me the Firefly of France ran forward with hands extended, greeting me as if I were his oldest friend, his brother, his ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... added income for either of them, saving two trifles, for five long months. Once Lewisham won twelve shillings in the prize competition of a penny weekly, and three times came infinitesimal portions of typewriting from a poet who had apparently seen the Athenaeum advertisement. His name was Edwin Peak Baynes and his handwriting was sprawling and unformed. He sent her several short ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... cat-tails, and the fronds of fern, felting the material into a circle that an elm-leaf amply roofs over. Outside, lichens or bits of bark blend the nest so harmoniously with its surroundings that one may look long and thoroughly before discovering it. Two infinitesimal, white eggs tax the nest accommodation ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... said Mr Hazlit, nodding approval. "Now," he continued, with much gravity, "if I were to make the necessary calculation—which, I may remark, would be a question in proportion running into what I may be allowed to style infinitesimal fractions—I would probably find out that the proportion payable to one would be a shilling, to another half a sovereign, to another a pound or so, while to many would accrue so small a fraction of a farthing that no suitable coin of ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... that dark, chill, central realm where, transformed as a gnome, she clutches her votaries, plunges into the primeval abyss-the matrix of time—and sets them the Egyptian task of weighing, analyzing the Titanic "potential" energy, the infinitesimal atomic engines, the "kinetic" force, the chemical motors, the subtle intangible magnetic currents, whereby in the thundering, hissing, whirling laboratory of Nature, nebulae grow into astral and solar systems; the prophetic ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... causes; and there is no objection in principle to doing so here. But that an exudation from the bark of a shrub, which has no nutritive properties at all, is found only in one or two places in Arabia, and that only at certain seasons and in infinitesimal quantity, seems a singularly thin 'substratum' on which to build up the feeding of two millions of people, more or less exclusively and continuously for forty years, by means of a substance which has nothing to do with tamarisk-trees, and is like the natural product in nothing but sweetness ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... this wonderful novel! Where shall we find its like for richness of reflection—for inexhaustible good-humour—for large and liberal humanity! Like Fontenelle, Fielding might fairly claim that he had never cast the smallest ridicule upon the most infinitesimal of virtues; it is against hypocrisy, affectation, insincerity of all kinds, that he wages war. And what a keen and searching observation,—what a perpetual faculty of surprise,—what an endless variety of method! Take the chapter headed ironically A Receipt ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... their palm-leaf fans: it was sultry weather, and the vendors of these made little fortunes, hawking them outside. Was it not more than possible that he had been the dead woman's lover? The Crown Counsel improved on this idea. Wretched little Mrs. Bough, of infinitesimal account in Life, had become through Death a person of importance. Much was made out of the fact that she had gone to Chilworth Street some days previously to her deplorable ending, and remained closeted with Dr. Saxham for some time. He had supplied ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... undoubtedly true are discovered by methods in which infinitesimals are made use of, which could never have been if their existence included a contradiction in it; I answer that upon a thorough examination it will not be found that in any instance it is necessary to make use of or conceive infinitesimal parts of finite lines, or even quantities less than the minimum sensible; nay, it will be evident this is never ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... alone—of the twelve races of mankind only to the Mediterranean and Mongolian—are we indebted for what is usually called "universal history." This last, extending over somewhat less than six thousand years, represents a period of infinitesimal duration in the long millions of years ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... afterward wrote, "was a dawn wherein it was bliss to be alive. The air was full of noteworthy work done by the older men of the place and of hopes that one might find a way to get a little working power one's self. One longed to be a doer of the word, not a hearer only, a creator of his own infinitesimal fraction of the product, bound in God's name to produce when ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... base line to the horizon. Of this we shall speak further on. In nature it is not really level, but partakes in extended views of the rotundity of the earth, though in small areas such as ponds the roundness is infinitesimal. ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... the extent your lordship possesses it, but I am equally certain I have never before enjoyed the honor of being presented to your lordship!" said John Steele. The words were punctiliously spoken, his accents as cold as the other's. An infinitesimal trace of constraint seemed to have crept into the box; Steele turned and holding out his hand, thanked Sir Charles and his ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... educated middle, and mainly professional, class, consisting chiefly of lawyers, doctors, schoolmasters, newspaper men; an important and influential class, no doubt, but one which itself only represents an infinitesimal fraction—barely, perhaps, one-hundredth part—of the whole population. To what extent it is really representative even of that small section it is impossible to say, as the members are not returned by any clearly defined body of constituents or by any formal process of ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... well. The animal's knowledge had a long start of ours; the method alone has changed. Our operators proceed by making us inhale the fumes of ether or chloroform; the insect proceeds by injecting a special virus that comes from the mandibular fangs in infinitesimal doses. Might we not one day be able to benefit by this hint? What glorious discoveries the future would have in store for us, if we understood the beastie's ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... matter under one or a few forms, and that whilst this our planet has gone circling on according to fixed laws, and land and water, in a cycle of change, have gone on replacing each other, that from so simple an origin, through the process of gradual selection of infinitesimal changes, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... from the front room, bearing a card: a footman had brought it, who said his lady was waiting below. Lady Gorgon's name was on the card! To seize his hat and rush downstairs was, with Mr. Scully, the work of an infinitesimal ...
— The Bedford-Row Conspiracy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... seek in vain upon the map of Europe for the bygone state of Gruenewald. An independent principality, an infinitesimal member of the German Empire, she played, for several centuries, her part in the discord of Europe; and, at last, in the ripeness of time and at the spiriting of several bald diplomatists, vanished like a morning ghost. Less fortunate than Poland, she left not a regret behind ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Tiger did not exist, save as an incident of the past. Through the curtain of smoke which oozed upward through his mustache at regular intervals, his eyes gleamed alert, interested, concentrated upon a problem compared to which Willy was only an infinitesimal insect. ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... summer day was there to mock, as is the way of things in a world where the struggles and disasters of humanity must be counted so infinitesimal. ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... be foiled. The enemy will succeed in penetrating the impregnable fortress; each foe has his special tactics, contrived with appalling skill. See, an egg is inserted by means of a probe beside the torpid larva; or else, in the absence of such an implement, an infinitesimal grub, an atom, comes creeping and crawling, slips in and reaches the sleeper, who will never wake again, already a succulent morsel for her ferocious visitor. The interloper makes the victim's cell and cocoon his own cell and his own cocoon; and next ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... Lady is the latest resultant of the two forces of ennui and dissipation acting on a Society that is willing to spend money and desires to kill time. She has played many parts, some (of infinitesimal proportions), on the burlesque stage, others in the semi-private life of her own residence in the South-west district of London. Her versatility has gained for her many admirers and a precarious income, but so long as she possesses the former she scorns to live upon the latter. Being unquestionably ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... down to hold on to the limber and think at the same time of the great game of which I had become an infinitesimal part. I was sitting on the right hand side of the limber close to the wheel and, before long, the effort to think and hold on at the same time was too much for me, and I fell into a fairly sound sleep, Sergeant ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... and plunged into the problem of creating an encephalograph that would record the infinitesimal irregularities that were superimposed upon the great waves. Their operation became large; they bought the old structure on top of the hill and moved in, bag and baggage. They cohabited but did not ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... this homoeopathic treatment of the 3-1/8 quadrature—remember, homoeopathic, similia similibus,[390] not infinitesimal—and at the imputation thrown upon it, I asked myself, what is vulgarity? No two agree, except in this, that every one sees vulgarity in what is directed against himself. Mark the world, and see if anything be so common as the description of ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... Catherine came forward to the infinitesimal dressing-table, and stood a moment before the common cottage looking-glass upon it. The candle behind her showed her the outlines of her head and face in shadow against the white ceiling. Her soft brown hair was plaited high above the broad white brow, giving ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in the air of the hold had glowed dull-red at the moment of the explosion. In the twinkling of an eye, in an infinitesimal fraction of a second since the first tilt of the bench, I was sprawling full length on the cargo. I picked myself up and scrambled out. It was quick like a rebound. The deck was a wilderness of smashed timber, lying crosswise like trees ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad |
