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Ingenious   Listen
adjective
Ingenious  adj.  
1.
Possessed of genius, or the faculty of invention; skillful or promp to invent; having an aptitude to contrive, or to form new combinations; as, an ingenious author, mechanic. "A man... very wise and ingenious in feats of war." "Thou, king, send out For torturers ingenious." "The more ingenious men are, the more apt are they to trouble themselves."
2.
Proceeding from, pertaining to, or characterized by, genius or ingenuity; of curious design, structure, or mechanism; as, an ingenious model, or machine; an ingenious scheme, contrivance, etc. "Thus men go wrong with an ingenious skill."
3.
Witty; shrewd; adroit; keen; sagacious; as, an ingenious reply.
4.
Mental; intellectual. (Obs.) "A course of learning and ingenious studies."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Ingenious" Quotes from Famous Books



... through many a page and hear his ingenious application of Biblical verses, his carefully balanced arguments, his earnest consideration of what seems to the modern reader a most trivial question. To him, however, and probably to the women also it was a weighty subject, more important by far than the ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday

... Sister so far, that she was understood by her, as if she had spoke, and I remember this Lady was the first I saw use the significative Way of Discourse by the Fingers; I dare not say 'twas she invented it (tho' it probably might have been an Invention of these ingenious Sisters) but I am positive none before her ever brought it ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn

... in military engineering and fortification to walk round these wonderful defences. The wiring too was most ingenious and often carefully concealed in the hedges or ditches. Inside the gun shelters, you found that the gun was fixed on a central pivot and worked round a wooden platform with every degree carefully marked. Whilst on the walls stood ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley

... so ingenious-minded a writer fail to see how far over the heads of the enemy all his arrows pass? When Mr. McTaggart himself believes that the universe is run by the dialectic energy of the absolute idea, his insistent desire to have a world of that sort is felt by him to ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... infidelity and materialism, let us leave the busy arena of commerce, men are gloating over gain and gold in their hidden corners; let us rest with that sturdy, active, middle-class, where the mechanic's ingenious conceptions puzzle and captivate the most listless observer; let us watch the busy minds and busier fingers of those men, so fascinated by their daily toil, that all the world outside their own great pursuits has become a power beyond them, which they neither ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"

... they first examine his name, and torment the letters thereof, arranging and altering them according to their will, and flying off to the speech of the Indians and Medes and Chaldeans, and other Barbarians, if Greek will not serve their turn. How saith Socrates? "I bethink me of a very new and ingenious idea that occurs to me; and, if I do not mind, I shall be wiser than I should be by to- morrow's dawn. My notion is that we may put in and pull out letters at ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang

... And so ad infinitum. Eventually all the "stunts" were used and many more. Not that all the students cheated. Everything considered, the percentage of cheaters was not great, but those who did cheat usually spent enough time evolving ingenious methods of preparing cribs and in preparing them to have learned their lessons honestly ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks

... as at Oxford, expect to find its inhabitants all saints. No: I had heard much of their vices. The subtle and ingenious arts, by which they trick and prey upon each other, had been pictured to me as highly dangerous; and of these arts, self confident as I was, I stood in some awe. But fore warned, said I, fore armed: and that I was not easily to be circumvented ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... details, which can be useful to his clients; his watchful attention, seizing on every weak point in the opposite case; his quickness and readiness; his sound and excellent judgment; his keen insight into character and motives, his almost intuitive knowledge of men; his ingenious and powerful cross-examinations; his adroitness in turning aside troublesome testimony, and availing himself of every favorable point; his quick sense of the ridiculous; his pathetic appeals to the feelings; his sustained eloquence, and remarkably energetic declamation,—all ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Cold Davis, fiery Foote, ingenious Slidell, polished and versatile Soule, ardent King, fail to withstand that mighty trio, "Webster, Seward, and Clay," the immortal three. The death of the soldier-President Taylor calms the clamor for a time. The struggle shifts to the House. Patriotic Vinton, ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... recommended him to return them without further notice. But Walpole, good-naturedly considering that it was no "grave crime in a young bard to have forged false notes of hand that were to pass current only in the parish of Parnassus," wrote his ingenious correspondent a letter of well-meant advice, counseling him to stick to his profession, and saying that he "had communicated his transcripts to much better judges, and that they were by no means satisfied with the authenticity of his supposed manuscripts." ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... and the copying of the 'Encyclopaedia,' must be to get this not over-bright pawnbroker out of the way for a number of hours every day. It was a curious way of managing it, but really it would be difficult to suggest a better. The method was no doubt suggested to Clay's ingenious mind by the color of his accomplice's hair. The four pounds a week was a lure which must draw him, and what was it to them, who were playing for thousands? They put in the advertisement, one rogue has the temporary office, the other rogue incites the man to ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various

... of this tree grow to a height of sixty or seventy feet. As all the nuts are at the top the gathering of them would be an extremely difficult matter were it not for an ingenious contrivance by which the natives manage to climb the trees; for it may be easily understood that to shin up an exceedingly rough pole of seventy feet high, with bare legs, would try the mettle of most ...
— The Cannibal Islands - Captain Cook's Adventure in the South Seas • R.M. Ballantyne

... foot of the staircase is a large painting, formerly in fresco at Houghton House, which was taken off the wall, and put on canvass by an ingenious process of the late Mr. Salmon. It represents a gamekeeper, or woodman, taking aim with a cross-bow, full front, with some curious perspective scenery, 6 feet by 9-1/2 feet. We have heard a tradition, that it is some person of high rank in disguise; some say James I., who was once on a visit ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 491, May 28, 1831 • Various

... imperfect intelligence with which they are sometimes endowed. We have a school here, directed with as much perseverance as enlightened patience, which already offers the most satisfactory results; by a very ingenious method, the mental and physical capacities are exercised at the same time; and many have been taught the alphabet, figures, and to distinguish colors; they have also succeeded in teaching them to sing in chorus; and I assure you, madame, that there is a kind of strange charm, at once sad ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue

... course, in most circumstances much greater difficulty in getting at water than pond-frogs; and this is especially true in certain tropical or desert districts. Hence most of the frogs which inhabit such regions have had to find out or invent some ingenious plan for passing through the tadpole stage with a minimum of moisture. The devices they have hit upon are very curious. Some of them make use of the little pools collected at the bases of huge tropical leaf-stalks, like those of the banana plant; others dispense with ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various

... difficulties of her position one by one. They frightened her, and her terror reacted upon the fond talk that fills the fairest hours which lovers spend alone together. Mme. de Bargeton had no country house whither she could take her beloved poet, after the manner of some women who will forge ingenious pretexts for burying themselves in the wilderness; but, weary of living in public, and pushed to extremities by a tyranny which afforded no pleasures sweet enough to compensate for the heaviness of the yoke, she even thought of Escarbas, and of going to see ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... that hypothesis of suicide, and the figure stood at the learned gentleman's elbow, frightfully sawing at its severed throat, it is undeniable that the counsel faltered in his speech, lost for a few seconds the thread of his ingenious discourse, wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, and turned extremely pale. When the witness to character was confronted by the Appearance, her eyes most certainly did follow the direction of its pointed finger, and rest in great hesitation ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens

... among his acquaintances; he had begun to congratulate himself upon having lived it down. And now it was resurrected, flung at him in sincerest mockery by a woman whom, to his knowledge, he had never before laid eyes upon. Odious appellation, hateful invention of an ingenious enemy! ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance

... shook her head. "That is most ingenious. And would be delightful; but it is wrong. Now, mama. The least likely person ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann

... quietly submits to his rule, and ends by contributing her aid to strengthen the walls and shackles by which he essays to confine her. If, by assiduous repair of his dikes, he, for a considerable time, restrains the floods of a river within new bounds, nature, by a series of ingenious compensations, brings the fluctuating bed of the stream to a substantially constant level, and when his ramparts have been, by his toil, raised to a certain height and widened to a certain thickness, she, by her laws of gravitation ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... am nothing less than a poet, I shall not presume to dance with the Nine Sisters, to make use of the thought of the ingenious Sarasin. However, here follows an Ode of Anacreon, which may supply the place of a translation of those verses ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus

... belonging to kinds in which the fission was complete. In other words, Mr. Spencer would explain it as the coalescence of {164} organisms of a lower degree of aggregation in one longitudinal series, through survival of the fittest aggregations. This may be so. It is certainly an ingenious speculation, but facts have not yet been brought forward which demonstrate it. Had they been so, this kind of serial homology ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... lo kind which the French call cabbyrays, or wine-houses; and jest as master's green glass-coach pulled up, another coach drove off, out of which came two ladies, whom I knew pretty well,—suffiz, that one had a humpback, and the ingenious reader will know why SHE came there; the other was poor Miss Kicksey, who came to see her ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... November, 1837, that is to say, sixteen days before our own visit, and he it was who had substituted the barrel for the bottle, adding an invitation to all who should succeed him to use it as the receptacle of letters for different destinations. I mean to improve this ingenious and useful contrivance by forming an actual post-office on the highest point of the peninsula with an inscription in letters of a size so gigantic as to compel the attention of navigators who would not otherwise have touched at Port Famine. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne

... forget that the main plot concerns the love of Vasantasena and Charudatta. Indeed, we have in The Little Clay Cart the material for two plays. The larger part of act i. forms with acts vi. to x. a consistent and ingenious plot; while the remainder of act i. might be combined with acts iii. to v. to make a pleasing comedy of lighter tone. The second act, clever as it is, has little real connection either with the main plot or with the story of the gems. The breadth of treatment which is observable in ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka

... unanimity within itself. A cross-consultation was then held between the four sachems who represented the four classes; and when they had agreed, they appointed one of their number to express their resulting opinion, which was the answer of their nation. The several nations having, by this ingenious method, become of 'one mind' separately, it only remained to compare their several opinions to arrive at the final sentiment of all the sachems of the League. This was effected by a conference between the individual representatives ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale

... and will gif you lessons in Danish, Swedish, English, Bortuguese, Spanish and Bersian." Thus occupied in meditations, the rapid hours and the rapid steamer pass quickly on. The sun is sinking, and, as he drops, the ingenious luminary sets the Thames on fire: several worthy gentlemen, watch in hand, are eagerly examining the phenomena attending his disappearance,—rich clouds of purple and gold, that form the curtains of his bed,—little barks that pass black across his disc, his disc every instant ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Fifteen hundred and fifty francs," he went on after a pause. "Every shot must go to the mark! Laure is right. Trust a woman! I have only calico shirts. Where some one else's welfare is concerned, a young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. Guileless where she herself is in question, and full of foresight for me,—she is like a heavenly angel forgiving the strange incomprehensible ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac

... difficult to imagine a more ingenious and more dramatic composition. The four personages of the prologue were bewailing themselves in their mortal embarrassment, when Venus in person, (vera incessa patuit dea) presented herself to them, clad in a fine robe bearing the heraldic ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... of one's thoughts. Her features, which taken separately might seem irregular, were singularly harmonious, and, like a thin veil which tempers a too dazzling light, softened the whole expression. Her light chestnut hair was arranged about the temples in ingenious waves; while her still darker eyebrows gave, at times, an imposing gravity to her face. The same contrast was to be found in the mouth; the short distance which separated it from the nose would indicate, according to Lavater, ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard

... of her young brothers besides this. Bob and Fred were enamored of the radio. They were ingenious lads. Nell said she believed they could rig a radio set with a hair-pin and a mouse-trap. But she was going to help them obtain a fairly good set; only, because of the shortage of funds at the parsonage, Bob and Fred would ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose

... and Settlements of the Europeans in Northern and Central Africa, at the Close of the Eighteenth Century." "The Complaynt of Scotland," a curious political treatise of the sixteenth century, next appeared under his editorial care, with an ingenious introduction, and notes. In 1801, he contributed the ballad of "The Elf-king," to Lewis' "Tales of Wonder;" and, about the same period, wrote several ballads for the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border." The dissertation ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... acquirit eundo, remind us strongly of the Phaedrus. The jest is a long one, extending over more than half the dialogue. But then, we remember that the Euthydemus is a still longer jest, in which the irony is preserved to the very end. There he is parodying the ingenious follies of early logic; in the Cratylus he is ridiculing the fancies of a new school of sophists and grammarians. The fallacies of the Euthydemus are still retained at the end of our logic books; and the etymologies of the Cratylus ...
— Cratylus • Plato

... the broom-handle out in the entry? Some of the boys knew you wouldn't let me, but I said you would. I knew you would let a feller take it," said the ingenious Charlie. ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand

... This ingenious gentleman was the son of Mr. Andrew Marvel, Minister and Schoolmaster of Kingston upon Hull in Yorkshire, and was born in that town in the year 1620[B]. He was admitted into Trinity College in Cambridge December 14, 1633, where he had not been long before his studies ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber

... questions asked at Monastic Visitations were, whether the monks were guilty of superstition, apostacy, treason or thieves, or coiners.—MSS., Cott. Cleop. ii., 59. Henry, Prior of Tupholme, was said to be “very ingenious in making false money.”—Monas. Anglic., ii., p. 269. Thompson’s “Boston,” ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

... body of very poor persons, individually—in the commercial sense of the term—insolvent, manage to create a new basis of security which has been somewhat grandiloquently and yet truthfully called the capitalisation of their honesty and industry. The way in which this is done is remarkably ingenious. The credit society is organised in the usual democratic way explained above, but its constitution is peculiar in one respect. The members have to become jointly and severally responsible for the debts of the association, ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett

... where Latin, Greek, and mathematics had been the staples of education for many generations, and were believed to afford the only suitable preparation for the learned professions, public life, and cultivated society. In proclaiming this doctrine with ample illustration, ingenious argument, and forcible reiteration, Spencer was a true educational pioneer, although some of his scientific contemporaries were really preaching similar doctrines, each in his ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... say, was not strictly true, but it seemed to offer an ingenious excuse for occupying the table for some time without arousing too ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges

... the great masters limited themselves to charming framework and ingenious arabesques for their Madonnas and Holy Families. But, as Luebke says,[4] one soon sees that Duerer depended on architecture for borders and backgrounds far less than Holbein; he ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... wanted. At the time when he published this volume of Letters he seems to have had some foresight into his future life. "I am thinking," he says, "of the intimacies which I shall form with the learned and ingenious in every science, and of the many amusing literary anecdotes which I shall pick up." When fame did come upon him by his book on Corsica, no one could have relished it more. "I am really the great man now," he writes to his friend Temple. ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell

... alone at a rough and dirty desk in the inner room of the works "office," surrounded by dust-covered sample vases and other vessels of all shapes, sizes, and tints—specimens of Horrocleave's "Art Lustre Ware," a melancholy array of ingenious ugliness that nevertheless filled with pride its creators. He looked through a dirt-obscured window and with unseeing gaze surveyed a muddy, littered quadrangle whose twilight was reddened by gleams from the engine-house. In this yard lay flat a sign that had been blown ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett

... letter announcing her shame, and (probably) her intention to commit suicide, he had hastened upstairs to denounce Constant. He had then rushed to the girl's lodgings, and, finding his worst fears confirmed, planned at once his diabolically ingenious scheme of revenge. He told his landlady he was going to Devonport, so that if he bungled, the police would be put temporarily off his track. His real destination was Liverpool, for he intended to leave the country. Lest, ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill

... his colossal pride which he thus avenged, without avowing it even to himself—nay, laboring for a length of time, sometimes for a whole twelvemonth together, to persuade himself that the interest of the State was concerned in the matter. Ingenious in connecting his private affairs with the affairs of France, he had convinced himself that she bled from the wounds which he received. Joseph, careful not to irritate his ill-temper at this moment, put aside and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... found the interest of their club flagging, Ralph would convulse them by imitations of the "Member from Cranberry Centre," or fire them with speeches of famous statesmen. Charity fairs could not get on without him, and in the store where he worked he did many an ingenious job, which made him valued for his mechanical skill, as well as ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott

... expressions nearly a century afterward, in sustaining a theory contradictory to history as well as to common sense. It is as if the familiar expressions often employed in our own time, such as "the people of Africa," or "the people of South America," should be cited, by some ingenious theorist of a future generation, as evidence that the subjects of the Khedive and those of the King of Dahomey were but "one people," or that the Peruvians and the Patagonians belonged to the ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... "the said Pickering to make a good strong dore and make a substantiale payre of stocks and places the same in said cage." A spot conveniently near the west end on the meeting-house was selected as the site for this ingenious device. It is more than probable that "the said Pickering" indirectly furnished an occasional bird for his cage, for in 1672 we find him and one Edward Westwere authorized by the selectmen to "keepe ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... distinguished Past President of The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, has invented an ingenious system of piece work which is adapted to meet this very case, and which has especial advantages not possessed by any of the ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor

... could barely afford even that. The enemy was entrenching within 200 to 400 yards of all my battalions, pushing out saps from their trenches along the ditches and folds of the ground, and connecting up their heads in a most ingenious and hidden manner. The French were not attacked, so they sent a couple of companies at my request to Les Plantins, behind the Norfolks. However, after another attack between 9 and 10 A.M. the Germans ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen

... sadly now, nor resigned, but smiling, archly, with all the ingenious charm of the woman who ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc

... Grant, toying with his coffee, "I have made a provision for that which I think is rather ingenious. Don't imagine that this all came to me in a moment. The central thought struck me last night on my way home, and I knew then I had the embryo of the plan, but I lay awake until daylight working out details. I am going to allot votes on a very unique principle. It seems to ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead

... and made tresses of hair a towel, and broke the alabaster flask for his anointing; the feminine tenderness that lifted his mangled body from the cross and wrapped it in new linen, with costly spices, and laid it in a virgin tomb, have at length been surpassed by the ingenious devotion of the ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various

... It was altogether an ingenious idea, and one that with time and patience promised success. Indeed, it seemed the only plan that held out a hope beyond mere chance—for amidst so many devious ways, to have proceeded without some plan would have been to trust to chance, and ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid

... this nonsense, Leila?" he said as he rose. "Is this an ingenious little game set up between you and John?" To his utter amazement she ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell

... Matthews, he celebrated the coronation at Dizful, in bed. And by the time he had slept off his fag, Bala Bala and the Father of Swords and the green chest and the ingenious Magin looked to him more than ever like figures of myth. He was too little of the timber out of which journalists, romancers, or diplomats are made to take them very seriously. The world he lived in, moreover, was too solid to be shaken by any such flimsy device as the one of which he had happened ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... together. Finally, in order to obtain a witness, she accuses Amarilli to Mirtillo of being faithless, and bids him watch the mouth of the cave in which she alleges the nymph has an assignation with Coridone. This ingenious plan would have succeeded to perfection but for Mirtillo's precipitancy, for, seeing Amarilli enter the cave, he at once concludes her guilt and follows her forthwith to wreak revenge. At that moment the satyr appears and, misunderstanding ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... scientific aspect of chemistry. It has shown us how bodies stand affected to each other through an almost boundless range of combinations. It has given us a most ingenious theory to account for certain fixed relations in these combinations. It has successfully eliminated a great number of proximate compounds, more or less stable, from organic structures. It has invented ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... which Pericles exercised for so long a period over an ingenious but fickle people like the Athenians, is an unquestionable proof of his intellectual superiority. This hold on the public affection is to be attributed to a great extent to his extraordinary eloquence. Cicero regards him as the first example of an almost ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith

... along three roads, across which steps in fours and threes are placed at intervals. Down the middle of each a rapid stream runs in a stone channel, and this gives endless amusement to the children, specially to the boys, who devise many ingenious models and mechanical toys, which are put in motion by water-wheels. But at 7 a.m. a drum beats to summon the children to a school whose buildings would not discredit any school-board at home. Too much Europeanised ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird

... floor beside him, and began the business of taming him by getting him used to seeing me, cultivating his acquaintance by poking my finger between the bars, talking and singing to him, and endeavoring, by other ingenious devices, to make him feel at home. He scampered around the confines of his domicile, as in a treadmill, all the time I was thus employed, and could not be induced ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland

... The ingenious and easy arrangement of the binomial gave me time to tackle my algebra book from the proper commencement. In three or four days, I had rubbed up my weapons. There was nothing to be said about addition and subtraction: ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... ceiling was capable of being lit up. An ingenious system of electric heating, which has since been imitated, allowed the temperature of the walls and room to ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux

... to be present. For, as I said, the Count was a perfect gentleman, and always stood by his friends through thick and thin; but the thrashing which Speug got from Bulldog was monumental, and in preparation for it that ingenious youth put on ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren

... brilliant mathematician and an ingenious inventor. Brailsford says that his inventions were "partly useful, partly whimsical." They would be, of course. They included a crane, a planing-machine, a smokeless candle and a gunpowder motor—besides his really big and notable invention of ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin

... the most considerable and most grave in that description of politicians. A few, indeed, who, I admit, are equally respectable in all points, differ from me, and talk his Grace's language. I am too feeble to contend with them. They have the field to themselves. There are others, very young and very ingenious persons, who form, probably, the largest part of what his Grace, I believe, is pleased to consider as that party. Some of them were not born into the world, and all of them were children, when I entered into that connection. I give due credit to the censorial brow, to the broad ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... is romantic; and if you were to ask me who of all powerful and popular writers in the cause of error had wrought most harm to their race, I should hesitate in reply whether to name Voltaire, or Byron, or the last most ingenious and most venomous of the degraded philosophers of Germany, or rather Cervantes, for he cast scorn upon the holiest principles of humanity—he, of all men, most helped forward the terrible change ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin

... Jerry, sarcastically, "for your very ingenious explanation; but I do not see why his guns should be shotted. Perhaps Mr Macallan will now oblige me by his ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat

... days of hard riding for our friends to reach their destination, we will leave them, and return for a time to the gentle Mahbracca, who, when she had left the Prince, had gone to her private room to prepare an ingenious wire arrangement, which she called a "prince-trap," in which he was to be inclosed and hung up before the window of the Princess, for the amusement of ...
— Ting-a-ling • Frank Richard Stockton

... evening stroll. Their success was short-lived, for, only an hour afterwards, they were spotted and chased by some farmers, being finally brought to a stop by a man with a shot-gun. Another couple left the camp by the following ingenious method. A captain, who spoke German like a native, dressed up in the clothes of a Hun private (somehow acquired). Some of the essential things were missing, and had been manufactured in secret, such as a cap and a painted wooden bayonet, with a lovely coloured ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight

... the next second leaped back, warned in time by a suspicious rumbling above his head. He looked down to see a slab of granite weighing half a ton on the spot where he had stood a moment before. It was an ingenious bit of mechanism arranged to protect the treasure; the jewel had been attached by a stout cord which, when pulled, loosed the weight above. Not only this, but it became evident in a few seconds that ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... was the reason they had brought him to the landing field. He was to furnish a grisly warning to the crew of the cruiser. However, there the Throgs were making a bad mistake if they believed that his death by any ingenious method could scare ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton

... have been about forty when he saw the fifth, and may have attained seventy-five or eighty years, which is no great age; but it seemed so to them, for he had now doubled the age for superannuation among them. It is an ingenious plan for attaching the members of the tribe to the chief's family, and for imparting a discipline which renders the tribe easy of command. On their return to the town from attendance on the ceremonies of initiation, a prize is given to the lad who can run fastest, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... find again by making a cross furrow, and when found will lead you straight above the depot. They would never excite suspicion, even if a native got hold of them; for they would appear to have been dropped or blown on the ground by chance, not seen and trampled in. Mr. Atkinson mentions an ingenious way by which the boundaries of valuable mining property are marked in the Ural, a modification of which might serve for indicating caches. A trench is dug and filled with charcoal beat small, and then covered over. The charcoal lasts for ever, and cannot be tampered ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton

... government, had, as soon as the King returned, quitted London for the Dutch head quarters. One of these was Halifax. William had welcomed him with great satisfaction, but had not been able to suppress a sarcastic smile at seeing the ingenious and accomplished politician, who had aspired to be the umpire in that great contention, forced to abandon the middle course and to take a side. Among those who, at this conjuncture, repaired to Windsor were some men who had ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... custom prevailed with learned men to change their names. They showed at once their contempt for vulgar denominations and their ingenious erudition. They christened themselves with Latin and Greek. This disguising of names came, at length, to be considered to have a political tendency, and so much alarmed Pope Paul the Second, that he imprisoned several persons for their using certain affected names, and some, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... are studded with the names of those who have made rapid progress in their first season. Colonel Quill, we read in our Vardon, took up golf at the age of fifty-six, and by devising an ingenious machine consisting of a fishing-line and a sawn-down bedpost was enabled to keep his head so still that he became a scratch player before the end of the year. But no one, I imagine, except Vincent Jopp, has ever achieved scratch on his ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse

... the loss of which was due in part, but not wholly, to the wood-chucks. The hired men scolded about it, and Gramp himself, who had a farmer's natural aversion to wood-chucks, fretted over it. We boys, too, magnified the damage and discussed ingenious plans for exterminating them. But after all, I do not believe that we really got two hundred weight of hay less in the field, in consequence of wood-chucks; and certainly the clover as it stood was not worth sixty cents ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... sugar-canes—a convincing proof that they grew in the neighbourhood. We all tried them; and for several days each member of our community was to be seen walking about with a piece of sugar-cane in his mouth. Sambo was an ingenious mechanic, and forthwith set to work to construct a sugar manufactory. It was very simple, consisting of a number of our largest clay pots for boiling the juice, and a long trough with sides, and a board at each end, slightly inclining towards the pans. Into the ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston

... that neither man nor woman will have much difficulty to tell how "beauty makes riches pleasant". Surely this emendation, though it is elegant and ingenious, is not such as that an opportunity of inserting it should be purchased by declaring ignorance of what every one knows, by confessing insensibility ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson

... singular statement which Columbus gave to the sovereigns of his supposed vision. It has been suggested that this was a mere ingenious fiction, adroitly devised by him to convey a lesson to his prince; but such an idea is inconsistent with his character. He was too deeply imbued with awe of the Deity, and with reverence for his sovereign, ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving

... sovereignty over Louisiana than was held by France when she transferred it, or by Spain when she owned it, was never dreamed of when the negotiation was made. It was an afterthought on the part of the hard-pressed defenders of the right of secession. It was the ingenious but lame device of an able lawyer who undertook to defend what ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... The latter ingenious young lady, during this while, continued to adore business, and with increasing fervor every day, and regretted, quite aloud, that she had never paid sufficient attention to this absorbing amusement, out ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester

... consciousness. Without going into this very complex question, however, there remains the undoubted fact of the connection; the thought, which is known by us in consciousness; and the brain-change, which has been verified by ingenious mechanical and electrical instruments, and the effects of which we behold in the chemical changes in the brain-substance itself after severe thinking. This being so, it has been said, Why not suppose that so-called subconscious ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... he designed in 1844 another instrument, which in various modifications has come into extensive use—the grease-spot photometer. In 1852 he began to carry out electrolytical decompositions by the aid of the battery. By means of a very ingenious arrangement he obtained magnesium for the first time in the metallic state, and studied its chemical and physical properties, among other things demonstrating the brilliance and high actinic qualities of the flame ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... As soon as a passage was opened, we drew near, and found on the opposite base the inscription, with nearly half the latter part of the verses worn away. Thus would this most famous, and formerly most learned, city of Greece have remained a stranger to the tomb of one of its most ingenious citizens, had it not been discovered by a ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... "brevets" intrigued against the regiment; but at length they found it easier to wear their "calotte," and say nothing. This society began in raillery and playfulness, seasoned by a spice of malice. It produced a great number of ingenious and satirical little things. That the privileges of the "calotte" were afterwards abused, and calumny too often took the place of poignant satire, is the history of human nature as well as ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... case was so simple, that there was no opportunity for ingenious schemes. There she was, in the beautiful room, with the only exit to the house, the hall door, securely locked. The door was of solid mahogany, the knob and lock of a most secure firmness. Had it been a light or flimsy door, Patty would have rattled and shaken it, but this door was solid as a rock. ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells

... partly because he had already suffered severely in the Flying Boats, that Tony collapsed so quickly in the giddy-go-round. He only mounted Bucephalus (who was spotted, and had no tail) because Jackanapes urged him, and held out the ingenious hope that the round-and-round feeling would very likely cure the up-and-down sensation. It did not, however, and Tony tumbled ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing

... to cover the summit of the monument. In one of the rooms was a model of the monument itself, on a scale, I should think, of about an inch to afoot. It did not impress me as having grown out of any great and genuine idea in the artist's mind, but as being merely an ingenious contrivance enough. There were also casts of statues that seemed to be intended for some other monument referring to Revolutionary times and personages; and with these were intermixed some ideal statues or groups,—a naked boy playing marbles, very ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... failed to breed, because the females employed none of those artifices, tricks, and hanky-pankies with which women accommodate the olives of Poissy, and for this reason they thoroughly deserved the title of beasts. She promised him no longer to play with such a serious affair, and to forget all the ingenious devices in which she had been so fertile. But, alas! although she kept as quiet as that German woman who lay so still that her husband embraced her to death, and then went, poor baron, to obtain absolution from the pope, who delivered his celebrated brief, in which he requested ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... enough—to convey the unutterable contempt avowed for all that he had written, by the fashionable critics. One critic—who still, I believe, edits a rather popular journal, and who belongs to that class, feeble, fluttering, ingenious, who make it their highest ambition not to lead, but, with a slave's adulation, to obey and to follow all the caprices of the public mind—described Mr. Wordsworth as resembling, in the quality of his mind, an old nurse babbling in her paralytic dotage ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... upon herself all the responsibilities of my affairs. She is desirous that, domestically, I should abdicate; that, renouncing further rule, like the venerable Charles V, I should retire into some sort of monastery. But indeed, the chimney excepted, I have little authority to lay down. By my wife's ingenious application of the principle that certain things belong of right to female jurisdiction, I find myself, through my easy compliances, insensibly stripped by degrees of one masculine prerogative after another. In a dream I go about my fields, a sort of lazy, happy-go-lucky, good-for-nothing, ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville

... little canoe cut her way, as if she were chasing a smuggler; and had it not been for a shark or two who, in anticipation of their services being required, never left her side for a second, Popanilla really might have made some ingenious observations on the nature of tides. He was rather surprised, certainly, as he watched his frail bark cresting the waves; but he soon supposed that this was all in the natural course of things; and he now ascribed his previous fright, not ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli

... said he in his memoirs, "I ceased to have recourse to little means to distract the people and occupy their attention. It required an extraordinary effort of the imagination to invent something that would excite the people. The most ingenious attempts do not always succeed, while the clumsy ones take a surprising effect. Among those of the latter kind there was a story after my fashion of which 5 thousand copies at one kopek a copy ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose

... widespread in the western world of the 1970's, particularly among the young. These effects, on the whole negative, are offset by a number of positive factors. Human beings are curious and imaginative. They are also ingenious, inventive and intuitive. All of these attributes are assets when dealing with ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... typesetting was at last generally done away with by the invention of two intricate and ingenious machines. The linotype, the invention of Ottmar Mergenthaler of Baltimore, came first; then the monotype of Tolbert Lanston, a native of Ohio. The linotype is the favorite composing machine for newspapers and is also widely ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson

... hinted by one ingenious police reporter that the bookkeeper was really the guilty man. He even raked up some story of the man at his lodgings which intimated that Chesterton had some art as an actor. Parts of disguises were ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe

... causeless breaks proceed from want of truth to the subject, and prove a lack of the careful rendering of love in the author. The poet must listen to the naive voice of nature as he moulds his rhythms, for the ingenious and elaborate constructions of the intellect alone will never touch the heart. Rhythm may proceed with regularity, yet that regularity be so relieved from monotony and so modified in its actual effects, that however regular may be the structure ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various

... following particulars, as nearly as I can recollect them, in the words of the narrator. It may be necessary to observe that he was what is termed a well-spoken man, having for a considerable time instructed the ingenious youth of his native parish in such of the liberal arts and sciences as he found it convenient to profess—a circumstance which may account for the occurrence of several big words, in the course of this narrative, more distinguished for euphonious effect, than for correctness of ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... to slant, to squint, to cheat. Skouth, scope. Skriech, a scream. Skriegh, to scream, to whinny. Skyrin, flaring. Skyte, squirt, lash. Slade, slid. Slae, the sloe. Slap, a breach in a fence; a gate. Slaw, slow. Slee, sly, ingenious. Sleekit, sleek, crafty. Slidd'ry, slippery. Sloken, to slake. Slypet, slipped. Sma', small. Smeddum, a powder. Smeek, smoke. Smiddy, smithy. Smoor'd, smothered. Smoutie, smutty. Smytrie, a small collection; a litter. Snakin, sneering. Snap smart. Snapper, to ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... that the freedom that Shakespeare valued was in fact freedom, not any of those ingenious mechanisms to which that name has been applied by political theorists. He thought long and profoundly on the problems of society; and anarchy has no place among his political ideals. It is by all ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh

... tower (Torre dell'Orologio) in the Renaissance style of 1400, crowned with the gilded lion of St. Mark. On the festa days three figures, the Three Wise Men, preceded by an angel, come forth on the tower and bow before the Madonna, in a niche above,—a very ingenious piece of mechanism. With its rich architecture and sculptures and masses of color, the piazza of San Marco is really an open-air hall, where all the town congregates ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... present Bible among the typographical differences found in the copies are three varieties of the colophon, two of which however are identical in language and differ only in the printers' use of contractions and capitals. The more common of the forms affirms that: "This present work by the ingenious invention of printing or stamping letters without any scratching of the pen has been thus fashioned in the city of Mainz and to the worship of God has been diligently brought to completion by Johann Fust citizen and Peter Schoeffer ...
— Catalogue of the William Loring Andrews Collection of Early Books in the Library of Yale University • Anonymous

... I read of just such a ease in the Advertiser a year ago. It occurs annually—in the newspapers. And I'll tell you what, Mrs. Crashaw—Roberts found out his mistake as soon as he went to his dressing-room; and that ingenious nephew of yours, who's closeted with him there, has been trying to put him up to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... emotion in learning that she had never lived with her husband, and his consequent conviction that she regarded the marriage as a mistake, the ceremony itself loomed up as a grim fact, one not to be brushed aside by ingenious arguments. Behind it, as a prop to its stability, was the strict tradition of Christianity, an inheritance of peculiar influence with both the participants in the strange mistake. There was no cause for divorce which either of their respective ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... ingenious craftsmen. They secured two wheels left by the Signalling Corps, and on these fastened a stretcher; out of a lot of the web equipment lying about they made a set of harness; two donkeys eventuated from somewhere, ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston

... compatriot and friend, M. Quellien, a Breton poet full of raciness and originality, the only man of the present day whom I have known to possess the faculty of creating myths, has described this phase of my destiny in a very ingenious style. He says that my soul will dwell, in the shape of a white sea-bird, around the ruined church of St. Michel, an old building struck by lightning which stands above Treguier. The bird will fly all night with plaintive cries around the barricaded door and windows, seeking to enter ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan

... ingenious little thing you are!' exclaimed the fairy; 'but, let us see—if you came home and found your cruel papa doing duty as the family hatstand, or strutting about as ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey

... is more infinite, noble, and suggestive than thought. We soon come to the end of the ingenious allegory. It tells only one story but where there is a perfect image of life there is infinitude and mystery. We do not tire considering the long ancestry of expression in a face. It may lead us back through the ages; but we do tire of the art which imprisons ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell

... by some of us to have a hidden personal application, and to afford a fair opening for a lively rejoinder, if the Koh-i-noor had been so disposed. The little man uttered it with the distinct wooden calmness with which the ingenious Turk used to exclaim, E-chec! so that it must have been heard. The party supposed to be interested in the remark was, however, carrying a large knife-blade-full of something to his mouth just then, which, no doubt, interfered with the reply he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various

... ILIAD must have done, may try his hand in our critical age, at a ballad in the style of the Border ballads. If he succeeds in producing nothing that will at once mark his work as modern, he will be more successful than any poet who has made the experiment, and more successful than the most ingenious modern forgers of gems, jewels, and terra-cottas. They seldom deceive experts, and, when they do, other ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... of them, the rifles and ammunition being taken by our men and the corpses thrown outside. This has apparently had a chilling effect on the policy of open charges in this quarter, and now the Chinese commanders are advancing their lines by means of ingenious parallels and zig-zag barricades, which will take some time ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... graceful compliment. It would have given me much satisfaction, I confess, if I could have talked to her about the part taken by her people, not less in the life of the Saxon and Germanic races, than in that of the Latin Occident. Such a dissertation, it appeared to me, would have been an ingenious method of thanking the lady for having thus appeared to an old scholar, contrary to the invariable custom of her kindred, who never show themselves but to innocent ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France

... byways and hedges and found this—er—peculiar plea, which has enabled him to show you the proverbial woman, to put her in the box—to give, in fact, a romantic glow to this affair. I compliment my friend; I think it highly ingenious of him. By these means, he has—to a certain extent—got round the Law. He has brought the whole story of motive and stress out in court, at first hand, in a way that he would not otherwise have been able to do. But when you have once ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... for this tale the peculiarity of its having been the first essay of its author, Alexander Bethune, the self-educated "Fifeshire labourer." This excellent and ingenious man became subsequently well known by his volume of "Tales and Sketches of the Scottish Peasantry," published by Mr. Adam Black, and designated at the time a literary phenomenon. It was truly said of him by the Spectator: "Alexander Bethune, if he had written ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various

... conceives that the more expeditious way of getting rich is to sell them at a low price to all. But there are only two ways of lowering the price of commodities. The first is to discover some better, shorter, and more ingenious method of producing them: the second is to manufacture a larger quantity of goods, nearly similar, but of less value. Amongst a democratic population, all the intellectual faculties of the workman ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... as one of the many harmless, but troublesome and tiresome fools, who are called "cranks" over there, and who seem to flourish in America. People who go about everywhere and pursue everyone with an infallible system, an ingenious invention, a gigantic scheme. They have calculated everything and only want a millionaire or an influential person to realize their idea - to reform the world and make it happy ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... seems not to have been observed by those who thus far have been engaged in deciphering these inscriptions. By representing Hea as male, Nin is made to appear as the offspring of two fathers while he is left absolutely motherless. To obviate this difficulty an ingenious attempt has been made to account for his existence by substituting his own wife as the author of his being. Although in the numerous accounts which I had read of Hea, in my search for information concerning her, she had always been designated ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble

... already begun in 1866. It was little like an ordinary botany book;—that was to be expected. It did not dissect plants; it did not give chemical or histological analysis: but with bright and curious fancy, with the most ingenious diagrams and perfect drawings—beautifully engraved by Burgess and Allen—illustrated the mystery of growth in plants and the tender beauty of their form. Though this was not science, in strict ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood

... taken out and given to me. The king then sat on his iron chair, and I on a wooden box which I had contrived to stuff with the royal grass he gave me, and so made a complete miniature imitation of his throne. The folly in now allowing me to sit upon my portable iron stool, as an ingenious device for carrying out my determination to sit before him like an Englishman. I wished to be communicative, and, giving him a purse of money, told him the use and value of the several coins; but he paid little regard to them, and soon put them down. The small-talk ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke

... more than they could count, Scent, from a most ingenious little fount, More beer, in little kegs, Many dozen hard-boiled eggs, And goodies ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells

... friend learned in Scottish history suggests an ingenious remark, that this might mean more than a mere full drinker. To drink "fair," used to imply that the person drank in the same proportion as the company; to drink more would be unmannerly; to drink less might imply some unfair motive. Either interpretation shows the importance attached to ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay

... Francis Burdett and others, who chose to meddle with the British Constitution wherever they found a fragment large enough to talk about, has been visited by the government, and tried and imprisoned. His book on the British Constitution is, though somewhat visionary, both original and ingenious. He is six feet high, with a very broad chest; wears a fur cap and blue cotton-velvet dressing-gown in the sultriest weather; is a great admirer of Jeremy Bentham, Mrs. Wheeler, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various

... of divinity at Cambridge,[251] is said to have been the person who suggested this ingenious expedient, and to have advised the king, as the simplest means of carrying it out, to consult in detail the universities and learned men throughout Europe. His notorious activity in collecting the opinions may have easily connected him with the origination of the plan, which ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... of excuseful thing I could think of, knowing very well that the most ingenious lie would fall far short of atoning for the ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde

... summer with rich, tender grasses, starred with flowers. It is not a fertile land. The rocks creep out with frequent and unpleasing persistency. But Martin Conwell viewed life cheerfully, and being an ingenious man, added to the business of farming, several other occupations, and so managed to make a living, and after many years to pay the mortgage on his home which came with the purchase. The little farmhouse, clinging to the bleak ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr

... to place there as inhabitants, or at least to set on work there upon my account while I stayed, and either to leave them there or carry them forward, as they should appear willing; particularly, I carried two carpenters, a smith, and a very handy, ingenious fellow, who was a cooper by trade, and was also a general mechanic; for he was dexterous at making wheels and hand- mills to grind corn, was a good turner and a good pot-maker; he also made anything that was proper to make of earth or of wood: in ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe

... dry out of doors, after he had been in the rain. She told me these simple adventures in such a manner, that in my mind they assumed the proportions of never-to-be-forgotten dramas, of grand and mysterious poems; and the ingenious stories invented by the poets which my mother told me in the evening had none of the flavor, none of the fullness nor of the vigor ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... is clear, then. He is working a simple but ingenious game on Freddie. It wouldn't succeed with everybody, I suppose; but from what I have seen and heard of him Freddie isn't strong on intellect. He seems to have accepted the story without a murmur. What does he do? He has to raise a thousand pounds immediately, and the raising of the first five ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... gist and substance of all the more or less ingenious discourse between Charles and the Marquise, as of all such discourses—past, present, and to come. Allow a certain space of time, and the two formulas shall begin to mean "Love me," and ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac

... rare smile of extraordinary sweetness. Her intention was so unmistakable—so touchingly ingenious, as are all youth's attempts to heal a bitterness ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler

... to this brilliant writer, who comes to the conclusion that no satisfactory solution of the mystery has ever been propounded or ever can be. But while his examination of the different theories is singularly free from bias he is evidently impressed by the ingenious view of Dr. Amos Stoot, the eminent Chicago alienist, that the masked inmate of the Bastille immured himself voluntarily in order to investigate the conditions of French prison life at the time, but, owing to the homicidal development of his subliminal consciousness, was detained indefinitely ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various

... out of a majestic Delft teapot, ornamented with paintings of fat little Dutch shepherds and shepherdesses tending pigs,—with boats sailing in the air, and houses built in the clouds, and sundry other ingenious Dutch fancies. The beaux distinguished themselves by their adroitness in replenishing this pot from a huge copper teakettle. To sweeten the beverage, a lump of sugar was laid beside each cup, and the company alternately nibbled and sipped with great decorum; ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin

... us for fear into the mountains, having formerly received injurious treatment from the Portuguese, who they said had carried off some of them forcibly. Their town which they left, is all built of stone covered with spars and palm branches, with wooden doors, and very ingenious wooden locks. Near the sea-side stands their church, enclosed by a wall like that of a church-yard, having within a couple of crosses and an altar, on which lay frankincense, with sweet wood and gums. When we first got speech of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr

... impatiently. "King Alfred's supposed device of measuring Time by Candles—a Myth." Would to heaven his invention of juries was a myth, too. Scotland Yard would get on much better without them. "A Lamp-clock was another Simple and Ingenious Design." How intolerably long-winded the writer was. What had he to say about hood clocks? "Very few of the Early Clocks had Dials. The Device was generally a Mechanical Figure which struck the Hour on a Bell." Evidently the forerunner of the devilish alarum clock. "Early ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees

... Colonel Delafield has already, upon a small scale, made some very successful experiments of curvilineal dikes, constructed with caissons of concrete; and we have no doubt that, with adequate means at his disposal, this ingenious engineer could avert the dangers which threaten, not only the fort, but the noble harbor of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... experiments (which I should call the least successful in the collection) his formula is not the episodical "slice of life," with crumbly edges. His choice is for the well-made, with usually some ingenious little twist at the finish, and (so to speak) a neatly tied bow to end all. As an instance of this kind I commend to your notice the admirably shaped little yarn called "Two-penn'orth." Mr. PALMER has a pretty wit (perhaps ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various

... Mr. Sprudell's only essay at promoting, but he knew how it was done. A good dinner, wine, cigars; and he had gone the ingenious guild of money-raisers one better by an actual, uncontrovertible demonstration of the safety ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart

... Of this ingenious way of enslaving foreign nations unknown to themselves, Italy's experience offers us an instructive illustration. The headquarters of the German commercial army in that realm were the offices of the Banca Commerciale in Milan. This institution was founded under the auspices of the Berlin ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon

... my way deep in thought," Jack went on, "when whom should I meet but Lisburne? Lisburne is the most ingenious man I know. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various

... of Bonar Bridge, Southey crossed Fleet Mound, another ingenious work of his friend Telford, but of an altogether different character. It was thrown across the River Fleet, at the point at which it ran into the estuary or little land-locked bay outside, known as Loch Fleet. At this point there had formerly been a ford; ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... The ingenious author of Philosophic Researches concerning the Americans, speaking of a race which appear to resemble the Acephali of Herodotus, or the race of men having one eye, and that in their chest, says, "There is in Canibar a race of savages who have hardly any neck, and whose shoulders ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny

... America. Yes, he too had travelled, and not only in thought. He knew how many strange nations and false religions lodged in this round earth, itself but a speck in the universe. There were few ingenious authors that he had not perused, or philosophical instruments that he had not, as far as possible, examined and tested; and no man better than he could understand and prize the recent discoveries of "the incomparable Mr Newton". Nevertheless, a certain ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana

... leaping up, quickly descended to the shore. The kayaks were old ones which had been found by the party on arriving at the deserted village. They had probably been left as useless by previous visitors, but Okiok's boys, Norrak and Ermigit, being energetic and ingenious fellows, had set to work with fish-bone-needles and sinew-threads, and repaired them with sealskin patches. They were now about to test their workmanship and ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne

... covering the whole of a large classroom wall, drawn presumably from joint memory by these officers, who by its aid were able to trace the progress of the war as tidings filtered through to them by an ingenious system of signalling practised ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry



Words linked to "Ingenious" :   ingenuity, clever, ingeniousness, adroit



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