"Mechanism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... side," she continued, "is a piece of mechanism which will only work when a secret lock has been opened, and to effect this the bird's eye must first be pushed aside to make room for the key. Your ignorance of all this became apparent to me when I found both of the two keys in my room. One of them belongs to you, and I have brought it to ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... explaining the mechanism of that Winchester to Sheriff Collins we'll reluctantly dispense with your presence, Mr. Reilly. We have arranged a temporary treaty of peace," the ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... telegrams were handed in giving fresh details of the disaster—horrible details. The ship was a total loss; of that splendid mechanism, built by years of toil, by the expenditure of many millions, there remained only a twisted and useless mass of wreckage; and in that wreckage lay three hundred of France's sailors. Small wonder that the President sat, chin in hand, staring straight before him, and that the others ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... concentrated, and her ears only registered the surging of her own blood. With a sudden wrench the bar flew round in her hands, and she fell forward on her knees, flung with her own impetus. Would the aged mechanism respond? Was there more rust on the inner wheels and springs? Ah! she could hear a gurgling and a whirling of wheels. Yes! there came the water; she heard the trickle, the splashing; then the whole grotto seemed alive. She ran to a broken place in the outer ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... chemical agent, that its effect, as such, might perhaps alone account for the impulse which the spring gives to vegetation. But, in order to explain the mechanism of that operation, it has been supposed that the warmth of the spring dilates the vessels of plants, and produces a kind of vacuum, into which the sap (which had remained in a state of inaction in the trunk during the winter) rises: ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... weapons which they constructed, after iron had been recovered from the ore, was a bolo, and a number were subsequently manufactured. To this they added several spears. All weapons were kept out of Chief's reach, and the boys were cautioned against permitting him to learn the mechanism and use of the guns. He always looked longingly at the bolos, from the time he had witnessed their ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... mechanism through which passed a strip of metal. Click! 'Twas cut. Whir! 'Twas a cylinder. Click! Whir! Click! A corner, an edge, an end, and b-r-r-rr! It was dropped, a metallic cartridge, to do its part in peace or war. Even more fascinating was it ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... the Voice, duly and most appropriately embodied, sat half-facing him. The Voice's eyes confirmed his worst suspicions, and, dazed though they were at the moment, there were deep lights in them that wholly disordered his mental mechanism. Nor were her first words such as to restore ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... captured plenty of them." Tallis thumbed the stud that allowed the magazine to slide out of the butt and into his hand. Then he checked the mechanism and the power cartridges. Finally, he replaced the magazine and put the weapon into the empty sleeve holster ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... the one he had arranged to go by, and he had still to speak to Lydia on the second object of his visit, which like a second surgical operation seemed to require an interval. The hours had to go by; there was eating to be done; the children came in—all this mechanism of life had to be gone through with the dreary sense of constraint which is often felt in domestic quarrels of a commoner kind. To Lydia it was some slight relief for her stifled fury to have the children present: she felt a savage glory in their loveliness, as if it would taunt ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... delicate machinery of a human brain, like any man-made mechanism of great nicety, may readily be thrown into confusion, its exquisite balance disturbed, its functioning confounded. Thirst, near-exhaustion, severe bodily distress and, on top of all, blood-lust anger made Alan Howard over into another man. He was possessed, ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... almost ceased from Ceylon. Along with these the trunks of the larger trees are profusely covered with other delicate creepers, chiefly Convolvuli and Ipomoeas; and the pitcher-plant (Nepenthes distillatoria) lures the passer-by to halt and conjecture the probable uses of the curious mechanism, by means of which it distils a quantity of limpid fluid into the vegetable vases at the extremity of its leaves. The Orchideae suspend their pendulous flowers from the angles of branches, whilst the bare roots and the lower part of the stem are occasionally ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... nerves simply act as though their synapses had been shorted through. It only takes a small percentage of that kind of damage to the nerve fibers to ruin the whole nervous system. The signals get jammed up and confused, and the whole mechanism ceases ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... such a solid and well-regulated condition, that it kept on going like a good machine. The new driver had as much as he could manage, and there were some who thought that the more delicate parts of the complicated mechanism would be likely to suffer under ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... him. And he betook himself to the air-shed where the superb "White Eagle" rested all a-quiver for departure, palpitating, or so it seemed to him, with a strange eagerness for movement which struck him as unusual and "uncanny" in a mere piece of mechanism. ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... grasping the taut and, in one sense, irresponsive mechanism of a steering-wheel governed by steam, a sailor can "feel" the movement of his ship, a seaworthy vessel being a living thing, obedient as a docile horse to the least touch of the rein. But, in the unlikely event of fortune favoring Courtenay to the extent of giving ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... advising persons suffering from Insomnia to try a musical box in their bed-rooms; and I therefore purchased a rather expensive one, which plays six tunes, with drum and trumpet accompaniment. Something seems to have gone wrong with the mechanism, as, after being fully wound up, it remains obstinately silent for an hour or so, at the end of which period it suddenly starts off at break-neck speed, and repeats one of the tunes backwards over and over again. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... differences in efficiency and in the functions performed. The same functions may be performed and the same degree of efficiency reached apparently with different organizations. Cleveland shows, for example, how our own government might become much more efficient and make radical changes in the mechanism of the legislative and executive functions without sacrificing any principle we hold to, and perhaps without any ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... ship, and the wind keeps the sea in motion. This destroyer is a toy. Its terrible vitality is fed by the ship, the waves, and the wind, each lending its aid. What is to be done with this complication? How fetter this monstrous mechanism of shipwreck? How foresee its coming and goings, its recoils, its halts, its shocks? Any one of those blows may stave in the side of the vessel. How can one guard against these terrible gyrations? One has to do with a projectile that reflects, that ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... revolutions. It was hung in the year 1682, and was baptized in the presence of Louis XIV. and Queen Theresa. Its weight is thirty-two thousand pounds—the clapper alone weighing a thousand pounds. A clock in one of the towers is world-renowned for the intricacy and curiosity of its mechanism. The feats it performs every time it strikes the hour and quarter-hour, can hardly be credited by one who ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... had done heroic work under adverse conditions. A tentative theory of the mechanism involved had already been formulated, and the search had started for a means to duplicate the super-dielectricity in materials otherwise more suitable to man's needs. But as he grew familiar with the place and ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... the Carinthian, had carved upward of a hundred faces; a chessboard, the completion of which had occupied a Dutchman for eighteen years; golden carriages drawn by fleas; toys composed of porcelain or ivory in imitation of Chinese works of art; curious pieces of mechanism, musical clocks, etc., were industriously collected into the cabinets of the wealthy and powerful. This taste was, however, not utterly useless. The predilection for ancient gems promoted the study of the remains of antiquity, as Stosch, Lippert, and Winckelmann prove, and ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... Martian lives only on fruit, and he lives only a few degrees on either side of the Equator. All the businesses that in your earth arise from the preparation and sale of meat and all the various confections, disappear there, and also all the mechanism of house heating and lighting. Also there are no railroads, but innumerable canals, which form a labyrinth of waterways, and are fed from the tides of the great northern ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... tattler. He, Martin Eden, was a better man than that fellow. The thought cheered him. It seemed to draw him nearer to Her. He began comparing himself with the students. He grew conscious of the muscled mechanism of his body and felt confident that he was physically their master. But their heads were filled with knowledge that enabled them to talk her talk,—the thought depressed him. But what was a brain for? he ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... spinsters make it a point of honor to resemble the lay figures of a painter; they sit on their hips, never on their chairs. When any one speaks to them they turn their whole busts instead of simply turning their heads; and when their gowns creak one is tempted to believe that the mechanism of these beings is out of order. Mademoiselle Habert, an ideal of her species, had a stern eye, a grim mouth, and beneath her wrinkled chin the strings of her cap, always limp and faded, floated as she moved. Two moles, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... viewed as an industrial or economic mechanism, the structure of which is made up of what is called its economic institutions. These institutions are habitual methods of carrying on the life process of the community in contact with the material environment in which it lives. When ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... set bells ringing in all parts of the ship. By means of a complicated mechanism, the air was exhausted from each compartment in turn, and then replaced, and as the bells rang, the men at work trooped out of these compartments consecutively. This had been originated for the purpose of destroying any life ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... should attack again, Paul would be sure to waken him in time. The rain grew harder on the roof, and its steady patter was like the rocking of a cradle to a child. His nerves were of steel, and the mechanism of his body and brain were not upset at all. The half-dropped lids dropped down entirely, and he ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the man straightened up, stood for an instant with his eyes still on his work, then, as he was turning to another part of the intricate mechanism, he ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... physiological or vital response.—I now proceed to a demonstration of the fact that whatever be the mechanism by which they are brought about, these plant responses are physiological in their character. As the investigations described in the next few chapters will show, they furnish an accurate index of physiological activity. For ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... subject of debate was the Nottingham Frame-breaking Bill. Workmen were rioting and wrecking because their labour had been displaced by the introduction of machinery, and Byron's view was that "we must not allow mankind to be sacrificed to improvements in mechanism"—"the maintenance of the industrious poor is of greater consequence than the enrichment of monopolists"—"I have seen the state of these miserable men, and it is a disgrace to a civilised country." The speech was well received. The impression produced two days later ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... had twice gone over every part of these magnificent establishments. I had seen at the Bank the spirit of order operating like predestination, compelling the will of man to act necessarily and continually with all the precision of mechanism. I had beheld human creatures, called clerks, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... is not surprised at the regular motion of the ocean; he will never draw from it theological conclusions. The phenomena of nature prove the existence of a God only to some prejudiced men, who have been early taught to behold the finger of God in every thing whose mechanism could embarrass them. In the wonders of nature, the unprejudiced philosopher sees nothing but the power of nature, the permanent and various laws, the necessary effects of different combinations ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... causal order and assures us of our freedom, immortality, and God. It is because we possess this deeper source of truth in practical reason that freedom and an ideal kingdom in which purpose reigns are vouchsafed to us, and that we can free ourselves from the mechanism of the natural order. It is moral truth that both sets us free and demonstrates our freedom, and that makes harmony possible between the mechanical theory of science and the teleological conception of philosophy. The scientific understanding would plunge us into determinism ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... clearness the last sad chapter of the tale of Peter, Peter who had made me so intimately his confidante, whose love and hopes and solitary strivings I knew all about. Struck down in the moment of his triumph by a great stupid lump of soulless stone, by a blind, relentless mechanism which had been at work from the beginning, timing that rock to fall—just then. Not the moment before, not the moment after, out of an eternity of moments, but at that one instant when Peter stooped for the last of his brown bags—and then I rejected this, and knew that there was ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... the instrument, removed some plugs, turned some screws, and finally placed in his pocket a small concealed part of the mechanism. Then he ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... weight, are arranged in line upon each side of the chain of buckets of the dredging machine. See Figs. 1 and 2. The battering rams, suspended by chains, are raised by hydraulic power to a height varying from 1.50 to 6 meters (4 ft. 11 in. to 19 ft. 8 in.), and are then let fall upon the rock. The mechanism of the battering rams is carried by a metallic cage which can be moved forward or backward by the aid of steam as the needs of the work require. A series of five battering rams gives from 200 to 300 ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... stairs. Across the end, under the front windows, was a workbench, with a variety of carpenter's tools, few in number, and of the most useful kind. On the bench was an unfinished piece of work, whose intended use would have puzzled a philosopher, if several similar specimens of mechanism, completed and practically applied, had not appeared in the cellar to explain ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... I know is that Dick wants to build a heavy steel hull, and he is going to put something inside it that will take us out into space. Only occasionally do I see a little light as he tries to explain the mechanism of the ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... present, the new evidence that I produce, the interpretation that I place on certain acts of which the public has seen only the exterior manifestations without being able to discover the secret reasons or the invisible mechanism, all establish, if not an intimacy, at least amicable relations ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... him to make the offer. The way she had addressed him was not ingratiating, but he delighted in examining any fine mechanism and he had never handled such ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... in the creek was barely three feet deep, Officer Valden sprang from the car, holding his right hand, which had been caught in the brake mechanism. ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock
... static tests can be used for transverse bending, compression, tension, shear, and cleavage. A common form consists of three main parts, namely: (1) the straining mechanism, (2) the weighing apparatus, and (3) the machinery for ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... the north of Europe and Asia, from the marshes of the Baltic to the banks of the Amoor and the shores of the Pacific Ocean.[38] The languages of all those peoples, though various enough, had certain features in common. No one of them reached the delicate and complex mechanism of internal and terminal inflexion; they were guiltless of the subtle processes by which Aryans and Semites expressed the finest shades of thought, and, by declining the substantive and conjugating the ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... nickeled tube that carried the dripping water into the space over the glass bowl, had a second tube within it; through which his assistant from the adjoining room either blew, or sent by some mechanism, the chemicals (probably potassium) that would take fire and ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... relinquishing himself completely to the will of the old man. During the supper, which Droom prepared with elaborate care, and far into the night, the young man sat and listened without interest to the garrulous talk of his host, who explained the mechanism and ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... regardless of appearances; others rolled aside, bent upon placing some little distance between themselves and the invader. Bluff was trying to work the mechanism of his gun in order to secure a second shot, but as so often happens when the hunter is excited, he failed to accomplish what should have been ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... metaphors, who was unable to discover better similes in its praise. But what is the oil called which trickles down upon the hammers and stampers? And how would it console a workman who chanced to get one of his limbs caught in the mechanism to know that this oil was trickling over him? Passing over this simile as bad, let us turn our attention to another of Strauss's artifices, whereby he tries to ascertain how he feels disposed towards the universe; this question of Marguerite's, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... as on the last day of his life he sits discoursing with his friends, still holds good. He is discussing the same old question, whether there is anything more than force, material, mechanism in the world. He says that one might assign as "the cause why I am sitting here that my body is composed of bones and muscles; that the bones are solid and separate, and that the muscles can be contracted and extended, and are all inclosed ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... calm, but within his heart a storm was raging. Rather to the surprise of the spectators, he took the weapon, turned it over curiously in his hands, for it was the first German rifle he had handled, examined the mechanism of the lock, then raised his eyes to the motionless figure of the ...
— The Children of France • Ruth Royce
... there was some inaccuracy in former drawings of the species, I had the specimen suspended and drawn with great care by Mr. Edward Forbes. This position explained the mechanism of the mouth, showing its great size, even in the short Balaena Whales; its great capacity in the Mysticetus ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... direction, Darwin soon noticed that a good deal was occurring in an entirely unmystical and even unmeaning way of which the older speculative Deist-Evolutionists had taken little or no account. Nowadays, when we are turning in weary disgust and disillusion from Neo-Darwinism and Mechanism to Vitalism and Creative Evolution, it is difficult to imagine how this new departure of Darwin's could possibly have appealed to his contemporaries as exciting, agreeable, above all as hopeful. Let me therefore ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... mother, who is the mainspring of the smoothly running mechanism of the ideal home, will be scientifically trained for her position. Her "domestic science" will no longer be open to the criticism that it is not science at all, nor will she feel that her business is unworthy of scientific treatment. Always she will keep ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... night's rest was vouchsafed at last. Dick threw off the Arab robes he had worn since Abdur Kad'r and he climbed the hill overlooking Suleiman's Well. He opened and closed the breech of his heavy double-barreled Express rifle to make sure that the sand clouds had not clogged its mechanism, and fingered ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... of the rattlesnake's signal, like the shaking of dry peas in a pod, springs instinctively aside, even though he knows nothing of snakes. How much more, therefore, would a suspicious waiter, whose nerves were all alert for the soft, deadly purr of dynamite mechanism, spoil everything the moment his hand touched the bag? Yes, Dupre reluctantly admitted to himself, the handbag theory was not practical. It led to either self-destruction ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... was employed at a watchmaker's of repute. He spent all his working life with a magnifying glass in his eye, peering into the mechanism of watches, adjusting the delicate pivots and springs on which their lives moved. His occupation had perhaps encouraged in him a habit of introspection. Perhaps he found the human machine as worthy of interest as the works of watches and clocks. Anyhow, ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... front of the house and Eugene Morgan jump lightly down from it. The car was of a new pattern, low and long, with an ample seat in the tonneau, facing forward; and a professional driver sat at the wheel, a strange figure in leather, goggled out of all personality and seemingly part of the mechanism. ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... hearth. My grandfather stepped upon it, seized one of the bronze sconces above the mantel and gave it a sharp turn. At the same moment, Bates, upon another chair, grasped the companion bronze and wrenched it sharply. Instantly some mechanism creaked in the great oak chimney-breast and the long oak panels swung open, disclosing a steel door ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... he fell upon his knees, and his fingers sought the small projections of the gear on the inside of the door He could no more budge the mechanism than a child could open a ...
— Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat - or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure • Victor Appleton
... superstition; pilgrimages were suppressed, and many wonder-working images were pulled down and destroyed. The famous Rood of Boxley, a figure whose contortions had once imposed on the people, was taken to the market-place at Maidstone,[1058] and the ingenious mechanism, whereby the eyes and lips miraculously opened and shut, was exhibited to the vulgar gaze.[1059] Probably these little devices had already sunk in popular esteem, for the Blood of St. Januarius could not be treated at Naples to-day in the same cavalier fashion as ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... brought an encyclopaedic knowledge to bear upon his task; he can give an exact account of the machinery of a provincial printing-press; he can write a dissertation on the methods of military organization; he can reveal the secret springs in the mechanism of Paris journalism; he is absolutely at home in the fraudulent transactions of money-makers, the methods of usurers, the operations of high finance. And into all this mass of details he can infuse the spirit of life. Perhaps his masterpiece in realistic description is his account of ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... movements against these parapets, as they had stood there meditating on the aspect of affairs. In the case of the more friable bricks and stones even the flat faces were worn into hollows by the same mixed mechanism. The masonry of the top was clamped with iron at each joint; since it had been no uncommon thing for desperate men to wrench the coping off and throw it down the river, in reckless ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... great Mind which put harmony into the movements of celestial bodies, could also give it to the internal mechanism of society. We will see the advantages of this invention escaping from the individual, to become for ever the common patrimony ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... Charles he also sent the image of an ass, which, by touching a certain string, did open its mouth and wave its ears in a manner most curious to behold, wherewith the infant was infinitely delighted, as was I, without inquiring at that time into the exquisite mechanism whereby the extraordinary demonstrations were produced. But in the course of little more than a month he was led, by his inquiring turn of mind, to pry into the mystery; and in the pursuit of knowledge—laudable surely in a ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... once, a film moving horizontally across his large eyes and retracting, to show that he understood. Due to the difficulty of using his artificial speech mechanism, he refrained from speaking until ...
— The Indulgence of Negu Mah • Robert Andrew Arthur
... forward the dough between the different operations pass round rollers, which are each operated by an adjustable silent clutch feed, in place of the usual ratchet and pawl mechanism. Movement is given to each feed by the connecting links shown, to each of which motion is in turn imparted by the bell crank lever placed beside the eccentric. This lever is actuated by a crank pin on the main shaft, working into a block sliding in a slot in the shorter or horizontal ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... this very opulent bachelor was passionately fond of weapons. He used to buy pistols, revolvers, daggers, hang them on his wall and show them to acquaintances. He prided himself on them, and was quite a specialist on the mechanism of the revolver. Mitya, without stopping to think, went straight to him, and offered to pawn his pistols to him for ten roubles. The official, delighted, began trying to persuade him to sell them outright. But Mitya would not consent, so the young man gave him ten roubles, protesting that nothing ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... family and the community. It struggles to tear itself loose from the pitiless machinery of government, hemming every life within its iron pale. The Cossack took refuge in the wild freedom of nomadic life, and the Old Believer was equally averse to giving in to the complicated mechanism of government. He would have nothing to do with the census, with passports or stamped paper. He strove to elude the new systems of taxation and conscription, and to this day some of the Raskolniks are in a state of systematic revolt against ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... while they squatted on Nature's mattress of fragrant pine needles (see illustration, page 230), he told about leaves and their work, cells and their place, roots and their arrangement, tendrils and their mechanism, flowers and their devices, seeds and their travels. The third talk was upon the evolution of plant life, law and logic of creation, perpetuation of life in the lower forms, edible and poisonous mushrooms, and the perpetuation of life in the higher forms. The ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... even more expenditure of thought than in the composition of individual character and situations, otherwise he would be like the conductor of a puppet-show who has entangled his wires, so that the puppets receive from their mechanism quite different movements from those which ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... from himself to God, who gave him the companion by whose example he was betrayed into sin, instead of placing it upon the woman, who was the guilty cause. Thus he refuses or neglects to denounce the sin; but takes for granted that woman was as God made her, and acted in accordance with her mechanism. Hence, Adam argued, if any one was responsible, it was her Maker. She acted in accordance with the nature which had been given her. We hear this doctrine advanced daily. "I am what God made me." A cotton mill weaves ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... contemplation; bent and swung himself about; crept on his knees, and stuck his head into corners and between the machines, for he would know everything so exactly; he would see the screw in the propelling vessels, understand their mechanism and effect under water—and the water itself poured like hail-drops down his forehead. He fell unconscious, backwards into my arms, or else he would have been drawn into the machinery, and been crushed: he looked at me, and ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... to control its muscles; above all, the extraordinary and sudden lapse of a memory which had hitherto been wonderful for his years. There was something not right, some hidden wheel broken or locked in the mysterious mechanism that we call ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... in a striking part. Then the place for him to do this is the pit. Painters, I know, always get as close up to a picture they want to copy as they can; and I should imagine actors would want to do the same, in order to look into the texture and mechanism of their art. Even theatrical critics can make nothing of a part that they see from the boxes. If you sit in the stage-box, your attention is drawn off by the company and other circumstances. If you get to a distance ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... electro-magnetic mechanism an arrangement for converting the pull of the electro-magnet varying in intensity greatly over its range of action, into a pull of sensibly equal strength throughout. The use of a rocking lever acting ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... since 1999; thousands of Ituri refugees from the Congo continue to flee the fighting primarily into Uganda; 90,000 Angolan refugees were repatriated by 2004 with the remainder in the DRC expected to return in 2005; in 2005, DRC and Rwanda established a border verification mechanism to address accusations of Rwandan military supporting Congolese rebels and the DRC providing rebel Rwandan "Interhamwe" forces the means and bases to attack Rwandan forces; the location of the boundary in the broad Congo River with the Republic of the Congo is ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... sense of that which had eaten him like a vile leprosy. Mental futility, spiritual futility. Of physical he did not know. All that was left him of his youth was a belief in God. At sea he was too close to the immense mechanism of the stars, on land too close to milling millions, not to believe, not to accept ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... powerful blast of powder had been placed in the hollow of the stone-work, where the mechanism for opening and closing the great sluice-gates was fixed, and the result of the explosion was a huge chasm in the stone, and one of the gates blown right off, leaving the way ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... so enduring and its condition so tolerable. That has often made me say that I am not astonished men are sometimes sick, but that I am astonished they are sick so little and not always. This also ought to make us the more esteem the divine contrivance of the mechanism of animals, whose Author has made machines so fragile and so subject to corruption[131] and yet so capable of maintaining themselves: for it is Nature which cures us rather than medicine. Now this very fragility is a consequence of the nature of things, unless we are ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... generous and liberally cultivated nature might find a refuge and congenial souls in either of these two persuasions, but he objected to some points of the formal creed of the older church, and especially to the mechanism which renders it hard to get free from its outworn and offensive formulae,—remembering how Archbishop Tillotson wished in vain that it could be "well rid of" the Athanasian Creed. This, and the fact that the meeting-house was nearer than the chapel, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... processes by which thought moves. It was the machine he loved, not what the machine makes. The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise. So much, indeed, did the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he despised language, or looked upon it as an incomplete instrument of expression. Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the Muse's hollow hill creates and answers its own voice; ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... older men know nothing of the mechanism of the human body, as dissection is unknown to native science. Dr. Nosoki told me that he relies mainly on the application of the moxa and on acupuncture in the treatment of acute diseases, and in chronic ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... are several ways of constructing a gun-trap. Of course a gun is the principal part of the mechanism, and the trigger pulled by a string is the main point of the contrivance. In some countries the bait is tied to the string, and the animal on seizing the bait tightens the string, draws the trigger, and shoots itself. In this way, however, there is always some uncertainty as to the result. ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... prejudices and superstitions at variance with nature, and study natural organization to learn the intention of the Creator; learn the nature of plants, the organization of the earth, its components how formed, and of what—all animal creation—the mechanism of the universe, its motions—the exact perfection of every creation for the design of that creation; see and know God's will, and God's wisdom, and God's power in all of them; descend to the minor and most infinitesimal creation; learn its organization, and see God here with ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... of each kind there are numerous varieties—are capable of conversion, in the animal mechanism, into fat and oil. The non-plastic food substances do not contain nitrogen, hence they are commonly termed non-nitrogenous elements. The oily and fatty matters contain a large proportion of carbon, their next most ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... sixteenth century. We are apt to forget that alongside Shakespeare and at his heels other dramatists were supplying material for the theatre. The influence of Marlowe and particularly of Kyd, whose Spanish Tragedy with its crude mechanism of ghosts and madness and revenge caught the popular taste, worked itself out in a score of journeymen dramatists, mere hack writers, who turned their hand to plays as the hacks of to-day turn their hand to novels, and with no more literary merit than that caught as an echo from better ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... not read that early in the seventeenth century there appeared in Paris the philosopher Descartes, accompanied by the figure of a beautiful woman? She moved, spoke, and seemed life itself; but Descartes declared she was an automaton, a masterpiece of mechanism he himself had made. Yet many refused to believe his story, declaring he had by sorcery compelled a spirit to serve him in this form. He ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... secured my head had been loosened and the mechanism of the chair reversed, allowing me my freedom. I looked around the room in wonder. There stood the littered card-table and the empty glasses of the previous night, while the air was still heavy with the ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... phase in the Bain, that it was "dooll, varry dooll, but the mutton was good." I was a fool to go there; of course one cannot expect people with their livers and their spleens, and their entire internal tubular mechanism out of order, to be chirpy and frolicsome. There were a good many ladies there, pale, I could not quite make out whether from ill-health or from violet-powder; but I think the latter had something to do with their pallor, for, after drinking, ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... compact automatic pistol, a blunted shape no larger than his palm. It was a beautiful mechanism, and as with his silken razors, merely to hold it, to test the smooth action, gave ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... is itself instinctive. Young animals, notably the monkey and the child, fall spontaneously to imitating when they reach a certain age. Imitation shows itself to be instinctive in the case of the mocking bird, the parrot, etc. Furthermore, the mechanism of this function of imitation is now very well known. The principle of psychology recognised above under the phrase Kinaesthetic Equivalents, teaches us that the idea of a movement, coming into the mind through sight or some ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... no combination of material atoms—no mechanism, however strong and useful—that shall not dissolve and be rearranged, and take on ever higher forms of expression. This is, and has always been the unfailing law of progression, of the outworking of the ascending series. It involves all circumstances, and all earthly ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... hydraulics everything was done— the hoisting of ammunition, loading, training: guns intact, guns wrecked by the Dreadnoughts; and shimmering kitchens, which reeked a smell of heat, and the dairy-maids, and the line of kine, and the row of prison-doors, and the mechanism of ventilation, fans and blowers, the drainage-system, and the dynamos for lighting, for supplying power to motors, for heating, and for shimmering forth rich in the search-lights; and the central ballroom, the clothes ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... of trick pictures, or when some accident scene is shown, the camera takes views up to a certain point with real persons posing before it. Then the mechanism is stopped, "dummies" are substituted for real personages, and the taking of the film goes on. So the little "break" caused by Mr. Sneed could be ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... usefulness and thrift. Has it ever occurred to you what a wonderful piece of mechanism is that hand with which Nature has equipped you for seizing the oars of life's activities? Galen, the famous anatomist, after a prolonged study of the human hand, conceiving it to be the proximate instrument of the soul, was ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... him; two of his sons, quite elderly themselves, attend him almost to the front, so that he may have to make but a few steps unsupported. The old man is frosted with age, and moves stiffly, like a piece of mechanism rather than a living creature, nor is there any expression—neither smile nor interest—upon his absolutely immobile features. He wears breeches and gaiters, and a blue coat cut in the style of two generations since. There is a small clear space in the midst of ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... Creator, expressly directed to these purposes. We are on all sides surrounded by bodies wonderfully curious, and no less wonderfully diversified." Trifling, therefore, and, perhaps, contemptible, as to the unthinking may seem the study of a butterfly, yet, when we consider the art and mechanism displayed in so minute a structure, the fluids circulating in vessels so small as almost to escape the sight, the beauty of the wings and covering, and the manner in which each part is adapted for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 403, December 5, 1829 • Various
... Professor Page, has from time to time been noticed in our Journal, and we have now to give a further account of this interesting mechanism, as furnished by an American periodical. It appears that several of these machines have lately been submitted to critical examination by competent authority at Washington, and with very favourable conclusions. The principle has already been explained—namely, the alternate ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... was made.[9] It is tempting to set this down as a Johnsonian prejudice, and to deny or retort the comparison. Fielding, we might say, paints flesh and blood; whereas Richardson consciously constructs his puppets out of frigid abstractions. Lovelace is a bit of mechanism; Tom Jones a human being. In fact, however, such comparisons are misleading. Nothing is easier than to find an appropriate ticket for the objects of our criticism, and summarily pigeon-hole Richardson as an idealist and ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... then each class at the Academy—four companies—came out upon the grassy plain upon the double-quick. Their motions were light and swift, and yet so accurately timed that each company seemed one perfect piece of mechanism. A cadet stood at a certain point with a small color flying. Abreast of this their advance was checked as suddenly as if they had been turned to stone, and the entire corps was in line. Then followed a series of skilful manoeuvres, in which ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... started a new hare. I have got a glimpse of a method of causing a piston-rod to move up and down perpendicularly, by only fixing it to a piece of iron upon the beam ... I think it one of the most ingenious simple pieces of mechanism I have contrived. ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... eternally feminine. One should not attempt athletics unless she is sure that her physique will endure this. A strain may wreck one's health and looks. Most women are built like watches—one thing wrong upsets the whole mechanism. ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... N.Y., 1887; and for an able and impartial historical survey, Taussig's Tariff History of the United States, N.Y., 1888, may be recommended. For a lucid view of currency, see Jevons's Money and the Mechanism of ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... wrong in the calculation. The psychologist knows that the mental elements cannot be brought under such a simple formula according to which good will and insight are sufficient; he knows that the mental mechanism which is at work there has its own complicated laws, which must be considered with the same care for detail as those technical schemes for improvement. The psychologist is not astonished that though the technical improvements ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... say, all these measures, efforts, and plans—which were not at all worse than others issued in similar circumstances—did not affect the essence of the matter but, like the hands of a clock detached from the mechanism, swung about in an arbitrary and aimless ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... followed a regular pillage; everything went, from matches to toothpicks. Meanwhile the bell rings and the train starts. Not one of us disturbs himself, and while sitting on the walk, I explain to the painter how the tubes work, the mechanism of the bell. The train backs down over the rails to take us aboard. We ascend into our compartments again and we pass in review the booty we had seized. To tell the truth, there was little variety of food. Pork-butcher's ...
— Sac-Au-Dos - 1907 • Joris Karl Huysmans
... tears, and looked at the doctor in hopes that he might suggest some plan by which she could accomplish her end. To him she was but another case of a badly working mechanism. Either from the blow on her head or from hereditary influences she had a predisposition to a fixed idea. That tendency had cultivated this aberration about the woman her husband preferred to her. Should she happen on this woman in her wanderings about Chicago, there would be one ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Whereby we are led back to our old question, what sap is, and where it comes from, with the now superadded question, whether the young pith is a mere succulent sponge, or an active power, and constructive mechanism, nourished by the abundant ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... real wonder! We just begin to have glimpses of the effects of the mind upon the body. To me, Akron, the faculty has set too great store upon herbs and bitter drafts, and cutting with the knife. I would fain have the soul acknowledged more, our therapy built on the dual mechanism of mind and substance. For if an idea can lead to the apparent death of the whole body, so might other ideas bring about the apparent death of a part of the body, like, for example, a paralysis of the members, or of the senses of sight, feeling, hearing; and in ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... in question was laid with all the curves unnecessarily quick, even those in the "pass-bies," I thought it expedient to employ differential gear, as illustrated at D, Fig. 1, which is a sketch plan showing the mechanism employed. M is a Siemens electric motor running at 650 revolutions per minute; E is a combination of box gearing, frictional clutch, and chain pinion, and from this pinion a steel chain passes around the chain-wheel, H, which is free to revolve upon the axle, and carries ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various |
