"Plasticity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... now described all the differences in the skeletons which I have observed. It is impossible not to be struck with the high degree of variability or plasticity of many of the bones. We see how erroneous the often-repeated statement is, that only the crests of the bones which give attachment to muscles vary in shape, and that only parts of slight importance become ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... dependence of thought and action upon the nervous system, and particularly upon the brain. To understand habit we must look beyond thought and action and consider some of the fundamental characteristic features of the nervous system. One such characteristic is the plasticity of the nervous substance. If I bend a piece of paper and crease it, the crease will remain even after the paper is straightened out again. The paper is plastic, and plasticity means simply that the substance offers some resistance to adopting a new form, ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... which we regard with such horror as Orientals feel for low-necked dresses and round dances. Orientals use dress to conceal the contour of the form. The waist of a woman is made to disappear by a girdle. To an Oriental a corset, which increases the waist line and the plasticity of the figure, is the extreme of indecency—far worse than nudity. It seems like an application of the art of the courtesan to appeal to sensuality.[1408] Perhaps the most instructive case of all is that of the Tuareg men, who keep the mouth always covered. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... they lack all sense of style; All plasticity of limb Lacks that race. Full surely they ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music—which is the art of arts. And it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... early character was plasticity and fickleness. I was mortified by this exposure of my ignorance, and disgusted with my former course of reading. I now set myself violently to the study of history. With my turn of mind, and with the preposterous habits which I had been daily acquiring, I could not fail to make ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... each particular variation was from the beginning of{256} all time pre-ordained, the plasticity of the organization, which leads to many injurious deviations of structure, as well as that redundant power of reproduction which inevitably leads to a struggle for existence, and, as a consequence, to the Natural Selection ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... but very great prolongation of infancy had produced two effects: the lengthening of the care of children tended to differentiate the horde into family-groups, and the lengthening of the period of youthful mental plasticity made it more possible for a new generation to improve upon the ideas and customs of its predecessors.[65] In these two concomitant processes—the development of the family and the increase of mental plasticity, or ability to adopt new methods and strike out into ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... too well to worship unreservedly any God of whose character she can be an adequate expression. Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds from nature; but none the less so all we know of evil. Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference,—a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral {44} universe. To such a harlot we owe no allegiance; with her as a whole we can establish no moral communion; and we are free in our dealings with her several parts to obey or destroy, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... great patience and remarkable ingenuity, allow us to think that there really exist certain intermediary forms between crystals and liquids in which bodies still retain a peculiar structure, and consequently act on light, but nevertheless possess considerable plasticity. ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... decrescendo from a choir. To a group of musical enthusiasts in Chicago he suddenly suggested a trip to the Cincinnati May Festival. Speaking to the boys of Upper Canada College, he drew from his pocket a piece of putty to illustrate the plasticity of character. Standing amid heaps of luggage at the docks in St. John, he looked at the immigrant sheds and said, "What a very human picture!" Pocketing the proof of an hospital article, which as proprietor of the Toronto News ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... opportunity lies in its strategic element. In every opportunity two or more forces meet in such a way that the one force so lends itself to the other as momentarily to yield plasticity. Nature is full of these strategic times. Iron passes into the furnace cold and unyielding; coming out it quickly cools and refuses the mold; but midway is a moment when fire so lends itself to iron, and iron so yields its force to flame as that ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... he disliked had been symbolic to him of a difference in temperament. Bobby had no predilections for perfumes or poets. She blindly accepted his judgment of all things, and if she sometimes failed to conform to his wishes, it was through forgetfulness and not opposition. He gloried in her plasticity; after all, was it not among the ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... elegance. Where was the 'Sunday school teacher'? Transformed!—in five weeks—into this vision that was sitting opposite to him? Really, women were too wonderful! His male sense felt a kind of scorn for the plasticity of the sex. ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... however, they introduced certain modifications of their own. The crude brick of Nineveh and its neighbourhood was used while damp, and, when put in place, did not greatly differ from pise.[171] Spread out in wide horizontal courses, the slabs of soft clay adhered one to another by their plasticity, through the effect of the water with which they were impregnated and that of the pressure exercised by the courses above.[172] The building was thus, in effect, nothing but a single huge block. Take it as a whole, put aside certain parts, such as the doorways and drains, that ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... are very far as yet from that stage in the history of Wills in which they become powerful instruments in modifying society through the stimulus they give to the circulation of property and the plasticity they produce in proprietary rights. No such consequences as these appear in fact to have been associated with the Testamentary power even by the latest Roman lawyers. It will be found that Wills were never ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... weakened individual interest, want of plasticity and enterprise, routine torpidity, are in a measure applicable to every large business as compared with a smaller. Adam Smith considered them fatal barriers to the growth of joint-stock enterprise outside a certain narrowly-defined range. But the economies of ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... luxuriantly in every condition of heat or cold, wetness or dryness, capable of supporting fruit-culture in America. So many of the kinds have horticultural possibilities that it seems certain that some grape can be domesticated in all of the agricultural regions of the country, their natural plasticity indicating, even if it were not known from experience, that ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... and critical scenes, or those which specially attract their imagination. On such a point every author must obviously be a law unto himself. From the theoretical point of view, one can only approve the practice, since it certainly makes for plasticity. It is evident that a detached scene, written while those that lead up to it are as yet but vaguely conceived, must be subject to indefinite modification.[13] In several of Ibsen's very roughest drafts, we find short passages of dialogue ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... companion's saying to him in the vestibule, when they had taken their hats and sticks and were on the point of going out: "Lord, man, how can you be so impenetrably dense? Don't you see that she's really of the softest finest material that breathes, that she's a perfect flower of plasticity, that everything you may have an apprehension about will drop away from her like the dead leaves from a rose and that you may make of her any perfect and enchanting thing you yourself have the ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... the plasticity of the material. A perfectly plastic substance would have no elasticity and the smallest forces would cause a set. Lead and moist clay are nearly plastic and wood possesses this property to a greater or less extent. The plasticity of wood is increased by wetting, heating, and especially ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... guess" and "That's so," but her fresh Western ideas, and her infinite play of fancy in the queen's English. She turned it as a potter turns his clay. In Britain our mother tongue has crystallised long since into set forms and phrases. In America it has the plasticity of youth; it is fertile in novelty—nay, even in surprises. And Melissa knew how to twist it deftly into unexpected quips and incongruous conjunctions. Her talk ran on like a limpid brook, with a musical ripple playing ever on the surface. As for Bernard, he helped ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various
... his native rocks, with two claws as usual. True, in these cases the tail and the claw don't bud out in turn into a new lizard or a new lobster. But that is a penalty the higher organisms have to pay for their extreme complexity. They have lost that plasticity, that freedom of growth, which characterizes the simpler and more primitive forms of life; in their case the power of producing fresh organisms entire from a single fragment, once diffused equally over the whole body, is now confined to certain specialized ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... the non-dental Saturdays, repaired to this seat of joy with the easy Albert—he at home there and master of the scene to a degree at which, somehow, neither of us could at the best arrive; he quite moulded, truly, in those years of plasticity, as to the aesthetic bent and the determination of curiosity, I seem to make out, by the general Barnum association and revelation. It was not, I hasten to add, that I too didn't, to the extent of my minor chance, drink at the spring; ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... intelligence is given, and we have only to continue the process. Where the vehicle for the transmission of things past is poetry, then we have them presented in that succession, and with that modification of force, a resilient plasticity, now advancing, now recoiling, insinuating and grappling, that ere this material and mental warfare is over, we find the facts thus transmitted are incorporated with our psychical existence. And in tradition is it otherwise?—Every man tells the tale ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... eyes swept over the form beside me, as she sat cold, impassive; her attitude one of quiet ease, her whole mien the essence of calm self-possession. That excess of pride and dignity and supercilious arrogance that in Lucia replaced, at times, her seductive plasticity at others, had always exercised a violent attraction over me. And now, when this pride seemed joined with a positive hostility to myself, it failed to repel; it simply raised to its highest pitch a savage and acrimonious ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... analyze the mental processes which his tests bring into play. It is true that many of Binet's earlier assumptions proved untenable, and in this event he was always ready, with exceptional candor and intellectual plasticity, to acknowledge his error and to plan a ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... semi-solid or viscous liquids at air temperature, they melt on the application of heat and can be made sufficiently fluid to mix with the mineral aggregates that may be used in the road surface. Upon cooling, the bituminous materials return to the previous state and impart a certain amount of plasticity to the mixture, at the same time serving as a binding or cementing agent, which is sufficiently stable for many classes of ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... conscious life of human beings, and there came, moreover, on the part of parents, the beginning of feelings and actions not purely self-regarding. But still more, the period of infancy was a period of plasticity. The career of each individual being no longer wholly predetermined by the careers of its ancestors, it began to become teachable. Individuality of character also became possible at the same time, and for the same reason. All ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... sleep, and set like a clay face left on its cheek in a hot and dry studio. She was still only in part awake, however, and by the time she had extinguished the night-light and given her patient his tonic, she had recovered enough plasticity. "Well, isn't that grand! We've had another good night," she said as she departed to ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... inviolable the stamp that God has set upon his creatures; and if man is able to influence their organization in some slight degree, it is because the Creator has given to his relations with the animals he has intended for his companions the same plasticity which he has allowed to every other side of his life, in virtue of which he may in some sort mould and shape it to his own ends, and be held responsible also for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... mixture of clay and chopped straw or reeds, worked into a stiff paste with water. The clay was the river mud from the banks of the Nile, and as this had not sufficient cohesion in itself, the chopped straw (or reeds) was added as a binding material. The addition of such substances increases the plasticity of wet clay, especially if the mixture is allowed to stand for some days before use; so that the action of the chopped straw was twofold; a fact possibly known to the Egyptians. These sun-dried bricks, or "adobes," are ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... — N. softness, pliableness &c adj.; flexibility; pliancy, pliability; sequacity^, malleability; ductility, tractility^; extendibility, extensibility; plasticity; inelasticity, flaccidity, laxity. penetrability. clay, wax, butter, dough, pudding; alumina, argil; cushion, pillow, feather bed, down, padding, wadding; foam. mollification; softening &c v.. V. render soft &c adj.; soften, mollify, mellow, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... gracefully and awkwardly, how to make both fantastic and realistic gestures, always unconventional gestures, because conventions stamp the imitator. She must peer into every period, glance at every nation. Every nerve centre must be prepared to express any adumbration of plasticity. Many of the new operas, Carmen, La Dolores, Salome, Elektra, to name a few, call for interpretative dancing of the first order. Madama Butterfly and Lakme demand a knowledge of national characteristics. Pelleas et Melisande and Ariane et Barbe-Bleue ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... eager and impassioned activities. Growth is not something done to them; it is something they do. The positive and constructive aspect of possibility gives the key to understanding the two chief traits of immaturity, dependence and plasticity. ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... his environment, these men, and they were moulding the clay of him into a more ferocious thing than had been intended by Nature. Nevertheless, Nature had given him plasticity. Where many another animal would have died or had its spirit broken, he adjusted himself and lived, and at no expense of the spirit. Possibly Beauty Smith, arch-fiend and tormentor, was capable of breaking White Fang's spirit, but as yet there were ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... expression, as is shown by the minute indications in which every page of his work abounds. The crescendos, often leading to a sudden drop to pianissimo, the long stretches of hushed suspense, the violent sforzandos on unimportant beats, the plasticity of periodic formation, all these workings of a rich imagination first gave music its place as the supreme art ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... self-interest, keeping men of far greater abilities to play like puppets, and despising those whom it has brought down to its own level. The petty fixed idea naturally prevails; it has the advantage of persistence over the plasticity ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... is thoroughly washed and partially dried. Camphor is then added, and the whole is ground together and thoroughly mixed. At this stage coloring matter may be put in. A little alcohol increases the plasticity of the mass, which is then treated for some time to powerful hydraulic pressure. Then comes breaking up the cakes and feeding the fragments between heated rolls, by which the amalgamation of the whole is completed. Its perfect plasticity allows it to be rolled into sheets, drawn ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... angularities—father or child? Should we demand of our elders, who are burdened by numerous cares, and whose lives are for the most part hurried and difficult, that they adapt themselves to our attitude of mind? Is it not meet that we, who still retain the plasticity of youth, make advances? Without surrendering an iota of our own individuality we might cultivate that sympathetic insight that would reveal the inestimable worth of our spiritual heritage. Not merely reverence ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... persist, and the instinct of personal rivalry? In how many has the crude desire for material ownership or the impulse to punish an affront by physical attack died out? Experimental evidence is even proving that the general plasticity of the nervous system, which has always been considered to be transitory, is of very, very much longer duration ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... even feel inclined to write every day. We are reading together the Divina Commedia,—or rather, its last part. There was a time when I felt more attracted by the awful plasticity of the Inferno. Now I like to plunge into the luminous mist, peopled with still more luminous spirits, of the Dantesque heaven. At times it seems as if amid all that radiance I see the dear, familiar features, and my sorrow becomes almost ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... a fresh difficulty. The Japanese face is exceedingly expressive. When a native of the Island Empire smiles or scowls, exhibits surprise or fear, he apparently does these things with his whole soul. Such facial plasticity provides far more effective concealment of real emotions than the phlegmatic indifference of the Briton, who, in the words of Emerson, requires "pitchforks or the cry ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... more precise. The demand upon her increased steadily as the act went on, and as she met it there slipped into her acting some of her own potentialities of motive and of passion. She offered to the shaping circumstance rich material and abundant plasticity, and when the persecution of her destiny required her to throw herself irretrievably away she did it with a splendid appreciation of large and definite movement that was ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... for a much more personal conception of the subject and a tone of narration in which the finest irony is mingled raise it far above the arid level of the roman experimental. In four generations, whose representatives are placed before us with uncommon plasticity and lifelikeness, the decaying family slowly passes across the stage. From generation to generation the robust, sober business sense is poisoned with a greater and greater infection of morbid feelings and hypersensitive nerves, until finally the vitality of the family ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... XVII.), their reluctance to protrude beyond its limits, and the restricted range and small numerical strength of such protrusions as occur. This seems to be the conservatism of the mature race type, which has lost some of its plasticity and shuns or succumbs to the ordeal of adaptation to contrasted climatic conditions, except when civilization enables it partially to ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple |
