"Tangent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... muzzle-pivoting part of the arrangement, of which, were it worth while to go into its details, we should need some further diagrams to make it quite clear. Nor is it worth while to go into the description of various minor points of refinement about the gun mounting, such as the very exposed long tangent scale seen in the figure, by which the elevation or depression is read off, nor the still more exposed and rather ricketty arrangement by which the rear sight is arranged to rise and fall with the gun, and allowance for dispart avoided. The recoil of the gun is resisted ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... don't want to talk to Winthrop. He's too clever a young man, Winthrop. In the merger case, you remember—had me on the stand for three hours. Made me talk too." The mind of the old man suddenly veered at a tangent. "How the devil can Helen retain him?" he demanded peevishly. "She can't retain him. She hasn't any money. And he's District Attorney too. It's against the law. Is he doing it as a speculation? Does ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... taken an unexpectedly disagreeable turn. Gray had anticipated an unpleasant moment or two, but this—well, it was indeed the crash. Calamity had overtaken him from the very quarter he had least expected and most dreaded, and his mind raced off at a tangent; a dozen ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... I assumed was some obsolete firman. The result was truly amazing, and the scene had some real humour in it. With profound salaams, the Turks unhanded me, helped me to mount, and, as I rode off at a tangent with Andreas at my horse's head, called after me what sounded like friendly farewells. When we were back among the Russians—I don't remember seeing much of the Servians later on that day—Andreas explained that he had passed himself for the Turkish dragoman of a British ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... low to avoid the bullets he sped at a tangent in the opposite direction, for the timber of Wheeling Hill. The Indians afoot could not catch him, no bullet caught him; he would make it—he would make it; there he goes, up the hill. He ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... more explicit. If A B C, in Fig. 16, represent your blade lying flat on the paper, d o the intersection of a plane at right angles to the plane of the paper and also at right angles to the tangent to the curve at the point o, where we will suppose the edges of the blades to meet, it will be seen at a glance that the leverage from o to C is considerable, and that a great strain is thrown upon the thumb which is endeavouring to keep ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... after a very pleasant ride, and clattered up its one long street to the principal hotel; but Mr. Fosbrooke whipped into the yard to the left so rapidly, that our hero, who was not much used to the back seat of a dog-cart, flew off by some means at a tangent to the right, and was consequently degraded in the eyes ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... dashed after it with upraised paddle. The swan made a desperate detour, apparently bent on gaining the water; it ran round a bush, and was almost caught in the arms of the younger squaw, who, leaving her senior in the canoe, had joined in the pursuit. A shriek from the squaw sent it off at a tangent to the left, pinions aloft, and terror depicted on its visage. English Chief also doubled, but a crooked stump caught his foot and sent him headlong into the bush. At that instant, Coppernose, having ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne
... refuge. The tall flag-staff came suddenly into view, and in less than four minutes they would be rushing by. Over forty miles to the hour were they flying now. Big Ben had just let out another notch as they swung into the two-mile tangent, when at the same instant he and Geordie caught sight of three or four black dots dimly bobbing in the midst of a little dust-cloud on the roadway far ahead, and almost at the same instant came from each the low cry, ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... myself. I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering—that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, WHEREVER THEY MAY LEAD. But the reason why he wants sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is PREDESTINED to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the "direct" practical man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... a co-ordinate and living power by right of Christ's institution and express promise, I go along with them; but I soon discover that by the church they meant the clergy, the hierarchy exclusively, and then I fly off from them in a tangent. ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... circumstance. For our surroundings affect us in two ways; subtly and permanently, tinging us through and through as wine tinges water, or, by some violent neighbourhood of antipathetic force, sending us off at a tangent as far as possible from the antagonistic presence that so detestably environs us. The fact that Charlotte Bronte knew chiefly clergymen is largely responsible for 'Shirley,' that satirical eulogy of the Church and apotheosis of Sunday-school teachers. ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... send Creech off on another tangent which wound up in dark, mysterious threats. Then Slone caught the name of Lucy. It abruptly killed ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... Incidence—The angle which a line drawn from the leading to the trailing edge of the plane makes with the horizontal trailing angle between the tangent to the trailing edge of the plane and the chord or a line drawn from the leading to ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... never fall in love with the persons they are expected to, but invariably go off on an unknown tangent of their own, in obedience to the same law of Nature, perhaps, which causes an unusually tall girl to lose her heart to a very diminutive—though ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... Happy Valley ran Market Street, a bias cut across the city that was to be. Market Street is about all that saved that city from making a checker-board of its ground-plan. Market Street flew off at a tangent and set all the south portion of the town at an angle that is rather a relief than anything else that I know of. Who wants to go on forever up one street and down another, and then across town at right angles, as if life were a treadmill ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... been the first of the Danes to break down the barriers of their own exclusive set. To be sure, he realized that in a city like New York it was quite possible for circles of equal choiceness to exist tangent to each other, yet in mutual ignorance of one another; but his years abroad in slower-moving countries had not prepared him for the countless agile performers clambering up and down over the social trapeze. In his father's day, society had stood on ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... following is an example of such a device which was successfully employed in a chute of the above dimensions, 400 ft. long and having a drop of 110 ft. This chute had a maximum inclination of 45 and its lower end curved to a horizontal tangent, running into the storehouse. Near the bottom of the chute a horizontal strip was nailed across the upper edges and to it was nailed the upper end of a 20 ft., 112-in. board, the lower end of which rested on the bottom of the chute. Several pieces of timber ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... general effect to the last example is the work upon another important series of vases. Instead of the simple meandered or zigzag arrangement of parts, two of the dividing lines of the zone run tangent to the neck of the vase on opposite sides, forming arched panels and leaving upright panels between. In the example presented in Fig. 168 the arched areas are filled in with lattice-like arrangements of lines. In others ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... the growing stack, caught it with his pitchfork and threw it on, with a sideways twist, to the man on the lower end who got further and further along as he packed the sheaves, so that the thrower had to increase the tangent of his twist at every throw. Each of the men caught and tossed and placed, always to the moment, with the unending flow of machinery. And again —so often before, but never so keenly as now—was Ishmael struck with the pattern of it all.... This could not surely be the only ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... obviously, is an exact statement of the coincidences of phrase and thought in Shakspere and Montaigne. Not that such coincidences are the main or the only results to be looked for; rather we may reasonably expect to find Shakspere's thought often diverging at a tangent from that of the writer he is reading, or even directly gainsaying it. But there can be no solid argument as to such indirect influence until we have fully established the direct influence, and this can only be done by exhibiting a considerable number of coincidences. ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... study or effort, unless they are remarkably gifted. Many a wife has neglected her mind, body and powers and when some woman with developed powers enters her marriage orbit, she flies off at a tangent, admits defeat and gets a divorce without putting forth an effort to win back the husband who is ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... to Eliminate Momentum. Light Machines Unstable. The Application of Power. The Supporting Surfaces. Area not the Essential Thing. The Law of Gravity. Gravity. Indestructibility of Gravitation. Distance Reduces Gravitational Pull. How Motion Antagonizes Gravity. A Tangent. Tangential Motion Represents Centrifugal Pull. Equalizing the Two Motions. Lift and Drift. Normal Pressure. Head Resistance. Measuring Lift and Drift. Pressure at Different Angles. Difference Between ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... closely, but not necessarily steam tight. The head is screwed in and soldered, and the yoke, G, which receives the connecting rod pin, is screwed into the head. The connecting rod, H, is of steel with brass ends. The lower end, which receives the crank pin, is split, and provided with a tangent screw for taking up wear. The crank pin is secured in the crank disk, I, by a nut on the back. The eccentric rod, J, is of steel, screwed at its lower end into an eccentric strap of cast or wrought iron, which surrounds the eccentric, K. The valve, L, is ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... did see me, for he sprang to the wheel, thrusting the other man aside, and whirled it round and round, hand over hand, at the same time shouting orders of some sort. The vessel seemed to go off at a tangent to its former course and leapt almost instantly ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... off at a tangent and Hollis continued on his way. He found Nellie alone, her brother having gone out on the range. She came out on the porch, hearing his pony's hoofs on the hard sand and rocks of the trail, and there was a sincere welcome in her eyes. It was the first time that he ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... me. But he now appeared wholly incapable of that degree of intellectual concentration which could enable him to examine a subject to its close. He would begin to talk with me seriously enough, and with a due solemnity, about the suit against him; but, in a tangent, he would dart off to the consideration of some trifle, some household matter, or petty affair, of which, at any other time, he must have known that his hearers had no wish to hear. Poor Julia confirmed the conjectures which I entertained, but did not utter, by telling me that her father had ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... to see the New York World fly off at a tangent about this latest of the Wilsonian hobbies. Frank Irving Cobb, the editor of the World, is, as I have often said, the strongest writer on the New York press since Horace Greeley. But he can hardly be called a ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... he seemed to master the bowling, and soon fetched about ten runs in a classic manner. Then I tossed him a Yorker which he missed and it went off at a tangent as soon as it had reached the tree. "Not out," I cried hastily, for the face he turned to ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... tangent, "to see Peter Auber, at the India House," or, "could not wait an instant; they were to meet Josh: Alexander ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... worthy had easy steering to do, so he joined in; he was fond of variety, and he sang some lines in a high falsetto which sounded like the whistling of the gaff (with perhaps a touch of razor-grinding added); then just when you expected him to soar off at a tangent to Patti's topmost A, he let his voice fall to his boots, and emitted a most bloodcurdling bass growl, which carried horrid suggestions of midnight fiends and ghouls and the silent tomb. Still, his mates thought he was a musical prodigy; he was entranced with the sweetness and power ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... have married well. I'm sure her friends have tried hard enough for her. But what can you do with a girl who throws herself at the heads of ineligibles, and when one trots out an unexceptionable PARTI and does one's best to bring them together, goes off at a tangent and lets the whole thing drop through. You know how it was with....' Lady ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... Delight came in, straight from Boston, where she had been doing two days' shopping; and in her hand she carried a parcel in white paper. I was going to say a round parcel, which it would have been but for something which ran out in a sharp tangent from one side, and pushed the wrappings into an odd angle. This she put ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... magnet of my heart was here," he answered half-playfully, half-tenderly. "When that is gone, I shall be likely to fly off in a tangent again." ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... cleverly by a length. 1000 sovs with 3000 in specie. Also ran: J de Bremond's (French horse Bantam Lyons was anxiously inquiring after not in yet but expected any minute) Maximum II. Different ways of bringing off a coup. Lovemaking damages. Though that halfbaked Lyons ran off at a tangent in his impetuosity to get left. Of course gambling eminently lent itself to that sort of thing though as the event turned out the poor fool hadn't much reason to congratulate himself on his pick, the forlorn hope. Guesswork it reduced itself ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Y's, when I was almost in despair, I rammed down him a sort of general statement of the situation as I saw it; at least, I made a start. But soon he stopped me and ran off at a tangent on some historical statement I had made, showing that his mind was not at all on the real subject, the large subject. When I returned to Washington, and he had read my interviews with Grey, Asquith, and Bryce[45], and my own statement, ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... Europe, Ishmael? you and the judge? Well, Merlin did start off at a tangent yesterday from Tanglewood. I suppose he is pining after his child, and has taken a sudden freak to rush over and see her. And as you are the staff of his age, of course, he would not think of undertaking so long a journey without the support ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... strictly correspond with the fact; but, from the parallax, as derived from observation (and if this cannot be depended on certainly, no magnitudes in astronomy can), we find, that the moon does not fall from the tangent of her orbit, as much as the theory requires. As this is of vital importance to the integrity of the theory we are advocating, we have made the computation on Newton's own data, except such as were necessarily inaccurate at the time ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... the boundary on the lower counties on the Delaware (now the State of that name) and the Province of Maryland should be marked out. The boundary was an arc of a circle described around the town of Newcastle, with a given radius, and a meridian line tangent thereto. This was a far more difficult operation than to draw a meridian line from a given point, such as the source of a river. It was thought in 1763 worthy of the attention of the first assistant ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... versos equites iterumque reversos subgraduatorum pellentes agmina ferro, inque pavimentis equitantes undique turmas? proh pudor! o mores, o tempora! forsitan olim exercens operam curvo Moderator aratro inveniet mixtis capitum fragmenta galeris relliquias pugnae, et mentem mortalia tangent. me sacer Aegidius Musarum fana colentem aegide defendit, perque ignea tela, per hostes ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... 'argument' (to a function), used so often as to have become a new word (like 'piano' from 'pianoforte'). "The sine function takes 1 arg, but the arc-tangent function can take either 1 or 2 args." ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... mountains, separating every where the waters of the Adriatic Gulf from those of the Mediterranean. Where it forms an elbow, touching the Mediterranean, as a smaller circle touches a larger, within which it is inscribed, in the manner of a tangent, the name changes from Alps to Apennine. It is the beginning of the Apennine which constitutes the state of Genoa, the mountains there generally falling down in barren, naked precipices into the sea. Wherever there is soil on the lower parts, it is principally in olives ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Law of Motion and the Parallelogram of Forces, instead of the earth going off at a tangent in the direction of A E, it will take a mean path in the direction of A B, its path being curved instead of being a ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... not see the beauty of the valley, but as, far below, he saw Judith trot up to the Day's corral, he was smitten suddenly by his sense of loneliness. Too bad of Jude, he thought, always to be flying off at a tangent like that! A guy couldn't offer the least criticism of her fool horse, that she didn't lose her temper. Funny thing to see a girl with a hot temper. Ordinary enough in a man, but girls were usually just mean and spitty, like cats. A guy had to admit that there ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... code, nor yet binding through the stern behest of mechanical necessity, but a law which finds definition at every moment, and at every moment also marks a direction of progress, being as it were the shifting tangent to ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... youngster," said he, with a significant twinkle in his eye which made the other two chaplains grin, I could see, at some joke they had between them. "I'll try and call on your father, if I can find time before he leaves Portsmouth. Tell him when you get back, that old Tangent ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... suddenly—his mind was off at a tangent, away for the moment from her. Well, they had failed last night in all save murder! Failed—and one of them had already paid the price, and another, in the Tombs awaiting trial, faced the certainty of the death chair in Sing Sing! ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... his arm and began to walk forward gently with her. Something in the grave tenderness with which this was done reminded Fleda irresistibly of the times when she had been a child under his care; and somehow her thoughts went off on a tangent back to the further days of her mother and father and grandfather, the other friends from whom she had had the same gentle protection, which now there was no one in the world to give her. And their images did never seem more winning fair than just then,—when ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... know me to go off on a tangent, without some sort of a string to hold on to? I ain't goin' to swarm all alone! I never heard of such a thing. Though if I couldn't swarm, and the thing was to be done, I say I'd try it. But Savira Golding is going to be ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... that the scraping-knife should never be a secant, and the brush always a tangent ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... dialogue, the subject of it had had time to cast aside her fur cloak, to fasten upon her slender, arched feet, clad in dainty, laced boots, a pair of steel skates, with tangent blades, and without either grooves or straps, and to dart out upon this miniature sheet of water with the agility of a person accustomed to skating on ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... range often did freakish things. There had been a man recently discharged from the General as convalescent, who had been shot in the shoulder, and the bullet, striking the collar-bone, had taken a curious tangent, following up the muscle of the neck and lodging just beneath the ear. In that case there had been the external evidence of the bullet's location. In this case there was no such evidence to ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... suit, for our visit; not Countess Rudolf's kindness, as you may perhaps suppose)—"and a pretty old suit it is by this time! for I was young, a mere child, in fact, when it began, ha, ha!—By the way," she continued, flying off at a tangent, "they advised us to put an end to the suit by arranging a match between me and Karpathy. I was young then, as I have said—a mere child, ha, ha!—but I would not entertain the idea, ha, ha! I made a mistake, no doubt; for how rich should I not have been now, a good ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... off at a tangent. Speeding. Falling free in the dome of the heavens. A rotating black oblong. But in a moment distance dwindled it to a speck. A dull silver dot with the sunlight on it. A speck of human Earth dust, ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... sake of economy of space, our cut omits the Point and Swannanoa tunnels (the latter is the summit tunnel), but covers all of the location which is of interest to engineers, the remainder at the Swannanoa end being almost "on tangent" to and through ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... spent, and any resolute hand could have impelled them away from the carriage-pole with which the roans threatened to impale their wretched sides. The front wheel, however, made him heroic, going off at a tangent into a cloth-merchant's shop, and precipitating a clash while he still clung to the reins. The door flew open on the under side and Hilda fell through, grasping at the dust of the road; while the driver, discovering that ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... searching in Wych Hazel's face to see whether she comprehended and how she enjoyed what he was giving her. As to the relations between them, his manner all the while, as well as during the ride, was very much what it had been before the disclosure made by Mrs. Coles had sent Wych Hazel off on a tangent of alienation from him. Nothing could exceed the watch kept over her, or the care taken of her; and neither could make less demonstration. There was also the same quiet assumption of her, which had been in his manner ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... was so completely a star of a confined orbit, that his ideas seldom described a tangent to their ordinary revolutions. He was so much accustomed to hear of England ruling colonies, the East and the West, Canada, the Cape, and New South Wales, that it was not an easy matter for him to conceive himself to be without the influence of the British laws. ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... believing that she could turn off so suddenly at a complete tangent, spoke to her once or twice but got no other answer than a long, contented sigh. He stood for a little while trying to make out her outline in the dim corner of the room. Then he tiptoed out to the hall, possessed himself of a ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... floundering, "I suppose it's what the general run of people think—and do. It's keeping to the rules. It's trotting on the course. It isn't going off at some tangent of ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... those incidents in which he has shown the strange and violent side of his character, and omitting the stretches between where his wisdom and judgment have had a chance. His conversation when he does not fly off at a tangent is full of pith and idea. "The greatest monument ever erected to Napoleon Buonaparte was the British National debt," said he yesterday. Again, "We must never forget that the principal export of Great Britain to the United States IS the United States." Again, ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... in two hands, stand erect and whirl round on his heels till momentum was obtained, and then—let go. The missile would fly like a bullet, and woe betide any one who stood in its way. The performance precluded any kind of aim; the stone was hurled off at any chance tangent: and it was bad luck rather than any kind of malice that guided one three-pound boulder through the window, across the kitchen, and into a portrait of Judas de Beer which hung on the wall not half a dozen feet from the slumbering ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... day removes the orient vault, The rustic peasant leaves his humble home, And when the sun with fiercer tangent strikes, Fatigued and parched, he sits him in the shade; Then plods again with hard, laborious toil, Until black night the hemisphere enshrouds. And then he rests. But I must ever chafe At morning, noon-day, evening, and ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... guns, shooting down men and horses. The 38th behaved splendidly, but all their officers were killed or wounded, a number of gunners, and many horses. Two guns were for a time in the hands of the Boers, who, I believe, removed the tangent sights. It appears that the M.I. escort of the Battery, owing, I suppose, to some misunderstanding, retreated. The situation was saved by Captain Budworth, of our Battery, who collected and brought up some mounted infantry, whether Yeomanry or ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... working beam and a vertical plunger-type pump beneath the other end. Heavy, flat chains were secured to a sector at each end of the working beam and to the engine and pump piston rods in such a way that the rods were always tangent to a circle whose center was at the beam pivot. The weight of the reciprocating pump parts pulled the pump end of the beam down; the atmosphere, acting on the open top of the piston in the steam cylinder, caused the engine end of the beam to be pulled down when the steam beneath the piston ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... coins began to drop, The Kid was firing at them. He didn't waste a bullet. With each quick explosion a piece of gold flew off on a tangent. Br-r-rang, cling! Br-r-rang, ting! There were six coins, and The Kid fired six times. He never missed one! He picked the last one out of the air, ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... in his own phraseology,—still affected in its prose by the classical pedantries caught from Pope by Ramsay,—"the sun entered Virgo, when a charming fillette, who lived next door, overset my trigonometry, and set me off at a tangent from the scene of my studies." We need not detail the story, nor the incessant repetitions of it, which marked and sometimes marred his career. The poet was jilted, went through the usual despairs, and resorted to the not unusual sources of consolation. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... his blood beginning to thrill with the anticipation of battle. "I'll give you half. I'm on duty from Fort Churchill, off on a tangent of my own." He did not take his eyes from the slit in the wall as he told Anderson in a hundred words what had happened since his meeting with Bram Johnson. "And with forty cartridges we'll give 'em a taste ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... line and a curve (mixed angle) or between two curves (curvilinear angle) is measured by the angle between the line and the tangent at the point of intersection, or between the tangents to both curves at their common point. Various names (now rarely, if ever, used) have been given to particular cases:—amphicyrtic (Gr. [Greek: amphi], on both sides, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... high voice of Tharon as El Rey thundered down toward him. Then Buford, riding midway of the sweeping line, fired and the boy dropped his gun, swayed and clung to his saddle horn as his horse bolted and tore off at a tangent to the ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... could about devils and pitchforks and caldrons, he came to a sudden pause—a blank look came into his face, and, looking round the church and seeing the sunlight streaming through the door, his thoughts went off at a tangent. "Now, boys," he said, "if this fine weather continues, I hope you'll be all out in the bog next ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... triangle, A B H express algebraically the value of the sine, co-sine, tangent, and co-tangent of angle A in terms of a, b, and h, they being the altitude, base, and hypothenuse ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... "sacredness" of the number was of much more recent date than the creation of the worlds, and could not therefore account for it. He next tried an ingenious idea, comparing the perpendiculars from different points of a quadrant of a circle on a tangent at its extremity. The greatest of these, the tangent, not being cut by the quadrant, he called the line of the sun, and associated with infinite force. The shortest, being the point at the other end of the quadrant, thus corresponded to the ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... phenomena connected with the administration of electric baths having forced upon me some doubts in this respect, I made very careful experiments, both with and without the aid of the galvanometer (Bradley's Tangent), to satisfy these. Without wearying the reader with details, I will state that the result of my experiments leaves no room for doubt that water at the temperatures stated—and still more so at 98 1/2 deg.—is superior to the human body as a conductor of electricity. I do not mean to be understood ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... at Rosses Point, Cyaptin, till ye loighten up t' fourteen faate. Thin, thr'll be watther f'r yes at th' Quay, but..." (Another tangent to the lee rail.) ... "Ach! What-t's th' matther wit' ye now. Be m' sowl, it's heart-breakin' ye are, wit' yer shoutin' an' that-t! What-t? Salt baafe an' a few bisskits! No! Oi will natt!! Ast 'im yersilf ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... went off at a tangent to a certain issue troubling his legal conscience. He had not wavered in the usual assumption of omniscience, but he was by no means sure that he had given right advice. Well! Without that power to decide ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... arithmetic. After all, the imagination ought not to be startled any more at so many orders of infinites than at the so well-known proposition, viz., that curve lines may always be made to pass between a circle and a tangent; or at that other, namely, that matter is divisible in infinitum. These two truths have been demonstrated many years, and are no less incomprehensible than the things we ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... connection. The laws of the universe forbade it. Napoleon Bonaparte de Neville lost his hold as she crashed into the sorghum patch. George Washington Marlborough tripped over an irrigation ditch, and soared away at a tangent, like a sputtering remnant of a burnt-out world. Don Juan San Diego went the wrong side of a mulberry tree, and the lasso parted with a snap. He never stopped until his momentum carried him through the slats of ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... raised the Idiot to his feet, and brought him, maundering, to a room where no light was. He kneeled before him with a lighted torch of bear's fat and the tendons of the deer, and waving it gently to and fro, sang the ancient rune, until the eye of the Idiot, following the torch at a tangent as it waved, suddenly became fixed upon the flame, when it ceased to move. And the words of the chant ran through Grah's ears, and pierced to the remote parts of his being; and a sickening trouble ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... father from the stern of the motor boat," continued Polly Jarley. "It may have been a big root of the same tree, under water, that had proved the finish of the boat. For nobody ever saw the Bright Eyes again. She just ran off at a tangent, into the middle of the lake, somewhere, we suppose, ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... this fact led almost immediately to the Method of Tangents of Fermat and Barrow; and this again is the stepping-stone to the Differential Calculus,—itself a particular application of that instrument. Dr. Barrow regarded the tangent as merely the prolongation of any one of these infinitely small sides, and demonstrated the relations of these sides to the curve and its ordinates. His work, entitled "Lectiones Geometricae," appeared in 1669. To his high ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... a new force, my thoughts flew off at a tangent, and I said to myself, "Bravo, Romeo! You shall find me a ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... any evidence of a current of any kind, until there came on a storm from the northwest that drove a great deal of ice around the great ring; but it seemed to keep rather clear of the great wall of ice and to go off in a tangent toward the south. The lead showed no bottom at one hundred fathoms, even within a quarter of a ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... yet the food cycle is not complete. Some of the processes of decomposition appear to cause a portion of the nitrogen to fly out of the circle at a tangent. In the process of decomposition which is going on through the agency of micro-organisms, a considerable part of the nitrogen is dissipated into the air in the form of free nitrogen. When a bit of meat decays, part of the meat is, indeed, converted into ammonia ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... formula for centripetal acceleration - and the concept of such acceleration itself - is the result of splitting circular movement into two rectilinear movements, one in the direction of the tangent, the other in the direction of the radius, and of regarding it - by a mode of reasoning typical of spectator-thinking - as composed of the two. This procedure, however, useful as it may be for the purpose of calculation, is contrary ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... tangent, leaving Jeffreys, cool in body and mind, to await his return. To an ordinarily excitable person, the position was a critical one. The water was numbing; the ice at the edge of the hole was rotten, and broke away with every ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... passing over into red, and then into blue. Similar colors could also be distinguished in the mock-moons. Sometimes there are two large rings, the one outside the other, and then there may be four mock-moons. I have also seen part of a new ring above the usual one, meeting it at a tangent directly above the moon. As is well known, these various ring formations round the sun, as well as round the moon, are produced by the refraction of rays of light by minute ice crystals floating ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... Annie's cheeks. She went off swiftly at a tangent. "Wouldn't it give a fellow a jar? This guy Jim Collins slips it to me confidential that he's off the crooked stuff. Nothin' doin' a-tall in gorilla work. He kids me that he's quit goin' out on the spud and porch-climbin' don't look good to him no more. A four-room flat, a little ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... joyfully obeyed. The pony ran off at a sharp angle to inspect a lamp-post on the opposite side of the way, and then went off at a tangent to another lamp-post on the other side. Having satisfied himself that they were of the same pattern and materials, he came to a stop apparently absorbed in meditation. 'Will you go on, sir,' said the old gentleman, gravely, 'or are we to wait here for you ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... a break of music, and all about them women darting into line, sudden banners floating out, and the white horse prancing in the archway, for all the world as if spun at a tangent off the narrative ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... displeasure as he saw Clarissa serving the first course, but he quickly concealed these emotions and proceeded to plunge into an animated conversation with his guests. Indeed, it assumed the character of a monologue in which he frequently adverted to the weather, to be off on a tangent the next moment on a discussion of finance, politics, sociology, on which subjects, however, he was far from showing the positiveness and fixed opinion that he did while descanting upon the weather. In all the subjects he touched upon, he exhibited a certain ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... iam non domus accipiet te Iaeta, neque uxor Optima, nee dulces occurrent oscula nati Praeripere et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent: Non poteris factis florentibus esse, tuisque Praesidium: misero misere" aiunt, "omnia ademit Una dies ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... age; and her father's small legacy gave her a measure of independence. But how could one set about getting married in the face of open opposition? And—how keep the truth from Roy? Or tone it down, so that he would not go off at a tangent straightaway? ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... longer run, he crawled. Naked, now, and with only a few kifs still clinging to him. And the blind tangent of his flight had taken him well out of the path ...
— Happy Ending • Fredric Brown
... sharp crescent of Venus in the pale sky, and about half the apparent size of the moon. The object-glass of the instrument was divided into squares, and she passed rapidly across the field of the telescope, sailing, as it were, in ether; by the slightest motion of a tangent-screw of great length, we were able to bring her back as often as we liked, to the centre of the field. This mechanical process might, however, have been rendered unnecessary, had the machinery attached to the instrument been wound up; for when this is the case, ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... Shakespeareville, Kansas. It seemed that the Shakespeareville Chamber of Commerce had recently held an enthusiastic debate as to whether the American soldiers should be known as "Sammies" or "Battling Christians." The thought gagged him. He dropped the newspaper, yawned, and let his mind drift off at a tangent. He wondered why Gloria had been late. It seemed so long ago already—he had a pang of illusive loneliness. He tried to imagine from what angle she would regard her new position, what place in her considerations he would continue to ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... block or two from Charles, Biddle Street performs a jog, dashing off at a tangent from its former course, while Chase Street not only jogs and turns at the corresponding intersection, but does so again, where, at the next corner, it meets at once with Park Avenue and Berkeley Street. After this it runs but a short way and dies, as though ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... I knew that I should be reproached with indolence and even cowardice. I knew that I should be supposed to be one of those consistently impracticable people who insist on going off at a tangent when the straight course lies before them. That I should be relegated to the class of persons who have failed in life through some deep-seated defect of will. The worst of a serious decision of the kind is that, whichever step one takes, one is sure to be blamed. ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... adjusted to the upper surface of the mercury in the tube; for this purpose its back and front edges should be made to coincide, that is, the eye should be placed in exactly the same plane which passes through the edges; they should then be brought carefully down until they form a tangent with the curve produced by the convex surface of the mercury and the light is just excluded from between them and the point of contact. It is desirable in making this adjustment that the eye should be assisted by a magnifying-glass. The reading ...
— The Hurricane Guide - Being An Attempt To Connect The Rotary Gale Or Revolving - Storm With Atmospheric Waves. • William Radcliff Birt
... gaining in effectiveness by doing so. It seems that each speaker was allowed only twenty minutes, and rather than run the risk of going off on a tangent, he had written the whole thing out—but he ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... what need is there of flying off at such a tangent?" said Mr. Stillinghast, with a grim smile; "I did not mean that, but what will become of you when ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... mollifying Miss Gallifer. Without explaining who Letty was she insisted on her right to remain. If Miss Gallifer was mystified, it was no more than Miss Towell was, or anyone else who touched the situation at a tangent. To that Barbara was indifferent, while Letty didn't ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King |
