"Vacuum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... objects of sense there is a third nature in which they are contained—that is to say, space, which may be explained in various ways. It is the element which surrounds them; it is the vacuum or void which they leave or occupy when passing from one portion of space to another. It might be described in the language of ancient philosophy, as 'the Not-being' of objects. It is a negative idea which ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... immaterial, and exerted along a geometrical surface of no thickness whatever—and yet actual enough to stop even a Millikan ray that travels a hundred thousand light-years and then goes through twenty-seven feet of solid lead just like it was so much vacuum! That's what we're up against! However, I'm going to try out that model, Mart, right now. Come on, guy, snap into it! ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... has risen," said Ives, "on the Arabian nights. There are no more caliphs. The fisherman's vase is turned to a vacuum bottle, warranted to keep any genie boiling or frozen for forty-eight hours. Life moves by rote. Science has killed adventure. There are no more opportunities such as Columbus and the man who ate the first oyster had. The only certain thing is ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... spring, and the nights are calm. It seems the least little bit like what it used to be in Wisconsin on the lake. But there we had such lovely woodsy hills, and great meadows, and fields with cattle, and God's real peace, not this vacuum." ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... unable successfully to carry on two rapid processes at the same time. We attempt a prodigy, and the result is a fool." There was a child in Languedoc who at six years was of the size of a large man; of course, his mind was a vacuum. On the other hand, Jean Philippe Baratier was a learned man in his eighth year, and died of apparent old age at twenty. Both were monstrosities, and a healthy childhood would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... the street car company the United States is represented by the Standard Oil Company, the Vacuum Oil Company, and the New York Export and Import Company. Other American firms of merchants and manufacturers have resident agents, but they are ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... may be Sir Auckland Geddes and Mr. J. H. Thomas are only clippings from the illustrated press. It may be that a miner is a complicated machine for cutting coal and voting on a ballot-paper. It may be that coal-owners are like the petit bleu arrangement, a system of vacuum tubes for whooshing Bradburys about from one ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... these cases, as well as in others of more or less limited nature, is the x-ray. Exposures every few days, of short duration and 4 to 10 inches distance, with medium vacuum tube. This method has served me well in occasional cases; caution is necessary, and it should not be pushed further than the production of the mildest reaction. The repeated application of a high-frequency current, by means of the vacuum electrodes, ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... must die?" Harrik's voice seemed far away. In his own ears it sounded strange and unusual. All at once the world seemed to be a vast vacuum in which his brain strove for air, and all his senses were numbed and overpowered. Distempered and vague, his soul seemed spinning in an aching chaos. It was being overpowered by vast elements, and life ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... every process must take place in it which takes place at all. But let us suppose that cavities exist in this otherwise universal medium, as caverns exist in the earth, or cells in a Swiss cheese. In such a cavity there would be absolutely nothing. It would be such a vacuum as cannot be artificially produced; for if we pump the air from a receiver there remains the luminiferous ether. Through one of these cavities light could not pass, for there would be nothing to bear it. Sound ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... the dagger of the Bohemian or of the surly monk (it mattered little which to him), and as to the issue of the trial. But as soon as his heart was vacant in that direction, Fleur-de-Lys returned to it. Captain Phoebus's heart, like the physics of that day, abhorred a vacuum. ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... the answer would be because everything tends to go to its natural place, implying, thereby, that there was some occult power or tendency in bodies to behave in certain definite ways. Those were the days of the time-honoured legends about Nature "abhorring a vacuum," tolerating no "breaks," and the wonders of her "curative force". These phrases about abstractions were held to be adequate explanations of any of the ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... and settled that the term nature only comprehends the people with sleek coats and full stomachs. Nature abhors a vacuum,—therefore has nought to do with empty bellies. Happy are the men whose fate, or better philosophy, has kept them from the turnips and the heather—fortunate mortals, who, banned from the murder of partridges and grouse, have for the last few days of our contemporary, been dwellers in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... moral fact of what women ought to do, it is equally necessary to abstain from making any decision prior to experiment. We see plainly enough the waste of time and thought among the men who once talked of Nature abhorring a vacuum, or disputed at great length as to whether angels could go from end to end without passing through the middle; and the day will come when it will appear to be no less absurd to have argued, as men and women are arguing now, about what woman ought to do, before it was ascertained ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... lady of fashion." Such an illustration is worthless. The individual chosen does not fairly represent the class. If, on the other hand, a teacher in physics should announce that "all bodies fall at the same rate in a vacuum," and should illustrate by saying, "If I place a bullet and a feather in a tube from which the air has been exhausted, they will be found to fall equally fast," his example would be a fair one, as ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... orbit of the earth is the path which it follows in space in its annual revolution around the sun. To a planet there is no up or down, except as ascent and descent are estimated from and towards itself. In all other respects it floats in vacuum, or what is so nearly so as to be thus termed. Now, let the uninstructed reader imagine a large circular table, with a light on its surface, and near to its centre. The light shall represent the sun, the outer edge of the circle of the table the earth's orbit, and its surface the plane ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... humor. The morning meal went by in silence, but little food passing the lips of either. How could it, when the thermometer was ninety-four at eight o'clock in the morning, and the leaves upon the trees were as motionless as if suspended in a vacuum. Bodies and minds were relaxed—and the one turned from food, as the other did from thought, with ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... rupis erat cava, recessusque habuit, et saxeos specus, euntes in vacuum montem; sive natura pridem factos, sive exesos mari, et undarum crebris ictibus: In hos enim cum impetu ruebant et fragore, aestuantis maris fluctus; quos iterum spumantes reddidit antrum, et ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... her purpose by their absence affected her brain as a sudden vacuum affects the body: she nearly fainted. Who had done this? There was only one person on the premises besides herself. Eustacia involuntarily turned to the open window which overlooked the garden as far as the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... said Bennie. "Absolute insulation! Beats the thermos bottle, and requires no vacuum. It isn't quite what I want though, because the disintegrating rays which the ring discharge gives out break down the zirconium, which isn't an end-product of radioactivity. The pressure in the capsule rises, due to the liberation of helium, ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... rays of the sun, is by far the hottest portion of the earth. The atmosphere at that quarter, being constantly superheated and correspondingly rarified, ascends into the vault above. This creates a semi-vacuum below, and the cooler atmospheres north and south of the equator rush in and fill the aforesaid vacuum. Pouring in from opposite directions with an impetus that often amounts to hurricanes, they boil up as they meet, miles into ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... high and noble natures that never laugh, and are incapable of understanding the pleasures of gayety. But minds like these have some vacuum; they certainly lack what is ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... have perused those documents which you have in your hand, you will have some faint idea. Ivor, when it's your funeral, I'll smile. Mabel, Duchess of Datchet, it is beginning to dawn upon the vacuum which represents my brain that I've been the victim of one of the prettiest things in practical jokes that ever yet was planned. When that fellow brought you that card at Cane and Wilson's—which, I need scarcely tell you, never came from me—some one walked out of the front entrance ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... within the adjoining rings, so that it appeared truncated and became as thick as the rest of the body. This part could then be seen to swell a little; and this, I believe, is due to the pharynx being pushed a little forwards. Then by a slight withdrawal of the pharynx or by its expansion, a vacuum was produced beneath the truncated slimy end of the body whilst in contact with the object; and by this means the two adhered firmly together. {28} That under these circumstances a vacuum was produced was plainly seen on one occasion, when a large ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... But the imagination is not voluntary; it works to supply a necessity; its function is creation, and creation is needed only to fill a vacuum. The wild Arab, feeling his own insignificance, and comprehending the necessity for a Creating Power, finds between himself and that Power, which to him, as to you the other day, assumes a personality, an immense distance, and fills the space with a race half ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... a fuss of him, if it had been possible. But Smith was not amenable to polite attentions. To attempts to render him particular consideration he opposed a barren inertia; one could as easily have been obliging to a lamp-post. The man's consciousness seemed to exist in a vacuum; he lived in a solitude to which the kindly Doctor could never penetrate. Once, certainly, his persistent geniality won him a rebuff. It was at breakfast, and he was following his custom of endeavoring to trap Smith into conversation. Smith sat opposite him ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... ignited platinum wire, the electric arc between two carbons, an electric machine spark, an induction coil spark, and a vacuum tube glow. Also a large nail was magnetized by being wrapped in the current, and two helices were suspended and seen to direct ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... as Michel de Bourges has said, we will hold our sittings in a square bounded by four barricades. But provisionally I suggest the Salle Roysin. Do not forget that in such a crisis there must be no vacuum before the nation. That alarms it. There must be a government somewhere, and it must be known. The rebellion at the Elysee, the Government at the Faubourg St. Antoine; the Left the Government, the Faubourg St. Antoine the citadel; such are the ideas which from to-morrow we must impress ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... naked truth!" answered the old man. "That is good in theory and practicable in the world of which youth dreams. Here is the schoolmaster, who has struggled in a vacuum; with the enthusiasm of a child, he has sought the good, yet he has won only jests and laughter. You have said that you are a stranger in your own country, and I believe it. The very first day you arrived you began by wounding the vanity of a priest who is regarded by the people as a saint, and as ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... Greeks. And if any one says that the two jobs are not tanti, and the landowning job is more important than the other, I disagree with him entirely, and it would be impossible for him to prove it. But there was a vacuum—that I quite admit—and Nature—or Providence—disliked it. So she sent you along, my dear lady!'—he turned upon her a glowing countenance—'and you fitted it exactly. You laid hands on what has proved to be your job, and Chicksands, I expect, has been telling you how ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... predisposition to skepticism. The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century had broken the shackles of priestly Papal superstition over the human mind; and [true] evangelical doctrine not being introduced to supply the vacuum, the mass swung readily over from the regions of dark superstition to blank atheism. Thus were the elements ready prepared to hand for such spirits as Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot, Weishaupt, and others, to work upon, and ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... Society places its transparent bell-glass over the young woman who is to be the subject of one of its fatal experiments. The element by which only the heart lives is sucked out of her crystalline prison. Watch her through its transparent walls;—her bosom is heaving; but it is in a vacuum. Death is no riddle, compared to this. I remember a poor girl's story in the "Book of Martyrs." The "dry-pan and the gradual fire" were the images that frightened her most. How many have withered and wasted under as slow a torment in the walls ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his head pumped out like a vacuum pan, or stuffed full of odds and ends like a bologna sausage, and do his work right. It doesn't make any difference how mean and trifling the thing he's doing may seem, that's the big thing and the only thing for him ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... send them?" asked Mrs. Horton. "Harriet will heat up some soup and you can carry it in the vacuum bottle." ...
— Sunny Boy and His Playmates • Ramy Allison White
... responded that the vacuum was due to the fact that his breakfast had consisted of a piece of bread and his last night's supper of a dish of soup, but the Dunne pride inclined to reservation on family and personal matters. He speared another small potato and paused, with fork suspended ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... alternately connected by a three-way hand-operated valve, with a boiler and a source of water supply. When the water in one receiver had been driven out by the steam, cold water was poured over its outside surface, creating a vacuum through condensation and causing it to fill again while the water in the other reservoir was being forced out. A number of machines were built on this principle and placed in actual use ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... opens only in the holiness of such men,—is a thunder out of clear sky, before which generations of the impure, like brute beasts, tremble and cower. An equal moral genius will see that the ascension of an immortal Love has left behind this vacuum, mitigated, not deepened, by the furniture of devils and their flame. Men strive in vain to be afflicted by a revelation of the best and worst. The mind is naturally a form of gladness, and every window in us takes the sun. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... strange stillness in the air, not the natural stillness of the Wild, but an unhealthy one, as of a suspension of something, of a vacuum, of bated breath. It was curiously full of terror. More and more he felt like a trapped animal, caught in a vast cage. The sky to the north was glooming ominously. Every second the horizon grew blacker, more bodeful, and Locasto stared at it, with a ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... the smell into the house, to the great annoyance of the audience; but it does not. Perhaps, like everything else behind the curtain, it is not real, after all; or perhaps it has a very high specific gravity, and would stay behind even if all the air passed out, preferring the vacuum which nature abhors—nothing would seem too absurd to account ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... some sample poppies to the H.E.W. offices. They were in vacuum-sealed plastic envelopes, because I knew that once my virus spores got loose in the atmosphere, they'd spread all over the world like radioactive dust, or faster. I hoped to see the Commissioner of Narcotics, Myron P. Bishop, but His Magnificence was harder to reach than the whole ...
— Revenge • Arthur Porges
... of the Petit Courier Illustre is one of the best fellows in the world, and occasionally (when my pockets represent that vacuum which Nature very properly abhors) he advances me a couple of Napoleons. I wipe out the score from time to time by furnishing a design for the paper. Now to-day, you see, I'm in luck. I shall pay off two obligations at once—to say nothing of ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... my love, Thus agitated, flames the higher; All's hard that has not you for goal; I scarce can move my hand to write, For love engages all my soul, And leaves the body void of might; The wings of will spread idly, as do The bird's that in a vacuum lies; My breast, asleep with dreams of you, Forgets to breathe, and bursts in sighs; I see no rest this side the grave, No rest nor hope, from you apart; Your life is in the rose you gave, Its perfume suffocates my heart; There's no refreshment in the breeze; ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... moment spent away from his books; and every day, when not engaged in writing, devoured the compositions of the ancient Greeks and Romans": ("Erat in hoc homine inexhaustus quidem legendi amor; nullum enim patiebatur esse vacuum tempus. Quotidie aut scribebat, aut aliquid ex Graecis Latinisque litteris mandabat"):—"Mittas ad me, rogo, singula commentariola mea, hoc est, excerpta illa ex variis libris, quos legi, quae sunt plurima, ac dispersa; ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... faith in a vacuum? You came to me as a salesman and I must give you something to sell. This is simple morality; but if such a grant entails concomitant evils, surely I am absolved of ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... sisters,—scarcely kin were they, but kinder never lived, and their house was at our disposal. We threw out the furniture; we made a green bower of the adobe chamber. One window, that bore upon the forlorn vacuum of the main street, was speedily stained the deepest and most splendid dyes; from without, it had a pleasing, not to say refining, medieval effect; from within, it was likened unto the illuminated page of an antique antiphonary—in flames; yes, ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... creeps about with stealthy feet, winding its way into the most secluded courtyards and sending a sudden shiver through the frail bamboos that stand beside your dinner-table in some heated square. Then the zephyr departs mysteriously as it came, and leaves behind a great void—a torrid vacuum which is soon filled up by the honey-sweet fragrance of hay and aromatic plants. Every night this balsamic breath invades the town, filling its streets with ambrosial suggestions. It is one of the charms of Rome at this particular season; ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... the religious idea is undergoing a crisis. People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that, while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... cover the shelves and their sides with green baize. This protects the bindings of the books considerably, and it is easily stuck on with glue. It has also the advantage of holding the dust which collects, and with the aid of a small 'vacuum-cleaner' such as most households possess nowadays, the cases may be cleaned thoroughly without removing a single shelf.[48] Felt would be better, but it is, of course, much more expensive. Sir John Cheke, tutor to Edward the Sixth, that learned man who, says Milton, 'taught Cambridge and King ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... had been away two hours when without warning the hot air became insufferably close and the light ghost of breeze died to a breathless stillness. The drought had lasted almost four weeks, and now at last, though the skies were still clear, that heat-vacuum seemed ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... nearest snow to supply the rarefied air in the valley heated by the sun, even now tolerably powerful; it blows for some days so long as a vacuum is formed, and discontinues when clouds again appear; hardly so, as it before only blew for three or four days, although several more elapsed before clouds re-appeared: it may however be dependent on each fresh fall of snow in ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... landed," answered the good canon; "the intense heat that a day like this creates in our valleys and on the lakes so weakens the sub-strata, or foundations of air, that the cold masses which collect around the glaciers sometimes descend like avalanches from their heights, to fill the vacuum. The shock is fearful, even to those who meet it in the glens and among the rocks, but the plunge of such a column of air upon one of the lakes is ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... really an instance of endosmosis? Might it not rather be atmospheric pressure that stimulates the flow of nourishing fluids and distils them into the Anthrax' cup-shaped mouth, working, in order to create a vacuum, almost like the suckers of the Cuttlefish? All this is possible, but I shall refrain from deciding, preferring to assign a large share to the unknown in this extraordinary method of nutrition. It ought, I think, to provide physiologists with a field ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... is to be soldered. The platinum and carbon become incandescent, the bicarbonate is decomposed, and a fresh deposit of carbon solders the filament to its support. The system thus mounted is placed within the permanent globe, and a vacuum is obtained in the ordinary way, while the testing and finishing details present nothing of special interest. The finished lamp is then photometrically tested, and placed on a support something like the Edison mounting. Upon it are engraved the working constants. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... feel the lack of that hunting party for years to come, Jane. There will be a vacuum in my inner consciousness. I shall wake up in the middle of the night sighing for that hunting party. But you see to-day is Wednesday, and we must leave Friday, and Frank and I have sworn by every fish in the creek to take to-morrow ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... solved this problem in the most satisfactory manner. If, in his grand experiments, the manure which he gave to his fields was in the same state, i.e. dried at 110 deg in a vacuum, as it was when analysed, these fields received, in 16 years, 1,300 pounds of nitrogen. But we know that by drying all the nitrogen escapes which is contained in solid animal excrements, as volatile carbonate of ammonia. In this calculation the nitrogen of the urine, which by decomposition is converted ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... heavenly bodies, there may yet be a resisting medium in space, and there may be electric and magnetic forces to deal with. There may, further, be cases where the effects of luminous radiative repulsion become apparent, and also Crookes' vacuum-effects described as "radiant matter." Nor is it quite certain that Laplace's proofs of the instantaneous propagation of gravity ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... monads and intervals conjointly a line can arise, and also a surface, and also a solid. As to the interval thus existing between monads, some considered it as being mere aerial breath, but the orthodox regarded it as a vacuum; hence we perceive the meaning of their absurd affirmation that all things are produced by a vacuum. As it is not to be overlooked that the monads are merely mathematical points, and have no dimensions or size, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... hours before their existence is known in the states further east; and the same wind, which is a tempest at Hatteras, becomes softened to a breeze, near the Penobscot. There is, however, little mystery in this apparent phenomenon. The vacuum which has been created in the air, and which is the origin of all winds, must be filled first from the nearest stores of the atmosphere; and as each region contributes to produce the equilibrium, it must, ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... Belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, that massive stellar engine blasted out enough energy to make it uncomfortable to look at with the naked eye. But it could illuminate matter only; the hard vacuum of space remained dark. The pilot could have located the planets easily, without looking around. He knew where each and every one of ...
— Thin Edge • Gordon Randall Garrett
... you to make: "What a wondrous system it indeed must be which insists on flourishing to all appearance under such an absence of advertised or even of confessed relation to it as would do honour to a vacuum produced by an air-pump!" The formulation, the approximate expression of what the system at large might or mightn't do for those in contact with it, became thus one's own fitful care, with one's attention ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... legion of clerks, paradise of fashion, crowds of customers, and all the fascination of a day of shopping. 'Where did you get that love of a shawl?' asks Miss Matilda Namby Pamby of her friend Miss Araminta Vacuum. 'Why, at Stewart's, of course,' is the inevitable reply; 'and so cheap! only $250.' Now, to this pair of lady economists, what is 'Stewart's' but a mere locality, as impersonal as Paris or Brussels, or ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... their high average longevity and education, their freedom from war and crime, their relative immunity from pain and zymotic disease, and all their other negative superiorities. This is all too finite, we say; we see too well the vacuum beyond. It lacks the note of infinitude and mystery, and may all be dealt with in the don't-care mood. No need of agonizing ourselves or making others agonize for these good creatures just ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... crow, which was flying over the forum, was stunned with the force of it, and fell down among the crowd. Hence we may conclude, that when birds fall on such occasions, it is not because the air is so divided with the shock as to leave a vacuum, but rather because the sound strikes them like a blow, when it ascends with force, and produces ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... painting in the past, all the human values and the complexes of association which have invested the visible world with beauty for men, proves to us in his tortured diagrams that he has found nothing to take their place, He gives us a Chimaera bombinans in vacuo, that vacuum which the universe is to the human spirit when it denies itself. He tries to make art, having cut himself off from all the experience and belief that produce art. For art springs always out of a supreme ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... the problem of government without a royal governor. They were as helpless as bees without a queen. Indeed, so strong was their instinct to get a royal head that they tried to preserve themselves by kidnapping Charles's mother, poor, mad Joanna, to fill the political vacuum that they had made. So in the civil wars in France; notwithstanding the more promising materials for the formation of a republic in that country, all parties were, in fact, headed by claimants to ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... regarded as changes (in mundo non datur saltus); and likewise, in the complex of all empirical intuitions in space, any break or hiatus between two phenomena (non datur hiatus)—for we can so express the principle, that experience can admit nothing which proves the existence of a vacuum, or which even admits it as a part of an empirical synthesis. For, as regards a vacuum or void, which we may cogitate as out and beyond the field of possible experience (the world), such a question cannot come before the tribunal of mere understanding, which decides only upon questions that concern ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... vacuum bottle, and a big gallon bottle of mineral water. This Paul broke, and, dipping a handkerchief in it, made a wet bandage for the German's head. Then he dropped the vacuum bottle where the officer must find it when he recovered consciousness. And now he did something that surprised ...
— The Belgians to the Front • Colonel James Fiske
... it to be of service in propelling vessels.[CI] In 1785, William Symington took out a patent, by which he obtained, with economy of fuel, a more perfect method of condensation of steam and a more perfect vacuum. ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... has the disadvantage of radiated heat in the workings, of loss by the radiation, and, worse still, of the impracticability of placing and operating a highly efficient steam-engine underground. It is all but impossible to derive benefit from the vacuum, as any form of surface condenser here is impossible, and there can be no return of the hot soft water ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... fact—what seems to us quiet in the beginning of our attempt, will seem like noise and whirlwinds, after we have gone further along. Some one may easily say that it is absurd to take half an hour a day to do nothing in. Or that "Nature abhors a vacuum, and how is it possible to do nothing? Our minds will be thinking of ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... locomotives in this country between about 1845 and 1870. The exhaust steam from the cylinders is directed up the straight stack (shown in phantom in fig. 27) by the blast pipe. This creates a partial vacuum in the smokebox that draws the fire, gases, ash, and smoke through the boiler tubes from the firebox. The force of the exhausting steam blows them out the stack. At the top of the straight stack is a deflecting cone which slows the velocity of the exhaust and ...
— The 'Pioneer': Light Passenger Locomotive of 1851 • John H. White
... as I passed the school-house on my way to call on the curate, I heard such an uproar that I stopped involuntarily to listen. I soon satisfied myself that it was only the usual water-spout occasioned on the ocean of boyhood by the vacuum of the master. As soon as I entered the curate's study, there stood the missing master, hat in hand. He had not sat down, and would not, hearing all the time, no doubt, in his soul, the far confusion of his forsaken realm. He had but that ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... sarcastic refinements, 'science tells us that a perfect vacuum ain't possible, but after watching you I know better, and for you, Mr. Workingman's Friend,—us to the floor,' and I run ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... ebullition goes on so quickly that the temperature of the water thus robbed of heat quickly falls to 0 deg. C., and the remaining water freezes. Thus, then, by pumping out the air from a vessel, i.e. working in a vacuum, we can boil a liquid in such exhausted vessel far below its ordinary boiling temperature in the open air. This fact is of the utmost industrial importance. But touching this question of latent heat, you ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... clock, that I'd stuck it out to Y minutes past O! But it's no hardship to get up at five, these glorious mornings. The days get longer, and the weather is perfect. And the prairie looks as though a vacuum cleaner had been at work on it overnight. Positively, there's a charwoman who does this old world over, while we sleep! By morning it's as bright as a new pin. And out here every one is thinking of the day ahead; Dinky-Dunk, of his crop; Olga, of the pair of sky-blue corsets ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... slow sinking into warm, unsounded darkness and unconsciousness. It might be years, it might be ages. Even in after-life, looking back, he never broke that time into weeks or days: people might so divide it for him, but he was uncertain, always: it was a vague vacuum in his memory: he had drifted out of coarse, measured life into some out-coast of eternity, and slept in its calm. When, by long degrees, the shock of outer life jarred and woke him, it was feebly done: he came back reluctant, weak: the quiet clinging to him, as if he had been drowned ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... take for spots on the sun are the faults of your glasses, or of your eyes." The dead hand of Aristotle barred the advance in every department of research. Physicians would have nothing to do with Harvey's discoveries about the circulation of the blood. "Nature is accused of tolerating a vacuum!" exclaimed a priest when Pascal began his experiments on the Puy-de-Dome to show that the column of mercury in a glass tube varied in height with ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... in respect of rationality. For as the formal conditions of a metaphysical teleology are undoubtedly present on the one hand, and the formal conditions of a speculative atheism are as undoubtedly present on the other, there is thus in both cases a logical vacuum supplied wherein the pendulum of thought is free to swing in whichever direction it may be made to swing by the momentum of ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... certain vibrating movements, or waves. They differ from sound waves, however, in form, velocity, and in method of origin and transmission. Light waves are able to pass through a vacuum, thus showing that they are not dependent upon air for their transmission. They are supposed to be transmitted by what the physicist calls ether—a highly elastic and exceedingly thin substance which fills all space and penetrates all matter. As a rule, light waves originate in bodies ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... these pages will but swing up to the WHITE- LIFE harmony-plane, Health, Happiness and Power must be yours as surely as air rushes into a broken vacuum. If you ask, "What are the limits of this truth?" I answer, "I don't know." To speak otherwise would be mere speculation. I affirm the great truth: All things are yours. That YOU, if stricken through and ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... at this place in the manuscript a considerable vacuum, of which I have already given an explanation*, and which I am not sufficiently informed to make the attempt to fill up. But to put the reader in a situation to follow my mother's narrative, I will run ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... drawn down by contraction, thus adding to the enlargement of the chest by increasing its depth. The abdominal muscles relax and allow the stomach, liver, and other organs in the abdomen to move downward to make room for the depressed diaphragm. This causes a vacuum in the chest. The lungs expand to fill this vacuum and the air rushes in to fill the ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... The vacuum left by departed greatness was everywhere observable, whilst the battles and processions portrayed on the walls told you who had here excited revelry after retiring from slaughter, or dismissed pageantry in search of pleasure. ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... opened the door. This might be interesting, like a vacuum-cleaner salesman who had cleaned her drapes last week for free. And Kitty Kyle Battles Life wouldn't be on for almost ...
— Teething Ring • James Causey
... much that he could hear of Martha and the children, when he looked up, as of something else that he needed more. Even the foulest and most careless soul that God ever made has some moments when it grows homesick, conscious of the awful vacuum below its life, the Eternal Arm not being there. Yarrow was neither foul nor careless. All his life, most in those years in the prison, he had been hungry for Something to rest on, to own him. Sometimes, when his evil behavior ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... air was sucked from his lungs by a mighty vacuum, and the next the terrible compression upon his chest caused ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... That accomplished, suppose we dropped it on the instant. Suppose, further, that we should continue this process, and never allow ourselves to repeat a disagreeable brain-impression aloud or mentally. Imagine the result. Nature abhors a vacuum; something must come in place of the unpleasantness; therefore way is made for feelings more comfortable to ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... gang of thieves that has just set up business in Sherwood Forest: a pretty presence, indeed, to get into my castle with force and arms, and make a famine in my buttery, and a drought in my cellar, and a void in my strong box, and a vacuum in my ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... faith. With all his studies in the modern schools of science, he was not a whit more advanced in learning than Democritus of old—Democritus who based his system of morals on the severest mathematical lines, taking as his starting-point a vacuum and atoms, and who after stretching his intellect on a constant rack of searching inquiry for years, came at last to the unhappy conclusion that man is absolutely incapable of positive knowledge, and that even if ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... a man happy yet; there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... confess to feeling interested on being told that the stream of muddy liquid issuing from the crushed canes and trickling gaily down its wooden gutters, would ultimately figure as the lump-sugar of our breakfast-tables. There is also a peculiarly fascinating apparatus known as a vacuum-pan, peeping into which, through a little tale window, a species of brown porridge transforms itself into crystallised sugar of the sort known to housekeepers as "Demerara" under your very eyes; and another equally attractive, rapidly revolving machine in which the molasses, ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... expression is reminiscent of a boy's definition of a vacuum,—a large space with nothing in ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... work and the few daily vexations that hamper every one's lot, I continued to extract a great deal of enjoyment out of my life. To sum it up with a word, it was life—not mere existence—a life brimming over with duties and responsibilities and untried work, too busy for vacuum. Every corner and interstice of time filled up—heart, and head, and hands always fully employed; and youth and health, those two grand gifts of God, making ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... kangaroo-dogs him, you might say—through life. At adult age, he consists chiefly of wings; but, in addition to these, he has a pair of eager, sleepless eyes, endowed with a power of something like 200 diameters; and he has also a perennially empty stomach—the sort of vacuum, by the way, which Nature particularly abhors. He can eat nothing but fish; and, since he suffers under the disadvantage of being unable to dive, wade, or swim, some one else must catch the fish for him. The penguin does this, and does it with a listless ease which would excite the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... world in all its beauty, perfection, variety and infinity. It must be extremely pleasant. But felicity was denied to Roderick Anthony's contemplation. He was not a common sort of lover; and he was punished for it as if Nature (which it is said abhors a vacuum) were so very conventional as to abhor every sort of exceptional conduct. Roderick Anthony had begun already to suffer. That is why perhaps he was so industrious in going about amongst his fellow-men who would have been surprised and humiliated, had they known how little solidity and ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... and her Secret Sea had kept her soul awake with movement. But her Friend was dead, and there was no more sea. The very fine rain blew across her Secret World, and blotted it out. The very distant sound of guns—which was not so much a sound as an indescribable vacuum of sound—shattered the walls of her ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... omitted, for it is the completest and most sententious vindication of polyerotism ever phrased: "Ce n'etait pas que je n'aimasse les autres: mais j'avais encore, outre leur place, celle-ci vide dans mon ame." And the soul of Hylas, like Nature herself, abhorred a vacuum! (This approximation is not intended as "new and original": but it was some time after making it that I recovered, in Notre Dame de Paris, a forgotten anticipation of it ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... spirituality, immateriality, incorporeality, &c. pronounced, neither his senses nor his memory afford him any assistance; they do not furnish him with any means by which he can form an idea of their qualities, or of the objects to which he ought to apply them; in that which is not matter he can only see vacuum and emptiness, which as long as he remains what he is, cannot, to his mind, be susceptible ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... growing more and more beautiful in color, design, and texture, and one can find among them papers suited to all needs. Fabrics of all kinds have become possibilities since their dust-collecting capacity is now no longer a source of terror, as vacuum cleaners are one of the commonplaces of existence. Painting or tinting the walls, when done correctly, is very satisfactory in ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... return to the soul of Julius Caesar, and call it an immaterial automaton (M. Leibniz's own phrase), and compare it with an atom of Epicurus; I mean an atom surrounded with a vacuum on all sides, and which will never meet any other atom. This is a very just comparison: for this atom, on the one hand, has a natural power of moving itself and exerts it without any assistance, and without being retarded or hindered by anything: and, on the other ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... ship because I thought there might be a hidden source of buoyancy somewhere. It would take a lot of air bubbles to turn this ship into a balloon, but there are large vacuum chambers under the multiple series condensers in the engine room which conceivably could have sucked in a helium leakage from the carbon pile valves. And there are bulkhead ...
— The Sky Trap • Frank Belknap Long
... dozen things at once. Like all dignitaries, he was impatient of contradiction, and fought for his opinions against the merchant himself with a stiff-neckedness that often horrified Anton. One of his peculiarities was that of abhorring a vacuum as much as nature herself. Wherever there was an empty corner, a closet, a cellar, a recess to be discovered, there Pix would intrude with tuns, ladders, ropes, and all imaginable commodities; and wherever he and his giant band of porters had once got ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... dinosaur meat brought back from the colony on Alpha C IV to satisfy the heavy demand for that odd-tasting delicacy on Earth—the Valhalla used the most efficient freezing system of all: a compartment which opened out into the vacuum of space. The meat was packed in huge open receptacles which were flooded just before blastoff; before the meat had any chance to spoil, the lock was opened, the air fled into space and the compartment's heat ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... subordinate brilliancy, known as comet 1868 ii., or sometimes as Winnecke's, was the subject of his experiment. On comparing its spectrum with that of an olefiant-gas "vacuum tube" rendered luminous by electricity, he found the agreement exact. It has since been abundantly confirmed. All the eighteen comets tested by light analysis, between 1868 and 1880, showed the typical hydro-carbon ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... shells. Between forty-five hundred and five thousand metres, their bursts have been so close under us that we have been lifted by the concussions and set down violently again at the bottom of the vacuum; and this on a clear day when a chasse machine is almost invisible at that height, and despite its speed of two hundred kilometres an hour. On a gray day, when we are flying between twenty-five hundred and three thousand metres beneath a film of cloud, ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... the name out in three long booming triumphancies—pausing for it to produce its magical effect. Then he read two more letters, one from a manufacturer of vacuum cleaners and one from the president of ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... now ready. The engine-driver pulls open the regulator, and we glide back and are attached to the train. We have air-breaks worked on the engine, vacuum-breaks which can pull us up quickly, and when all the connections are made the "Flying Dutchman" is ready; he is harnessed to his eight coaches full of people—the solemn and sorry; the glad and the cheerful; and boys and girls, going on all sorts ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... nebulae would seem to be composed of gas in an extremely rarified form. It is difficult to convey an adequate idea of the rarity of nebular gases. The residual gases in a vacuum tube are dense by comparison. A cubic inch of air at ordinary pressure would contain more matter than is contained in millions of cubic inches of the gases of nebulae. The light of even the faintest stars does not ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... miles) from our Sun. Even this is a respectable distance! But beyond this world, an immense gulf, almost a void abyss, extends to the nearest star, [alpha] of the Centaur. Between Neptune and Centauris there is no star to cheer the black and cold solitude of the immense vacuum. One or two unknown planets, some wandering comets, and swarms of meteors, doubtless traverse those unknown spaces, but ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... a saucer, which forms the division between the chest cavity and the abdominal cavity. By downward expansion it causes the lungs to expand likewise and to suck in the air. The pressure of air being greater on the outside of the body than within, it rushes in and fills the vacuum created by the descending diaphragm. As the diaphragm relaxes and becomes contracted to its original size and position, the air is expelled from ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... trees must not fill in the vacuum with earth; but he may cover it over with stones or stubble. He who cuts down trunks of sycamore must not fill in the vacuum with earth, but he may cover it over with stones or stubble. Men must not cut down a young ...
— Hebrew Literature
... devotion, Guy was impelled to study that delicate and sensitive nature, entirely swayed by love of Sulpice, that suffered at times a vague pressure as of some indefinable anguish at the throat, as if a vacuum—a choking vacuum—had been created about her ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... are after all merely shadowy servants of the Emperor. They represent neither themselves nor the people, and such subserviency kills independence and leaves us with mediocrities gesticulating in the dark, and making phrases in a vacuum. ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... attention on Mars is the PREPARATION OF FOODS. With an atmospheric pressure of only eight pounds to the square inch, water boils at 175 degrees on our planet. This temperature is inadequate for cooking foods properly, especially the coarser varieties. But recourse is had to the cooking of food in vacuum or under pressure, as the exigencies of ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... this particular vacuum tube, which will amplify sounds three or four times over any other I have tried, we expect to talk with ground stations or other aircraft at a distance of three thousand miles. Notice what a simple thing it is, ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... machine in such manner that it will operate with, or a little behind, in the matter of time, the sixth valve. The machine is intended to carry full load with only the first bank of five valves in operation, with proper steam pressure and vacuum. If the steam pressure is under 150 pounds, or the vacuum is less than 28 inches, the sixth valve may operate at or near full load, and also open the stage valve and allow steam to pass to the second-stage nozzles at a much higher rate ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... to talk of the distance to Cambridge; the college life; and of how glad he would be to get there himself; starting topics till, to use his own expression, when describing the scene to his uncle, he felt "in a state of mental vacuum." ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... Sound from a vacuum cannot be heard in the Physical World, but the harmony which proceeds from the vacuous cavity of a celestial archetype is "the voice of the silence," and it becomes audible when all earthly sounds have ceased. Elijah heard it not while the storm was raging; nor ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel |
