"Variability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and reach a point of view, to become a spectator, while the only way to fit into the century was simply to keep moving in whirls of unintelligent unison; never to meditate, never to reason upon one's course; but to sweep onward, somewhere, anywhere as long as it was in a new direction. Elasticity, variability—were not these the indispensable qualities of the modern mind? The power to make quick decisions and the inability to cling to convictions; the nervous high pitch and the failure to sustain the triumphant note; energy without ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... fumes of chloride of ammonium substantially the same results were obtained. Sufficient, however, has been here stated to illustrate the variability of the position of the neutral point. [Footnote: Brewster has proved the variability of the position of the neutral point for skylight with the sun's altitude, a result obviously connected ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... gemination cannot be a work of permanent character, it being certain that in a given instance it may change its appearance and dimensions from one season to another. If we should assume such a work, a certain variability would not be excluded from it; for example, extensive agricultural labor and irrigation upon a large scale. Let us add, further, that the intervention of intelligent beings might explain the geometrical ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... suspected of a slight degree of variability. It is evidently a star of enormous actual magnitude, for its parallax escapes trustworthy measurement. It can only be ranked among the very first of the light-givers of the visible universe. Spectroscopically ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... laughed. She had charming white teeth—small and sharp and with enough irregularity to carry out her general suggestion of variability. "Yes, I shall like that, when it comes," she said; "But the chances are against ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... of the Negritos and the Papuans they recognized that the Papuans were diversified and presented a variety of types, but Meyer regards this not as pointing to a crossing of different elements but as revealing simply the variability of the race. He continues (p. 80): "As the external habitus of the Negritos must be declared as almost identical with that of the Papuans, differences in form of the skull, the size of the body, and such like have the less weight in opposition ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... which Sivori is compared with Spohr, may be interesting: "Spohr is of colossal stature, and looks more like an ancient Roman than a Brunswicker; Sivori is the antithesis of Spohr in stature. Spohr has the severe phlegmatic Teutonic aspect; Sivori has the flashing Italian eye and variability of feature. Spohr stands firm and still; Sivori's body is all on the swing, he tears the notes, as it were, from his instrument. Spohr's refinement and polish have been the characteristics of his playing; in Sivori it is wild energy—the soul in arms—the determination ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... are found in which it is impossible to distinguish between c and t; and hence in mediaeval times, and even later, such forms as fatio, loto, pecieris, licterae are not infrequently found for facio, loco, petieris, litterae. An extreme example of the confusion which this variability must have caused is in the case of the fourteenth-century annalist, Nicholas Trivet, whose surname sometimes ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... found any use for the Glamis solar system. There was a sun of highly irregular variability. There were two planets, of which the one farther out might have been useful for colonization except that it was subject to extreme changes of climate as its undependable sun burned brightly or dimly. The nearer planet was so close to its primary that it had long ceased to ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... for in the two processes the mind finds itself again. The confusion between them is therefore natural. To escape it, different names would have to be given to the two kinds of order, and that is not easy, because of the variety and variability of the forms they take. The order of the second kind may be defined as geometry, which is its extreme limit; more generally, it is that kind of order that is concerned whenever a relation of necessary determination is found between causes and effects. It evokes ideas of inertia, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... enormous rise in 1867 from an average of 3,500 per annum. to 24,000 was most likely a result of accidental accumulation and not representative of any special abundance. Finally, each and every line manifests extraordinary variability in the '30's. It is not to be supposed that the population fluctuated so enormously from one year to another, but rather that the ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... of the two original trees over a 10-year period, and of these young orchard trees over a 3-year period, show that there is great variability in time of flowering, depending upon the sequence of weather events each season. Fertilizer treatments have had no measureable effect. The trees have shed pollen as early as January and as late as April, and stigma ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... here an illustration of the simple and effectual means by which animals are brought into harmony with the rest of nature. That slight amount of variability in every species, which we often look upon as something accidental or abnormal, or so insignificant as to be hardly worthy of notice, is yet the foundation of all those wonderful and harmonious resemblances which play such an important part in the economy of nature. ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... things condemns the murderer, the liar, the sensualist, and the coward! and how do you come by 'natural goodness' if your moral is merely your customary? No, with all respect for your immense ability and your cultured outlook, I do not recognize the lawless variability of the right and the wrong standard which you posit. How get you your evidence? From human actions? But it is the most familiar of facts that men do things they feel to be wrong. I have known a thief ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... inconsequence and variability of her sex, immediately proceeded to hug and kiss the mite as affectionately as she had been shaking and vituperating him the moment before, he putting up with the new form of treatment as calmly and indifferently as he ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... knock holes in the ground with their fore-paws. Again, some of them charge home with a ferocious resolution which their extreme tenacity of life renders especially dangerous; while others can be turned or driven back even by a shot which is not mortal. They show the same variability in their behavior when wounded. Often a big bear, especially if charging, will receive a bullet in perfect silence, without flinching or seeming to pay any heed to it; while another will cry out and tumble about, and if charging, ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... of thinking. "Even in God I discover defects," was the remark of one of them to his youthful listener—to whom he had been communicating his views on the world in general. In the company of these elders, with such or kindred opinions, Goethe was early familiarised with the variability of human judgments on fundamental questions. And he laid the experience to heart, for on no point in the conduct of life does he insist with greater emphasis than the folly of expecting others to ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... the great variability of ephemeral insects and of animal plants, on the impossibility of discovering the parent-stock of our wheat and of others of our domesticated plants,[87] and on the tendency of both plants and animals to resume feral characteristics on ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... intelligence or some unusual quality of his instincts, perhaps very far back in animal life, that has in the end made him a warlike creature. Man does seem to be a creature of feelings rather than of instincts as far back as we find much account of him, and to be characterized rather by the weakness and variability of his instincts than by their definiteness. It is quite likely, too, that man never was at any stage a herd animal; in fact it seems certain that he was not, and that his instincts were formed long before he began to live ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... have dark diffuse dorsal stripes that are wide in specimens from the Mancos River Valley. The generally darker color of the specimens from the Mancos Valley as compared with that of specimens from on the Mesa was noticed in the field, and is another example of the local variability of pocket gophers. The nine specimens listed by Youngman (1958:372) as from "Mesa Verde National Park," Mancos River, 6200 ft., are not here listed among "specimens examined" because possibly some, or all, of the nine were trapped on the east side of the River and ...
— Mammals of Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado • Sydney Anderson
... organic variation. Morgan and Plough, * for example, have discovered that when a certain fly, called the drosophila, is subjected to extremes of heat or cold, the offspring show an unusually strong tendency to differ from the parents. Hence the climatic variability of the interior of large continents in temperate latitudes provides new forms of life and then selects some of them for preservation. The fossils found in the rocks of the earth's crust support this view. They indicate that most of the great families of higher animals originated in ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the "Origin" was, "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" I suppose that Columbus' companions said much the same when he made the egg stand on end. The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness, and the beacon-fire of the "Origin" ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... it frankly, "Yes, Cousin Ned. You have made the voyage, you see, and have come back friends with me. The variability of opals! Ah! Sir John, you join us in season. We were talking of opals. Is the opal a gem that ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in their brightness are called Variable Stars, or "variables." The first star whose variability attracted attention is that known as Omicron Ceti, namely, the star marked with the Greek letter [o] (Omicron) in the constellation of Cetus, or the Whale, a constellation situated not far from Taurus. This ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... the temperaments of parents blend and revivify in their children. As Stephanie grew up she had repeated in her very differing body some of her father's and mother's characteristics—an interesting variability of soul. She was tall, dark, sallow, lithe, with a strange moodiness of heart and a recessive, fulgurous gleam in her chestnut-brown, almost brownish-black eyes. She had a full, sensuous, Cupid's mouth, a dreamy and even languishing expression, a graceful neck, and a heavy, dark, and yet pleasingly ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... the South African plateau, whether river, spruit, sluit, or donga, have, in addition to their extreme variability, another marked and almost universal peculiarity. Running in deep beds, of which the banks are usually level with the surrounding country, and the sides terraced from the highest to the lowest water-mark, they constitute natural entrenchments which are generally invisible, except where rarely ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... shelving coasts, like those of the Netherlands, the maritime currents are constantly changing, in consequence of the variability of the winds, and the shifting of the sand-banks, which the currents themselves now form and now displace. While, therefore, at one point the sea is advancing landward, and requiring great effort to prevent the undermining and washing away of the dikes, it is shoaling at another by its own deposits, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... form of a diffuse gummatous infiltration of the membranes which gives rise to symptoms referable to the parts pressed upon, and especially paralysis of one or other of the cranial nerves. As in other intra-cranial syphilitic lesions, the symptoms show a variability in intensity which is characteristic. The diagnosis is made by the history, and the treatment is carried out on the same lines as ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... little group of stars in the Milky Way, in one of which his chief had seen or fancied a remarkable colour variability. It was not a part of the regular work for which the establishment existed, and for that reason perhaps Woodhouse was deeply interested. He must have forgotten things terrestrial. All his attention was concentrated upon the great blue circle of the telescope field—a circle powdered, ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... character all the childishness and inconsistency of a beardless race. He has courage, spirit, and strength; but, cursed with instability, that courage, strength, and energy have neither method nor guidance; for the Pole displays a variability resembling that of the winds which blow across that vast plain broken with swamps; and though he has the impetuosity of the snow squalls that wrench and sweep away buildings, like those aerial avalanches he is lost in the first pool and melts ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... numerous observations upon men and animals, John Hunter showed that the essential difference between the so-called warm-blooded and cold-blooded animals lies in the constancy of the temperature of the former, and the variability of the temperature of the latter. Those animals high in the scale of evolution, as birds and mammals, have a high temperature almost constant and independent of that of the surrounding air, whereas among the lower ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... time of King Charles II. that the first serious steps were taken to cope with the smuggling evil, and from here we really take our starting-point in our present inquiry. Prior to his time the Customs, as a subsidy of the king, were prone to much variability. In the time of James I., for instance, they had been granted to the sovereign for life, and he claimed to alter the rates as he chose when pressed for money. When Charles I. came to the throne the Commons, instead of voting ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton
... magnitude, at which it continues for about 2 days 12 hours, when the same series commences anew. It seems that the period required by Algol to go through its changes is itself subject to a slow but certain variation. We shall see in a following chapter how it has been proved that the variability of Algol is due to the occasional interposition of a dark companion which cuts off a part of the lustre of the star. All the circumstances can thus be accounted for, and even the weight and the size of Algol and its dark ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... map, he does not hopelessly lose his way. Nor, to this comparison, can it be an adequate objection, that the twistings of the town are always the same, and those of human nature subject to variation. The grand points of human nature are the same to-day they were a thousand years ago. The only variability in them is in expression, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... be given by any number of tabular statements or cases of extreme individual variation, but we obtain a basis of fact by which to test the statements and objections usually put forth on the subject of specific variability; and it will be found that, throughout the work, I have frequently to appeal to these diagrams and the facts they illustrate, just as Darwin was accustomed to appeal to the facts of variation ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... She wore a cotton dress of a forget-me-not blue which suits her pale colouring. She looked quite pretty. When I told her so she blushed like a girl. I was glad to see her in gay humour again. Of late months she has been subject to moodiness, emotional variability, which has somewhat ruffled the smooth surface of our companionship. But to-day there has been no trace of "temperament." She has shown herself the pleasant, witty Judith she knows I like her to be, with a touch of ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... l'aime, a le gout parfait; celui qui ne le sent pas, et qui aime au deca ou au dela, a le gout defectueux. Il y a donc un bon et un mauvais gout, et l'on dispute des gouts avec fondement." Delicacy and variability or variety were appended as attributes of taste. This French definition of the Italian word was speedily adopted in England, where it became "good taste," and we find it used in this sense in Italian and German writers of ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... abnormality, of disaster, and of death. Young people suffer much from the want of comprehension and intelligent sympathy of their elders, much also from their own ignorance and too fervid imagination. The instability of the bodily tissues and the variability of their functions find a counterpart in the instability of the mental and moral natures and in the variability of their phenomena. Adolescents indeed "never continue in one stay;" left to themselves ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... extraordinary. But the way is a very narrow and restricted one, and all savages of the same race walk in it exactly alike. Cunning they have, skill they have, instinct they have, to a most marvellous degree; but of spontaneity, originality, initiative, variability, not a single spark. Know one savage of a tribe and you know them all. Their cleverness is not the cleverness of the individual man: it is the inherited and garnered intelligence or instinct of the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... flagship), the Pinta, and the Nina. He started from the port of Palos, first for the Canary Islands. These he left on the 6th September, and steered due west. On the 13th of that month, Columbus observed that the needle of the compass pointed due north, and thus drew attention to the variability of the compass. By the 21st September his men became mutinous and tried to force him to return. He induced them to continue, and four days afterwards the cry of "Land! land!" was heard, which kept up their spirits for several days, till, on the 1st October, large numbers ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... positively known, but there can be hardly any doubt of their being descendants of the four or five wild species so generally distributed throughout the mountainous portions of the globe, the marked differences between the wild and domestic species being readily accounted for by the known variability of the animal, and by the long series of painstaking selection to which all its characteristics have been subjected. No other animal seems to yield so submissively to the manipulations of culture. Jacob controlled the color of his flocks merely by causing them ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... hundred feet meant mere wading, though there was some variability among the sand ridges of the bottom; but the water, at its deepest, never reached their shoulders. Their small accident now began to take on the character of a ceremonial—an immersion incident to some religious rite or observance; and the little Sunday crowd collecting ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... but the most distinct genera and orders within the same great class—for instance, mammals, birds, reptiles, and fishes—are all the descendants of one common progenitor, and we must admit that the whole vast amount of difference between these forms has primarily arisen from simple variability. To consider the subject under this point of view is enough to strike one dumb with amazement. But our amazement ought to be lessened when we reflect that beings almost infinite in number, during an almost infinite lapse of time, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... a good deal of divergence in the opinion of explorers as to the temperature of Tierra del Fuego. Weddell attributes this to the different seasons of their visits, and the variability of the winds. When he was there and the wind was in the south the thermometer was never more than two or three degrees above zero, whereas when the wind came from the north it was as hot as July in England. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... connection (objects are directly known only as the contents of a consciousness, cui objecta sunt, subjects only as centers of relation, as the scene or foundation of a representative content, cui subjecta sunt: outside my thoughts body does not exist as body, nor I myself as soul). (2) The variability of the objects of perception. (3) Sensationalism—all specific differences in consciousness must be conceived as differences in degree, all higher mental processes and states, including thought, as the perceptions and experiences, transformed according to law, of beings which ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... in trying to fathom femininity, is a sensation equally foreign to his temperament. Neither the remarkable persistence of one's own characteristics, not infrequently matter of deep regret to their possessor, nor the charmingly unaccountable variability of the fairer sex, at times quite as annoying, is a phenomenon sufficient to stir his curiosity. Accepting, as he does, the existing state of things more as a material fact than as a phase in a gradual process of development, ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... that the peasants of Europe do not as a whole use their mental powers in a much more logical or abstract manner than do primitive people. I maintain that such superiority as they have is due to differences (1) of environment and (2) of variability. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... that there is much confusion of ideas in the general statement of the variability of species so often repeated lately. If species do not exist at all, as the supporters of the transmutation theory maintain, how can they vary? and if individuals alone exist, how can the differences which may be observed among them ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... passive sense. Of the two kinds of vision, the passive is the more serviceable as being the more perspicuous and literal, but it has the disadvantage of being largely under the control of external influences and consequently of greater variability than the positive vision. It is, indeed, quite the common experience that the passive medium requires "conditions" for the proper exercise of the faculty and where these are lacking no ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... orders within the same great class—for instance, mammals, birds, reptiles, and fishes—are all the descendants of one common progenitor, and the whole vast amount of difference between these forms has primarily arisen from simple variability. Darwin recognized that he who for the first time should consider the subject under this point of view would be struck dumb with amazement. He submits, however, that the amazement ought to be lessened when we reflect that beings almost ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... all animals of the same species resemble each other; thus, the hunter who knows the red-deer in his father's forest, may know in every forest on earth how the stag will behave in any given case. The better a genus is fitted for variability in the conformation of its individuals, the higher is the rank it is entitled to hold in the graduated series of creatures capable of development; and it is precisely that wonderful many-sidedness of his inner life, and of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... influence of the exciting causes of the moment. They are like the leaves which a tempest whirls up and scatters in every direction and then allows to fall. When studying later on certain revolutionary crowds we shall give some examples of the variability of their sentiments. ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... duration of the redundant measure the subjective reports indicate a large variability. The dactylic form appears to be slightly longer than the trochaics among which it appears; but not infrequently it is shorter.[9] These variations are probably connected with differences in stress due to the relation which the measure ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... well to state here however that owing to variability in behavior with variation in conditions it is dangerous to draw too general conclusions and until a given source has actually been investigated under specific cooking conditions one should not rely too strongly on analogies based on comparative ...
— The Vitamine Manual • Walter H. Eddy
... difficulty disappears. If music, taking for its raw material the various modifications of voice which are the physiological results of excited feelings, intensifies, combines, and complicates them—if it exaggerates the loudness, the resonance, the pitch, the intervals, and the variability, which, in virtue of an organic law, are the characteristics of passionate speech—if, by carrying out these further, more consistently, more unitedly, and more sustainedly, it produces an idealised language of emotion; ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... for, and in, a torrid clime, and there is some difference between their strong ivory masticators and the transparent pearly teeth which so rapidly decay in the eastern states, from no other cause than the variability of the climate. Besides, do the teeth of the women in the western states decay so fast? Take a healthy situation, with an intermediate climate, such as Cincinnati, and you will there find not only good teeth, but ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being growth with reproduction; variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a ratio of increase so high as to lead to a struggle for life, and as a consequence to natural selection, entailing divergence of character ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... form and colour and that enchanting variability was the look of intelligence, which at the same time seemed complementary to and one with the all-seeing, all-hearing alertness appearing in her face; the alertness one remarks in a wild creature, even when in repose and fearing nothing; but seldom in man, ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... middle name is Mischief," he began, plunging in medias res; "Byrd's is Variability; for the last five months the Mary lady's has ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... feet to tons depends on the specific gravity of the ore, its porosity, and moisture. The variability of ores throughout the mine in all these particulars renders any method of calculation simply an approximation in the end. The factors which must remain unknown necessarily lead the engineer to the provision of a ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... conclusive, fails now that the law of Natural Selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of Natural Selection, than in the course which the wind blows." There again Darwin fell into a mistake, because he confused an intermediate with a final cause. Even if Natural Selection were all ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... vary with their state of mind. At times they will build a very elaborate structure of their own; then, again, they take up with an old crow's nest or the summer nest of a squirrel, and with very little patching up make this answer their purpose. Because of this variability on their part, it is not an easy matter ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... spite of the obscurity of the subject several principles of orthography have been definitely established, especially with regard to the older Latin, which will guide future editors. And the labours of Ritschl, Corssen, and many others, cannot fail to bring to light the most important laws of variability which have affected the spelling of Latin words, so far as the variation has not depended on mere ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... alcohol may do to the individual. The concern of evolutionists, therefore, is with the man who is so constituted that the mental effects of alcohol acting directly on the brain are pleasing, and we must show that there is a congenital variability in this mental ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... racial type varies somewhat and with it the national life and thought. Compare England, Germany, France, and Spain as to the variability in characteristics of literature and art, in moral ideals, in ethical practice, in religious motive, and in social order. Their differences are evident, but they tend to disappear under the influence of rapid transit and close intercommunication, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... variability;—the patent fact, that all species vary more or less; that domesticated plants and animals, being in conditions favorable to the production and preservation of varieties, are apt to vary widely; and that by interbreeding, any variety may be fixed into a race, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... the very act, as it were, of capturing one's self, the personage we believe we have seized escapes, disappears. Nor is it only the complexity of our inner being which obstructs our examination, but its exceeding variability. The investigator's regard should embrace all the sides of the subject, and ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... N14, Cl35.5 occupy in the free state one volume, but in the combination, CNCl, two volumes; their specific gravity is, therefore, by chemical action reduced to one half. The fact thus elicited of the variability and variation of the specific gravity is of fundamental importance and involves the irrelevancy of the mathematical demonstration of the hypothesis. In this demonstration the specific gravity is assumed to be constant, and this assumption ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... miscellaneous aggregations, such as atmospheric air or rock, composed of heterogeneous substances, and not constituting or belonging to any real Kind,(191) or it is in the case of organic beings. In them, indeed, there is variability in a high degree. Animals of the same species and race, human beings of the same age, sex, and country, will be most different, for example, in face and figure. But organized beings (from the extreme ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... producer's farm. Sustaining this extension of the act, the Court pointed out that the effect of the statute was to support the market. It said: "It can hardly be denied that a factor of such volume and variability as home-consumed wheat would have a substantial influence on price and market conditions. This may arise because being in marketable condition such wheat overhangs the market and, if induced by rising prices, tends to flow into the market ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... in the framework of the organic systems and for the progressive element in the development. The other is the struggle for existence and natural selection, which approaches the organisms purely from without like individual variability, must as a whole appear a necessity, but in each single case in the concrete mixture of coinciding circumstances, would seem a work of chance for the individual ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... The striking variability of the human jaw is strongly opposed to the idea of its being under the direct and dominant control of so uniform a cause as ancestral use and disuse. Mr. Spencer regards a variation of 1 oz. as a large one, but I found that the English jaws ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... madcap mood that it was as well there were none but married people with him,—the subject being of a 'Gampish' nature. But he was not always full of spirits or even-tempered,—indeed, I was sometimes puzzled by the variability of ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... define a species, but even to determine whether it has any real existence in nature, or is a mere abstraction of the human intellect, some contending that it is constant within certain narrow and impassable limits of variability, others that it is capable of indefinite and ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... harmony by his own free-will. He is even as a wisp in the wind, moved by every breath of passion, acting now by his will and now by his instincts, erring with one, only to retrieve by the other, falling by one, only to rise by the other—a creature of incalculable variability. We have the consolation of knowing that evolution is ever in action, that the ideal is a light that cannot fail. He will not forever balance thus between good and evil. When this jangle of free-will instinct ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... formerly occupied; while others have changed their color since the era of astronomical observation. In short, there is no permanence in the heavens, any more than on the earth; but a perpetual progress and change is the destiny of suns and stars, of which the most conspicuous indication is the variability of their powers of giving light, of which I ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... variability. It expressed itself in the pioneer's one method; namely, an annual revival of religion. In the pioneer churches there were few or no Sunday schools or other societies. In those regions in which the pioneer has remained the type ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... was so intense that when he came to see his father in Baltimore the latter had him committed to the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital.[3] He remained there for one year and eight months, during which time his mood showed great variability. At times he would be elated, again depressed or anxious, often silly with irrelevant laughter. Towards the end of his admission he had quite long intervals when he appeared normal. Eight months after his discharge he began to have monthly attacks lasting from one ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... remains are singular from the extreme variability of their mineralogical composition. Every intermediate form is present, between flinty-slate, clay-slate passing into grey wacke, pure limestone, sandstone, and porcellanic rock; and some of the beds can only be described ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... have an illustration of the variability of the progeny of a nut in this collection of chestnuts by Mr. Riehl out in Illinois. This is a parent nut, the Rochester, and these others are seedlings from the Rochester, except where marked otherwise, some showing a tendency ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... extreme fairness in Holland—and a vast mental and physical diversity. Were the Jews to discontinue all intermarriage with "other races" henceforth for ever, it would depend upon quite unknown laws of fecundity, prepotency, and variability, what their final type would be, or, indeed, whether any particular type would ever prevail over diversity. And, without going beyond the natives of the British Isles, one can discover an enormous range of types, tall and short, straight-haired and curly, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... psychological basis of speech and gives only enough of the actual descriptive or historical facts of particular languages to illustrate principles. Its main purpose is to show what I conceive language to be, what is its variability in place and time, and what are its relations to other fundamental human interests—the problem of thought, the nature of the ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... these changes and arbitrarily to mark some prices up and some prices down. But as this is guesswork, and will be subject to frequent revision, one of the striking phenomena will doubtless be an increase in the variability of prices. The general level of prices will tend to rise. The rise will probably be greatest in little countries like Belgium, which are in the war zone and largely dependent on foreign trade. The rise will be less in England and in the United States than on the Continent. In fact, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... which it bequeaths. Though, like nearly all fevers, it is self-limited, tends to run its course and subside when the body has manufactured an antitoxin in sufficient amounts, it is unique in another respect, and that is in the extraordinary variability of the length of its "course." This may range anywhere from ten days to as many weeks, the "average expectation of life" being about six weeks. The agonizing intensity of the pain and acute edge of the discomfort usually subside in from five to fifteen days, especially under competent ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... invariability of types during hundreds of thousands of years at least. I hope to present a part of this evidence in a future article upon Coral Reefs, but in the mean time I cannot leave this subject without touching upon a point of which great use has been made in recent discussions. I refer to the variability of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... constant value which will be exactly repeated in each test, even though no error be made. The most that can be accomplished is to find average values, the amount of variation above and below, and the laws which govern the variation. On account of the great variability in strength of different specimens of wood even from the same stick and appearing to be alike, it is important to eliminate as far as possible all extraneous factors liable to influence the results of ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... Llywarch Hen from 'the cruel prison of the earth, from the abode of death, from the loveless land.' The salient features, therefore, of the Celtic conceptions of the other-world are their consonance with the suggestions made by Celtic scenery to the Celtic imagination, the vagueness and variability of these conceptions in different minds and in different moods, the absence of any ethical considerations beyond the incentive given to bravery by the thought of immortality, and the remarkable development ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... actual sense of what a tree should be? Shall we take the Platonic myth literally, and say the idea is a memory of the tree I have already seen in heaven? How else establish any relation between that eternal object and the type in my mind? But why, in that case, this infinite variability of ideal trees? Was the Tree Beautiful an oak, or a cedar, an English or an American elm? My actual types are finite and mutually exclusive; that heavenly type must be one and infinite. The ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... Development,[348] von Baer expressed belief in a limited amount of evolution. In this paper he did not admit that all animals have developed from one parent form, and he refused to believe that man has descended from an ape; but, basing his supposition upon the facts of variability and upon the evidence of palaeontology, he went so far as to maintain that many species have evolved from parent stocks. In the absence of conclusive proofs he did not commit himself to a belief in any extended ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... know what to do with Roy: how to treat him; how to bring him up. He may improve as he grows older. Perhaps to his unfortunate infirmity may be ascribed his uncertainty and his variability of temper and disposition. It is possible that he cannot hear even when he wants to hear. It is not impossible that he is making-believe all the time. One great, good thing can be said for Roy: he is ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton
... in January, 1864, in calm weather, the report of an eighteen-pounder, with three pounds of powder, was faint at four miles. Still, in the Trinity House experiments of 1865, made in light weather with a light gun, the report was clearly heard seven miles away. Dr. Gladstone records great variability in the range of gun-sound in the Holyhead experiments. Prof. Henry says that a twenty-four-pounder was used at Point Boneta, San Francisco Bay, Cal., in 1856-57, and that, by the help of it alone, vessels came into the harbor during the fog at night ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... this year (1817) has fixed itself very firmly in my mind, and I hope that it has done so from my conscience having been afterwards sorely troubled by it; it is curious as showing that apparently I was interested at this early age in the variability of plants! I told another little boy (I believe it was Leighton, who afterwards became a well-known lichenologist and botanist), that I could produce variously colored polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain colored fluids, which was of course a monstrous fable, and had ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... persistent and resistant, we are so made that we fit ourselves to the most diverse conditions. Will the Indian, the Negro, or the Mongol ever conquer the Teuton? Surely not! The Indian has persistence without variability; if he does not modify he dies, if he does try to modify he dies anyway. The Negro has adaptability, but he is servile and must be led. As for the Chinese, they are permanent. All that the other races are not, the Anglo-Saxon, or Teuton if ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... Given variability, which is natural and to be expected, and given the absence of detail about the "residential portion" of other houses than that of Odysseus in the poems, it does not seem to us that this house is conspicuously "late," still less that ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... that it buys—chiefly as a stick wherewith to beat the Gold Standard. He shows, very easily and truly, that it is absurd to suppose that the value of the monetary gold standard is invariable. Thereby he is only beating a dead horse, for no such argument is nowadays put forward. The variability of the gold standard of value is acknowledged, whenever a fluctuation in the general level of commodity prices is recorded. But gold is the basis of our credit system, and of those of all the economically civilised ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... latter genus. In Puccinia the number of species is by far the most numerous; in this genus the spores are uniseptate, and, as in all the Pucciniaei, the peduncles are permanent. There is great variability in the compactness of the spores in the sori, or pulvinules. In some species, the sori are so pulverulent that the spores are as readily dispersed as in the Uredines, in others they are so compact as to be separated from each other with great difficulty. As ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... was lighted with smiles so fascinating, that Frances, who, in compliance with her earnest entreaties, had accompanied her to the sick chamber, sat gazing on a countenance that possessed so wonderful variability, impelled by a charm that was beyond her control. The youth had thrown an earnest look at Frances, as soon as his sister raised herself from his arms, and perhaps it was the first glance at the lovely lineaments ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... Rambi. Whether these are distinct species, however, or whether they are mere races, and how far any of them are identical with the Sumatran Orang, as Mr. Wallace thinks the Mias Pappan to be, are problems which are at present undecided; and the variability of these great apes is so extensive that the settlement of the question is a matter of great difficulty. Of the form called "Mias Pappan," Mr. Wallace observes: "It is known by its large size, and by the lateral expansion of the face ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... content that should not be allowed through). While the extent of overblocking and underblocking will vary with the product (and may improve over time), underblocking and overblocking result from numerous sources, including the variability in the perspectives that humans bring to the task of ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... most remarkable anticipations of modern science were made by Cardan. He believed that inorganic matter was animated, and that all nature was a progressive evolution. Thus his statement that all animals were originally worms implies the indefinite variability of species, just as his remark that inferior metals were unsuccessful attempts of nature to produce gold, might seem to foreshadow the idea of the transmutation of metals under the influence of radioactivity. It must ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... empiricism is not to see the omnipresence of reason in thought, the mistake of rationalism is not to admit its variability and dependence, not to understand its natural life. Parmenides was the Adam of that race, and first tasted the deceptive kind of knowledge which, promising to make man God, banishes him from the paradise of experience. His sin has been transmitted to his descendants, though hardly ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... higher limit of audibility varies with different persons has long been known; and there can be no reason for doubting that there is a similar variability in the lower limit. Thus, to some observers, the sound remains inaudible throughout, however intently they may be listening. Again, it is found that, the deeper the sound, the greater must be the strength of the vibrations required ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... made to indicate, like a weathercock grown rusty, remains just where he was in the last week of last October. It is true, that his protest against binding him to his opinions, and his reservation of a right to whatever opinions he pleases, remain in their full force. This variability is pleasant, and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 'verbatim' in his book—as I apprehend it, I say, it is, that all the phenomena of organic nature, past and present, result from, or are caused by, the inter-action of those properties of organic matter, which we have called ATAVISM and VARIABILITY, with the CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE; or, in other words,—given the existence of organic matter, its tendency to transmit its properties, and its tendency occasionally to vary; and, lastly, given the ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... thus be seen that the idea of the variability of species came to Charles Darwin as an inference from personal observations in the field, not as a thought borrowed from books. He had, of course, read the works of his grandfather much earlier in life, but the arguments of Zoonomia and The Temple of Nature had not served in the least to ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... founded on the memory of past events, on foresight, reason and imagination, with exactly similar actions instinctively performed by the lower animals; in this latter case the capacity of performing such actions has been gained, step by step, through the variability of the mental organs and natural selection, without any conscious intelligence on the part of the animal during each successive generation. No doubt, as Mr. Wallace has argued, much of the intelligent work done by man is due to imitation and not to reason; but there is this great difference ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... seems to me the weak point in the theory. How can we reconcile the mutation and the variability of the germ plasm, with its immortality and ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... miles in diameter with bright but not very lofty walls, situated among the mountains near the S.W. side of the Mare Serenitatis. It is surrounded by a region remarkable for its great variability in brightness. There is a large bright ring-plain on the W., with a less conspicuous companion on the ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... again those that enable their possessor to struggle for existence most efficiently will be preserved. Repeat this process for millions and millions of years, and, as it is impossible to assign any limit to variability, it would seem as though the present diversities of species must certainly have come about sooner or later, and that other divergences will continue to come about to the end of time. The great agent in this development of life ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... of the general theory of relativity. According to this theory the metrical qualities of the continuum of space-time differ in the environment of different points of space-time, and are partly conditioned by the matter existing outside of the territory under consideration. This space-time variability of the reciprocal relations of the standards of space and time, or, perhaps, the recognition of the fact that "empty space" in its physical relation is neither homogeneous nor isotropic, compelling us ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... of this is obvious:—The dry ore has a constant composition, and the results of all assays of it will be the same, no matter when made; the moisture, however, may vary from day to day, and would be influenced by a passing shower of rain. It is well to limit this variability to the moisture by considering it apart, and thus avoid having the percentage, say, of copper rising and falling under ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... be great variability in the degree and manner in which chloroform renders the glands insensible to the subsequent action of meat. In the plant last referred to, which had been exposed for 2 m. to three drops of chloroform, some few tentacles curved up only to a perpendicular position, and particles of meat were placed ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... our domestic races of animals and plants leads to the following conclusions. Changed conditions of life are of the highest possible importance in causing variability, both by acting directly on the organisation, and indirectly by affecting the reproductive system. Spontaneous variation of unknown origin plays its part. Some, perhaps a great, effect may be attributed to the increased use ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... animals and of "sporting plants" in the vegetable kingdom, is still shrouded in mystery, and the question whether this is not precisely the ground on which Darwin and Nietzsche will meet, is an interesting one. The former says in his "Origin of Species", concerning the causes of variability: "...there are two factors, namely, the nature of the organism, and the nature of the conditions. THE FORMER SEEMS TO BE MUCH THE MORE IMPORTANT (The italics are mine.), for nearly similar variations sometimes arise ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... domestication, variants that have been produced in cultivation but are not known to occur and perpetuate themselves in the wild, such as Schwedler's maple known as Acer Platanoides var. Schwedleri. Plants of this group, that may be grown from seed and which do show a limited variability, are distinguished from botanical varieties by placing them in a new category called cultivar (a name coined long ago by L. H. Bailey and meaning, a variety from cultivation). The abbreviation for the category is cv. Furthermore, in an effort to differentiate cultivar names ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... The variability of the wind in the arctic seas is a remarkable fact, and very often only a few minutes intervene between a calm and a frightful tempest. This was Hatteras's experience on the 23d of June, in the middle ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... of the extreme variability of the sheep under culture, it is generally supposed that the innumerable domestic breeds have all been derived from the few wild species; but the whole question is involved in obscurity. According to Darwin, sheep have ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... effort AND seeking of a harmonious reality arises morality. "Man seeks the truth, a world that does not contradict itself, that does not deceive, that does not change; a real world,—a world in which there is no suffering. Contradiction, deception and variability are the causes of suffering. He does not doubt there is such a thing as, a world as it might be, and he would fain find a road to it."[1] But alas, intelligence and knowledge both are imperfect, and one group seeking a truth that will bring them good crops, ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... general variability of taste we have in great measure failed to grasp certain laws of beauty which obtain whether appreciated or not. Abstract beauty is but a concept, a thought form for purposes of discussion. The beauty perceived pertains to something, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... the normal woman (height, weight, brain, nervous system, hair, senses, physiognomy, and intellectual and moral manifestations), the authors arrived at the conclusion that the physical, anatomical, physiological, functional, and sensory characters of the female show a lower degree of variability ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero |
