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Vertical   Listen
adjective
Vertical  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to the vertex; situated at the vertex, or highest point; directly overhead, or in the zenith; perpendicularly above one. "Charity... is the vertical top of all religion."
2.
Perpendicular to the plane of the horizon; upright; plumb; as, a vertical line.
Vertical angle (Astron. & Geod.), an angle measured on a vertical circle, called an angle of elevation, or altitude, when reckoned from the horizon upward, and of depression when downward below the horizon.
Vertical anthers (Bot.), such anthers as stand erect at the top of the filaments.
Vertical circle (Astron.), an azimuth circle. See under Azimuth.
Vertical drill, an upright drill. See under Upright.
Vertical fire (Mil.), the fire, as of mortars, at high angles of elevation.
Vertical leaves (Bot.), leaves which present their edges to the earth and the sky, and their faces to the horizon, as in the Australian species of Eucalyptus.
Vertical limb, a graduated arc attached to an instrument, as a theodolite, for measuring vertical angles.
Vertical line.
(a)
(Dialing) A line perpendicular to the horizon.
(b)
(Conic Sections) A right line drawn on the vertical plane, and passing through the vertex of the cone.
(c)
(Surv.) The direction of a plumb line; a line normal to the surface of still water.
(d)
(Geom., Drawing, etc.) A line parallel to the sides of a page or sheet, in distinction from a horizontal line parallel to the top or bottom.
Vertical plane.
(a)
(Conic Sections) A plane passing through the vertex of a cone, and through its axis.
(b)
(Projections) Any plane which passes through a vertical line.
(c)
(Persp.) The plane passing through the point of sight, and perpendicular to the ground plane, and also to the picture.
Vertical sash, a sash sliding up and down. Cf. French sash, under 3d Sash.
Vertical steam engine, a steam engine having the crank shaft vertically above or below a vertical cylinder.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Vertical" Quotes from Famous Books



... Two vertical sections through the refrigerating coils are shown in fig. 6. Section A-B shows the entrance near the floor of the calorimeter room. The air is drawn down over the coils, passes through the blower, and is forced ...
— Respiration Calorimeters for Studying the Respiratory Exchange and Energy Transformations of Man • Francis Gano Benedict

... the heat of fusion were created by the expansive power of heat acting from below, we should expect to find every species of fracture, dislocation, and contortion in those bodies, and every degree of departure from a horizontal towards a vertical position. And this is just what we do find. From horizontal, the strata are frequently found vertical; from continuous, broken, and separated in every possible direction; and from a plane, bent and doubled. The theory is confirmed by an examination of the veins and fissures ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... captain, as he looked at the ruin of the shed, amid which the airship was. "This is my first accident of this kind. The lever of the vertical rudder snapped, and I couldn't control her. Luckily the roof was rotten, or we ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis

... regulator, invented by Mr. Stenberg, in which the effect of centrifugal force is utilized. In a vessel, A, of parabolic shape is placed a disk, C, which floats on glycerine contained by the vessel, and is attached to the walls of the vessel by an annular membrane, so that it may rise and fall in a vertical direction as the glycerine is carried with more or less force toward the edge of the vessel by centrifugal action. The inner surface of the vessel, A, is provided with radial grooves, by which the rotary motion of the vessel is communicated to the glycerine. To the center of the disk, C, is attached ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various

... purple. Here the bergs assume changing forms, first a castle, then a balloon just clear of the horizon, that changes swiftly into an immense mushroom, a mosque, or a cathedral. The principal characteristic is the vertical lengthening of the object, a small pressure-ridge being given the appearance of a line of battlements or towering cliffs. The mirage is produced by refraction and is intensified by the columns of comparatively warm air rising from several cracks and leads ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... the forward end being shaped something like a spur or ram. At the after end were two flickering, interlacing circles of a glittering greenish-yellow colour, apparently formed by two intersecting propellers driven at an enormous velocity. Behind these was a vertical fan of triangular shape. The craft appeared to be flat-bottomed, and for about a third of her length amidships the upper half of her hull was covered with a ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith

... as abbreviations, in the same manner as these objects are still characterized in our almanacks, and in our astronomical calculations. Thus also the kingdom of China is designed by a square, with a vertical line drawn through the middle, in conformity perhaps with their ideas of the earth being a square, and China placed in its center; so far these may be considered as symbols of the objects intended to be represented. So, also, the ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... of the light usually called me in the morning. By a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our western gable, where the boards had shrunk and separated, flashed suddenly into my eyes as stripes of dazzling blue, at once so dark and splendid that I used to marvel how the qualities could be combined. At an earlier hour, the heavens ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... principal groups of animal and vegetable life which can be arranged in a vertical line of descent; species and even genera cannot always be so—for these contain beings whose organization has been dependent on the possession of such and such a ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler

... vibrant invisible wing is immovably suspended in a near vertical position over a large bell white corolla, while I feast from a platter with a scarlet border and a ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt

... in vertical lines are read from top to bottom, the order of the columns being from right to left. There ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... did not look out the ports at all. He watched the screen before him. There was a vertical line across the side of the lighted disk. A blip moved downward across it, showing their height in thousands of miles. After a long time the blip reached the bottom, and the vertical line became double and another blip began to descend. It measured ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... since it is so innocent, and may be so pious and full of holy advantage, whatsoever can innocently minister to this holy joy sets forward the work of religion and charity. And, indeed, charity itself, which is the vertical top of all religion, is nothing else but a union of joys, concentred in the heart, and reflected from all the angles of our life and intercourse. It is a rejoicing in God, a gladness in our neighbour's good, a rejoicing with him; and without love we cannot ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate

... tusks and other bones are often dredged up from the bed of that shallow sea, and the reader will see in the map given in Chapter 13 how vast would be the conversion of sea into land by an upheaval of 600 feet. Vertical movements of much less than half that amount would account for the annexation of England to the continent, and the extension of the Thames and its valley far to the north-east, and the flowing of rivers from the easternmost parts of Kent and Essex into ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell

... cotton jackets, bright red and yellow, mixed in patterns, confined at the waist by the apron-strings, but bobtailed below the waist; short woolen petticoats, with broad vertical stripes, red and white, most vivid in color; white worsted stockings, and neat, though high-quartered shoes. Under their jackets they wore a thick spotted cotton handkerchief, about one inch of which was visible round the ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade

... back and prepared another strip, humbly and without any attempt at style. This time, too, I did not consider the line of the ceiling, but conformed to the vertical edge of Westbury's final strip, allowing my loose section to dangle like a plumb-line several moments before permitting it to get its death-grip on the wall. I will not say that this second attempt was an entire success, but it was a step in that direction. With a little smudging, a slight wrinkle ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine

... cross of three equal bands - the vertical part is yellow (hoist side), black, and white - the horizontal part is yellow (top), black, and white; superimposed in the center of the cross is a red disk bearing a sisserou parrot encircled by 10 green five-pointed stars edged in yellow; the 10 stars represent ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... day we made two stops, and at the second took on board eighteen more passengers. It seemed to me that they would have to sleep in a vertical position, since, as far as I could discover, the places where it could be done horizontally were all occupied. At five in the afternoon of this day, we arrived at a small rubber estate called Boa Vista, where the owner kept ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange

... men who had been employed for so many hours on a most fatiguing and harassing duty, and exposed to the burning rays of a vertical sun, began to suffer most painfully from increased thirst, and it was at that moment when they were almost bereft of hope that they experienced one of the many merciful interpositions of Providence by which the Almighty displays ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly

... ourselves to the islands of the Pacific, to the West Indies, or to the Indian Ocean, to find great masses of lime formed similarly by living corals, and well known to everyone under the name of "coral-reefs." Such reefs are often of vast extent, both superficially and in vertical thickness, and they fully equal in this respect any of the coralline limestones of bygone ages. Again, we find other limestones—such as the celebrated "Nummulitic Limestone" (fig. 10), which sometimes attains a thickness ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... of the voice is elongation, thus: [drawn vertical oval] This means high placing and low resonance; it means that the tone has the ring of forward high placing and the reinforcement, color, and beauty of added low resonance. Elongation is a distinguishing feature of all truly ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer

... the blow-pipe can be rotated about a vertical axis so as to throw the flame in various ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall

... under a vertical sun. Lat. 17 degrees, or thereabouts. We saw Madeira at a distance like a cloud; since then, we had about four days trade wind, and then failing or contrary breezes. We have sailed so near the African shore that we ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon

... particular species of Fern by this means,—a birth-mark, as it were, by which he detects the parentage of the individual. Another indication, equally significant, is found in the tubular structure of the wood in Ferns. On a vertical section of any well-preserved Fern-trunk from the old forests the little tubes may be seen very distinctly running up its length; or, if it be cut through transversely, they may be traced by the little pores like dots on the surface. Trees of this description are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... daily till the full. After the full the terrene gravitation must again decrease till the end of the third quarter, when it will again be the least, and must increase again till the new moon; that is, the solar and lunar counter-gravitation is greatest, when those luminaries are vertical, at the new moon, and full moon, and least about six hours afterwards. If it was known, whether more menstruations occur about six hours after the moon is in the zenith or nadir; and in the second and fourth quarters of the moon, than in the first ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... requirements of timber construction. In such regions, Saxon churches were probably built of wood. The only wooden church of Saxon times which remains is that of Greenstead in south Essex, with a rectangular chancel and aisleless nave constructed of vertical logs placed side by side, and framed originally into a timber plinth. However, it may be stated as a general rule, that, whatever may be the helps or hindrances to development provided by local materials, the real starting-point of the parish church plan of the middle ages ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson

... times possess to be considered an "undefended" town. Let the principle involved in Art. 25 be carried into much further detail, should that be found feasible, but, in the meantime, let us not for a moment relax our preparation of vertical firing guns ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland

... so familiar to us in the portraits of pugilists, exaggerated by the caricaturists in their portraits of fighting men, and noticeable in well-developed persons of all classes. But in imperfectly grown adults the jaw retains the infantile character,—the short vertical portion necessarily implying the obtuse angle. The upper jaw at the same time fails to expand laterally: in vigorous organisms it spreads out boldly, and the teeth stand square and with space enough; whereas in subvitalized persons it remains narrow, as in the child, so that the large front ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... centripetal force, I understand any force which draws it to the centre, or counteracts the centrifugal tendency. In the conical pendulum, or steam engine governor, which consists of two metal balls suspended on rods hung from the end of a vertical revolving shaft, the centrifugal force is manifested by the divergence of the balls, when the shaft is put into revolution; and the centripetal force, which in this instance is gravity, predominates so soon as the velocity is ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne

... divers isms! Overboard with them, and hey for the Fortunate Isles! Then for tobacco in a hammock 'twixt the palms! Then for wine cooled in a brooklet losing itself in silver sands! Then for — but O these bilboes on our ankles, how mercilessly they grip! The vertical sun blisters the bare back: faint echoes of Olympian laughter seem to flicker like Northern Lights across the stark and pitiless sky. One earnest effort would do it, my brothers! A little modesty, a short sinking of private differences; and then we should all be free and equal ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame

... landing place, and the surgeon and the second both went up the wharf in search of some means of transporting the unfortunate man to his home. Meanwhile he lay upon his rude couch exposed to the nearly vertical rays of the sun; his only attendant a negro, who brushed away the flies which annoyed him. His features were of a deadly pallor; he breathed with difficulty, and appeared ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper

... with precisely similar ropes. She is killed after the same number of days. She is struck by an identical blow, with the same instrument, in the same place, the middle of the forehead, producing an absolutely vertical wound. An ordinary murderer displays some variety. His trembling hand swerves aside and strikes awry. The lady with the hatchet does not tremble. It is as though she had taken measurements; and the edge of her weapon does not swerve by a hair's breadth. Need I give you any further proofs or ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc

... highly interesting to see here at this season of the year, as we well could do, so near the equator, the regular systematic procession of the wind and rain following up the sun in its northward passage. The atmosphere, at this time and place, was heated and rarefied by the vertical rays of the sun; that produced a vacuum, which the cold airs of the south taking advantage of, rush up to fill, and with their coldness condense the heated vapours drawn up daily from the ocean and precipitate them back again on the earth ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke

... should be formed of vertical bars, and should have the intervening spaces to measure ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett

... end, Hall and Billy went out of sight over the south side of the backbone, and when Saxon saw them again they were rounding the extreme point of rock and coming back on the cove side. Here the way seemed barred. A wide fissure, with hopelessly vertical sides, yawned skywards from a foam-white vortex where the mad waters shot their level a dozen feet upward and dropped it as abruptly to the black depths of battered rock ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... using the spindle and distaff for spinning this wool into yarn, and two different kinds of looms for weaving the yarn into cloth. One of these, called guregue, is not very unlike the ordinary loom of Europe; but the other is vertical or upright, and called uthalgue, from the verb uthalen, signifying to stand upright. From a verb in their language, nudaven, which signifies to sew, they must have used some kind of needle to sew their garments; but I know not ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr

... inches. The height of the form is 11 inches. With these dimensions a form may be folded and filed with ordinary letter sheets (8 1/2 inches by 11 inches). The ruling which has been found most convenient is for the vertical divisions 3 columns to 1 1/8 inches, while the horizontal lines are ruled 6 to the inch. The columns may, or may ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor

... moon is full the sun is practically vertical over the whole lunar surface, so the only details then seen are those which are vaguely brought out by differences ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks

... page was the column containing the boys' names, arranged in order of seniority, the boy who had been longest in the school being at the head, and the last new boy at the foot. Each boy had a line to himself, running out to the end of the page, and these parallel lines were crossed by vertical ones, ruled from the top to the bottom of the page, and having at the top the names of all the different classes; so that the page when ready for its entries resembled very much a checker board, only that the squares were very small, and exceedingly numerous. ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley

... aid of other and more solid matter. The air is temperate in those cavities of the earth where the sun is the most effectually excluded; whereas the coldest regions yet known to us are the tops of the Andes, where the sun's rays have the most direct operation, being the most vertical and the least obstructed by vapors. Those regions are deprived of heat by being so far removed from the broad surface of the earth; a body that appears requisite to warm the surrounding atmosphere by its cooperation with ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... Guildhall, 1895), is a very charming figure of quite a young girl seated on a carpet upon a raised step at the foot of a building. Behind her is a bas-relief, against which her head, crowned by a chaplet of flowers, tells out with sculpturesque effect; the sharp, vertical line of thread strained between her hands, and thence in diagonal line to the ball at her feet, is curiously rigid, and by contrast makes the draperies across which it is silhouetted ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys

... and I shouldn't think of refusing to listen to such a reasonable request," the vicar replied. Seeing that Reuben had secured the pen, he resumed his vertical position, and added, "You know, Dewy, it is often said how difficult a matter it is to act up to our convictions and please all parties. It may be said with equal truth, that it is difficult for a man of any appreciativeness ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy

... the horizontal vibrations are the most frequent, and they cause the least damage to the slightly-built habitations. Vertical shocks are most severe; they rend the walls, and raise the houses out of their foundations. The greatest vertical shock I ever felt was on the 4th of July, 1839, at half-past seven in the evening, when I was in the old forests of the Chanchamoyo territory. Before ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi

... an image of a series of handwritten dots, dashes, vertical marks, and other marks appears here in ...
— Track's End • Hayden Carruth

... have a leathery appearance and generally stand in a vertical position, so that one side receives as much light as the other. A valuable aromatic oil is extracted from the leaves, and is used for medicinal and other purposes. It is said to be very objectionable to mosquitoes, and Harry was told that if he scattered a few drops of eucalyptus oil on his ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox

... had improved for the Belgians in other ways. They were being paid, for one thing, with something like regularity. Food was better and more plentiful. One day Henri appeared at the top of the street and drove down triumphantly a small unclipped horse, which trundled behind it a vertical boiler on wheels with fire box ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... descended unchanged to the modern Persian, who is really a marvellous expert—when he chooses to use his skill—at conveying water where Nature has not provided it. I watched some men making one of these kanats. They had bored a vertical hole about three feet in diameter, over which a wooden windlass had been erected. One man was working at the bottom of the shaft. By means of buckets the superfluous earth was gradually raised up ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... valley, and ran our horses swiftly by, but I noticed that the Indians did not seem to be disturbed by the manoeuvre and soon realized that this indifference was occasioned by the knowledge that we could not cross Hat Creek, a deep stream with vertical banks, too broad to be leaped by our horses. We were obliged, therefore, to halt, and the Indians again made demonstrations of friendship, some of them even getting into the stream to show that they were at the ford. Thus reassured, we regained ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... pointing above tree-tops. At the western end of the island, where boats sheer out into mid-current, came the dull, heavy roar of the cataract and above the north shore rose great, billowy clouds of foam. With a sweep of our paddles, we were opposite a cleft in the vertical rock and saw the shimmering, fleecy waters of Montmorency leap over the dizzy precipice churning up from their own whirling depths and bound out to the river like a panther ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... and therefore I should require the weightiest evidence to make me believe in such immense changes within the period of living organisms in our oceans, where, moreover, from the great depths, the changes must have been vaster in a vertical sense. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... the blue of the bay with its anchored ships, and even beyond this the faint purple of the Oakland shore. On either side of these doors, in deep alcoves, were divans with mattings and head-rests for opium smokers. The walls were painted blue and hung with vertical Cantonese legends in red and silver, while all around the sides of the room small ebony tables alternated with ebony stools, each inlaid with a slab of mottled marble. A chandelier, all a-glitter with tinsel, swung from the centre of the ...
— Blix • Frank Norris

... saw that the war at the intake must be forced to a speedy finish or the cause would be lost. The immense volume of water, flowing with increased strength and velocity as it defined for itself a more distinct channel down the steeper grade of the Basin, began cutting in the soft soil a vertical fall that from the foot of the grade moved swiftly up-stream; a mighty cataract from fifty to sixty feet in height and a full quarter of a mile wide, moving at the rate of from one to three miles a day and leaving as it went a great ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright

... about the middle of the afternoon, and the sun was at its brightest, the rays being vertical. From their woodland cup they looked up at a circle of shining blue sky, continually crossed by tiny white clouds, following one another in a regular procession from south to north. The majesty of the wilderness and the illimitable covering of forest green appealed ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler

... in consequence of money being more plentiful in the centre than the extremities of the empire. Thus the market of its towns was lost to the Italian cultivators, and gained to those of Egypt and Lybia, where a vertical sun, or the floods of the Nile, almost superseded the expense of cultivation. Pasturage became the only way in which land could be managed to advantage in the Italian fields; because live animals and dairy produce do not admit of being transported ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various

... cadets stationed at this spot, all thirsting (presumably) for information on gas, and Mills bombs, and studs on the cocking-piece, and forming fours, and vertical intervals and District Courts-martial; and when the order came to "carry on" with education it caused something like a panic. A council of war nearly caused Head-quarters to cancel a battalion parade, but they pulled themselves together and held the drill, and the appointed Jack ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various

... secured by means of a window-board. This is a board the edge of which rests on the edge of the window-sill, the ends being attached firmly to the window-frame. It affords a vertical surface three or four inches high and situated three or four inches in front of the window, so as to deflect the cold air upward when the window is slightly opened. The air will then reach the breathing-zone, instead of flowing on to the floor and chilling the feet, which is the usual consequence ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk

... plants, after having been left for 2 hrs. in the gas, were immediately given bits of meat in the usual manner, and on their exposure to the air most of their tentacles became in 12 m. curved into a vertical or sub-vertical position, but in an extremely irregular manner; some only on one side of the leaf and some on the other. They remained in this position for some time; the tentacles with the bits of meat not having at first moved more quickly or farther inwards than the others without meat. ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin

... a very remarkable peculiarity in connection with the cove: the sides of the basin wherein it lay consisted everywhere of perfectly vertical cliffs, some two hundred feet high, so that, look where I would, I could at first discover no way down into it. Looking a little closer, however, I presently became aware of an exceedingly narrow and dangerous zigzag path traversing ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood

... as ours—high and broad and visored; their sides drawn forward into a vertical ridge, a prominence, an upright wedge, somewhat like the visored heads of a few of the great lizards—and the heads, long, narrowing at the back, were fully twice ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... strong sea wind. It was perched on something like a dozen stout posts driven into the soft soil and then the space between the floor level and the sand was heavily and stoutly boarded in—thick planks being used. Between the floor and the sand was a space of about eighteen inches vertical, and a dozen men could have sprawled therein—lying at full length—but to escape would have required the connivance of one or more of the sentries surrounding the building and the ripping off of one or more of ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King

... of a pumping engine. An engine serves several wells,—the tumbling-rods, rudely boxed in, stretching off through the fields and over the hills to wherever needed. The operatives dwell in little shanties scattered conveniently about; in front of each is a vertical half-inch pipe, six or eight feet high, bearing a half bushel of natural-gas flame which burns and tosses night and day, winter and summer, making the Bottom a warm corner of the earth, when the unassisted temperature is in the eighties. It is a bewildering ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites

... without representatives on the present surface, and their characters are in general less clearly ascertained. Amongst the most remarkable are—the sigillaria, of which large stems are very abundant, shewing that the interior has been soft, and the exterior fluted with separate leaves inserted in vertical rows along the flutings—and the stigmaria, plants apparently calculated to flourish in marshes or pools, having a short, thick, fleshy stem, with a dome-shaped top, from which sprung branches of from twenty to thirty feet ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers

... fire-place recess, round another smaller shoulder of rock, was a perfectly vertical wall of smooth stone terminating just above our reach at an opening three yards wide or more. The top of the wall of rock at the bottom of the opening was almost as straight ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... in a bit. To fly across as he had that morning was one thing, but to pen one up in a nice little pocket in the hills, and then on a vertical radius of three or four thousand feet, to circle round over one's head—anything yet devised by the human nightmare was crude and immature to this. But was it overhead? If behind, and travelling at fifty or sixty miles an hour, the bomb would carry forward—just enough probably to bring ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl

... "crawl" of the lead. Lead, under the variations of temperature of the atmosphere, expands and contracts considerably; and from its own weight, and the steepness of the roofs, the contraction takes place in a downward direction, and starts the joints, letting in the weather. This raking of the vertical rolls was a device whereby the old builders in some measure got over their difficulty by inducing a fixed expansion ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell

... move was to convert the steam frigate Merrimac, captured half-burned with the Norfolk Navy Yard, into an ironclad ram. A casemate of 4 inches of iron over 22 inches of wood, sloping 35 degrees from the vertical, was extended over 178 feet, or about two-thirds of her hull. Beyond this structure the decks were awash. The Merrimac had an armament of 6 smoothbores and 4 rifles, two of the latter being pivot-guns at bow and stern, and a 1500-lb. cast-iron beak or ram. With her ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... arterial tracing shows that the nearly vertical tip-stroke is due to the sudden rise of blood pressure caused by the contraction of the ventricles. The long and irregular down-stroke means a gradual fall of the blood pressure. The first upward rise in this gradual ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.

... pompadour and appeared with her hair parted in the middle and doused over her ears in long, undulating billows. No other girl in town came within a quarter of an inch of Miss Larrabee's dare. When straight-fronts became stylish, Miss Larrabee was a vertical marvel, and when she rolled up her sleeves and organized a country club, she referred to her shoes as boots and took the longest steps in town. But with it all she was no mere clothes-horse. We drilled it into her head during her first two weeks that "society" news in ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... tube to the burner. Franchot invented the moderator lamp in 1836, which, because of its simplicity and efficiency soon superseded many other lamps designed for burning animal and vegetable oils. The chief feature of the moderator lamp is a spiral spring which forces the oil upward through a vertical tube to the burner. These are still used to some extent in France, but owing to the fact that "mechanical" lamps eventually were very generally replaced by more simple ones, it does not appear necessary to describe ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh

... within the church, and consequently pass upward through its roof in their course, physical matter being clearly no obstacle to their formation. In the hollow centre of the form float a number of small crescents arranged apparently in four vertical lines. ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant

... seen against the cloudless sky to the south. A little to the east, beyond the valley of the Cernon, which I intended to cross, were high hills or cliffs, treeless and sterile, with hard-cut angular sides, terminating upwards in vertical walls of naked stone. These were the buttresses of the Causse de Larzac. The lower sides of some of the hills were blue with lias marl, and wherever they were steep not ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... the vertical keel is broken in two and the flat keel bent into an angle similar to the angle formed by the outside bottom plates. This break is now about 6 feet below the surface of the water and about 30 feet above its ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley

... answer to Dion Leith. She went on slowly in the fog, thinking, thinking. Two vertical lines showed in ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... cruiser rose slowly under the lift of the fans; then he opened the throttle and swept out in a parabolic curve that ended in a vertical line. Straight up, the ship roared. It shot through a stratum of clouds. The sun that was under the horizon shone redly now; it grew to a fiery ball; the earth contracted; the markings that were coastlines and mountains drew ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... by a series of fine cords, approximately parallel, but without cross-threads of any kind. There is little uniformity of arrangement. In the upper part, and about the base of the neck, the indented lines are generally vertical. On the bottom they are quite irregular, as if the vessel, in making, had been rolled about on a piece of netting or coarse cloth. The cords have been about the size of the ordinary cotton cord used by merchants. One exception is seen in ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of a Portion of the Collections Made During the Field Season of 1881 • William H. Holmes

... Ethiopia, beyond which we come to the high mountain of Sierra Liona, the summit of which is continually enveloped in mist, out of which thunder and lightning almost perpetually flashes, and is heard at sea from the distance of forty or fifty miles. Though the sun is quite vertical in passing over this mountain, and extremely hot, yet the thick fog is never dissipated. In our voyage we never lose sight of land, yet keep always at a considerable distance, carefully observing the declination ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr

... recognised as indispensable in military operations, its uses are somewhat limited. It can be employed only in comparatively still weather. The reason is obvious. It is essential that the balloon should assume a vertical line in relation to its winding plant upon the ground beneath, so that it may attain the maximum elevation possible: in other words, the balloon should be directly above the station below, so that if 100 ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot

... from a blast furnace is run into the converter through its open necklike top O, the converter being tipped over to receive it; the air blast is then turned on and the converter rotated to a nearly vertical position. The elements in the iron are rapidly oxidized, the silicon first and then the carbon. The heat liberated in the oxidation, largely due to the combustion of silicon, keeps the iron in a molten ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson

... outside—the spots of light which lengthened into streaks, the shadows, the other vehicles, the glaring fronts of theatres in Federal Circle—formed a ribbon of smutched panorama, the running of which obliterated vertical lines and made all the world horizontal. At each crossing we jumped, landing again to scoot forward to the next, where, through the opening of side streets, came the faint sound of whistles in the harbor; and still, Estabrook,—confound him!—to my cautions ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child

... not prevent inbreeding, as there was always the possibility that uncles and nieces might marry, so that a "horizontal" system was superimposed across this "vertical" one, forbidding all marriages between different generations. Thus, all marriages between near relations being impossible, the chances to marry at all are considerably diminished, so that nowadays, with the decreased ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... were unfamiliar, appealed for exploration. Great boulders perched on perilous peaks, torn and twisted strata, with here and there raised beaches, and great outcrops of black trap-rock piercing through red granite cliffs in giant vertical seams—all piqued one's curiosity to know the geology of this unknown land. Some stone arrow-heads and knives, brought to me by a fisherman, together with the memories that the Norse Vikings and their competitors on the ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... two such slices to be prepared from our lump of coal—one parallel with the bedding, the other perpendicular to it; and let us call the one the horizontal, and the other the vertical, section. The horizontal section will present more or less rounded yellow patches and streaks, scattered irregularly through the dark brown, or blackish, ground substance; while the vertical section will exhibit more elongated bars and granules of the same yellow ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... principal, and they are important. The noxious effects may be obviated, or rather the noxious cause will not be generated, under the following arrangement, namely, a carpet of painted canvas for the floor of the tent; a tent with a light roof, as defense against perpendicular rain or the rays of a vertical sun; and with side walls of moderate height, to be employed only against driving rains. To the first there can be no objection: it is useful, as preventing the exhalations of moisture from the surface of the earth; it is convenient, as always ready; and it is economical, as ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy

... saw any trace of gravel or sand, or any material necessarily derived from land, on an iceberg. Several showed vertical or irregular fissures filled with discoloured ice or snow; but, when looked at closely, the discoloration proved usually to be very slight, and the effect at a distance was usually due to the foreign material filling the fissure reflecting light less perfectly than the general surface ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... A train was due to leave for Palmanova, the nearest station to Versa, at 5.30 a.m. As I waited for it on the platform, I looked out at the station lights, a dull orange under their dark shades, and at the red signals beyond, four in a vertical line, and beyond again at the dim outlines of houses and dark trees against a sky, at first a very deep dark blue, but slowly lighting up with the beginning of the dawn. The train did not start till nearly seven. ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton

... with each movement of the child, and thus it rocks itself to sleep. Another device in which small children are kept is known as galong-galong. This consists of a board seat attached to a strip of split rattan at each corner. Sliding up and down on these strips are vertical and horizontal pieces of reed or bamboo, which form an open box-like frame (Fig. 1, No. 1). The reeds are raised, the child is put in, and then they are slipped back in place. This device is suspended from a rafter, at ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole

... into the River. He had not scaled those logs: neither had his assistants. There was no record of them on the books. Of course, he had heard the chop and slash at the settlers' cabins, but homesteaders don't farm on the edge of a vertical precipice unless they are a lumber company; and logs tossed over that precipice to the River were destined for only one market, Smelter City. Then he remembered giving a permit to a Swede settler of the Homestead Slope to take out windfall and dead tops for a little portable gasoline ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... from the standpoint of the current theories is that these conformable relations of incongruous strata are often repeated over and over again in the same vertical section, the same kind of bed reappearing alternately with others of an entirely different "age," that is, appearing "as if regularly interbedded" (A. Geikie) with them, in a manifestly undisturbed series ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price

... colors of red and gray and brown, and their perpendicular walls crowned with fantastic columns and figures of stone or clay, carved out by the winds and the rains of ages. Here and there, rising out of the plain, are curious sharp ridges, or square-topped buttes with vertical sides, sometimes bare, and sometimes dotted with pines,—short, sturdy trees, whose gnarled trunks and thick, knotted branches have been twisted and wrung into curious forms by the winds which blow unceasingly, hour after hour, day after day, and month after month, over mountain ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell

... within a delimited zone around the British Isles and in the Mediterranean. They would permit the sailing of a few American steamships, however, provided they followed a certain defined route to Falmouth and nowhere else, and provided there were marked "on ship's hull and superstructure three vertical stripes one meter wide, to be painted alternately white and red. Each mast should show a large flag checkered white and red, and the stern the American national flag. Care should be taken that during dark, national flag and painted marks are easily recognizable from a distance, ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour

... sand and ashes rising into a belt of green, another zone of black volcanic rocks streaked with snow-beds, and then a glittering crest of silver. From the burning desert at its base to the icy pinnacle above, it rises through a vertical distance of 13,000 feet. There are but few peaks in the world that rise so high (17,250 feet above sea-level) from so low a plain (2000 feet on the Russian, and 4000 feet on the Turkish, side), and which, therefore, present so grand ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

... at that particular point, and leading us to think that the diameter is greater at that extremity. We may easily undeceive ourselves if we watch the movements of the vibrio, when we will readily recognize the bend, especially as it is brought into the vertical plane passing over the rest of the filament. In this way we will see the bright spot, THE HEAD, disappear, ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... Proserpinae, to discover a grave mistake in the specifications of Veronica. It is Veronica chamaedrys, not officinalis, which is our proper English Speedwell, and Welsh Fluellen; and all the eighth paragraph, p. 74, properly applies to that. Veronica officinalis is an extremely small flower rising on vertical stems out of recumbent leaves; and the drawing of it in the Flora Danica, which I mistook for a stunted northern state, is quite true of the English species,[32] except that it does not express the recumbent action ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... This simple device brought its owner a fortune. Isaac M. Singer, destined to be the dominant figure of the industry, patented in 1851 a machine stronger than any of the others and with several valuable features, notably the vertical presser foot held down by a spring; and Singer was the first to adopt the treadle, leaving both hands of the operator free to manage the work. His machine was good, but, rather than its surpassing merits, it was his wonderful business ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson

... work. The man's life and reason were saved by that little bit of labour. Then for a day or two he was employed in washing the corridors, and in making brushes; after that, came the crank. This was a machine consisting of a vertical post with an iron handle, and it was worked as villagers draw a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various

... Distinctions, irresistibly suggests that the collection must in his time [1284-1331] have occupied a special room, of which the two Demonstrations represent the two sides. The Distinctions would be narrow vertical divisions of these, and each of them would have its numerous subdivisions into Gradus. As the best English equivalent of Demonstratio I would suggest the word Display,' which fairly gives the idea of a wall-surface covered with books; and I figure the building to myself ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage

... of the artillery became a duty like any other; only, now that the enemy were warned, it was more dangerous. The fort resembled a volcano with its belching flames and smoke; but, owing to the vertical direction in which it was forced to fire, it made more noise than it did harm. Five or six men were killed to each wagon; that is to say, a tenth of each fifty; but the cannon once safely past, the fate of ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere

... conditions of light and shade (say with the light coming from the right side). (2) I reduced their portraits photographically to the same size, being guided as to scale by the distance between any two convenient points of reference in the features; for example, by the vertical distance between two parallel lines, one of which passed through the middle of the pupils of the eyes and the other between the lips. (3) I superimposed the portraits like the successive leaves of a book, so that the features of each portrait lay as exactly as the case admitted, in front of ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... which Bath gets its fame are believed to owe their origin to the surface drainage of the E. Mendips, which percolates through some vertical fissure, perhaps at Downhead, to the heart of the hills, and are conducted by some natural culvert beneath the intervening coal measures, washing out as they go the soluble mineral salts, and whilst still retaining ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade

... slight disposition to headache, I felt no remains of yesterday's illness. In a few minutes we reached a point where the buttress was overhanging, and there was no other way of surmounting the difficulty than by passing around one side of it, which was the face of a vertical precipice of several ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis

... a section of concrete flat on top, and forming a regular segmental arc beneath, was far stronger than one in which a portion of the under surface was parallel to the upper; showing, apparently, that the arched form, even with homogeneous concrete, causes the conversion of a large part of a vertical pressure into lateral thrust, reducing by so much the tendency of the load to break the concrete transversely. This observation is important theoretically as well as practically. It has been of late generally maintained that a concrete arch is not an ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various

... through the park Meynell took off his hat and walked bareheaded through the mist, evidently feeling it a physical relief to let the chill, moist air beat freely on brow and temples. Flaxman could not help watching him occasionally—the forehead with its deep vertical furrow, the rugged face, stamped and lined everywhere by travail of mind and body, and the nobility of the large grizzled head. In the voluminous cloak—of an antiquity against which Anne protested in vain—which was his favourite garb on wet days, he might have been a friar of ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... officers in plenty only a fence or two away; and the back of this house boasted a fire-escape. By inverting a convenient ash-can and standing on it, an active man might possibly, if sufficiently desperate, manage to jump a vertical yard (more or less), catch the lowermost grating of the fire-escape, and ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance

... religious without devotion, that a man can be religious without taste? the sentiment of devotion seeming to be, an aggregation of our most virtuous, most refined, conscious, energies of soul, in the awful vertical point of sublimity. ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of - our Ideas of Beauty, etc. • Frances Reynolds

... opened out on a little clearing among the trees, and showed them, set on high, the out-lines of a native house. Like all Tahitian houses, it was on the model of a bird cage, and the oval wall of bamboos, set side by side, let through vertical streaks of light from the lamp or fire within. As the whole party drew nearer, they heard, deep below them on the other side, the pleasant sound of falling water, and realized the cliff they were mounting ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... coast, near Zanzibar, we find the rains following the track of the sun, and lasting not more than forty days on any part that the sun crosses; whilst the winds blow from south-west or north-east, towards the regions heated by its vertical position. But in the centre of the continent, within 5 deg. of the equator, we find the rains much more lasting. For instance, at 5 deg. south latitude, for the whole six months that the sun is in the south, rain continues to fall, and I have heard that the same takes place at 5 deg. north; ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke

... imposing furnishing, dignified by a formidable stack of medical books in one corner, and the "drug store," which was simply a roomy bookcase filled with jars, bottles, boxes and packages, all labeled in a neat vertical hand. ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower

... all stripped. There were others closer into the enemy's works than I was allowed to go. On going later to where the Sixth Missouri crossed, I found that they were under the bank, and had dug in with their hands and bayonets, or anything in reach, to protect themselves from a vertical fire from the enemy overhead, who had a heavy force there. With great difficulty they were withdrawn at night. Next day arrangements were made to attempt a lodgment below Haines's Bluff: This was to be done by Steele's command, while the rest of the force ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... catching an illness: so too, if a man penetrate to the tropics, and carry with him the habits of England or France, he will certainly peril his life, for these habits are unsuitable to places where a vertical sun pours down its scorching rays upon the body. Every climate requires especial modes of conduct for physical constitution. Brandy and water might be a very good beverage, and even a medicinal protective at the North Pole, but it would be ruinous if ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman



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