"Amorphous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... here, preening, testing itself like an athlete—a chimera, amorphous yet weirdly symmetric—under the darkening sky, in the green of the hollow, the armored hosts ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... only so far as chemistry is concerned. Did you ever realize that practically all industrial chemistry is colloidal in its nature? Hard rubber, celluloid, glass, soap, paper, and lots of others, all have to deal with amorphous substances, as to which comparatively little has been really settled. My methods are similar to those followed by Luther Burbank. He plants an acre, and when this is in bloom he inspects it. He has a sharp ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... carelessly; but he thought the right thing had not been said about Walt Whitman. "His books sell largely, and there is a large audience of friends in Washington who praise and listen. Emerson believes in him; Lowell not at all; Longfellow finds some good in his 'yaup;' but the truth is, he is in an amorphous condition." ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... its purpose, or the people who placed it there, seems as it were to be rescued from the heathen darkness in which it has dwelt, and to be admitted within the community of scientific truth, by being christened a monolith. If it be large and shapeless, it may take rank as an amorphous megalith; and it is on record that the owner of some muirland acres, finding them described in a learned work as "richly megalithic," became suddenly excited by hopes which were quickly extinguished when the import ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... samples obtained, I think, by special request some weeks ago, and which do not favorably correspond with the sample under consideration, being much more highly colored, and in comparison having a very strong odor. Saccharin now occurs as a very pale yellow, nearly white, amorphous powder, free from grittiness, but giving a distinct sensation of roughness when rubbed between the fingers. It is not entirely free from odor, but this is very slight, and not at all objectionable, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... all builders; building up—what? Character, ourselves. But what sort of a thing is it that we are building? Some of us pigsties, in which gross, swinish lusts wallow in filth; some of us shops; some of us laboratories, studies, museums; some of us amorphous structures that cannot be described. But the Christian man is to be building himself up into a temple of God. The aim which should ever burn clear before us, and preside over even our smallest actions, is that which lies in this misused old word, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... under the microscope, sliced and polished specimens of these concretions, and of the solid marl-rock, collected in various places between the Colorado and Santa Fe Bajada. In the greater number, Dr. Carpenter finds that the whole substance presents a tolerably uniform amorphous character, but with traces of incipient crystalline metamorphosis; in other specimens he finds microscopically minute rounded concretions of an amorphous substance (resembling in size those in oolitic rocks, but not having a concentric structure), united by a cement which is often ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... began to build, each according to its nature, under the superintendence of a curious chemistry,—here forming sheets of black mica, there rhombs of a dark-green hornblende and a flesh-colored feldspar, yonder amorphous masses of a translucent quartz. It would add further, that at length, when the slow process was over, and the entire space had been occupied to the full by plate, molecule, and crystal, the red fiery twilight of the dream deepened ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... and isolated an amorphous resin of yellowish color and very bitter taste. It is soluble in alcohol, ether and chloroform, slightly soluble in sulphuret of carbon, insoluble in turpentine or benzin. He believes that it is the active principle of the ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... motionless man, and then, as he exerted his strength, a strange, hideous thing happened. The body under his touch dropped to pieces. Its head rolled away; its trunk became dismembered and he fell backward heaving an amorphous torso into the air. For, exerting the needful pressure to move a heavy weight, he found none and tumbled to the ground, holding up ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... of gypsum and salt, as much as two feet in thickness, left by the evaporation of the spray on the rocks on the windward coast. Beautiful stalactites of selenite, resembling in form those of carbonate of lime, are formed near these beds. Amorphous masses of gypsum, also, occur in caverns in the interior of the island; and at Cross Hill (an old crater) I saw a considerable quantity of salt oozing from a pile of scoriae. In these latter cases, the salt and ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... objects; old as the Prophet Ezechiel and far older? Rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes. And fancy the most assiduous Potter, but without his wheel; reduced to make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by mere kneading and baking! Even such a Potter were Destiny, with a human soul that would rest and lie at ease, that would not work and spin! Of an idle unrevolving man the kindest Destiny, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... quality in a man which touches human nature at most points of its circumference, which reinvigorates the consciousness of our own powers by recalling and confirming our own unvalued sensations and perceptions, gives classic shape to our own amorphous imaginings, and adequate utterance to our own stammering conceptions or emotions. The poet's office is to be a Voice, not of one crying in the wilderness to a knot of already magnetized acolytes, but singing amid the throng ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... get any further than that. Like the systole and diastole of a slowly beating pulse, the word kept on forming in his mind and welling away in a tide of confused and amorphous scenes; and forming again; and again oozing in presentments of speculations, scenes, surmises, and in profound disturbances of strange emotions. War.... And there kept appearing the face of Otway with the little points of perspiration about his nose. Otway had predicted this ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... too, to consider, but her amorphous masses were slow to assemble and unwieldy to move. The Executive Staff of Berlin had timed everything by measure for crushing France in four weeks, and would then lead its enormous forces against the Russian empire before it ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... mounted to the porch, and shook her extended hand, cushioned with fat, and oddly damp and lifeless. He could see her countenance now—it was plaster white with insignificant features and rose like an amorphous column from a swollen throat, a nose like a dab of putty, eyes obscured ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... infancy, and English prose was still undeveloped. Yet we do find in Lodge certain qualities of style that show clearly an advance over the formlessness of some of the stories that had preceded. Though the sentence and paragraph structure is loose and amorphous, the transitions from one subject to another are almost invariably well made, or at least are clearly marked. Phrases such as, "But leaving him so desirous of the journey, to Torismond"[1]; "Leaving ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... difficulties which make it unprofitable in any event. A gold ore may contain copper or arsenic, so as to debar cyanidation, where this process is the only hope of sufficiently moderate costs. A lead ore may be an amorphous compound with zinc, and successful concentration or smelting without great penalties may be precluded. A copper ore may carry a great excess of silica and be at the same time unconcentratable, and there may ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... little, Clare tried him. She had an amorphous mind. But Jane threw up at him, as she enveloped Charles in the towel, 'I'll try and think it out some time, Arthur. I haven't time now.... There's a reason ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... nerves, muscles, or distinct organs, and only manifesting its vitality to ordinary observation by thrusting out and retracting from all parts of its surface, long filamentous processes, which serve for arms and legs. Yet this amorphous particle, devoid of everything which, in the higher animals, we call organs, is capable of feeding, growing, and multiplying; of separating from the ocean the small proportion of carbonate of lime which is dissolved in sea-water; and of building up that substance into a skeleton ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... brain was only two-thirds of what would have been its normal size. Instead of filling the skull completely, it shared the space with a green, amorphous shape. This was ridged somewhat like a brain, but the green shape had still darker nodules and extensions. Lea took her scalpel and gently prodded ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... the pause to lapse without comment—save for an amorphous sort of conversation which he felt to be going on between his eyes and ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... crystalline and amorphous are also found in a particular stratum of dolomite at Bullatotte and Badulla, in which there is a peculiar copper-coloured mica with metallic lustre. Star rubies, the "asteria" of Pliny (so called from their containing a movable six-rayed ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... lava. The shape of the block is a saddleback, and the lay is west-east, curving round to the south. The formation is of the coarse grey granite general throughout the Province, and it is dyked and sliced by quartz veins of the amorphous type, crystals being everywhere rare in Midian (?) The filons and filets, varying in thickness from eight metres to a few lines, are so numerous that the whole surface appears to be quartz tarnished by atmospheric corrosion to a dull, pale-grey ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... about forty sous, and two kitchen chairs with the straw seats almost gone. The extremely picturesque costume of the centenarian pauper was hanging from a nail, and below it, on the floor, were the shapeless mat-weed coverings that served him for shoes, the whole forming, with his amorphous old hat and knotty stick, a ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... bottle and shook out what little powder, like finely ground glass, it contained. He greedily absorbed what there was and, petulantly exploring the empty container, flung it into the bushes. A nodding drowsiness overtook him, his head rolled forward, he sank slowly into a bowed amorphous heap. Harry ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Instructions we are able to detach certain attitudes of mind which led to the atrophy of principles essentially good, and others which pushed the system forward on healthy lines and flung off obsolete restraints. In an art so shifting and amorphous as naval tactics, the difference between health and disease must always lie in a certain vitality of mind with which it must be approached and practised. It is only in the history of tactics, under all conditions of weapons, movement ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... of the living protoplasm itself into a molecular mechanism. If there is any truth in the received doctrines of physics, that contrast between living and inert matter, on which Bichat lays so much stress, does not exist. In nature, nothing is at rest, nothing is amorphous; the simplest particle of that which men in their blindness are pleased to call "brute matter" is a vast aggregate of molecular mechanisms performing complicated movements of immense rapidity, and sensitively ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... dandy in his smug black garments with his diamond stud gleaming in the ivy-bosomed shirt (his rings had been given to Miss Birdie), with his features wilting like the wild pansies in the lapel of his coat, dwindled to an amorphous streak beneath the keen ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... worlds, or from their deserts—also from aerial regions too indefinite or amorphous to be thought ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... taken no account. The party of Revolution is the party which under an Irish Parliament would be master of the situation. Leaders will not be lacking. But at present the party must from the necessity of the case be amorphous, and therefore, politically and as a power, practically non-existent. Pass the bill, and then you will see something. A new party, the party of Independence, or, as they will call it, of Freedom, will take shape and formidably influence events. The temptation to take the ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... of mine were quite vague; mere amorphous emanations of the mind, partaking of the nature of nostalgia, and giving birth to nothing in the shape of plans, nor even of definite desires. Then, suddenly, this vague uneasiness became the dominant factor in my daily life, as the result of one of those apparently haphazard ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... are composed of certain fundamental and similar elements which are governed by the same rules of life, though at first glance they may appear to be widely different. These are (a) amorphous substances, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... years following, the best that the working class could do in the way of organization was to produce the craft union movement, which, notwithstanding all its failings, was an advance in liveability at least, over the amorphous and confused Knights of Labor. But now, the working class, grown stronger, more experienced and more ideologically developed, has given birth to the C.I.O. movement, with its industrial unionism, trade union democracy, organized political action and ...
— Labor's Martyrs • Vito Marcantonio
... exist because of the chemical behavior of the compound NH3, but which Denham alone had managed to procure. Tommy deduced that it was an allotropic modification of the substance which forms an amalgam with mercury, as metallic tin is an allotrope of the amorphous gray powder which is tin in its ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... nine years. Bixiou, who had never seen any other hat on Poiret's head, dreamed of it and declared he tasted it in his food; he therefore resolved, in the interests of his digestion, to relieve the bureau of the sight of that amorphous old hat. Poiret junior left the office regularly at four o'clock. As he walked along, the sun's rays reflected from the pavements and walls produced a tropical heat; he felt that his head was inundated,—he, who never perspired! Feeling that he was ill, ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... rather than a dramatic triumph. His chief models were literary dramas. 'Goetz von Berlichingen' had won its way into favor as a book for the reader. The dramatic works of Klinger, Lenz, Wagner and the like, were for the most part too extravagant and amorphous for representation, and Shakspere's day had ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... rueful smile stirred in her eyes. It was amusing that she, who detested large dinners and adored general conversation, should at the moment be so engrossed in preventing the very type of conversation she preferred. She returned to Pollen. What a horrid man he really was! Unangled and amorphous, and underneath, cold! He had a way of framing the woman to whom he was talking and then stepping back out of the picture. One felt like a model in all manner of dress and undress. She laughed softly. "Don't," she begged, "be so mysterious about yourself! Tell ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a block of marble which resists every effort. When a sentiment or an idea, having in itself a reason for existence, slips into the crowd, its members soon crystallize and form a sect. The sect is then the first crystallization of every doctrine. From the confused and amorphous state in which it manifests itself to the crowd, every idea is predestined to define itself in the more specific form of the sect, to become later a party, a school, or ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... epic—something enormous and amorphous—like the body of an elemental giant—about each of these books. In the "Titan," especially, the peculiar power of Dreiser's massive, coulter-like impetus is evident. Here we realize how, between animal passion and material ambition, there is little ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... him, was utterly inadequate, although the best its inferior nature allowed it to form. For if, instead of so conceiving of its maker, it refused to make use of these relative perfections as a makeshift, and so necessarily thought of him as amorphous metal, or mere oil, or by the help of any other inferior conception which a watch might be imagined capable of entertaining, that watch would he wrong indeed. For man can much more properly be compared with, and has much more affinity to, a perfect watch in full ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... soft, warm landscape—even though I have never expected to behold quite such a violent bit of jungle," and under his guidance the projection flashed over hundreds of miles of territory. To the eyes of the Terrestrials the screen revealed only a blank, amorphous grayness, through which at times there shot lines and masses of vague and meaningless form; but the Venerian was very evidently seeing and enjoying ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... not. The skeleton is, in a sense, the fundamental element in the human organism. It can exist, and, with a little assistance, retain its form, when stripped of muscle and blood and nerve; whereas a boneless man would be an amorphous heap, more helpless than a jelly-fish. But do we therefore account the skeleton man's noblest part? Scarcely. It is by his blood and nerve that he lives, not by his bones; and it is because his bones are, comparatively speaking, dead matter ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... or amorphous cosmical vapor so universally diffused, and which generates heat through condensation, probably modifies the transparency of the universal atmosphere, and diminishes that uniform intensity of light which, according to Halley and Olbers, should arise, if every point throughout the depths ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... as his repasts. A black doublet, which descended to his knees; large and long breeches; an old patched black cloak; an amorphous hat, very much worn, and the edges ragged; a large neckcloth of coarse cloth, begrimed with snuff; a dirty shirt, which he always wore as long as it lasted, and which the broken elbows of his doublet did not ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... you can use your absolute freedom in any way you want." Democracy, seeking to free a man from being a slave to one master, has simply increased the number of masters a man shall have. He is hemmed in with crowds of masters. He cannot see his master's huge amorphous face. He cannot go to his master and reason with him. He cannot even plead with him. You can cry your heart out to one of these modern ballot-boxes. You have but one ballot. They will not count tears. The ultimate question in a crowd civilization ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... obtained. In the meantime a second conical flask containing 1250 cc. of toluene is attached to the funnel, and a new charge of 150 g. of crude methyl red is placed in the paper. When extraction is complete it is found that a certain amount of black amorphous insoluble matter remains on the filter; this is discarded. The crystals of methyl red are filtered off and washed with a little toluene. The weight of pure material is 755-805 g. The mother liquors are concentrated to one-fourth of their volume, and the crystals which separate on cooling ...
— Organic Syntheses • James Bryant Conant
... this, the military situation in Europe was almost disheartening. Imperial Russia had disappeared and the Germans were preparing to carve up the vast amorphous Russian carcass. Having driven their way through the Balkans to Constantinople they were on the point of opening their boasted direct route from Berlin to Bagdad. England, France and Italy began to feel war-weary. The German submarines threatened to cut off ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... various degrees of slope, may be a straight line, or looped, and may be curved on either side; but a "mean" taken from the several manuscripts would leave the unfortunate letter without any tail whatever, or travestied as a "u" with an amorphous flourish. A definition of the radical form of the letter or sign by which it can be distinguished from any other letter or sign is a very different proceeding. Therefore, if a "mean" or resultant of any number of radically different signs to express ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... with pearly shadows; would thicken and spread out; would draw together and rise in an irregular spiral column, curling, swaying, poising, as if uncertain what to do next; and at last, all at once making up its mind, (how like a younker or a prodigal!), would go sailing away, straggling away, amorphous, on a puff of wind, leaving the hillside clear again;—till, presently, the process ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... Guanin: a white amorphous compound which occurs in the transparent areas of some wings, giving a milky tinge, and is also found in the photogenic organs of Lampyridae: an excretory substance, composition ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... merchant of the town. The merchant and his wife were both of old families which had lived in the community for several generations, and whose blood was presumably of the purest strain; yet the boy was sallow, with amorphous features, thin shanks, and stooping shoulders. The youth standing in the judge's office, on the contrary, was straight, shapely, and well-grown. His eye was clear, and he kept it fixed on the old gentleman with a look in which there was nothing of cringing. He was no darker than many ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... horizon is yet lost in the dusk; the false dawn is spreading the figments of its illusion; the trees in the distance seem like rain-clouds; and the amorphous shadows of the monasteries on the mountain heights and hilltops all around, have not yet developed into silhouettes. Everything, except the river in the wadi below, is yet asleep. Not even the swallows are astir. Ah, but ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Australian life. The idea is in part a survival from earlier years when a host of military officers, Civil Servants, journalists and tourists described in some form the more obvious peculiarities of the colonies: their giant, evergreen forests, strange amorphous animals, aristocratic gold-diggers, ex-convicts in carriages, and general state of topsy-turveydom. There is quite an amazing variety of occasional records of this class in forgotten books, magazines and pamphlets. In at least a score of well-known ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... this loomed another line of vast windmills, and then suddenly the amorphous tumult of the rotating wheels was pierced with a deafening sound. It was a mechanical shrilling of extraordinary intensity that seemed to come simultaneously from every point of ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... "Where then is that celebrated, broad, beautiful Russian soul? So much was and is being said about it, but wherein does its breadth, might and beauty actively manifest itself? And is not our soul broad because it is amorphous? And it is probably owing to its amorphousness that we yield so readily to external pressure, which disfigures ...
— The Shield • Various
... could have passed the time without thinking it half so long. The darkness appeared to me to double the duration of the hours, as though it was something physical and substantial that clogged the wheels of my watch, and hindered the motion of time itself. Amorphous darkness! I fancied it gave me pain—a pain that light would at once have alleviated; and sometimes I felt as I had once done before, when laid upon a sick couch counting over the long drear hours of the night, and anxiously watching for the day. In this way slowly, and far ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... encountered, indeed, that had his not been too strong a nature to be thwarted by adulation any more than by contemptuous neglect, he might well have become spoilt—so enthusiastic, that were it not for the heavy and prolonged counterbalancing dead weight of public indifference, a huge amorphous mass only of late years moulded into harmony with the keenest minds of the century, we might well be suspicious of so much and long-continued eulogium, and fear the same reversal of judgment towards him on the part of those who come after us as we ourselves have meted to many an one ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... from the ravages of war, for the shops were open and the inhabitants stood talking and gossiping at the doors of their houses. Here and there rubble lay across the pavement, and what had once been a home was now an amorphous pile of bricks and beams. Just by the church was a ruined restaurant, and a host of little children played hide and seek behind ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... dropped in an aluminum alkyl, and then pushed the polymerization along with both ultraviolet and heat. Got a stiff gel out of the pot and drew it into a quarter of a pound of fibers. I only had time to determine that the fibers were amorphous—no time to draw them further to see if they would develop crystallinity. I put them in an open-mouth jar which I later found had been used to store mercury. One evening I took them out and found they ...
— The Professional Approach • Charles Leonard Harness
... compelled by what his verse is to stride vigorously across rooms as if they were vast desert places, in spite of what his toes are. He strode magnificently, triumphantly, to the window and flung the shade up and looked out at the amorphous mist creeping in across the roofs. The crawling fog must have suggested his great, gray Dread, for presently he turned away with a shudder and sank upon a couch ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... is at once chart and compass. It led Ralph Peden out into a cloudy June dawning. It was soft, amorphous, uncoloured night when he went out. Slate-coloured clouds were racing along the tops of the hills from the south. The wind blew in fitful gusts and veering flaws among the moorlands, making eddies and back-waters of the air, which twirled the fallen ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... diamond, graphite, amorphous carbon, coke, mineral coal.—Carbon a reducing agent, a decolorizer, ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... he was a handsome boy, for youth is amorphous and the promise of today is not always fulfilled by the morrow. Jerry's features were unformed at ten and, as has already been suggested, made no distinct impression upon my mind. Whatever his early photographs may show, at least they gave no sign of the remarkable ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... his substance, though he could evidently experience human sensations with his amorphous body. He did not know whether he could see; yet, he was dodging this way and that, as the beings who occupied this ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... were, in himself, a double quantity of being. Robust humor and lofty sentiment alternated so strangely in him, that sometimes he seemed like the natural son of Rabelais, and at others he rose up a very twin brother of the Stratford Seer. There was nothing in him amorphous and unconsidered. Whatever he chose to do was always perfectly done. There was a genuine Thackeray flavor in everything he was willing to say or to write. He detected with unfailing skill the good or the vile wherever it existed. He had an unerring ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... framework for its peculiar emotional mood," mysticism seems reduced to an emotional development on all fours with emotional development in other directions. It is not peculiar to religious minds because "it has no specific intellectual content." It is amorphous, so to speak. And it may form diverse 'matrimonial alliances' precisely because it does not point to a hidden world of reality, but is merely indicative of tense emotional moods. In the face of nature the non-theistic Richard Jeffries experiences all the feelings of ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... me a touching glance,—or rather, a glance which her amorphous features meant to make touching,—and, waving musk from her handkerchief through the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... purchaser is as much puzzled in his choice as an untravelled Cockney with a Parisian bill of fare. The making of the flaked cocoa is peculiarly interesting, and is, we were informed, peculiar to this establishment. To see how the amorphous mass comes from the mill in long curling ribbons, uniform in thickness and texture, is a sight that provokes astonishment, as much by the rapidity of the operation as by the ease with which it appears to be accomplished, but which has only been arrived at by a persevering ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... through hoppers, 3-1/2 to 4-1/2 tons at a time, into the large calcining furnace. Here it is roasted for a period ranging from twelve to twenty-four hours, after which it is drawn into the ash-pit, where it remains to cool. In this state, the ore is a black, amorphous substance, and is termed calcined ore. The object of this process is to oxidise the extraneous metals, and also to reduce the quantity of sulphur, by driving it off in the form of vapour. It is, therefore, in this and the analogous processes of roasting, that the sulphurous and arsenous ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... not mention domicil. Nowhere does it posit the powers of the states or the nation upon that amorphous, highly variable common-law conception. * * * No legal conception, save possibly 'jurisdiction,' * * *, affords such possibilities for uncertain application. * * * Apart from the necessity for travel, [to effect a change of domicile, the latter], criterion ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... Lustrous, yellow-brown, amorphous tannin, having the chemical composition C76H52O46. Derived from the bark and fruit of many plants; used as an astringent [contracts the tissues or canals ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... interglobular spaces there is a substance which is called amorphous or structureless, and a filling to be in harmony with this substance should be amorphous or structureless in its composition. The only materials we have which meet these conditions are gutta-percha and tin. It is its structureless character that gives to tin its value. Coming in contact ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... indeed, she had always been this royal creature, this woman bright and winning as some warm, rich summer's day. The fire that sleeps in marble never flashes and informs the whole mass so fully; if a pearl—lazy growth and accretion of amorphous life—should fuse and form again in sparkling crystals, the miracle would be less. And with what complete unconsciousness had she stepped from passive to positive existence, and found this new state to be as sweet and strange as any child has found it! Long ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... had he not gone lovingly over every tine of them?—but was this rag of a thing all that was left of the splendid stag he had beheld lying on the heather? However, Mr. Macleay speedily reassured him. He was shown the various processes and stages of the taxidermist's art, the amorphous mass of skin and hair gradually taking shape and substance until it stood forth in all its glory of flaming eye and proud nostril and branching antlers; and he was highly pleased to be told that this head he had got in Strathaivron was a fairly good one, as stags now go in the North. So, ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... be supposed, however, from the above remarks, about the multiform and self-contradictory character of the amorphous thing called Hinduism, that it is therefore impossible for us to understand and measure its nature and power. For Brahmanism, through all ages, has not been without a definite tendency, an underlying philosophy and pervasive fundamental beliefs. ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... proficiency by the interchange of ideas, had a right to expect valuable instruction from the lips of a man who occupies the post of honor in the chief educational institute of the State; but were regaled with a cataclysm of misinformation, precipitated from an amorphous mind, which seemed to be a compromise between Milton's unimaginable chaos and that "land of darkness, as darkness itself, and where the light was as darkness." That such an address could proceed from the president ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... concentrated sulphuric acid on bromides, since secondary reactions take place, leading to the liberation of free bromine and formation of sulphur dioxide. The usual method employed for the preparation of the gas consists in dropping bromine on to a mixture of amorphous phosphorus and water, when a violent reaction takes place and the gas is rapidly liberated. It can be obtained also, although in a somewhat impure condition, by the direct action of bromine on various saturated ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... pass the old store-house. It loomed a black, amorphous pile heaved up against the stars, and the man's footsteps dragged as he came to the gaping gates ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... faculty and the same elements are necessary for the personification of such types or idols. The three elements appear in their proper sequence even in the amorphous phantasms which these types first shadow forth, and which are subsequently perfected and embodied in human form. For the consciousness of the external form always exists in the first vague and nebulous conception ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... we endeavored, from the enormous, amorphous Plum-pudding, more like a Scottish Haggis, which Herr Teufelsdrockh had kneaded for his fellow-mortals, to pick out the choicest Plums, and present them separately on a cover of our own. A laborious, perhaps a ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... for nothing which is not in some way its own, and it is perhaps an amorphous vanity, as carbon is akin to a diamond, that makes a hard-won victory ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... waggons, our own weather-bleached buffalo-tents, the metallic sheen of the stream, and the speckled oxen browsing along its banks. Between these objects the atmosphere was filled with a uniform and amorphous darkness; and dusky forms like ours could be seen only under the light of the blazing fires. A few of these had been kindled outside the enclosure—near the avenue entrance; but most were inside, surrounded by groups of emigrants—the flames casting their ruddy light upon the bright cheerful ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... through St. Germanus to the modern strict defence against all "liberals" has glorified the unchanging. Every outburst of the interior fires in the history of Gaul has been followed by a rapid, plastic action which reduced to human use what might otherwise have crystallised into an amorphous lava. So the wild freedom of the twelfth century was captured to form the Monarchy, the University, the full Gothic of the thirteenth: so the Revolution permitted Napoleon and produced, not the visionary unstable grandeur of the Gironde, but the schools and laws and roads and set government ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... only in one corner, looked weird enough. Around me, and among the medley of pictures and casts and the piles of canvases stacked against the wall, the eye encountered only a series of cinder-gray tints and undetermined outlines casting long amorphous shadows half-way across the ceiling. A draped lay figure leaning against a door seemed to listen to the whistling of the wind outside; a large glass bay opened upon the night. Nothing was alive in this part of the room, nothing alight except a few rare glints upon the gold of the frames, ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... unresting vehicle. Although it was chill, I was obliged to open my window, for the degradation of the air soon became intolerable to one who was awake and using the full supply of life. Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the black, amorphous hills shoot by unweariedly into our wake. They that long for morning have never longed for it ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one of a flood of disease germs that have invaded a body, that paper. There I was, one corpuscle in the big amorphous body of the English community, one of forty-one million such corpuscles and, for all my preoccupations, these potent headlines, this paper ferment, caught me and swung me about. And all over the ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... sulphocarbonate reaction as a means of defining a normal cellulose. As already pointed out, cotton cellulose passes quantitatively through the cycle of treatments involved in solution as sulphocarbonate and decomposition of the solution with regeneration as structureless or amorphous cellulose (hydrate). ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... recent, the protagonist of chaos in these things happened to be that rigid but curiously amorphous power which Prussia has wielded for many years to no defined end. The protagonist upon the other side of the arena was that same Romanized Gaul which had ever since the fall of the Empire least lost the continuity with the past ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... truth begins to dawn on Napoleon that Moscow is not the heart of Russia, as he had asserted to De Pradt that it was. Gradually he sees that that primitive organism had no heart, that its almost amorphous life was widespread through myriads of village communes, vegetating apart from Moscow or Petersburg, and that his march to the old capital was little more than a sword-slash through a pond.[271] Had he set himself to study with his former care the real ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... solitude—and this, too, even before Matilda had gone—a queer new something had begun to stir within her, almost as though threatening an eruption. It seemed a force, or spirit, rising darkly from hitherto unknown spaces of her being. It frightened her, with its amorphous, menacing strangeness. She tried to keep it down. She tried to keep her mental eyes away from it. And so, during all these days, she had no idea what the fearsome ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... mother lye from chinamine is evaporated down and protractedly exhausted with boiling ligroine, whereby conchinamine and a small quantity of certain amorphous bases are dissolved out. Upon cooling the greater part of the amorphous bases precipitates out. The ligroine solution is then first treated with dilute acetic acid, and then with a dilute solution of caustic soda, whereupon a large quantity of a resinous precipitate is formed. This is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... genius—open-eyed, sagacious, patriotic, and cosmopolitan—and I can strongly recommend the occasional perusal of his Latin Psalms to all modern readers who wish to keep their feelings of reverence fresh and prevent their Latin quantities from getting amorphous. ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... and lissom figure. They pronounce her morally unsound; they say her nature has a taint; they chill her popularity with silent smiles of slow disparagement. But they have no particulars; their slander is not concrete. It is an amorphous accusation, sweeping ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... the growth of peat opposed to the conclusion that the number of centuries may not have been four times as great, even though the signs of Man's existence have not yet been traced down to the lowest or amorphous stratum. As to the "kitchen-middens," they correspond in date to the older portion of the peaty record, or to the earliest part of the age of stone as known ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... were soon walking swiftly down the main road of Beldover, a wide street, part shops, part dwelling-houses, utterly formless and sordid, without poverty. Gudrun, new from her life in Chelsea and Sussex, shrank cruelly from this amorphous ugliness of a small colliery town in the Midlands. Yet forward she went, through the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street. She was exposed to every stare, she passed on through a stretch of torment. It was strange that she should have chosen ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... gleefully continued their course for a little while longer, though the handwriting on the wall had begun to blaze forth when all the canons of art and the fruit of years of serious effort were insulted by the production of the amorphous creation of one whose sole claim on popular attention as a composer was that he was a royal duke and the brother-in-law of the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... resembled clearings, were supposed to be the mission or Indian settlements; but the weather was smoky and unfavorable to far views with the glass. The rock displayed here in the escarpments is a compact amorphous trap, which appears to constitute the mass of the Blue mountains in this latitude; and all the region of country through which we have traveled since leaving the Snake river has been the seat of violent and extensive igneous action. ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... you are very late. This is how you become smart all at once in your New York atmosphere! But pray be seated; and here are cigarettes, if you will. No? Very well; but tell me; has that amorphous gill-slit—oh, no, the branchial lamella—has it behaved itself and proved to be the avenue which shall ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... quantity of water sufficient to make a fluid paste of them, squeeze out the mixture, filter the liquid obtained, and this liquid will contain the cerealine sufficiently pure to be studied in its effects. Its principal properties are: The liquid evaporated at a low temperature produces an amorphous, rough mass nearly colorless, and almost entirely soluble in distilled water; this solution coagulates between 158 deg. and 167 deg. Fah., and the coagulum is insoluble in acids and weak alkalies; the solution is precipitated by all diluted acids, by phosphoric ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... corresponding images develop clearly in the reader's mind. Impressive epithets and phrases abound. His metaphors are frequent and forceful. Mirabeau's face is pictured as "rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled." In describing Daniel Webster, Carlyle speaks of "the tanned complexion, that amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown, the mastiff-mouth, accurately closed." He formed many new compound words after the German fashion, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... accomplished the deed. Of all reviews, the crushing review is the most popular, as being the most readable. When the rumour goes abroad that some notable man has been actually crushed,—been positively driven over by an entire Juggernaut's car of criticism till his literary body be a mere amorphous mass,—then a real success has been achieved, and the Alf of the day has done a great thing; but even the crushing of a poor Lady Carbury, if it be absolute, is effective. Such a review will not make all the world call for the 'Evening ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... sky of a sunny, cloudless day. He watched it from the window of his bedroom in the new-built wing of Banghurst's Tudor house. And as the stars were overwhelmed and the shapes and substances of things grew into being out of the amorphous dark, he must have seen more and more distinctly the festive preparations beyond the beech clumps near the green pavilion in the outer park, the three stands for the privileged spectators, the raw, new fencing of the enclosure, the sheds and workshops, the Venetian masts ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... contributed not a little, to the good health and heart of the party. Almost every exploring party on short commons, records some favourite cookery, some dish that their souls loved. In McKinlay's journey, the dish most in vogue was a kind of "amorphous" black-pudding, made of the carefully-saved blood of the bullock, horse, or sheep, as the case might be, boiled with some fat, and seasoned with a little condiment, which being of light carriage, can always be ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... occupied a huge, amorphous house some three-quarters of a mile to the west of the campus. It was a construction in wood, with manifold "features" suggestive of the villa, the bungalow, the chateau, the palace; it united all tastes and contravened all conventions. In its upper story was the commodious apartment ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... followers. We are henceforth to write hexameters in English on an entirely new plan, of which the result is that they lose all likeness to any hexameters previously encountered on the slopes of Parnassus or anywhere else and become something so blind and staggering and dreadfully amorphous that the whole mind of the reader rises ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... worms, and the kangaroo, and other coleoptera, and said he knew the history and ways of all such pachydermata. He said the kangaroo had pockets, and carried its young in them when it couldn't get apples. And he said that the emu was as big as an ostrich, and looked like one, and had an amorphous appetite and would eat bricks. Also, that the dingo was not a dingo at all, but just a wild dog; and that the only difference between a dingo and a dodo was that neither of them barked; otherwise they were just the same. He said that the only game-bird in Australia was the wombat, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... from civilization and flung into the arms of Nature the most terrible thing is the sense of the amorphous, the feeling that there is no structure in this world where houses are not and laws are not and streets are not, no power to intervene between oneself and injury, no thread to cling to. The idea of a Providence to such a ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... came to the house a ragged, poorly-dressed, grey- headed, awkward, amorphous—in short, a very strange-looking— little old man. At first glance it might have been thought that he was perpetually ashamed of something—that he had on his conscience something which always made him, as it were, bristle up and ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... awake to a light and wholesome world furnished with such solidly comforting facts as soaps and razors and hot and cold saltwater taps; and subsequently one left one's stateroom to see, at the breakfast table, leaden-eyed and flushed of countenance, an amorphous lump of humid flesh in shapeless garments of soiled white duck, the author of that mutter in the dark; who, lounging over a plate of broken food and lifting a coffee cup in the tremulous hand of an alcoholic, ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... one aspect, she was the pre-war Peggy, with her cut-and-dried little social ambitions and her definite projects of attainment; but in another she was not. The pre-war Peggy had swiftly turned into the patriotic English girl who had hounded him into the army. He found himself face to face with an amorphous, characterless sort of Peggy whom he did not know. It was perplexing, baffling. Before he could formulate an idea, ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... all inordinate exaggeration of size—the Egyptian was from the first left without hint of any system of proportion, whether constructive, or of visible parts. The cavern—its level roof supported by amorphous piers—might be extended indefinitely into the interior of the hills, and its outer facade continued almost without term along their flanks—the solid mass of cliff above forming one gigantic entablature, poised upon props instead of columns. ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin |
