"Degenerate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great purpose of their preservation and enforcement. That which was experimental in our plan of government was the question whether democratic rule could be so organized and conducted that it would not degenerate into license and result in the tyranny of absolutism, without saving to the people the power so often found necessary of representing or destroying their enemy, when he was found in the person of ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... of memory, enabling of judgment, and enlarging of conceit, which commonly we call learning, under what name soever it come forth or to what immediate end soever it be directed, the final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... assimilate the shells of knowledge along with the oysters, others instinctively use their powers of secretion to better purpose. Remember also that in Elizabethan times school-boy study was a far more strenuous matter than it is in these degenerate days, and that it was ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... been a decline in public interest for some years before 1691, when the abuses which had grown round the celebration led to its reduction from fourteen to four days: but the fair lingered on in a degenerate state till it was last proclaimed by the Lord Mayor in 1850, and finally ceased in 1855. The live cattle market, so vividly described, with its attendant nuisances, in the twenty-first chapter of "Oliver Twist," was closed at the same time, and the business transferred to the new ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... would have sounded absurd, but, to-day, some forms of heart disease are known to be the regular sequences of some particular form of kidney disease, just as some form of pneumonia attends an affected heart and that some forms of pneumonia degenerate into phthisis. When the blood change is an established fact, it is only a question as to which is the weak organ, and the organism of the individual will decide whether it will be a simple sick-headache or the beginning of ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... bits of the woodland scenery—shaded rills, flowing springs, dashing cascades, fairy glens, and among the castellated rocks of the dark ravines. Their parts are so exquisitely perfect, almost they persuade the nature-lover to degenerate into a mere naturalist, walking through the woods seeing nothing but sporophytes through his lens, just as a rare book sometimes causes the bibliophile to become a bibliomaniac, reading nothing but catalogues. It is a credit to be a bibliomaniac provided one is a bibliophile ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... for you yet," she said. "I was afraid that you were a very degenerate Osbaldistone. But what brings you to Cub Hall? I suppose you could have stayed away if ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... which he can reap but small advantage. They look on the desire of the bloodshed, even of beasts, as a mark of a mind that is already corrupted with cruelty, or that at least by the frequent returns of so brutal a pleasure must degenerate into it. ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... level of any motives existing under pagan moralities; and, on the other hand, he traduces great men like Caesar, whose natures were beyond his scale of measurement, by tracing their policy to petty purposes entirely Plutarchian. But he was a Greekling in a degenerate age of Grecians. As to the French Memoirs, which are often so exceedingly amusing, they purchase their liveliness by one eternal sacrifice of plain truth. Their repartees, felicitous propos, and pointed ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... That love should be capable of ending in such vermiculate results as too often appear, is no more against the loveliness of the divine idea, than that the forms of man and woman, the spirit gone from them, should degenerate to such things as may not be looked upon. There is no plainer sign of the need of a God, than the possible fate of love. The celestial Cupido may soar aloft on seraph wings that assert his origin, or fall down on the belly of a snake and creep ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... painters work and work, and thanks to them the comforts of life grow greater every day, the demands of the body multiply, but we are still a long way from the truth and man still remains the most rapacious and unseemly of animals, and everything tends to make the majority of mankind degenerate and more and more lacking in vitality. Under such conditions the life of an artist has no meaning and the more talented he is, the more strange and incomprehensible his position is, since it only amounts to his working for the amusement ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... considering the policy to be adopted for suppressing the insurrection I have been anxious and careful that the inevitable conflict for this purpose shall not degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle. I have therefore in every case thought it proper to keep the integrity of the Union prominent as the primary object of the contest on our pan, leaving all questions which are not ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... to a minor, or some one unfit to take up the chieftainship, and this continued to prevail for centuries after the Anglo-Norman invasion, and was even adopted by many owners of English descent who had become "meere Irish," as the phrase ran, or "degenerate English." ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... Degenerate Douglas! oh, the unworthy Lord! Whom mere despite of heart could so far please, And love of havoc (for with such disease Fame taxes him) that he could send forth word To level with the dust a noble horde, A brotherhood of venerable Trees, Leaving an ancient Dome, ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... time there was a tendency for the free laborer to degenerate into a serf, attached to the soil of the farm on which he and his forefathers had been settled for centuries. A contract dated in the first year of Cyrus is an illustration of the fact. It records the lease of a farm near Sippara, which belonged to the temple of the Sun-god, ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... wedding, an archbishop had performed the ceremony, and the newspapers had devoted pages to describing the gowns and the jewels and the presents and all the rest of the magnificence. And the Count was a wretched little degenerate, who beat and kicked his wife, and flaunted his mistresses in her face, and wasted fourteen million dollars of her money in a couple of years. The mind could scarcely follow the orgies of this half-insane creature—he had spent two ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... Swift's 'Polite Conversation,' and compare the bill of fare with the menu of a modern London dinner. The very report of such conviviality—before which Christopher North's performances in the 'Noctes Ambrosianae' sink into insignificance—is enough to produce nightmares in the men of our degenerate times, and may help us to understand the peevishness of feeble invalids such as Pope and Lord Hervey in the elder generation, or Walpole in that which was rising. Amongst these Gargantuan consumers, who combined in one the attributes of 'gorging Jack and guzzling Jemmy,' Sir Robert ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... impassioned eloquence. His musical criticisms are refined and acute, but without repulsive technicalities or scientific terms, ever sparkling with the poetic ardor of the generous soul through which the discriminating, yet appreciative awards were poured. Ah! in these days of degenerate rivalries and bitter jealousies, let us welcome a proof of affection so tender as his "Life ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... unfitted, And if recover'd, prove no source of joy, But one of deep regret, that a young stock Which culture and the graft of education Would now have loaded on each bough with fruit, Neglect hath left degenerate and worthless. How should I joy, yet dread to meet my cousin, Should your ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... dramatic power into this meagre form, that even now the truth and sincerity of his songs charm us no less than their extraordinary melodic beauty. But it is easy to see that in the hands of composers less richly endowed, this form was fated to degenerate into a mere concert upon the stage. The science of vocalisation was cultivated to such a pitch of perfection that composers were tempted, and even compelled, to consult the tastes of singers rather than dramatic truth. Handel's successors, ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... letter to King would have been favoured with the imprint "de l'Imprimerie Imperiale." Peron's anthropological studies among Australian aboriginals led him to conclusions totally at variance with the nebulous "state of nature" theories of the time, which pictured the civilised being as a degenerate from man unspoiled by law, government, and convention. The tests and measurements of blacks which he made, and compared with those of French and English people, showed him that even physically the native was an inferior animal; his ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... Eleanor's aunt did not prevent her from being an agreeable acquaintance. Although she believed in the intellectual capacity of woman, she did not look upon herself as a representative of the class: her admiration of her sex did not degenerate into self-laudation, and her enthusiasm was not tainted by egotism. Hers was not a strong-mindedness that showed itself in ungainly coiffures and tasteless attire. It was content with desiring and claiming for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... toast will show the animus of the assembly, and of its orators. It was delivered by M. Saint Just:—"To the men strong, courageous, and valiant in the cause of humanity. To those whose names serve as a guide, a support, and an example to the degenerate beings—to all those whom history calls heroes!... To Brutus, to Catiline, to Jesus Christ, to Julian the Apostate, to Attila!... To all the thinkers of the middle age.... To unfortunate thinkers!... To Jean Jacques Rousseau, and his pupil, Maximilian Robespierre!" This enumeration of names ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... our Churchmen learned to associate themselves with the popular cause; and, with few exceptions, neither the hierarchical spirit of the foreign divines, nor the monarchical bias peculiar to the French, characterised the writers of the English school. The Civil Law, transmitted from the degenerate Empire to be the common prop of absolute power, was excluded from England. The Canon Law was restrained, and this country never admitted the Inquisition, nor fully accepted the use of torture which invested Continental royalty with so ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Eastern Empire to its ancient seat in these islands, to a time when two of my ancestors, Joyce Bolge and Hengist Horsa Bluebin, wrestled with one another for the prime ministership of the British Empire, and occupied that position successively with a glory of which we can in these degenerate days form but a faint conception. When I think of these mighty men, lions in war, sages in peace, not babblers and charlatans like the pigmies who now occupy their places in Baghdad, but strong silent men, ruling an empire on which the sun ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... suspects the new order, he does not hide either from himself or us. Intellectual contempt for the idolatries of the forum and the market-place has infected him with a touch of that chagrin which came to men like Tacitus from disbelief In the moral government of a degenerate world. Though he strives, like Tacitus, to take up his parable nec amore et sine odio, the disgust is ill concealed. There are passages where we almost hear the drone of a dowager in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was said of Tocqueville that he was an aristocrat who accepted ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Holland. This was situated in a high part of the town; and from the window of her summer apartment, we had the prospect of the sea, the islands, and the Asian mountains.—My letter is insensibly grown so long, I am ashamed of it. This is a very bad symptom. 'Tis well if I don't degenerate into a downright story-teller. It may be, our proverb, that knowledge is no burden, may be true, as to one's self but knowing too much, is very apt to make us troublesome to other ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... of Bill pledging national credit for loan to East African Protectorates entered upon. Not without opposition from Ministerial benches. ALPHEUS CLEOPHAS MORTON, of whom we hear little in these degenerate days, insisted that this kind of charity should begin at home—that is in the Highlands of Scotland. WEDGWOOD and THORNE thought Government had gone far enough in the way of lavish expenditure of tax-payers' money by providing them and others with salaries of L400 a year. From other side of House ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... are to understand that his time is come and so should a Viking die: further, if you will, the subject is a modern Viking, ready for the responsibilities of the title. Sketches of our ancient wooden walls and our iron and plated defences line the panellings. These degenerate artists do ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... inherited the sentiment of chivalry, and contrasted with the roundhead not more by its loyalty to the person of the prince, than by its recognition of the superior grace and refinement of womanhood. Even in the debased and degenerate epoch of court life which followed 1660, the forms and language of homage still preserved the tradition of a nobler scheme of manners. The Puritan had thrown off chivalry as being parcel of Catholicism, and had replaced it by the Hebrew ideal of the subjection and seclusion of woman. ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... descent from the ancient Romans, they were, in reality, for the most part, the sons of the bolder barbarians of the North; and, contaminated by the craft of Italy, rather than imbued with its national affections, they retained the disdain of their foreign ancestors for a conquered soil and a degenerate people. While the rest of Italy, especially in Florence, in Venice, and in Milan, was fast and far advancing beyond the other states of Europe in civilisation and in art, the Romans appeared rather to recede than to improve;—unblest ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... reconstruction of the Whig party is indispensable to the perpetuity of the Union. The Democratic party, though now national, if left to the sole opposition of the Republican, which is a sectional party, must inevitably, sooner or later, itself degenerate into sectionalism. This must be the necessary result of such antagonism. But a party based upon intelligence and moral worth must, most of the time, be in the minority of the country, and much of the time exceedingly small. This the Whigs ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of self must always poison this young man's ointment, and to-night there was some excuse from his degenerate point of view. He must give it up. Stingaree was right; it was only one man in thousands who could do unerringly what he had done that night. Oswald Melvin was not that man. He saw it for himself at last. But it was a bitter hour for him. Life in the music-shop would ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... sad and solitary—a pale and beautiful ruin, pathetic beyond speech, infested by noisy shop-keepers and petty pilferers, the degenerate sons of the robbers who once roamed the sea and enthroned her on her ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... Degenerate Douglass! thou unworthy Lord Whom mere despite of heart could so far please, And love of havoc (for with such disease Fame taxes him) that he could send forth word To level with the dust a noble horde, A brotherhood of venerable ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... no sudden desertion of it. For many months no news had been heard of the Argonauts. They were considerably overdue: the sages of Dreamland shook their grizzly heads. They were just as sage and shaky in those days as in these degenerate times. The maids of the hamlet wept for a season, then turned from sorrowing, dried their tears, took unto themselves new lovers, and the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... preside at the table, and act the part of a mother, so far as she can; she must watch the characters of the men who approach her charge, and endeavor to save the inexperienced girl from the dangers of a bad marriage, if possible. To perform this feat, and not to degenerate into a Spanish duenna, a dragon, or a Mrs. General—who was simply a fool—is ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... scarfs and pincushions. There is no supremer test of character. Eleven years of hotel housekeepership guarantees a knowledge of human nature that includes some things no living being ought to know about her fellow men. And inevitably one of two results must follow. You degenerate into a bitter, waspish, and fault-finding shrew; or you develop into a patient, tolerant, and infinitely understanding woman. Martha Foote dealt daily with Polack scrub girls, and Irish porters, and Swedish chambermaids, and Swiss waiters, and Halsted Street bell-boys. Italian tenors fried ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... narrative, but the pictures of the natives are atrocious. Many of the figures are distorted, and all of them have a smutty look, as if they had been rubbed with lampblack or coal-dust. There is not one simple, honest presentation of the natural human form in the book. When the Parisian becomes a degenerate, he is the most degenerate of all—a refined, perfumed degenerate. A degenerate Englishman may be brutal and coarse, but he could never be guilty of the inane or the outrageous things which the Cubists, ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... was a very brave man himself, said now in great anger: The more base and degenerate in you to take such means for her as you have done, and leave her on such slight conditions.' Then turning to Valentine, he said: 'I do applaud your spirit Valentine, and think you worthy of an empress's love. You shall have Silvia, for you have well deserved her.' Valentine then ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... I'm afraid, look like a young man of our degenerate day. She was far too beautiful and distinguished for that. Besides, her dark curling hair, quite short for a woman, was too long, and her eyes—like the eyes of all poets—were women's eyes. She looked, indeed, like one of those wonderful ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... of writing assigned to an epoch remarkable for the severity and precision of its taste? If Spain is meant, the attack is perfectly intelligible, as the epoch is exactly that when Spanish taste began to degenerate, and the style of Spanish writers to become vicious, inflated, and fantastic, in imitation of Gongora, who did so much to ruin the literature of his country; as other writers of much less ability, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... can, therefore, claim from us no further consideration; it is mere naked rudeness and selfishness, ill-disguised by the gaudy rays of outward decency; a mere cherishing of the sensual nature which, left to itself, would soon degenerate into monstrous barbarism, of which we already ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... times are much degenerate from those, Which your sweet Muse, which your fair fortune chose; And as complexions alter with the climes, Our wits have drawne th' infection of our times. That candid age no other way could tell To be ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... depression, as if he had been staying with a clergyman.... He was very agreeable, but spoke too lightly, I thought, of veal soup, I took him aside, and reasoned the matter with him, but in vain; to speak the truth, Luttrell is not steady in his judgments on dishes. Individual failures with him soon degenerate into generic objections, till, by some fortunate accident, he eats himself into better opinions. A person of more calm reflection thinks not only of what he is consuming at that moment, but of the soups of the same kind he has met with in a long course of dining, and which have gradually ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... course every one understands that "high art" becomes very much diluted in its country progress, and when it appears in out-of-the-way places, where the people are neither wealthy nor well read, it is apt to degenerate into ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... dared); He ate it knowing. Then divisions came. She, like a spirit strayed who lost the way, Too venturesome, among the farther stars, And hardly cares, because it hardly hopes To find the path to heaven; in bitter wise Did bear to him degenerate seed, and he, Once having felt her upward drawing, longed, And yet aspired, and yearned to be restored, ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... thing you can do," said Gladys. Her tone was forcible. She was full of the vulgar shrewdness of a degenerate race, for the old acumen of that race ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... wiry-looking fellow, whom so far drill and six months in the North-west Territory of Her Majesty's Indian dominions had not made muscular-looking; though, for the matter of that, he did not differ much from his companions, who in appearance were of the thorough East-end Cockney type—that rather degenerate class of lads who look fifteen or sixteen at most when twenty. Stamina seemed to be wanting, chests looked narrow, and their tunics covered gaunt and angular bodies, while their spiked white helmets, though they fitted their heads, had rather an extinguisher-like ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... try to persuade him that seed-time and harvest were the same thing, and that he had nothing to do but to rest in what he had done; show his bright colours and flutter like a moth in the sunshine, or sit down like a degenerate bee in the summer time and eat his own honey. The power of action which he knew in himself could not rest without something to act upon. It longed ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... reconciling the numerous class of small traders, the great majority in all urban constituencies, to the change—to its continuance, and also justify its extension to all incomes above L50 or L100 a-year. Without that extension it will inevitably degenerate into a confiscation of property ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... true sexual act, and passes insensibly into it. If, however, continued on into adult age, it becomes morbid, passing into erotic fetichism; what in the inexperienced youth is the natural auxiliary and stimulus to imagination, in the degenerate onanist of adult age is a sign of arrested development. Thus, onanism," the author concludes, "is not always a vice such as is fiercely combated by educators and moralists. It is the natural transition by which we reach the warm and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... "love of the human race is nothing else in us but love of justice," and that "of all the virtues, justice is that which contributes most to the common good of men." While enjoining the discipline of pity as one of the noblest of sentiments, he warns us against letting it degenerate into weakness, and insists that we should only surrender ourselves to it when it accords with justice.[308] But that is all. What constitutes justice, what is its standard, what its source, what its sanction, whence the extraordinary holiness with which its name has come to be ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... followed the dusty road and examined the telegraph poles, for the woodpecker of these latter days has departed from the ways of his fathers, deserted the cool and fragrant woods, and taken up his abode in degenerate places, a fitting change of residence to follow his change of habit from digging his prey out of the tree-trunks to catching it ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... and where art thou, My Country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now— The heroic bosom beats no more! And must thy Lyre, so long divine, Degenerate into hands like mine? ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... Price. I tremble for the cause of liberty, from such an example to kings. I tremble for the cause of humanity, in the unpunished outrages of the most wicked of mankind. But there are some people of that low and degenerate fashion of mind that they look up with a sort of complacent awe and admiration to kings who know how to keep firm in their seat, to hold a strict hand over their subjects, to assert their prerogative, and by the awakened vigilance of a severe despotism to guard ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... different toes. There are no associated constitutional symptoms, no tendency to similar morbid changes in other parts, and no infiltration elsewhere. There is little or no edema with ainhum. In ainhum there is, first, simple hypertrophy, then active hyperplasia The papillae degenerate when deprived of blood supply, and become horny. Meanwhile the pressure thus exerted on the nervi vasorum sets up vascular changes which bring about epithelial changes in more distant areas, the process advancing anteriorly, that is, in ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... words: for the which Timocrates reprooued him in the hearing of one Polemon. That is no wonder quoth Polemon, for so be all women. And besides, Phanorinus being knowen for an Eunuke or gelded man, came by the same nippe to be noted as an effeminate and degenerate person. ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... still more in the sequel of my tour, my eye was amused; but the pleasing vision cannot be fixed by the pen; the particular images are darkly seen through the medium of five-and-twenty years, and the narrative of my life must not degenerate into a book ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... of the Indians conquered in war. Roger Williams in a letter to John Winthrop in 1637 writes as follows of a successful expedition against the Pequots: "It having again pleased the Most High to put into our hands another miserable drove of Adam's degenerate seed, and our brethren by nature, I am bold (if I may not offend in it) to request the keeping and bringing up of one of the children." The following extract from a letter to Winthrop in 1645 is a curious mixture of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... If Edward Griffin's smiling face I should present in colors true— In good Samaritanic view; The patron of Joe Lee, whose name Is known to histrionic fame; Who play'd at Shylock on the stage, When tragedy was more the rage Than in this sad degenerate age. And where art thou, my friend, George Story, A man of yore, though not yet hoary? The even tenor of thy way Hast thou maintain'd for many a day; They tell us within human range That mortal things are given to change, It may be so, yet thou art still But little changed, ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... time they lose! ... There are dozens of men I know who are far less presentable than this highly coloured and robust young human being; and yet they are part of the accomplished scheme of things—like degenerate horses, you know—always pathetic to me; but they're still horses, for all that. Quid rides? Species of the same genus can cross, of course, but I had rather be a donkey than a mule. ... And if I were a donkey I'd sing and cavort with my own kind, and let horses flourish their ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... but well-authenticated historical fact. Have we yet realised its significance? Have we pictured, are we able to picture to ourselves, what company He kept? Among what surroundings His divine figure was actually seen? In what purlieus of degenerate Jerusalem? In what iniquitous splendours? In what orgies of the Gentiles? And who are they to whom He showed most tenderness? Who but the rich young man? The woman taken in adultery? And Mary Magdalene with her seven devils? ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... men for nourishment or refreshment, must be almost poison to an entirely different and lower order of human beings. The virtues of the common man would perhaps mean vice and weakness in a philosopher; it might be possible for a highly developed man, supposing him to degenerate and go to ruin, to acquire qualities thereby alone, for the sake of which he would have to be honoured as a saint in the lower world into which he had sunk. There are books which have an inverse value for the soul and the health according as the inferior soul and the ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... methysticum, generally called Ava or Kava—its name in the Tongan and other languages. Some old men assert that the true Fijian mode of preparing the root is by grating, as is still the practice in two or three places; but in this degenerate age the Tongan custom of chewing is almost universal, the operation nearly always being performed by young men. More form attends the use of this narcotic on Somosomo than elsewhere. Early in the morning the king's ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... After exhibiting his character in its true light, ringing all the changes upon his worthlessness, and ridiculing his opponent for bringing him there, he closed by saying, "Gentlemen of the jury, I will convince you that this degenerate specimen of humanity is not the son of the saintly and exemplary Elder Asbury Newman, but that he is the legitimate son of Beelzebub the prince of devils. He is an eyesore to his father, a sore eye to his mother, a vagabond upon earth, and a most damnable liar!" Poor Asbury never ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... Sir Henry, as he rose. "I am giving her to you, understand, for your father's sake; in the trust that you are the same honourably good man, standing well before the world and Heaven, that he was. Unless your looks belie you, you are not degenerate." ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... goodwill is the very spirit which we desire to foster. And finally its customs—or at any rate, its main customs—are well designed to symbolize that spirit. If we have allowed the despatch of Christmas cards to degenerate into naught but a tedious shuffling of paste-boards and overwork of post-office officials, the fault is not in the custom but in ourselves. The custom is a most striking one—so long as we have sufficient imagination to remember vividly that we are ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... till the meal was done To pledge a health? Degenerate son Of friendly sires! a health thrice-told Each guest had pledged to fellowships old,— Untarrying eager mouth to wipe, And across the board with hearty gripe Joining rough hands,—ere the meal was o'er:— Hearts and hands went with "healths" ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... Provencal.[369] To the north there is a similar exchange between Italy and Switzerland with the adjacent Austrian province of the Tyrol. In the rugged highlands of the Swiss Grisons bordering upon Italy, we find a pure Alpine stock, known to the ancients as the Rhaetians, speaking a degenerate Latin tongue called Romansch, which still persists also under the names of Ladino and Frioulian in the Alpine regions of the Tyrol and Italy. In fact, the map of linguistic boundaries in the Grisons shows the dovetailing of German, Italian, and Romansch ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... sympathies, and there was a dread of intrusting to it too many important functions. Mason thought that the sway of an aristocracy would be worse than an absolute monarchy; and if the Senate might every now and then elect the president, there would be a risk that the dignity of his office might degenerate, until he should become a mere creature of the Senate. On the other hand, the small states, in order to have an equal voice with the large ones, in such an emergency as the failure of choice by the electoral college, wished to keep the eventual choice in the hands ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... commune with her and no other; Care and the battle of life shall cease; Men her degenerate children behind us, Only the might of her beauty shall bind us, Full of rest, as we gaze on the face of our mother, Earth in the health and ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... England, and dictates the vote of Parliament on the most momentous question in the history of the world. Why, when these sentiments were uttered, I almost expected to see the shades of Burke and Fox, and Pitt and Chatham, and Peel and Wellington, rise in the midst and denounce the degenerate bearer of such a message. What! the British Commons become the supple tools, the obsequious minions, the obedient parasites, to do the bidding of a foreign master, and tremble when his envoy should stamp his foot and wave the imperial banner in the halls of Parliament. From whom was this message, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the writer's own canons of taste. In hac est pura oratio, a phrase of the prologue to The Self-Tormentor, is the implied burden of them all. He is a sort of Literary Robespierre; one seems to catch the premonitory echo of well-known phrases, "degenerate condition of literary spirit, backsliding on this hand and on that, I, Terence, alone left incorruptible." Three times there is a reference to Plautus, and always with a tone of chilly superiority which is too proud ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... have joined in giving testimony against our author, as to the choice of his verse, which they condemn as boyish and being apt to degenerate into the doggrel; but while they censure his verse, they applaud his matter, and Dryden observes, that had he chose any other verse, he would even then have excelled; as we say of a court favourite, that whatever his office be, he still makes it uppermost, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... apart from the racial factor, enables it to respond for good or for evil to the pre-natal—that is to say, maternal—environment. Thus we may easily fall into the mistake of supposing our race to be degenerate, when poor feeding and exposure to unhealthy surroundings on the part of the mothers are really responsible for the crop of weaklings that we deplore. And, in so far as it turns out to be so, social reformers ought to heave a sigh of relief. Why? ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... which fall under these last heads are only tolerable within narrow limits, and always require careful watching; for they may easily become excessive or even betray an animus; and in either case they pass at once into quite a different category. From cases of excusable oscitancy they degenerate, either into instances of inexcusable licentiousness, or else into ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... vantage the steeples of Notre Dame de Noyon add the one ingredient which makes a unity of the entire ensemble,—a true old-world atmosphere, a town seen in not too apparent a state of unrepair and certainly not a degenerate. ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... thief? The persecutor of women? The pitiless butcher of defenseless men? Were those fine, clean-cut features but a mask that covered an abyss of black evil? Did that broad forehead actually conceal the crafty, degenerate brain that planned and executed the bloody and treacherous piracy ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... treated by the "cyanide" process), I collected specimens for some time in the beautiful forests at the foot of the limestone mountains of Poak. Here I saw something of the Land Dayaks, but they are a poor degenerate breed, and not to be compared to the Sea Dayaks, who are born fighters, and whose predatory head-hunting instincts give a great deal of trouble to the government. These latter were the Dayaks I was anxious to meet, and I soon made arrangements ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... be added here, that an occasional girl goes wrong through temperamental shortcomings within herself—perhaps she may even be a degenerate; but the proportion of women who would willingly and deliberately sacrifice their virtue is vanishingly small as compared with the proportion of young men who seem to be willing to sacrifice their virtue. This is probably ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... concerns us a good deal more. Further, it is unfair to the Lower-Empire to view it only as a time of feebleness and cowardice and corruption. It was also an epoch of immense activity, prolific of daring and high-flying adventurers, some of them heroic. Even the most degenerate of the last Emperors never lost the conviction of Roman majesty and grandeur. Unto the very end, they employed all the ruses of their diplomacy to prevent the Barbarian chiefs from imagining themselves anything else but vassals of the Empire. ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... condition of the Jews been more abject than at the time of Mendelssohn's appearance on the scene. It must be remembered that for Jews the middle ages lasted three hundred years after all other nations had begun to enjoy the blessings of the modern era. Veritable slaves, degenerate in language and habits, purchasing the right to live by a tax (Leibzoll), in many cities still wearing a yellow badge, timid, embittered, pale, eloquently silent, the Jews herded in their Ghetto with its single Jew-gate—they, the descendants of the Maccabees, the ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... book, where the heroine receives whacks with patient smiles. Fate boots her from pillar to post and she blesses Fate and is much obliged. That most deadly reproach to degenerate human nature—the accidental fact of sex—had been so skilfully extirpated from those pages that, like chaste amoebae, the characters merely multiplied by immaculate subdivision; and millions of lineal ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... practice. This agrees with the facts generally shown by criminology and sociology, that the elements practicing promiscuity to any great extent in modern societies are those most closely related with the degenerate and criminal elements. Those elements, in other words, in modern society that practice promiscuity are on the road to extinction, and if a people generally were to practice it there is no reason to believe that such a people would meet with ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... scattered here and there among the keepers of the Seal, observant priests. They omit isolated groans. They launch Quixotic sorties. But they retire and collapse without waiting combat. To their denunciation of "degenerate, sinful and corrupting cesspools of alleged art" (I quote from a review of some of my own work appearing in an issue of the Springfield (Ill.) Republican), there is no answering response. They are left abandoned, the Fiery Cross burning ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... whiteness and silky texture, that on the tail is three or four inches long; these cats frequently spread their tails on their backs, as squirrels do. The colour is generally white, but sometimes light brown; they do not catch mice. This beautiful species does not degenerate speedily, and it appears to thrive better in Paris than in any other part of Europe. The figures of both these animals ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... perhaps, they do not speak as they pass each other, and their caresses are lavished on others. Such friendships are not only silly, they are even dangerous. They are a weakening of moral fiber, a waste of mawkish sentimentality. They may be even worse. Such friendship may degenerate even into a species of ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... people of Korea against Japan in the spring of 1919 came as a world surprise. Here was a nation that had been ticketed and docketed by world statesmen as degenerate and cowardly, revealing heroism ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... were communities, scarce known by name In these degenerate days, but once far-famed, Where liberty and justice, hand in hand, Ordered the common weal; where great men grew Up to their natural eminence, and none Saving the wise, just, eloquent, were great; Where power ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... was of opinion, at the time—and am so still— that we might have obtained considerably more than we did of the last, but for the eagerness with which we prosecuted our search for the larger gems, which caused our search for the smaller seed pearls to degenerate into a ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... upon as fulfilling the true social function of Art; standing midway between theory and practice; inspired by thought, and stimulating action. Only the social artist has to look to it that his thoughts be not merely true but adequate, lest he degenerate into a mere decorator. How far will a series of "regional surveys," like those of [Page: 143] Mr. Booth in London and Mr. Rowntree in York, carry us! Not so far, I fear, as Professor Geddes seems to hope. Cities in our modern ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... fleeting westward. Sometimes I have had such thoughts, Why may not that be the place of the New Jerusalem? But you have handsomely and fully cleared me from such odd conceits. But what, I pray? Shall our English there degenerate, and join themselves with Gog and Magog? We have heard lately divers ways, that our people there have no hope of the conversion of the natives. And, the very week after I received your last letter, I saw a letter, written from New England, discoursing of an ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... day, but they had gallons of tea, and they consumed them, too; and these stalwart Nor'westers afterwards became as uproarious on that inspiring beverage as if they had all been drunk. There was this peculiarity, however, in their uproar, that it was reasonable, hearty, good-humoured; did not degenerate into shameful imbecility, or shameless impropriety, nor did it end in stupid incapacity. It subsided gradually into pleasant exhaustion, and terminated in profound ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... in an electric chair before he got his deserts. His mind had passed through innumerable phases since he left his sister's house in Washington, and now as he shamelessly flirted with Miss Seebrook he knew himself for an unmoral creature, a degenerate who was all the more dangerous for being able to pass muster among decent folk. He had always imagined that citizens of the underworld were limited in their social indulgences to cautious meetings in the back rooms of low saloons, but this he had found to be a serious mistake. ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... the Minds of the People the Idea of unfortunate from that of the Want of some necessary soldierly Quality. At best the unfortunate General has Pity only as the Reward of his Services; and how soon does Pity degenerate into Contempt. Cicero if I mistake not some where tells us, that when a General is fortunate it matters not whether it is ascribd to his being a Favorite of the Immortal Gods, or to certain good Qualities in him which others are incapable of observing. ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... history nor their fate. What was once a land occupied by nations superstitious and sensual is now inhabited by robbers and slaves. The robbers have been expelled or slain, and the oppressed peasant is emancipated by the arms of the nation who avenged the cause of Heaven upon the degenerate Greeks, but who nevertheless have derived neither instruction nor warning from their downfall and subjugation. The Nile meantime, which has seen so many nations and generations rise and disappear, still flows and overflows, to distribute its fertilizing ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English
... government of college, Those liberal helluos of knowledge, Who, e'en in these degenerate days, Deserve the world's unceasing praise; Who, friends of science and of men, Stand forth Gomorrah's righteous ten; On them I naught but thanks bestow, For, like my cash, my credit's low; So I can give nor clothes nor wines, But bid them welcome ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... satisfactory progress is made the instructor will proceed to the exercises at will, by which is meant assaults between two men, each endeavoring to hit the other and to avoid being hit himself. Fencing at will should not be allowed to degenerate into ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... it. This is the subject which this narrative opens; and we, the long-descended offspring of these hordes, have seen this sight and witnessed this exertion of power carried on through centuries; and degenerate and ungrateful children as we are, we are living still upon the deeds which God wrought in that conversion of the nations by the pastoral staff of St. Peter, leading them into a land ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... that is, he tortures him. From that moment the fall of that man is rapid. The heat, the loneliness, the fever, the fear of the black faces, keep him on edge, rob him of sleep, rob him of his physical strength, of his moral strength. He loses shame, loses reason; becomes cruel, weak, degenerate. He invents new, bestial tortures; commits new, unspeakable 'atrocities,' until, one day, the natives turn and kill him, or he sticks his gun in his mouth and blows the top ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... lessons concerning Esau. He was a man intent upon immediate physical enjoyment; an idle drifter without spiritual ideals. From his character and that of the Edomites, his descendants, there is taught the lesson that such an unambitious man or nation will always become degenerate and prove a failure. God himself cannot make a man out of ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... a large area relatively to its population; it has broad streets and very few slums. But it has come down in the world since the Renaissance. Degenerate descendants of the d'Estes of that time stripped many of the Palazzi of their artistic beauties and sold them to help pay their debts. Ferrara is a city of old Palazzi, street after street of them, inhabited mainly now by well-to-do ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... so much credit at the Elks, the Athletic Club, and the Boosters'. His friends had always congratulated him on his oratory, but in their praise was doubt, for even in speeches advertising the city there was something highbrow and degenerate, like writing poetry. But now Orville Jones shouted across the Athletic dining-room, "Here's the new director of the First State Bank!" Grover Butterbaugh, the eminent wholesaler of plumbers' supplies, chuckled, "Wonder ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... marvellous and mysterious character that seemed at the first glance to invest it, and takes rank, without any straining, among the other processes of selection. It seems to me that, from the facts that sterile animal forms can adapt themselves to new vital functions, their superfluous parts degenerate, and the parts more used adapt themselves in an ascending direction, those less used in a descending direction, we must draw the conclusion that harmonious adaptation here comes about without the cooeperation of the Lamarckian principle. This conclusion once established, however, we ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... B.C.): degenerate polished red and painted white ware; wheel-made white ware with painted ornament in glazed black or brown, of the 'Late Minoan' or 'Mycenaean' style introduced from the Aegean; various hand-made wares of foreign styles, probably from Syria or ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... disappeared as an efficient organ, but the significant fact is that small rudiments of hind limbs are present just where corresponding structures are placed in the seal. These vestiges cannot be reasonably accounted for, unless they are the degenerate hinder limbs of a remote four-footed ancestor. Furthermore the unborn whale possesses a complete coat of hair, which is afterwards replaced by blubber; but hair is a thatchlike coat to shed rain, as the way the hairs lie on a terrestrial mammal indicates. ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... invited him to meet the Prince of Wales.] meal. But I am too old for company that would be so new, so don't take it amiss, my best of friends, if I ask to be bidden when I should see more of YOU. You don't know how dull a man, once lively, can degenerate into being. ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... case of the epileptic Misdea, which first suggested to my father the idea of a link between crime and epilepsy. As this case has become famous in the annals of crime in Italy, it will perhaps be of interest to the reader. Misdea, the son of degenerate parents, manifested a series of typical epileptic anomalies—asymmetry, vaso-motor disturbances, impulsiveness, ferocity, etc. At the age of twenty, while serving in the army, for some trivial motive he ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... shown in Figs. 18 and 19, the difference being that the Apache shack is not covered with birch bark, a material peculiar to the North, but the Apache uses a thatch of the rank grass to be found where his shacks are located. To-day, however, the White Mountain Apache has become so degenerate and so lost to the true sense of dignity as a savage that he stoops to use corn-stalks with which to thatch the long, sloping sides of his shed-like house but by so doing he really shows good horse sense, for corn-stalks and corn leaves make ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... the excellent and gifted young man every success; I trust that his youthful idealism and impulse towards the ideas of the people may never degenerate, as often happens, on the moral side into gloomy mysticism, and on the political into blind chauvinism—two elements which are even a greater menace to Russia than the premature decay, due to misunderstanding and ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... go back; year by year, the tone of public opinion must sink lower down; year by year, the Congress and the Senate must become of less account before all decent men; and year by year, the memory of the Great Fathers of the Revolution must be outraged more and more, in the bad life of their degenerate child. ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... makes a donkey load. The gigantic cauliflower is not distinct from our European species, but is solely produced by a cultivation which necessity has dictated. Being one of the Northern vegetables that degenerate or bear no seed if not annually procured from Europe, it is propagated by cuttings. After the heads are gathered the stubs are allowed to throw out new shoots, which are again planted and have to grow two years, producing the ...
— The Cauliflower • A. A. Crozier
... and his time as a subject and thus to challenge comparison with Dumas's immortal musketeers; but the result justifies the boldness.... The plot is admirably clear and strong, the diction singularly concise and telling, and the stirring events are so managed as not to degenerate into sensationalism. Few better novels of adventure than this have ever been written."—OUTLOOK, ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... right himself in her eyes. But so headlong was he in the attempt, and so misguided, that presently he overshot his mark by dropping an unflattering word concerning Crispin, whereby he attributed to the Tavern Knight's influence and example the degenerate change that had of late been wrought ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... of the Philadelphia Convention favored the indefinite eligibility of the President. It was Jefferson who raised the objection that indefinite eligibility would in fact be for life and degenerate into an inheritance. Prior to 1940 the idea that no President should hold for more than two terms was generally thought to be a fixed tradition, although some quibbles had been raised as to the meaning of the word "term". President Franklin ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... there must be moral equality or else no respect; and hence between parent and child intercourse is apt to degenerate into a verbal fencing-bout, and misapprehensions to become engrained. And there is another side to this, for the parent begins with an imperfect notion of the child's character, formed in early years or ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it. He seemed to take a kind of satisfaction in disgusting them, and driving them nearly mad, while they were so irritably sensitive at the age of fourteen or fifteen. So that Arthur, who was growing up when his father was degenerate and elderly, hated ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... defend ye—and rehearse FIVE glorious ACTS of yours—in modern verse; Each one concluding with a generous deed For Dunlap, Cooper, Woodworth, Knowles, Placide! 'Twas nobly done, ye patriots and scholars! Besides—they netted twenty thousand dollars! "A good round sum," in these degenerate times— "This bank-note world," so called in Halleck's rhymes; And proof conclusive, you will frankly own, In liberal actions ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... Holland, being truly and absolutely a Dutch enterprise; and though all the proofs in the world were introduced on the other side, I would set them at nought as undeserving my attention. If these three reasons be not sufficient to satisfy every burgher of this ancient city, all I can say is they are degenerate descendants from their venerable Dutch ancestors, and totally unworthy the trouble of convincing. Thus, therefore, the title of Hendrick Hudson to his renowned discovery ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... supplementary buildings fit for companionship with this quaint home, and a fenced garden and ancient orchard, beyond which five woodmen were leisurely sawing an old-fashioned woodpile of immense size;—only princely estates can supply such a luxury in these degenerate days. ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... changed in our degenerate days, and it is now possible for any one to find any other person with the simple key of ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... intellectual messages and ambitious discussions into the film houses. Political and economic, social and hygienic, technical and industrial, esthetic and scientific questions can in no way be brought nearer to the grasp of millions. The editors will have to take care that the discussions do not degenerate into one-sided propaganda, but so must the editors of a printed magazine. Among the scientists the psychologist may have a particular interest in this latest venture of the film world. The screen ought to offer a unique opportunity to interest wide ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... degenerate youth (who before the war had been unlovingly known throughout Europe as the "White Rabbit" and who now was mentioned in dispatches as the "Crown Prince") had succeeded in leading some half-million fellow-Germans into a "pocket" that had ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... and its physical constitution traces of a foreign origin. The Caribs preserve traditions that seem to indicate ancient communications between North and South America. Such a phenomenon deserves particular attention. If it be true that savages are for the most part degenerate races, remnants escaped from a common wreck, as their languages, their cosmogonic fables, and numerous other indications seem to prove, it becomes doubly important to examine the course by which these remnants have been driven from one hemisphere ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... at Jedburgh, in the days of yore It was a pewter measure, the claret being in ancient days served from the tap, and had the figure of a hen upon the lid. In later times the name was given to a glass bottle of the same dimensions. These are rare apparitions among the degenerate topers of ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... utriculus is a warped, irregular bag, whose sections have become unrecognizable. The utriculus and sacculus are in wide-open communication with each other and have almost become one. The utriculus opens broadly into the scala tympani, and the nervous elements of the cochlea are degenerate. ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... the episode in the Farmers' and Merchants' burglar-proof had become an episode forgotten—or at least forgiven. "You know men—a little; but when it comes to the women ... well, if I didn't keep continually nagging at you, your two heroines—with neither of whom you are really in love—would degenerate into ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... we repay The debt thou claim'st in this exhausted age? Thou givest our lyres a theme, that might engage Those that could send thy name o'er sea and land, While sea and land shall last; for Homer's rage A theme; a theme for Milton's mighty hand - How much unmeet for us, a faint degenerate band! ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... such an education are not counteracted by the life of the battle-field or the laborious sport of hunting. And if the laws of etiquette and Court manners can act on the spinal marrow to such an extent as to affect the pelvis of kings, to soften their cerebral tissue, and so degenerate the race, what deep-seated mischief, physical and moral, must result in schoolboys from the constant lack of ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... of Murray, the natural son of James V. The Franciscan monks were not very popular at this period, and at the suggestion of the King Buchanan wrote a satirical poem entitled Silva Franciscanorum, in which he censured the degenerate followers of St. Francis, and harassed them in many ways. This poem so enraged the monks that they seized him and imprisoned him in one of their monasteries. One night, while his guards slept, he contrived to escape by a window, and underwent great perils. ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... felt Out along the wall for support. Was this a dream, some ghastly, soul-terrifying nightmare! Danglar! Those working lips! That callous viciousness, that leer in the degenerate face. It seemed to bring a weakness to her limbs, and seek to rob her of the strength to stand. She could not even hope against hope; she knew that Danglar was in deadly earnest. Danglar would not have the slightest compunction, let alone hesitation, in ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... do myself justice; whether wise or weak in the presence of the only being who had ever mastered my mind, I was determined not "to point a moral and adorn a tale." I had other duties and other purposes before me than to degenerate into a slave of sighs. I was to be no Romeo, bathing my soul in the luxuries of Italian palace-chambers, moonlight speeches, and the song of nightingales. I felt that I was an Englishman, and had the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... of the degenerate race on the high Realt was rightly feared in the whole district. He was the terror of the peaceful inhabitants of the district, and harried not only them but also merchants and pilgrims who passed along ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... background for his plays, but only a background. A picture of Spanish society does emerge from the dramas, indeed. It is a society in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty, in which the old titled families are generally degenerate and slothful, and the middle classes display admirable spiritual qualities, but are too often unthrifty and inefficient. Of the laboring classes, Galds has little to say. Bitter religious and political intolerance creates ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... did more than this: it gave her a self-reliance quite unusual—indeed not very desirable—in one so young; and there was danger, all the greater because she was quite unconscious of it, that it might degenerate into something different from an humble yet earnest self-reliance. But there was nothing of that as yet, and all ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... with him; and the fragrant clouds would be some consolation in the eyes, or rather in the noses, of some of us. But still,—almost six hours of tragedy! It is too much of a good thing for these degenerate days; and we must allow the prompter to use his pencil on the actors' copy of "Hamlet," though he strike out page upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... statesman and general, was an hereditary priest of the Eleusinian family of the Kerykes, and held the offices of archon basileus and eponymus in Athens. When the Heruli overran Greece and captured Athens (269), Dexippus showed great personal courage and revived the spirit of patriotism among his degenerate fellow-countrymen. A statue was set up in his honour, the base of which, with an inscription recording his services, has been preserved (Corpus Inscrr. Atticarum, iii. No. 716). It is remarkable ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... by these light wizards of our degenerate age, I dreamed away most of my school life, utterly deaf to the voices of the older enchanters—Homer, Horace, Virgil—whom I was sent to school on purpose to make friends with; a deafness I lived to deplore, like other dunces, when ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... been of the same type as her step-daughter, Masa. Both possessed high courage and intellectual endowments of an extraordinary order, and both were profoundly ambitious. Maki saw no reason why her husband, Hojo Tokimasa, should lend all his great influence to support the degenerate scions of one of his family in preference to the able and distinguished representative of the other branch. Tomomasa was both able and distinguished. By a prompt and vigorous exercise of military talent he had crushed a Heike rising in Ise, which had threatened for a time to become perilously ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Leonard took note of these things, which, to his mind, showed clearly that the inhabitants of this city were the degenerate inheritors of some ancient and forgotten civilisation. Their fortifications, stone-built houses, drinking-shops, and markets indicated this, just as their rude system of theology, with its divinities of Light ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... the worthless men become workmen. Worthless men are changed into economic assets. The dependents become independent. Working by means of the laws of environment and association, the Army elevates the degenerate from a pseudo-social and anti-social class to a higher level and to social position. Where individuality was lost, independence of ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... them and to protect them from fraud and injustice.* The current opinion of the Indian character, however, is too apt to be formed from the miserable hordes which infest the frontiers and hang on the skirts of the settlements. These are too commonly composed of degenerate beings, corrupted and enfeebled by the vices of society, without being benefited by its civilization. That proud independence which formed the main pillar of savage virtue has been shaken down, and the whole moral fabric lies in ruins. Their ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... wrought velvet of knavery;" and in his Father Hubburd's Tales, we find "like an old cunning bowler to fetch in a young ketling gamester:" see Middleton's Works, v. 543, 589, ed. Dyce. Keistrels are hawks of a worthless and degenerate breed. ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... they have made less progress in civilization than their philanthropic champions have promised or anticipated, let the want I have suggested receive some consideration. It may be that even a white peasantry would degenerate under such influences. Reverse this, and when the negro has cropped his sugar or his coffee, create a demand for his labour in the mills and manufactories of which nature has invited the establishment on this island, and before another sixteen years ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... descended from the apes being generally quoted as a correct expression of Darwin's theory, whereas he never suggested any such thing, but that man and the apes had a common ancestor, which makes of the ape rather a degenerate lemur than a human ancestor. Other and more prevalent errors will occur to the reader, these being due to the use of what is called "the evidence of the senses"; and of all criteria the evidence of ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... which they were made. And as, according to Dr. Ingleby, "the primal evidence of the forgery lies in the ink writing, and in that alone," with that alone we shall at present concern ourselves. As the careless, half-formed hand of the present day, degenerate from "the round hand of the school-master," appears only in the pencil writing, we have therefore to deal but with the first three styles of writing enumerated by Mr. Hardy; and as he himself admits that "it is perfectly possible that any ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... note that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work; that it is a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper; of prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and degenerate children—for all of which things the community has naturally to pay. And now consider that in each of my little free communities there would be a machine which would wash and dry the dishes, and do it, not merely to the eye and the touch, but scientifically—sterilizing them—and ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... of noble birth. He would probably have been better for a plebeian strain, since there was in him a touch of the degenerate. His mother's father had published a humanitarian poem on cats. His great-uncle had written a peculiar novel. Young Alfred was nervous, delicate, slightly epileptic, and it is certain that he was given to dissipation, which so far had affected his health only ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... glittered on the sideboards, the numerous dishes, that covered the tables, the number and gay liveries of the attendants, with the chivalric and splendid attire of the guests, united to form a scene of magnificence, such as we may not hope to see in these DEGENERATE DAYS. ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... and to depend for their livelihood on the property of others, as soon as they find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded from the honors of office by his poverty, institute the rule of violence; and now uniting their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages and find once more a master ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... military manoeuvre was repeated more than once by Roman generals, and shows how admirably the troops were drilled in what are called the degenerate days of the Roman armies.—(Finlay's Greece under the Romans, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... would do him good now; he was thoroughly bewitched by the girl, and though he made a hundred promises to give her up, would never hold one of them. Alas! alas! that the son of good Duke Philip should be so degenerate. ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... towards the Brill, Sylvia still remaining under that amiable disguise: but in their passage from town to town, which is sometimes by coach, and other times by boat, they chanced one day to encounter a young Hollander of a more than ordinary gallantry for that country, so degenerate from good manners, and almost common civility, and so far short of all the good qualities that made themselves appear in this young nobleman. He was very handsome, well made, well dressed, and very ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... other half-human demons, are sometimes regarded as degenerate gods. It will be seen, however, that while certain spirits developed into deities, others remained something between these two classes of supernatural beings: they might attend upon gods and goddesses, or operate ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... beauties; you should have extracted 'em. "The Ancient Marinere" plays more tricks with the mind than that last poem, which is yet one of the finest written. But I am getting too dogmatical; and before I degenerate into abuse, I will conclude with assuring you ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... than error, and must have been, on the whole, useful to mankind. We do not believe that they originated in human fraud, that their essence is superstition, that there is more falsehood than truth in their doctrines, that their moral tendency is mainly injurious, or that they continually degenerate into greater evil. No doubt it may be justly predicated of all these systems that they contain much which is false and injurious to human virtue. But the following considerations may tend to show that all the ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... a single woman. It may degenerate to a fault, it is true; but in most of those in this condition it is so restricted, as to be a theme not for censure, but approbation. In a country like ours, where, if fortunes are often made, they are also not seldom lost, in a day, this virtue is of prime concern. And everywhere ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... common thing as a wheel. Idiots! Solomon's court fool would have scoffed at the thought of the young Galilean who dared compare the lilies of the field to his august master. Nil admirari is very well for a North American Indian and his degenerate successor, who has grown too grand to admire anything but himself, and takes a cynical pride in his stolid indifference to everything worth reverencing ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... our young friends begin to think, becoming mercenary, 'This is the man who HAD pounds, who borrowed them,' which I did. I always borrow pounds. So our young friends, reduced to prose (which is much to be regretted), degenerate in their power of imparting pleasure to me. Why should I go to see ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... Enough. It is all seeming, and no being. If you would know how a man speaks in earnest, Read here this passage, where St. Peter thunders In Paradise against degenerate Popes And the corruptions of the church, till all The heaven about him blushes like a sunset. I beg you to take note of what he says About the Papal seals, for that concerns Your ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... plays? What necessity is there at times to put one piece into another? Are not his discussions and monologues too long? Does not his own exuberant genius become a fatigue to himself and to his readers? Are not, perhaps, his characters too real? and do they not often degenerate, without motive, from the sublime into the ridiculous? Would Hamlet have appeared less interesting or less mad had he not spoken indelicate and cruel words to Ophelia? Would Laertes have seemed less grieved on hearing of ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli |
