"Geometrical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... function was very different. In his first work Professor Smyth describes the coffer as showing no "symptoms" whatever of grooves, or catchpins or other fastenings or a lid. "More modern accounts," he re-observes, "have been further precise in describing the smooth and geometrical finish of the upper part of the coffer's sides, without any of those grooves, dovetails, or steady-pin-holes which have been found elsewhere in true polished sarcophagi, where the firm fastening of the lid is one of the ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... means of inlaying deserves mention. In the chapter on Ancient Furniture we have seen that ivory was used as an inlaid ornament as early as six centuries before Christ, but its revival and development in Europe probably commenced in Venice about the end of the thirteenth century, in copies of geometrical designs, let into ebony and brown walnut, and into a wood something like rosewood; parts of boxes and chests of these materials are still in existence. Mr. Maskell tells us in his Handbook on "Ivories," that ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... a hut-ward is—to the aesthetic eye—a hideous structure. Knowing what it stands for, the science, the tenderness and the fundamental civilisation which it represents, we may descry, behind its stark geometrical outlines, a real nobility and beauty. Entering a typical hut-ward you behold thirty beds, fifteen on each side of the room. Between each pair of beds is a locker in which the patient stows his belongings. (Woe betide him if his locker is not kept neat!) In the central aisle of the room are ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... abstraction, being completely empty, left, as we have said, full room for every gratuitous hypothesis and the logical consequences resulting therefrom, the "scientific" mission of these reformers assumed the appearance of a geometrical problem; given a certain nature, find what structure of society best corresponds with it. So Morelly complains bitterly because "our old teachers" failed to attempt the solution of "this excellent problem"—"to find the condition in which it should be almost impossible for men to be depraved, ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... Moreover, he could be in two or more places at once, and cause two bodies to occupy the same space—which to us is inconceivable. Stranger still, he might be both alive and dead at the same time—since Past, Present, and Future would be all one to him; the world without beginning or end ...—From the "Geometrical Possibilities," of Abd'el Kasir, ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... having been selected as the resting-place of a creature from outside his realm. He seems to be almost hypnotized into a state of abject lifelessness. The effect of this juxtaposition of the round forms of the human body and the almost geometrical angularity of the fabulous beast is very interesting and adds a new note to the many other ideas presented. The architectural scheme of the fountain is made doubly interesting by a rich use of animal forms of ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... "The Egyptians and the Greeks hung geometrical forms over their cradles, so as to strike the eyes of the child with lawful relations. Froebel introduces colored balls for the same purpose, which, considering the psychological and emotional condition of the child, leads to the ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... hill I had now to climb, but without venturing very near. At length I thought I had had enough of his company, so at the next bend in the road I came to a stand beside a heap of stones that a cantonnier had neatly piled up in geometrical pattern. There I waited, and the animal came on gaily, little expecting to find himself suddenly at close quarters with me. Just as he turned the corner he raised a howl that said he was both surprised ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... colossal beams, bent beneath the weight of the upper stories, though it had never given way under them. Built en colombage, that is to say, with a wooden frontage, the whole facade was covered with slates, so put on as to form geometrical figures,—thus preserving a naive image of the burgher ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... great stress on reconnaissance and control of artillery fire as the main uses of aircraft. For reconnaissance the aeroplanes were practised to co-operate with cavalry. For fire control official maps, divided into geometrical squares, so that a pair of numbers will identify a position within a score or so of yards, were supplied in duplicate to the pilots of the aeroplanes and to the commanding officers of batteries. The system of signalling employed was mostly primitive, but already in 1911 the French ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... because they are incompatible with the nature of the female intellect. We have been mistaken.' In England, Miss Ormerod has distinguished herself by her observations on insect life. Very recently a paper was read before the Mathematical Society of London by Mrs. Bryant, Sc.D., on the geometrical form of perfectly regular cell structure, illustrated by models of cube and rhombic dodecahedron. In another section, Mme. Traube Mengarini studies the function of the brain in fishes; while, in our ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... examination for Sandhurst begins on the 26th this year," he explained, "and so far as I can make out I shall romp through it. I am going to take all the subjects in Class One—mathematics, Latin, French, geometrical drawing, and English composition; I'll astonish them in the last subject! Plenty of dash and go, eh, Peggy,— that's the style to fetch 'em! In Class Two you can only take two subjects, so I'm going in for chemistry and physics. I rather fancy myself in physics, and if I don't come out at the head ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... elements of beauty in a village are not fine houses, costly fences, paved roadways, geometrical lines, mathematical grading, nor any obviously costly improvements. They are, rather, cosiness, neatness, simplicity, and that homely air that grows from these and from the presence ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... rhythmically passing forms like the vans of windmills, and between them glimpses of a remote and pallid sky. Then Howard had thrust him forward across the bridge, and he was in a little narrow passage decorated with geometrical patterns. ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... England became rather a science than an amusement of social intercourse. The 'doctrine of chances' was studied with an assiduity that would have done honour to better subjects; and calculations were made on arithmetical and geometrical principles, to determine the degrees of probability attendant on games of mixed skill and chance, or even on the fortuitous throws of dice. Of course, in spite of all calculations, there were miserable failures—frightful losses. The polite gamester, ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... a large and lofty chamber with vaulted ceiling, that dated back almost to the early Norman period; its walls, decorated in geometrical designs, were covered with many varieties of antique weapons of warfare; halberd and mace gleamed and mingled with harquebus, poleax or lance. At one end of the hall were ranged in a row suits of armor which at first ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... number of eggs laid varies with the size of the animal. The law of production may be arithmetically expressed as follows: The number of eggs produced at each reproductive period varies in a geometrical series, while the length of lobsters producing these eggs varies in an arithmetical series. According to this law an 8-inch lobster produces 5,000 eggs, a lobster 10 inches long 10,000, a 12-inch lobster 20,000. This high rate of production is not maintained beyond the length of 14 to ...
— The Lobster Fishery of Maine - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, Vol. 19, Pages 241-265, 1899 • John N. Cobb
... the twilight at our lonely mast on the shore, just seen above the alders, and hardly yet come to a stand-still from the swaying of the stream; the first encroachment of commerce on this land. There was our port, our Ostia. That straight geometrical line against the water and the sky stood for the last refinements of civilized life, and what of sublimity there is in history ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... minnie would be written by five small u's. In round-bodied letters like a, d, g, the circle is rarely completed, but is left open, so that small a becomes u, and small d may be mistaken for it, with the i undotted and t uncrossed. Despite its geometrical and caligraphic inaccuracy in detail, this hand is generally written with great regularity, that is, the characters, though incomplete, are always uniform in their irregularity. The e is never open, ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... even, it is to be hoped, on the way to free itself finally from the ugliness of "carpet bedding"—when plants are largely grouped and massed instead of being placed in alternate kinds at regular intervals in geometrical patterns. Present day taste with its appreciation of garden colour, of masses and groups of particular kinds, instead of isolated plants dotted about with irritating regularity, is found beautifully exemplified in the numerous ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold
... stationery (articles) counsel (advice or an adviser) miner (a workman) council (a body of persons) minor (under age) complement (a completing element) angel (a spiritual being) compliment (praise) angle (geometrical) ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... and better than by Napier's Bones, &c.] The famous Lord Napier, of Scotland, the first inventor of logarithms, contrived also a set of square pieces, with numbers on them, made generally of ivory, (which perform arithmetical and geometrical calculations,) and are commonly called ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... geometrical calculations, and then, by the aid of a barometer, when an ascent has been made. The column of mercury in the instrument falls in proportion as the barometer is carried up the mountain, because the air which presses ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... begin to prove my Propositions in detailed geometrical fashion, it is advisable to sketch them briefly in advance, so that everyone may ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... genesis of nature we again find the synthetic conception of the elements, which he estimates to be four; to which geometrical forms correspond, and the world was finally organized after its human type. He divides the soul into several distinct and independent powers, which are ever revolving between life and death: they inhabit ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... know to be right, for the right's sake alone. And conscience has never wavered in the inculcation of that precept. The reason of man has been constantly advancing, discovering the content of the moral law just as it has been discovering the content of the geometrical, mathematical or musical law; but conscience, like the polar star, has been pointing steadily in one direction, the direction of duty, without error, without failure. "An erring conscience," says the ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... tracing their sources to Greece and Rome, and thence down the main stream of European civilization, we have now for many of them one or two parallel histories in India and in China. The history of geometry, for instance,—the first formation of geometrical conceptions or technical terms—was hitherto known to us from Greece only: now we can compare the gradual elaboration of geometrical principles both in Greece and India, and thus arrive at some idea of what ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... grandeur. I have not often felt thus when looking on architecture, but have felt, at all events, at first, intense exultation at the beauty of it; that, and a certain kind of satisfaction in looking on the geometrical tracery of the windows, on the sweeping of the huge arches, were, I think, my ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... hair dressed in those geometrical undulations without which no New York audience feels itself clothed. They saw Pinky less frequently as time went on and her feeling of responsibility lessened. Besides, the magazine covers took most of her day. She gave a tea for her father and mother at her own studio, and Mrs. Brewster's hat, ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... the kindergarten, and it should develop through the grades and high school in ways similar to the arithmetic, and in conjunction with the arithmetic, drawing, and construction work. Since geometrical forms involve numerical relations, they supply good materials to use in making number relations concrete and clear. This is now done in developing ideas of fractions, multiplication, division, ratio, per cent, etc. It should be done much more fully and variously than at present and for the double ...
— What the Schools Teach and Might Teach • John Franklin Bobbitt
... in shame of the inanimate creature she had become, to force herself to think: and had, for a chastising result, a series of geometrical figures shooting across her brain, mystically expressive of the situation, not communicably. The most vivid and persistent was a triangle. Interpret who may. The one beheld the two pass from ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... meaning. And the more I hear the most sacred terms employed, the more I am satisfied that they have entirely and radically different meanings in the minds of those who use them. Yet they deal with them as if they were as definite as mathematical quantities or geometrical figures. What would become of arithmetic if the figure 2 meant three for one man and five for another and twenty for a third, and all the other numerals were in the same way variable quantities? Mighty intelligent correspondence ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... against,—the least sign of hesitation or uncertainty,—the very danger every European with knowledge of the situation had dinned in our ears. Everybody declared that difficulties were sure to grow on our hands in geometrical proportion to our delays; and it was perfectly known to the respective branches of our Government primarily concerned that while the delay went on it was in neglect of a duty ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... Strasbourg, were at work upon a machine which, if perfected, should at once extend letters a hundred-fold, and by that process revolutionize literature. The writers before, few as they were, had been almost as numerous as the readers; hereafter the readers were to increase in a geometrical proportion, and each great writer should address millions. Movable types, first of wood and then of metal, were made, the latter as early as 1441. Schoeffer, Guttenberg, and Faust brought them to such perfection that books were soon printed and issued in large numbers. But so slowly did ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... and then," I continued, with painful candour, for I longed to see the pictures he had spoken of, "group themselves into globes and round balls of fire, and the lines that flash about sometimes look like triangles and crosses—almost like geometrical figures. ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... I had, at an earlier period, given some attention to logic, and among those of the mathematics to geometrical analysis and algebra,—three arts or sciences which ought, as I conceived, to contribute something to my design. But, on examination, I found that, as for logic, its syllogisms and the majority of its other precepts are of avail—rather ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... well to remark that a strategic point is not necessarily a geometrical point; an entire province, or a considerable portion of a geographical frontier, is, in military language, sometimes denominated a point. In the same way, strategic lines, instead of being mathematical lines, are frequently many miles ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... her hair dressed in those geometrical, undulations without which no New York audience feels itself clothed. They saw Pinky less frequently as time went on and her feeling or responsibility lessened. Besides, the magazine covers took most of her day. She gave a tea for her father ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... need not wonder, therefore, if in some schools all spring, all vigor, all joyousness of work is crushed out under that load of names and dates, of anomalous verbs and syntactic rules, of mathematical formulas and geometrical theories which boys are expected to bring up ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... Inasmuch as if there is chance in one thing there must be chance in another, and the solar system is too mathematically designed to be a haphazard arrangement. With all our cleverness, our logic, our geometrical skill, we can do nothing so exact! As part of the solar system, you and I have our trifling business to enact, Monsignor,—and to enact it properly, and with satisfaction to our Supreme Employer, it seems to me that if we are honest with the world and ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... yellow, lettered in white; mathematics was represented in a small way by the cipher and nine digits, lettered in black upon ten plain unpainted blocks, giving in their forms that number of the principal geometrical figures, to which was added a shallow box with a broad lid, perforated by ten holes, corresponding to the blocks in number, size and shape, but large enough for the blocks to easily pass through ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... have happened more happily. You would say there was in that place Plato's academy; but I do his house an injury in comparing it to Plato's academy, where there were only disputations of numbers and geometrical figures, and sometimes of moral virtues. I should rather call his house a school or university of Christian religion; for, though there is none therein but readeth and studyeth the liberal sciences, their special ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... are scarcely more than heads out of the vast subtle muddle of thinking about spheres and ideally perfect forms and so on, that was the price of this little necessary step to clear thinking. How large a part numerical and geometrical magic, numerical and geometrical philosophy have played in the history of the mind! And the whole apparatus of language and mental communication is beset with like dangers. The language of the savage is I suppose purely positive; the thing has a name, the name has a thing. This indeed is the ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... capitals, together with Gothic structures of every kind, are erected wherever there is an opportunity to place them; but I never saw any attempt at figure or animal drawing for personal decoration. The forms are generally geometrical in design and symmetrical in arrangement, each limb receiving the same ornamentation as its fellow. None of ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... language as our own. Nothing in them worth quoting. Evidently "silly season" over there as well as here. Account of the Sea Serpent. Let off patent sky-shattering rockets, but the inhabitants of the adjacent planet failed to observe them. They have arranged bonfires in geometrical order, so far as we can understand it, as a signal (if it is one); they seem to wish to observe something like "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay." Interesting. Popular song of fourteen years ago just reached our nearest neighbour in the Solar System. Cannot observe more, as the planet ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 20, 1892 • Various
... knowing well the irregular plan on which the streets are laid out, was struck by the manner in which, as looked down upon from this height, they formed themselves into beautifully defined curves, straight lines, and other highly respectable geometrical shapes. They saw the castle and the pier with what seemed to be ants crawling on it. A little patch of colour, that to Josiah looked like a ball of scarlet worsted, was, the captain ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... method employed to dispell the illusion. It was suggested that, at the moment of the appearance of the phenomenon, the child be requested to fixate the end of the father's index finger which was revolved, in the air, to form various geometrical figures. This had the desired effect. Clearly we have here a case of the object altering its apparent size without altering its distance. Under normal conditions a change in size is followed by a corresponding change in the distance. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... mathematical proportions, such as we employ in chemistry and natural philosophy, such as the Pythagoreans and even Aristotle make use of in Ethics and Politics, e.g. his distinction between arithmetical and geometrical proportion in the Ethics (Book V), or between numerical and ...
— The Republic • Plato
... freedman, assuring him that all was quiet, was ordered to leave the room. Cato no sooner found himself alone, than, seizing his sword, he stabbed himself below his chest. The blow not despatching him, he fell from his bed and overturned a table, on which he had been drawing some geometrical figures. At the noise of the fall, his servants shrieked, and his son and friends immediately flew to the room. They found him weltering in his blood, with his bowels appearing through the wound. 11. The surgeon, perceiving that his intestines ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... vine-dresser being the equatorial case between the two extremes of the envoy. Malthus again, in his population-book, contends for a mathematic difference between animal and vegetable life, in respect to the law of increase, as though the first increased by geometrical ratios, the last by arithmetical! No proposition more worthy of laughter; since both, when permitted to expand, increase by geometrical ratios, and the latter by much higher ratios. Whereas, Malthus persuaded himself of his ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... is, for example, in the arithmetical and geometrical ratios, set up in political economy by the celebrated Mr. Malthus. His numbers will go on smoothly enough, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, as representing the principle of population among mankind, and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, the means of subsistence; ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... with a poverty-stricken refugee, and if the delights of the ordinary subscription-card should ever pall, she can fly for relaxation to the seductive method of the snowball, which conceals under a cloak of geometrical progression and accuracy, the most comprehensive uncertainty in its results. One painful incident in her career must be chronicled. Fired by her example, but without her knowledge, a friend of hers from whom she is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 24, 1890 • Various
... directed the public curiosity to Tasmania. For several successive years new books were published, describing the fertility of the soil and the beauty of the climate. These generally contained a theory of pastoral increase—a geometrical progression towards wealth. The increase was, indeed, rapid beyond oriental precedent. Between 1810 and 1820, it was estimated at fifty fold.[109] The adaptation of these colonies for the growth of wool first drew the attention of several gentlemen of Hamburgh, whose importations ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... is supposed to have contained a hundred and twenty-five geometrical paces, or six hundred and twenty-five Roman feet, corresponding to our furlong. Eight stadia make a geometrical, or Italian mile; and twenty, according to Dacier, a French league. It is observed, notwithstanding, by Guilletiere, a famous French writer, that ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... be doubted that MR. WILKINSON has traced with singular acumen the manner in which the spirit of geometrical research was diffused amongst the operative classes, and the class immediately above them—the exciseman and the country schoolmaster. Still it is not to be inferred, that even these classes did not contain ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various
... economic science? Within certain limits, it is apparently true: Ricardo used mathematical formulae, though he kept to arithmetic, instead of algebra. When Malthus spoke of arithmetical and geometrical ratios, the statement, true or false, was, of course, capable of precise numerical expression, so soon as the ratios were assigned. So there was the famous formula proving a relation between the number of quarters of corn produced by a given harvest, and the number of shillings that ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... accidental truths, those of which the contrary is impossible only under certain conditions. Now, revelation could not contradict necessary truths; but it may appear to contradict those which are accidental. Geometrical truths are necessary; and therefore revelation could not oppose them; but as accidental truths refer to the changes of natural things, it follows that these may be apparently contradicted by revelation; though if we search minutely, we shall at last be able to lift the veil from the contradictions. ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... daring was sometimes over-daring; and there are critics who profess to discern, after the beginning of the Russian campaign, and especially in the last contest in Belgium, signs of a decline in his almost superhuman vigilance and energy. Yet all must admit "that transcendent geometrical faculty," as Sainte-Beuve calls it, "which characterized Napoleon, and which that powerful genius applied to war with the same ease and the same aptitude that Monge [a great French mathematician] ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... swerved, ever more and more influenced by the Orient, for Rome, always successful in war, had established colonies in the East. Soon Byzantine art reached Rome, bringing its arabesques and geometrical designs, its warm, glowing colours, soft cushions, gorgeous hangings, embroideries, and rich carpets. In fact all the glowing luxury ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... character of the masonry would indicate that local workmen were employed in building this chapel, and that little was spent in ornamenting it at the time of the erection. There are, however, some traces of frescoes on the inside of the walls, both geometrical patterns and figures. The pointed doorways and the lancet window on the south side would indicate the thirteenth century as the date of the original building, and this agrees with the documentary evidence mentioned above for the foundation ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins
... Nikolay Levin, with an ironical smile, his eyes flashing malignantly, "has the charm of—what's one to call it?—geometrical symmetry, of clearness, of definiteness. It may be a Utopia. But if once one allows the possibility of making of all the past a tabula rasa—no property, no family— then labor would organize itself. But ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... in the condensed shape of allegorical symbols, India, nevertheless, has known how to express all these teachings more or less successfully. She has immortalized them in her ugly, four-headed idols, in the geometrical, complicated forms of her temples, and even in the entangled lines and spots on the foreheads of ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... geometrical student in reading the printed instructions to himself or in reading them aloud, might simply occupy his eye, or eye and ear with them and his Reason might soar away to other subjects, ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... and sun to be earthly, and the moon of the same nature as the sun, but illumined by it. Somewhat more valuable would appear to have been his geometrical science, could we with accuracy attribute to Thales many problems claimed also, and more probably, by Pythagoras and later reasoners. He is asserted to have measured the pyramids by their shadows. He cultivated ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... senornama. Plainly simple, klare. Plainness simpleco. Plaint plendo. Plaintive plenda. Plait (with straw) pajloplekti. Plait plekti. Plait plektajxo. Plait (hair) harligo. Plan plano. Plan (geometrical) plato. Plane raboti. Plane (tool) rabotilo. Planet planedo. Plank tabulo. Plant planti. Plant kreskajxo. Plantation plantejo. Plaster plastro, gipso. Plastron brustosxirmilo. Plate stanumi. Plate ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... instruments have been brought, they have revealed nothing on the planet save the so-called canals, to indicate the presence of sentient rational beings. The canals discovered by Schiaparelli of the Milan Observatory in 1877 are so regular, outlined with such remarkable geometrical precision, that it is claimed they must be artificial and the work of a high order of intelligence. "The evidence of such work," says Professor Lowell, "points to a highly intelligent mind ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... himself a series of visages presenting successively all geometrical forms, from the triangle to the trapezium, from the cone to the polyhedron; all human expressions, from wrath to lewdness; all ages, from the wrinkles of the new-born babe to the wrinkles of the aged and ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... no store at all upon rhyme. I am tempted to-day to go farther, and to maintain that, the larger, the sublimer, your subject is, the more impertinent rhyme becomes to it: and that this impertinence increases in a sort of geometrical progression as you advance from monosyllabic to dissyllabic and on to trisyllabic rhyme. Let me put this ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... built by the Romans in the geometrical Roman way you may see as you look down from the Bell Tower upon its four main streets—north, south, east and west—east becoming Stane-street and running direct to London. Chichester then was Regnum. On the departure ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... a while forget his disappointment almost as completely as he did the wet-winged winds that had been flapping and wheeling about the house ever since the thaw set in. His obliviousness could not, however, ensure him against the effects of cold shower-baths, and before long his geometrical drawing was done to the accompaniment of a hollow-sounding cough, which made Dan remember a time some years ago when Nicholas had been so seriously ill with pleurisy that voices had said at their door, "Ah, ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... as that in plate LXXI, is similar in design and method of execution to that shown in the other plates. There is one point, however, in which the Roman work is quite different. In Sicily and southern Italy the bands and borders of geometrical patterns are largely made up of glass or composition, while the Cosmati confined themselves to the use of colored marbles. In the south, and particularly in Sicily, gold is freely used, but this is lacking in ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration - Vol 1, No. 9 1895 • Various
... studied mathematics in Paris according to the analytical method, instead of the geometrical, which was at that time exclusively taught ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... such plasticity to habituation, or such ready adjustment to new conditions. It is the age of external and mechanical training. Reading, writing, drawing, manual training, musical technic, foreign tongues and their pronunciations, the manipulation of numbers and of geometrical elements, and many kinds of skill have now their golden hour; and if it passes unimproved, all these can never be acquired later without a heavy handicap of disadvantage and loss. These necessities may be hard for the health of body, sense, mind, as well as for morals; ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... example when the existence of the one and the non-existence of the one are equally assumed to involve the existence of the many: (12) Words are used through long chains of argument, sometimes loosely, sometimes with the precision of numbers or of geometrical figures. ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... and gravel, and slime, most curiously made of these, even so as to be wondered at, but not to be made by man, no more than a king-fisher's nest can, which is made of little fishes' bones, and have such a geometrical interweaving and connection as the like is not to be done by the art of man. This kind of cadis is a choice bait for any float-fish; it is much less than the piper- cadis, and to be so ordered: and these may be so preserved, ten, fifteen, or twenty days, or it ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... paints, he understands the chemical properties of all his colors. However vague some of his figures may seem, however formless the shadows, to him the outline is as clear and distinct as that of a geometrical diagram. For this reason Mr. Poe has no sympathy with Mysticism. The Mystic dwells in the mystery, is enveloped with it; it colors all his thoughts; it affects his optic nerve especially, and the commonest things get a rainbow edging from ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... into species. Animals tend to increase in geometrical ratio. Varieties diverge in consonance with diversity of opportunity for life. In the struggle for existence those which best accord with their surroundings will survive and propagate their kind. Sexual selection has put a premium on beauty. The causes which in brief periods produce ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... geometrical figures on the ground with the tip of his boot, and finally took off his hat, turned ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... of novel application of his unrivalled machinery. The second side begins with "the circle rectified" by W. E. Walker,[590] who finds [pi] 3.141594789624155.... This is an off-shoot from an accurate geometrical rectification, on which is to be presumed Mr. Gillott's new machinery is founded. I have no doubt that Mr. Walker's error, which is only in the sixth place of decimals, will not hurt the pens, unless it be by the slightest possible ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... to be sent to London, one Mr Robert Adams, a man of excellent skill, took the exact bigness, height, length, breadth, and other dimensions of this huge vessel, that these might be preserved according to the exact rules of geometrical proportions, both for present knowledge and transmission to posterity, omitting nothing which either his art could demonstrate, or any mans judgment think worthy of being known. After an exact survey of the whole frame, he found the extreme length, from the beak head to the stern, where a lantern ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... are elastic gaseous bodies, whose particles tend to rush away from one another with great force. Water, at the same temperature, is a strong though brittle solid, whose particles tend to cohere into definite geometrical shapes, and sometimes build up frosty imitations of the most complex forms ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... mechanics working such an instrument enabled them to add many improvements to it; until the skilful artisan at length produced not merely circular turning of the most beautiful and accurate description, but exquisite figure-work, and complicated geometrical designs, depending upon the cycloidal and eccentric movements which were from time to time added ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... habitually used, the derivation and classification of the verbal form, etc.) the less likely is he to acquire an ability which can be used for anything except the mere noting of verbal visual forms. He may not even be increasing his ability to make accurate distinctions among geometrical forms, to say nothing of ability to observe in general. He is merely selecting the stimuli supplied by the forms of the letters and the motor reactions of oral or written reproduction. The scope of coordination (to use our prior terminology) is extremely ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... periodical literature, simply because the chief inducement is on the wrong side. If an author receives twice as much pay for a page as for half a page, he will write a page as a matter of course; and, as a matter of course, the quality of what he writes will be depreciated in geometrical proportion. For the same thing, said in few words, is ten times more effectual than when said in ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... he exclaimed, as the door shut, and, for a man of his temperament, got a very queer feeling, as he walked through the park, of carriages irresistibly driven; of flower beds uncompromisingly geometrical; of force rushing round geometrical patterns in the most senseless way in the world. "Was Clara," he thought, pausing to watch the boys bathing in the Serpentine, "the silent woman?—would ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... smiling eyes. As always, in the aimless din and multiplicity of streets he felt himself most securely at home. The smear of gestures, the elastic distortion of crowds winding and unwinding under the tumult of windows, gave him the feeling of a geometrical emptiness of life. ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... the Minot boys had his own room, and there collected his own treasures and trophies, arranged to suit his convenience and taste. Frank's was full of books, maps, machinery, chemical messes, and geometrical drawings, which adorned the walls like intricate cobwebs. A big chair, where he read and studied with his heels higher than his head, a basket of apples for refreshment at all hours of the day or night, and ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... argument, to prevent the vessel of the state from being hurried forward with the progress of improvement, and dashed in pieces down the tremendous precipice of human perfectibility. Then comes Mr. Malthus forward with the geometrical and arithmetical ratios in his hands, and holds them out to his affrighted contemporaries as the only means of salvation. "For" (so argued the author of the Essay) "let the principles of Mr. Godwin's Enquiry and of other similar works be carried literally ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... all the world over for its pipes, a branch of manufacture for which it is now as famous as of yore. Partly in this parish and partly in that of Benthall, and only about 300 yards from the station, are the geometrical, mosaic, and encaustic tile works of the Messrs. Maw. They were removed here a few years since from Worcester, the better to command the use of the Broseley clays, since which they have attained to considerable importance, and now rival ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... or blocking the roadway with an importunity which required some zigzagging—was a series of pools, all alike, of regular geometrical circles. To Desnoyers, they seemed like sunken basins for the use of the invisible Titans who had been hewing the forest. Their great depth extended to their very edges. A swimmer might dive into ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... mullions; it is this tracery which marks most clearly the various changes of style. The shape of the arch is similar throughout. This was a concession on the part of the later builders which ensured harmony in the whole; but on each side the tracery is varied. On the east side it is geometrical in character, the work being transitional between Early English and Decorated; on the south side the tracery is more flowing and has advanced to Decorated; on the west side again, we get the transitional style between ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... that of population generally, is in its nature, a geometrical progression, it must continue to augment, as long as subsistence can be obtained. This view of the subject is truly alarming; but when we consider the extent of territory which is overspread by this foul blot on the map of our beloved country, the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... days are more ancient than the division of the day into twenty-four parts; and Joseph Scaliger has attempted to derive the names of the days from those of the planets, without reference to this method of division. His explanation, however, which is altogether geometrical, inasmuch as it depends on the properties of the heptagon, seems quite unsatisfactory, though Selden appears to have been inclined to adopt it. At any rate, the account of the matter given by Dio Cassius ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... one quantity is to be divided by another, the signs which denote both are placed in the form peculiar to the operation of division; and thus algebra, by means of a symbolical construction of quantity, just as geometry, with its ostensive or geometrical construction (a construction of the objects themselves), arrives at results which discursive cognition cannot hope to reach by the ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... proportionably enlarged the range of constructive theory. The discovery of a new primary planet and its attendant satellites was but the first step of his progress into the labyrinth of the heavens. Cotemporaneously with his observations, the French astronomers, and especially La Place, with a geometrical skill scarcely, if at all, inferior to that of its great author, resumed the whole system of Newton, and brought every phenomenon observed since his time within his laws. Difficulties of fact, with which he struggled in vain, gave way to more accurate observations; and problems that defied the power ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... was long ere my ark touched on an Ararat, and rested. The idea (viz. the law evolved in the mind) of the Supreme Being appeared to me to be as necessarily implied in all particular modes of being, as the idea, of infinite space in all the geometrical figures by which space is limited." He goes on to state at this period, about the latter end of the year 1796, "For a very long time I could not reconcile personality with infinity; and my head was with Spinosa, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... of such solidity as we are assured on high authority they are. In the promotion of national prosperity, colonization may prove a gradually efficient auxiliary; but as a remedy for present ills, its action must evidently be too slow and restricted; and even though it should be impelled to a geometrical ratio of progression, still would the prospect of effectual relief be discernible only through a vista of years. Meanwhile, time presses, and the patient might perish if condemned alone to the homoeopathic process of infinitesimal doses ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... brief period of incubation fall sick with the disease; being bitten by other mosquitoes they serve to transmit the disease through the "intermediate host" to still others. Thus the epidemic extends, at first slowly from house to house, then more rapidly, as by geometrical progression. ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... created and pictured upon her piece of work. Some of these designs represent conventionalized objects of nature—birds, clouds, mountains, rain, corn, lightning, tadpoles, dragon-flies, horned toads, serpents and the like; others are purely geometrical, and the variety and extent of them are more wonderful than any except the experts realize. In a monograph upon the ancient pottery of these people, Dr. Fewkes pictures every known geometrical figure of ancient and modern times, all of which were ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... that our mountain barometers were broken at an early stage of the expedition; the height however of some principal points had been previously obtained, and is marked on the chart; these in two instances were verified by geometrical measurement, and the difference was found to be too trilling to be noticed. The conveyance of such delicate instruments is always attended with great risk, and in our case peculiarly so, our means being only those of horseback. I am afraid that a ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... spring up most naturally, those which arise through a community of interests, are all dispersed, and the broadest, most express, and most positive interdictions are promulgated against their revival under any pretext whatever.[2250] France is cut up into geometrical sections like a chess-board, and, within these improvised limits, which are destined for a long time to remain artificial, nothing is allowed to subsist but isolated individuals in juxtaposition. There is no desire to spare organized bodies ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... again he circled, studying the ground beneath. Now he could see that the tough grass and undergrowth marked curious geometrical patterns. Here, for example, was an oblong of bare earth around which the vegetation grew, and it was obviously ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... to the rude but shapely cone before us,—massive in its materials and fabric, and yet constructed with some degree of mechanical skill,—to come to the conclusion that the Nuraghe are works of a very early period, just when rude labour had begun to be directed by some rules of geometrical art. But, in examining the details, we find little or nothing to assist us in forming any clear idea of the period at which they were erected, or the purpose for which they were designed. There are not the ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... outset the idea had had the utmost tangibility in the mind of Dalton. He had all along represented the different atoms by geometrical symbols—as a circle for oxygen, a circle enclosing a dot for hydrogen, and the like—and had represented compounds by placing these symbols of the elements in juxtaposition. Berzelius proposed to improve upon this method by substituting for the geometrical symbol the initial of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... fastened together with some viscous matter resembling much the "ointment made of dead men's flesh" mentioned by Mr. Glanvill. Bragge had done a piece of research upon the stuff and discovered that the particles were arranged in geometrical forms with equal numbers in each part.[35] Justice Powell called for the pillow, but had to be content with the witness's word, for the pillow had been burnt. Arthur Chauncy, who was probably a relative of the justice of the peace, offered to show the judge pins taken from Anne Thorne. It ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... chopping-tray, was the washtub. The ironing or mangling apparatus consisted of a rolling-pin, round which the article of clothing was wrapped, and a curved paddle of hard wood, its under-surface carved in pretty geometrical designs, with which it was smoothed. This paddle served also to beat the clothes upon the stones, when the washing was done in the river, in warm weather. A few wooden bowls and spoons and earthen pots, including the variety which keeps milk cool without either ice or running water, completed ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... existence of a planet between Mars and Jupiter, and another between Venus and Mercury, he might be able to attain his object; but he found that this assumption afforded him no assistance. Kepler then imagined that as there were five regular geometrical solids, and five planets, the distances of the latter were regulated by the size of the solids described round one another. The discovery afterwards of two additional planets testified to the absurdity of this speculation. A description ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... In both cases the basic axioms are obtained from intuition; the structural work from reason. Our knowledge of the ether may be as absolute and exact as our knowledge of prakriti, working on physical as we work on geometrical axioms. ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... intercourse with him, was subjected to the same penalties as could by law be inflicted on the criminal himself. Several writs of intercommuning were now issued against the hearers and preachers in conventicles; and by this severe and even absurd law, crimes and guilt went on multiplying in a geometrical proportion. Where laws themselves are so violent, it is no wonder that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... according to well-defined laws, elaborates its structure into a crystal of great beauty, so does the protoplasm elaborate itself into the most beautiful of all structures—the cell unit. Just as gold and copper crystallizes in a geometrical form, a cube—bismuth and antimony in a hexagonal, iodine and sulphur in a rhombic form—so we find among radiolaria, and among other protista and lower forms, that they "may be traced to a mathematical, fundamental form, and whose form in its whole, as well as in its parts, is bounded by definite ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawning of time. Some eighty thousand years are supposed to have existed between paleolithic and neolithic man. Yet in all that time he only learned ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... independent existence of figure, which is the limitation of distance, and of motion, which is change of place, must be equally inconceivable. Solidity requires more particular consideration, as it is a term applied to two very different things, the one of which is solidity of form, or geometrical solidity; while the other is solidity of substance, ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... to examine into this fairy-tale in a consecutive and orderly way—by geometrical progression, so to speak—linking detail to detail in a steadily advancing and remorselessly consistent and unassailable march upon this tinsel toy-fortress of error, the dream fabric of a callow-imagination. To begin with, young sir, I desire to ask you ...
— A Double Barrelled Detective Story • Mark Twain
... ancient town was square or almost square, the house-blocks were of the same shape, and the plan of the town was indistinguishable from a chess-board. Or, instead of squares, oblong house-blocks formed a pattern not strictly that of a chess-board but geometrical and rectangular. Often the outline of the town was irregular and merely convenient, but the streets still kept, so far as they could, to a rectangular plan. Sometimes, lastly, the rectangular planning was limited to a few broad thoroughfares, ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield |
