"Mechanical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not produce parallels to Oxford and Cambridge in opulence, buildings, libraries, professorships, scholarships, and all the external dignity and mechanical apparatus of learning. If there is an inferiority, it is in the persons, not in the places or their constitution. And here I can not help confessing that a desire to please the great, and bring them to the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... State institutions offering complete college curricula or doing college grade of work: Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College, Georgia State College for Colored Youths, Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College, Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, and ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... had a short time previously called upon him, and he fancied that a slight glimpse of remembrance crossed his mind, when, in a moment, he silently passed to his library, and taking down a book, (from mechanical habit) turned over the pages, without reading, or the power of reading. Pardon prolixity, where the heart is so full. Surely the world does not present a more melancholy, or a more humiliating sight, than the prostration ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... bodily form like to man, which is related by way of prototype to the human form." [125] As well might we say that because a watchmaker constructs a chronometer with a movement somewhat like that of his own heart, therefore he is mechanical, metallic, and round. Against this anthropomorphic materialism science lifts up its voice; for what modern philosopher, worthy of the name, fails to distinguish between phenomenon and fact, inert matter ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... an army a thorough mowing-machine, it then seemed necessary that it should be disciplined into complete mechanical obedience. To secure this, prompt payment of wages and inexorable punishment of delinquencies were indispensable. Long arrearages were now converting Farnese's veterans into systematic marauders; for unpaid soldiers in every age and country have usually degenerated ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... if his tender for the Slate Company's haulage is approved," Hayes began. "His traction engine is suited for the work and he is prepared to buy a trailer lurry, which we would find useful in the dale. Mechanical transport would be a public advantage ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... consideration of the state of the various sciences, mechanical, physiological (p. 355), and mental (p. 355), that no new difficulties can be suggested hereafter, distinct in kind from the present; nor any unknown kinds of evidence ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... methinks, has fostered and yet feeds Edward's suspicions of thy harmless father. The king chides himself for having suffered poor Warner to depart unscathed, and even recalls the disastrous adventure of the mechanical, and swears that from the first thy father was in treasonable conspiracy with Margaret. Nay, sure I am, that if I dared to wed thee while his anger lasts, he would condemn thee as a sorceress, and give me up to the secret hate of my old foes the Woodvilles. ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... about Drawbaugh is that he was a mechanic in a country village near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was ingenious but not inventive; and loved to display his mechanical skill before the farmers and villagers. He was a subscriber to The Scientific American; and it had become the fixed habit of his life to copy other people's inventions and exhibit them as his own. He was a trailer of inventors. More than forty instances of this imitative habit were shown at ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... of any other existing race. The incisores are thick and round, not, as usual, flattened into edges, but resembling truncated cones; the cuspidati are not pointed, but broad and flat on the masticating surface, like the neighbouring bicuspides. This may be attributable to mechanical attrition, depending on the nature of the food which the teeth are employed in masticating. The upper does not overlap the under jaw, but the teeth meet at their surfaces. This peculiarity of teeth has been noticed by Blumenbach as a characteristic ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... For all general mechanical work, this is the most valuable book for the farmer, blacksmith, carpenter, carriage and wagon building, painting and varnishing trades published. The department on Blacksmithing is based on the various text books by Prof. A. Lungwitz, Director of the Shoeing School of the Royal Veterinary ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... probably borrowed from the Tibetans, prevails among the Shokas. The Tibetans, with a more intense religion than the Shokas, use for this purpose not only the wind but even water to propel their praying machines. Let me explain these simple mechanical contrivances for prayers. One or more rags or pieces of cloth, usually white, but on occasions red or blue, are fastened and hung by one end to a string stretched across a road, a pass, or a path. On crossing a pass for the first time Shokas invariably cut a strip of ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... rights. For the Indian title to 116,349,897 acres acquired since the 4th of March, 1829, the United States have paid $72,560,056 in permanent annuities, lands, reservations for Indians, expenses of removal and subsistence, merchandise, mechanical and agricultural establishments and implements. When the heavy expenses incurred by the United States and the circumstance that so large a portion of the entire territory will be forever unsalable are considered, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... surprised with three rhymes together, to which the reader could not accommodate his voice, did he not obtain notice of the change from the braces of the margins. Surely there is something unskilful in the necessity of such mechanical direction. ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... officers with royal titles and fortified by signs, passwords, and ritual. Some of these orders decorated the faithful with high-sounding degrees. The societies adopted fantastic names such as "The Supreme Mechanical Order of the Sun," "The Knights of St. Crispin," and "The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor," of ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... lance merits most attention, as it is more generally used, and is usually of better mechanical and ornamental workmanship. The shaft is a piece of either palma brava or of kulippa palm, varying from 1.8 to 2.4 meters in length. It has a uniform diameter of about 16 millimeters for a distance equal to one-half of its length from, ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... boys wrote mere mechanical verses, Poe wrote genuine poetry; the boy was a born poet. As a scholar he was ambitious to excel. He was remarkable for self-respect, without haughtiness. He had a sensitive and tender heart and would do anything for a friend. His nature was entirely ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... an hour the Turks ascended this form in turn, stood, bowed, knelt, prostrated themselves in silent prayer, reiteratedly. They prayed very differently from Russian peasants. Their movements were abrupt and mechanical, like steps in a military drill. They were nearer to spiritual death and praying-boxes than any I had ever watched pray before. I felt myself in the presence of a new form of piety. I had crossed the great broad line that separates ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... described and illustrated daily to the public, who pay for seats as in an ordinary theatre, and keep the Urania profitably filled all the year round. Professor Spies is a young man of great mental alertness and mechanical resource. It is the photograph of a hand, his wife's hand, which illustrates, perhaps better than any other illustration in this article, the clear delineation of the bones which can be obtained by the Roentgen rays. In speaking of the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... little city of Roseland with its avenues of palms and magnolias had a boom. Large substantial brick and granite blocks were erected. Very many new and handsome residences were built, besides putting a new appearance on some of the old buildings. The commercial, professional and mechanical classes were all doing well, and living in ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... infirmities of body, continued to carry on the government, and to exercise hunting in all its branches; to teach his workers in gold and artificers of all kinds, his falconers, hawkers, and dog-keepers, to build houses majestic and good, beyond all the precedents of his ancestors, by his new mechanical inventions, to recite the Saxon books, and more especially to learn by heart the Saxon poems, and to make others learn them also; for he alone never desisted from studying, most diligently, to the best of his ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... American citizens. Don't be uneasy—we would not come to this little town. We'd hide somewhere, a long way off, in the north or in the south. I shall be changed by that time, and she will, too, in America. The doctors shall make me some sort of wart on my face—what's the use of their being so mechanical!—or else I'll put out one eye, let my beard grow a yard, and I shall turn gray, fretting for Russia. I dare say they won't recognize us. And if they do, let them send us to Siberia. I don't care. It will show it's our fate. ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... evolution of self-consciousness. Before that time, in the period of SIMPLE consciousness, when the human mind resembled that of the animals, fear indeed existed, but its nature was more that of a mechanical protective instinct. There being no figure or image of SELF in the animal mind, there were correspondingly no figures or images of beings who might threaten or destroy that self. So it was that the imaginative power of fear began with Self-consciousness, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... internal administration of whiskey. Having thus spoken, Mr. Fairley, with great promptitude and infantine simplicity, at once bared two legs of entirely different colors and mutely waited for his daughter to rub them. If Flip did this all unconsciously, and with the mechanical dexterity of previous habit, it was because she did not quite understand the savage eyes and impatient gestures of Lance in his encompassing wig and blanket, and because it helped ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... the crises of his life. For years he had suppressed his soul, in a kind of mechanical despair doing his duty and enduring the rest. Then his soul had been softly enticed from its bondage. Now he was going to break free altogether, to have at least a few days purely for his own joy. This, to a man of his integrity, meant a breaking of bonds, ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... attack, strong earth-works had been hastily thrown up entirely across it, and it had been further protected by a thick, impenetrable mass of abattis, the materials for which were so plentifully furnished by the Virginia woods and in the construction of which the quasi-mechanical army was rapidly efficient. The left was protected by the James River and the terror-inspiring gun-boats. In front the hill sloped gently down to the Charles City and Richmond road, and other points by which the enemy must debouch to ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... system, more perfect than that of any other state, just because no other state has ever regarded war as the final aim and the highest form of state action. She commanded unequalled resources in all the mechanical apparatus of war; she had spared no pains to build up her armament works, which had, indeed, supplied a great part of the world; she had developed all the scientific industries in such a way that their factories could be rapidly and easily turned to war ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... does rather more honour to the author's feelings than his taste. The mechanical part, with regard to numbers and language, is not so perfect as so short a work as this requires; but the pathetic it contains, particularly in the last stanza but one, is ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... class of rhetoricians and orators at Rome in the time of Cicero, who were famous for having made the same mistake. They would do every thing by a fixed and almost mechanical rule, by calculation and measurement. Their sentences were measured, their gestures were measured, their tones were measured; and they framed canons of judgment and taste, by which it was pronounced an affront on the intellectual nature ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... many points: still, I fancy that you and I have much in common. We belong to those who have learnt to 'look upwards'—there goes the ball, up again!—and who find comfort in doing so. Do you know that many men believe that the universe was formed by concurrence of mechanical processes and is still slowly developing, that there is no divinity whose love and power guard, guide and lend grace to the lives ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... early days of western settlement a community was founded in Illinois. It was an agricultural community, but in the midst of it a village grew, which in the course of time became a small city. One of the first settlers was a young farmer with a mechanical turn of mind. He began experimenting to improve the methods of planting grain. The result was the invention of a corn planter, the manufacture of which became one of the chief industries of the growing city, employing hundreds of men and sending machines to all parts of the world. Another ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... should reconnoitre the coast at the head of the Gulf as landing would be easier with every few miles we drew away towards the North. I told him it would be useless to land at any distance from my objective, for the simple reason that I had no transport, mechanical or horse, wheeled or pack, to enable me to support myself further than five or six miles from the Fleet and it would take many weeks and many ships to get it together; however, I ended, I would to-morrow see ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... are not mechanical; from any in which the mind, not the hand, has been the creating power. I saw you very much interested the other day in the Eddystone lighthouse; did it help you to form no opinion of ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... I., already two thousand years old when Constantinople was founded, was reared in the Hippodrome, by order of the great Emperor Theodosius, and some of the bas-reliefs on its pedestal still explain to us the mechanical devices by which it was lifted into position, while in others Theodosius, his wife, his sons, and his colleague sit in solemn state, but, alas! with grievously mutilated countenances. Near it is a spiral column of bronze which, almost till our own day, bore three serpents ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... meeting in the Church Family, in which, once a week, all the members—male and female, young and old—are gathered to overhaul the accounts of the week, and to discuss all the industrial occupations of the family, agricultural and mechanical, as well as housekeeping and every thing relating to their practical life. These weekly meetings are found to give the younger members a greater interest in the society, and they were established because it was thought necessary to make efforts to keep the youth whom they bring up. "We ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... and equipment, machinery and mechanical appliances, woven apparel, knit apparel, footwear, toys and sporting ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... went on, transfusing into his canvas the grandeur and simplicity of the Italian school; still, though he felt palpably within him the creeping advance of the deadliest and surest enemy to fame, he pursued, with an unwearied ardour, the mechanical completion of his task; still, the morning found him bending before the easel, and the night brought to his solitary couch meditation rather than sleep. The fire, the irritability which he had evinced ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... instead of a loom and a heap of guineas, they have had some erudite research, some ingenious project, or some well-knit theory. Strangely Marner's face and figure shrank and bent themselves {161} into a constant mechanical relation to the objects of his life, so that he produced the same sort of impression as a handle or a crooked tube, which has no meaning standing apart. The prominent eyes that used to look trusting and dreamy, now looked as if they had been made to see only one kind of thing that was ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... or the weaker beasts which from Oates's viewpoint would hardly survive the rigours of the winter. Apart from the animals picked for this journey, we had nine beasts left to be taken care of by the little Russian, Anton, and the trusty Lashly, whose mechanical knowledge and practical ability were needed to help get ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... woman who left everything to tend a mother with a six-weeks-old baby! But no. One could not. As Miss Annie Brett smiled at me pointedly, and rubbed her ringed hands, and kept on smiling with her terrific mechanical effusiveness, I lost all my self control; I would have resigned myself to a hundred horrible tomorrows under the omnipotent, inexplicable influence of the private bar. I ejaculated, as though ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... of the representatives of a class that from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical. As the upper strata of society were planed off by war, pestilence, civil slaughter, and assassination, the pressure on the great mass of men (peasants, serfs, unskilled labourers, the so-called "lower classes") was increasingly ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... bequeathed its vivid impressions to the world. Painting on glass, polishing diamonds, the Carillon, lace, and tapestry, were among the inventions which owed their birth to the Netherlands in these ages, when the faculties of mankind sought so many new channels for mechanical development. The discovery of a new world by Columbus and other eminent navigators gave a fresh and powerful impulse to European talent, by affording an immense reservoir for its reward. The town of Antwerp was, during the reign ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... and then a brisk cathartic of Glauber's salt two ounces, and common salts one ounce, dissolved in two wine pints of water, half a pint to be taken every hour till it purges. The worm extends from the stomach to the anus, and the amalgama tears it from the intestine by mechanical pressure, acting upon it the whole way. Electric shocks through the duodenum greatly assists the operation. Large doses of tin in powder. Iron filings in large doses. The powder of fern-root seems to be of no use, as recommended ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... character—the scenes at the boarding-school—all have a distinctness of delineation which approaches reality itself. But when the authoress comes to deal with great passions, and represent morbid characters, we find that she is out of her element. The character of Rochester is the character of a mechanical monster. The authoress has no living idea of the kind of person she attempts to describe. She desires to represent a reckless man, made bad by circumstances, but retaining many marks of a noble character, and she fills his conversation with slang, makes him impudent and lustful, a ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... pitchers' battle; and the game droned along, through inning after inning, with seldom more than three men to bat in each half, while the score board presented a most appropriate double procession of naughts. Spectators, warmly praising that smoothly oiled mechanical process of one, two, three and out, and telling each other that this was a great game, nevertheless yawned and dropped their score cards, and put away their pencils, and looked about the grandstand in ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... certain familiar mechanisms which constitute almost a routine of manipulation for the manufacture of paradoxes. One such mechanical process is the play with the derivatives of words. Thus he reminds us that the journalist is, in the literal and derivative sense, a journalist, while the missionary is an eternalist. Similarly "lunatic," "evolution," "progress," "reform," are etymologically tortured into the ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... your thirty pounds out of the biggest cans—a twenty and a ten. There's your opener," he added, pointing to a rather complicated mechanical can-opener fastened to the bulkhead. "Open everything before you ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... fifty per cent. annually on their whole capital, and yet cannot supply one tenth of the demand for their production. The result of only ten per cent. duties in excluding products from abroad, would give life and impetus to mechanical and manufacturing industry, throughout the entire South. Our people understand these things, and they are not afraid of results, if forced to declare Independence. Indeed I do not see why Northern Republicans should wish ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... favoured by the liberal sentiments of the age, has been eagerly utilized by enterprising managers of businesses in search of the cheapest labour. Not only women, but also children are enabled, owing to the nature of recent mechanical inventions which relieve the physical strain, but increase the monotony of labour, to make themselves useful in factories or home-work. Each year sees a large growth in the ranks of women- workers. Eager to earn each what she can, girls ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... times of which I have spoken, they said, "We can make all men think alike." All the mechanical ingenuity of this earth cannot make two clocks run alike, and how are you going to make millions of people of different quantities and qualities and amount of brain, clad in this living robe of passionate flesh—how are you going to make millions of them think alike? If the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... and efficient. Water is more intimately concerned with life than rock, air higher in the rank of service than water, electric and magnetic agencies more powerful than air; and light, the most delicate, is the supreme magician of all. Just think how much expenditure of mechanical strength is necessary to water a city in the hot summer months. What pumping and tugging and wearisome trudging of horses with the great sprinklers over the tedious pavement! But see by what beautiful and noiseless force Nature waters the world! The sun looks steadily on the ocean, and its beams ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... are concerned. She worked as a domestic and in factories until she was married for the first time at the age of twenty. She had no children by this marriage. It is stated on good authority that she took preventive measures against conception and if pregnant induced abortion by drugs and mechanical measures. At the end of eight years there was a divorce. Just which one of the partners was at fault is impossible to state, but that there was more than mere incompatibility is evident by the reticence of all concerned. Shortly afterward, she married her present husband with whom she has lived ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... violoncello-wood,—30 pipes each. Couplers: swell to great; choir to great; swell to choir; swell to great octaves, swell to great sub-octaves; choir to great sub-octaves; swell octaves; swell to pedal; great to pedal; choir to pedal. Mechanical accessories: swell tremulant, choir tremulant, bellows signal; wind indicator. Pedal movements: three affecting great and pedal stops, three affecting swell and pedal stops; great to pedal reversing pedal; crescendo and full ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy
... of the average six to seven words contained in the Virgilian hexameter for its usage elsewhere in Virgil's works or other Latin authors, would DALY have had to maintain the laborious mechanical process of flipping through these concordances, lexica, and editions each time. Nor would he have had to frequent as often the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at the Johns Hopkins University to consult the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. Instead of devoting countless hours, or the bulk of his research ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... matter, irreligious? Were the old alchemists atheists as well as dreamers in their attempts to transmute earth into gold? Or, to take an instance from force (power)—which stands one step nearer to efficient cause than form—was the attempt to prove that heat, light, electricity, magnetism, and even mechanical power, are variations or transmutations of one force, atheistical in its tendency? The supposed establishment of this view is reckoned as one of the greatest ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... afterwards giving it the requisite hardness by "tempering" it in oil. Many tools used by the gun stockers are to be bought ready made, which will fulfil all the requirements of this tool, but it is so easily made that I consider anyone with the least mechanical ability should be able to make one. The object of this tool is to run in under bones and to cut and drag out pieces of flesh through ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... irksome to have to write on every railway ticket that he delivered. He saw the clumsiness of the method of tearing the bit of paper off the printed sheet as it was wanted, and filling it up with pen and ink. He perceived how much time, trouble, and error might be saved by the process being done in a mechanical way; and it was when he set his foot down on a particular spot on the before mentioned field that the idea struck him how all that he wished might be done by a machine—how tickets might be printed with the names of stations, the class of carriage, the dates of the ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... that must naturally arrest the attention is the singular combination that it presents of an operative with a speculative organization—an art with a science—the technical terms and language of a mechanical profession with the abstruse teachings of a ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... of saints were carved, and innumerable Madonnas painted throughout Italy, in the earlier days of the Christian church, they were either literal transcripts of common life, or mechanical copies or imitations of works furnished from the great store looms of the Asiatic Greeks. There were thousands—nay, tens of thousands of men, who wrote themselves artists, while not one of them had enough of imagination and skill to ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... Psychological or mechanical aids are used to help put the subject in a state of hypnosis. The use of the aids helps increase the suggestibility of the subject toward hypnosis. The two most widely used hypnotic aids are the crystal ball and chain ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... the West," he said, "have advanced step by step, ever upward in the mechanical sciences, we of the East have advanced also step by step ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... of General Jackson as a presidential candidate, now the state of the country in respect of parties, now the merits of "American Writers," which afforded his 'prentice hand the requisite practice in the use of the pen. He had already acquired a perfect knowledge of typesetting and the mechanical makeup of a newspaper. During his apprenticeship he took his first lesson in the art of thinking on his feet in the presence of an audience. The audience to be sure were the members of a debating club, which he had organized. He was very ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... accompanied Linnet on her way to Marjorie's to spend the evening. Marjorie's pale face and mourning dress had touched him deeply. He had taught a class of boys near her class in Sunday school, and had been struck with the dull, mechanical tone in which she had questioned the attentive little ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... kind and agreeable. She shook hands, and hoped you were well; hoped you had had a pleasant journey, hoped you would be happy in College, hoped you would like your rooms; but there was a certain mechanical quality in her voice which betrayed the fact that she had said the same thing over and over again on innumerable occasions, would say it twenty times or more this very afternoon, and that your own personal arrival left ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... implied to produce the spontaneous ease with which Brunnhilde hailed the sun. More astounding even was the fact that this mere learning of notes was but the preliminary to what she called "real work." And when she had got through the mere mechanical part of it, she would have to study. Then when her practice was over, she would indulgently sit with her head in profile against a dark background, and Georgie would suck one end of his brush and bite the other, and wonder whether he would ever produce anything which he could dare to offer ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... afforded an opportunity to every soldier of becoming a general. There is nothing which a leader of genius might not accomplish with such men. He must have regretted, at this recollection of his earlier years, that he ever centred in himself all liberty and intelligence, that he ever created mechanical armies and generals only fit to obey. Bonaparte began the third epoch of the war. The campaign of 1792 had been made on the old system, with dispersed corps, acting separately without abandoning their fixed line. The committee of public ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... when, on the morning of her birthday, having presented her with a purse which he knew she had long coveted, he found himself thanked in a perfunctory and mechanical way. ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... was startled in my fitful, half-mechanical playing by a piercing scream; this was almost immediately followed by a confused noise of sobs and cries, and a running of people to and fro, which seemed, however, to be approaching nearer. I was just going to hurry to the spot whence the noise ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... The walls were crowded with highly-coloured chromos of Hindu gods and badly-painted indecent pictures. A cut-glass chandelier hung from the ceiling, and expensive but ill-assorted European furniture stood about the apartment. French mechanical toys under glass shades ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... soon a new village of respectable proportions sprang into being, and the chemical works were pushed forward with equal celerity. The arrangement of Addiewell Chemical Works is admirably calculated for their purpose. They cover nearly a half of the entire site, the buildings as well as the mechanical appliances being on a gigantic scale. The retort sheds are upwards of 200 yards in length taken together, and each shed contains a double row of retorts. Altogether, there are no less than 354 retorts, capable of distilling more than 3000 tons of shale per week, and producing ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... supplies, what single power could resist him? War with him became a mere mechanical calculation. Among the causes of his elevation, the use he made of the other continental Powers must not be forgotten; whether gained by corruption, treachery, or force, they all became his allies; they were all compelled to assist him ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... domestic objects sometimes bear christian names. We may mention spinning-jenny, and the innumerable meanings of jack. Davit, earlier daviot, is a diminutive of David. Fr. davier, formerly daviet, is used of several mechanical contrivances, including a pick-lock. A kind of davit is called in German Juette, a diminutive of Judith. The implement by which the burglar earns his daily bread is now called a jemmy, but in the ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... foundation; it was also mine: sundry letters in reply to sundry unsuccessful applications written on "thick double laid post," as the advertisements say, I seized upon, and thrust their crumpled forms between the sooty bars of the grate with some wood, the model of a mechanical invention of my own, which had been rejected by a Society, and why, I knew not; I severed limb from limb, and disposed their fragments across and athwart on the letters previously mutilated. How to obtain my coal posed me for a moment; but I recollected that in a geological cabinet under my window, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... that I do not propose to tell them—especially them—why I go. For I am going. I must go! There are reasons I cannot explain." He sighed, and looked wildly at Moya, whose smile was becoming mechanical. "I hate the excuse, but it will have to be said that I go for a change—for my health. My health! Great God! But ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... and obeyed their orders in a mechanical manner, that showed too plainly that his mind was wandering from the scenes about him. He looked helplessly around, and did not appear to realize the situation in which he was so suddenly and ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... wraith, the hall was empty when P. Sybarite entered it. But it echoed with sounds of rowdy revelry from the room in back: mechanical clatter of galled and spavined piano, despondent growling of a broken-winded 'cello, nervous giggling and moaning of an excoriated violin—the three wringing from the score of O You Beautiful Doll an entirely adequate accompaniment ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... newspaper work, being editor of the Charlottesville Morning News and editor on the Baltimore News. In the fall of 1906 he re-entered the University of Virginia as a graduate student. In 1907 he was elected Associate Professor of History and Economics at the Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College and filled that position for two sessions. In 1909 he was made Instructor of History at the University of Virginia and once more matriculated in the Graduate Department of that institution. He is a member of the American Historical Association and the Virginia Historical ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... some of the smaller and slower vessels of the auxiliary fleet, consisted of a microphone, or delicate mechanical ear, carefully guarded by metal discs from accidental damage, and connected to ear-pieces or ordinary telephone receivers by an electric wire which passed through a battery. Where the wire came in contact with the sea water it was heavily insulated ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... a mechanical process. The agitation of the cream dashes the oily globules in the cream against each other, and they remain together and grow larger, until the butter is, what the dairy woman calls, gathered. The butter in the milk, when drawn from the cow, is the ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... too, the old, red-blooded emotions of battle have all been eliminated by the mechanical conditions of modern warfare in which men and women are just so many units, automata. Don't you see? To fight war with its own weapons—that has become the ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... a thorough master of his trade in its more mechanical details, and there were signal instances of his intelligence in the higher things of it which might well have put Mrs. Maxwell to shame for her many hasty judgments of the actor. He was altogether more of a man, more of a mind, than she ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... wore away my spirit; my nerves became irritated by the fretful tinkling of the convent bell; evermore dinging among the mountain echoes; evermore calling me from my repose at night, my pencil by day, to attend to some tedious and mechanical ceremony of devotion. ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... constrained. By multifarious devices we have been endeavoring to dispense with governing; and by very superficial speculations, of laissez-faire, supply-and-demand, &c. &c. to persuade ourselves that it is best so. The Real Captain, unless it be some Captain of mechanical Industry hired by Mammon, where is he in these days? Most likely, in silence, in sad isolation somewhere, in remote obscurity; trying if, in an evil ungoverned time, he cannot at least govern himself. The Real Captain undiscoverable; the Phantasm Captain ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... to play it properly. I know people like Paderewski and—I can only think of Paderewski for the moment, I know that sort of person doesn't think much of the pianola artist; but they are quite wrong about it all. The mechanical agility with the fingers is nothing, the soul is everything. Now you can get the soul, the con molto expressione feeling, just as well in the pianola as in the piano. Of course you have to keep ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... they were anything but first-rate goers it certainly was not because the works could decently complain of want of room. In good sooth they were big enough, and perhaps, as the saying is, ugly enough, to be the most correct of all mechanical performers; in Mr Pinch's eyes, however they were smaller than Geneva ware; and when he saw one very bloated watch announced as a repeater, gifted with the uncommon power of striking every quarter of an hour inside the pocket of its happy owner, he almost wished that he were ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... town, but will be back this evening. After dinner we go round to the government konak and call on the Vali, Hallil Eifaat Pasha, whom Mr. Weakley describes beforehand as a very practical man, fond of mechanical contrivances; and who would never forgive him if he allowed me to leave Sivas with the bicycle without paying him a visit. The usual rigmarole of salaams, cigarettes, coffee, compliments, and questioning are gone through with; the Vali is a jolly-faced, good-natured man, and is evidently ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... DAUGHTER—I hope that the news I announce will give you as much joy as it has already given our dear Roland and me. Sir John, whose heart you doubted, claiming that it was only a mechanical contrivance, manufactured in the workshops at Vaucanson, admits that such an opinion was a just one until the day he saw you; but he maintains that since that day he has a heart, and that that heart ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... a day spent under the influence of a more terrible suspense than that which drank up the strength of this sinking girl during the trial of her lover. Actuated by a burning and restless sense of distraction, she passed from place to place with that mechanical step which marks those who seek for comfort in vain. She retired to her apartment and strove to pray; but the effort was fruitless; the confusion of her mind rendered connection and continuity of thought and language impossible. At one moment she repaired to ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... fled on and on, with only the blind instinct to hide her disgrace. The village was empty of all but the sick and the bed-ridden. There was not an eye on Mauryeen Daly as she fled by the open doors. With a mechanical instinct she turned in at the door of her mother's house. The cool darkness of it after the glare outside was grateful to her. She closed the door and barred it. Then she turned into a room off the kitchen, ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... to hear that. I think that greater good is obtained by not being too much in its immediate sphere. Of course greater mechanical skill is acquired by constant practice, but I know by my own experience that when the soul has reached a certain height of culture, the physical nature becomes subordinate to the spiritual, and is controlled by it, ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... examinations, a change which would involve the appointment of a larger number of inspectors than at present exist. It is all-important that this alteration should be undertaken without delay. The mechanical agglomeration of lifeless snippets of information which characterises the present method is an absurd and antiquated remnant of the bad old times, and the sooner this part of the system is hewn down the better it will be for ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... and seized him, sobbing and clinging to him, and kissing him. He clasped her with his left arm round her body, as if to protect her, but it was a mechanical action. He was not thinking of her. Wild with rage, and uttering hoarse cries, he plunged the broken spear again and again into the depths of the pool, seeking utterly to destroy the enemy that had so lately had him in its grip. Then slowly he came to himself, and wiped his forehead, and ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... rustling in the trees, caused by the freshening night breeze which Tom thought smelt of rain. And again the silent figure veered around with a kind of mechanical precision, the very perfection of clock-work German discipline, as if to give each point of the compass its allotted ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... all the mechanical difficulties had not been overcome. Many evenings had been devoted to discussing, not the form of its screw nor its dimensions, but whether it ought to be put behind, as the Tissandier brothers had done, or before as Captains Krebs and Renard had done. It is unnecessary ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... say without offense that in the course of time the personnel has apparently worked down to the level of vulgarity defined by the ways and means of this modern warfare; which means the level on which runs a familiar acquaintance with large and complex mechanical apparatus, railway and highway transport and power, reenforced concrete, excavations and mud, more particularly mud, concealment and ambush, and unlimited deceit and ferocity. It is not precisely that persons of pedigree and gentle breeding have ceased to enter or seek entrance to employment ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... been some secret mechanical contrivance, all wonders unknown to the ignorant being attributed by ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... intelligence has nothing to do; and which, when they rise up, like an enraged elephant from the jungle, scatter all the conventionalities of our training, and all the smooth and automaton-like operations of our minds to the winds. As I stood there, listening to the dead-level, unimpassioned, mechanical voice of the phonograph, pouring forth those deadly sentences, I realized for the first time what the sunny-haired ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... interval, during which he was busy as Elia, came the period of album verses, which lasted to the end. The impulse to write personal prose, which was quickened in Lamb by the London Magazine in 1820, seems to have taken the place of his old ambition to be a poet. In his later and more mechanical period there were, however, occasional inspirations, as when he wrote the sonnet on "Work," in 1819; on "Leisure," in 1821; the lines in his own Album, in 1827, and, pre-eminently, the poem "On an Infant Dying as Soon ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... simpler garb than that of my guide, but of similar fashion, was standing motionless near the threshold. My guide touched it twice with his staff, and it put itself into a rapid and gliding movement, skimming noiselessly over the floor. Gazing on it, I then saw that it was no living form, but a mechanical automaton. It might be two minutes after it vanished through a doorless opening, half screened by curtains at the other end of the hall, when through the same opening advanced a boy of about twelve years old, with features closely resembling those of my guide, so that they ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... life, aid and sympathy, on account of the common participation in human frailty and folly. This observation, however, puts aid and sympathy in the field of private and personal relations, under the regulation of reason and conscience, and gives no ground for mechanical and impersonal schemes. ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... manifestavit et ostendit veritatem et incorruptionem donavit"; III. 16. 9: III. 18. 1-7 and many other passages), that is, to regard Christ as having performed a work. Secondly, alongside of the deification of Adam's children, viewed as a mechanical result of the incarnation, he placed the other (apologetic) thought, viz., that Christ, as the teacher, imparts complete knowledge, that he has restored, i.e., strengthened the freedom of man, and that redemption (by which he means fellowship with God) therefore takes ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... BOSWELL. 'I understand he was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not dull in poetry.' JOHNSON. 'Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull every where.[961] He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.' He then repeated some ludicrous lines, which have escaped my memory, and said, 'Is not that GREAT, like his Odes?' Mrs. Thrale maintained that his Odes were melodious; upon ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... he does it in five he is miserable. He will never experience that happy surprise with which we hail our best strokes. Only his bad strokes surprise him, and then we may suppose that he is not happy. His length and accuracy are mechanical; they are not the result, as so often in our case, of some suddenly applied maxim or some suddenly discovered innovation. The only thing which can vary in his game is his putting, and putting is ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... advanced in civilized life to possess either the power or the will to wage that war against the order of nature which seems, hitherto, an almost inseparable condition precedent of high social culture, and of great progress in fine and mechanical art. Destructive changes are most frequent in countries of irregular and mountainous surface, and in climates where the precipitation is confined chiefly to a single season, and where, of course, the year is divided into a wet and a dry period, as is the case throughout a great ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... The gallows, formerly consisting of three posts, over which were laid three transverse beams. This clumsy machine has lately given place to an elegant contrivance, called the NEW DROP, by which the use of that vulgar vehicle a cart, or mechanical instrument a ladder, is also avoided; the patients being left suspended by the dropping down of that part of the floor on which they stand. This invention was first made use of for ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... dollars per year; with railway traffic of four to six thousand millions per year, and the annual domestic exchanges of the country, running up to nearly ten thousand millions per year; with over two thousand millions of dollars invested in manufacturing, mechanical, and mining industry; with over five hundred millions of acres of land in actual occupancy, valued, with their appurtenances, at over seven thousand millions of dollars, and producing annually crops valued at over three thousand ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... must have occurred in Berta's house, for the nurse seemed to have been seized by a sudden fit of restlessness that would not let her sit still for a moment. She went to and fro, upstairs and down, out and in, with the mechanical movement of an automaton. It was a sort of nervous attack that had in a moment increased twofold the housekeeper's domestic activity. Suddenly she would stand still, and placing her forefinger on her upper lip she would remain ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... the finest race and that most advanced in the arts of the entire west coast of North America." They and their almost equally advanced Tlingit and Tsimshian neighbors on the mainland displayed much mechanical skill, especially in canoe-building, woodcarving, and the working of stone and copper, as well as in making blankets and baskets. To this day they earn a considerable amount of money by selling their carved objects of wood and slate to traders and tourists. Their canoes were ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... united these two beings. Practical as they both were in the common affairs of life, they shrank from anything which would promise to materialise the subtleties of the mind. Some thoughts, they felt, were as impalpable as sounds, and, just as music ceases to be divine when it is poured out of some mechanical contrivance, so the mysteries of the human soul become mere bodily conditions—more or less humiliating—when demonstrated, catalogued, and legalised. There is nothing modern nor uncommon in this especial disposition. ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... Snarl; "only they are impossible, that is all. You have, however," concluded he, with a manner slightly supercilious, "succeeded in the mechanical parts; the hair and the dress are well, Mr. Triplet; but your Woffington is not a ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... Gimp Hines had finished rigging his bubb, minutes ahead of Frank, or anybody else. On second thought, maybe this was natural enough. Here, where there was no weight, his useless leg made no difference—as the space-fitness examiners must have known. Besides, Gimp had talented fingers and a keen mechanical sense, and had always tried harder ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... equipment of arms and accoutrements. The non-commissioned officers are former members of the regular army, in which they must have served three years in the infantry and cavalry or four years in artillery and engineers. During this period they are given a practical education in books and in the mechanical duties of the soldier. They are taught to repair guns, manufacture powder, make harness, shoe horses, and do everything else that is likely to come within their experience in the field. This training is highly valued by ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... springs of water which ever sparkled in the earth. They called it the Seven Sisters. Round the springs they built an immense and costly well. Over the well was a great leaden lid of extraordinary weight, and by a certain mechanical device this lid was closed on the well every evening at sundown. The springs became abnormally active between sundown and sunrise, so that there was always a danger that they might flood the valley and destroy the people. As security against this the citizens ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... common-sense philosophers of his day. For us, it is enough to say that he worships Nature but takes rather the aesthetic than the dialectical point of view. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful are all one, as he constantly insists, and the universe impresses us not as a set of mechanical contrivances but as an artistic embodiment of harmony. He therefore restores the universal element which is apt to pass out of sight in Pope's rhymed arguments. He indulges his philosophical enthusiasm in what he calls The Moralists, a Rhapsody. It culminates in a prose hymn ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... wandered out on the veranda, and amused themselves by jerking the rope ladder up and down. By a clever mechanical contrivance the ladder went up and down something on the principle of an automatic shade roller. It was great fun to roll it up and feel a certain security in the thought that nobody could get into "Breezy Inn" unless they saw fit to let down ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells |
