"Moot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the same quarter is, that Professor Erni of Yale College has been making an interesting series of experiments on fermentation—a process of which the original cause has never yet been satisfactorily explained, and is still a moot-point with chemists. They tell us it is one by which complex substances are decomposed into simpler forms, as some suppose, by chemical action; others, by development of fungi, different in different ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 426 - Volume 17, New Series, February 28, 1852 • Various
... study this was the only law-school in the United States. Many anecdotes of his peculiarities during his residence at the school were related by his preceptors to the young gentlemen from Georgia who followed him in the office in after years. A moot court was a part of the system of instruction, in which questions of law, propounded by one of the professors, were argued by students appointed for the purpose. On one occasion, Cumming was replying to the argument ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... his successor, Paul the Third, the influence of Contarini and the moderate Catholics secured a more favourable reception of plans of reconciliation. In April, 1541, conferences for this purpose were in fact opened at Augsburg in which Contarini, as Papal legate, accepted a definition of the moot question of justifications by faith which satisfied Bucer and Melancthon. On the other side, the Landgrave of Hesse and the Elector of Brandenburg publicly declared that they believed it possible to come to terms ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... had allowed to exist for so long a time the privilege of the monastery. And these exceptions, with a hint of some foul murder committed at the castle, reached the nobles roundabout and stirred up a general demur. Beside, it was whispered in the shire-moot that the woman about to be espoused by him was a rank Papist and had already placed popish pictures about the Chapel that was contiguous to the castle. This was all that possibly could be said against her, as she was known to be most gracious to the poor Protestants in and about Crandlemar; ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... and think that I have said quite enough for the spuriousness of the Annals never to be hereafter argued as a moot point, but accepted as an established fact. I need not go into further consideration; because further consideration cannot give more weight to what has been put forward. I, therefore, pause, assured that with only these ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... dwellers on the eastern side of the Andes to reach. Whether this was a masterpiece of policy calculated to discourage lawsuits, or whether it was merely due to Spanish incuriousness and maladministration, is a moot point. *2* The Indians of the missions were not allowed to possess firearms at this period. *3* 'Paraguay', Dr. E. de Bourgade la Dardye; English edition by George Philips junior (London, 1892). The Indians call it Salto de Canandiyu, which, according to Azara, was the ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... pleasant corner cell, whence he might solace himself by a view of the street and the courthouse park. Further, the deputy ministered to Mr. Johnson's hurts with water and court-plaster, and a beefsteak applied to a bruised and swollen eye. He volunteered his good offices as a witness in the moot matter of intoxication and in all ways gave him treatment ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... your tonsils out now, won't you?" The question of a tonsilectomy had been a moot one for years. Nancy had always been anxious to have them out, having been told that it was merely a case of "snip, snip, and a day on ice cream." Henry, who regarded tonsilectomy skeptically as a fad, and who ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... all parts of the country; and we notice that at every port where we stop Mrs. MacDonald has friends to visit—a cousin here, and an auntie there. The fancy bag in which you carry your calling cards and little friendly gifts up here is a "musky-moot"; the more formidable receptacle, which gives your friends warning that you may stay a day or two, is a "skin-ichi-mun." Visiting a little on our own account, we note that we have penetrated to a latitude ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... words, had time allowed—and of course there was no knowing what effect the resistance of Dublin might have on the country—it may be a moot point whether it might not have been advisable to separate the two questions of the sentence of death and the actual executions, and one can well imagine the conciliatory effect of a Royal Act of Clemency in the event of maturer ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... gives name of friendship to sexual love; quoted; on bravery; unmetrical line of; on man's wretched lot; on modesty; on advantages of music; order of different kinds of exercises according to; on intercourse between men and their wives; calls salt divine; epithets applied to liquids by; a moot point in third book of Iliad; essay on life and poetry of; biographical sketch of; the two works of; metre and dialects used by; epithets used by; tropes found in; figures of speech in; various styles used by; on constitution ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... connected with the ceremony was regarded as the most sacred attestation of the engagement entered into between the newly-elected king or chief and his people. It was placed in some conspicuous position, upon the top of a "moot-hill," or the open-air place of assembly. Upon it was usually carved an impression of a human foot; and into this impression, during the ceremony of inauguration, the king or chief placed his own right foot, in token that he was installed by right into the possessions of his predecessors, and ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... flitting like a dark, graceful ghost through the city streets, and the sight sent his heart plunging against his side like an inward sledge-hammer. Would one pulse in her heart stir ever so faintly at sight of him? Just as he asked himself the question, and was stepping forward to moot her, feeling very like the country swain in love—"hot and dry like, with a pain in his side like"—he suddenly stopped. Another figure came forth from the shadow of an opposite house, and softly ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... looking at an abject slave and a young lady who is getting fairly tamed, though at times she still rebels. Both of these young women exercise authority over me all day long until the ownership of my own soul has become a moot question. When my leg is properly spliced again I shall take that freak Susie to New York and exhibit her as the greatest natural curiosity I have been able to find ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... difference of opinion among scholars, Elijah was usually questioned as to how the moot point was interpreted in the heavenly academy. (79) Once, when the scholars were not unanimous in their views as to Esther's intentions when she invited Haman to her banquets with the king, Elijah, asked by Rabba bar Abbahu to tell him her real purpose, said that each and ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... matter to be settled before I go," Benjulia proceeded. "Here are some papers, which I have received from your lawyer, Mr. Moot. They relate to a slander, ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... side of any question such as I have referred to, upon which the public is divided. But the matters referred to in that correspondence are insignificant compared with the taking in public an active part on either side of such moot questions as I have referred to. The conclusion that Mr. Smith's usefulness was gone, does not depend on the truth or untruth of them; it was therefore not necessary or proper to discuss them further with Mr. Smith upon ...
— The Story of a Dark Plot - or Tyranny on the Frontier • A.L.O. C. and W.W. Smith
... arming slaves, is, in my opinion a moot point, unless the enemy set the example. For, should we begin to form battallions of them, I have not the smallest doubt, if the war is to be prosecuted, of their following us in it, and justifying the measure upon our own ground. The contest then ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... heavily across the floor, and Will mechanically pushed down his spectacles and dipped a pen in ink, slewing the register round for the guest's signature. He says he knew at a glance that The Mysterious Stranger was no travelling man, but this is a moot point, Tracey's memory being minutely accurate and at ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... still a moot point whether 'Letters Written for the Post, and not for the Press,' an anonymous volume which appeared in 1820, and which consists of descriptions of a tour in Scotland, interspersed with dull moral ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... return in resting, writing up our journals, and preparing a report of our explorations, to be forwarded by special courier to the Major. During this time great numbers of wild, wandering natives—Chukchis, Lamutkis (la-moot'-kees) and a few Koraks—came into the settlement to exchange their furs and walrus teeth for tobacco, and gave us an excellent opportunity of studying their various characteristics and modes of life. The Wandering Chukchis, who visited us in the greatest ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... was an impatient thing for me to hear Betsy working out the afternoon with perpetual chatter and challenge of prices, combating now as a lodger all those points which as a landlady she never would allow even to be moot questions. If any applicant in European Square had dared so much as hint at any of all the requirements which she now expected gratis, she would simply have whisked her duster, and said that the lodgings for such people ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... he knew that the mastership or pupilship of Fra Lippo to Masaccio (called 'Guidi' in the poem), and vice versa, was a moot point; but in making Fra Lippi the master, he followed the best authority he had access to, the last edition of Vasari, as he stated in a Letter to the 'Pall Mall' at the time, in answer to M. Etienne {a writer in the 'Revue des deux Mondes'.} ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... invading germ, so in just the same degree does it adversely influence the functions of the tissues that are to fight against it. To our minds the question thus set up must always remain more or less a moot-point, and while we fully agree that cold undoubtedly checks the growth of septic material, we just as fully believe that warmth serves to place the healthy surrounding structures in a far better condition to maintain a vigorous phagocytosis against it. We thus continue to advise a hot antiseptic ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... Britain of her supremacy on the seas, on a radical change in the international status of Egypt and Ireland, and much else, had these innovations been compatible with his own special object. But they were not. He was apparently minded to test the matter by announcing his resolve to moot the problem of the freedom of the seas, but when admonished by the British government that it would not even brook its mention, he at once gave it up and, presumably drawing the obvious inference from this downright refusal, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Europe or Asia in his backyard, nor a lifetime of leisure for research, for special learning, on the moot questions of church-scholarship. Progress consists in each man's doing his best to advance the interests of the kingdom of God in his own special sphere. From others he must take something for granted. The ear ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... street tumult in which the yells of the lottery venders, the braying of donkeys, the whoops of the cabmen, and the blaring of the little motor cars with big horns, combine to render Caracuna the noisiest capital in the world. Through the saddle-colored hordes on the moot ground of the narrow sidewalks moves an occasional Anglo-Saxon resident, browned and sallowed, on his way to the government concession that he manages; a less occasional Anglo-Saxoness, browned and marked with the seal that the tropics put upon every woman who braves ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... a moot question to the gardener, for if she has a pleasant neighbour, she does not like to raise an aggressive barrier or perhaps cut off the view, yet to a certain extent I like being walled in at least on two sides. A total lack of boundaries is too impersonal,—the eye travels on and ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... may be found in the presence of the edible frog of the Continent at Foulmire, on the edge of the Cambridge Fans. It is a moot point still with some, whether he was not put there by man. It is a still stronger argument against his being indigenous, that he is never mentioned as an article of food by the mediaeval monks, who would have known—Frenchmen, Italians, ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... have manoeuvred against his wife to send him downstairs at the lady's heels. The fellow was a perfect riddle, hard to read as the zebra lines on the skin of a wild jackass—if Providence intended any meaning when she traced them! and it's a moot point: as it is whether some of our poets have meaning and are not composers of zebra. 'No one knows but them above!' he said aloud, apparently to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... men hold warring opinions. We have not even raised the question of laid or wove paper, nor of the intermixture of different series or sizes of types. In short, every phase of the subject bristles with moot points, the settlement of one of which in a given way may determine the settlement of a score ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... deer is a moot question, but it is a habit of the brute. For so many hundreds of years have we been at it, that we can hardly be expected to reform immediately. Undoubtedly, it is a sign of undeveloped ethnic consciousness. We are depraved animals. I must admit ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... Moot courts alone will not make skilful lawyers; the manikin is but an indifferent teacher of anatomy; and we may safely say that no statesman was ever made so by books, schools, and street discussions, without actual experience in some ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... dispute, I do not know; but when he rose and led me forth with his curved palm under my elbow the matter had been settled his way, and no ill-feeling left: rather, as I sensed it, a feeling of relief that some one had promptly and energetically laid a moot question for once ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... all the priors, monks, and canons, that were in all the cells in England, and all who had the care and superintendence of christianity, that they should all come to London at Michaelmas, and there should speak of all God's rights. When they came thither, then began the moot on Monday, and continued without intermission to the Friday. When it all came forth, then was it all found to be about archdeacons' wives, and about priests' wives; that they should forgo them by St. Andrew's mass; and he who would not do that, should ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... government. But recently politicians thought that they had discovered a new plan for carrying on the internal affairs of the country, and the idea was to leave each district to manage its own affairs. This is only a return to the original Saxon plan. In every village there was a moot-hill, or sacred tree, where the freemen met to make their own laws and arrange their agricultural affairs. Here disputes were settled, plough lands and meadow lands shared in due lot among the villagers, and everything arranged according to ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... reproduction of a photograph showing a jibber-jawed June bride in full regalia, Miss Manvers was moved enviously to paraphrase an epigram of moot origin: "There, but for the grace of God, stands ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... prudent to divulge to his friend; and in order to gain certain ends he had induced Alaric to become a director of this line. The line in question was the Great West Cork, which was to run from Skibbereen to Bantry, and the momentous question now hotly debated before the Railway Board was on the moot point of a branch to Ballydehob. If Undy could carry the West Cork and Ballydehob branch entire, he would make a pretty thing of it; but if, as there was too much reason to fear, his Irish foes should prevail, and leave—as Undy had once said in an eloquent speech at a very influential meeting ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... him interesting to a woman of perception, apart from his fair hair and early-Christian face. But such is the heightening touch of memory that his beauty was probably richer in her imagination than in the real. It was a moot point to consider whether the temptations that would be brought to bear upon him in his course would exceed the staying power of his nature. Had he been a wealthy youth he would have seemed one to tremble for. In spite of his attractive ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... why they (the abolitionists) so exceedingly regret sister's having begun those letters. Brother Weld was not satisfied with writing us one letter about them, but we have received two more setting forth various reasons why we should not moot the subject of woman's rights at all, but our judgment is not convinced, and we hardly know what to do about it, for we have just as high an opinion of Brother Garrison's views, and he says, 'go on.' ... The great effort of abolitionists now seems to be to keep every topic ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... night, that we midden vind her, Inzide a woak wi' a hollow moot, An' drough a hole near the groun' behind her, I pok'd a stick in, an' catch'd her voot; An' out she scream'd, O, An' jump'd, an' seem'd, O, A-most to ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... so humbly appealed to me for my opinion on that moot point, did much to conciliate me. He had not carried me with him all the while. He seemed to me a bit out of date, too like an ante-Christian prophet. Yet how my heart went out to him as he ended up so very abruptly ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... of our arming slaves is in my opinion a moot point, unless the enemy set the example. For, should we begin to form battalions of them, I have not the smallest doubt, if the war is to be prosecuted, of their following us in it, and justifying the measure upon our own ground. The contest then must be, who can ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... his works stand to nature, to historic precedent, and lastly, to inward consciousness or individual character. We have seen that the notion prevalent in Rome, that the living model was wholly discarded, is inaccurate; bearing on this moot point may be here told an anecdote. It is related how one morning, when the artist was engaged on the Tasso frescoes, in the Villa Massimo, he had need of the life for a muscular arm, and so sallied forth into the neighbouring Piazza ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... gentleman (for he was but three-and-twenty) combined with the miserly vice of an old man, any of the open-handed vices of a young one, was a moot point; so very honourably did he keep his own counsel. He was sensible of the value of appearances as an investment, and liked to dress well; but he drove a bargain for every moveable about him, from the coat on his back to the china on his breakfast-table; and every bargain by representing ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... This is the moot point for psychoanalysis. But let us look at sex, in its obvious manifestation. The sexual relation between man and woman consummates in the act of coition. Now what is the act of coition? We know its functional purpose ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... a moot point whether a balloon caught in a thunderstorm is, or is not, in any special danger of being struck. It has been argued that immunity under such circumstances must depend upon whether a sufficiently ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... it is a moot point how far the money lent by the Jews was actually the King's in the first instance, there is no doubt that the Exchequer treated the money of the Jews as held at the pleasure of the King. There was a special Exchequer ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... the homely flowers John Bunyan knew and loved, leads to the village green, fringed with churchyard elms, in the middle of which is the pedestal or stump of the market-cross, and at the upper end of the old "Moot Hall," a quaint brick and timber building, with a projecting upper storey, a good example of the domestic architecture of the fifteenth century, originally, perhaps, the Guesten- Hall of the adjacent ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... nineteenth century, the utmost importance attaches to Anglo-Saxon arrangements respecting local government and administration. The smallest governmental unit was the township, comprising normally a village surrounded by arable lands, meadows, and woodland. The town-moot was a primary assembly of the freemen of the village, by which, under the presidency of a reeve, the affairs of the township were administered. A variation of the township was the burgh, or borough, whose population was apt to be larger ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... to state facts, rather than to moot theories, I leave this debatable ground to others, and here close a narrative, compiled with much care, of this interesting and instructive case. I was the rather disposed to examine it critically and report it in detail, because it seems to suggest valuable hints, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... well-established rule has been overthrown, another, believed to be quite as wrong and perhaps not so well fortified by time and subsequent cases, may share the same fate. Shall counsel risk advising his client not to prosecute his claim or defence, when another bolder than he, may moot the point and conduct another cause resting upon the same question to a successful termination? The very foundations of confidence and security are shaken. The law becomes a lottery, in which every man feels disposed to try his chance. Another cause of this uncertainty is ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... three narrow tongues that form, roughly, the segments of a half-circle. Whether the German tongue is split in the middle by N'glili River, so that it forms a flattened broad arrow, with the central prong the river is a moot point. We, in Downing Street, claim that the lower angle of this arrow is wholly ours, and that all the flat basin of the Field of Blood (as they call it) is entitled to receive the shadow which a flapping Union ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... and reveal to the knowledge of civilized man the great river, afterwards called the Amazon, and the country of Brazil. The fleet in which Vespucci took passage left Spain in the month of May, 1499, that commanded by Pinzon left in December; and it is still a moot question whether the first or the second was the first to arrive on the coast of Brazil. But Pinzon sailed beyond Vespucci on that voyage, though he was to be surpassed, the next year, in the generous rivalry that existed for making the ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... Mr. E.A. Freeman, however, puts it more truthfully in saying: "The circumstances of New England called the primitive assembly (that is, the Homeric agora, Athenian ekklesia, Roman comitia, Swiss landesgemeinde, English folk-moot) again into being, when in the older England it was well-nigh forgotten. What in Switzerland was a survival was in New England rather ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... smart girls; they have life and wit; and yesterday, upon Charlotte's raving against me upon a related enterprise, I told her, that I had had in debate several times, whether she were or were not too near of kin to me: and that it was once a moot point with me, whether I could not love her dearly for a month or so: and perhaps it was well for her, that another pretty little puss started up, and diverted me, just as I was entering upon ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... the word koldun is still, I believe, a moot point. The discovery of the money in the warlock's coffin seems an improbable incident. In the original version of the story the wizard may, perhaps, have turned into a heap of gold (see above, p. ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... the principal village; but it was deserted, even in broad day, when he passed through. Men, women, and children fled before him. Even the dogs and pigs got out of the way, while the king was not above hiding under a mat. The two prime ministers lived in terror of Bunster, who never discussed any moot subject, but struck out with ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... which that eloquent statesman, a man by no means inclined to a timorous policy, had declared that "no feeling of wounded pride, no motive of questionable expediency, nothing short of real and demonstrable necessity, should ever induce him to moot the awful question of the transcendental power of Parliament over every dependency of the British crown. That transcendental power was an ordinance of empire, which ought to be kept back within the penetralia of the constitution. It exists, but it should be veiled. It should ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... lorries started for our seaport soon after nine, carrying the hospital mailbag and as many messages as a village carrier. The life of the driver was far more exciting than his occupation would suggest, and it was always a moot point whether or not he would succeed in getting back the same night. The road was of the usual Belgian type, with a paved causeway in the middle just capable of allowing two motors to pass, and on each side was a morass, flanked ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... the Negro has been a moot question for a generation past. But even to-day what do we find the general reliance of the American mind in determinating this question? Almost universally the resort is to material agencies! The ordinary, and sometimes the extraordinary American is unable to see ...
— Civilization the Primal Need of the Race - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Paper No. 3 • Alexander Crummell
... —The moot point is did he forget it, J. J. O'Molloy said quietly, turning a horseshoe paperweight. Saving princes is a ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... genuineness of the Prologues of these plays has long been a moot question. The tendency of the more recent investigators has been to hold that all were, at least in part, written by ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... Thomas opposed the belief and doctrine of the immaculate conception of the blessed Virgin Mary. In Solana's day the dogma of the immaculate conception had not yet been defined by the Church; it then was a moot question. But in that day the belief in and teaching of the immaculate conception was common, though not (as said) of duty—Dominicans only, one may say, holding to the contrary. The pupils, then, of Santo ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... not so clear about that," said Lord Valentine; "that is the very point at issue. I do not think the great majority are the best judges of their own interests. At all events, gentlemen, the respective advantages of aristocracy and democracy are a moot point. Well then, finding the question practically settled in this country, you will excuse me for not wishing to agitate it. I give you complete credit for the sincerity of your convictions; extend the same confidence to me. You are democrats; I am an aristocrat. My family has been ennobled ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... reason, plead, remonstrate, expostulate; contend, dispute, controvert, moot, discuss; prove, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the difference of the two cases lay in the fact, that as to the killing of the body there was no doubt about the matter, whereas mankind differed very widely as to the killing of the soul; and that as long as it remained a moot point whether priests did so or not, it would hardly be practicable or even politic to adopt ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... bad ones among them, "but the good council of the wise sachems and the mark of disgrace put upon unruly persons had a very desirable influence."[199] The extreme form of punishment in the power of the folk-moot of the Tuschinen is to be excluded from the public feasts, and to be made a spectator while stoned in effigy and cursed.[200] Sending a man to Coventry is in vogue among the Fejir Beduins: one who kills a friend is so despised that he is ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... market-town, which stood in a hollow among the moors. The grass sloped to a river that sparkled in the sun and then vanished in the alders' shade. Across the stream, old oak and ash trees rolled up the side of the Moot Hill, and round the latter gray walls and roofs showed among the leaves. A spire and a square, ivy-covered tower rose above the faint blue haze of smoke. A few white clouds floated in the sky and their cool shadows crept ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... I was old enough to be told anything like this that I began to feel that the moor was in secret my companion and friend, that it was not only the moot to me, but something else. It was like a thing alive—a huge giant lying spread out in the sun warming itself, or covering itself with thick, white mist which sometimes writhed and twisted itself into wraiths. First I noticed and liked it some day, perhaps, when it ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... days of Pythagoras down to the present time it has been a moot question whether a vegetable or meat diet was best for man. Each side can present equally strong arguments; each can point to exceptional instances of physical development under the different methods; each can point to ill results that follow rigid adherence to one ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... the medium; or whether it is a sort of compound consciousness, made up of the collected minds of those forming the circle at the time; or whether some other interpretation is open to us—this is all a moot question, which is referred to here, merely to draw attention to the fact of ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... trade. Martin Schongauer was dead, but under that master's brothers Duerer studied and helped to support himself by his art at Colmar and at Basle. Various wood-blocks executed by him at the latter place are preserved there. Whether he also visited Venice now or not is a moot point. Here or elsewhere, at any rate, he came under the influence of the Bellini, of Mantegna, and more particularly of Jacopo dei Barbari—the painter and engraver to whom he owed the incentive to study the proportions of the human body—a study which henceforth became ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... is what I never had refused before in the provinces north of Suse; but he declined the offer, saying he was more than recompensed already by the establishment of the port of Santa Cruz. "Myself, my family, my kabyl," said he, "hail you as a father; (e moot alik) they will die in your cause." No favour could have equalled that of re-establishing the commerce of Agadeer. These circumstances serve to show what reception might be expected from these people, if the British Government would negociate with the ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... light tentatives have winged Betwixt your Majesty and Russia's court, To moot that one of their Grand Duchesses Should be your Empress-wife. Nought ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... mind, mental pabulum. subject, subject matter; matter, theme, noemata [Gr.], topic, what it is about, thesis, text, business, affair, matter in hand, argument; motion, resolution; head, chapter; case, point; proposition, theorem; field of inquiry; moot point, problem &c (question) 461. V. float in the mind, pass in the mind &c 451. Adj. thought of; uppermost in the mind; in petto. Adv. under consideration; in question, in the mind; on foot, on the carpet, on the docket, on the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Asgarby, and one at Asterby in 1904. In 1899 our local pack of hounds, the South Wold, ran a badger, instead of a fox, over several fields, until he took to ground, and was afterwards killed by one of the party, as he kept his head out of the hole. It should hardly be a moot point whether the extermination of the badger is an advantage or not, although a good deal has been written on both sides of the subject. Its skin makes the “sporran” of the kilted Highlander, and its hair ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... the guards chiefly expended their vigour on the spectators of the original disturbance. Whether this had been secretly engineered by the authorities for one of the purposes I previously indicated, must always remain a moot point. In any case it did not incline the Parisians to vote for the Government candidates. Every deputy returned for the city on that occasion was an opponent of the Empire, and in later years I was told ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... others, and will be said in every age in support of the conflicting opinions on government: and that wisdom and duty dictate an humble resignation to the verdict of our future peers. I doing this myself, I shall certainly not suffer moot questions to affect the sentiments of sincere friendship and respect, consecrated to you by so long a course of time, and of which I ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... held its session at the entrance of the Temple-Mount. If these courts, in turn, failed to solve the problem, they appealed to the court that sat in the entrance of the ante-court, where a discussion was entered into upon the moot points of the case; if no decision could be arrived at, they all referred to the (supreme) court of seventy-one, where the matter was finally decided ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... had just to moot the question And say you felt the closing hour had come And we should simply jump at your suggestion And all the Hague with overtures would hum; You'd but to call her up, And Peace would follow like a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... skill and taste of our forefathers, and recalls the wonders of old-time. It will be our endeavour to tell of the old country houses that Time has spared, the cottages that grace the village green, the stern grey walls that still guard some few of our towns, the old moot halls and public buildings. We shall see the old-time farmers and rustics gathering together at fair and market, their games and sports and merry-makings, and whatever relics of old English life have been left for an artist and scribe of the ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... for acts committed in violation of District law were transported to Virginia-alien territory-to serve their terms. It was a moot point whether prisoners were so treated with sufficient warrant in law. Eminent jurists held that the District had no right to convict a person under its laws and commit that person to confinement in another state. They contended that sentence ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... institution in Biggleswick which deserves mention. On the south of the common, near the station, stood a red-brick building called the Moot Hall, which was a kind of church for the very undevout population. Undevout in the ordinary sense, I mean, for I had already counted twenty-seven varieties of religious conviction, including three Buddhists, a Celestial Hierarch, five Latter-day Saints, and about ten varieties of Mystic whose ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... office had begun to improve. I had had my salary raised, and I had ceased doing janitor work. I had become more of a clerk and less of an office boy. A number of us "kids" had got up a moot court, rented a room to meet in, and finally obtained the use of another room in the old Denver University building, where, in the gaslight, we used to hold "quiz classes" and defend imaginary cases. (That, by the way, was the beginning ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... [190] We moot a higher question: Is he fit for the pulpit,—for that great conservative power by which religion, and morals, and freedom, must be maintained among us? "I do not believe," he declares, in one of his sermons, "the miraculous origin of the Hebrew church, or the Buddhist ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... heard a toot-moot o' that kin' afore I left, but I thocht it better to tak' nae notice o't. I'll be wi' ye a' day the morn though, an' I'm thinkin' I'll clap a rouch han' on their mou's 'at I hear ony mair ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... and the evidence furnished by their supposed Dipterus has not been confirmed. And as the Old Red Sandstones of Scotland have no true fossiliferous base, but rest on primary rocks both to the south and north of the Grampians, it may be regarded as in some degree a moot point whether the lowest fossiliferous beds to the north be older or newer than those to the south, or, what is quite possible, of the same age. Provisionally, however, I have arranged my paper on the supposition that ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... It is a moot point whether Tom-all-Alone's be uglier by day or by night, but on the argument that the more that is seen of it the more shocking it must be, and that no part of it left to the imagination is at all ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... to aristocracy, in the sense at least in which that word is usually understood. If it were not a bad habit to moot cases on the supposed ruin of the constitution, I should be free to declare, that if it must perish, I would rather by far see it resolved into any other form, than lost in that austere and insolent domination. But, whatever my dislikes may be, my ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... in lieu of chapel walls for within it he could retire at all times and be hidden. Of all that he experienced within his heart at this time not any part was visible to the brother who was his idle visitor; or perhaps only the least part, and that not until the moot point between them ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... the Parisian experts giving an opinion of no greater value than that of Orfila's in the Lafarge case, but find also an element of doubt introduced by the country practitioner, with his common sense on the then moot question of the accumulation, the absorption, and elimination of ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... though comforted, was not assured; for even after this, through the course of the whole "AEneis," she still apprehends the interest which Juno might make with Jupiter against her son. For it was a moot point in heaven whether he could alter fate or not; and indeed some passages in Virgil would make us suspect that he was of opinion Jupiter might defer fate, though he could not alter it; for in the latter end of the tenth book ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... 1898, a joint high commission sat at Quebec and canvassed all moot matters between the two countries, among them that of the Alaska boundary. It adjourned, however, without settling the question, though a temporary and provisional understanding was reached and ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... very pressing nature on his mind. His saddler had to be seen,—and threatened,—on a certain matter touching the horses' backs. A draught of hounds were being sent down to a friend in Scotland. And there was a Committee of Masters to sit on a moot question concerning a neutral covert in the XXX country, of which Committee he was one. But the desire to punish Slide was almost as strong in his indignant mind as those other matters referring more especially to the profession of his life. "Phineas," he said, "you are bound to do it. If ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... cove below, and they come in all glowing, with the floating tresses that make Metelill look so charming, and full of merry adventures at breakfast. We all meet in the great room at the hotel for a substantial meal at half-past one, and again (most of us at least) at eight; but it is a moot point which of these meals we call dinner. Very merry both of them are; Martyn and Horace Druce are like boys together, and the girls scream with laughter, rather too much so sometimes. Charley is very noisy, and ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his native city; where, from his previous reputation, not only as a lawyer well versed in common law, with great knowledge in the practical parts of it, but as a most skilful conveyancer, and great real property lawyer, with a deep knowledge of all its intricacies and moot points, he, at once, obtained considerable practice, and a fine income, which, I believe, by present provincial counsel would be regarded rather as a fiction than reality. He was, moreover, a fluent speaker, with diction pure, and most grammatical. I ought, here, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... analysis, they must be assumed to consist almost entirely of that substance generally in the form of common salt, and be valued accordingly. Sulphate of lime and organic matter though abundant constituents of most manures, add but little to their value, and it is a moot point whether they ought to be taken into consideration, although most persons allow a small value for them. Carbonate of lime, sand, or siliceous matter, and water, of course, are ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... in the Brazils have begun to moot the question—that they ought in sincerity to put an end to the African slave trade, and in lieu thereof to bring labourers from Africa as free people. The supply of such that will be required, both to maintain the present numbers of the black population and to extend cultivation in that country, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... Gumming believed his own prophecies is a moot point. It is said that he bought the lease of a house, which expired about twenty-five years after his date ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... are shared by few. It is much to be desired that some notice of the subject may be taken in Parliament, when, by being treated in a proper manner, it may be effectually stopped. Lord Aberdeen has spoken to Lord John Russell, who will be quite prepared to moot it in the ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... enactments, and possess such an unlimited independence in their individual States, that although the exclusion of the Cabinet is now very generally admitted to be an error, I saw no inclination to moot the question; probably, lest other questions affecting the slave and non-slave-holding States might be brought on the boards, and again disturb ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... to be the Fact, how absurd must appear the Praises of such an Editor? It seems a moot Point, whether Mr. Pope has done most Injury to Shakespeare as his Editor and Encomiast; or Mr. Rymer done him Service as his Rival and Censurer. Were it every where the true Text, which That Editor in his late pompous ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... sea-folk of the ship-shires King Orry remembered the Church. He found it on the island at his coming, left it where he found it, and gave it a voice in the government. He established a Tynwald Court, equivalent to the Icelandic All Moot, where Church and State sat together. Then he appointed two law-men, called Deemsters, one for the north and the other for the south. These were equivalent to his Icelandic Loegsoegumadur, speaker of the law and ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... sibilantly, and other people had whispered, in the long intervals of the organ. She had removed him from the church before the collection for the Red Cross, and when they had eaten a sort of dinner she had borne him away to the Russian dancers in the Moot Hall. ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... suspiciously cheap luxuries. There were points also connected with the process of their elaboration which had given me an undefinable uneasiness in the refreshment rooms of a hundred railway stations. I was determined to settle these moot points once for all. So I entered the establishment with an eye of as keen a speculation as an exciseman's searching a building for illicit distillery, and I came out of it a more charitable and ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... the lost opening of L.U. may have been fuller. The author of the Glenn Masain version kept nearer to the old story, adding, however, more modern touches. Where the new character of Bricriu comes from is a moot point; I incline to the belief that the idea of Bricriu as a mere buffoon is a later development. But in neither version is the story, as we have it, a pre-Christian one. The original pre-Christian idea of Flidais ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... process of japanning be more simple and produces a less durable, a less costly coating than the Japanese method, yet its practice is not so injurious to the health. Indeed, it is a moot point in how far the Japanese themselves now utilize their classical process, as the coat of natural japan on all the articles exhibited at the recent Vienna exhibition as being coated with the natural lacquer, when recovered after ...
— Handbook on Japanning: 2nd Edition - For Ironware, Tinware, Wood, Etc. With Sections on Tinplating and - Galvanizing • William N. Brown
... Wilton, "I have sent for you and Ermengarde together, in order that I may ask for an explanation. I did not moot the question yesterday, although the circumstance which aroused my displeasure occurred the day before. Pray take this chair, ...
— The Children of Wilton Chase • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... our loving subjectes as for our solace and pleasure, when we shall thinke good to see them during our pleasure.' The Globe Theatre was noted as the customary scene of their labours, but permission was granted to them to perform in the town-hall or moot-hall of any country town. Nine actors are named. Lawrence Fletcher stands first on the list; he had already performed before James in Scotland in 1599 and 1601. Shakespeare comes second and Burbage third. The company to which they belonged was thenceforth styled the King's company; its members ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... and the deep, quiet places of the country; rebellious to all labour, and pettily thievish, like the English gipsies; rustically ignorant, but with a touch of wood-lore and the dexterity of the savage. Whence they came is a moot point. At the time of the war, they poured north in crowds to escape the conscription; lived during summer on fruits, wild animals, and petty theft; and at the approach of winter, when these supplies failed, built great fires in the forest, and there died stoically by starvation. They ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... interval," I sallied out, wrapped up in my plaid, to examine the serpentine beds in the neighborhood, which produce what is so extensively known as the Portsoy marble. The beds or veins of this substance,—for it is still a moot point whether they occur here as mere insulated masses of contemporary origin with the primary formations which surround them, or as Plutonic dykes injected into fissures at a later period,—are of very ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... Whether they received this generic name because they are suggestions for the Jewish cause, or because they are written to answer the insinuations ([Greek: kath' hypothesin]) of adversaries, is a moot point. But their general purport is clear: they were an apologetic presentation of Jewish life, written to show the falsity of anti-Semitic calumnies. The Jews are good citizens and their manner of life is humanitarian. The Essene sect is a living proof ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... that it is important to avoid the too free use of condiments and stimulating foods. We have used salt so long that our bodies seem adapted to it, and it is usually considered essential to the welfare of domestic stock; therefore it is a moot question as to whether it is advisable for human beings to avoid it altogether. Yet the excessive use of it to which we are prone is certainly harmful. How is this to be avoided? If we eat our food in a hand, I have found that the longer you are without it the more you long ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... infancy walk with God from his Baptism? Why does not every one lead a pious life? Evidently, such is not the case!" "As a matter of fact, for a hundred years the Lutheran Church has abandoned the moot question of the body of Christ, etc., and has left it to the consciences of its members to decide what they must believe according to Holy Writ. This we may do without deviating from the faith of our Church, since at our ordination, especially in this country, we confess nothing more than ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... Lyndsay wrote his remarkable drama, 'The Satire of the Three Estates'—Monarch, namely, Barons, and Clergy. It is made up in nearly three equal parts of ingenuity, wit, and grossness. It is a drama, and was acted several times—first, in 1535, at Cupar-Fife, on a large green mound called Moot-hill; then, in 1539, in an open park near Linlithgow, by the express desire of the king, who with all the ladies of the Court attended the representation; then in the amphitheatre of St Johnston in Perth; ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... were usually men much older than he. At the "Moot Club" he took part with James Duane, who was to be New York's first continental mayor; Gouverneur Morris, who had not at that time acquired the wooden leg which he once snatched off and brandished with happy effect before a Paris mob; and Samuel Jones, ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... They had become "upper class" and now their name would be formally recorded in the Stud Book, their money joined to land. Whether this was a little late in the day, and those rewards of the possessive instinct, lands and money, destined for the melting-pot—was still a question so moot that it was not mooted. After all, Timothy had said Consols were goin' up. Timothy, the last, the missing link; Timothy, in extremis on the Bayswater Road—so Francie had reported. It was whispered, too, that this young Mont ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... my interest was concerned in the other. But let us drop both our pretences; for I believe it is a moot point, whether I am more likely to make a Master Bull, or ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... the side of unrestricted commerce, which is the side towards which justice inclines, and we lived far within our borders with scarcely the power to injure or be injured, except on the ocean. Now we are running into the crimes to which strong nations are liable. Our diplomatists unblushingly moot the question of taking foreign territory by force if it cannot be purchased; our executive prevents piratical expeditions against the lands of neighboring States as feebly and slowly as if it connived at them; we pick ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... be trusted to bring out all these doubtful points, had been delayed in anticipation of Mr. Fairbrother's return. His testimony could not but prove valuable, if not in fixing the criminal, at least in settling the moot point as to whether the stone, which the estranged wife had carried away with her on leaving the house, had been the genuine one returned to him from Tiffany's or the well-known imitation now in the hands of the police. He had been located somewhere in the mountains of ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... they expected him to make for the Garth. They were, however, in front, where he would sooner have them than behind, and he set off down the valley for Hexham. He found the old Border town, clustering round the tall dark mass of the abbey, strangely picturesque; the ancient Moot Hall and market square invited his interest, but he shrank from wandering about the streets in the dark. Now he had Graham's checks, he must be careful; moreover his knapsack and leggings made him conspicuous, and he went ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... the speed of the automobile on the roads, in France and England, as indeed everywhere else, has been the moot point in all ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... partnership, guardianship, loan for use, mortgage, division of a 'family,' partition of joint property, those on the innominate contracts of sale by commission and exchange, and the suit for recovery of an inheritance. Until quite recently it was a moot point whether the lastnamed was properly an equitable action, but our constitution has definitely decided the question ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian |
