"Vertical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... miles where the river can be crossed. The south bank is so precipitous that the trail from the plain twists and turns like a snake before it emerges upon a narrow sand and gravel beach. The opposite side of the river is a vertical wall of rock which slopes back a little at the lower end to form a steep hillside covered with short grass. The landing place is a mass of jagged rocks fronting a small patch of still water and the trail up the face of the cliff ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... different coils. These loose rolls, of course, occupied much space and could be put into the tar only in a standing position, because in a horizontal one the several coils would have pressed together again. The loose roll was therefore slipped over a vertical iron rod fastened into a circular perforated wooden foot. The upper end of this iron rod ended in a ring, in which the hook of a chain or rope could be fastened. With the aid of a windlass the roll was raised or lowered. When placed in the pan with boiling tar, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... the scientific name for the element gold and the figure is its atomic weight. You will see," he added, pointing down the second vertical column on the chart, "that gold belongs to the hydrogen group—hydrogen, lithium, sodium, potassium, copper, rubidium, silver, caesium, then two blank spaces for elements yet to be discovered to science, then gold, and finally ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... a vertical sun. Lat. 17 degrees, or thereabouts. We saw Madeira at a distance like a cloud; since then, we had about four days trade wind, and then failing or contrary breezes. We have sailed so near the African shore that we get little good ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... enervated condition. I had, I imagine, a swarter skin and firmer flesh when I could ride all day over great summer-parched plains, where there was not a bush that would have afforded shelter to a mannikin, and think that I was having a pleasant journey. The cloudless sky and vertical sun—how intolerable they would now seem, and scorch my brain and fill my shut eyes with dancing flames! At present even this mild June sun is strong enough to make the old mulberry tree on the lawn ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... of a few hundred yards, taking no lives and doing little material damage. Since then, several big craft have appeared at night, but have always been frightened away by the searchlights and the fire of the small vertical guns which ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... had known in the First World War. And when their fire was first concentrated on the Han city, they blew its outer walls and roof levels into a chaotic mass of wreckage before the nervous Yellow engineers could turn on the ring of generators which surrounded the city with a vertical film of disintegrator rays. Our explosive rockets could not penetrate this film, for it disintegrated them instantly and harmlessly, as it did all other material substance with the sole exception of "inertron," ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... flat surface, but it operates on the same principle as the other. The coffee beans are placed in the chamber at the top, and the ground coffee drops into the drawer a at the bottom. The adjustment of the grinding rolls is regulated by the notched head at the end of the vertical shaft. ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 5 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... in the military mast, protected by twelve inches of steel, perforated by vertical and horizontal slits for observation, stood the captain and navigating officer, both in shirt-sleeves; for this, the conning-tower, was hot. Around the inner walls were the nerve-terminals of the structure—the ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... substance of the frame in a single sheet would be about half an inch thick. These are suggestively called balloon frames. The former would be huge and inconvenient, the latter are often fair and frail. That the frame of the outer wall of a wooden building should be mainly vertical is evident, the outer studs, if possible, extending from the sill to the plates, and as many of the inner ones as may be reaching through both stories, especially those by the staircase, where the shrinking ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... the past, of the Sun's motion, and not by any means to living creatures of antediluvian creations, as some wiseacres have imagined. Many of these ancient monuments, monstrous in form, are records of that awful period of floods and devastation known as the Iron Age, when there was a vertical Sun at the poles; or, in other words, when the pole of the Earth was ninety degrees removed from the pole of the ecliptic. To those who can read aright, every lineament tells as plainly as the written ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... of the garden impinged upon the river, and there ended; for the bank was steep and vertical, and the deep, still water that ran under it formed a sufficient protection on ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... equal vertical bands of green (hoist side) and white with a red five-pointed star within a red crescent; the crescent, star, and color green are traditional symbols of Islam (the ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... thirty centimetres below the surface of the ground. The extent of their runs varies, and we found them extending in length from thirty to forty metres and more. These runs are connected with the surface by vertical holes of about five centimetres in diameter. In many places four, five, and more holes have led to the same run. In such cases there is generally, not far off, an enlargement for the nest, lined with finely-ground vegetable material, where the young are produced and reared. In front ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... the stuffing would have been expensive: they abandoned the idea. The linden tree, thrown down in the garden, might have been used as a horizontal pole; and, when they were skilful enough to go over it from one end to the other, in order to have a vertical one, they set up a beam of counter-espaliers. Pecuchet clambered to the top; Bouvard slipped off, always fell ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... of Yedo. Not the least beauty of the scene consists in the wondrous clearness of an atmosphere so transparent that the most distant outlines are scarcely dimmed, while the details of the nearer ground stand out in sharp, bold relief, now lit by the rays of a vertical sun, now darkened under the flying shadows thrown by the fleecy clouds which sail across the sky. Under such a heaven, what painter could limn the lights and shades which flit over the woods, the pride of Japan, whether in late autumn, when the russets and yellows ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... eyes like vertical slits in green-yellow stone—gave one quick look at, and through, the open window. He had the impression, framed in the window, of a bobbing, black, "square" bowler hat—not often seen these days—and a red face with small eyes, and a sticking-out beard of aggressiveness. This was no Hawkley. ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... police officers in plenty only a fence or two away; and the back of this house boasted a fire-escape. By inverting a convenient ash-can and standing on it, an active man might possibly, if sufficiently desperate, manage to jump a vertical yard (more or less), catch the lowermost grating of the fire-escape, and draw ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... up now. The ground beneath them seemed in rapid motion, coming towards them from all directions, and dwindling away beneath their feet. The incline too—now in form a vertical concave wall—kept shoving itself forward, and they had to step backwards continually to avoid ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... for the want of a home all ready for him. He had been filling the other cottage with all sorts of furniture. She imagined it all new, fresh with varnish, piled up as in a warehouse. There would be tables wrapped up in sacking; rolls of carpets thick and vertical like fragments of columns, the gleam of white marble tops in the dimness of the drawn blinds. Captain Hagberd always described his purchases to her, carefully, as to a person having a legitimate interest in them. ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... sun, but always cool in the shade. I never heard of an instance of sun-stroke from exposure to the mid-day sun, for there always was a light air—often scarcely perceptible until you were well out in the open,—to temper the fierce vertical rays. It sometimes happened that I found myself obliged, either for business or pleasure, to take a long ride in the middle of a summer's day, and my invariable reflection used to be, "It is not nearly so hot out of doors as one fancies it would be." Then there is none of the stuffiness ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... substance, however small, thrown at it; a thin jet of water only half an inch in diameter, if discharged at great pressure equivalent to a column of water of 500 metres, cannot be cut even with an axe, it resists as though it were made of the hardest steel; a thin cord, hanging from a vertical axis, and being revolved very quickly, becomes rigid, and if struck with a hammer it resists and resounds like a rod of wood; a thin chain and even a loop of string, if revolved at great speed over a vertical pulley, becomes rigid and, if allowed to escape ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... of Potter gave place to vertical rods with small pegs which pressed upward or downward as desired. These have long since been replaced by other devices, but all are only simple modifications of a contrivance devised by the mere lad whose duty it was to turn ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... different styles for different purposes, such as tiling for kitchen and bathroom walls, light papers for dark rooms, etc. The division of wall space will be the next point to be settled, i.e. the height of the tiling or wainscot, the width of a border, or the effect of horizontal and vertical lines in breaking up wall space. These questions may be discussed as far as the immediate circumstances and the development of the ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs
... I use polarized light, polarized not in the horizontal or vertical planes, but in the direction of the fourth dimension—an easy matter. One uses Iceland spar under colossal pressures, that is all. And since the worlds are very thin in the direction of the fourth dimension, the thickness of a single ...
— The Worlds of If • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... shelters fully ten men. It suits servants perfectly well. For the master who wants to work, to write, to draw, occasionally to receive officials, the ideal tent would be one of the same material, but of larger proportions, and comprising two parallel vertical partitions and surmounted by a ridge roof. The round form of Kirghiz and Mongol tents is also very comfortable, but it requires a complicated and inconvenient wooden frame-work, owing to which it takes some considerable time to ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... short—and this is their scenic weakness—never attain to the proper mountain spirit. There is a further point, however, in which they also recall Derbyshire, but in which they are far preeminent. This is the vast agglomeration of caves and vertical potholes—like those in Craven, but here called etonnoirs—that riddle the rolling wolds in all directions. Chief among these is the mammoth cave of Han, the mere perambulation of which is said to occupy more than two hours. I have never penetrated myself into its sombre and dank recesses, but ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... ordinary artificial horizon is useless for very low angles. They can be measured to within two or three minutes, by means of a vertical point of reference obtained in the following manner:—Tie two pieces of thread, crossing each other at two feet above the ground, put the vessel of mercury underneath it, and look down upon the mercury. When the eye is so placed, that the crossed threads exactly cover their ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... with vertical, pallid folds gathered loosely into a chin frosted with unkempt silver; his mouth was lipless, close, shadowed by an overhanging, swollen nose; and, from beneath deep, troubled brows, pale blue eyes set close together regarded life ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... inner workings of a mine, shows, above ground, a typical horse whim driving a bucket windlass. Below ground is shown a crank-driven piston pump typical of those driven by Stangenkunst. In this case, however, it is driven by an underground vertical treadmill. ...
— Mine Pumping in Agricola's Time and Later • Robert P. Multhauf
... person, since from his office of magistrate, and the reputation of wit on which he piqued himself, no idea could be formed of it. The judge major, Simon, certainly was not two feet high; his legs spare, straight, and tolerably long, would have added something to his stature had they been vertical, but they stood in the direction of an open pair of compasses. His body was not only short, but thin, being in every respect of most inconceivable smallness—when naked he must have appeared like a grasshopper. His head was ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... railway train any ordinary man any day in the year (if he goes fast enough) can see through a board fence. It may be made of vertical slats five inches across and half an inch apart. He sees through the slits between the slats the whole country for miles. If he goes fast enough a man can see ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... to establish an hydraulic saw-mill, which rapidly cut up the trunks of trees into planks and joists. The mechanism of this apparatus was as simple as those used in the rustic saw-mills of Norway. A first horizontal movement to move the piece of wood, a second vertical movement to move the saw—this was all that was wanted; and the engineer succeeded by means of a wheel, two cylinders, and pulleys properly arranged. Towards the end of the month of September the skeleton ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... super-structure, but the straight band of masonry on which the figures of the Apostles are carved has to support both itself and the stonework of the tympanum. The method by which it is enabled to do this is as follows: the stones, the joints being vertical, are locked into one another by semicircular ridges fitting into corresponding indentations. Mr. Smirke, writing on aperture heads in "Archaeologia," vol. xxvii., said that he thought these excrescences, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... sewing-card to do. I made the first row of vertical lines and let her feel it and notice that there were several rows of little holes. She began to work delightedly and finished the card in a few minutes, and did it very neatly indeed. I thought I would try another word; so I spelled "c-a-r-d." She made the "c-a," then stopped and ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... the captain, as he looked at the ruin of the shed, amid which the airship was. "This is my first accident of this kind. The lever of the vertical rudder snapped, and I couldn't control her. Luckily the roof was rotten, or we might have ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... penetrate it to a depth depending only on the medium, which means that there is a constant ratio between the tangents, instead of the sines, of the inclination of the incident and refracted rays to the normal. Experiment proved that this gave too high values for refraction near the vertical compared with those near the horizon, so Kepler "went off at a tangent" and tried a totally new set of ideas, which all reduced to the absurdity of a refraction which vanished at the horizon. These were followed by another set, involving ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... without being tall, and his clothes hung loosely about him, as if he had fallen away in them since they were made. His face was almost the face of the caricature American: deep, slightly curved vertical lines enclosed his mouth in their parenthesis; a thin, dust-coloured beard fell from his cheeks and chin; his upper lip was shaven. But instead of the slight frown of challenge and self-assertion which marks this face in the type, his large blue eyes, set near together, gazed sadly from under ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... height of the lowest level of the chain is upwards of 15,000 feet. But it was not the actual height of the various peaks, nor the masses of glistening snow which clothed them, brightly reflecting the rays of an almost vertical sun, and tinted by the most brilliant hues, that was the chief cause of wonder and admiration. It was the sharpness of the horizon-line against the serene clear sky which displayed precipices and crags of inconceivable grandeur, the overhanging ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... that the inclination of the earth's equator to the plane of her orbit (the obliquity of the ecliptic) has been diminishing slowly since prehistoric times; and this fact has been confirmed by Egyptian and Chinese observations on the length of the shadow of a vertical pillar, made thousands of years before the Christian era, ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... the tin-pot along by hook or by crook. There was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man. And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs. A few months of training had done for that ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... that nothing is so obstinate as error—that fashionable idolatry is of all things the most incorrigible by argument, and the least susceptible of conviction—that while the dog-star of favouritism is vertical over a people, there is no reasoning with them to effect; and that all the efforts of common sense are but given to the wind, if employed to undeceive them, till the brain fever has spent itself, and the public mind has settled down to a state of rest. We had heard Master ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... beauty of feature, but which was wonderfully attractive all the same. It was not an old face, but it was deeply lined, and those who knew and loved him best could tell the meaning of each of those eloquent tracings. The deep vertical mark running up the forehead meant sorrow. It had been stamped there for ever on the night when Hubert, his first-born, had been brought back, cold and lifeless, from the river to which he had hurried forth but an hour before, a picture of happy boyhood. ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... wire mounted with commutator to be rotated so as to cut the lines of force of the earth's magnetic field, thereby generating potential difference. The axis of rotation may be horizontal, when the potential will be due to the vertical component of the earth's field, or the axis may be horizontal, when the potential will be due to the vertical component, or it may be set ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... bitternesses surely most bitter are the bills for things of which the fruition has ceased—for worn-out finery, for withered flowers, for drunk wine. Pilkington's boots, were they never so treble soled, could not endure for ever, and Miss Joliffe's eyes followed unconsciously under the table to where a vertical fissure showed the lining white at the side of either boot. Where were new boots to come from now, whence was to come clothing to ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... and loaded his old rifle, his eyes rested upon a vast and imposing array of mountains filling the landscape. All are heavily wooded, all are alike, save that in one the long horizontal line of the summit is broken by a sudden vertical ascent, and thence the mountain seems to take up life on a higher level, for it sinks no more and passes ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... an abrupt turn round the south-west angle of the Peak to a narrow shelf of considerable length, rugged, uneven, and so overhung by the cliff in some places that it is necessary to crouch to pass at all. Above, the Peak looks nearly vertical for 400 feet; and below, the most tremendous precipice I have ever seen descends in one unbroken fall. This is usually considered the most dangerous part of the ascent, but it does not seem so to me, for such foothold as there is ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... west through Comrie. The phenomena of earthquakes in the latter district are now being systematically observed and recorded, under the direction of a committee appointed by the British Association, seismometers being employed on the two principles of vertical pendulum and delicately poised cylinders. Arrangements have been made to ascertain whether shocks in this region can be traced to any common central point, there being reason to believe them to be connected with a mass of granite in Glen Lednoch, whose position was indicated on a ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... Strata, above the Level of the Sea, should be referred to the rising up of the Land, not to the going down of the Sea. Strata of Deep-sea and Shallow-water Origin alternate. Also Marine and Fresh-water Beds and old Land Surfaces. Vertical, inclined, and folded Strata. Anticlinal and Synclinal Curves. Theories to explain Lateral Movements. Creeps in Coal-mines. Dip and Strike. Structure of the Jura. Various Forms of Outcrop. Synclinal Strata forming Ridges. Connection of Fracture and Flexure of Rocks. ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... to justify its name. A gap appeared in the rampart of hills which shut out the sea, and on the left of the opening rose a vertical cliff, coloured a burning orange by the sunlight, the companion cliff on the right being livid in shade. Between these cliffs, like the Libyan bay which sheltered the shipwrecked Trojans, was a little haven, seemingly a beginning made by Nature herself of a perfect harbour, which appealed ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... once, rather glad of something to keep him occupied. As he drove away he did not see Mukhum Dass lurking near the small gate, as it was not intended that he should. Mukhum Dass, for his part, did not see Pinga, the one-eyed beggar with his vertical smile, who watched him from behind a rock, for that was not intended either. Pinga himself was noticed closely by ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... another strip, humbly and without any attempt at style. This time, too, I did not consider the line of the ceiling, but conformed to the vertical edge of Westbury's final strip, allowing my loose section to dangle like a plumb-line several moments before permitting it to get its death-grip on the wall. I will not say that this second attempt was an entire success, but it was a step in that direction. With ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... fadmongers, teetotallers, missionaries of divers isms! Overboard with them, and hey for the Fortunate Isles! Then for tobacco in a hammock 'twixt the palms! Then for wine cooled in a brooklet losing itself in silver sands! Then for — but O these bilboes on our ankles, how mercilessly they grip! The vertical sun blisters the bare back: faint echoes of Olympian laughter seem to flicker like Northern Lights across the stark and pitiless sky. One earnest effort would do it, my brothers! A little modesty, a short sinking of private differences; and then we should all be free and equal gentlemen ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... shelves and faults in the strata here and there deeper down, and then lower and lower still the gaps and hollows whence stalwart trees had risen from seeds dropped or hidden by some bird—trees which had grown out almost horizontally, and then curved up into their proper vertical position, to rise up and up as the years rolled on, though now they looked mere shrubs a ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... Episcopal succession and the characteristics of the Scottish Church. The tower is supported upon a carved capital with six amethysts between repousse oak-leaves, and is jointed to a circular boss surrounded with four vertical bands enriched with cairngorms, while between the bands are carbuncles set off by filigree work. There are also silver bosses at the joints of the ebony portions ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... replied: "I knew you would come to that sooner or later, so I prepared a little sketch (Fig. 7), which shows the bow of a vessel, and the tall mast. The lines from A to B give an angle with the vertical line of the mast, which will enable you to determine how far the ship ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... Raise the arm laterally until horizontal; carry it to a vertical position above the head and swing it several times between the vertical and ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... when William Cotton brought out his famous Cotton's patent frame. In his machine the frame was in a sense turned on its back, for the parts, such as the needles, which had been horizontal, were made vertical and vice versa. He also reduced the number of the moving parts and perfected the cam arrangement. Another very important development of the machine was when it was built in a number of divisions so as to work a number of articles side ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... throughout is backed by teak, varying in thickness from 18 in. to 20 in., behind which is an inner skin of steel 2 in. thick. The engines are being constructed by Messrs. Humphreys, Tennant & Co, London, and are of the vertical triple expansion type, capable of developing a maximum horse power of 13,000 with forced draught and 9,000 horse power under natural draught, the estimated speeds being 16 and 171/2 knots respectively at the normal displacement. The regular coal supply is 900 tons, which will enable the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... muslin that morning—white, with a waving vertical line of brown running through it; also a white linen collar and the big straw hat which she had taken from the peg outside the door. The hat rested any way on her yellow-brown hair, that waved a little, was heavy, and clung ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... index, and beneath this (leaving a line blank) he copies the title-page of the book in extenso, using red ink for red print, capitals where capitals occur, and underlining those words which are in italics. The end of each line is indicated by a vertical stroke. Then follows a complete collation of the book. The following illustration, however, will convey a better idea than can be given in words. It will be noticed that after the size (which is given in the English notation) the measurement of the title-page ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... has been a fearful enemy for months. I have been every night, through his means, transported into Asiatic scenes. Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan. From kindred feelings ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... the exterior. This is of course an extreme example and does not represent the usual practice, but it brings sharply to consciousness the well known fact that for these buildings we have substantially one method of construction—that of the vertical strut, and the horizontal "fill"—while in style they appear as Grecian, Roman, Renaissance, Gothic, Modern French and what not, according to the whim of ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... vibrations are the most frequent, and they cause the least damage to the slightly-built habitations. Vertical shocks are most severe; they rend the walls, and raise the houses out of their foundations. The greatest vertical shock I ever felt was on the 4th of July, 1839, at half-past seven in the evening, when I was in the old forests of the Chanchamoyo territory. ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... follows:—The twenty specimens are first arranged in a series according to the body-lengths (which may be considered to give the size of the bird), from the shortest to the longest, and the same number of vertical lines are drawn, numbered from one to twenty. In this case (and wherever practicable) the body-length is measured from the lower line of the diagram, so that the actual length of the bird is exhibited as well as the actual variations ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... feet from tip to tip. A trussed spar at the bottom carried six superposed bands of thin holland fabric fifteen inches wide, connected with vertical webs of holland two feet apart, thus virtually giving a length of wing of ninety-six feet and one hundred and twenty square feet of supporting surface. The man was placed horizontally on a base board beneath the spar. This apparatus when tried ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... There was an answering cry from the corral, after which there seemed to be promise of quiet. Janet held her breath and got what reassurance she could out of the fact that she was surrounded by walls, between the shrunk boards of which the glare of the fire showed in vertical streaks. As it was pitch dark inside, she could see nothing of her protecting structure except in so far as it had the appearance of being a ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... cliffs ordinarily imply a not very inviting declivity; they offer themselves less as a road than as a fall; they sink rather than incline. This one—probably some ramification of a road on the plain above—was disagreeable to look at, so vertical was it. From underneath you saw it gain by zigzag the higher layer of the cliff where it passed out through deep passages on to the high plateau by a cutting in the rock; and the passengers for whom the vessel was waiting in the creek must have come ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... object, and was grand and noble. The great thickness of the columns, the beautiful entablature, the ample proportion of the capital; the great horizontal lines of the architrave and cornice, predominating over the vertical lines of the columns; the severity of geometrical forms, produced for the most part by straight lines, gave an imposing simplicity to the Doric temple. How far the Greek architects were indebted to the Egyptian we cannot tell, for though columns ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... white cross that extends to the edges of the flag; the vertical part of the cross is shifted to the hoist side, and that design element of the Dannebrog (Danish flag) was subsequently adopted by the other Nordic countries of Finland, Iceland, Norway, ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the machine as a kite. The larger angle gave more resistance to forward motion, and reduced the speed of the wing on that side. The decrease in speed more than counterbalanced the effect of the larger angle. The addition of a fixed vertical vane in the rear increased the trouble, and made the machine absolutely dangerous. It was some time before a remedy was discovered. This consisted of movable rudders working in conjunction with the twisting of the wings. The details ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... wooden spoon used for stirring it being placed upright in the middle of the kettle, if it falls down, more meal must be added; but if the pudding is sufficiently thick and adhesive to support it in a vertical position, it is declared to be PROOF; and no more meal is added.—If the boiling, instead of being continued only half an hour, be prolonged to three quarters of an hour, or an hour, the pudding will be considerably ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... trench has been dug out the sandbags are placed along the top so as to form what is called a "parapet." Then the trench is dug deeper still and the firing platform is put in. Next the vertical struts of wood are put in position with wiring in between to hold back the mud, and in places where it is possible blocks fill in gaps to strengthen the structure. Finally the bed of the trench is boarded over with long ...
— A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire • Harold Harvey
... himself into a vertical position in the eighteen inches between the bunk and a flat surface that cut off the point of the wedge. He stretched out an arm to remove towel and razor from one of the lockers, then carefully folded the bunk upward and ...
— Satellite System • Horace Brown Fyfe
... dress from ballooning and puffing out of all proportion round about her person, while the vicar, who stood without his hat, employed a spongy handkerchief from time to time in tempering the ardours of a vertical sun. If you will consent to imagine a bald blackbird, his neck being shrunk in apprehensively, as you may see him in the first rolling of the thunder, you will gather an ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... things are double, one against another." (Ecclus. xlii. 25.) The son of Sirach may have had in view the human body as divisible by a vertical median line into two symmetrical halves. But in each of the halves thus made, the same organ or limb is never repeated twice in exact likeness, nor do any two parts render exactly the same service. This variety of organs in the bodies of the higher ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... where they excavate, and even in the living cities where they still fight and pray. The sorrow of all Palestine is that its divisions in culture, politics and theology are like its divisions in geology. The dividing line is horizontal instead of vertical. The frontier does not run between states but between stratified layers. The Jew did not appear beside the Canaanite but on top of the Canaanite; the Greek not beside the Jew but on top of the Jew; the Moslem not beside the Christian ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... Calvinistic Ramaites of the South (ten), are called Ten-galais. Outwardly these sects differ in having diverse mantras, greetings, dress, and especially in the forehead-signs, which show whether the 'mark of Vishnu' shall represent (Vadagal belief) one or (Tengal) two feet of the god (expressed by vertical lines[74] painted fresh daily on the forehead). The Ten-galais, according to a recent account, are the more numerous ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... began at about eight o'clock in the morning, are said to have been vertical. Some faint idea may be formed of the extreme violence of this motion from the fact mentioned by Humboldt that the dead bodies of some of the inhabitants who perished were tossed over a small river to the height of several hundred ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... reef is good enough on the surface, the next thing to be done is to ascertain, by means of cuts and shafts, its nature below the surface. This may be done either by an underlay shaft, which follows the reef down from the surface, or by a vertical shaft, sunk some distance away from the outcrop, to cut the reef ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... quality of the powder. The decision soon arrived at was as follows: 1st—The bullet was to be a hollow aluminium shell, its diameter nine feet, its walls a foot in thickness, and its weight 19,250 pounds; 2nd—The cannon was to be a columbiad 900 feet in length, a well of that depth forming the vertical mould in which it was to be cast, and 3rd—The powder was to be 400 thousand pounds of gun cotton, which, by developing more than 200 thousand millions of cubic feet of gas under the projectile, would easily send it as ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... the right hand; it is well to have the finger slightly moist, but not damp. The neck of the pipette should be long enough to allow its being firmly grasped by the fingers and thumb of the right hand without inconvenience. The pipette is first held in a vertical position long enough to allow any moisture outside the tube to run down, and then the liquid is allowed to run out to the level of the upper mark; this is easily effected by lessening the pressure. If the finger is wet, the flow will ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... squares now occupied by the men and the other four vacant horizontal lines between them are called RANKS. The vertical lines of squares running perpendicularly to the ranks are called FILES. The oblique lines of squares, that is, lines which connect squares of the same ...
— Chess and Checkers: The Way to Mastership • Edward Lasker
... A cruel road, almost vertical and negotiated by a twining zigzag path, has brought me down, after infinite labor, from the mountains over 4,000 feet below my highest point reached yesterday, and I now stand in the middle of the bridge gazing at the silent green stream flowing between cliffs of wall-like steepness. I ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... the following morning, would be to take a complete set of accurate measurements of this quebrada, before pushing on with the survey of the route. A quebrada, it may be explained, is a sort of rent or chasm in the mountain, usually with vertical, or at least precipitous sides, and very frequently of terrific depth, the impression suggested by its appearance being that at some period of the earth's history the solid rock of the mountain had been riven asunder by some titanic force. ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... felt by the travellers a blow, as if of an explosion under the house in which they sat. It was a strong vertical bump which nearly tossed them all off their chairs. Van der Kemp and his man, after an exclamation or two, continued supper like men who were used to such interruptions, merely remarking that it ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... is a hot place. The soil is hot and dry; the wind comes across the lazily murmuring leaves laden with a warm sickening smell drawn from the rapidly growing, broad-flung banners of the corn. The sun, nearly vertical, drops a flood of dazzing light and heat upon the field over which the cool shadows run, only to make the heat seem the ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... woman; the female book-agent takes on new lustre and even the poetess is a desirable companion beside her. The mannish woman wears a coat and vest and—no, she doesn't wear trousers, because she doesn't dare, but a vertical strip of braid down the middle of her skirt suggests the effect. From a distance you couldn't distinguish between her and a man to save your life, for her hat, shirt-bosom, collar and tie are the real thing. She has pockets in her skirt, one on each side, and, sometimes at the club, ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman
... laughing. Punin was completely bald; not a single hair was to be seen on the high conical skull, covered with smooth white skin. He passed his open hand over it, and he too laughed. When he laughed he seemed, as it were, to gulp, he opened his mouth wide, closed his eyes—and vertical wrinkles flitted across his forehead in three rows, like waves. 'Eh,' said he at last, 'isn't ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... of high in usage, may apply to the very same distance simply measured in an opposite direction, high applying to vertical distance measured from below upward, and deep to vertical distance measured from above downward; as, a deep valley nestling between high mountains. High is a relative term signifying greatly raised ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... engines the vertical boiler is much used. In Fig. 8 we have three forms of this type—A and B with cross water-tubes; C with vertical fire-tubes. The furnace in every case is surrounded by water, and fed through ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... sought the safest way out by attacking the enemy machines nearest the French lines. Rockwell, Prince, and the captain broke through successfully, but Balsley found himself hemmed in. He attacked the German nearest him, only to receive an explosive bullet in his thigh. In trying to get away by a vertical dive his machine went into a corkscrew and swung over on its back. Extra cartridge rollers dislodged from their case hit his arms. He was tumbling straight toward the trenches, but by a supreme effort he regained control, righted ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... to? A thin, tall man with narrow shoulders and yet somehow giving an impression of great wiry strength. He had a boldly drawn line of profile, hair black and glossy and, as Raven saw with distaste, rather long under his hat, vertical lines marking his cheeks, lines deeper than seemed justified by his age, and, as he had noted before, his eyes were also black with a spark in them. What was the spark? It was, Raven concluded again, in this quick scrutiny, like that in ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... black line indicates the "pipe" or call; the four faint horizontal lines, the notes, and the vertical bars, ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... more nor less than a gigantic rock of obsidian, of a dark greenish hue, having its flanks irregularly furrowed by vertical fissures and ridges. This peculiar kind of rock, under the sun, or in a very bright moonlight, gives forth a sort of dull translucence, resembling the reflection of glass. The vitreous glistening of its sides, taken in conjunction with the mass of thick white fog which usually robes ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... to be, not a buoyant cork, but a buoyant bullet. And therefore that it may have momentum for pace, it must have weight to carry; and to carry that weight, the wings must deliver their blow with effective vertical, as well ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... have crept to such a place and still remained invisible, he would have laughed. He was going to his thatched hut, to brown wife and babies, and it was no wonder that he trotted swiftly. The muscles of the great cat bunched, and now the whipping tail began to have a little vertical motion that is the final warning of ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... new design for a flag, and all set to work to produce a suitable one. Mrs. Stevenson's drawing, which consisted of three vertical stripes of green, red, and yellow, with a horizontal shark of black showing white teeth and a white eye, pleased him best and was adopted. The design was afterwards sent to Sydney and Tembinoka's flag manufactured from it. The shark was a neat reference to the king's supposed descent, of ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... analyzed, as far as possible, the action of the forming forces in one wave of simple elevation, the Mont Saleve, and in another of lateral compression, the Mont Brezon: but the investigation of the Mont Saleve had presented unexpected difficulty. Its facade had been always considered to be formed by vertical beds, raised into that position during the tertiary periods; the speaker's investigations had, on the contrary, led him to conclude that the appearance of vertical beds was owing to a peculiarly ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... is snowing steadily. The flakes come straight down, but in a half hour they have a marked slant toward the north; the wind is taking a hand in the game. By mid-afternoon the storm is coming in regular pulse-beats or in vertical waves. The wind is not strong, but seems steady; the pines hum, yet there is a sort of rhythmic throb in the meteor; the air toward the wind looks ribbed with steady-moving vertical waves of snow. The impulses travel along like undulations in ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... yellow. 40 7 Background of upper (zig-zag) part of design unstained, but that of lower (rectangular) part and whole of back fold of apron and fringe stained yellow. 41 10 1/2 Faintly tinted broad horizontal and vertical lines and triangles in figure represent yellow stain. No other staining in the apron. 42 6 3/4 Background of design unstained, but back fold end of apron and fringe stained yellow. 43 6 3/4 No background staining in the apron. The smallness of the amount of decoration and the ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... pieces, and the fragments were heard to tinkle as they fell within the barn. The chagrin of the mortified rifleman was cunningly abated by Peter's declaring that he himself was at fault in confining his master's attention to vertical rather than to horizontal considerations; but while he thus explained away the failure, he winked at the other servants and whispered aside to Plutarch that, though horticulture was his profession, he was a better shot ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... (Fig. 56). The teeth of these harrows are round, square or diamond-shaped spikes fastened into a wood or iron frame. The teeth are set in a vertical position or are inclined to the rear. These harrows are shallow in their action; they run easily but tend to compact the soil more than the other types and are therefore better adapted to loose soils and to finishing off after the work of the ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... enjoying the greatest reputation, which have, as an essential feature, a great number of rods which cannot possibly develop their strength, and might as well be of much smaller dimensions. These rods are the vertical and horizontal rods in the counterfort of the retaining wall shown at a, in Fig. 2. This retaining wall consists of a front curtain wall and a horizontal slab joined at intervals by ribs or counterforts. The manifest and only function ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... see the end of this vertical dive, for two more single-seaters were upon us. They plugged away while I remedied the stoppage, and several bullets ventilated the fuselage quite close to my cockpit. When my gun was itself again, I changed the drum of ammunition, and hastened to fire at the nearest ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... as used in land-surveying, levelling, &c., is well known. But the great theodolite, with its vertical circle and telescope adapted to the observation of the heavenly bodies, as used by nautical astronomers, commonly called an alt-azimuth instrument, is almost an observatory per se. By this alone, within three hours on each side of noon, the longitude, latitude, and magnetic variation of a position ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... vertical and gave a good hold, but when I'd got up eighteen or twenty feet I came to an awkward slab. It bulged out, but I found a hold for my hands and scrambled over the edge. I managed this because the alternative was falling off and shooting to the bottom of the coulee, but perhaps because I was weaker ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... door-frames and window-frames are of metal, rounded and impervious to draft. You are politely requested to turn a handle at the foot of your bed before leaving the room, and forthwith the frame turns up into a vertical position, and the bedclothes hang airing. You stand in the doorway and realize that there remains not a minute's work for any one to do. Memories of the fetid disorder of many an earthly bedroom after a night's ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... old Cornish mines, there are two ladders in the shaft, moved up and down alternately, see-saw, and by skipping from one to the other at right moments you ascended or descended, and where the drawing-up is by a gin or horse-whinn, with vertical drum; the Tisbury and Chilmark quarries in Wiltshire, the Spinkwell and Cliffwood quarries in Yorkshire; and every tunnel, and every recorded hole: for something urged within me, saying: 'You must be sure first, or you ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... prominently, the roundness of the shoulder giving place to a flattening or depression immediately below it, so that a straight-edge applied to the lateral aspect of the limb touches both the acromion and the lateral epicondyle. The vertical circumference of the shoulder is markedly increased; this test is easily made with a piece of tape or bandage and is compared with a similar measurement on the normal side—we lay great stress on this simple measure, as it is a most reliable aid in diagnosis. The head of the bone can usually be ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... and species, leads the observer who traverses distant lands and lofty mountains to the study of the geographical distribution of plants of the earth's surface, according to distance from the equator and vertical elevation above the sea. It is further necessary to investigate the laws which regulate the differences of temperature and climate, and the meteorological processes of the atmosphere, before we can ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... reader must enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these dreams of Oriental imagery and mythological tortures impressed upon me. Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlight, I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan. From kindred feelings I ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... place. Oh the delight, the blessedness of the languor of recovery, when one finds himself in a large airy room, with a dreamy indistinct recollection of great past suffering, endured in a small miserable vessel within the tropics, where you have been roasted one moment by the vertical rays of the sun, and the next annealed hissing hot by the salt sea spray;—in a broad luxurious bed, some cool sunny morning, with the fresh sea breeze whistling through the open windows that look into the piazza, and rustling the folds of the clean wire gauze musquitto ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott |
