"Mechanical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in fact, more a mechanical mixture of social elements than a well differentiated chemical compound. For in spite of the great variety of ingredients thrown into its caldron of destiny, as no affinity existed between them, no combination resulted. The power to fuse was wanting. Capability to evolve anything is not one ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... according to a creed—a creed which was at that time unknown in business. The new is always thought odd, and some of us are so constituted that we can never get over thinking that anything which is new must be odd and probably queer. The mechanical working out of our creed is constantly changing. We are continually finding new and better ways of putting it into practice, but we have not found it necessary to alter the principles, and I cannot imagine how it might ever be necessary ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... relate the exploration of America and the East, or will point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of printing and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and by gunpowder; and will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance all the instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid the dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and perpetuate the new ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... last two days he had talked to himself as he quickened his steps under the influence of his thoughts. He had never thought much hitherto, as he had given all his mind, all his simple faculties to his mechanical work. But now fatigue and this desperate search for work which he could not get, refusals and rebuffs, nights spent in the open air lying on the grass, long fasting, the contempt which he knew people with a settled abode felt for a vagabond, and that question which he was ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... gather the lower moral-classes on Saturday and Sunday nights—the little troubled men who are pictured in the comics as "the Consumer" or "the Public." They have made sure that the place has three qualifications: it is cheap; it imitates with a sort of shoddy and mechanical wistfulness the glittering antics of the great cafes in the theatre district; and—this, above all, important—it is a place where they can "take a nice girl," which means, of course, that every one has ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... we should have done at Verdun without Lieutenant Roeder, our mechanical officer. All the boys behaved splendidly, but Lieutenant Roeder had the tremendously difficult task of keeping the Section going when the rolling-stock was none too good, and fearful weather and ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... is called well-bred; that is, languid, silent, perfectly dressed, and insipid. Of her two children, Arthur was almost the exclusive favourite, especially after he became the heir to such brilliant fortunes. For she was so much the mechanical creature of the world, that even her affection was warm or cold in proportion as the world shone on it. Without being absolutely in love with her husband, she liked him—they suited each other; and (in spite ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... insight into many kinds of literature suited to his varied tastes and temperament. In addition, however, to the hours spent in reading, he and his brother John found endless delight in turning the loft of an outhouse adjoining their yard into a sort of mechanical factory. Here they contrived, by saving up all their pence (the only pocket-money that came to them), to make crackers and other simple fireworks, and to turn old keys into toy cannon, besides making a large variety of articles for practical domestic purposes. Thus he cultivated ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... immortalized this vision in a poem, giving utterance to an irrepressible emotion, but still exhibiting the delicate lines of a beautifully designed composition." The other Germans are usually so taken up with technical and mechanical questions that they leave no room for aesthetic considerations. Whether Cynewulf wrote the poem or not,—and the probabilities favor his authorship, though we may not hesitate to say with Morley, "I don't know,"—it is certainly the work of a gifted Christian poet, who reverences the cross ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... in right of its metre only, they judge to be such rather by courtesy than by kind, on an apprehension that it costs the writer little trouble, that he has only to give his lines their prescribed number of syllables, and so far as the mechanical part is concerned, all is well. Were this true, they would have reason on their side; for the author is certainly best entitled to applause who succeeds against the greatest difficulty, and in verse that calls for the most artificial ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... properly speaking, may be termed his own; in which he introduced more cool tints into the shadows and flesh, approaching nearer to nature than the universal glow of Giorgione." After stating what little is known of the mechanical means employed by Titian in the colouring of his pictures, Sir Abraham observes: "Titian's grand secret of all, appears to have consisted in the unremitting exercise of application, patience, and perseverance, joined to an enthusiastic ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... abyss and fixed on the opposing hill, and as the long curve before me was diminished by successive sharp advances, still my heart was caught half-way in every breath, and whatever it is that moves a man went uncertainly within me, mechanical and half-paralysed. The great height with that narrow unprotected ribbon across it was more than I ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... said, on leaving his eastern home, after peace had been declared, for the then verge of civilization—the Ohio. Here the soldier lived to see the wilderness blossom like the rose, and here he died, grieving that infirmity prevented his flying from the din of the sledge hammer, and the busy hum of mechanical life. Mr. Duncan's father, in the vigor of manhood, crossed the Mississippi, and settled at the Cold Springs, a region then isolated from civilization, as the Ohio was many years before the white man had planted his foot west of the Alleghanies. But ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... chivalrous nature saw right threatened by might. In the Confederate navy under Commodore Pegram, in the Army of Northern Virginia under Longstreet, at the close of the war he was Chief Ordnance officer to General Fitzhugh Lee. But although the force of arms, of men, of money, of mechanical resources, of international support, had decided against the Confederacy, he refused to acknowledge permanent defeat for Southern ideals, and so cast his lot with those beside whom he had fought. His ambition was to help his adopted country in reconquering through journalism and sound ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... admiration for his great abilities, sagacity, and self-reliance, and disgust for his cruelties, his malice, his suspicions, and his tricks. He had no faith in virtue or disinterestedness, and trusted only to mechanical agencies—to the power of armies—to the principle of fear. He was not indifferent to literature, or the improvement of his nation; but war was alike his absorbing passion and his highest glory. Peter the Great was half a barbarian, and Charles ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... L. Horst, in his discussion on Leviticus XVii,-XXYi, and Ezekiel (Colmar, 1881), has strikingly shown that the mechanical style of criticism in which Dillmann even surpasses his predecessor Knobel, is not equal to the problem presented by the Law of Holiness. He goes on, however, to an attempt to save, by modifying it, the old Strassburg view ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... but the briefest span. His motor had begun again to splutter, in mechanical death. Then, with a sudden memory, sweat broke out on Bostwick's face. His gasolene was gone! He had thoroughly intended refilling his tank, having barely had a sufficient supply to run him from the claim to camp; and ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... out of the mud, and once more got afloat towards the middle of February following. This immense undertaking was accomplished by the indefatigable exertion and mechanical skill of her commander, Captain Kuper, C.B., assisted by Captain ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... and summer. There are no exceptions to this rule. If it storms, the outside blinds may be closed, but the windows must remain open. The city air is just as efficient for our purpose as is the air of any other vicinity—the point is, to get enough of it from a mechanical standpoint. The advantages from sending patients away, even under the old belief, were more than discounted by conditions incident to the new environment that were detrimental to their progress. Now ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... that they obey that commandment when they set a priest or a nun on the steps of the altar to repeat Ave Marias day and night. That is a way of praying without ceasing which we can all see to be mechanical and unworthy. But have we ever realised what this commandment necessarily reveals to us, as to what real prayer is? For if we are told to do a thing uninterruptedly, it must be something that can run unbroken through all the varieties of our legitimate ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... sat down rather suddenly on a Louis XIV chair which crackled. Several times he passed an ample hand over his features. A mechanical smile struggled to break out, but it was not the smile, any more than ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... not need strengthening, though his sense of humour might get the better of them for a moment; and of secular instruction he seems to have received as little from the one set of teachers as from the other. I do not suppose that the mental training at Mr. Ready's was more shallow or more mechanical than that of most other schools of his own or, indeed, of a much later period; but the brilliant abilities of Robert Browning inspired him with a certain contempt for it, as also for the average schoolboy intelligence to which it was apparently adapted. It must be for this reason that, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... how the retention of waste affects the system—how the deleterious effects are produced. There are three factors at work in this process, mechanical, gaseous and absorptive, the last named being infinitely the most pernicious. We will first consider ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... ever widening from the circumference towards the focus. In the case of a large mountain such fissures, whether filled with lava or otherwise, would be of great breadth towards the focus, or central crater, and could not fail to make manifest beyond dispute their mechanical origin. But no fissures of the kind here referred to are, as a matter of fact, to be observed. Those which do exist are too insignificant and too irregular in direction to be ascribed to such an origin; so that the views of Von Buch and Davy must be dismissed, ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... flash of a clenched fist in the lamp light knocks his companion into the gutter. Down the street he sees rows of tall smoke-begrimed brick buildings hanging black and ominous against the sky. At the end of a street a huge mechanical apparatus lifts cars of coal and dumps them roaring and rattling into the bowels of a ship that lies tied ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... in Bacon's sense, but a new Nature, the existence of which is dependent upon men's efforts, which is subservient to their wants, and which would disappear if man's shaping and guiding hand were withdrawn. Every mechanical artifice, every chemically pure substance employed in manufacture, every abnormally fertile race of plants, or rapidly growing and fattening breed of animals, is a part of the new Nature created by science. Without it, the most ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... a scale of the most magnificent proportions. These experiments were made in a large building which was especially built for this object. It contained every facility for his various new designs, and in it he anticipated many advances in electrical science and in mechanical devices, which have made the civilization of our day so remarkable. I recall distinctly as a boy his ingenious approximation to the telephone, and even the recent advances in wireless telegraphy, which has been the instrumentality by which ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... little farther along under the arcades was the stall where Mademoiselle la Pierre, the Prussian giantess, could be seen for a silver piece. Next to this place of amusement was a small salon containing a mechanical billiard-table, over which a billiard-ball, when adroitly struck, would roll, touching the door of a little gilded chateau and causing the images of celebrated personages to appear at each of the windows, to the huge delight of the easily ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... endeavouring to unveil them. He therefore would not suffer his mind to rest upon any inquiry in regard to the past, till the emotions which it might produce could be indulged unwatched; and, applying to the mechanical business of the pen, he wrote on to the conclusion, and then demanded, simply, "To whom am ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... looked rather blank. "Too different Johnsons, I think, my dear. But perhaps you didn't mean the Elizabethans; perhaps you mean the dramatists of the other Johnson's time. Well, I like Sheridan pretty well, though his wit strikes me as mechanical, and I really prefer Goldsmith; in his case, I prefer his Vicar of Wakefield, and his poems to his plays. Plays are not very easy reading, unless they are the very best. Shakespeare's are the only plays that one ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... up, like an enraged elephant from the jungle, scatter all the conventionalities of our training, and all the smooth and automaton-like operations of our minds to the winds. As I stood there, listening to the dead-level, unimpassioned, mechanical voice of the phonograph, pouring forth those deadly sentences, I realized for the first time what the sunny-haired ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... Another mechanical Method of making great Men, and adding Dignity to Kings and Queens, is to accompany them with Halberts and Battle-axes. Two or three Shifters of Scenes, with the two Candle-snuffers, make up a compleat Body of Guards upon the English Stage; and by the Addition of a few Porters ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... shells, I have been able to turn this propensity to good account; by placing them within their reach, the ants in a few days will remove every vestige of the mollusc from the innermost and otherwise inaccessible whorls; thus avoiding all risk of injuring the enamel by any mechanical process. ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... which seemed to have lain for ages in its present position. Yet under that stone was the end of the wheel's axle with cogwheels rigged to pass on the power engendered by the wheel to some mechanical contrivance ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... white apartment three black figures stood about a central glitter of crystal and silver. At once the aged, slightly mechanical voice of Don Balthasar rose thinly, putting himself and his house ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... as the 'education sponge method,' and was first described by Dr. D. J. Hamilton, of Edinburgh, in 1881. It has frequently been used in America since then. The sponge really acts in a mechanical manner to support the new finger-tissue that is developed. The meshes are filled in by growing tissue, and as it grows the tissue absorbs part of the sponge, which is itself an animal tissue and acts like catgut. Part of it is also ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... may not the fine morality of the Sacred Scriptures be engraven on the minds of the young? I believe the arm of the assassin may be often stayed by the lessons of his early life. When I see the village school, and the tattered scholars, and the aged master or mistress teaching the mechanical art of reading or writing, and thinking that they are teaching that alone, I feel that the aged instructor is protecting life, insuring property, fencing the altar, guarding the throne, giving space and liberty to all the fine powers ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... a piano-player fan, contending that when the principles of beautiful tone production are understood, mechanical means will probably come nearer to perfection than the human hand. Mr. Arthur Whiting, considering the horseless pianoforte some time ago, was also enthusiastic. The h. p. is entirely self-possessed, and has even more platform imperturbability ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... suggested that the great wings were a part of some ingenious mechanical device, for the limitations of the human mind, which is always loath to accept aught beyond its own little experience, would not permit him to entertain the idea that the creatures might be naturally ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Gordon Makimmon drove the stage between Greenstream and Stenton. At dawn he left Greenstream, arriving in Stenton at the end of day; the following morning he re-departed for Greenstream. This mechanical, monotonous routine satisfied his need without placing too great a strain on his energy; he enjoyed rolling over the summer roads or in the crisp clear sunlight of winter; he liked the casual converse ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... greater one and the number of complete cures will also be increased in a short time. Formerly tuberculous inflammation of the spine was treated as follows: the abscesses were opened and antiseptics carefully applied: mechanical apparatus and corsets were used to aid in a natural cure. These apparatus will surely be of inestimable value at the application of ...
— Prof. Koch's Method to Cure Tuberculosis Popularly Treated • Max Birnbaum
... there is small hope for your play as a play if you haven't some small idea in it somewhere and somehow, even if it is hidden—it is sometimes better for you if it is hidden, but it must of course be integral. Some ideas are mechanical. Then they are no good. These are the ideas for which the author does all the work, instead of letting the ideas do the work for him. One should write what one sees, but observe under the surface. It is a mistake to look at the reflection of the sky in the water of theatrical convention. Instead, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... me?" Indeed, this behaviour by no means detracted from the merit of the deed, or shortened by a single day the term of indulgence, in the estimation of the Italians. Their understanding of devotion and ours are totally different. With us devotion is a mental act; with them it is a mechanical act, strictly so. The mind may be absent, asleep, dead; it is devotion nevertheless. These peasants had undertaken to climb Pilate's staircase on their knees; not to give devout or reverent feelings into the bargain: they had done all they engaged to do, and ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... both get into habits—sometimes apart, sometimes in conjunction. Nowadays we seat the body to work the intellect, even in its lower form of mechanical labor: it is your clod that toddles about laboring. The Peripatetics did not endure: their method was not suited to man's microcosm. Bodily movements fritter mental attention. We sit at the feet of Gamaliel, or, as some call him, Tyndal; and we sit to Bacon and Adam Smith. But, when we are standing ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... In fact all the mechanical preparations were clumsy and inartistic, and the final scenes of the execution, therefore, revolting in the extreme. When the death-caps were all drawn over the faces of the prisoners, and they stood in line in the awful suspense between absolute life and immediate death, a man at the neck of ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... determining by actual tests the strength and value of all kinds of iron, steel, and other metals which may be submitted to them or by them procured, and to prepare tables which will exhibit the strength and value of said materials for constructive and mechanical purposes, and to provide for the building of a suitable machine for establishing such tests, the machine to be set up and maintained at the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... the self-made men of America. The third printer, Johnson, having a wife in England, was "brought up" and bound over before the court not to seduce the affections of the daughter of printer No. 2. The next Bostonians who tried their hands at the mechanical part of book-making—the printing and binding—were two of the most prominent citizens; Captain Green, a worthy man, the father of nineteen children by one wife and eleven by another, and rich, ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... money being pressing, he went to work in one of the local stores, selling behind the counter. If his father had lived he would, probably, have gone away after finishing high school and perhaps, if by that time the mechanical ability which he possessed had shown itself, he might even have gone to some technical school or college. In that case Jed Winslow's career might have been very, very different. But instead he went to selling groceries, boots, shoes, dry goods ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... compunction to turn both Charles and herself to his own profit.... Well, she thought, he might try, but he could not prevent either of them from making their reputations, and neither would ever sink to the mechanical docility of London players. ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... scene. His life, until the Colonel had recognized him as an acquaintance he had made at the house of a friend some years before, had been that of a recluse, the object of his retirement being to perfect some mechanical invention upon which he was engaged. He had soon developed into a friend of the family, and I had found him firmly installed as such when I made my appearance ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... the mechanical end of the business. It may interest some to learn that the photo-play, as seen in the theatre, is not taken all at once, nor in the order in which the scenes are seen as ...
— The Moving Picture Girls in War Plays - Or, The Sham Battles at Oak Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... she had since her marriage altered considerably in the right direction. She used to be a little dry, a little stiff, and a little stately. To the last I should be far from objecting, were it not that her stateliness was of the mechanical sort, belonging to the spine, and not to a soul uplift. Now it had left her spine and settled in a soul that scorned the low and loved the lowly. Her step was lighter, her voice more flexible, her laugh much merrier and more frequent, for now ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... they were as large as any ants he has ever seen, black and moving with a steady deliberation very different from the mechanical fussiness of the common ant. About one in twenty was much larger than its fellows, and with an exceptionally large head. These reminded him at once of the master workers who are said to rule over the leaf-cutter ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... who by this time was scanning the mechanical toys on the great center tables. "Why don't you come and see? We will be crowded away from the best ...
— Dorothy Dale's Queer Holidays • Margaret Penrose
... commonly due to an attempt to understand life without any attempt to understand it in relation to God. It is like an attempt to understand a work of art without an attempt to understand the artist, to estimate in terms of mechanical effort, rather than in terms of mind. A work of art means what the artist means when he creates it: life means what God means in His creation and government of it, and it is hopeless to expect to understand it without reference to the mind ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... himself immediately with mechanical thoroughness. He filled his tub with cold water, undressed and plunged into it, dipping his head under half a dozen times. Then he rubbed down with the roughest towel he could find, gave himself a vigorous massage from head to feet, took a sharp turn ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... fool. Moreover, on leaving Rouen, he and I had joined forces. Sitting beside him in the coupe, I had driven the car with his hands—after a little practice—with astonishing results. In two days we had, we prided ourselves, raised such collaboration from the ranks of the Mechanical to the society of the Fine Arts. My part was comparatively easy. Sinking his initiative he had more nearly converted himself into an intelligent piece of mechanism than I would have believed possible. It would, of course, be vain to suggest that Pong would ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... ever actually walked the earth [Footnote: Of course the bugaboo creature called 'the sceptic' in the logic-books, who dogmatically makes the statement that no statement, not even the one he now makes, is true, is a mere mechanical toy—target for the rationalist shooting-gallery— hit him and he turns a summersault—yet he is the only sort of relativist whom my colleagues appear able to imagine to exist.] has denied the regulative character in his own thinking ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... walls. The Turks rushed to the edge of the ditch, attempted to fill the enormous chasm and to build a road to the assault. In the attack, as well as in the defence, ancient and modern artillery was employed. Cannon and mechanical engines, the bullet and the battering-ram, gunpowder and Greek fire, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... baby, which settled the surgeon business forever. Now listen, boy! You've got the nerve—plenty of men have that—but you've also got the fingers, which few men have. With your touch and your steady nerve and your mechanical ingenuity—I've seen your machines, boy—you can be a great surgeon! But you must know your subject. You must think, dream, sleep, eat, drink bones and muscles and sinews and nerves. Push everything else aside!" he cried, waving his great ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... unknown ages. For a life of instinctive impulse, we shall titan receive a life in which impulse is ever parallel with the highest law, and, doing only what we would, we shall do only what we ought. For energy which wanes as the years wax, and delight in action which is soon worn down into mechanical routine of toil, there will be bestowed strength akin to His 'who fainteth not, neither is weary.' All of which maturity and old age robbed us is given back in nobler form. All the limitation and weakness which they brought, the coldness, the monotony, the torpor, the weariness, will drop away. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... Two sets of acquaintances. Grateful patients and loyal voters, and I've got to keep solid with both outfits, especially the wives and mothers. They're the people. So it's drums, and dolls, and sheep on wheels, and games, and monkeys on a stick, and the saleslady shows you a mechanical bear, and it costs too much, and you forget whether the Judge's second girl is Nellie or Susie, and—well, I'm just in for my annual circus this afternoon! You're in luck. Christmas don't trouble ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... prevent anyone entering the place were the most elaborate and ingenious I had ever seen. Even if any person learnt the secret of draining the lake, the shaft leading to the mysterious subterranean place was unapproachable by reason of this extraordinary mechanical device. ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... blossoming clematis? A finely organized sentence should throb and palpitate like the most delicate vibrations of the summer air. We talk of literature as if it were a mere matter of rule and measurement, a series of processes long since brought to mechanical perfection: but it would be less incorrect to say that it all lies in the future; tried by the out-door standard, there is as yet no literature, but only glimpses and guideboards; no writer has yet succeeded in sustaining, through more than some single occasional sentence, that fresh and perfect ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... man, releasing Montparnasse, put his purse in the latter's hand; Montparnasse weighed it for a moment, after which he allowed it to slide gently into the back pocket of his coat, with the same mechanical precaution as ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... of coolies, with baskets on their heads, are bringing sand from the summer-dry edges of the bed of the Cooum river. In the foreground of the picture, scores of chattering village-labourers, from Triplicane and other hamlets hard by, are working under the directions of the mechanical employees of the Company, chipping stone, mixing lime, sawing timber, carrying bricks and stones and mortar, or laying them adroitly in place, with little dependence on ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... of the mass, the Sacrament was to be carried to a sick person. Touched by unusual devotion at this perilous time, the whole assembly rose to escort the procession on its way, passing out slowly, group after group, as if by mechanical instinct, the more reluctant led on by the general consent. Gaston, the last lingerer, halting to let others proceed quietly before him, turned himself about to gaze upon the deserted church, half tempted ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... renewal of the outer layer of the cuticle. As a result of this, the sense of touch became for a while more acute, and was at times unpleasantly delicate. This seemed to me, as I first thought of its cause, a mere mechanical result, but I incline to suspect now that it was in a measure due to a true increase in capacity to feel, because I found also that the sister sense of pain was heightened. Slight things hurt me, and a rather gentle pinch gave undue discomfort. No doubt a part of this ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... mano f. hand. mansedumbre f. meekness. manta blanket. manteca butter. mantenedor m. maintainer. mantilla a feminine wrap for head and shoulders. Manuel Immanuel. manuscrito manuscript. manana to-morrow, morrow, morning; pasado —— day after to-morrow. maquinal mechanical. mar m. & f. sea. maravilla marvel, wonder. maravillar vr. to wonder, be amazed marcha march. marchar to march; vr. to go away. marchitar to wither. marchito faded. Maria Mary. marido husband. marinero sailor. marisco shellfish. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... am the Queen of this land and that all the troops thou hast seen, whether horse or foot, are women, there is no man amongst them; for in this our state the men delve and sow and ear and occupy themselves with the tillage of the earth and the building of towns and other mechanical crafts and useful arts, whilst the women govern and fill the great offices of state and bear arms." At this the youth marvelled with exceeding marvel and, as they were in discourse, behold, in came the Wazir who was a tall gray-haired ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... the process whereby the food we eat is turned into material fit to be assimilated by the blood. It begins in the mouth by the mechanical grinding and crushing of the food, and the chemical conversion of the starchy part into sugar, in which form alone it can be assimilated. This conversion is carried out by the saliva. Hence the necessity for thorough mastication, even of sloppy foods that do not ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... scientific and mechanical interests; one of the first to adopt vaccination, applying it to his own children, and recommending it in the parish of Clapham, where he was rector in 1800; the principal founder of the Church Missionary Soc., 1798, the ...
— Noteworthy Families (Modern Science) • Francis Galton and Edgar Schuster
... football which shaped my end. Owing to my skill in the game, I took a post-graduate at the Sheffield Scientific School, that the team might have my services for an extra two years. That led to my knowing a little about mechanical engineering, and when I left the "quad" for good I went into the Alton Railroad shops. It wasn't long before I was foreman of a section; next I became a division superintendent, and after I had stuck to that for a time I was appointed superintendent ...
— The Great K. & A. Robbery • Paul Liechester Ford
... as a Task, and pouting and reading good Books for a Week together. Much of this I take to proceed from the Indiscretion of the Books themselves, whose very Titles of Weekly Preparations, and such limited Godliness, lead People of ordinary Capacities into great Errors, and raise in them a Mechanical Religion, entirely distinct from Morality. I know a Lady so given up to this sort of Devotion, that tho' she employs six or eight Hours of the twenty-four at Cards, she never misses one constant Hour of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... structure, but, although he possessed iron, he had no smith's anvil, or hammer, or tongs, or bellows, wherewith to forge it. In these circumstances he commenced one of the greatest pieces of work ever undertaken by man—greatest, not only because of the mechanical difficulties overcome, but because of the influence for good that the ship, when completed, had upon the natives of the Southern Seas, as well as its reflex influence in exciting admiration, emulation, and enthusiasm in ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne
... on any account, without having competent advice on the subject, use iron instruments, or mechanical supports of any kind: the ankles are generally, by such artificial supports, made worse, in consequence of the pressure causing a further dwindling away and enfeebling of the ligaments of the ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... them both to Kitty's cell, and left them alone with her. She was seated on the bed in the corner of the cell, in an attitude of deepest dejection. When they entered she looked up in a mechanical sort of manner, and Vandeloup could see how worn and pinched-looking her face was. Pierre went to one end of the cell and leaned against the wall in an indifferent manner, while Vandeloup stood right in front of the unhappy woman. Kitty arose when ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... out this scheme in the first instance required a complete acquaintance with the text, a clear idea of the sequence of events, an ingenious head to plot out the work, and no small amount of purely mechanical skill to bring it to a ...
— Little Gidding and its inmates in the Time of King Charles I. - with an account of the Harmonies • J. E. Acland
... irritate him, for the Frenchman's mental wanderings increased with the darkness. What made him rouse one with his awful laughter? These spells of walking insensibility were pleasanter far. At last the big man fell. To Willard's mechanical endeavours to help he spoke sleepily, but with the sanity of a ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... defined and esteemed merely as habit, and (as it is expressed in the prize essay of Cochius) as a long custom acquired by practice of morally good actions. For, if this is not an effect of well-resolved and firm principles ever more and more purified, then, like any other mechanical arrangement brought about by technical practical reason, it is neither armed for all circumstances nor adequately secured against the change that may be wrought by ...
— The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics • Immanuel Kant
... copying; unnecessary maledictions, hissed, rather than spoken, in the heat of business; and especially by a continual discontent with the height of the table where he worked. Though of a very ingenious mechanical turn, Nippers could never get this table to suit him. He put chips under it, blocks of various sorts, bits of pasteboard, and at last went so far as to attempt an exquisite adjustment by final pieces of folded blotting paper. But no invention would answer. If, for the sake of easing ...
— Bartleby, The Scrivener - A Story of Wall-Street • Herman Melville
... single long deepening shadow that precedes daybreak, then grey lights dawned on the far horizon, paling the stars to points of pearl upon dim purple mists. Worn and weary, Rosemary slept until she was called to begin the day's dreary round of toil, as mechanical as the ticking ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... as that! Which town, may I ask?' he said, with mechanical politeness, for his mind was running on what ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... the Menageries, a volume of the Transformations of Insects, and another of their Architectural Labours. The present, in well-chosen continuity of a novel plan of illustrating the Animal economy, is devoted to "an examination of Birds in the exercise of their mechanical arts of constructing Nests." "This work," observes the ingenious Editor, "is the business of their lives—the duty which calls forth that wonderful ingenuity, which no experience can teach, and which no human skill ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... of the 'old duets with her mother. She saw her mother's breast lift in a mechanical effort to try imaginary notes, as if doubtful of her capacity, more at home in the dumb deep sigh they fell to. Her mother's heroism made her a sacred woman to the thoughts of the girl, overcoming wonderment at ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Chinese live. Those people are known there under the name of Sangleys. Although heathen they have been allowed to reside there for the sake of commerce and because they are employed in almost all the mechanical trades. It cannot be denied that that nation fomented and maintained with aid and cunning the rebellions of the Indians which we have just related. That is apparent, because, when the alcalde-mayor Don Francisco Pulido was killed in Pangasinan, some Sangleys were found among the rebels, who contrived ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... little down the street and stood in the same position staring into the Repos du Poilu, where a large sign "American spoken" blocked up half the window. Two officers passed. His hand snapped up to the salute automatically, like a mechanical signal. It was nearly dark. After a while he began to feel serious coolness in the wind, shivered and started to wander aimlessly down ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... in a mechanical way, and had just placed my hand on the instrument, when I was thrilled by a call which I would have recognized among a thousand. Others heard and identified it also, and held their breath. The next instant this ...
— The Telegraph Messenger Boy - The Straight Road to Success • Edward S. Ellis
... by introspection, we cannot discover exactly what the mind is. No one knows what electricity is, though nearly everyone uses it in one form or another. We study the dynamo, the motor, and the conductors through which electricity manifests itself. We observe its effects in light, heat, and mechanical power, and so learn the laws which govern its operations. But we are almost as far from understanding its true nature as were the ancients who knew nothing of its uses. The dynamo does not create the electricity, but only furnishes the conditions ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... Eileen found herself practically a prisoner in her own home. She received the visitors invited by her father at first with a mechanical courtesy, but later on with an assumption of cheerfulness that deceived her father and even to more extent the doctor. She had begun to realise that she would never shake off the vigilance which surrounded her until she had convinced ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... great peace round him as he stood there, stroking one of the uprights with a kind of mechanical tenderness; the men were silent as they saw the two monks there, and watched to see what they ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... get such desertion and quiet and imperturbability. Monnickendam has, however, a treasure that few English towns can boast—its charming little stadhuis tower, one of the prettiest in Holland, with a happy peal of bells, and mechanical horses in action once an hour; while the tram line running right down the main street ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... protestations never to leave the yacht again, R—— and I wore the night away. P—— remained impregnable to the attacks of bugs, fleas, and mosquitoes; and while he told us, in a sonorous language of his own, how profoundly he slept, he sometimes gave mechanical signs of feeling by scratching obstreperously his legs and arms, and slapping himself ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... up of two elements that never mix any more than oil and water mix. A religion is a mechanical mixture, not a chemical combination, of morality and dogma. Dogma is the science of the unseen: the doctrine of the unknown and unknowable. And in order to give this science plausibility, its promulgators ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... and seven months, but one day, when the south, north, and east platform-steps were already finished—it was in the July of the third year, and near sunset—as I left off work, instead of going to the tent where my dinner lay ready, I walked down to the ship—most strangely—in a daft, mechanical sort of way, without saying a word to myself, an evil-meaning smile of malice on my lips; and at midnight I was lying off Mitylene, thirty miles to the south, having bid, as I thought, a last farewell to all those toils. I was going to ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... personal relations, neither appropriation nor surrender, neither egoism nor altruism, nor indeed any precisely measured mechanical mixture of the two, will solve the problem. Here the recognition of a common good, a commonwealth in which each person has an equal worth with every other, is the only satisfactory solution. "Be ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... in quantity, but in use. You need not make thrones or golden gates with it unless you like, but assuredly you can't do anything else with it. You can't make knives of it, nor armour, nor railroads. The gold won't cut you, and it won't carry you: put it to a mechanical use, and you destroy it at once. It is quite true that in the greatest artists, their proper artistical faculty is united with every other; and you may make use of the other faculties, and let the artistical one ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... and labor was one of the bad effects of slavery; but he thought it attended with many excellent consequences. It did not apply to all kinds of labor—not, for example, to farming. He himself had often held the plow; so had his father. Manufacturing and mechanical labor was not degrading. It was only manual labor—the proper work of slaves. No white person could descend to that. And it was the best guarantee to equality among the whites. It produced an unvarying level among them. It not only did not ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... only, since they were centres of nothing but 'manufacture,' and served no purpose but that of the gambling market, they have left less signs of their existence than London. Of course, the great change in the use of mechanical force made this an easy matter, and some approach to their break-up as centres would probably have taken place, even if we had not changed our habits so much: but they being such as they were, no sacrifice ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... to reading aloud in the sick room, my experience is, that when the sick are too ill to read to themselves, they can seldom bear to be read to. Children, eye-patients, and uneducated persons are exceptions, or where there is any mechanical difficulty in reading. People who like to be read to, have generally not much the matter with them; while in fevers, or where there is much irritability of brain, the effort of listening to reading aloud has often brought on delirium. I speak with great diffidence; because there is an almost universal ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... with which the higher dramatic works abound, is more loudly called for in this than it has been in any former period of British history. We are no longer in the age of enthusiasm. The days of chivalry have gone by—and gone by, it is feared, never to return. We are in the age of commerce and the mechanical arts. Material appliances, creature comforts,—stimulants to the senses—now form the great moving power of society. Gain is every where sought after with the utmost avidity; but it is sought not for any lofty object, but on account of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... the action of plaster is very complex, and that it promotes the distribution of both magnesia and potash in the ground, exercising a chemical action upon the soil which extends to any depth of it; and that, in consequence of the chemical and mechanical modifications of the earth, particles of certain nutritive elements become accessible and available to plants ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... that it would be of such immense importance to them in many ways. It would be of great service for their tableware; they could use it for their electric work, which interested them more than any branch to which their time had been given, among the mechanical arts; with that they could make thermometers and testing instruments; and give their house the air of a modern home, because windows ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... masturbating, and also women masturbating men. Among the Tamils of Ceylon masturbation is said to be common. In Cochin China, Lorion remarks, it is practiced by both sexes, but especially by the married women.[188] Japanese women have probably carried the mechanical arts of auto-erotism to the highest degree of perfection. They use two hollow balls about the size of a pigeon's egg (sometimes one alone is used), which, as described by Joest, Christian, and others,[189] are made of very thin leaf of brass; one is empty, the other (called the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... young that we must look if the love of music is to be fostered and encouraged in the coming years. "Let the rising generation become thoroughly well acquainted with the best Musical works through the medium of concert-lectures, the mechanical piano-player, municipal, hotel, and garden concerts. Let them follow up their knowledge with reading about Musicians' lives, work, and influence. Throughout all this instruction—and from the very first—let ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... binding together the more delicate tissues of the body. It has retained more of its rights and privileges, and consequently possesses a greater amount of both biological and pathological initiative. In many respects purely mechanical in its function, fastening the muscles to the bones, the bones to each other, giving toughness to the great skin-sheet, and swinging in hammock-like mesh the precious brain-cell or potent liver-lobule, it still possesses and exercises ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... goods and textiles, agricultural products, mechanical goods, phosphates and chemicals, ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... quantity of pottery was also unearthed, dating from the fourth century. The method by which the plan of a pyramid was laid out by the ancient Egyptians was discovered in this excavation, and the designs show considerable mechanical ingenuity in their execution, and afford a perfect system for maintaining the symmetry of the building itself, no matter how uneven the ground on which it was ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... humus of the soil are made up of a great variety of substances. The larger part of these act simply as a mechanical support for the plants and also serve to bring about certain physical conditions. Only a very small portion of these substances serve as the direct food of plants and the chemical conditions of these substances are ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... without offense that in the course of time the personnel has apparently worked down to the level of vulgarity defined by the ways and means of this modern warfare; which means the level on which runs a familiar acquaintance with large and complex mechanical apparatus, railway and highway transport and power, reenforced concrete, excavations and mud, more particularly mud, concealment and ambush, and unlimited deceit and ferocity. It is not precisely ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... remarks, as she congratulated her father on his happiness; yet it was not like herself, and Natalie could see, what Mr. Santon in his blindness of joy did not discern,—there was no heart in his daughter's mechanical tones. Winnie had not as yet seen her intended mother-in-law; she might be all that could be desired of one standing in that peculiar relation, and she might be otherwise; it was not that which had quelled the buoyant spirits of ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... cathartic remedy in a cathartic dose for constipation; in that case the reaction, if reaction follows, is not in the right direction, consequently the constipation is often aggravated. I have hardly ever seen, excepting in cases of mechanical obstruction, a severe and troublesome case of constipation that had not been caused by the use of cathartic remedies. So if we give an opiate, or an astringent, for a diarrhoea, we can see that it is a direct effort to restrain the disease ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... I cried, seizing a dessert-knife which was on my bureau. I rushed forward with a mechanical movement upon my little Comte de Toulouse, whom I snatched from the hands of his father, and I was on the verge of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the room with the quick strides but the mechanical purposelessness of embarrassment. Then he stiffened and stood erect. Yet in spite of all this he was strikingly picturesque and unconventional in his Highland dress, worn with the freedom of long custom and a certain lithe, barbaric ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... immediate growths of nature or the immediate necessaries of man. Now the arte facta are sought by the higher classes of society in a proportion incalculably beyond that in which they are sought by the lower classes; and therefore it is that the vast increase of mechanical powers has not cheapened life and pleasure to the poor as it has done to the rich. In some respects, no doubt, it has done so, as in giving cotton dresses to maid-servants, and penny gin to all. A ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... lastly, as regards such serial homology as is exemplified by the backbone of man, there are also several objections to Mr. Spencer's mechanical explanation. ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... life in a Camp of Instruction requires a peculiar cast of mind. It requires a genuine liking for a tread-mill round of merely mechanical duties; it requiers a taste for rising in the chill and cheerless dawn, at the unwelcome summons of "reveille," to a long day filled with a tiresome routine of laborious drills alternating with tedious roll-calls, and wearisome parades and inspections; it requires pleased contentment ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... shirtsleeves; and he carried in one mottled hand the ruins of a palm-leaf fan, in the other a balled wet handkerchief which released an aroma of camphor upon the banana-burdened air. He bore evidences of inadequate adjustment after a disturbed siesta, but, exercising a mechanical cordiality, preceded himself into the room by a genial half-cough and a hearty, "Well-well-well," as if wishing to indicate a spirit ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... main, one must seek this and develop it for himself. A text-book can point out what constitutes good form, what is pleasing and impressive to the eye and to the ear, and, in a word, what make up the externals of a good delivery; but beyond these mechanical directions it cannot go. A student should observe the following fundamental directions as his first step toward becoming a successful speaker. Afterwards, he should cultivate earnestness, enthusiasm, perception, a sense of humor, and all other such qualities as go to make ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... The mechanical construction of a letter, whether social, friendly, or business, falls into six or seven parts. This arrangement has become established by the best custom. The divisions are ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... no doubt, then, that the Mound Builders were familiar with the use of copper, silver, and lead, and in all probability of iron. They possessed various mechanical contrivances. They were very probably acquainted with the lathe. Beads of shell have been found looking very much like ivory, and showing the circular striae, identical with those produced ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... consequence numerous improvements have been effected in it. The transition to the present portable form is due, partly to the substitution of silk and gingham for the heavy and troublesome oiled silk, which admitted of the ribs and frames being made much lighter, and also to the many ingenious mechanical improvements in the framework, chiefly by French and English manufacturers, many of which were patented, and to which we ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... of it. He knew that beyond the blue ranges of mountains, both to east and west, vast preparations were going forward. The North, the region of great population, of illimitable resources, of free access to the sea, and of mechanical genius that had counted for so much in arming her soldiers, was gathering herself for a supreme effort. The great defeats of the war's first period were to be ignored, and her armies were to come again, more numerous, better ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... quite dazed. Their mechanical, overbearing way was something she was unaccustomed to. It was like the jaws of a pair of insentient iron pincers. She rose, ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... his price, he went to an old-fashioned bureau, and opened one of those secret recesses which cannot for three minutes remain a secret to any investigator possessed of a tolerably accurate eye or a three-foot rule. From this hiding-place—which he evidently considered a triumph of mechanical art, worthy the cabinet of a D'Argenson or a Fouche—he produced a packet of faded yellow letters, about which there lurked a faint odour of dried rose-leaves and lavender, which seemed the very perfume of ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... reflection, he again forgot his formidable antagonist, and involuntarily raised his eyes. The bull, profiting by the momentary inattention, rushed upon the man; the latter, taken unawares, leaped backwards, and, by a mechanical movement, made a thrust with his sword. Several inches of the blade entered, but in the wrong place. The weapon met the bone; a furious movement of the bull made it rebound from the wound amidst a spout of blood, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... apologetic acquiescence the Young Electrician reached up a lean, clever, mechanical hand and smouched one more streak of black across his forehead in a desperate effort to reduce his tousled yellow hair to the particular smoothness that befitted the presence of a lady who owned a business block in ...
— The Indiscreet Letter • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... race. The incisores are thick and round, not, as usual, flattened into edges, but resembling truncated cones; the cuspidati are not pointed, but broad and flat on the masticating surface, like the neighbouring bicuspides. This may be attributable to mechanical attrition, depending on the nature of the food which the teeth are employed in masticating. The upper does not overlap the under jaw, but the teeth meet at their surfaces. This peculiarity of teeth has been noticed by Blumenbach as a characteristic of the Egyptian mummy; but he thinks the nature ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... the matter lies deeper; for it can be explained more clearly than appears at first sight. The power of inertia applied to bodies which may be moved by mechanical means only, becomes force of habit when applied to bodies which are moved by motives. The actions which we do out of sheer force of habit occur, as a matter of fact, without any individual separate motive exercised for the particular ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the morning with Sedley Taylor and Professor Stuart, M.P., an old friend of former visits, and inspected the mechanical laboratory and workshops. There were about seventy university men, more or less, engaged in these, and it was interesting to see English Cambridge adopting the same line which we have already taken at Cornell against so much opposition, and surprising to find the Cambridge ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... that city which is defended by a citadel which contains an abundant stock of rice and weapons,—which is protected with impenetrable walls and a trench, which teems with elephants and steeds and cars, which is inhabited by men possessed of learning and versed in the mechanical arts, where provisions of every kind have been well stored, whose population is virtuous in conduct and clever in business and consists of strong and energetic men and animals, which is adorned with many open squares and rows of shops, where the behaviour of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... in the explanation of the obscure text of his master, he was led into such frivolous distinctions, and tasteless propositions, that his works deserve inspection, as examples of the manner of a true mechanical critic. ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... window, and stood with his back to her. In one of the houses opposite, at a window on the same level, a girl was practising the violin; his eyes followed the mechanical movements of ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... into the roadway and soon the boring machines were busy again, eating into the coal; for those tireless arms of Robert's never halted. He swung the handle or wielded the pick or shovel, never taking a, rest, while the sweat streamed from his body working like some mechanical product for always in his mind he was calculating his chances for being able to blast it through the barrier ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... Some remnant of the traditional dairy thus survives in the stony streets that are separated so widely from the country. But here, beside the hay, the hedgerows, the bees, the flowers that precede the blackberries—here in the heart of the meadows the romance has departed. Everything is mechanical or scientific. From the refrigerator that cools the milk, the thermometer that tests its temperature, the lactometer that proves its quality, all is mechanical precision. The tins themselves are metal—wood, the old country material for almost every purpose, is eschewed—and ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... employment in some one of the mechanical departments of literature—the only region in which he could think to do anything. When the architect comes to necessity, it is well if stones are near, and the mason's hammer: if he be not the better mason that he is an architect, ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... number of themes for thought, of which the most insistent was the power some women had of drawing out the love of men. For the rest of the day her gardening became no more than a mechanical directing of the setting out of seedlings, while she meditated on the problem ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... place, I became convinced that the myriads of microscopic organisms which pervaded the water did not light up their tiny lamps in response to a mechanical shock, such as would be produced by agitation of the medium in which they floated. There was no breeze, at any time, nor was there the faintest indication of a ripple on the glassy surface of the sea. Between the flashes ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... continued to carry on the government, and to exercise hunting in all its branches; to teach his workers in gold and artificers of all kinds, his falconers, hawkers, and dog-keepers, to build houses majestic and good, beyond all the precedents of his ancestors, by his new mechanical inventions, to recite the Saxon books, and more especially to learn by heart the Saxon poems, and to make others learn them also; for he alone never desisted from studying, most diligently, to the best of his ability; he attended the mass and other daily services of religion: ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... it had been when they first saw this chamber. The breech of the huge cannon had cooled and its massive block was open. Tommy was there, fishing the radium capsule from the powdery residue in order that it might be used in exciting the next charge. A mechanical precision ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... that the object of perception, though composed of elements partly material, partly mental, yet exhibits both alike in a form modified by their relation to each other. The composition is not a mere mechanical juxtaposition, in which each part, though acting on the other, retains its own characteristics unchanged. It may be rather likened to a chemical fusion, in which both elements are present, but each of them is affected ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... scholarships, while dental and medical studies can be carried on concurrently. The course of study includes the passing of a Professional Preliminary Examination or Matriculation, followed by two years' mechanical work, and two years' hospital practice. The student can be articled to a qualified dental practitioner for mechanics, or can obtain tuition at the Dental Hospital. This branch includes the preparation of models, vulcanite and metal ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... it was impossible; and he looked again at the dark shore that they were passing, at the shimmering sea, and then at the bronzed backs of the warriors as they paddled on in their drowsy, mechanical way. ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... balcony; and there are white painted pillars that support the low roof, and these pillars make a kind of entrance to the passage which traverses the house from end to end. England—England clear and spotless! Nowhere do you find a trace of dust or disorder. The arrangement of things is somewhat mechanical. The curtains and wall-paper in the bedrooms are suggestive of trades people and housemaids; no hastily laid aside book or shawl breaks the excessive orderliness. Every piece of furniture is in its appointed ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... whether she were alive or dead, and I watched the horse trotting, interested in his shambling gait, or not at all interested in it—I do not know which. On occasions of great nervous tension one observes everything.... Everything I remembered best appeared with mechanical regularity; now it was a wood, a while afterward somebody's farmyard, later on a line of cottages, another wood, one of my own gate lodges. An old sawyer lived in it now—looking after it for me; and I hoped that the wheels of the car would not bring him out, for it ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... useful inventions, are not those which reflect the greatest honor on the human mind. It is to a mechanical instinct, which is found in many men, and not to true philosophy that ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... was as much amused as Crawford had been at seeing his sisters in their military attire. He fully approved of all Percy had done; and when he heard of the proposed dummies, he thought the idea excellent. While Crawford, who possessed a great deal of mechanical ingenuity, went in to assist Mrs Broderick, he hurried to the back of the house, where he found Mangaleesu and Kalinda employed in manufacturing Kaffir warriors. They had collected a number of poles and sticks, and had obtained from the storehouse a sufficient quantity of ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... sober as a Trappist monk; and his foremost impulse the next day was to plunge headlong into some physical labor which should not allow him a moment's interval of idleness. He found no labor to his taste; but he spent the day so actively, in the mechanical annihilation of the successive hours, that Gertrude's image found no chance squarely to face him. He was engaged in the work of self-preservation,—the most serious and absorbing work possible to man. Compared to the results here at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... spinal malady, had been hitherto dependent on her niece for one of the few pleasures she could enjoy, the pleasure of having the best new novels read to her as they came out. Discovering this, Arthur volunteered to relieve Miss Haldane, at intervals, in the office of reader. He was clever at mechanical contrivances of all sorts, and he introduced improvements in Mrs. Carbury's couch, and in the means of conveying her from the bedchamber to the drawing-room, which alleviated the poor lady's sufferings and brightened her gloomy life. With these claims on the gratitude ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... but recommends moderate ones as part of the physician's art. Asclepiades, in the time of Pompey the Great, called exercises the common aids of physic, and got great glory—and money, it is to be hoped—by various mechanical contrivances for the sick. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... as if she never wished to move again. She lay there counting the minutes that made the passing hours, counting them calmly, with an inexorable and almost cold self-possession. The process presently became mechanical, and she was able, at the same time, to dwell upon the events that had followed upon the discovery of the murdered woman by the tent: Androvsky's pulling aside of the door of the tent to find it empty, their short ride to the encampment close by, their rousing ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... Mosaic is so named from the tesselated pavements of the Romans, which being worked in a regular and mechanical manner, were called Opus musivum, opera quae ad amussim facta sunt. Hence the Italian musaico, the French mosaique, and our English mosaic. See "N. & Q.," Vol. iii., ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... at a little private hotel just across from the court house square with its scarlet geraniums and its pretty fountain. The house is filled with German civil engineers, mechanical engineers, and Herr Professors from the German academy. On Sunday mornings we have Pfannkuchen with currant jelly, and the Herr Professors come down to breakfast in fearful flappy German slippers. I'm the only creature in the place ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... mechanical memorizing, of the Catechism is of paramount import, Luther insisted that the instruction must be popular throughout. Preachers and fathers are urged to come down to the level of the children and to prattle with them, in order to bring the Christian fundamentals ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... elder stranger. "You seem a fine young springald, and at the right age to prosper, whether among men or women. What say you? I am a merchant, and want a lad to assist in my traffic; I suppose you are too much a gentleman to assist in such mechanical drudgery?" ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... acetic and trichloracetic acids, aldehyde and chloral, marsh gas and chloroform are pairs of compounds referable to the same type. He also postulated, with Regnault, the existence of "molecular or mechanical types" containing substances which, although having the same number of equivalents, are essentially different in characters. His unitary conceptions may be summarized: every chemical compound forms a complete whole, and cannot therefore ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... one could be found so blind to obvious inferences as to accept natural selection, "or the preservation of favoured machines," as the main means of mechanical modification, we might suppose him to argue much as follows:- "I can quite understand," he would exclaim, "how any one who reflects upon the originally simple form of the earliest jemmies, and observes the developments they have since attained ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... oaks on the Welbeck estate were transplanted thither under the fourth Duke's direction, a mechanical appliance being used ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... experiences; and old men grotesque in a dissolute senility; and sudden bursts of orchestral music, and simpering ballads, and comic refrains and crashing choruses; and lights, lingerie, picture-hats and short skirts; and over all, dominating all, the set, eternal, mechanical, bored smile ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett |
