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More "Disuse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sharpest of all the boys in Northbourne. Naturally sharp, that is to say, for he, in common with Alick Carnegy, was incorrigibly idle, and Ned's talent of ability was therefore allowed to rust from disuse. ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... succeeded; the cheerlessness of the little chamber turned her thoughts backwards to the years of girlhood, and when she had finished dressing she almost mechanically lit the fire and put the kettle to boil. Her childish dexterity returned, unimpaired by disuse. When Debby awoke, she awoke to a cup of tea ready for her to drink in bed—an unprecedented luxury, which she received ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... not the belly and the heart. Granted that the function romantic love has served has been necessary; that is no reason to conclude that it must always be necessary, that it is eternally necessary. There is such a thing as rudimentary organs which served functions long since fallen in disuse ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... the forerunner of a movement which took almost a hundred years to become generally accepted. We have been accustomed to say that Ericsson's armor-clad monitor revolutionized naval warfare; but the perfection of the torpedo is forcing the armor-clad ships into disuse, as they in their day thrust aside the old wooden frigates. The wise nation to-day, seeing how irresistible is the power of the torpedo, is abandoning the construction of cumbrous iron-clads, and building light, swift cruisers, that by speed and easy steering can avoid the submarine ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... embarked on the ocean of Indian affairs, and will probably make a long session. I went thither the other day to hear Charles Fox, contrary to a resolution I had made of never setting my foot there again. It is strange how disuse makes one awkward: I felt a palpitation, as if I were going to speak there myself. The object answered: Fox's abilities are amazing at so very early a period, especially under the circumstances of such a dissolute life. He was just arrived from ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... essential at the home table have fallen into disuse in camp. It is pardonable, and perhaps best, to bring on whatever you have cooked in the dish that it is cooked in, so as to prevent its ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... had to base his calculations partly upon the Bills of Mortality, which had been imperfectly begun under Elizabeth, but fell into disuse, and were revived, as a weekly record of the number of deaths, beginning on the 29th of October, 1603; notices of diseases first appeared in them in 1629. The weekly bills were published every Thursday, and any householder could have them supplied to him ...
— Essays on Mankind and Political Arithmetic • Sir William Petty
... violence and arms. When he saw that their minds, as having been rendered ferocious by military life, could not be reconciled to those principles during the continuance of wars, considering that a fierce people should be mollified by the disuse of arms, he erected at the foot of Argiletum a temple of Janus, as an index of peace and war; that when open, it might show the state was engaged in war, and when shut, that all the neighbouring nations were at peace with it. Twice only since the reign of Numa hath ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... foil, the idea being that the name was given to the "button" at the point. Now the earliest foils and fleurets were not buttoned; first, because they were pointless, and secondly, because the point was not used in early fencing. It was not until gunpowder began to bring about the disuse of heavy armour that anybody ever dreamt of thrusting. The earliest fencing was hacking with sword and buckler, and the early foil was a rough sword-blade quite unlike the implement we now use. Fleuret meant in Old French a sword-blade not yet polished and ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... door for her with an old-world politeness which disuse had rendered a little rusty: then, with an air of getting back to business after a pleasant but frivolous interlude, he took up the paper-weights once more and placed the ruler with nice care on ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... only." Thus when the children in a little Oxfordshire village lately beheld a ghost, "dressed in a long narrow gown of woollen, with bandages round the head and chin," it is clear that the ghost was much more than a hundred years old, for the act "had fallen into disuse long before it was repealed in 1814." But this has little to do with parish registers. The addition made to the duties of the keeper of the register in 1678 was this—he had to take and record the affidavit of ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... disuse of Government issues of paper-money from that time till recent years, there had long been in some of the cities of China a large use of private and local promissory notes as currency. In Fuchau this was especially the case; bullion was ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... and hope of gain, Or to disuse me from the queasy pain Of being belov'd, and loving, or the thirst Of honour, or fair ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... leaders, Isaac Penington and Thomas Ellwood. At the actual time of burial there were no gravestones, but these have since been added. Though the house as a regular place of meeting has long fallen into disuse, there is still an annual gathering of Quakers there in memory of ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... he stood less proudly for his nation. Indeed, he flushed. He remembered articles girding at the policy of peace at any price, and half felt that Mrs. Lovell had meant to crown him with a Quaker's hat. His title fell speedily into disuse; but, "Yes, France," and "No, France," continued, his effort being to fix the epithet to frivolous allusions, from which her ingenuity rescued ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... possible that brattle has fallen into disuse through too indiscriminate application. After Burns's famous poem the word can establish itself only in the sense of a scurrying dry noise: it ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... fell beast, never at peace, Who coming o'er against me, by degrees Impell'd me where the sun in silence rests. While to the lower space with backward step I fell, my ken discern'd the form one of one, Whose voice seem'd faint through long disuse of speech. When him in that great desert I espied, "Have mercy on me!" cried I out aloud, "Spirit! or living man! what e'er thou be!" He answer'd: "Now not man, man once I was, And born of Lombard parents, Mantuana both ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... of making heavy applications of fresh burned lime to stiff limestone soils to make them friable, and to make their plant food available, led to disuse of all lime in some sections on account of the exhaustion that followed dependence upon these large amounts as a manure. Queerly enough, these original limestone soils have latterly been going into the acid class through loss of their distinctive elements, and they, too, ...
— Right Use of Lime in Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... seen much violence and treachery, had but little faith in human goodness. He lived in a tower in the company of birds and books, and from this place he filled his position as counsellor by the aid of a number of little maxims. His rules were these: "Never revive a law once fallen into disuse; always accede to the demands of a people for fear of revolt, but accede as slowly as possible, because no sooner is one reform granted than the public demands another, and you can be turned out for acceding too quickly as well as for ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... soon came in their eyes to indicate a patriot, and some even affected a ruder mode of dress as if to show they gloried in the title. However, after the lapse of a very few years, the name fell into disuse, as it had been connected with so many scenes of ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... I make choice of one with muscles so inert from disuse were this to be an onset, where men give and take hard blows. I ask you not upon the ship's deck at all, my friend, nor shall I require your company one step farther than the roof of the great sugar warehouse of Bomanceaux et fils. Still, it will require steady nerve to do even what little ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... latter went into disuse many years ago. In fact it never had many soldiers in it, and was, ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... would be as thoroughly implanted in them as the power to swim or skate, so that, once acquired, they'd never quite lose it. I speak from experience, for I learned to skate and swim when a boy, and I feel that nothing—no amount of disuse—can ever rob me of these attainments. Still further, in early manhood I joined the great volunteer movement, and, though I have now been out of the force for many years, I know that I could 'fall ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... scala vestibuli is fixed and its parts are rendered incapable of vibration. The condition of atrophy which is observable in the sense cells and in the nerve elements is probably due to the impossibility of functional activity; it is an atrophy caused by disuse ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... Anecdotes (vol. viii. p. 456.), tells us that "Baskerville was buried in a tomb of masonry, in the shape of a cone, under a windmill in his garden; on the top of this windmill, after it fell into disuse, he had erected an urn, and had prepared an inscription," of which MR. ELLIOTT has given ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... kept during three hundred and sixty years and more; then the over-confident octogenarian's prophecy failed. During the tumult of the French Revolution the promise was forgotten and the grace withdrawn. It has remained in disuse ever since. Joan never asked to be remembered, but France has remembered her with an inextinguishable love and reverence; Joan never asked for a statue, but France has lavished them upon her; Joan never asked for a church for Domremy, but France is building one; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a language in its present form is not sufficient. Spanish, for example, has changed comparatively less than German since the sixteenth century, yet there are locutions as well as words found in early documents pertaining to America that have fallen into disuse and hence are not commonly understood. Provincialisms abound, hence the history of the author and the environment in which he was reared should be taken into account, for sometimes there are phrases that are unintelligible without a knowledge of the writer's early surroundings. ...
— Documentary History of the Rio Grande Pueblos of New Mexico; I. Bibliographic Introduction • Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier
... very soon—within a month—perhaps less—the country will run with the blood of vengeance from Churchill to the Barrens. If what I expect to happen does happen there will be no government road built to the Bay, the new buildings at Churchill will turn gray with disuse, the treasures of the north will remain undisturbed, the country itself will slip back a hundred years. The forest people will be filled with hatred and suspicion so long as the story of great wrong travels down from father to son. And this wrong, ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... gaining for each the aims and line of conduct desired? If so, is the result of the process to gain a ground of mutual compromise and accommodation and a division of labor in joint life which will enable the process itself to fall into disuse. ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... of at least fourteen centuries. It is an oft-told story, how, with the destruction of the Temple, the Jewish desire for song temporarily ceased. The sorrow-laden heart could not sing of love. The disuse of a faculty leads to its loss; and so, with the cessation of the desire for song, the gift of singing became atrophied. But the decay was not quite complete. It is commonly assumed that post-Biblical Hebrew poetry ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... Winkle, and to wonder seriously if the place was destined ever to wake up. How any shops afford their proprietors a subsistence here is a marvel. The few to be seen had but one shutter down, the rest being rusty with disuse. There were a plenty of broad-brimmed hats with priests under them, a sure crop in Spain, but scarcely a citizen was to be seen, or aught else to be noticed, except a few rusty towers and antique fountains. Everything ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... "The colonists contended that there was no real difference between the principle of these new duties and the Stamp Act. They were both designed to raise a revenue in America, and in the same manner. The payment of the duties imposed by the Stamp Act might have been evaded by the total disuse of stamped paper, and so might the payment of these duties by the total disuse of those articles on which they were laid; but in neither case without great difficulty. The Revenue Act of 1767 produced resolves, petitions, addresses, ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... of the wretched criminal, had something in it hideous and disgusting to the more refined feelings of later times. But if an old tradition of the Parliament House of Edinburgh may be trusted, it was the following anecdote which occasioned the disuse of ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... those who advocate the disuse of milk have a substitute or imitation to take its place, nut milk made from finely ground nuts and water. Like all other imitations, it is inferior to the original. It is more difficult to digest than real milk and ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... man is able to communicate by language to his children and others, the knowledge of the kinds of food to be avoided, he would have little occasion to use the faculty of voluntary rejection; so that this power would tend to be lost through disuse. ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... breed the qualities of the strong which would make them stronger, and certain qualities in the weak which would increase their weakness. For parasitism and likewise slavery infallibly entail the degradation of certain structures and an overgrowth of others by the law of use and disuse. The type of organ which would function normally, were not its possessor parasitic in that function, invariably degenerates or disappears. Parasitic insects lose their wings. An entire anatomical system may even be lost. So the tapeworm, which feeds ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... has suffered with her eyes. It is this avoidance of the hereditary predisposition more than anything else that has reduced the formerly wide prevalence of this disease in the European countries generally. A consideration for the future of our horses would demand the disuse of all sires that are unlicensed, and the refusal of a license to any sire which has suffered from this or any other ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... testing practically what disuse does in reducing parts. I have made [skeletons] of wild and tame duck (oh the smell of well-boiled, high duck!), and I find the tame duck ought, according to scale of wild prototype, to have its two wings 360 grains in weight; but it has only 317, or 43 grains too little, or ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... released from duty, and grow weak; so that, after this has been continued for some time, leaving off the unnatural support produces a feeling of weakness. Thus a person will complain of feeling so weak and unsupported, without corsets, as to be uncomfortable. This is entirely owing to the disuse of those muscles, which ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... only, when he had ventured to look a little higher, our eyes met; and no thief taken with a hand in a man's pocket could have shown more lively signals of distress. This set me in a muse, whether his timidity arose from too long a disuse of any human company; and whether perhaps, upon a little trial, it might pass off, and my uncle change into an altogether different man. From this I was awakened ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... foreman's wordless departure Steve Packard and Bill Royce went together to the old ranch-house, where, settled comfortably in two big arm-chairs, they talked far into the night. A sharp glance about him as he lighted a lamp on the table showed Packard dust and disuse everywhere excepting the few untidy signs ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... which the muscle elements are merely diminished in size without undergoing any structural alteration, is commonly met with as a result of disuse, as when a patient is confined to bed for ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... the candle down on the ground, and went out, and turned the key. I found, on looking round, that I was right in my conjectures. I was in a cellar, which, apparently, had long been in disuse. Melchior soon returned, followed by an old crone, who carried a basket and a can of water. She washed the blood off my head, put some alve upon the wounds, and bound them up. She then ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to satisfy the mind: and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have been confinedly called; so ever fresh, and green, and warm are all the inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this great city. I should certainly have ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... of the muscles is almost expressed by the one word exercise. It is a matter of everyday knowledge that the muscles are developed and strengthened by use, and that they become weak, soft, and flabby by disuse. The effects of exercise are, however, not limited to the large muscles attached to the skeleton, but are apparent also upon the involuntary muscles, whose work is so closely related to the vital processes. While it is true that exercise cannot be applied directly to the involuntary muscles, it ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... has as many feet as Briareus had hands, or unless he is a centipede, he cannot wear all the slippers given to him; and the shirt-studs and sleeve-buttons are equally burdensome. Rings are now fortunately in fashion, and can be as expensive as one pleases. But one almost regrets the disuse of snuff, as that gave occasion for many beautiful boxes. It would be difficult to find, however, such gold snuffboxes as were once handed round among monarchs and among wealthy snuffers. The giving of wedding-presents has had to endure ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... now a citizen, a member of society, with developed powers of social sympathy, of social energy. How has he developed these powers? Not by any supposition that the early sex instincts he felt in his boyhood were wholly animal and must be atrophied by disuse, but by gathering and directing them into the right channels. Direction, like control, depends ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... was abrogated. When Babylon replaced Palestine as the centre of Jewish intellect, the works of Philo, like the rest of the Hellenistic-Jewish literature, written as they were in a strange tongue, fell into disuse, and before long were entirely forgotten. The Christians, on the other hand, found in Philo a notable evidence for many of their beliefs and a philosophical testimony for the dogmas of their creed. They claimed him as their ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... national assemblies which Charlemagne had so often consulted, and even those convocations of the great lords and bishops which had been so frequent in the tenth century, fell into disuse under the Capetiens, in consequence of the rise of the feudal power and the decline of the royal authority. The king, by his constant donations to his leudes or great vassals, had, in course of time, very nearly stripped himself of domains, and these benefices ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... from the wall, and the squatter girl was sweeping out the dust of ages which settled again upon the coats and among the webby meshes of the net now dry and shrunken from disuse. One leg was missing from the stove, but three red bricks shoved under the side did the work of the broken part; the ancient frying pan with patches of grease upon it suspended itself from a newly driven ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... oriental languages in Latin characters. Unfortunately a uniform system of transcription, applicable to all tongues, seems not to be practical at present. It was attempted in the Sacred Books of the East, but that system has fallen into disuse and is liable to be misunderstood. It therefore seems best to use for each language the method of transcription adopted by standard works in English dealing with each, for French and German transcriptions, whatever their merits ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... mental gifts and graces; the poor get a good share of them, but the pity is they get so little chance of exercising them. For many splendid qualities wither from disuse or perish from lack of development. But some survive, as the following ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... picked up some gravel, threw it at the panes, and waited to see the result. The night-bell which had been fixed when Fitzpiers first took up his residence there still remained; but as it had fallen into disuse with the collapse of his practice, and his elopement, she did not venture ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... them pleasant girls, and Miss Melville was an unusually successful teacher, and as dearly loved as a judicious teacher can be. The school-house was a bit of a brown building tucked away under some apple-trees on a quiet by-road. It had been built for a district school, but had fallen into disuse years ago, and Miss Melville had ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... the faculty of receiving it. That diminished capacity is sometimes represented as men's own act, and sometimes as the divinely inflicted penalty of not hearing, but in either case the same fact is in view—namely, the loss of susceptibility by neglect, the dying out of faculties by disuse. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Lizzie, and I dragged our sleds and boards for the purpose of riding down-hill, was a merry, frolicking stream of water, over which, in times long gone, a sawmill had been erected; but owing to the inefficiency of its former owner, or something else, the mill had fallen into disuse, and gradually gone to decay. The water of the brook, relieved from the necessity of turning the spluttering wheel, now went gayly dancing down, down, into the depths of the dim old woods, and far away, I never knew exactly where; but having heard rumors of a jumping-off ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... the stillness of the night, for all that the hour was early. The air of the place was as that of some gigantic sepulchre. A little daunted by this all-enveloping stillness, I skirted the terraces and approached the house on the eastern side. Here I found an old-world drawbridge—now naturally in disuse—spanning a ditch fed from the main river for the erstwhile purposes of a moat. I crossed the bridge, and entered an imposing courtyard. Within this quadrangle the same silence dwelt, and there was the same obscurity in the windows that overlooked it. I paused, ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... trader (the name "sutler" fell into disuse about now) kept a large store but, nothing that I could use to beautify my quarters with—and our losses had been so heavy that we really could not afford to send back East for more things. My new white ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... imposed, to inquire by a jury quantum inde regi dare valeat per annum, salva sustentatione sua et uxoris et libe- rorum suorum, (how much is he able to give to the king per annum, saving his own maintenance, and that of his wife and children). And since the disuse of such inquest, it is never usual to assess a larger fine than a man is able to pay, without touching the implements of his livelihood; but to inflict corporal punishment, or a limited imprisonment, instead of such a fine ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... and suggested long disuse. Its air was less of dilapidation than desertion, and lichen and fungus played a large part in such an aspect. The walls were low, and the heavy roof was flat and sloping. As the man drew near a flight of birds streamed from its eaves, screaming ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... was so sharply drawn between the social classes that for a long time slavery, or even death, was the punishment for a mixed marriage. In course of time this barbarous custom fell into disuse, but free choice continued to be discouraged by the law that if a man married a woman beneath him in rank, neither she nor her children were raised to his rank, and in case of his death she had no claim to the usual provisions legally ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... thought to myself, repeating the phrases I had used then—"there is no reason why I should not tell a ghost story. True, I had never done so before, but the literary attainments which have enabled me to perfect my recent treatise upon the 'Disuse of the Comma' are quite equal to impromptu experimentation in the field of psychic phenomena." I was aware that the young people themselves hardly expected serious acquiescence, and that, too, stimulated me. I cleared my throat in a prefatory manner, and silence ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... and Barclay employed it, largely in imitation of Chaucer; Wyatt used it in his Vixi Puellis Nuper Idoneus; and Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece. Since then it has not proved attractive to the poets—though no reason for its disuse is obvious—except Wordsworth (in his translations of Chaucer) and Morris, Chaucer's ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... before their heads appeared at the open window. It makes me smile to think how bewildered they must have been. Picture to yourself your own feelings if, on looking out of your luxurious carriage, you suddenly perceived that the lines upon which you ran were rusted and corroded, red and yellow with disuse and decay! What a catch must have come in their breath as in a second it flashed upon them that it was not Manchester but Death which was waiting for them at the end of that sinister line. But the train was running with frantic speed, rolling and ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... generally supposed, that the imagination of women is particularly active, and leads them astray. Why then do we seek by education only to exercise their imagination and feeling, till the understanding, grown rigid by disuse, is unable to exercise itself—and the superfluous nourishment the imagination and feeling have received, renders the former romantic, ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... kills the bull) was Francisco Romero, of Ronda in Andalusia (about 1700), who introduced the estoque, the sword still used to kill the bull, and the muleta, the red flag carried by the espada (see below), the spear falling into complete disuse. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... there was some danger of an epidemic due to the unsanitary conditions of the place, ill fitted to harbour so many strangers. The precautions instituted by the Roman founders in regard to their water supply had long since fallen into disuse. ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... ideas of a former generation, and sought to correct them by the scandal of a factious party. With such qualifications he came back eager for the domination, the pleasures, and the display that befitted his princely birth. A long disuse of all political activity combined with the flatteries of his new friends to fill him with an overweening conceit of his own capacity and influence. If aught had gone wrong in his absence, it seemed quite natural ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... punishment on their countrymen to gratify their sworn enemies, the Spaniards. All, therefore, purposely misunderstood the regent, and allowed the Inquisition and the edicts to fall almost entirely into disuse. This forbearance of the government, combined with the brilliant representations of the Gueux, lured from their obscurity the Protestants, who, however, had now grown too powerful to be any longer concealed. Hitherto ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... in its appearance. It had been kept a long time in the Temple among other precious objects of great antiquity, the use and origin of which had been forgotten. The same has been in some degree the case in the Christian Church, where many consecrated jewels have been forgotten and fallen into disuse with time. Ancient vases and jewels, buried beneath the Temple, had often been dug up, sold, or reset. Thus it was that, by God's permission, this holy vessel, which none had ever been able to melt down on ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... which unites them. The great aim of the slaveholder, then, should be to keep his people in strict subordination. In this, it may in truth be said, lies his entire duty." Again, in speaking of the punishments of slaves, he remarks: "If to our army the disuse of THE LASH has been prejudicial, to the slaveholder it would operate to deprive him of the MAIN SUPPORT of his authority. For the first class of offences, I consider imprisonment in THE STOCKS[A] at night, with or without hard labor by day, as a powerful ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... hath lain long in air. The skin and the nails were complete and whole, as though the body had been placed for burial over night. I touched the hand and moved it, the arm being something flexible as a live arm; though stiff with long disuse, as are the arms of those faqueers which I have seen in the Indees. There was, too, an added wonder that on this ancient hand were no less than seven fingers, the same all being fine and long, and of great beauty. Sooth to say, it made ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... short time the owl was plucked, dressed and boiling merrily over the fire in a kettle that was becoming rusty from disuse. ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... send him their best hawks and hounds. He was victorious over the Cornish men, who were not yet quite under the Saxon government. He restored such of the old laws as were good, and had fallen into disuse; made some wise new laws, and took care of the poor and weak. A strong alliance, made against him by ANLAF a Danish prince, CONSTANTINE King of the Scots, and the people of North Wales, he broke and defeated in one great battle, long famous for the vast numbers ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... imagination in such cases often colours highly without a premeditated design of falsehood. Fear and dread, however, accompanied its progress; such families as had neglected to keep holy water in their houses borrowed some from their neighbours; every old prayer which had become rusty from disuse was brightened up—charms were hung about the necks of cattle, and gospels about those of children—crosses were placed over the doors and windows;—no unclean water was thrown out before ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... is the waste and atrophy of his best powers through disuse. Thus the early settlers of the Coachela Valley fought hunger and thirst while rivers of water ran away a few feet below the surface ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... things old and new. Among ourselves it is perhaps at present more desirable that we should bring out the old things than seek to find the new. The historic circumstances of the Anglican Church have been such as to lead to the practical disuse of much that is of great spiritual value in the treasury of the Church. It is largely in the attempt to bring into use the riches that have been abandoned that some are to-day incurring the charge of disloyalty—a charge that they are not careful to answer, if they may be ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... they did not intermarry with that race, and it was seldom that any Cimbrian knew its language. But now intermarriage is very frequent; both Italian and Cimbrian are spoken in nearly all the families, and the Cimbrian is gradually falling into disuse. They still, however, have books of religious instruction in their ancient dialect, and until very lately the services of their church were ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... Mrs. Gotfry take counsel together. The one train for Baalbek leaves in the morning; the carriage road is ruined from disuse; and only on horseback can we fly. So, Mrs. Gotfry orders her dragoman to hire horses for three,—nay, for four, since we must have an extra guide with us,—and a ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... push-buttons, he was as helpless as a baby. Beyond the little stunt he did in his office or his store, and beyond the ability to cross a crowded street, he was no good. He not only didn't know how to do things, but he was rapidly losing, through disuse, the power to learn how to do things. The modern city dweller, bred, born, brought up on this island, is about as helpless and useless a man, considered as a four-square, self-reliant individual, as you can find on the broad expanse of the ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... squarely, and relentlessly the two great dangers confronting the Republic: the danger of the National Government breaking down in its effective machinery through the burdens that threaten to be cast upon it; and the danger that the local self-government of the States may, through disuse, become inefficient. The House of Governors plan seems to have in it possibilities of mastering both of these evils at ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... many reasons I could offer why sentence should not—could not—be pronounced upon me according to law, if seven months of absolute solitary imprisonment, and the almost total disuse of speech during that period, had left me energy enough, or even language sufficient to address the court. But yielding obedience to a suggestion coming from a quarter which I am bound to respect, as well indeed as in accordance with ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... this occasion it will not be out of place to describe some of the features of the said festival and procession, to the end that some memory of them may descend to posterity, seeing that they have now for the most part fallen into disuse. First, then, the Piazza di S. Giovanni was all covered over with blue cloth, on which were sewn many large lilies of yellow cloth; and in the middle, on certain circles also of cloth, and ten braccia ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... House was a survival of the flush times, and barring a certain tawdriness from disuse and neglect, and a rather garish effect which marched evenly with the brick-and-terra-cotta fronts in Texas Street and the American-Tudor cottages of the suburbs, it was a creditable relic. The auditorium was well filled in pit, dress-circle and ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... rich: that is, would become the fashion. At which point nothing but the achievement of economic independence by women, which is already seen clearly ahead of us, would be needed to make marriage disappear altogether, not by formal abolition, but by simple disuse. The private contract stage of this process was reached in ancient Rome. The only practicable alternative to it seems to be such an extension of divorce as will reduce the risks and obligations of marriage to a degree at which they ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... slang at its first introduction, but its convenience favoured it: soon it became reconciled to the ear, then it ceased to be slang, and finally the original form, ceasing to have any apparent advantage of propriety or elegance, dropped into total disuse. Sortes, it is a clear case, inherited from Socrates his distressing post of target-general for the arrows of disputatious Christendom. But how came Socrates by that distinction? I cannot have a ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... such pale fables of the early Christian life as "Work while ye have the Light." A man's gifts are not given him for nothing, and the man who has the great gift of dramatic fiction has no right to cast it away or to let it rust out in disuse. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... characters, but it will be found that these have had frequent laborious intervals, that though they may have been vicious, they have never been indolent, and that their minds have never slumbered and lost by disuse the power of exertion. Reflections of this sort make me very uncomfortable, and I am ready to cry with vexation when I think on my misspent life. If I was insensible to a higher order of merit, and indifferent to a nobler kind of praise, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... of missionary importance from before. About midway of the beach no less than three churches stand grouped in a patch of bananas, intermingled with some pine-apples. Two are of wood: the original church, now in disuse; and a second that, for some mysterious reason, has never been used. The new church is of stone, with twin towers, walls flangeing into buttresses, and sculptured front. The design itself is good, simple, and shapely; but the character is all in the detail, where ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the ordinary rifle-practice, which has come of late years to be considered in Europe almost as the one thing needful for the soldier, while with us it has been gradually sinking into disuse for a quarter of a century. When called upon to send an army into the field, we find that more than half of its members have never fired a gun, and even of those who have, not one in a hundred has had any instruction ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... which birds are captured by trained falcons, is of the highest antiquity. Pennant mentions that the Saxon King Ethelbert (who died in 760) sent to Germany for a cast of falcons to fly at cranes (herons?). As this sport has now fallen into disuse, I must refer my readers for particulars to Blaine, Daniel, Freeman, Harting, Captain Dugmore, and to occasional articles by one or two modern falconers in the columns of ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... ancestors it was accustomed to make much use of the larger hawks in hunting. Curiously enough this amusement, more refined and elaborated than any other form of the chase, has gradually fallen into disuse among Europeans. So far as I have been able to learn, the only region in which it is well preserved is in northern Africa, a country in which the custom was probably introduced from Spain during the occupancy of that peninsula by the Moors. From the ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... may be some consolation to you to know that in this vicinity the mint beds are not used for pasture, the punch bowls are not permanently filled with carnations, the cock-tail glasses show no signs of disuse and the corkscrew hangs within reach of your shortest member. (Laughter.) We are a great people over this way. Perhaps you are not aware of that, but we bear prosperity with meekness and adversity with patience. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... why then, when I was in prison, I accepted with grateful thanks your offer? My dear Frank, I don't think you will ask so thoughtless a question. The prisoner looks to liberty as an immediate return to all his ancient energy, quickened into more vital forces by long disuse. When he goes out, he finds he has still to suffer: his punishment, as far as its effects go, lasts intellectually and physically just as it lasts socially: he has still to pay: one gets no receipt for the past when one walks ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... mines were abandoned. The trail fell into disuse. The years passed by. The '49 rush brought new travelers of another breed who beat down the old track again. Passing through the gorge they too found the Apaches lurking among the rocks and more than one old argonaut laid down his eight-square rifle ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... problem. Of an 84-fathom mine called Auff der Halsbrucker, near Freiberg, he says "they are not so much troubled with water, and have very good engines to draw water out." Yet the chain of dippers and rag and chain pump were evidently fallen into disuse, as they do not appear among the mining machines reported by Fritsche and Wagenbreth as having been described by Lohneyss (1617) or Roessler (1700); and Fritsche and Wagenbreth declare that German hydraulic machinery was able to compete ...
— Mine Pumping in Agricola's Time and Later • Robert P. Multhauf
... could get at, had gladly denied himself its pleasures, and consorted with the young men he met at the caffe's, or in the Piazza. But when the Vervains came, they recalled to him the younger days in which he had delighted in the companionship of women. After so long disuse, it was charming to be with a beautiful girl who neither regarded him with distrust nor expected him to ask her in marriage because he sat alone with her, rode out with her in a gondola, walked with her, read with her. All young men like a house in ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... hitch her vision, not to a star, but to a—a tin dipper. You don't understand. You know it seems to me, Mrs. Blair, that most people, women, anyhow, are like great big houses with only half the rooms in use. The mentality closed up and musty from disuse because they have never found or made the keys. I want my child to live roundly—in all her mental rooms. What is the use closing off any part of a house that was meant for light and sunshine? I want her to know ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... the indefatigably industrious, checking, limiting and sometimes almost destroying constitutional irritability and vicious passions. The natural power of the will in different men differs greatly, but there is no part of our nature which is more strengthened by exercise or more weakened by disuse. The minor faults of character it can usually correct; but when a character is once formed, and when its tendencies are essentially vicious, radical cure or even considerable amelioration is very rare. Sometimes the ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... services; composed a disorderly and consequently a feeble army; and during the few days which they were obliged by their tenures to remain in the field, were often more formidable to their own prince than to foreign powers, against whom they were assembled. The sovereigns came gradually to disuse this cumbersome and dangerous machine, so apt to recoil upon the hand which held it; and exchanging the military service for pecuniary supplies, enlisted forces by means of a contract with particular officers, (such as those the Italians denominate "condottieri,") whom they dismissed at ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... in such a service, and probably did not maintain strong navies, having little use for them. Thus Yakinlu may have expected that his neglect, whatever it was, would be overlooked. But Asshur-bani-pal was jealous of his rights, and careful not to allow any of them to lapse by disuse. He let his displeasure be known at the court of Yakinlu, and very shortly received an embassy of submission. Like Baal, Yakinlu sent a daughter to take her place among the great king's secondary wives, and with her he sent a large sum of money, in the disguise of a dowry.[14175] ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... ideas, being arrested in the state in which the use of the alphabet found it, went into general disuse for common purposes; and the works then extant, as well as the knowledge of writing in that mode, being no longer intelligible to the people, became objects of deep and laborious study, and known only to the learned; that is, to ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... its upper line, relieved against the gray sky, he made out a broken front and one tower massively battlemented. A pavement split the road in two; crossing it, he came to an opening, choked with timbers and bars of iron; surmisably the front portal at present in disuse. He needed no explanation of its condition. Fire and battle were ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... compromise had place, and scrutiny Became stone-blind, precedence went in truck, And he was competent whose purse was so. A dissolution of all bonds ensued, The curbs invented for the mulish mouth Of headstrong youth were broken; bars and bolts Grew rusty by disuse, and massy gates Forgot their office, opening with a touch; Till gowns at length are found mere masquerade; The tasselled cap and the spruce band a jest, A mockery of the world. What need of these For gamesters, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... 'It seems certain that the MUMMERS of England, who (in Northumberland at least) used to go about in disguise to the neighbouring houses, bearing the then useless ploughshares; and the GUISARDS of Scotland, not yet in total disuse, present, in some indistinct degree, a shadow of the old mysteries, which were the origin of the English drama. In Scotland, (me ipso teste,) we were wont, during my boyhood, to take the characters of the apostles, ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... were dying on the vine, that easy living was making farmers and storekeepers out of them, that they were getting soft, ruined by disuse of their talents for meeting and coping with hostile conditions. There had even been threats that one of these days they would all pile into their ship and come back home. So far he had stopped them by threats ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... Cities.%—Yet another characteristic of the period was the great change which came over the cities and towns. The development of canal and railroad transportation had thrown many of the old highways into disuse, had made old towns and villages decline in population, and had caused new towns to spring up and flourish. Everybody now wanted to live near a railroad or a canal. The rapid increase in manufactures had led ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... has resulted in developing men for special branches, so that today we have relatively few men who can skillfully operate for instance the engine lathe and planer. Even if there are those who ever had that ability, most of them have lost it through disuse. ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... little old rocking-chair, her desk and table, and her toilet and mantel ornaments and things of use. A pair of candle-branches with dropping lustres,—that she had marveled at and delighted in as a child, and had begged for herself when they fell into disuse in the drawing-room,—stood upon the chimney along which the first sun-rays glanced. Just in those days of the year, they struck in so as to shine level through the clear prisms, and break ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... a surprising time to open the door, which was not only locked on the outside, but the lock seemed rebellious from disuse; and when at last he stood back and motioned me to enter before him, I was greeted on the threshold by that peculiar and convincing sound of the rain echoing over empty chambers. The entrance-hall, in which I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a convict into the street after twenty-one years penal servitude. Indeed it is worse; for the convict may have learnt before his conviction how to live in freedom and may remember how to set about it, however lamed his powers of freedom may have become through disuse; but the child knows no other way of life but the slave's way. Born free, as Rousseau says, he has been laid hands on by slaves from the moment of his birth and brought up as a slave. How is he, when he is at last ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... was usual to rate wages, first by general laws extending over the whole kingdom, and afterwards by particular orders of the justices of peace in every particular county, both these practices have now gone entirely into disuse. "By the experience of above four hundred years," says Doctor Burn, "it seems time to lay aside all endeavours to bring under strict regulations, what in its own nature seems incapable of minute limitation; for if all persons ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... extent true. During the twenty years that had elapsed since the World War armament of all kinds had fallen into disuse. Few improvements in offensive weapons had been made. The military organization and equipment of the United States, and, indeed, that of many of the other great powers, was admittedly inadequate to cope with ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... right to be by him regarded as existent. He paid no heed to the different natures of the two kinds of existence, their different laws, and the different demands they made upon the two consciousnesses; he had in fact, by a long course of disobedience growing to utter disuse of conscience, arrived nearly at non-individuality. In regard to what was outside him he was but a mirror, in regard to what was inside him a mere vessel of imperfectly interacting forces. And now his capacities and incapacities together had culminated in a hideous plot, ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... reasonable kinds of punishment exist. Those used in the old days: corporal and capital punishment, which, as human nature gradually softens, come more and more into disuse," said Nekhludoff. ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... critical rationalism cannot dissect and explain, has gradually ruled out of court the doctrine of salvation until the preacher's power, both to experience and to transmit it, has atrophied through disuse. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... authority. At our own peril always, if we do not like the right,—but not at the risk of being hanged and quartered for political heresy, or broiled on green fagots for ecclesiastical treason! Nay, we have got so far, that the very word heresy has fallen into comparative disuse ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... revolver in his bedroom, wild and unfamiliar emotions seethed within him. He did not realize it, but they were the emotions which should have come to him thirty years before and driven him out to hunt Indians in the garden. An imagination which might well have become atrophied through disuse had him as thoroughly in its control as ever he had had ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... probable that neither doctor nor priest can do much if the patient is hit in earnest. He soon succumbs, and is laid out in his best clothes in an improvised chapel and duly sped on his way. The custom of burying the dead in the gown and cowl of monks has greatly passed into disuse. The mortal relics are treated with growing contempt, as the superstitions of the people gradually lose their concrete character. The soul is the important matter which the Church now looks to. So the cold clay is carted off to the ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... any sense of the accurate, must have been frequently mortified and vexed at the distortion of his sentences by the printer's now general substitution of a semicolon, or comma, for the dash of the MS. The total or nearly total disuse of the latter point, has been brought about by the revulsion consequent upon its excessive employment about twenty years ago. The Byronic poets were all dash. John Neal, in his earlier novels, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... some parts of the State, as early as 1860, widows, and wives whose husbands were necessarily absent from the school meetings, voted upon these questions. During the years of the war this practice became very common, but fell into disuse ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... legislation of an anti-alcoholistic tendency to prevent crimes of violence, associations for destitute children, and co-operative associations to check the tendency to theft. Above all, they insisted on those regulations—unfortunately fallen into disuse—which indemnify the victim at the expense of the aggressor, in order that society, having suffered once for the crime, should not be obliged to suffer pecuniarily for the detention of the offender, solely in homage to a theoretical principle ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... that giant. Once in the dead days I turned the balance of the world from the right-hand road which now is dull with disuse, to the left-hand road which glitters so brightly to your eyes, and the face of the earth was changed. Now again I will turn it from the left-hand road to the right-hand road in which for millions of years it was wont to run, and once more the face of the earth shall change, ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... committee. The Mad Parliament, as it was afterwards called in derision, was resolved to make good its claims. The scheme of reinforcing Parliament by the election of knights of the shire had indeed been suffered to fall into disuse since its introduction in 1254, yet every tenant-in-chief had of old the right of attending, and though the lesser tenants-in-chief had hitherto seldom or never exercised that right, they now trooped in arms to Oxford ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... Introductions to, and conclusions of, letters are as much out of fashion, as to at, etc. on letters. This sublime age reduces every thing to its quintessence: all periphrases and expletives are so much in disuse, that I suppose soon the only way of making love will be to say "Lie down." Luckily, the lawyers will not part with any synonymous words, and will, consequently preserve ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... and thus violate a fundamental principle of aesthetics?" Our reply must be, that there are various kinds of hoods, and that, if they be considered ugly, it is more from their strangeness, through long disuse, than from any fault in their natural form. Besides, the very principle of concealment, so essential to a woman's modesty, militates rather against the principle of beauty; we admit it to be a difficulty—we would even say that the head of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... on to Vandon. The stable clock, still partially paralyzed from long disuse, was laboriously striking eleven as he drew up before the door. His resounding peal at the bell startled the household, and put the servants into a flutter of anxious expectation, while the sound made some one else, breakfasting late in the dining-room, pause with ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... hooker is of an ancient model, now fallen into disuse. This kind of hooker, which has done service even in the navy, was stoutly built in its hull—a boat in size, a ship in strength. It figured in the Armada. Sometimes the war-hooker attained to a high tonnage; thus the Great Griffin, bearing a captain's flag, and commanded ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... with an oath. "Citizen Merlin is too much of an aristo to hurt anyone; his hands are too clean; he does not care to do the dirty work of the Republic. Isn't that so, Monsieur Merlin?" added the giant, with a mock bow, and emphasising the appellation which had fallen into complete disuse ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... program of services. In the past it has been an armory of platitudes or a forecast of punishments. It promised that it would stop this evil practice, drive out corruption here, and prosecute this-and-that offense. All that belongs to a moribund tradition. Abuse and disuse characterize the older view of the state: guardian and censor it has been, provider but grudgingly. The proclamations of so-called progressives that they will jail financiers, or "wage relentless warfare" upon social evils, are simply the reiterations of men who do not ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... history of the island which one of the brothers has written, S. Lazzaro was once a leper settlement. Then it fell into disuse, and in 1717 an Armenian monk of substance, one Mekhitar of Sebaste, was permitted to purchase it and here surround himself with companions. Since then the life of the little community has been easy ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... liberty of a war-prisoner, a city, or for the restoration of a captured vessel: formerly much practised at sea. It then fell into disuse, but was revived for a time in the seventeenth century. At length the greater maritime powers prohibited the offering or accepting such ransoms. By English law, all such securities shall be absolutely ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... which his family had a right to use. Without doubt the Harts did bear arms in the days of William of Orange, when they were granted to the famous Dutchman Captain van Hardt who so distinguished himself at the Battle of the Boyne. But after his death the family grew poor; the arms fell into disuse and were forgotten so completely that one descendant thought they might have been a hart rampant, while another declared they were a sheaf of ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... Plains," was a man of wonderful physique, straight and stout as a pine. His red-brown hair hung in curls below his shoulders; he wore a full beard, and his keen, sparkling eyes were of the brightest hue. He came from an Eastern family, and possessed a good education, somewhat rusty from disuse. ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... for a moment, and then his eyes turned to the clock. It was on the stroke of midnight! So late—and Faith going out! He tried to think, to understand, but his brain worked slowly, like machinery that wanted oiling through long disuse. Then suddenly he ...
— The Beggar Man • Ruby Mildred Ayres
... relations is very clear and strong. It enables the primitive man to find his way through the trackless forest, and the carrier pigeon to recover his mate and dwelling place from the distance of hundreds of miles away. In civilized men, however, the habit of the home and street and the disuse of the ancient freedom has dulled, and in some instances almost destroyed, all sense of this shape of the external world. The best training to recover this precious capacity will now be ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... the issue is not between the theory of a supernatural cause and the theory of any one particular natural cause, or set of causes—such as natural selection, use, disuse, and so forth. The issue thus far—or where only the fact of evolution is concerned—is between the theory of a supernatural cause as operating immediately in numberless acts of special creation, and the theory of natural causes as a whole, whether ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... in the room, and a chest, and, in the corner, a pallet-bed, upon which lay the withered body of a man. That was all, except some prints that hung upon the wall, dusty and lifeless-looking. Such changes do years of disuse make in dwellings which, when inhabited, have been replete with human interest. Even yet there was abundant indication that the room had once been the abode of one who put much of his own personality ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... dear me!" explained Father Noble, whose memory of her was so blurred that Doris did not venture to refer to it in detail; "I thought when the Sisters went away this beautiful old house would fall into disuse. It is a great happiness to ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... spectacle which the world has yet seen, that of a nation incapacitated by its Constitution to prepare for defense, before it was actually invaded. As the ceremony of a formal denunciation of war has of late fallen into disuse, the presence of an enemy within our territories must be waited for, as the legal warrant to the government to begin its levies of men for the protection of the State. We must receive the blow, before we could even prepare to return it. All that kind of policy by ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... the Land Code (Den-ryo) should have fallen quickly into disuse will be easily comprehended when we come presently to examine that system in detail, but for the neglect of portions of the Military Code (Gumbo-ryo), of the Code of Official Ranks and Titles, and of the Code relating to the Meritorious Discharge of Official Duties, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... flooding as a serious problem. Of an 84-fathom mine called Auff der Halsbrucker, near Freiberg, he says "they are not so much troubled with water, and have very good engines to draw water out." Yet the chain of dippers and rag and chain pump were evidently fallen into disuse, as they do not appear among the mining machines reported by Fritsche and Wagenbreth as having been described by Lohneyss (1617) or Roessler (1700); and Fritsche and Wagenbreth declare that German hydraulic machinery ...
— Mine Pumping in Agricola's Time and Later • Robert P. Multhauf
... dark turning, there came the clang of swords and a rushing and scuffling, but no cry of any kind; and methought the silence was more hideous than sound. Stiff as were my old joints with disuse, I drew my sword and lay about me lustily, striving to get between the villains and my young master (which is no credit to me, as I was so wrought with rage that I verily believe I would have no more felt the thrust of a rapier ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... only by receiving the services of the priest-physicians, but also in the superstitious belief that special virtue attached to the precincts of sacred buildings. Thus, in the temples of AEsculapius, sick people tried to get as near to the altar as possible. "It may fairly be surmised that the disuse of these temples in Christian times made the necessity of hospitals more apparent, and so led to their institution, in much the same way as in this country the suppression of monasteries, which had largely ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... morning and evening hymns were concerned, were in the same position. Paul Gerhardt's fine hymn, "Now Rests Beneath Night's Shadow", which was written twenty years earlier, had been ridiculed into disuse; Ken's famous morning hymn dates from twenty years later; and none of these are as fine ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... hundreds of other similar examples could be selected. Another class of similar influences are those produced by use and disuse. Beyond question the use of an organ tends to increase its size, and disuse to decrease it. Combats of animals with each other tend to increase their strength, flight from ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... should be suffered to become obsolete. But what makes a word obsolete, more than general agreement to forbear it? and how shall it be continued, when it conveys an offensive idea, or recalled again into the mouths of mankind, when it has once become unfamiliar by disuse, and unpleasing by unfamiliarity? ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... shall not speak of some ancient ceremonies of holy week which have fallen into disuse, such as the custom of carrying the gospel or the B. Sacrament in triumphant procession on Palm-Sunday, and others alluded to by Cancellieri and described by Martene, ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... feeling that I am leaving her in the dark. But I know it is all foolishness, as well as you do, all craziness. If she is alive it is because she believed she should live, and I shall perish because I didn't believe. I should like to believe, now, if only to see her again, but it is too late. If you disuse any member of your body, or any faculty of your mind, it withers away and if you deny your soul your soul ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... were useless and a clog to trade; And, that his noble style he might refine, No Rechabite more shunn'd the fumes of wind. Chaste were his cellars, and his shrivel board The grossness of a city feast abhorr'd; His cooks with long disuse their trade forgot; 620 Cool was his kitchen, though his brains were hot. Such frugal virtue malice may accuse, But sure 'twas necessary to the Jews; For towns, once burnt, such magistrates require As dare not tempt God's providence by fire. With spiritual food he fed his servants well, But ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... almost destroying constitutional irritability and vicious passions. The natural power of the will in different men differs greatly, but there is no part of our nature which is more strengthened by exercise or more weakened by disuse. The minor faults of character it can usually correct; but when a character is once formed, and when its tendencies are essentially vicious, radical cure or even considerable amelioration is very rare. ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... talked about virtue and vice as a man who is colour-blind talks about red and green; he did not see them as she saw them; if left to choose for himself he would have nothing to guide him. Was it politics that had caused this atrophy of the moral senses by disuse? Meanwhile, here she sat face to face with a moral lunatic, who had not even enough sense of humour to see the absurdity of his own request, that she should go out to the shore of this ocean of corruption, and ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... that the imagination of women is particularly active, and leads them astray. Why then do we seek by education only to exercise their imagination and feeling, till the understanding, grown rigid by disuse, is unable to exercise itself—and the superfluous nourishment the imagination and feeling have received, renders the former ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... the fore-limbs will not have been much modified in the embryos of these several forms; although in each form the fore-limb will differ greatly in the adult state. Whatever influence long continued use or disuse may have had in modifying the limbs or other parts of any species, this will chiefly or solely have affected it when nearly mature, when it was compelled to use its full powers to gain its own living; and the effects thus produced will have been transmitted to the offspring ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... constructed barrier. Formerly Conde was regarded as a fortress of formidable strength, but its position was not held to be of value in modern strategy. Its forts, therefore, had been dismantled of guns, and its works permitted to fall into disuse. But the fortress of Maubeuge lay immediately in rear of the British line. In rear again General Sordet held a French cavalry corps for flank actions. In front, across the Belgian frontier, General d'Amade lay with a French brigade at Tournai as ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... as my reader will see. He, and another farmer, his neighbour, had been so often re-elected churchwardens, that at last they seemed to have gained a prescriptive right to the office, and the form of election fell into disuse; so much so, that after Mr Summer's death, which took place some year and a half before I became Vicar of Marshmallows, Mr Brownrigg continued to exercise the duty in his own single person, and nothing had as yet been ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... heavy-headed sunflowers, a grapevine trellis extended to the farmyard at the end of the lane, whence an overgrown walk led across tangled meadows to the negro "quarters"—a long, whitewashed row of almost deserted cabins. Since the close of the war the "quarters" had fallen partly into disuse and had decayed rapidly, though some few were still tenanted by the former slaves, who gathered as of old in the doorways of an evening to strum upon broken-stringed banjos and to wrap the hair of their small offspring. Beyond this row there was a slight elevation called "Hickory Hill," where ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... ventilation and low shelves seem to be the true remedies for these evils, or, rather, the best means of amelioration, since there is no complete antidote to the decay common to all material things. The last condition involves the disuse of galleries and of rooms upon more than one flat, unless the atmosphere in the upper portions of the lower rooms be shut off from the higher, as it should be. Another precaution which might be taken with advantage is to use the higher shelves ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... cobbles of a conversation, he should at least allow another to carry the tarpot and fill in the chinks. When the evening was over, although I recalled two or three clever stories, which I shall botch in the telling, I came away tired and dissatisfied, my tongue dry with disuse. ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... drink cosily; the act of touching glasses in pledging a health. An early and extensive custom falling into disuse. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... This arrangement interrupted the weekly recitation of the whole psalter, and caused great difficulty in later times; for when the feasts increased in number the ferial psalter fell almost into complete disuse. ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... that the tub and bowl forms of the coffin continued to be used during the period extending from Hammurabi to Nabonnedos. In later times, it would appear, the custom of placing food and drink with the dead fell into disuse.[1269] We may perhaps find that, as was the case in Egypt, symbolical representations of food—a clay plate with the food modeled in clay—took the place of the old custom. Fewer utensils, too, are found in the graves of the later period; but, on the other hand, ornaments increase, until, when ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... "First Lines in Physiology," a treatise which received the highest commendation both at home and abroad. It passed through three editions, and although the rapid advance in physiological science since its publication has long since led to its disuse, it will still be admired by medical scholars for the purity of its style and the learning it ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... retention of old work at Seamer, near Scarborough. To this fine twelfth century aisleless church a north aisle was added in the fifteenth century. The builders, possibly wishing to avoid expense, employed the old method, which in those days of prosperity and general rebuilding had fallen into disuse. In order not to interfere with the older windows, they deliberately made their arches very low: the result is that, from the interior of the aisle, one can see that the old wall was almost entirely kept, the new columns being built up on the line of the flat pilaster ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... looking from a window of the mill, out upon the great wheel which had done all the work the past generations had given it to do, and was now dropping into decay as it had long dropped into disuse. Moss had gathered on the great paddles; many of them were broken, and the debris had been carried away by the freshets of spring and the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... men who have united both characters, but it will be found that these have had frequent laborious intervals, that though they may have been vicious, they have never been indolent, and that their minds have never slumbered and lost by disuse the power of exertion. Reflections of this sort make me very uncomfortable, and I am ready to cry with vexation when I think on my misspent life. If I was insensible to a higher order of merit, and indifferent to a nobler kind of praise, I should be happier far; but to be tormented with the ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... called "scutage," or "shield money" (1159).[1] The barons gladly accepted the offer. With the money Henry was able to hire "mercenaries," or foreign troops, to fight for him abroad, and, if need be, in England as well. Thus he struck a great blow at the power of the barons, since they, through disuse of arms, grew weaker, while the King grew steadily stronger. To complete the work, Henry, many years later (1181), reorganized the old English national militia,[2] and made it thoroughly effective for the defense of the royal authority. For just a hundred years (1074- 1174) ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... is denied to us. The full height to which our manhood is capable of rising can never be reached by us under the present system. The moral elevation which every Self-governing people feel cannot be felt by us. Our administrative and military talents must gradually disappear owing to sheer disuse, till at last our lot, as hewers of wood and drawers of water in ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... end of the seventeenth century the art of engraving on wood had fallen into disuse. Writing circa 1770, Horace Walpole goes so far as to say that it "never was executed in any perfection in England;" and, speaking afterwards of Papillon's "Traite de la Gravure," 1766, he takes occasion to doubt if that author would ever "persuade the world ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... thoughts of one brain could be transmitted to another, and knowledge be thus rapidly interchanged. I replied, that there were amongst us stories told of such trance or vision, and that I had heard much and seen something in mesmeric clairvoyance; but that these practices had fallen much into disuse or contempt, partly because of the gross impostures to which they had been made subservient, and partly because, even where the effects upon certain abnormal constitutions were genuinely produced, the effects ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... to differ intrinsically from the labour that has to do with elaborating the material means of life. The precise line of demarcation is not the same as it was in the early barbarian scheme, but the broad distinction has not fallen into disuse. ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... Turkey Meadows, it is more probable that some visitors, who detected a resemblance between this section of the country and the Holy Land, were responsible for the christening of this road and also of the Sea of Galilee—which last has almost dropped into disuse. There does not seem to be any particular suggestion of the land of the Pharaohs and present-day Egypt, but tradition explains that as follows: Old Squire Perce had accumulated a store of grain in case of drought, and when the ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... Arabic, and in the second place by the great dissimilarity between the Semitic language and its Indo-European original. This may have made the copies of Aristotle's text rare, and gradually led to their disuse. The great authority which names like Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes acquired still further served to stamp them as the approved expositors of the ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... they are, however, not so strong as those of the Negroes. The habit of blackening the teeth, from the age of fifteen, by the juices of certain herbs* and caustic lime, attracted the attention of the earliest travellers; but the practice has now fallen quite into disuse. (* The early historians of the conquest state that the blackening of the teeth was effected by the leaves of a tree which the natives called hay, and which resembled the myrtle. Among nations very distant from each other, the pimento bears a similar ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... The Pehlvi, he says, is much more flowing, and less overcharged with vowels, than the Zend. The books of Zoroaster, first written in Zend, were afterwards translated into Pehlvi and Parsi. The Pehlvi had fallen into disuse under the dynasty of the Sassanides, but the learned still wrote it. The Parsi, the dialect of Pars or Farristan, was then prevailing dialect. Kleuker, Anhang zum Zend Avesta, 2, ii. part i. p. 158, part ii. 31.—G.——Mr. Erskine (Bombay Transactions) ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... The old pet name, although it had to be fetched across more than half a century of disuse, flashed like lightning from madame's heart into the ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... astonishing how frequently Dickens' characters and descriptions come into the memory of a stranger visiting London. No one, who has ever seen them, will forget the houses in Chancery. Situated as some of them are, in the busiest and most crowded parts of the city, and mouldering away from disuse and neglect, the idea constantly presented itself to me as I passed one of them, "there is more of the Jarndyce property," and I never saw an "old clo'" man that the rascally Fagin and his hopeful proteges did not rise to my recollection. ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... young colt, too fiery for any other to drive, and, as a special attention to his employer's daughter, would drive her to the service. But since the coming of Cameron, Mandy had allowed this custom to fall into disuse, at first somewhat to Perkins' relief, for the colt was restless and fretted against the tie rein; and, besides, Perkins was not as yet quite prepared to acknowledge any special relationship between himself and the young lady ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... little history of the island which one of the brothers has written, S. Lazzaro was once a leper settlement. Then it fell into disuse, and in 1717 an Armenian monk of substance, one Mekhitar of Sebaste, was permitted to purchase it and here surround himself with companions. Since then the life of the little community has been ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... of an old-fashioned custom that has fallen into disuse since the multiplicity of typewriters made writing for one's own pleasure too arduous; or, if you will have another reason, since our existence and feelings have become so complex that we can no longer express them with the simple directness of our ancestors. He kept a diary with what he called ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... propensions, draw total destruction upon themselves. I am sorry for several gentlemen who, through the folly of their physicians, have in their youth and health wholly shut themselves up: it were better to endure a cough, than, by disuse, for ever to lose the commerce of common life in things of so great utility. Malignant science, to interdict us the most pleasant hours of the day! Let us keep our possession to the last; for the most part, a man hardens himself by being obstinate, and corrects his constitution, as Caesar did ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... another grow old. This chloroformed audience was afflicted with a long and too heavy programme, as is the custom in performances of this kind. They played fragments of the best known pieces, and sang songs from operas long since fallen into disuse even on street organs. This public saw the same comedians march out; the most famous are the most monotonous; the comical ones abused their privileges; the lover spoke distractedly through his nose; the great coquette—the actress par ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... privacy than by the ordinary means. Yet it must not be forgotten that the thieves' jargon was invented for that purpose, whilst the Rommany, originally the proper and only speech of a particular nation, has been preserved from falling into entire disuse and oblivion, because adapted to answer the same end. It was impossible to treat of the Rommany in a manner calculated to exhaust the subject, and to leave no ground for future cavilling, without devoting a considerable space to the consideration ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... on stationery, after a period of disuse, seem to be coming into favor again. The monograms in the best taste are the small round ones, though very pleasing designs may be had in the diamond, square, and oblong shapes. They should not be elaborate, and no brilliant colors should be used. The stamping is ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... jeunesse,' said Victor the garcon. I hear of no great advance in what are thought the essentials of morality; but the bourree, with its rambling, sweet, interminable music, and alert and rustic figures, has fallen into disuse, and is mostly remembered as a custom of the past. Only on the occasion of the fair shall you hear a drum discreetly in a wine-shop or perhaps one of the company singing the measure while the others dance. I am sorry at the change, and marvel once more ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by Henry IV. was due in part to a reaction in the church's favour; and it is certain that this prince, if he did not owe his crown to the support of the church, determined to conciliate it. He confirmed the Statutes of Provisors,[86] but he allowed them to sink into disuse. He forbade the further mooting of the confiscation project; and to him is due the first permission of the bishops to send heretics to the stake.[87] If English tradition is to be trusted, the clergy still felt insecure; and the French wars of Henry V. are said to ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... moon, rainbow, deer, elk, and sheep, but are usually performed for the specific purpose of obtaining rain. Formerly, too, when their lives were far less peaceful than they are to-day, the Pueblos indulged in war and scalp dances; but these are now falling into disuse. The most remarkable exhibition of dancing, still in vogue, is the repulsive Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona, which takes place every year alternately in four villages between the 10th and the 30th of August according to the phase ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... no snow yet. It is a curiosity of broken sleep that I made immense quantities of verses on that pedestrian occasion (of course I never make any when I am in my right senses), and that I spoke a certain language once pretty familiar to me, but which I have nearly forgotten from disuse, with fluency. Of both these phenomena I have such frequent experience in the state between sleeping and waking, that I sometimes argue with myself that I know I cannot be awake, for, if I were, I should not be half so ready. ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... having waited until she was safely moored, he was turning away, when a few words fell upon his ear uttered by some one on board a little weather-beaten barque close by him. It was only some commonplace order that was bawled out, but the sound fell upon the old man's ears with a strange mixture of disuse and familiarity. He stood by the vessel and heard the seamen at their work, all speaking with the same broad, pleasant jingling accent. Why did it send such a thrill through his nerves to listen ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... movere (not to disturb things that are quiet), I have no doubt that he would have thought that the less discussion is provoked upon such matters, the better for both church and laity. Nor had he ever been known to regret the disuse of the ancient custom of excommunication, nor any other diminution of the powers of the priesthood, whether minatory or militant; yet for all this, Parson Dale had a great notion of the sacred privilege of a minister of the gospel—to advise—to deter—to persuade—to reprove. And it was for the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... International Historical Congress that the word son had ceased to be vernacular in the dialects of many parts of England. 'I would not venture to assert (he adds) that the identity of sound with sun is the only cause that has led to the widespread disuse of son in dialect speech, but I think it has certainly contributed ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... schooner, but without a bowsprit or jib. For the fisheries a multitude of smaller types were constructed—such as the lugger, the shallop, the sharpie, the bug-eye, the smack. Some of these survive to the present day, and in many cases the name has passed into disuse, while the type itself is now and then to be ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... design of falsehood. Fear and dread, however, accompanied its progress; such families as had neglected to keep holy water in their houses borrowed some from their neighbors; every old prayer which had become rusty from disuse, was brightened up—charms were hung about the necks of cattle—and gospels about those of children—crosses were placed over the doors and windows;—no unclean water was thrown out before sunrise ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... the same parties with British reinforcements, known as the battle of Bridgewater, as more important than its precursor.... The victory of Chippewa was the resurrection or birth of American arms, after their prostration by so long disuse, and when at length taken up again, by such continual and deplorable failures, that the martial and moral influence of the first decided victory opened and characterized an epoch in the annals and intercourse of the two kindred and rival nations, whose language is to be spoken, as their institutions ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... seven deacons of the primitive Church of Jerusalem; who having a beautiful wife, and being taxed with uxoriousness, abandoned her, and permitted her to marry whom she pleased, saying that we must disuse the flesh; and thenceforward lived a single life in continency, as his children also. The Continentes afterwards embraced the doctrine of AEons and Ghosts male and female, and were avoided by the Churches till the fourth ...
— Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John • Isaac Newton
... deformed in the same manner; then there would be a distinct case of the transmission of an acquired characteristic. "The precise question," as Professor Thomson words it, "is this: Can a structural change in the body, induced by some change in use or disuse, or by a change in surrounding influence, affect the germ-cells in such a specific or representative way that the offspring will through its inheritance exhibit, even in a slight degree, the modification which the parent acquired?" ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... of hat or cut of coat, because it was being largely worn in Lancashire and the Midlands; fancy favouring a certain brand of champagne because it was being extensively patronised in German summer resorts. No wonder that religion is falling into disuse in this country ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... Roman law that, as custom can make law, so disuse can destroy it has never been adopted in the United States. No court, therefore, will pronounce a statute not to have the force of law on the ground that it is obsolete.[Footnote: Chief Justice Mason of Iowa, in 1840, undertook to import the doctrine ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... chiefly of land. In feudal times seignorial estates could be purchased by none but those of noble blood; but with allodial estates it was different all through Europe. Yet just at the time when feudal laws were passing into disuse the Irish were prevented, by carefully-drawn enactments, from purchasing even a rood of their native soil. "The prohibition had been already extended to the whole nation by the Commonwealth government, and when the lands forfeited by the wars ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... formerly called the Isthmus of Darien, but that name has fallen into disuse among all persons who have any intercourse with that part of the globe, though still preserved in some of ...
— A Succinct View of the Importance and Practicability of Forming a Ship Canal across the Isthmus of Panama • H. R. Hill
... every farm, along with the other implements, there should be a row of good books, which should not be allowed to rust with disuse: a book, like a hoe, grows brighter with employment. And no farm, even in this country where we enjoy the even balance of the seasons, rain and shine, shine and rain, should be devoid of that irrigation ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... while it was the object of Cimon to sustain the naval ardour and discipline of the Athenians; while the oar and the sword fell into disuse with the confederates, he kept the greater part of the citizens in constant rotation at maritime exercise or enterprise— until experience and increasing power with one, indolence and gradual subjection with the other, destroying ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... when the change of fashion brought about the disuse of long periwigs in every-day life, their price did not cease to fall until they had entirely disappeared. But, if a person wishes to have one made to-day for a masquerade, for the stage, etc., he would pay as much for it as its former price. On the other hand, the price of whalebone has never ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... seems certain that the MUMMERS of England, who (in Northumberland at least) used to go about in disguise to the neighbouring houses, bearing the then useless ploughshares; and the GUISARDS of Scotland, not yet in total disuse, present, in some indistinct degree, a shadow of the old mysteries, which were the origin of the English drama. In Scotland, (me ipso teste,) we were wont, during my boyhood, to take the characters ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... inventions that extended the range of motor life. Common movements, industries, and even games, train only a limited number of muscles, activities, and cooerdinations, and leave more or less unused groups and combinations, so that many latent possibilities slumber, and powers slowly lapse through disuse. Not only must these be rescued, but the new nascent possibilities of modern progressive man must be addressed and developed. Even the common things that the average untrained youth can not do are legion, and each of these should be a new incentive to the trainer as he ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... equipment exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since. Columbus[272] found the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery, which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... quiet, with no one stirring. Morning had half gone before Wood knocked and gave her a bucket of water, a basin and towels. Later he came with her breakfast. After that she had nothing to do but pace the floor of her two rooms. One appeared to be only an empty shed, long in disuse. Her view from both rooms was restricted to the green slope of the gulch up to yellow crags and the sky. But she would rather have had this to watch than an outlook upon the cabins and the doings of ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... communicate by language to his children and others, the knowledge of the kinds of food to be avoided, he would have little occasion to use the faculty of voluntary rejection; so that this power would tend to be lost through disuse. ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... in which the muscle elements are merely diminished in size without undergoing any structural alteration, is commonly met with as a result of disuse, as when a patient is confined to bed for ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... beauty of rhythm which is distinctively Italian. Specially curious and admirable is the use of elision (in the eighth, for instance, and even more so in the fifth line), so characteristic alike of ancient and modern Italy. In Latin poetry Virgil was its last and greatest master; its gradual disuse in post-Virgilian poetry, like its absence in some of the earliest hexameters, was fatal to the music of the verse, and with its reappearance in the early Italian poetry of the Middle Ages that ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... developing men for special branches, so that today we have relatively few men who can skillfully operate for instance the engine lathe and planer. Even if there are those who ever had that ability, most of them have lost it through disuse. ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... to ocean steamships, or whether it is destined to be surpassed by a still higher degree of speed, remains to be seen. Many persons are of opinion that the increased facilities of speed which are now within reach of travellers on long voyages will gradually lead to the total disuse of sailing ships for passenger traffic. It may be so, but there are still not a few who would prefer a sailing to a steam ship for a long sea voyage, notwithstanding its so greatly inferior rate of speed. But nowadays everything must be sacrificed to time. "Time flies," is at present the ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... interrupted the Lady Prioress; 'Not I, believe me. The laws of our order are strict and severe; they have fallen into disuse of late, But the crime of Agnes shows me the necessity of their revival. I go to signify my intention to the Convent, and Agnes shall be the first to feel the rigour of those laws, which shall be obeyed to ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... while abstaining from the gratification of his desires, reach the end of a certain period during which those particles which composed the man of vice, and which were given a bad predisposition, will have departed. At the same time, the disuse of such functions will tend to obstruct the entry, in place of the old particles, of new particles having a tendency to repeat the said acts. And while this is the particular result as regards certain "vices," the general result of an abstention from "gross" ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... not be misunderstood. I do not advocate the disuse of explanations. Let teachers explain, let children give explanations. Let the rationale of the various processes through which the child goes, receive a certain amount of attention. But the extreme into which some are now going, in primary education, ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... almost obsolete, and its English synonym, merry-andrew, is not much in vogue, but as they are andronymics, to coin a word, embalming the memories of two famous charlatans, they possess an abiding interest apart from all question of their use or disuse. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... very much, and was to appearance almost as a fourth mast: the more so, as she carried a square spritsail and sprit-topsail. On her quarter-deck and poop-bulwarks were fixed in sockets implements of warfare now long in disuse, but what were then known by the names of cohorns and patteraroes; they turned round on a swivel, and were pointed by an iron handle fixed to the breech. The sail abaft the mizzen-mast (corresponding to the driver ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... was open house for all who chose to come, with a sort of tacit understanding that none below the class of substantial yeomen or tradesmen would make their appearance. This custom has now fallen into disuse, but was maintained to the last by the Hon. Doctor Vernon-Harcourt, who was for more than half a century archbishop of York, and is yet retained by Earl Fitzwilliam at Wentworth House, his princely seat in Yorkshire. There, once or twice a year, a great gathering takes place. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... she pursued regardless of the course in which they led her; and these ideals were far from ignoble. To beauty of all kinds she was passionately sensitive. As a girl she had played the piano well, and, though the power had gone from long disuse, music was still her chief passion. Graceful ease, delicacy in her surroundings, freedom from domestic cares, the bloom of flowers, sweet scents—such things made up her existence. She loved her husband, and had once worshipped him; she loved her recovered daughter; but both affections ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... years. The first public issue was in 1611, when the book was dedicated to King James, and has since been known as King James's Bible. It was adopted not only in the English Church, but by all the English people, so that the other versions have fallen into entire disuse, with the exception of the Psalms, which, according to the translation of Cranmer's Bible, were placed in the Book of Common Prayer, where they have since remained, constituting the Psalter. It should be observed that the Psalter, which is taken principally from ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... it was usual to rate wages, first by general laws extending over the whole kingdom, and afterwards by particular orders of the justices of peace in every particular county, both these practices have now gone entirely into disuse. "By the experience of above four hundred years," says Doctor Burn, "it seems time to lay aside all endeavours to bring under strict regulations, what in its own nature seems incapable of minute limitation; for if all persons in the same kind of work were to receive ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... This system will not do. Every animal, from man himself to the guinea-pig, must have what is vulgarly, but truly, known as "elbow-room;" and it must be self-evident how emphatically this rule applies to winged animals. It may be urged, in the case of domestic fowls, that from constant disuse, and from clipping and plucking, and other sorts of maltreatment, their wings can hardly be regarded as instruments of flight; we maintain, however, that you may pluck a fowl's wing-joints as bare ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... surroundings; and here are buried two well-known Quaker leaders, Isaac Penington and Thomas Ellwood. At the actual time of burial there were no gravestones, but these have since been added. Though the house as a regular place of meeting has long fallen into disuse, there is still an annual gathering of Quakers there in memory of ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... and the disuse of English, and he played the role of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... course the theory of descent with adaptive modification has a delightfully simple answer to supply, viz., that when, from changed conditions of life, an organ which was previously useful becomes useless, natural selection, combined with disuse and so-called economy of growth, will cause it to dwindle till it becomes a rudiment. On the other hand, the theory of special creation can only maintain that these rudiments are formed for the sake of adhering to an ideal ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... modifications acquired by an individual during his lifetime are transmissible to his offspring; in other words, science does not, as a body, accept the theory that the effects of use and disuse in the parent are inherited by his children. Modern science does not, indeed, definitely foreclose discussion of the subject, but what it says is that the empirical issue is doubtful with a considerable balance against the supposed inheritance ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... matches himself against the forces of nature. In the towns he is warmed and fed and clothed so spontaneously and easily that after a time he perforce begins to doubt himself, to wonder whether his powers are not atrophied from disuse. And so, with his naked soul, he fronts the wilderness. It is a test, a measuring of strength, a proving of his essential pluck and resourcefulness and manhood, an assurance of man's highest potency, the ability to endure and to take care of himself. In just so far as he substitutes the ready-made ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... of the erect position do not advise that we should go on all-fours. It is just the same with a great human device, the introduction of clothes. They have led to all sorts of new susceptibilities to disease and even tendencies to direct injury of many kinds. Yet no one advocates the complete disuse of all clothing on the ground that corsets have sometimes proved harmful. It would be just as absurd to advocate the complete abandonment of contraceptives on the ground that some of them have sometimes been misused. ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... citizens were seized with such a passion for superstitious observances, and those for the most part introduced from foreign countries, that either the people or the gods appeared to have undergone a sudden change. And now the Roman rites were growing into disuse, not only in private, and within doors, but in public also; in the forum and Capitol there were crowds of women sacrificing, and offering up prayers to the gods, in modes unusual in that country. A low order of sacrificers and soothsayers ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... chose some pieces of oratory for your translations, whether ancient or modern, Latin or French, which would give you a more oratorical train of thoughts and turn of expression. In your letter to me you make use of two words, which though true and correct English, are, however, from long disuse, become inelegant, and seem now to be stiff, formal, and in some degree scriptural; the first is the word NAMELY, which you introduce thus, YOU INFORM ME OF A VERY AGREEABLE PIECE OF NEWS, namely, THAT MY ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... up in her own hands these evidences of an earlier occupancy of the room. They were garments of a day gone by. The silks were faded, dingy, worn in the creases from sheer disuse. Apparently they had hung untouched for ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... was unreasonable for me to expect the results of faith before exercising faith itself. I was stumbling at the very simplicity of faith. I was working to win what God was waiting to give, while my latent faculty of faith, the greatest asset in personality, was lying worthless through disuse. I thought of my experience on the ocean, when finally, helpless to help myself, I had left my whole problem with the Pilot and He had taken command and brought us through to safety, and so I deliberately gave up ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... effective ways of producing it, namely, the fire-saw, and the flint and steel. Owing to the sale of Manila and Japanese matches to such of the Manbos as come in contact with traders or with trading posts, the ancient methods of making fire are falling into disuse. ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... of my purpose if I have not shown that there has been so large an increase of the stock of silver as of itself to effect a positive reduction of its value; and that this result has been confirmed and made irreversible by the new and extensive European disuse of silver coinage. I have indicated the advisability of obtaining the co-operation of other leading nations, in fixing upon a common ratio of value between gold and silver, before embarking upon a course of independent action ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... be some very intimate connection between croquet and billiards. But while croquet is a very old game and now rapidly lapsing into disuse, billiards is a comparatively new one enjoying very wide popularity. The fact that small billiard tables are being made to fit conveniently into the drawing-room at home, proves that the modern host and hostess recognize ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... easily gather from the story. I will now compare with them two Lacedaemonian popular leaders, the kings Agis and Cleomenes. For they, being desirous also to raise the people, and to restore the noble and just form of government, now long fallen into disuse, incurred the hatred of the rich and powerful, who could not endure to be deprived of the selfish enjoyments to which they were accustomed. These were not indeed brothers by nature, as the two Romans, but ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... perhaps the most elegant in principle of all the forms of sun dial, has not, I think, fallen into greater disuse than have sun dials of other constructions. To describe, in this place, a modern ring dial, and the method of using it, would be useless: because it is an instrument which may be so readily inspected ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 67, February 8, 1851 • Various
... they are expressive; although the knowledge of them requires in us a delicate taste, a nice judgment, and much study and practice; yet they are nothing else but the language of nature, which we brought into the world with us, but have unlearned by disuse and so find the greatest difficulty in ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... Mr M'Queen was to accompany us half a day more. We stopped at a little hut, where we saw an old woman grinding with the quern, the ancient Highland instrument, which it is said was used by the Romans, but which, being very slow in its operation, is almost entirely gone into disuse. ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... they could feel. If he had ever considered them at all it was as cold and conscious creatures who taught themselves to cover up what they felt, so that when their emotions strove to assert themselves they were found, through long disuse, to be dumb and inarticulate. Edouard rejoiced that to the men of his race it was given to feel and suffer much. He was sure that beneath the calmness of her beauty this woman before him could feel deeply; he read in her eyes the sympathy ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... townships. People met after nightfall in the corners of quiet fields, in the shadow of the woods, and in other sequestered places, and there received such instruction in military drill and movements as was possible under the circumstances. Old muskets, pistols and cutlasses were furbished up after long disuse, and pressed into service once more. Small quantities of rifles and ammunition were surreptitiously obtained from the United States. Disaffected blacksmiths in the rural districts devoted themselves to the manufacture of ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... an equally clever chemist will be required to work this improved process as compared with those that have, one by one, fallen into disuse, mainly from want of knowledge among the operators. To a certain extent this is so. The natural chemical actions are not so delicate, but an ignorant operator would spoil this process, as he does nearly every other. When a reef is discovered, practice shows ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... especially the last two propositions by a series of examples as to the effects of use and disuse; and the most famous of these, the theory that giraffes had produced their long necks by continually stretching up towards the trees on which they fed, is well known to everyone. However, the ingenious speculations of Lamarck were unsupported by ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... the sign of the cross. The custom was in vogue during the reign of Philip I (1051-1108), but that monarch is said to have forfeited the power of healing, by reason of his immorality and profligacy.[77:2] During later medieval times the Royal Touch appears to have fallen into disuse in France, reappearing, however, in the reign of Louis IX (1215-1270), and we have the authority of Laurentius, physician to Henry IV, that Francis I, while a prisoner at Madrid after the battle of Pavia, in 1525, "cured multitudes of people ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to satisfy the mind: and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have been confinedly called; so ever fresh, and green, and warm are all the inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this great city. I should certainly have ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... came and everything was ready. Fong's talents, after years of disuse, rose in the passion of the artist and produced a feast worthy of the past. A florist decorated the table and the lower floor. Mother's jewels were taken out of the safety deposit box, and Lorry and Chrystie, in French costumes with their hair dressed so that they ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... that she went down to the dining-room. Mr. and Mrs. Muir had not yet appeared, and she strolled into the parlor, opened her piano, and played a few runs. She found it sadly out of tune from long disuse. As this was not true of her voice, she began singing a favorite ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... additional examples are presented, to note the effect of modification upon particular features of the animal, to observe how some come into prominence, representing the creature and the idea, while others fall into disuse and disappear. In nature the line of the body is perhaps the most strongly characteristic feature, and it is in art the most persistent. It survives in the stems of many conventional devices from which all other suggestions of the animal ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... which the Pope might act as judge and father of all, and as supreme court of appeal. To the Utraquists he would counsel conformity to the practice of the majority; although unable to understand why the Church should have allowed a practice instituted by Christ to fall into disuse. ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... 'em." It was evident that the white hat gent was an uneducated man. The minister commenced in full earnest, and gave an interesting account of the progress of temperance in Connecticut, the state from which he came, proving, that a great portion of the prosperity of the state was attributable to the disuse of intoxicating drinks. Every one thought the white hat had got the worst of the argument, and that he was settled for the remainder of the night. But not he; he took fresh courage and began again. "Now," said he, "I have just been on a visit to my uncle's in Vermont, and ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... simple and elementary mathematical problems are solved by merely pressing a few buttons or turning a crank, the operator understanding little or nothing of the fundamentals underlying the solution of the problems in hand. This means, in the near future, brain atrophy through disuse. ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... were so uncertain that the practice has fallen into disuse. Recourse is now had to the deadly "belatic." I do not believe that this trap, which is common nearly all over the Philippines, is original with the Negrito. It is probably the product of the Malayan brain. A trap almost identical with ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... old abandoned trail. It was somewhat overgrown, but the Supervisor turned into it and followed it for some length, finally arriving at a large spring, one of the best in the forest, which evidently had been known at some time prior to the Forest Service taking control, but now had passed into disuse. But Merritt was even more surprised to find beside the spring a prospector of the old type, with his burro and pack, evidently making camp ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... hard labor, severe as this often is. Age is more than the flight of the years, the stoop of the form, or the hardening of the arteries; it is also the atrophy of the intellect and the fading away of the emotions resulting from disuse. The farmer needs occasionally to have something more exciting than the alternation of the day's work with the nightly "chores." And his wife should now and then have an opportunity to meet people other than those for ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... the house the farmer led the way, and up to the old Dutch oven that had been built on to the foundation, for the baking of bread, and all family purposes, many years back; but which had fallen into disuse ever since the new coal range had been placed in ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... opinion, elections could be managed by the officials through the official Press in their own interest; elections would become a sham, and would no doubt soon fall into disuse. The official class would become a caste of hereditary ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... who actually kills the bull) was Francisco Romero, of Ronda in Andalusia (about 1700), who introduced the estoque, the sword still used to kill the bull, and the muleta, the red flag carried by the espada (see below), the spear falling into complete disuse. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... argue. I felt as if in that solitude, and in the pause of my wonted mental occupations, my intellect was growing languid, and its old weapons rusting in disuse. My pride took alarm. I had so from my boyhood cherished the idea of fame, and so glorified the search after knowledge, that I recoiled in dismay from the thought that I had relinquished knowledge, and cut myself off from fame. I resolved to resume my once favourite ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... discs on the branches of neighboring plants and begins to get its food through them, its roots perish. When it fails to use them it loses them. He also points to the hermit-crab as an illustration of this great fact in nature, that disuse means loss, and that to shirk responsibility is the road to degeneration. The hermit-crab was once equipped with a hard shell and with as good means of locomotion as other crabs. But instead of courageously following the hardy life of other crustaceans it formed ...
— Self-Development and the Way to Power • L. W. Rogers
... up and walk about it would be easier," said Robert. "I think my muscles are growing a bit stiff from disuse." ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... hall, the farm-house, the cottage, hardly changed during his long absence,—the same shady by-paths and hedge-lanes, the same veiled sky, and green lustre of the lawns and fields,—while his own affinities for these things, a little obscured by disuse, were reviving ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... successful teacher, and as dearly loved as a judicious teacher can be. The school-house was a bit of a brown building tucked away under some apple-trees on a quiet by-road. It had been built for a district school, but had fallen into disuse years ago, and Miss Melville ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... disease is the want of the appropriate exercise of the various faculties of the mind. On this point, Dr. Combe remarks: "We have seen that, by disuse, muscles become emaciated, bone softens, blood-vessels are obliterated, and nerves lose their characteristic structure. The brain is no exception to this general rule. The tone of it is also impaired by permanent inactivity, and it becomes less fit to manifest the mental powers ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to the Sumatrans to have degenerated from the more splendid virtues of our predecessors. Even the richness of their laced suits and the gravity of their perukes attracted a degree of admiration; and I have heard the disuse of the large hoops worn by the ladies pathetically lamented. The quick, and to them inexplicable, revolutions of our fashions, are subject of much astonishment, and they naturally conclude that those modes can have but little intrinsic merit which we are so ready to change; or at least that ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... save any portion of the fore-arm, disarticulation at the elbow-joint may be easily performed. This operation was proposed and performed so long ago as the days of Ambrose Pare,[30] was much approved by Dupuytren, Baudens, and Velpeau, had fallen into disuse for a time, but is now again recommended by some excellent surgeons, especially by Gross[31] and Ashhurst,[32] ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... Lamarckian doctrine that each succeeding generation would have new characters added to it by the modification of environmental factors and by the use and disuse of organs and functions. Thus gradually under such selection the species would be improved. But Darwin emphasized selection ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... through the broad old hallway as I stepped over the threshold, and there was a smell of wood smoke that told me the chimneys were still cold from disuse. Someone had stored the hall full of coils of rope and sailcloth, but in the midst of it the same tall clock was ticking out its cycle, and the portraits of the Shelton family still hung against ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... situation of the writers, recommended or recognised by the apostles and first preachers of the religion, or found to coincide with what the apostles and first preachers of the religion had taught, other accounts would fall into disuse and neglect; whilst these, maintaining their reputation (as, if genuine and well founded, they would do) under the test of time, inquiry, and contradiction, might be expected to make their way into the hands of Christians of all countries of ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... him, and condemned to death by the Senate. But on receiving sentence, the condemned man assumed a tone totally unexpected of him, for he boldly asserted that the punishment of death had fallen into disuse; that it was no longer the law of Hamburg; and concluded by defying the Senators to carry the sentence ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... composed a disorderly and consequently a feeble army; and during the few days which they were obliged by their tenures to remain in the field, were often more formidable to their own prince than to foreign powers, against whom they were assembled. The sovereigns came gradually to disuse this cumbersome and dangerous machine, so apt to recoil upon the hand which held it; and exchanging the military service for pecuniary supplies, enlisted forces by means of a contract with particular officers, (such as those the Italians ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... the branch line, carriages fell into disuse and dilapidation, and many an old barouche, landau, and brett passed into the hands of the negro hackmen who were former slaves of the old families. Among these ex-slaves the traditions of the first families of Columbus were upheld long after the war, and it thus happened that when, a few ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... disobedience to the law of the spiritual life. He who seeks to save his life shall lose it. He who makes this world his all shall receive as his reward only what this world can give. He who buries his talent shall, by the natural law of disuse, forfeit it. Not to believe in Christ is to miss eternal life. To refuse Him who is the Light of the world is to remain ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... Forty-third lying east of the Grand Central sluice gates; east of fashion; east, in a word, of Fifth Avenue—a great square brick building smoke-grimed, cobwebbed, and having the look of a cold-storage plant or a car barn fallen into disuse; dusty, neglected, almost eerie. Yet within it lurks Romance, and her sombre sister Tragedy, and their antic brother ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... in the process of learning is subject to the wasting effects of time. It is subject to the law of "atrophy through disuse". Just as a muscle, brought by exercise into the pink of condition, and then left long inactive, grows weak and small, so it is with the brain connections formed in learning. With prolongation of the condition of rest, the ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... receive the report of the new committee. The Mad Parliament, as it was afterwards called in derision, was resolved to make good its claims. The scheme of reinforcing Parliament by the election of knights of the shire had indeed been suffered to fall into disuse since its introduction in 1254, yet every tenant-in-chief had of old the right of attending, and though the lesser tenants-in-chief had hitherto seldom or never exercised that right, they now trooped in arms to Oxford to support the barons. To this unwonted gathering the committee ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... one another in quick succession, no good thing for the discipline of the abbey. When Matilda died in 1219, the old gallows on which the abbess had had the right of hanging offenders condemned by her court, fell into disuse, but the right was restored by the King to Amicia. Towards the end of the century, episcopal visitations began, and the Bishop of Winchester looked into various disorders that had grown up among the abbesses and sisters. The various methods of procedure and the things forbidden give us some ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: A Short Account of Romsey Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... custom and legalized institution upon gaining for each the aims and line of conduct desired? If so, is the result of the process to gain a ground of mutual compromise and accommodation and a division of labor in joint life which will enable the process itself to fall into disuse. ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... could never again have free intercourse of heart with any one;—why then use the rite of communion, where there is no communion? But, on the other hand, I thought it a mode of confessing Christ, and that permanently to disuse it, was an unfaithfulness. In the Church of England I could have been easy as far as the communion formulary was concerned; but to the entire system I had contracted an incurable repugnance, as worldly, hypocritical, ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... the first to run, and had shown most cowardice, he distributed into fifty decades,[33] and out of each decade he took one man, by lot, and put him to death; thus inflicting on the soldiers this ancient mode of punishment which had long fallen into disuse; for disgrace also is added to the manner of death, and many things horrible and dreadful to see accompany the punishment, in the presence of all the spectators. After inflicting this punishment, he made his men again face about and march against the enemy. ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... "Although every one agreed that the demonstration was a success the wooden rails were not durable enough to last long and the company was not rich enough to replace them with metal ones. Therefore, in spite of Allen's pleas and his wonderful exhibition of courage, the road fell into disuse, the engine was taken apart, ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... century clocks and watches began to supersede sun-dials, and these have gradually fallen into disuse except as an additional ornament to a garden, or in remote country districts where the old dial on the church tower still serves as an occasional check on the modern clock by its side. The art of constructing dials may now be ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... reminiscences of the vanished Skinners. He regarded the dim room for a space. The furniture had been greatly disordered—perhaps by some inquisitive rat—but a coat upon a clothes-peg on the door, a razor and some dirty scraps of paper, and a piece of soap that had hardened through years of disuse into a horny cube, were redolent of Skinner's distinctive personality. It came to Bensington's mind with a complete novelty of realisation that in all probability the man had been killed and eaten, at least in part, by the monster that now lay dead ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... viewing a poet generally, as is our present plight, the first question is: When was he born? The second, When did he (to use a favourite phrase of the last century, now in disuse)—When did he commence author? The third, How long did he keep at it? The fourth, How much has he written? And the fifth may perhaps be best expressed in the words of Southey's ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... rusty with age and disuse, two-handed weapons which it required a giant strength to wield; huge battle-axes, maces, clubs tipped with iron spikes, ancient suits of armour, rusty and unsightly, as old clothing of that sort ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... offences had caused a law to be passed of such overstrained severity that it broke down in the trial; so it fell into disuse, and became a dead letter,—a perch to birds of prey, and not their terror. From its extreme rigour, this law was extremely odious; and, as is always the case with laws so hated, the attempt to enforce it drew on a commensurate reaction of licentiousness; the law thus stimulating ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... the year what were called "public days," when it was open house for all who chose to come, with a sort of tacit understanding that none below the class of substantial yeomen or tradesmen would make their appearance. This custom has now fallen into disuse, but was maintained to the last by the Hon. Doctor Vernon-Harcourt, who was for more than half a century archbishop of York, and is yet retained by Earl Fitzwilliam at Wentworth House, his princely seat in Yorkshire. There, once or twice ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... explain THE INHERITED EFFECTS of the use or disuse of particular organs? The domesticated duck flies less and walks more than the wild duck, and its limb bones have become diminished and increased in a corresponding manner in comparison with those ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... her chin with a movement of coquetry most graceful in spite of long disuse, and the answering fire sprang into her eyes. She looked very piquant and a trifle diabolical. He pressed his lips suddenly on hers. A moment later something tugged at the long locks his hand caressed, ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... man's only comment, but the muscles of his lips relaxed slowly, as if rusty from disuse, into ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... pleasures, and consorted with the young men he met at the caffe's, or in the Piazza. But when the Vervains came, they recalled to him the younger days in which he had delighted in the companionship of women. After so long disuse, it was charming to be with a beautiful girl who neither regarded him with distrust nor expected him to ask her in marriage because he sat alone with her, rode out with her in a gondola, walked with her, read with her. All young men like a house in which no ado is made about ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... upon our non-renewable coal; the fact that but half the coal has been taken from the mines which have already been abandoned as worked out and by caving-in have made the rest forever inaccessible; the disuse of the cheaper transportation of our waterways, which involves comparatively slight demand upon our non-renewable supplies of iron ore, and the use of the rail instead—these are other items in the huge bill of particulars of ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... is the joy of health—my health and the health of the world. This April day has set brain and blood on fire. Now it would be well to ponder by this old canal! It looks as if it had fallen into disuse, and that is charming; an abandoned canal is a perfect symbol of—well, I do not know of what. A river flows or rushes, even an artificial lake harbours waterfowl, children sail their boats upon it; but a canal ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... were looking from a window of the mill, out upon the great wheel which had done all the work the past generations had given it to do, and was now dropping into decay as it had long dropped into disuse. Moss had gathered on the great paddles; many of them were broken, and the debris had been carried away by the freshets of spring and the floods ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of their warfare, the Persians of the Sassanian period did not greatly differ from the same people under the Achaemenian kings. The principal changes which time had brought about were an almost entire disuse of the war chariot, [PLATE XLVI. Fig. 3.] and the advance of the elephant corps into a very prominent and important position. Four main arms of the service were recognized, each standing on a different ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... but how much we cannot say. Thus, when varieties enter any new station, they occasionally assume some of the characters proper to the species of that station. With both varieties and species, use and disuse seem to have produced a considerable effect; for it is impossible to resist this conclusion when we look, for instance, at the logger-headed duck, which has wings incapable of flight, in nearly the same condition as in the domestic duck; ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... that Welsh used were undoubtedly far superior to any that were devised before his time and it is much to be regretted that they were allowed to fall into disuse. Perhaps the most important stricture on the observations that will have to be recorded is that the observers were not provided with a base station, on which account the value of results was impaired. It was not realised that it was necessary to make observations on the ground to ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... regiment of dragoons and also that a company of dragoons should be attached to each regiment of cavalry. These troops were not intended to fight on horseback, but were, in fact, mounted infantry, an arm which, after being in disuse for many years, has lately been recognized as a very valuable one, possessing as it does the mobility of cavalry with the fighting power of infantry. It was at the head of this regiment that the general started for Italy. The ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... broad old hallway as I stepped over the threshold, and there was a smell of wood smoke that told me the chimneys were still cold from disuse. Someone had stored the hall full of coils of rope and sailcloth, but in the midst of it the same tall clock was ticking out its cycle, and the portraits of the Shelton family still hung ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... duty, and grow weak; so that, after this has been continued for some time, leaving off the unnatural support produces a feeling of weakness. Thus a person will complain of feeling so weak and unsupported, without corsets, as to be uncomfortable. This is entirely owing to the disuse of those muscles, which corsets throw ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... and stout as a pine. His red-brown hair hung in curls below his shoulders; he wore a full beard, and his keen, sparkling eyes were of the brightest hue. He came from an Eastern family, and possessed a good education, somewhat rusty from disuse. ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... descendants of Ham, away off in the far mountains and valleys of Asia lying between the Mediterranean Sea and the Euphrates, seem more as if he were discussing an event of yesterday than something which is considered contemporary with our earlier history,—and we find them disappearing, disuse gradually producing an obliteration of this tissue in some cases, and the modifying influence of evolution producing it in others; the climbing muscle, probably the oldest remnant and legacy that has descended from our long-haired and muscular ancestry, is the best example of disappearance ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... on to show "that automatic actions and conscious habits may be inherited," {234b} and in the course of doing this contends that "instincts may be lost by disuse, and conversely that they may be acquired as instincts by the hereditary transmission of ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... of books follow; one "The First Three Gospels", by the Reverend Estlin Carpenter; the other on "Use and Disuse", directed against the doctrine of use-inheritance, by Mr. Platt Ball, who not only sent the book but appealed to him for advice as to his future course in undertaking a larger work ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... head-lights the white face and white hair of a very old, old man. The kneeling figure sobbed; the sobs rising from far down in the pit of the stomach, wrenching the body like waves of nausea. The man stretched his arms toward them. From long disuse ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... looking for other quarters. Even they were providential; for a friend met me in the post-office and proffered me her beautiful studio, then in disuse, for a merely nominal rent. There I rested and wrote for three months, intending that the proceeds of the book entitled "The Autobiography of an Autoharp" should start another home. But God willed otherwise, as ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... suppose that you two twins marry wives who are also twins born as like as two peas; and each pair of you has a family. Which of the two batches of children will tend on the whole to have the stronger legs? Your legs are strong by use; your brother's are weak by disuse. But do use and disuse make any difference to the race? That is the theoretical question which, above all others, complicates and hampers our present-day attempts to ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... doors of which are generally to be seen, laughing and gossiping, clusters of old salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping of a seaport. The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint; its floor is strewn with grey sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude, from the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a sanctuary into which womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom and mop, has very infrequent access. In the way of furniture, there ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that there lie hidden in the recesses of her armoire, the robes and coronet and full insignia of a first-rate novelist. She may not choose to take them out and air them, the crown may tarnish by disuse, the moth of indolence may corrupt, but there lies the panoply in which she may on any day appear fully dight, for the astonishment of an awakening world. Jane Austen and Maria Edgworth are heroines, whose aureoles shine in the painted windows ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... of Iran was indirectly or directly the cause of a certain religious decadence which followed upon the disruption of the Persian Empire, and was answerable for the fact that a great part of the scriptures was forgotten or fell into disuse. Persian tradition lays at the doors of the Greeks the loss of another copy of the original ancient texts, but does not explain in what manner this happened; nor has it any account to give of copies of the prophet's works which Semitic writers ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... in which they were wandering, and change in the channels of traffic had so turned its natural nourishment aside, that it was in parts withering and crumbling away. Not a few of the houses were, some from poverty, some from utter disuse, yielding fast to decay. But there were other causes for the condition of one, which, almost directly they came out of the lane I have just mentioned, into the end of a wide silent street, drew the roving, questing eyes of Clare and Tommy. The moon ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... conduct desired? If so, is the result of the process to gain a ground of mutual compromise and accommodation and a division of labor in joint life which will enable the process itself to fall into disuse. ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... right. We ought to enter fully, at least, into the spiritualism of the Bible. Circles and spiritual jugglery I regard as the lying signs and wonders, with all deceivableness of unrighteousness; but there is a real scriptural spiritualism which has fallen into disuse, and must be revived, and there are, doubtless, people who, from some constitutional formation, can more readily receive the impressions of the surrounding spiritual world. Such were apostles, prophets, and ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... next writer of inspired Hebrew love songs there stretches an interval of at least fourteen centuries. It is an oft-told story, how, with the destruction of the Temple, the Jewish desire for song temporarily ceased. The sorrow-laden heart could not sing of love. The disuse of a faculty leads to its loss; and so, with the cessation of the desire for song, the gift of singing became atrophied. But the decay was not quite complete. It is commonly assumed that post-Biblical Hebrew poetry revived for sacred ends; first hymns were written, then secular ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... It had been an established custom ever since his second marriage that Rufus should eat his Sunday dinner at the family table down at The Ship. Mrs. Peck—Adam's wife was never known by any other title, just as the man's own surname had dropped into such disuse that few so much as knew what it was—had made an especial point of this, and Rufus had never managed to invent any suitable excuse for refusing. He never remained long after the meal was eaten. When all the other fisher-lads were walking the cliffs with their own particular ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... the lungs, the stomach, the liver, &c., are maintained in their normal state of health. Their condition, moreover, is only to be improved by the muscular movements belonging to exercise. The heart itself is intended for action, not for inaction. By action it thrives, and by disuse it becomes weakened. It is so with all the other organs. In conclusion, therefore, it must be said that the whole system can only be kept in perfect health by muscular movements, and that in addition to keeping the body in health exercise actually increases the chances ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... the house, he followed Uncle Shadrach about and carefully barred the windows, shooting bolts which were rusted from disuse. After the old negro had gone out he examined the locks again; and then going into the hall took down a bird gun and an army pistol from their places on the rack. These he loaded and laid near at hand beside the books upon ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... that mysterious stroke from the unseen enemy? There was also a table in the room, and a chest, and, in the corner, a pallet-bed, upon which lay the withered body of a man. That was all, except some prints that hung upon the wall, dusty and lifeless-looking. Such changes do years of disuse make in dwellings which, when inhabited, have been replete with human interest. Even yet there was abundant indication that the room had once been the abode of one who put much of his own personality into his surroundings. The chair and the chest were carved with a rude device—the Devil grappling ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... with a Vowel.—Your readers are much indebted to Dr. Kennedy for his late exposure of the erroneous, though common, use of the phrase "mutual friend," and I am convinced that there are many similar solecisms which only require to be denounced to ensure their disuse. I am anxious to ask the opinion of Dr. K., and others of your subscribers, on another point in the English language, namely, the principles which should guide our use of "A" or "An" before a word beginning with a vowel, as the practice does not appear to be ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... seemed like half a road, half an entrance to a square of houses, and found yourself in the remains of an old farmyard, of which one side was a row of cottages. The rest was old red brick—I think I remember a great dovecote—and a quiet look of age and disuse. But now new buildings are rising in ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... day it would have been impossible to find a prouder or happier ship's company, but with all their feelings of elation they did not imagine that everything would run smoothly after such a long period of disuse, and they knew also that much hard work lay in front of them if they were to carry out the remainder of their program. If the Discovery was free before the navigable season closed Scott had resolved to spend the remaining ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... had fallen into disuse, their influence in this respect was visible in the readiness of wigged veterans to extend a kindly and useful patronage to students. Even so late as the close of the last century, great black-letter lawyers used to accost ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... characteristics of the other nations of the earth, it becomes the manifest duty of the school to do its share in perpetuating these ideals and prejudices and standards. Once let these atrophy through disuse, once let them fail of transmission because of the decay of the home, or the decay of the school, or the decay of the social institutions that typify and express them, and our country must go the way of Greece and Rome, and, although our blood may thereafter continue pure and unmixed, and ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... never again shall be able to grasp. To his astonishment, he finds that no small part of his range of mental activity and sense of power was involved in that exercise alone. He has not lost merely his hands; much of his inner being has been stricken into disuse. ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... plants (Chap. XI.); (5) some fresh facts and arguments on the wind-carriage of seeds, and its bearing on the wide dispersal of many arctic and alpine plants (Chap. XII.); (6) some new illustrations of the non-heredity of acquired characters, and a proof that the effects of use and disuse, even if inherited, must be overpowered by Natural Selection (Chap. XIV.); and (7) a new argument as to the nature and origin of the moral and intellectual faculties of man ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... Commons can legislate for Victoria, and that a statute of the Imperial Parliament overrides every law or custom repugnant thereto, by whomsoever enacted, in every part of the Crown dominions. The right, moreover, of Imperial legislation has not fallen into disuse. Mr. Tarring[42] enumerates from sixty to seventy Imperial statutes, extending from 7 Geo. III. c. 50 to 44 & 45 Vict. c. 69, which apply to the Colonies generally, and to this list, which might now be lengthened, must be added a large number of statutes applying ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... would I make choice of one with muscles so inert from disuse were this to be an onset, where men give and take hard blows. I ask you not upon the ship's deck at all, my friend, nor shall I require your company one step farther than the roof of the great sugar warehouse of Bomanceaux et ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... inconvenient that it had not for years, though kept by Mrs. Grose in exemplary order, been occupied. I had often admired it and I knew my way about in it; I had only, after just faltering at the first chill gloom of its disuse, to pass across it and unbolt as quietly as I could one of the shutters. Achieving this transit, I uncovered the glass without a sound and, applying my face to the pane, was able, the darkness without being much less than within, ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... preparation which characterized the general state of the country; and they suggest also the difference in energy and efficiency between a man of forty, in continuous practice of his profession, and generals of sixty, whose knowledge of their business derived over a disuse of more than thirty years, and from experience limited to positions necessarily very subordinate. From the meagreness of steamer traffic, all this provision of men and material had to go by sail vessel to Albany; and Chauncey wrote that his personal ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... pressing down his key. The blue spark leaped out for a long moment, but Mart was careful not to break it, and with a satisfied nod he threw off the current. The Seamew's wireless, in spite of a year of disuse, was in splendid shape; like other merchant ship stations of modern type, it was almost perfect in its conveniences. The whole transmitting apparatus, from the generator to the aerial tuning inductance, was in a special silence cabinet; this not only kept the noise of the spark and ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... commanders were wily men. They told the authorities at Buenos Aires, where the first named had sought asylum, and Puenta Arenas, Chile, where the second was interned, that the machinery of their ships was suffering from disuse, and requested permission for a day's run in the neighboring waters that the engines might have exercise. This was granted, and they quietly put to sea. That was the last seen of them by the South American folk. But the port officials at Rio de Janeiro were suspicious ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... insignificancy of Convocations, advances no such thing, but says, "if the clergy assembled often, and might act as other assemblies of clergy in Christendom, much good might have come: but the misfortune lay in their long disuse, and that in his own and a good part of his father's time, they never came together, except at the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... then to impart to the polished glass surface a fine coating of silver laid down by a chemical process. The silver-on-glass mirrors are so much lighter and so much easier to construct that the more old-fashioned metallic mirrors may be said to have fallen into almost total disuse. In one respect however, the metallic mirror may still claim the advantage that, with reasonable care, its surface will last bright and untarnished for a much longer period than can the silver film on the glass. However, the ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... during three hundred and sixty years and more; then the over-confident octogenarian's prophecy failed. During the tumult of the French Revolution the promise was forgotten and the grace withdrawn. It has remained in disuse ever since. Joan never asked to be remembered, but France has remembered her with an inextinguishable love and reverence; Joan never asked for a statue, but France has lavished them upon her; Joan never asked for a church for Domremy, but France is building one; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a target, completed their armour, except when ammunition failed, when they substituted for the gun, the lochaber axe; this was a species of long lance, or pike, with a formidable weapon at the end of it, adapted either for cutting or stabbing. The lochaber axe had fallen into disuse since the introduction of the musket; but a rude, yet ready substitute had been found for it, by fixing scythes at the end of a pole, with which the Highlanders resisted the attacks of cavalry. Such had been their arms in the ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... toilet and mantel ornaments and things of use. A pair of candle-branches with dropping lustres,—that she had marveled at and delighted in as a child, and had begged for herself when they fell into disuse in the drawing-room,—stood upon the chimney along which the first sun-rays glanced. Just in those days of the year, they struck in so as to shine level through the clear prisms, and break ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... a little hut, where we saw an old woman grinding with the quern, the ancient Highland instrument, which it is said was used by the Romans, but which, being very slow in its operation, is almost entirely gone into disuse. ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... protests against the peculiar sins which had marked Pagan life,—gluttony, wine-drinking, unchastity, ostentatious vanities, and turbulent mirth,—monasticism decreed abstinence, perpetual virginity, the humblest dress, the entire disuse of ornaments, silence, and meditation. These were supposed to disarm the demons who led into foul temptation. Moreover, monasticism encouraged whatever it thought would make the soul triumphant over the body, almost independent of it. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... church, the hall, the farm-house, the cottage, hardly changed during his long absence,—the same shady by-paths and hedge-lanes, the same veiled sky, and green lustre of the lawns and fields,—while his own affinities for these things, a little obscured by disuse, were reviving ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... in a little time I began to lose that little learning I had acquired at school, and by a continued disuse of my books became at length so utterly a stranger to learning, that I could not have read, far less have understood, a sentence in Latin: which I was so sensible of that I warily avoided reading to others, even in an English book, lest, if I should ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... chloroformed audience was afflicted with a long and too heavy programme, as is the custom in performances of this kind. They played fragments of the best known pieces, and sang songs from operas long since fallen into disuse even on street organs. This public saw the same comedians march out; the most famous are the most monotonous; the comical ones abused their privileges; the lover spoke distractedly through his nose; the great coquette—the actress par excellence, the last ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Andrews, has also most generously read the proofs of the translation. It is, of course, to be understood that these scholars are not responsible for the slips which may have wandered into my version, the work of one whose Greek has long "rusted in disuse." Indeed I must confess that the rendering "Etin" for [Greek text] is retained in spite of Mr. Butcher, who is also not wholly satisfied with "gledes of light," and with "shieling" for a pastoral summer station in the hills. But I know no word for it in English ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... of a people indirectly by imposing upon them certain predominant activities, which may develop one part of the body almost to the point of deformity. This is the effect of increased use or disuse which Darwin discusses. He attributes the thin legs and thick arms of the Payaguas Indians living along the Paraguay River to generations of lives spent in canoes, with the lower extremities motionless and the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... position do not advise that we should go on all-fours. It is just the same with a great human device, the introduction of clothes. They have led to all sorts of new susceptibilities to disease and even tendencies to direct injury of many kinds. Yet no one advocates the complete disuse of all clothing on the ground that corsets have sometimes proved harmful. It would be just as absurd to advocate the complete abandonment of contraceptives on the ground that some of them have sometimes been misused. If it were not, ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... old door connected with another passage that leads by a dark and wearying staircase to the servants' corridor beneath! I am afraid you won't be able to open it, as it is rusty with age and disuse. The servants would as soon think of coming up here as they would of making an appointment with the Evil One; so it has not ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... Alexandrian mysticism became stereotyped as dogmas, and Jewish law was abrogated. When Babylon replaced Palestine as the centre of Jewish intellect, the works of Philo, like the rest of the Hellenistic-Jewish literature, written as they were in a strange tongue, fell into disuse, and before long were entirely forgotten. The Christians, on the other hand, found in Philo a notable evidence for many of their beliefs and a philosophical testimony for the dogmas of their creed. They claimed him as their own, and the Church Fathers, to bind him ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... poor feet were so cramped, and the muscles so much weakened from long disuse, that he could not walk. He tottered at every step, and in a few minutes appeared greatly fatigued. But his liberated feet soon acquired uncommon agility, his plumage grew more resplendent, and he appeared perfectly happy. He no longer uttered harsh screams, but very readily learned ...
— Minnie's Pet Parrot • Madeline Leslie
... other side a support has been removed for the contents of the abdomen, and they sag down until they pry the uterus out of place and press it over towards the side where there is less pressure. The broad ligament on one side is stretched from use and on the other side shortened from disuse, and so ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... likewise been alleged, that if attendance at class-meeting be not made a church-law, and the capital punishment of expulsion be not attached to its violation, class-meetings will fall into disuse. I answer, this is beside the question. The question is, whether there is such a law in the Bible? Has our Lord or His Apostles given authority to any conclave or conference to make such a law? Our Lord and the Apostles knew better than their followers ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... on Turkish terra firma. The price has been paid for the first step and that is the step that counts. Blood, sweat, fire; with these we have forged our master key and forced it into the lock of the Hellespont, rusty and dusty with centuries of disuse. Grant us, O Lord, tenacity to turn it; determination to turn it, till through that open door Queen Elizabeth of England sails East for the Golden Horn! When in far off ages men discuss over vintages ripened in Mars the black superstitions ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... into disuse, either by treaty with France, or Gascony falling into the hands of the English. But vineyards were cultivated by private gentlemen as late as 1621. Our first wines from Bordeaux—the true country of Bacchus—appear ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... industry, but Shah Abbas especially gave a decided impetus to rug-weaving. He had a particular fondness for the beautiful creations of this industrial art, and the rugs made during his reign bring fabulous prices. After his death a reaction followed. Rugs fell into comparative disuse, and the manufacture deteriorated until about 1850, when, thanks to the demand in Europe, the industry revived. To-day it is in a flourishing condition and the most important source ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... from this hateful thing, and coming to the bed began to examine the huddle of goatskins, and though full of dust and something stiff, found them little the worse for their long disuse; the same applied equally to the sailcloth, the which, though yellow, was still strong and serviceable. Reaching the firelock from the corner I found it to be furnished with a snaphaunce or flintlock, ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... must have it in spite of this spirit of war rather than by destroying the spirit. In fact, the only practical way to destroy it is to let it, like vestigial organs of which biologists tell us, degenerate from disuse. This inherited emotional tendency remains as a threat with which we, as exponents of arbitration, must reckon before we are justified in saying that the world ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... makes me smile to think how bewildered they must have been. Picture to yourself your own feelings if, on looking out of your luxurious carriage, you suddenly perceived that the lines upon which you ran were rusted and corroded, red and yellow with disuse and decay! What a catch must have come in their breath as in a second it flashed upon them that it was not Manchester but Death which was waiting for them at the end of that sinister line. But the train was running with frantic speed, rolling and rocking over the rotten line, while the wheels ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... road to the sea, nearly a mile away. Man had almost given up the task of attempting to wrest a living from this inhospitable region. The boat channels which threaded the ooze were choked with weed and covered with green slime from long disuse, the little stone quays were thick with moss, the rotting planks of a broken fishing boat were foul with the encrustations of long years, the stone cottages by the roadside seemed deserted. Here and there the marshes had encroached upon the far ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... was in this that the full maturity of wisdom was seen. The emperors greatly increased the severity of punishments, as probably necessary in a corrupt state of society. After the decemviral laws fell into disuse, the Romans, in the days of the republic, passed from extreme rigor to great lenity, as is observable in the transition from the Puritan regime to our times in the United States. Capital punishment for several centuries was exceedingly rare, and this was ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... kindred occupations, and now half forgotten, might be given the descriptive title, a "homespun vocabulary." By definite explanation of these terms many a good old English word and phrase has been rescued from disuse. ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... body is well fed and clothed, the next demand is for exercise. Our powers are given us to be used; and unless they are used they waste away. Nothing destroys power so surely and completely as disuse. The only way to keep our powers is to keep them in exercise. We acquire the power to lift by lifting; to run, by running; to write, by writing; to talk, by talking; to build houses, by building; to trade, by trading. In mature life our exercise ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... of disobedience to the law of the spiritual life. He who seeks to save his life shall lose it. He who makes this world his all shall receive as his reward only what this world can give. He who buries his talent shall, by the natural law of disuse, forfeit it. Not to believe in Christ is to miss eternal life. To refuse Him who is the Light of the world ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... all the services it had rendered, this form of writing fell into disuse towards the commencement of our era; it was supplanted even in the country of its origin by alphabets derived from that of the Phoenicians.[53] It had one grave defect: its phonetic signs always represented ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... begun to show disuse. There was dust on the shining surfaces of the furniture and on the polished floors. The clocks had all stopped and the musty chill of a closed house was in ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... Yet it must not be forgotten that the thieves' jargon was invented for that purpose, whilst the Rommany, originally the proper and only speech of a particular nation, has been preserved from falling into entire disuse and oblivion, because adapted to answer the same end. It was impossible to treat of the Rommany in a manner calculated to exhaust the subject, and to leave no ground for future cavilling, without devoting a considerable space to the consideration of the robber dialect, on which ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... system and if it is the highest aim of mental hygiene, it follows that control should be the highest aim of legislation and custom, which together make up social hygiene. And—always remembering that control is of all virtues the one which strengthens with use and withers with disuse—every piece of new legislation should be most carefully examined as to its probable effect on the self-control of the people. Control, in short should be the paramount criterion of new legislation. A proximate advantage, unless it be a matter of life and death, ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... exception to the general rule. Abdur Kad'r, it is true, may have raged a little more extensively than usual when it was discovered that the well had caved in from sheer disuse, and several hours' labor would be necessary before some brackish water could be obtained. He did not trouble the Effendi with this detail, however. There was another more pressing matter to be dealt with, but, Allah be praised, that might wait till a less ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... also a pyramid of his daughter Hentsen is spoken of), and there are incidental notices of him in the medical and religious literature. The funerary cult of Khufu and Khafr[e] was practised under the twenty-sixth dynasty, when so much that had fallen into disuse and been forgotten was revived. Khufu is a leading figure in an ancient Egyptian story (Papyrus Westcar), but it is unfortunately incomplete. He was the founder of the fourth dynasty, and was probably born in Middle Egypt near Beni Hasan, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... Bertha's marriage, the good Prince Bishop promulgated an edict, that for the future no one should suffer the punishment of death for the crime of witchcraft in his dominions. But, after his decease, the edict again fell into disuse; and the town of Hammelburg, as if the spirit of Black Claus, the witchfinder, still hovered about its walls, again commenced to assert its odious reputation, and maintain its hideous boast, of having burned more witches than any other town ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... I was obliged to reply. 'With a people naturally more gentle and humane than we of Rome this custom would long ago have fallen into disuse. They would have easily found a way, as all people do, to conform their religious doctrine and offerings to their feelings and instincts. But the Romans, by nature and long training, lovers of blood, their ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... sometimes been considered as having innovated on our tongue by introducing big words into it from the Latin: but he commonly does no more than revive terms which had been employed by our old writers and afterwards fallen into disuse; nor does he, like them, employ even these terms in senses which scholars only would be likely ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... backs up that statement. Or it may be lost through rust or moths, the two things that threaten all inactivity. The stuff that isn't in use wears away. The wear of use can't compare with the wear of disuse or neglect. ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... like; or if their minds are too marked and oddly made to get into the mould, they give up reading altogether, or read old books and foreign books, formed under another code and appealing to a different taste. The principle of 'elimination,' the 'use and disuse' of organs which naturalists speak of, works here. What is used strengthens; what is disused weakens: 'to those who have, more is given;' and so a sort of style settles upon an age, and imprinting itself more than anything ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... the eighteenth century that Chief Justice Holt[49] is said to have ruled that in the future, where swimming had fatal results, those responsible would be prosecuted for murder. Such a declaration perhaps caused some disuse of the method for a time, but it was revived in the second third of the ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... easily, had it been a turn-to with the gloves, for diversion. Then, twenty years of disuse would have had their say, and the slow paralysing powers of old age asserted themselves, quenching the swift activity of hand and eye, and making their responsive energy, that had given him victory in so many a hard-fought ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... then hear the conclusion of the whole matter. The undesirable instincts do not need encouragement. It is better to let them fade away from disuse, or in some cases even by attaching punishment to their expression. They are echoes from a distant past, and not serviceable in this better present. The desirable instincts we are to seize upon and ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... in these horrible wilds. For ten years not a single glimpse of white face or figure. For ten ages no intelligible voice, save his own; and that, through long disuse, had threatened ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... the size of Roman palaces, there was the patriarchal system of life, now rapidly falling into disuse. The so-called 'noble floor' of every mansion is supposed to be reserved exclusively for the father and mother of the family, and the order of arranging the rooms is as much a matter of rigid rule as ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... without a knowledge of archery. It is a pity that this noble sport has fallen into disuse. We shall find it essential to some of ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... investing him with the legatine power, which he had exercised with very extensive authority. He confessed the indictment, pleaded ignorance of the statute, and threw himself on the king's mercy. He was perhaps within reach of the law but besides that this statute had fallen into disuse, nothing could be more rigorous and severe than to impute to him as a crime what he had openly, during the course of so many years, practised with the consent and approbation of the and the acquiescence of the parliament and kingdom. Not to mention what ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... feet area of wall, he inserted a crowbar between the joints of the bricks beneath, softly wriggling it until several were loosened. There was now disclosed the mouth of an old oven, which was apparently contrived in the thickness of the wall, and having fallen into disuse, had been closed up with bricks in this manner. It was formed after the simple old-fashioned plan of oven-building—a mere oblate cavity without ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... sitting up to meals, able to walk up and down stairs with an arm and a stick, and had also walked in the same way in the park. Considering how completely atrophied her muscles were from twenty years' entire disuse, this was much more than I had ventured to hope. She has now left with her nurse for Natal, and I have no doubt that she will return from her travels with her ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... attributed to the domestic duck flying much less and walking more than its wild parent." And again, "not a single domestic animal can be named which has not in some country drooping ears, and the view suggested by some authors, that the drooping is due to the disuse of the muscles of the ear, from the animals not being much alarmed by ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... of the scripture, 'till they were examined by the king and his council," &c. "He requires that none may argue against the presence of Christ in the Sacrament, under the pain of death, and of the loss of their goods; and orders all to be punished who did disuse any rites or ceremonies not then abolished; yet he orders them only to be observed without superstition, only as remembrances, and not to repose in them a trust of salvation."—Burnet's Hist. of ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... slaves. Pernambuco was still undergoing the miserable effects of the long and desultory war it had sustained; all the bands of government had been loosed during that disastrous period; law and justice had fallen into disuse; and had there not been a redeeming virtue in the free spirit that lived on in spite of the evils among which it had sprung, its very emancipation from a foreign power might have been regretted. The negroes who had escaped to the Palmares, and whose depredations ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... imitations of all sorts of birds or musical instruments; and often, when Gerald invited her to "trip it on the light, fantastic toe," she would entertain him with one of the negroes' clumsy, shuffling dances. Her sentimental songs fell into disuse, and were replaced by livelier tunes. Instead of longing to rest in the "sweet vale of Avoca," she was heard musically chasing "Figaro here! ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... proper and Scriptural language, "thou," and "thee," to a single person: and their disuse of the custom of uncovering their heads, or pulling off their hats, by way ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... Quieta non movere (not to disturb things that are quiet), I have no doubt that he would have thought that the less discussion is provoked upon such matters, the better for both church and laity. Nor had he ever been known to regret the disuse of the ancient custom of excommunication, nor any other diminution of the powers of the priesthood, whether minatory or militant; yet for all this, Parson Dale had a great notion of the sacred privilege of a minister of the gospel—to advise—to deter—to persuade—to reprove. And it was for ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... I must make the humiliating confession that long disuse has impaired sadly my understanding of German. If you should speak to me very slowly, probably I could comprehend you, but at that time you were not ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... observed, as well as from what they said, I should imagine that the Quakers generally pursue this course of entire separation from all connection with slavery, even in the disuse of its products. The subject of the disuse of slave-grown produce has obtained currency in the same sphere in which Elihu Burritt operates, and has excited the attention of the Olive Leaf Circles. Its prospects are not so weak as on first view might be imagined, if we consider ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... come easily after many years of disuse; he was always embarrassed and self-conscious when he expressed affection. He was afraid of her, too, thought that if he showed too much kindness she might suddenly become emotional, fling her arms around him and cover his face with ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... is needed for the disuse of a language of signs for the special purpose now in question when the speech of surrounding civilization is recognized as necessary or important to be acquired, and gradually becomes known as the best common medium, even before it is actually spoken by many individuals ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... that of complacency of mind or quietness of character—This trait confirmed by circumstances in their education, discipline, and public worship, which are productive of quiet personal habits—and by their disuse of the diversions of the world—by the mode of the settlement of their differences—by their efforts in the subjugation of the will—by their endeavour to avoid all activity of mind during their devotional exercises—all of which are productive of a quiet ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... the lawyer at this moment begun to sing, and to sing in a manner which could leave no doubt in anyone's mind that he was either exceedingly drunk or raving mad. It was a high, thin voice that they heard, and it seemed dry, as if from long disuse. Of words or tune there was no question. It went sailing up to a surprising height, and was carried down with a despairing moan as of a winter wind in a hollow chimney, or an organ whose wind fails suddenly. It was a really horrible sound, ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... difficulty. The particular state of her commerce, which, being only carried on from one part of her dominions to another, can only be for a time interrupted, but is in no danger of being invaded by any rival, or lost by disuse, at least requires our consideration, and we ought to make war with the utmost frugality, against a people whom no hostilities can really impoverish, whose commerce may be said to lie at rest rather than to be shackled, as it will rise into greater vigour at the end of the war, and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... that the "Little Iliad" also contained a description of the sack of Troy. It is probable that this and other superfluous incidents disappeared after the Alexandrian arrangement of the poems in the Cycle, either as the result of some later recension, or merely through disuse. Or Proclus may have thought it unnecessary to give the accounts by Lesches and Arctinus ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... that of some gigantic sepulchre. A little daunted by this all-enveloping stillness, I skirted the terraces and approached the house on the eastern side. Here I found an old-world drawbridge—now naturally in disuse—spanning a ditch fed from the main river for the erstwhile purposes of a moat. I crossed the bridge, and entered an imposing courtyard. Within this quadrangle the same silence dwelt, and there was the ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... the line was so sharply drawn between the social classes that for a long time slavery, or even death, was the punishment for a mixed marriage. In course of time this barbarous custom fell into disuse, but free choice continued to be discouraged by the law that if a man married a woman beneath him in rank, neither she nor her children were raised to his rank, and in case of his death she had no claim to the usual provisions ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... of the hill had two names. It had once been called The Watch Tower, for reasons but vaguely known by the present generation of villagers. To-day it was generally styled The Pines. Yet even this had fallen into disuse, save on the occupant's letter paper. When any one asked where Rear Admiral Killigrew lived, he was directed to "the big white house at the ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... at least allow another to carry the tarpot and fill in the chinks. When the evening was over, although I recalled two or three clever stories, which I shall botch in the telling, I came away tired and dissatisfied, my tongue dry with disuse. ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... to find that the first man was called red earth, because he was made of it. This was enough for one lesson. It set them to thinking. It woke up faculties previously dormant. The machinery was there, perfect in all its parts, but so rusted from disuse, that it required no little skill and patience to make it move at all; but the least movement was a great gain; more was sure to follow. Another lesson would take up Eve (Syriac, Hawa, meaning Life). Miss Fiske would begin by saying, "Is not that a pretty name? and would you not ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... general grounds that I have, albeit as an outside observer, watched with some anxiety and much gratification the progress of the Gaelic Revival. In the historical evolution of the Irish mind we find certain qualities atrophied, so to speak, by disuse; and to this cause I attribute the past failures of the race in practical life at home. I have shown how politics, religion, and our systems of education have all, in their respective influences upon the people, missed to a large extent, the effect upon character ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... sometimes almost destroying constitutional irritability and vicious passions. The natural power of the will in different men differs greatly, but there is no part of our nature which is more strengthened by exercise or more weakened by disuse. The minor faults of character it can usually correct; but when a character is once formed, and when its tendencies are essentially vicious, radical cure or even considerable amelioration is very rare. Sometimes the strong influence of religion ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... scrutinies to which their operations and accounts will be subjected. Thus disposed, as well from interest as the obligations of their charters, it can not be doubted that such conditions as Congress may see fit to adopt respecting the deposits in these institutions, with a view to the gradual disuse, of the small bills will be cheerfully complied with, and that we shall soon gain in place of the Bank of the United States a practical reform in the whole paper system of the country. If by this policy we can ultimately witness the suppression of all bank ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... reason did the Faculty of Theology in Paris re-echo the sentiment that, was prevalent in the time of Ximenes, "What will become of religion if the study of Greek and Hebrew be permitted?" The prevalence of Latin was the condition of her power; its deterioration, the measure of her decay; its disuse, the signal of her limitation to a little principality in Italy. In fact, the development of European languages was the instrument of her overthrow. They formed an effectual communication between the mendicant friars and the illiterate populace, and there was not one ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... astonish Parry[270] and Franklin,[271] whose equipment exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since. Columbus[272] found the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery, which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon[273] ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... woman, with no open vulgarity about her, but simply ignorant of the fact that bragging of one's distinguished relatives had fallen into disuse. Her daughter, was like her in manner, with the likeness imposed by having such a mother, but much more largely made in mind and body, pleasant-looking, healthy, ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... crumbling, with its face overgrown by creeping vines and colorful shrubs, Wilson Moore could not have chosen a more secluded and beautiful valley for his homesteading adventure. The little gray cabin, with smoke curling from the stone chimney, had lost its look of dilapidation and disuse, yet there was nothing new that Columbine could see. The last quarter of the ascent of the slope, and the few rods across the level terrace, seemed extraordinarily long to Columbine. As she dismounted and tied Pronto her heart was beating and ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... broad philosophical light it may not be the best course for mankind to shun all dangers. Strength in the organism comes from the use rather than the disuse of our powers. It is certain that the general health and vigour of mankind is to be developed by meeting rather than by shunning dangers. Resistance to disease means bodily vigour, and this is to be developed in mankind by the application of the principle of natural selection. In accordance ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... learned and the wise. Some instances there are of men who have united both characters, but it will be found that these have had frequent laborious intervals, that though they may have been vicious, they have never been indolent, and that their minds have never slumbered and lost by disuse the power of exertion. Reflections of this sort make me very uncomfortable, and I am ready to cry with vexation when I think on my misspent life. If I was insensible to a higher order of merit, and indifferent to a nobler kind of praise, I should be happier far; but to be tormented with ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... since they are there, they are operative and must be taken account of. We must see to it that the desirable ones have an environment which keeps them active, and that their activity shall control the direction the others take and thereby induce the disuse of the latter because they lead to nothing. Many tendencies that trouble parents when they appear are likely to be transitory, and sometimes too much direct attention to them only fixes a child's attention upon them. At all events, adults too easily ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... the year 1885, this system, which entailed severe losses, gradually fell into disuse, and business on cash ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... Specially curious and admirable is the use of elision (in the eighth, for instance, and even more so in the fifth line), so characteristic alike of ancient and modern Italy. In Latin poetry Virgil was its last and greatest master; its gradual disuse in post-Virgilian poetry, like its absence in some of the earliest hexameters, was fatal to the music of the verse, and with its reappearance in the early Italian poetry of the Middle Ages that ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... Alike, then, by his disuse and his use of parliaments, Henry strengthened the royal power, the initiative of all legislation remaining in his hands. To the same end he continued to depress the great nobles and to create a new nobility dependent ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... on the answer that sprang to them, and without a word she went to the kitchen for the milking-pails. The cows had forgotten her. They eyed her with suspicion and were restive. The first one kicked at her when she put her beautiful head against its soft flank. Her muscles had been in disuse and her hands were cramped and her forearms ached before she was through—but she kept doggedly at her task. When she finished, her father had fed the horses and was standing ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... ate liberally and enjoyed the inn's excellent wine. Also we set off on strong horses. From there only the danger of getting saddle-sick after our long disuse of horses and the certainty of getting saddle-sore, as we did, restrained us. We tore on through Martha, Forum Aurelii, and a nameless change-house, spurring and lashing as much as we dared, for we dared not disable ourselves with blisters, changing at each halt and getting splendid horses, our diplomas ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... Nippur show that the tub and bowl forms of the coffin continued to be used during the period extending from Hammurabi to Nabonnedos. In later times, it would appear, the custom of placing food and drink with the dead fell into disuse.[1269] We may perhaps find that, as was the case in Egypt, symbolical representations of food—a clay plate with the food modeled in clay—took the place of the old custom. Fewer utensils, too, are found in ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
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